“Giving a person a limpia is extremely delicate work since you are dealing with the person’s spirit. I will tell you of one of the early ways I learned to do limpias. It was called ‘a sweeping’ by my first teacher, doña Jovita, I’ll never forget her, from Nuevo Leon de Méjico Viejo! I’ve never known a woman más buena, may she rest in peace. She made a small broom with branches from the rue bush, rosemary, and hierba de cruz and brushed it over the person, up and then down in sweeping motions. The person usually stood in the center of the room, with arms spread in the form of a cross. On the floor, she burned incense in a brazier, close to the feet of the person getting the sweeping so that the fumes reached up to him. When she knew that the person was afflicted because of intentional harm done by someone else, she might cleanse the person by rubbing the egg of a black hen over his body, or sometimes use the chicken itself as a sweeping instrument, that would consume all the mal out of the person, and then she’d take it out, kill it, and bury it.

“As you have already seen, mi’ja, there are many ways to cleanse but what we must remember above all is that it is He who performs the work and we are only His servants made of vulgar flesh here on this earth. So when people come to me, resentful and bitter because catastrophe has struck their homes, their houses have burned down or their cow was hit by lightning … I always tell them to humble themselves before the magnificence and the power of Our Father in heaven and before anything we offer a prayer in which we begin: Thank you, Señor, Tatita Dios. Más merecemos. ¡Ay! We deserve even more, lowly beings that we are!”

4

Of the Further Telling of Our Clairvoyant Caridad Who After Being Afflicted with the Pangs of Love Disappears and Upon Discovery Is Henceforth Known as La Armitaña

At daybreak on Wednesday of Lenten Week doña Felicia readied herself for her yearly pilgrimage to Chimayo. She prepared a lonche to last three days, put on a cap with “Raiders” written across it to protect her head from the sun, and gave another one to Caridad, signaling to her that she was going along and that was that.

El Santuario was not far from the little adobe that don Domingo was having built for his daughter, and Caridad, who had chosen that spot because of its holy reputation, had only passed through the village. This was Caridad’s first pilgrimage. Sofi never took her girls to Chimayo during Holy Week. As a matter of fact, during their growing-up years it had been difficult to take them all together anywhere because of La Loca’s inability to be around people because of their all-too-human smell. But of course Caridad, through her dreams and from people’s accounts, knew all about Chimayo, which was why she had chosen to have her house built there with her father’s lottery winnings.