Caridad tried to hide her tension about the crowd and let herself move away from doña Felicia just enough so that she no longer was able to cling even to the reassuring smell of ground comino and chili that came off doña Felicia’s pores. Yeah, she was getting more like Loca more and more each day, she agreed to herself. Now, like Loca or like a blind person or even a dog, she was sensitive—although not averse—to individual body odors. Well, ni modo, she concluded, because after all, Caridad did not go in for psychoanalyzing that which just was and it was enough for her to know something without having to question it.

It was about then, however, that she stopped short at the sight of the most beautiful woman she had ever seen sitting on the adobe wall that surrounds the sanctuary. At that moment the woman also turned toward Caridad, but since she was wearing sunglasses, Caridad wasn’t sure whether her gaze was being returned.

“Come on, come on,” doña Felicia summoned Caridad the way one does with children, with a little sweeping gesture of the hand. Caridad, completely overwhelmed by the sight of the woman, blushed and followed doña Felicia into the church without a word. They lined up to go through the small rooms adjacent to the chapel where there is a pozito opened to the holy earth with which, since the early part of the nineteenth century, Catholics (really, it wasn’t their fault that they came so late to this knowledge, being such newcomers to these lands) have healed both their bodies and spirits.

Both doña Felicia and Caridad bent down and rubbed some of the earth along their brows and temples and on their forearms and put a little on their tongues. Doña Felicia also scooped some up and put it in a small coffee can she brought for that purpose, and then they slowly made their way out.

All the while, Caridad could do nothing but think of the woman on the wall. Maybe she had sunstroke and had just imagined her. She was exhausted and nearly dehydrated and surely she could not have experienced what she felt throughout her entire body just from the sight of a woman! But as soon as they were outside, coming around from the back of the church, she saw the woman in question, more real than before, still on the wall. Moreover, the woman on the wall was looking over her shoulders in Caridad’s direction!