Yes, perhaps this mountain woman was not the one the Penitente brothers thought her to be, but a spirit-memory, and that was why she was not overcome by them.

Don Domingo, who could spin a good tale himself, was amused by these accounts and although he knew his daughter was not of the common strain, he strongly suspected that she was not lifting horses nor bringing droves of men to their knees.

Sofi refused to join the Easter Week throngs, convinced that if that was la Caridad up there she would make herself invisible rather than let herself become a spectacle. She decided she would wait it out. Now that she knew her daughter was safe, living in a cave but safe nonetheless, her heart was calm.

Doña Felicia took her yearly pilgrimage to Chimayo and decided that she would go and get Caridad afterwards. It had been decades since she had done any mountain climbing. She did not drive and didn’t trust no one to take her up there neither. But she would tell her godson to point her in the general direction and she was certain she would find her apprentice and convince her to come back home with none of the resistance that Caridad had shown to the men.

Fe, who had not once worried over her sister’s disappearance but had continued with a business-as-usual attitude (she still worked at the bank and drove everybody up the wall with her perfectionist’s manias), continued to maintain that her sister’s departure from society must have something to do with being in love. In all fairness to la Fe, it must be admitted that her theory did coincide with the fact that Caridad disappeared right after she was bowled over by la Woman-on-the-wall-later-woman-on-a-hill.

Caridad herself could not explain, even if she were inclined to try, what led her up those mountains that day. She could not say why, after having slept for four days and nights before her trip, she was so overcome by sleep that after getting lost she pulled up in that secluded area, thinking it was as good a place as any to rest, and abandoning her pickup, curled up that first night at the mouth of a cave and slept undisturbed by the cold mountain winds.

The following dawn, when she woke to a delicate scar in the horizon that gradually bled into day and saw the sun then raise itself like a king from its throne over the distant peaks, Caridad only knew that she wanted to stay there and be the lone witness to that miracle every dawn.

Until those three men rode up on their horses she did not think of time or of no one, not doña Felicia, not her mom or the other members of her family, not even herself, but not a sleeping or waking moment went by when her heart did not long for Woman-on-the-wall in Chimayo.