Many times Francisco assisted, glad to help his nina but not completely aware of what all the details of the remedios meant or whether they in fact helped, although of course they had to help, since people held her in the highest regard and they always came back, and moreover recommended others to her as well.

So Francisco learned a little about being a diagnostician of physical and spiritual ailments, and which symptoms were caused by something physical and which were caused by the bad intentions of ill-wishers. But Francisco did not like to talk about these things too much with people, not even with his brothers once he went back home, who, being practical men, tended to find his godmother more an eccentric than someone to turn to for medical attention.

His father, however, did often go to doña Felicia for massages although he never followed the tea prescriptions she advised. He also managed to get Francisco to give him a massage at the end of a day in the field on occasion or a ventosa treatment when his rheumatism acted up.

Francisco watched his tío Pedro prepare to make a bulto many many times before he went to him one day after a philosophy class at the university to ask him to teach him the work of the santero. Francisco was attending college, but he was not pursuing anything in particular. He had learned to be a mechanic in the Army and he could always work at that to earn a living; in fact as it turned out, he ended up doing that to get by most of the time. But when he came back from Vietnam it was hard for him to concentrate on things, to take a steady job, so he spent nearly a year doing little more than wandering around the streets of Albuquerque, usually stoned on pot.

As it turned out, as it usually does with young romantic men, it was the love of a “pretty girl” that persuaded him to enroll at the university. She was to Francisco the epitome of loveliness, with sky-blue eyes and long blond hair, her loveliness was that much more enhanced by her lack of encumbrance by material things like money, that “just didn’t matter” as so many youth felt in 1969—at least those who did not go to Vietnam, or who did not live in barrios and housing projects.