“Then when he went off to the university, it was to study to be an engineer so he could work in Rio, to be a modern man for modern times. What good is the gift of healing if it can’t be used in modern times as well as ancient ones? Look at you, a thoroughly modern Millie, aren’t you? And what do American doctors tell you?”

“They don’t know what”—(I left off “the fuck”)—“I have. One doctor said he thought it was caused by nerves, another by taking too many baths. But if I’d followed the latter’s instructions, I’d be a stink bucket.”

She laughed, rose up.

“We’ll go back up and I’ll show you how to brew the tea,” she said. “It’s all internal. It all starts from the inside. We’re going to brew it with cactus water, but any water will do.”

I followed her. She was wearing flat, practical shoes, ringed with tan and brown. The muscles in her buttocks rippled as she walked; her shoulders danced.

“He used to be able just to touch someone and cure them,” she said. “Sometimes he didn’t even have to put his mind to it—just touch them—like if you jostled someone in a crowd, if he happened to touch someone who needed some cure they’d be cured. How can he say that’s ignorant folks’ belief, when they knew nothing to believe!”

He touched my back during our lovemaking I was thinking, and it was still . . .

“But probably now,” she was saying, “he couldn’t heal a mite. That’s what happens to you if you’ve got a power and you refuse to use it; you lose it.”

Was she trying to tell me she knew about . . .?

“If he turns to it again, maybe he’ll get the healing powers back. But they won’t come easy like before. They’ll come like judgment.”

I stood in the kitchen as she plunged the plant into boiling water, lifted it from the stove, and poured me some. Another batch she let sit in the sun to make sun tea. She sipped some herself because she said it was good for other problems, problems of spirit as well as physical ones.

“Me? I’m an amateur healing woman. I have only a joking relationship with it, but him, what a curandero he could have been!”

She was silent.

“I also have a plant that has contraceptive powers,” she said.

“That’s why there’s only Ensinadelo.”

I said nothing.

“In the beginning, you see, I feared him. If one crawling baby had such power! I was a young girl without much understanding. Not ignorant, no, but without much understanding.”

I said nothing.

“Do you think you’ll have any use for it?”

“Understanding?”

She laughed. “That other plant.”

“No,” I said, too quickly. I was always shy with older women about such matters, though we all knew where the oysters were, as I heard a fisherman’s wife say once; around younger women and my peers I had more bravado.