After our first vaccinating trip in October, it was more than two weeks before I followed Tatino back to Ajoya. I took a long way about, making a sixty mile loop of some of the more easterly villages—including La Sierrita, Azoteas, Pueblo Viejo, Candelero and Limón de las Castañedas—for I had never been into this rugged area before, and had long-standing invitations. It was a good trip, full of unexpected adventures and heart-warming welcome in each village and rancho along the way. As ever when I arrive at villages where I have not been before, I was appalled at some of the diseases and injuries that had been inappropriately treated or simply neglected. Yet, for me personally, the trip was without mishap, except for once when my mule, Hormiga, let me down with a splash.

The fault was my own: Hormiga had lost her rear shoes, and I had neglected to replace them before the trip. The Arroyo de Verano still carried a good bit of water, and was in bad shape for travel after the rains. At one spot, where we had to drop down a steep trough of cascading water and cross a deep pool at the bottom rock. She skittered downwards, her feet flying like a frenzied tap dancer’s, and cannon-balled into the pool. She landed off balance, her hooves sinking deep into the soft mud of the bottom. For a moment she floundered frantically, then keeled over sideways with a splash. I barely managed to hoist my camera over my head with one hand and extend my other hand toward a protruding rock to catch my fall, as I, too, went splashing under the floundering mule. Irineo’s grandson, Alvaro, who was at that moment passing through the canyon on his way to El Tule, at once sprang into the pool, caught hold of the halter, and hauled the mule away. As the three of us sloshed out of the pool, Alvaro and I were laughing so hard we nearly fell into the water afresh, not that it would have made much difference.

When I arrived back in Ajoya, the village was astir with talk about the recent deaths. The first death had been that of Juan, the cirrhotic, nicknamed Chútele, or El Tejón, because as a little boy he used to climb trees stark naked, where—with his dark skin, skinny face, and bright, black eyes—he had reminded the villagers of a coati-mundi. The next two deaths—which took place five days after Chútele died and two days before my return to Ajoya—were those of sixteen year-old Candelaria (Cande) Castro, and her new-born child.

Chútele’s relatives—as I mentioned in the third Report—had for a long time been accusing old Nicolasa, Rosaura’s washer-woman, of having hexed Chútele by placing a frog or a rat inside him through black magic. This, they said, was the cause of the grotesque swelling of his abdomen. As Chútele continued to get worse, and his belly to swell, the hostility of his relatives toward Nicolasa had continued to increase. Then came the night when Chútele took a sudden turn for the worse. As it happened, Nicolasa was sleeping in the house of Ramona’s grandparents, Gregorio Alarcón and Rosaura. Shortly before midnight a. group of men came banging on the heavily bolted doors. Rosaura got up, went to the door, and without opening it, called out, “What do you want?”

“We want Nicolasa to go with us to the loma to cure Chútele!” they said. “He can scarcely breathe.”

“Well, she’s not coming out!” cried Rosaura through the heavy doors. “I won’t let her!”

Rosaura knew only too well how they would have Nicolasa “cure” Chútele: they would beat her and very likely kill her, for it is thought that by killing a witch her evil spells are automatically lifted from those she has hexed. (The effectiveness of such a “cure” of an hechizo (hex) such as Chútele’s was by that time well established. Everyone in Ajoya knows the story of Felipe Estrada who, like Chútele, whose abdomen became “swollen like a bloated cow” while the rest of his body grew thinner and weaker. At last Felipe had gone to see a curandero de mal puesto (witch doctor) who told him he had been hexed, and named the old spinster, Paula as the witch. Everyone knows that no sooner had Paula been dragged out of her casa in Carrisál and beaten to death than the distension of Felipe’s abdomen disappeared, as if by magic. Anyone who doubts this can go to Carrisál and ask Felipe, who is now an old man, but remembers well.)

“Open up!” demanded the men at the door. “We want Nicolasa!”

“No!” shouted Rosaura with finality.

The men moved away, grumbling and swearing.

The next morning word circulated through Ajoya that Chútele was dying. Nevertheless, when the sun had risen high and hot in the morning sky, Old Nicolasa, disregarding Rosaura’s warnings, put her load of wash on her head, as was her custom, and made her way to the river. She constructed a small teepee of brightly colored rags stretched over converging poles, and thus sheltered from the sun, she began to scrub the garments, beating them on a flat stone to loosen the dirt.

Suddenly she heard a noise and looked around. Rubén Zepeda, Chútele’s seventeen year-old nephew, drew close to her and said stiffly, “I’ve come to ask you to go with me to cure my uncle. He’s dying…”

Nicolasa, angry at the young man’s implication, gave a snort and turned back to her washing.

“Please come!” begged Rubén, and again he added, “He’s dying!”

“¡Hijo de la chingada!” shrieked Nicolasa. “What in the devil makes you think I can do anything for your damned uncle!”

Ruben caught the old woman by the shoulder and said in a shaking voice, “Are you going to go with me? Yes or no?”

“No!” snapped Nicolasa. “Leave me alone!”

She jerked away from him. Ruben caught hold of her again and threw her to the ground. He closed his hands around Nicolasa’s throat and began to strangle her, crying “Kill my uncle, would you, you lousy witch! Die, damn you!”

Two other women who had been washing clothes a short distance upstream came running to Nicolasa’s aid. These were the aged Saturnina Castro, wife of Martín Chavez, and her niece, Jesús Castro. They clubbed Rubén with sticks until he let go. (“As soon as I let her go I felt sorry for her and wished I hadn’t done it,” said Rubén afterwards.) Nicolasa, her throat badly injured, gasped to regain her breath. Saturnina and Jesús escorted her back to the home of Rosaura, where the old woman collapsed.

That afternoon Chútele died. For twenty-four hours his wife and children sat around his small, swollen body, weeping, and praying for his soul. Then he was carried to the hillside cemetery in a small, wooden coffin. Half the village saw him buried.

Four days later, in the evening, sixteen year-old Cande Castro, a niece of Saturnina, gave birth to a small boy baby. It was a difficult birth, yet for the first hour or so afterward, both she and the child seemed to be doing well. Then, of a sudden, Cande went into a state of collapse, with high fever and labored breath. The midwives gave her agua de carmin and the medicinal herbs, all to no avail. Cande’s mother was frantic, and cried out, “It must be that she’s been hexed! Bring Nicolasa and see if she can cure her!”

Again a group of men came knocking on the heavy doors for Nicolasa. Again Rosaura turned them away. A few hours later, Cande succumbed, and the new-born infant died minutes after his mother. Now there was no doubting the cause. It was Nicolasa! Cande’s mother shrieked to God for revenge, and the village, like a great wall, echoed her pain.

From that day on, Old Nicolasa lived as a virtual prisoner within the confines of the Alarcón home. Shortly after my return from Verano, when I heard of what had happened, I went to call on her. Ramona and Rosaura greeted me as warmly and spontaneously as ever, but poor Nicolasa—who usually comes forward with her bony arms spread wide to embrace me—now stood silently, her arms drawn in against withered breasts, in the darkest corner of the hall. I went to her and hugged her, and she tried to laugh, but tears came to her eyes.

“ . . . It’s not just that I’m afraid to go out into the streets anymore,” she said. “I’m embarrassed to! The way the people all look at me, David, I tell you it really makes me ashamed, ashamed so that I can’t stand it. I can’t even go to the river to wash! What else is there to do?” She looked at me and smiled unhappily. “What did I do, David, I ask you that? I didn’t do anything to Chútele. Or to this Cande; I scarcely knew her! Why would I want to do any harm to her? Yet they blame me. Why me? I’m losing my mind. Curse them all!”

She bent her head to dry her eye on her shoulder. “You don’t have any medicine for my throat, do you? It hurts so much I can hardly swallow.”

I examined her throat and found it was still swollen and blue. “I’ll bring something,” I said, and left.

“All this talk about witchcraft is a lot of nonsense!” snapped Rosaura when I returned. “I’ll tell you why I don’t believe in it. My father, Bonefacio, started urinating blood in Nogales, and a doctor said he had to have a kidney stone removed. My father wrote for me to sell three calves to pay for it. So I sold them. Well, my father arrived in San Ignacio and met a band of gitanos (gypsies) who told him he’d been hexed. They said they would cure him for 900 pesos. So my father gave them 900 pesos, and the gypsies left, saying that the cure would take place invisibly in the course of three days. So! At the end of three days he was worse! We had to sell a full-grown cow to pay for the operation: They took out a stone as big as a dung beetle. And he got well.”

“I know,” I said. He showed me the stone when I stopped by at Vainilla on the way back from Pueblo Viejo.”

“My husband, Goyo, has almorranas (piles),” continued Rosaura, “And do you know he spent over 3000 pesos trying to get cured of a hex before he finally had them operated on. No sir, nobody’s going to make me believe in witchcraft! Look what they’ve done to poor Nicolasa! By the grace of God she’s not dead.”

“Better I were,” muttered Nicolasa sadly.

“Why do you defend her?” drawled easygoing, seventeen-year-old Chón, when I returned to the casa Chavarín, “since she’s guilty.”

“She is not guilty!” I replied, a little annoyed.

“Huh!” snapped Micaela. “I can name at least a dozen people right in this village that she’s done away with.” And she named them.

All over Ajoya people were dragging forth evidence against Nicolasa. Catalina, the wife of Heliodoro, remembered that one day she had argued with Nicolasa over the use of a lavadero (a big rock for washing), and the next day as she was going down the steep path toward the river, a huge black snake “fatter than natural” had fallen from the bank onto her foot. Micaela’s sister, Lupe, related how one day when she was going to wash, Nicolasa had touched her on the back and said, “¡Con eso te chingo!” (With this you’ve had it!), and from that time or, Lupe began to have eye trouble, stomach trouble, foot trouble, back trouble, and trouble with her daughter. Even blind Ramón recounted how Nicolasa had brought about the death of his brother. (Before this, he had been blaming old Cecilia).

The village was full of talk of witchcraft whether it applied to Nicolasa or not. Librada, the wife of old Caytano, remembered how Abraham Lomas had paid “La Joróita” to put “huevos de burro” (donkey balls) on Chencho Velázquez so their mutual sweetheart, Cuca Sánchez, wouldn’t love him. Sofía Chavarín told how her first cousin, Carlota, had been jealous of the marriage of Victoria (Toya) Nuñez with Gregorio Alarcón’s son, Librado, and how Carlota—on the advice of Micaela’s half-sister, Cosme—had succeeded in breaking up the marriage by repeating the “Oración de San Antonio” (Prayer of Saint Anthony) at twelve noon for nine consecutive days while she burned a candle al culo (at its ass end) with a needle through its center.

The stories were endless and everyone was busy telling them. Anyone who sided with Nicolasa was suspect, especially Rosaura, about whom people dug up all kinds of nasty gossip. “Rosaura protects Nicolasa because Rosaura’s got a secret romance going with Ricardo Manjarréz. So she’s been paying Nicolasa to hex her husband, Goyo, so he won’t find out. The whole village knows, and poor Goyo doesn’t suspect a thing!” and, “When Goyo’s son Salvador wanted to abandon Rosaura’s daughter, Jovita, Rosaura had Nicolasa hex Salvador so that he wouldn’t be able to do it with other women.” Et cetera.

It was too much for me. The day after I arrived in Ajoya, I saddled Hormiga again and rode across the river and the hills to Las Chicuras, to visit the family of little Goyo. But I was still upset.

“It’s completely unjustified the way people have been accusing Nicolasa!” I confided to Goyo’s mother, Jesús.

“Is it?” said Jesús challengingly.

“Don’t tell me you think she’s a witch too!” I cried.

Chuy laughed. “I really don’t know,” she said. “But in any case, Nicolasa brought it on herself.”

“The way she talks, you mean?”

“Exactly!” said Chuy. “Why, do you realize she’s threatened to hex our whole family to death! Whether she meant it, or could, who knows? But she said it, sure enough.”

Chuy lit a brown, hand-rolled cigarette in the coals. “You see, Nicolasa’s son, David, and an uncle I used to have named Lino, got into a fight over a girl they both liked. This was about twelve years ago when they were both young men. Well, a few days after they had been fighting, Lino got drunk. My uncle used to drink quite a bit. Well, this day Lino was walking up the alley past the house of María Vega, and he simply dropped dead! Somebody remembered that Lino and David had had a fight, and they decided that Nicolasa had probably hexed Lino. So a group of people went to Nicolasa’s casa on the loma, and asked her ‘Is it true that you hexed Lino to death?’ ’Damned right!’ screamed Nicolasa. ‘And I won’t stop until I kill off every last relative he’s got!’ And that,” concluded Chuy, “includes me and my children!”

“But surely that was just something she screamed out in anger because they accused her,” I suggested.

“Maybe,” replied Chuy. “But there are things Nicolasa has done that I can’t explain. Like the time she changed herself into an owl. That was several years before Lino died, when Remedios and I were just recently married and we lived in Saus. A friend of Remedios named Santiago was visiting us, and just at dusk they spotted a lechusa (barn owl) that had landed in the closest tree. Santiago, as a joke, cried out at the lechusa, ‘Mire! Allí está la Nicolasa, hija de la chingada! ¿Porque viniste pa’ca?’ (Look! There’s Nicolasa, daughter of a bitch! Why did you come here?) The lechusa flew away, and that was that. Well, the next day Remedios had to come to Ajoya, and he decided to stop by at the house of my grandmother next to Nicolasa’s casa there on the loma. As he was passing Nicolasa’s house, who should step out but Nicolasa. She took one look at Remedios, and screamed, ‘¡¿Que hubo, cabrón?! ¡Hijo de la chingada! ¿Porqué me maltrataste ayer?’ (What’s up, bastard?! Son of a bitch! Why did you speak evil to me yesterday?) Well, I’m telling you, poor Remedios just about died!” Chuy scratched her head. “So who knows if Nicolasa is a witch or not?” she said. “All I know is what people say.”