Photo by Grant Whitty / Unsplash

The curandera greets you with an abrazo and leads you to a room ablaze with candles that burn beneath a retablo of Our Lady of Guadalupe. You sit down in lawn chairs and begin the platica. You have never told anyone before: how one afternoon you snuck your father’s newsmagazines into your bedroom closet and thumbed through them, as if they were pornography.

The images are scored in your memory: a Vietnamese girl runs, naked, screaming, arms outstretched, her child’s body seared with napalm.

A seated monk on a street corner spills kerosene on his saffron robes, lights a match; his body is wrapped in flames, his stand against the war. 

In a pit of bodies, a dead baby rests on top of his mother’s body. The caption: My Lai Massacre. US Soldiers Followed Orders.

Beneath the shadow of beating helicopter blades a Black GI is loaded onto a gurney. His is another body exposed in the pornography of war: the man’s pants dangle where once he had legs.

On the cover of LIFE magazine a young woman holds a sign, Make Love Not War. Opposite her a man’s face is contorted with rage—his sign reads, Make War Not Love.

You don’t know it yet, but you will learn. What you are suffering from is susto, shock, soul loss.

The curandera hands you some tissue, but your tears are frozen inside you. It will take more platica to get at the core of your pain so that it might begin to melt and the tears begin to flow. 

“Tell me more,” she says softly. She quotes the Bible, about truth, “La verdad nos hara libres.” That’s what you want more than anything. To be able to tell the truth about your childhood; you want closure; you want to be set free.

You continue. “I was little. I saw those pictures of that war. There was the TV news, too. I was afraid. Dad was in the Marines. I was terrified that he would have to go away to fight. And that he would be killed.

“My job, when I got home from school, was to bring the mail in before my parents got home from work. That’s what I did. My hands shook as I went through the pile—looking for an envelope that might have Washington, DC, as the return address. If I found one, I would press it against the window so that the light would come through and I could see the writing. I was straining to see if the president had written to my dad to tell him he had to go to Vietnam. This went on for years until finally . . .”

The curandera takes your hands. It feels like the earth beneath you is trembling but it’s you who are trembling. You can’t bring yourself to say more. You’re not ready. The platica will have to continue another time.

You don’t know it yet, but you will learn. What you are suffering from is susto, shock, soul loss. There is no closure, no cure—but, if you are willing, the curandera will say the secret, sacred word. And maybe, just maybe, you will be healed.

Albuquerque, New Mexico