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Fifteen years ago, I took a small room at a shabby hotel in an unremarkable Mexican town. I was 23 and traveling as a way to elude responsibility. My life ambitions were vague, and I still made most of my choices in the lazy pursuit of sexual gratification. Not knowing anyone, I began visiting a nearby Aztec pyramid, a mound of stone on a bluff over the town partially retaken by jungle, where the local youth gathered at sunset to drink beer and gossip.
That’s where I first saw her, using a small knife to score the gnarled bark of a tree. Milky sap spilled out, gathering in slow tears along the cuts she’d made. A globule purled onto her hand, and as she turned to me, she raised her fingers to her lips and sucked it off. She wore a thin halter top and a loose, unstructured skirt with a dirty hem that brushed her bare ankles. Her skin was a deep, burnished color, like the earth after rain.
“Copal,” she told me. “I’m a bruja. A witch.” I laughed, but her fierce expression stopped me short. I knew nothing about brujería—the folk tradition of healing and spiritual cleansing practiced throughout Latin America—but her strangeness only heightened my desire to get close to her. As she bent to open a small sack of resinous crystals made from hardened sap, I glimpsed her loose breasts. “Copal,” she said again. “I burn it as part of limpias. Cleanings.”
“What do you clean?” I asked.
“Bad spirits,” she replied. “Evil thoughts. I also grant wishes. And make amarres. Love spells.”
She was older than me, perhaps in her mid-30s. Her shaggy black hair was touched with streaks of blue. I noticed a bird’s feather in it and reached to pluck it out. Her hand, sticky with sap and warmed by the afternoon sun, met mine. “I feel that you were brought here,” she said. “The wind brought you. But you need a limpia. Come to my house. I will clean you.”
When I arrived the next day at the whitewashed adobe box where she lived, I found her in the same top and grubby skirt. She led me into a walled garden where she had placed objects—bones, jars, and painted stones—among the thicket of trees and ferns, vines, and flowers.
“I knew you would come,” she said, seating me in a small chair. “I asked for it. But first, you must be made clean.” She lit a piece of copal and let it smolder, guiding its white plume toward me with a sheaf of feathers. I breathed its medicinal, faintly sweet scent as she circled me, murmuring under her breath. After a few revolutions, she leaned her hard torso against my body. “Completo,” she said. “Do you feel better?” I told her I felt much improved, and she tilted her head toward the house.
Moving from the brightness of the garden to the cool darkness inside rendered me momentarily blind. I felt her touch on my back and turned, trying to distinguish her silhouette from the shadows of the room. Using one hand, she unknotted her straps, then cupped her full breasts, as if offering the dark nipples. I pulled her to me, smelling sweat and smoke on her, and reached for her velvet grain. She sighed, then shimmied out of her skirt and lay on the bed. I hopped out of my own clothes and lay beside her, conscious of how much paler my skin was than hers.
The dirty sheets, the soups, the ceremonies, her obsession with collecting my seed—it had all begun to make me feel like a prisoner.
I’d come prepared, but when she saw me reach for the foil packet in my pants pocket, she told me, “No, no. Come down, come here.” I ignored her and slipped the condom on. As we moved and breathed against each other, a dog barked outside, and another answered. When we were done, I tugged off the sheath and tossed it to the floor. Immediately, she rose to scoop it up.
“I take it to the garden,” she said. “It will help everything grow. It’s the best of you.” Looking at the slick plastic wad in her hand, I hoped she was wrong. When she returned a moment later, she asked me to stay. In my postcoital lassitude, I assented.
The night extended into days. I checked out of my hotel, happy to live without expenses. We developed a little domestic routine—eating her soup, lounging in her garden, walking in the hills to collect copal and seeds and plants for the ceremonies I watched her perform for other clients. And we returned frequently to her love-stained bed. When we finished, she always collected the latex-bagged ejaculate—my “copal,” she began calling it—to bring to the garden. Once, I went looking for the place where she left it and exposed a wasp’s nest. The insects stung my face, my arms, my bare back. The bruja came out of the kitchen holding a clay tureen of soup, smiling as I swatted frantically.
The stings healed, but my nether regions were increasingly tender from our constant lovemaking, which I began to worry was less about pleasure-seeking and more about her controlling me. I felt like a curio to her clientele, who cast me knowing glances, as if I were a pet she dragged around and stroked. She kept me close, rarely letting me out of her sight. The dirty sheets, the soups, the ceremonies, her obsession with collecting my seed—it had all begun to make me feel like a prisoner. One morning, when she rolled on top of me, I demurred.
“Not happy?” she asked. “Gringos love Mexico. Be happy here. You stay.”
Forever was the unspoken last word. I went out to the garden but, after a few steps, felt a sharp pain shoot through my foot, as if I’d stepped on a nail. A pale scorpion scuttled into a litter of leaves. The bruja led me back to the bed, my foot numb and dragging like a club, and I lay there surrounded by the stale aroma of our sex. “Love, love,” she said, laying a damp rag across my forehead, securing the shutters, and closing the door. I went in and out of consciousness, wracked by spasms, breathlessness, and vomiting. There were soup spoons, sponges, and water trickling into my mouth. Eventually I awoke to find her perched on the edge of the bed.
“The limpia worked,” she said. “I’m pregnant.”
A wave of fear broke over me as I lay there, cold and naked. “I want to go home,” I said in a small voice, like the last leaf falling off a tree.
“You are home,” she said.
I closed my eyes and drifted back to sleep. The next time I woke, I felt for the first time that I could stand. I dressed shakily and found her in the garden, fussing with trinkets.
“You are better,” she said. “Have some food.”
I asked if she’d taken a pregnancy test.
“It’s not needed,” she said. “I can feel it.”
But I persisted, so we went to the local farmacia, where I bought three kits from a woman who wouldn’t look me in the eye. I waited on the bench outside a nearby cantina, feeling nauseated, while the bruja went in to use the bathroom. When she emerged, looking despondent, I snatched the tests from her hand: negative, negative, negative.
“You need another limpia,” she said. “Vamos,” she said. “We go back.”
“I feel ill,” I told her. I reached into my pocket, where I found only my passport and a small amount of money. Telling her I was thirsty, I handed her a bill and asked if she’d go back to buy me some water. As soon as the door banged shut, I began running until I reached the bus station. Without the bag I’d abandoned at the adobe house, I felt like an evacuee from a natural disaster. Shivering as I rode through the darkened Mexican landscape that night, I thought about the verdant chaos of the bruja’s garden and, under the leaves, the grasping pincers and poison tails.