At day break on Wednesday of Lenten Week doña Felicia readied herself for her yearly pilgrimage to Chimayo. She prepared with a lonche to last three days, put on a cap with "Raiders" written across it to protect her head from the sun, and gave another one to Caridad, signaling to her that she was going along and that was that.

El Santuario was not far from the little adobe that don Domingo was having built for his daughter, and Caridad, who had chosen that spot because of its holy reputation, had only passed through the village. This was Caridad's first pilgrimage. Sofi never took her girls to Chimayo during Holy Week. As a matter of fact, during their growing-up years it had been difficult to take them all together anywhere because of La Loca's inability to be around people because of their all-too-human smell. But of course Caridad, through her dreams and from people's accounts, knew all about Chimayo, which was why she had chosen to have her house built there with her father's lottery winnings.

In that valley in the Sangre de Cristo foothills nearly two centuries before, a Penitente Brother performing his penances during Holy Week ran toward a bright light coming out of the ground not far from the river. He dug at the spot where the light emitted and found a statue of Our Lord of Esquipulas.

Now, of course there are a lot of amazing aspects to this legend because Nuestro Señor de Esquipulas was the black Christ of the far-off land of the converted Indians of Esquipulas, Guatemala, and how He got to the land of the Tewa is anybody's guess! But he most certainly had a mission, which was to let people know of the healing powers of the sacred earth of Tsimayo--just like he had done in Esquipulas--so shortly after his appearance, the Catholic Church endorsed as sacred what the Native peoples had known all along since the beginning of time.

With this in mind, Caridad was more than willing to go but not all that thrilled, frankly, at the prospect of walking all the way there, which was the only way doña Felicia said that they would get there, refusing to jump in Caridad's pickup when Caridad opened the door for her.

"If I can make it on these rheumatic legs filled with varicose veins--certainly a young girl like you can make it there skipping all the way!" doña Felicia told Caridad who, without responding, reluctantly followed the old woman as she started down the road.

Doña Felicia nimbly led the way in the direction of the penitente procession she told Caridad that they were going to join, only stopping occasionally to take a swig of water from the jar that she had handed over to Caridad to carry along with the rest of their provisions.

"Doña Felicia--how hot do you think it is today?" Caridad called out to her guide after they had traveled a long while. At that point it really didn't matter how hot it was, because hot can only be so hot before it's just hot. The sun was pounding on Caridad's head right through the Raiders cap, sweat dripped down the sides of her face and down her neck. She was drenched under her breasts and armpits and her T-shirt was soaked. Caridad had only asked so as to make conversation, since she was lonely walking in single file all that long way.

"Don't talk," doña Felicia responded over her shoulder.
"¿Por que no?"

"Because it's hotter if you talk..."

They walked, rested, slept in a huddle at night, rose at dawn, and walked some more until Good Friday, when they caught up with the penitente procession. While it's not every day that you see a crowd following a Christ-like figure carrying a cross along the highway (unless your people are from Chimayo or Tome or similar places throughout the territory controlled by the Spanish queen and friars for centuries with such ferocity that neither Mexican nor U.S. appropriation diluted the religious practices of the descendants of the Spaniards who settled there, including this procession that has been performed annually for two hundred years and will probably go on for two hundred more, such is their fervant devotion), Caridad, who had not been in love with anyone since Memo, fell in love that Holy Friday, and this took her by such surprise that every other marvel around her paled in comparison.

So, the telling of the penitente procession, the description of Francisco, doña Felicia's godson, who carried the huge wooden cross over his bare shoulders for miles under the piercing sun, and all the rest of that impressive spectacle will be forsaken because it was surpassed by the one of Caridad falling in love.

When they reached el Santuario it was swarming with tourists and others also making their Lenten Week pilgrimage. Caridad stayed close to doña Felicia. "You're getting more like your sister Loca everyday," doña Felicia scolded her, pulling her faded tapalo away from Caridad's grasp.

Caridad tried to hide her tension about the crowd and let herself move away from doña Felicia just enough so that she no longer was able to cling even to the reassuring smell of ground comino and chili that came off doña Felicia's pores. Yeah, she was getting more like Loca more and more each day, she agreed to herself. Now, like Loca or like a blind person or even a dog, she was sensitive--although not averse--to individual body odors. Well, ni modo, she concluded, because after all, Caridad did not go in for psychoanalyzing that which just was and it was enough for her to know something without having to question it.

It was about then, however, that she stopped short at the sight of the most beautiful woman she had ever seen sitting on the adobe wall that surrounds the sanctuary. At that moment the woman also turned toward Caridad, but since she was wearing sunglasses, Caridad wasn't sure whether her gaze was being returned.

"Come on, come on," doña Felicia summoned Caridad the way one does with children, with a little sweeping gesture of the hand. Caridad, completely overwhelmed by the sight of the woman, blushed and followed doña Felicia into the church without a word. They lined up to go through the small rooms adjacent to the chapel where there is a pozito opened to the holy earth with which, since the early part of the nineteenth century, Catholics (really, it wasn't their fault that they came so late to this knowledge, being such newcomers to these lands) have healed both their bodies and spirits.

Both doña Felicia and Caridad bent down and rubbed some of the earth among their brows and temples and on their forearms and put a little on their tongues. Doña Felicia also scooped some up and put it in a small coffee can she brought for that purpose, and then they slowly made their way out. All the while, Caridad could do nothing but think of the woman on the wall. She was exhausted and nearly dehydrated and surely she could not have experienced what she felt throughout her entire body just from the sight of a woman! But as soon as they were outside, coming around from the back of the church, she saw the woman in question, more real than before, still on the wall. Moreover, the woman on the wall was looking over her shoulders in Caridad's direction!

Doña Felicia and an uneasy Caridad went to the front of the church and found a little shady spot under a cottonwood to have their lunch. Each one ate four oranges but couldn't touch any of the tacos de papitas doña Felicia had prepared, their stomachs were so unsettled from heat and fatigue. They peeled one orange after the next, sharing without a word, just sucking hard to end their thirst.

All the while, Caridad kept sneaking glances over at the woman on the wall who, as far as she could tell, was unabashedly staring at her as well.

"Maybe she thinks you are a long-lost cousin...," doña Felicia said out of nowhere.

Caridad blushed because the feelings she was having were not the ones one has for a long-lost cousin and yet, she couldn't explain them. Memo had been her only love. After Memo, all was a blur for her. She could not tell you the name or identify the face of one man among all those who had followed her out of the bars at night where she had spent entire years of her life.

It was a funny thing because you might figure that after what happened to her, not only with Memo, but especially because of that nightmarish night in Caridad's life, she might have become an embittered woman, who hated men for having served little purpose in her life but to bring her misery and shame. But she didn't. Caridad was incapable of hating anyone or anything. , which is why doña Felicia had elected her heiress to her healing legacy. Hating came quite easy in this life of injustices, doña Felicia figured, but having an abundant heart took the kind of resiliency that a curandera required.

Caridad had never talked about that night to anyone, but there were two people besides herself who knew what had happened because she had let them know through dreams and that was La Loca and doña Felicia. And they three knew that it wasn't a man with a face and a name who had attacked and left Caridad mangled like a run-down rabbit. Nor two or three men. That was why she had never been able to give no information to the police.

It was not a stray and desperate coyote either, but a thing, both tangible and amorphous. A thing that might be described as made of sharp metal and splintered wood, of limestone, gold, and brittle parchment. It held the weight of a continent and was indelible as ink, centuries old and yet as strong as a young wolf. It had no shape and was darker than the dark night, and mostly, as Caridad would never ever forget, it was pure force.

The night doña Felicia dreamt of the malogra, she jumped up and ran about the house with her escopeta--the one she had used in the Revolucion, a little rusty, but still operable--in a half-sleep until she realized it had been a dream and that the thing was not there in her rooms. When La Loca dreamt it she went out to the stall and slept between two of the horses. "Oh my God! Oh my God!" Sofi said , crossing herself when her daughter described her dream the next morning, coming in and carrying her blanket covered with hay that Sofi snatched from her and threw out the window. (Loca's hypersensitivity to human smells had shortchanged her response to the odors of the animals.)

In Loca's dream it had taken the shake of sheep's wool, large, voluminous, not in animal form but something just evil. "That was the malogra, 'jita! It was looking for you! Oh my God! And you went outside . . . that's where people see it, out in the dark, at night! Thank God it didn't find you out there!"

Caridad dreamt of it often, and while it still frightened her, on each occasion she built courage against it. One day, or rather night (for it seems the malogra only comes out at night), she would wrestle it to the ground, that wicked wool spirit, at the crossroad where she knew it still waited with nothing better to do.

"Doña Felicia, I'm too shy . . .," Caridad ventured to say to her friend. "Will you go up to that woman for me and ask her where she thinks she knows me from . . . if that's why she keeps looking at me?"

"She's gone, mi'jita," Doña Felicia answered casually, unaware of the importance it had to Caridad. Caridad looked up and sure enough the woman on the wall was gone. Caridad quickly scanned the area but didn't see a trace of her. She bit her lip. Suddenly she jumped up and declared, "I'm going to look for her . . . "

"And what are you going to say?" doña Felicia asked without budging from her spot. "And what is the purpose, anyway?"

Caridad sat back down. Her whole body was affected by a stranger and she couldn't explain why. And how the woman on the wall was lost to her in the thick of the crowd. In total despair, sitting on the ground with her legs tucked beneath her, she threw her body forward, arms stretched out, and let out a deep sigh of despair like a prayer.

"Oye, niña, this is not Mecca!" doña Felicia teased Caridad. Doña Felicia let out a little "hee-hee" laugh afterward because she still didn't know what Caridad was going through with Woman-on-the-wall. Caridad shook her head but did not get up. How could she tell doña Felicia that for the first time in years, since way before the attack, her heart was renewed, moved by another human being? Admit it, Woman-on-the-wall was the most beautiful woman she had ever seen--but she had scarcely had more than a glimpse of her. And what had made her so exceptional to Caridad in any case?

In and of herself there was nothing about her that was unusually striking. She was dark. Indian or Mexican. Black, black hair. Big sturdy thighs. She could tell that because the woman was wearing cutoffs. There was just something about her, and suddenly Caridad got up and without a word to doña Felicia began to wander about in search of her because she knew that she could not bear the thought of living without that woman.

For twenty minutes, Caridad searched without success and then she spotted Woman-on-the-wall, who by then was sitting on a small hill, legs spread out in front of her the way a child sits on the ground. She was pulling food items out of her backpack and talking with another woman; and for the first time Caridad realized that Woman-on-the-wall-now-on-a-hill had been with this other woman all along, but like a close-up lens, Caridad had focused only on the dark woman. Even now that she had become aware that Woman-on-the-wall-now-on-a-hill was not alone, she perceived the other woman as a blur rather than an actual person.

Then Woman-on-the-wall-now-on-a-hill looked over in Caridad's direction, and Caridad was certain that she was being looked at this time, because without realizing fully that she was doing it, she was climbing the hill toward the two women.

"Hi," they all said to each other when Caridad had reached them. A rather anticlimatic opening for the most dramatic moment in Caridad's life thus far. Well, then again, perhaps "dramatic" is not the best word here, considering who we are talking about, but to Caridad such events as her Holy Restoration, her clairvoyance, the Screaming Sister (as some unkind people back in Tome still referred to Fe), and such were just part of life. Falling in love. . . now that was something else altogether! In any event, that brief meeting overwhelmed Caridad, who, having nothing else to say, turned right around and went back down to the hill.

When she returned to doña Felicia, they gathered up their things and began their strenuous walk back to Albuquerque with the only consolidation that at least the sun had begun to set and would not leave them like a couple of dried peach pits by the side of the road before they had a chance to curl up somewhere to sleep.

Caridad returned at dawn on Easter Sunday to her little trailer with her inner being blooming bright red like the flowers on a prickly pear cactus. She swept, mopped, changed the linen, cleaned the kitchen appliances, scrubbed her bathtub and toilet bowl, and sang Aretha Franklin tunes. About 5 A.M., just as the sun was splitting the sky, doña Felicia knocked on Caridad's door. "What's going on?" she asked, looking at Caridad with a cleaning rag in her hand just about to start wiping off the venetian blinds.

"I can't sleep," Caridad said cheerfully.

"Well, nobody can say that cleaning is a waste of time, ma cheri, but why don't you try praying? Whatever you're trying to figure out will come to you, believe me. And you can give that little body of yours a rest." doña Felicia told Caridad and went back to her own little trailita with its smell of chili sauce, herbs brewing, and its fresh Yerba de la Vibora hanging from the window panels to dry.

So this is what Caridad set out to do as soon as doña Felicia left. Sometimes, however, she had a tendency to follow doña Felicia's advice to a fault, which may explain why it wasn't until the following Tuesday, when doña Felicia had to revive Caridad who had passed out at some point before her altar that she stopped praying for light ot be shed on her regarding Woman-on-the-wall-later-woman-on-a-hill-with-someone-else.

"Ay! doña Felicia," Caridad said. "I'm a lousy student for you! I see mirages and am filled with bad dreams! Right now I was dreaming of being pursued by a creature with huge wings like a giant eagle, but he had these small horns--or maybe it was a she--and he or she was wearing armor and I was flying as fast as I could to escape it until I hit a telephone wire and crash-landed. Good thing you woke me up and saved me!"

"Why don't you go up to Ojo Caliente?" doña Felicia suggested. "And take yourself a nice mineral bath, cheri!" She slipped Caridad a ten-dollar bill knowing that since Caridad left her job at the hospital her finances were tight. Since the assassination of Caridad's Corazon, doña Felicia no longer charged her rent. So Caridad packed her vinyl overnight bag with hair blower, toiletries, and a change of clothes (badly needed since she was still wearing the T-shirt and jeans she had on during her long trek to Chimayo and back, and she had cleaned house in the same apparel), got in her pickup truck, and left.

This was the last that anyone saw of her of her for a year. To begin with, Caridad had no sense of direction and could not read a map, so consequently she did not carry one; also; she had never been to Ojo Caliente. That by itself might explain her getting lost. But then I shouldn't have said that no one saw her because she did make a stop at the NuMex gas station just off I-25, where Francisco el Penitente happened to be working at the time as a mechanic, and he told his godmother later that Caridad had stopped and put ten dollars even in her tank. This was when doña Felicia knew something was up because she knew that Caridad only had ten dollars and would not have gone up to the hot springs for a mineral bath without money to pay for it. Still, doña Felicia decided not to call Sofi and don Domingo, since that would only serve to worry them, until a few nights had passed and doña Felicia herself could not divine what had become of Caridad.

First, the old curandera lit a special candle, for St. Anthony who helps people find lost things. Well, of course Caridad was not a thing, but la inocente was lost like a broken compass just the same. But St. Anthony kept silent and did not give doña Felicia so much as a clue, not even when she turned him upside down to persuade him to cooperate. Instead, he kept more tight-lipped than ever. The truth is St. Anthony probably just didn't know where Caridad went, since like I said, he is for finding things, not people.

Now, El Santo Niño de Atocha is another matter--and he more than likely had probably guided Caridad to a refuge. But many years before doña Felicia and El Santo Niño had had a falling out, so she no longer entrusted her prayers to the child Jesus who once saved Christians from Muslims in conquered Spain and in North America saved conquering Catholics from pagan Indians. (This was part of doña Felicia's problem with the little saint in Spanish regal dress, trying to accept that he saved souls or abandoned them depending on their nationalistic faith.)

Doña Felicia used divining sticks and then she took out her dog-eared deck of Tarot cards given to her by a woman in Veracruz back in '27, but neither of these gave her any specific information. All she knew was that Caridad was alive and that she had left on her own accord. She told Caridad's family as much on the third day after her disappearance.

"Ay! How could you let esa inocente out of your sight, doña Felicia!" Sofi wailed, hands up in the air. She came over directly to Caridad's trailer as soon as she got the news from doña Felicia, as if she had to see with her own eyes that Caridad was really gone. Sofi feared the worst for her daughter.

"Now, now, Sofi," said one of doña Felicia's vecinas, "reprochas ain't gonna do nobody no good . . ." "I say we call the police. That's what they're there for! St. Anthony might help you find a ring that has fallen behind trastero, but he can't bring a grown woman back against her will!" another comadre contributed.
"And what makes you think that Caridad doesn't want to come back?" Sofi asked, somewhat put off by the neighbor's presumptions about her daughter, whom she hardly knew.

"And what makes you think that the police would find her?" Sofi's husband added. From what he understood the local police had done next to nothing to find his daughter's attacker or attackers when she was left for dead by the road. If they knew who it was that had disappeared they probably would do little more than a routine hospital and jail search for Caridad, such had been her reputation. Domingo had heard many insulting stories about his daughter and had defended her honor more than once in Valencia County bars when it was suggested that she had for all intents and purposes "asked for it" when she was attacked.

"No, we'll get some people together and we'll go out to look for her ourselves," he said. And that's what happened. For weeks, Caridad's father and those concerned about Caridad spread themselves out throughout the state posse-style in hopes of finding her. Somehow they were certain that she had not left her homeland. But where could she be? Not in Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Taos, or any of the villages they put out the word. They asked the peoples from the pueblos all the way from Taos to the Zuñi to see if she had turned up on any of the reservations. But there was no sign of her no place.

Meanwhile, Esperanza was still missing in the Persian Gulf. The last traces of her and the other three members of the news crew were their abandoned jeep, six thousand dollars in cash, camera equipment, and footsteps in the sand leading toward enemy lines.

Domingo's and Sofi's invitation to Washington by the only senator who seemed interested in discussing their missing daughter brought them little reassurance. It was an election year and Domingo decided afterward that the senator's only concern was getting some good publicity out of their meeting, which had been on national television news. The couple returned home feeling worse about Esperanza than ever.

"God gave me four daughters," Sofi told Father Jerome her confessor, who was still saying Mass at the church at Tome," and you would have thought that by now I would be a content grandmother, sitting back and letting my daughters care for me, bringing me nothing but their babies on Sundays to rock on my lap! But no, not my hijitas! I had to produce the kind of species that flies!"

"Your daughters fly?" Father Jerome interrupted and cleared his throat a little. He had never gotten over the sight of the infant who had risen from her little casket and ascended to the church roof, but he did not know of any other incidents since then.

"Well, Padre," Sofi explained, "you remember when La Loca went to the church rooftop the day of her funeral when she was three years old? Then, just before Caridad's disappearance, doña Felicia told me that Caridad had a dream where she was flying and being pursued by Lucifer or some other horrible winged monster like that, and if I know Caridad more than likely she is flying around somewhere in the mountains, keeping out of the way of telephone wires! And then my Esperanza flew--not with her own wings, of course, Esperanza is much too practical for that--but in a jet to another continent and she too, is gone! The only one who stays earthbound is la Fe . . ." At this point, Sofi began to cry.

"Well, be thankful for that much," Father Jerome sighed and put a hand on her shoulder to comfort her. He had once talked to the bishop about the case of the resurrected child, but had not brought himself to mention the details about her flying or her announcement regarding her otherwordly travels. The bishop had dismissed it as an example of the ignorance of that community and added that such "resurrections" were commonly reported where proper medical attention was not given.

"And what do you think happened to your sister?" Sofi had asked Fe's opinion one evening out of desperation. She knew Fe did not have clairvoyant faculties, but her calmness about the matter puzzled her mother so that she wanted to hear Fe's speculations.

"Which _____?" Fe asked. Sofi could not hear the second word to her question because of the fact that Fe had severely damaged her vocal cords during the days when she had so violently and ceaselessly screamed; as a result, when she spoke now her voice was scratchy-sounding, similar to a faulty World War II radio transmitter, over which half of what she was saying did not get through, something like talking to Amelia Earhart just before contact was broken off altogether and she went down.

Sofi understood her daughter, while exercising to the fullest the patience granted to her to endure the particular life she had been given. Nevertheless, being only human, she answered with exasperation. "Of course I mean Caridad! I'm too scared to even think of la Esperanza . . . bombs falling, prisoners of war paraded on the television every night. ¡Dios mio! God only knows what has happened to mi'jita . . .!"

"Did you ___ think _______ Cari _____ eloped?" Fe suggested. Poor Fe, she never did get over Tom. All she seemed to think about were bridal gowns, floral arrangements, and the June wedding she never had.

"Caridad get married? To whom?" Sofi asked.

To whom indeed.

A year passed before Caridad was found one day living in a cave in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. It was Francisco el Penitente and two of the hermanos from his morada who found her quite by accident. No one knows why they were up there just before Holy Week, all on horseback that afternoon, when they spotted the traces of a fire someone had made and followed their noses to the cave that turned out to be Caridad's home.

The young woman was hardly recognizable. You can imagine what she looked like after not having changed her clothes or been in contact with a single human being for four seasons!

More than likely she had bathed in the stream that ran a few miles down below, but Francisco would not have ventured to gamble on it. At least we know what her water supply was and from the other things the men found that day, jackrabbit pelts and the bones of other similar small animals, it was also apparent as to how she kept herself alive. Now, how she kept herself warm during that bitter winter that had just passed, besides with animals skins and maintaining a fire, no one will ever know.

"You're coming with us!" one of the brothers said sternly to Caridad once they all were able to agree that she was indeed the woman that everybody had been looking for so long.

Caridad shook her head. The man dismounted from his Arabian steed and went over to her to pull her firmly toward his horse. She resisted and let herself drop on the ground. He bent down to take her up in his arms, figuring she would be even easier to get on the horse without any resistance but he couldn't lift her. "What the . . . !" he said, dumbfounded at how heavy she was although she was only half his size.

The other man joined him and finally Francisco el Penitente and yet the young woman could not be budged. The first brother, irate that his strength seemed no match for such a slight person, motioned to yank her along by the hair. "Stop!" Francisco el Penitente called, dropping to his knees. "It is not for us to bring this handmaiden of Christ back to her family. Can't you all see that? It is not our Lord's will."

He said a quiet prayer on Caridad's behalf and the men left, resigned that it was for them to simply relieve her mother of her worry by reporting that they had found her.

The word spread quickly, however, that a woman hermit was living in a cave up there and that she had resisted with passive yet herculean strength three men who tried to carry her back home. Many people remembered the stories regarding La Loquita Santa and were not surprised that her sister also showed out-of-the-ordinary abilities.

So it was that during that Holy Week, instead of going to Mass at their local parishes, hundreds of people made their way up the mountain to la Caridad's cave in hopes of obtaining her blessing and just as many with hopes of being cured of some ailment or another. Not only the nuevo mejican-style Spanish Catholics went to see her but also Natives from the pueblos, some who were Christian and some who were not, since for more than a year Caridad's disappearance had been a mystery throughout the state and her spartan mountain survival alone seemed incredible.

The three men who Caridad resisted by making herself into lead weight turned into a score of men as the story spread. Francisco's humble gesture of delivering a prayer for her well-being became the act of many men brought to their knees before the holy hermit, all begging forgiveness for their audacious attempt at manhandling her. It was said that she lifted the very horse in the air that the hermano had tried to force her to mount--with him on it--but out of benevolence brought it back down safely without so much as spooking the horse with her defiant magic.

The word had even gotten as far as Sonora to Yaqui land. The stories grew until some began to say that she was the ghost of Lozen, Warm Springs Apache mystic woman warrior, sister of the great chief Victorio who had vowed "to make war against the white man forever." And Lozen, among the last thirty-eight warriors, was the only woman. It was Lozen who alerted the others when the enemy approached, being warned herself by the tingling of her palms and her hands turning purple.

When left by herself, Lozen tuend toward the four directions and sang to her god Ussen to guide her through the wilderness.

Yes, perhaps this mountain woman was not the one the Penitente brothers thought her to be, but a spirit-memory, and that was why she was not overcome by them.

Don Domingo, who could spin a good tale himself, was amused by these accounts and although he knew his daughter was not of the common strain, he strongly suspected that she was not lifting horses nor bringing droves of men to their knees.

Sofi refused to join the Easter Week throngs, convinced that if that was la Caridad up there she would make herself invisible rather than let herself become a spectacle. She decided she would wait it out. Now that she knew her daughter was safe, living in a cave but safe nonetheless, her heart was calm.

Doña Felicia took her yearly pilgrimage to Chimayo and decided that she would go and get Caridad afterwards. It had been decades since she had done any mountain climbing. She did not drive and didn't trust no one to take her up there neither. But she would tell her godson to point her in the general direction and she was certain she would find her apprentice and convince her to come back home with none of the resistance that Caridad had shown to the men.

Fe, who had not once worried over her sister's disappearance but had continued with a business-as-usual attitude (she still worked at the bank and drove everybody up the wall with her perfectionist's manias), continued to maintain that her sister's departure from society must have something to do with being in love. In all fairness to Fe, it must be admitted that her theory did coincide with the fact that Caridad disappeared right after she was bowled over by la Woman-on-the-wall-later-woman-on-a-hill.

Caridad herself could not explain, even if she were inclined to try, what led her up those mountains that day. She could not say why, after having slept for four days and nights before her trip, she was so overcome by sleep that after getting lost she pulled up in that secluded area, thinking it was as good a place as any to rest, and abandoning her pickup, curled up that first night at the mouth of a cave and slept undisturbed by the cold mountain winds.

The following dawn, when she awoke to a delicate scar in the horizon that gradually bled into day and saw the sun then raise itself like a king from its throne over the distant peaks, Caridad only knew that she wanted to stay there and be the lone witness to that miracle every dawn.

Until those three men rode up on their horses she did not think of time or of no one, not doña Felicia, not her mom or the other members of her family, not even herself, but not a sleeping or waking moment went by when her heart did not long for Woman-on-the-wall in Chimayo.

Once the three men had gone away that day the spell of solitude under which Caridad had lived peacefully was broken, but she remained in her cave home in a daze, trying to remember what her life was like before she got there.

There followed another disorientating event, worse than the abrupt appearance of the penitentes who tried to make her do something she didn't want ot do. After so many, many months of tranquility--through heat, winds, snow, and blooming cactus again, her entire mountain was invaded up to the threshold of her very cave home by hundreds of people!

What did they want? As the first dozens arrived, she thought they had come to get her by force--like those three men--and she went deep inside the cave to hide. But later, she heard them call to her: "Oh Holy One! We beg you, please take pity on us!" "Your blessing, Little Hermit!" "I beg you, santita armitaña, help my mi'jito!" or "Cure my dying padre!" or " . . . a mi abuela!" or "a mi pierna coja que ya no sirve pa' nada!"

Of course, all this was confusing to Caridad, who, having been away from society for so long, made no connections between those pleas and her recluse existence and she just went deeper into the cave until all the voices finally went away.

Unbeknownst to Caridad, however, down below some of the daily newspapers had reported the pilgrimage to her mountain with "eyewitnesses" who had supposedly seen her. Some claimed to have been touched and blessed by her and still some others insisted that she had cured them! One man said that when he laid eyes on her, he saw a beautiful halo radiate around her whole body, like the Virgen de Guadalupe, and that she had relieved him of his drinking problem. One woman showed the press a small scrap of cloth that she said she had torn from la Santita Armitaña's robe!

"Robe?" Sofi said, after she read the article. "What was my daughter wearing when she left here anyway?" she asked doña Felicia, who was at the stove making fideos in one pot and preparing a purification baño for a neighbor in another.
"Distracted" as she tended to be at that stage in her life, she accidently sprinkled a little camphor oil in the fideos that was meant for the baño in the other pot for a woman down the road with espanto. But decided that it couldn't hurt too much, even if it gave the food a suspicious taste.
"I can tell you she wasn't dressed for the occasion, cheri!" doña Felicia laughed. "But then, who's to say how a handmaiden of Christ should dress!"
"A handmaiden of Christ? Now who is calling her that?" Sofi asked.
"My godson Francisco. But I think he's in love with la Caridad . . . No matter. Tomorrow I'll start up there and she'll be back home soon enough!"

But as it turned out, by the time the old lady made her way up to the cave home of her apprentice who had absentmindedly let a year pass without letting her know where she was, not even in a dream, Caridad had found her truck, had some trouble starting it up, but had been able to take off, remembering only that she was on her way to Ojo Caliente to take a mineral bath. She didn't have money and the price for a bath and wrap had gone up a buck anyway since the year before, but fortunately Caridad had brought with her some animal pelts and she traded a flawless deer skin for the bath. It was worth much more than one bath and the woman behind the counter gave her credit for a series of visits before she sent the bewildered-looking mountain woman in filthy rags off to the locker room.

Slowly Caridad took off her handmade deer-skin moccasins. She laid her Raiders cap beside her on the bench. And finally she pulled off her T-shirt. She scarcely noticed the attendant, who had placed a clean towel next to her, pick up her Raiders cap. "I'll be a sonofagun!" the attendant said, and still Caridad did not look at her, more shy than ever around people after not having been around no one for so long. The woman had a kind of singsong accent that Caridad took to be Native American. Slowly she glanced up, sensing the woman was waiting to meet her eyes.

"I remember you! You're the woman who was at Chimayo last year! You came up to me and my friend and then went off right away!" The woman spoke as if she had just run into an old high school chum and wasn't being recognized because she had gained too much weight or had too many babies or didn't wear bangs no more. She looked straight into Caridad's eyes, expecting Caridad to respond to her own enthusiasm at any moment, but Caridad's stare was dull and blank.

This woman before Caridad had nice teeth. She had shiny black hair pulled back, half in a ponytail and half down. She was confident and kind and full of stories of good times and bad times--all this Caridad was sure of. But she could not possibly be la Woman-on-the-wall-later-woman-on-a-hill that had obsessed her to such an extreme that she had all but abandoned life itself. . .could she?

Not because it wouldn't have made perfect sense to run into her at the first stop she made after returning to the world, for Caridad believed that her life had to have a turn for the better at sooner or later and this would have been as good a time to start as any.

But this attendant--who now, disappointed or just confused that Caridad had only stared at her and said nothing, had concluded that Caridad was burnt out on drugs or something and went about her business picking up wet towels off the floor--was just a woman.

The woman led Caridad to her bath after Caridad had showered for no less than an hour, feeling hot water run down her back for the first time since we all know when, and after a while, she called Caridad out of the tub to wrap her up and let her sweat out her body's toxins.

Then the woman began to talk again, as she arranged Caridad with a huge flannel sheet and a kind of wool Army blanket, leaving her neatly wrapped like a human burrito. All the while, she went on talking as if Caridad wasn't hearing her. "I just thought you were someone I had seen at Chimayo last year, but I guess I was wrong . . . Anyway, you looked so much like a cousin of mine that I ain't seen since we were girls. She's Pueblo, like me. Well, I'm half. My father was Mexican, so my grandma tells me. I didn't know my mother either. She died of a bad liver, you know how that goes. That's why I got to live with my grandma in Acoma.

"I ain't seen none of my cousins for a long time . . . I sure miss 'em. My friend, you know, the one I was with that day when I thought I first saw you? She's kinda like my roomate, you know? She didn't think you were my cousin. You're not Indian, are you? But I had this feeling like we knew each other . . ."

Caridad closed her eyes. The she felt the woman's breath close to her face. "Are you sure you wasn't that woman in Chimayo last year?" the woman whispered.

"Yes," Caridad finally said. "That was me." A hot tear was escaping down her left eye, making its way to her ear when the Acoma-Mexican woman caught it with her finger and wiped it off. "Shhh," she told Caridad. "You rest now. Just rest."