The Deep Magic of Mexico
By: Ana Arana
Tags: Fiction, Short Story, Big Reads

Illustrations by Patricio Betteo, Nexos Magazine, Mexico City

A steady client I met the second time I visited Nancy’s clinic is Marta Flores, a short, stout woman in her mid-fifties who holds on to Nancy for strength and comfort. Nancy has helped Marta feel entitled to happiness.

Marta is a traditional mother and wife. The first six years she visited Nancy, she got advice on how to put up with her first husband, a man who tortured Marta psychologically. He is gone now, and Marta is happily remarried. Now she comes to mend the lives of her three grown sons, Enrique, Francisco, and Raul, and their families.

I became close to Marta and visited her several times in her modest apartment, where we talked about faith and choices in life. Marta first visited Nancy in 2003. She had visited several healers and brujas through the years, but she believes Nancy was the most powerful. “She’s helped me to treasure the happy moments in life,” she said.

Marta and her family live in a small apartment in a working-class neighborhood north of the Basilica, the shrine to the Virgin of Guadalupe, in the northern part of Mexico City. For thirty-three years she was married to Marco, a violent and taciturn man who worked as a bus driver. Marco barely provided enough money for the family, but Marta was never allowed to work outside the home. “Sometimes we did not have money for dinner,” she said. “We were always short.”

Her weekly visits to see Nancy at the time helped her find patience to put up with her life, which, she said, was gray and dull. She was always depressed. Then, in mid-2010, tragedy struck the family. And that tragedy freed Marta.

Marco had been having seizures and he apparently got dizzy and fell from the entrance to the second floor apartment. He died immediately. She did not love him, but she mourned him.

Almost a year after Marco died, Marta met Toño, a muffler repairman who worked at a shop near Marta’s house. Toño started flirting with Marta, but she was afraid to reciprocate. “I had met my husband when I was seventeen. And I was married to him for thirty-three years,” she explained. “I did not know what to do.” She liked the man, but thought that women her age do not get second chances. She went to see Nancy and posed a question: “Should I listen to Toño ?”

Absolutely, Nancy said.

Today, Marta and Toño are married and live in the modest, two-bedroom apartment where Marta lived with her first husband. Toño moved his muffler shop into Marta’s garage. They share the house with Marta’s thirty-one-year old son, Raul, the youngest of her children. “Toño is a gift from God,” Nancy told her. “You have to cherish the opportunity.”

One Saturday morning I visit Marta at home. I enter the house crossing Toño’s car shop, where soot covers the floors and walls and mufflers are lined up like decorations. An unpainted staircase leads to the second floor apartment.

Marta built this apartment ten years ago, on top of a one-floor house she inherited from her father. For years, she and her children and husband slept crowded in one room in the area where the muffler shop is located today. Her first husband had been opposed to building the new apartment. But Nancy gave Marta the impetus to borrow money and rebuild the apartment anyway. Marta said she began the house renovation because a ghost started appearing to her children, a ghost that came after a jealous neighbor spread cemetery dirt in front of her house and on the roof.

Marta’s challenge today is keeping her family safe from crime and promoting the education of her grandchildren. Her oldest son, Enrique, lives in another small apartment, which she built for him on the second floor next to hers. Enrique is only thirty-three, but he has two teenage boys because his girlfriend got pregnant when he was seventeen.

Without an education, Enrique had difficulty finding a good job, but he finally found work — with Nancy’s help, according to Marta. He is a warehouse attendant at a local supermarket. His wife, Lorena, works as an assembler in a nearby textile factory. Marta has helped raise their two sons, her grandchildren.

Marta’s second son, Francisco, lives in Chalco, another low-income neighborhood in Mexico State, where he works as a truck driver. Marta sees little of him because his wife does not get along with her. But every time she sees Nancy, she asks the cards about Francisco.

Lately, Marta has been more concerned with her youngest son, Raul. A reserved young man, Raul has finally found a girlfriend. But the relationship is complicated.

Raul’s girlfriend used to live with an enforcer for a local drug gang, called La Familia. The group is originally from the state of Michoacan, but they have a large presence in Mexico State, especially in Los Reyes and nearby municipalities, where they engage in drug dealing, extortion, and theft.

One day, in front of Nancy’s clinic, Marta shows me a computer printout of an Instagram photo. A young, pretty girl with long black hair is smiling — and holding a large revolver. She is fifteen.

“This is the daughter of my son’s new girlfriend,” Marta tells me.

Raul fell in love with the girlfriend while the ex-husband was in jail. And now that the ex-husband has been released from prison, Marta fears he will attack her son. The day she showed me the photo, she had come to see Nancy, seeking protection for Raul.