The incident at my ex-girlfriend's house that day, when I saw that strange woman who apparently practiced some kind of witchcraft, had left me with the idea that perhaps Nátaly had “done some work” on me. I had never known such things up close, but in Colombia you frequently see flyers and posters advertising the services of magicians and brujos who “attract and bind the beloved one,” who “ward off your enemies” and many other unsettling offers, so tying the threads together, it occurred to me that perhaps Nátaly had hired that lady to make me leave Angélica and lead me to her side.
Even, in one of my many desperate attempts to win back my wife's love, a few weeks before my mystical awakening thanks to marijuana and to my baptism in the Sierra Nevada, I had implored Angélica to accept going with me to consult an old woman who was said to have gifts of clairvoyance and who, without a doubt, could help us see whether we had been victims of some supernatural attack.
Perhaps motivated by curiosity more than by the slightest intention of returning with me, Angélica agreed to accompany me to consult the old woman whose name I no longer remember. We went one warm afternoon and found the place in a poor neighborhood of Santa Marta. It was a humble single-story house, much longer than it was wide, as the old houses in those neighborhoods usually are. There the pleasant old woman received us with a gesture for us to go inside the dwelling.
After a brief introduction in which she no doubt clearly noticed my eagerness to repair the convalescing relationship and the little interest of my companion, the lady invited Angélica to a corner of the room in which she had images and little statues of saints, candles and a Bible. There she asked her to read a long prayer and that upon doing so, she close her eyes and put herself in prayer. Then she led me before a large poster with an image of the Sacred Heart of Jesus that dominated the place and told me that I had a very powerful protection of the Sacred Heart, that nothing bad would happen to me thanks to it and that I should be very grateful. Then she also delivered to me a prayer and asked me to read it in a low voice, facing the famous image in which Jesucristo gently touches a radiant heart surrounded by a crown of thorns in the center of his chest.
After a while, she took a rosary in her hands and sat down next to where I was standing, closed her eyes with force and began to mutter some kind of unintelligible prayer. All of a sudden, some minutes passed, she stretched out a hand and tugged my arm with some brusqueness, pulling me out of the concentration I was in. She made me a sign letting me understand that I shouldn't attract Angélica's attention. Then she pointed at her, looked me in the eyes and, gesturing at the same time with her hand and her face, made me understand that Angélica was not the woman for me.
Once we finished the prayers the old woman gave us her diagnosis. She said that a woman without scruples had done us a “work” with cemetery earth and that it was something very strong. That what they had done was to see her turned into a destitute woman, lost in alcohol and perhaps even so that she would commit suicide. She also said that with that work they had put a veil over her face so that she could not see me, that if we wanted to reestablish the relationship, a “treatment” had to be done to remove that veil.
It goes without saying that Angélica did not believe her decisions came from some external interference, but she said she would not be surprised if Nátaly had resorted to witchcraft to try to do her harm. For my part, I didn't know what to think since on the one hand, the idea that everything could be solved with some magic generated in me a vague hope, but on the other hand, the words the seeress gave me while we were alone destroyed that illusion: Before we took leave of the old woman, Angélica withdrew for a moment to the bathroom and the seeress took the opportunity to tell me another part of her diagnosis:
“This little monkey is not a woman for you; all she wants is to run around with this one and that one, let her go! I see you with a woman like this, pretty and white-skinned, but it isn't her. Besides, I see you in another country, Canada it seemed to me, or the United States. And I see you in a beautiful and large house, with two little children.”
Fourteen years later while I write this book, those words still impress me since up to now it is the most exact prophecy some stranger has made to me, besides having done so with surprising exactness. Today I live in Canada, I have a beautiful wife of white skin and light brown hair, we live in a house and we have two young sons, besides my daughter Ana María. At that time, I didn't even consider the possibility of living outside Colombia and certainly I did not believe I could be happy with any other woman besides Angélica.
I returned to Bogotá in September of 2006, after almost seven years of living by the sea, discovering life and committing some errors that fortunately had not caused irreparable consequences. However, the recurrent nightmares and a “weird” sensation, like that of being pursued, made me think that something was not right inside me.
My mother, who as I have recounted is at once a fervent Catholic and a believer in the supernatural, agreed with the seeress that “the other one” had done witchcraft on me and although she never held my ex-wife in high esteem, she considered lamentable what she had had to go through, although of course, much more so, what I was living. She told me that a nephew had gone to a brujo knower of santería to rid himself of a witchcraft that supposedly a business partner had done on him. His case, it seemed, had been much more serious than mine since he had become physically ill and had found himself more than once as a dazed being, leaving the house and driving aimlessly for hours.
I made, without hesitating, my second visit to a brujo in less than a year, this time in Bogotá, in an upper-middle-class neighborhood and in a much more imposing house than that of the seeress lady. The brujo went by the name of “Hermano Juan” and was a thin man of about 35 years with a sparse beard and he dressed in white from head to toe, including a strange turban he wore. He invited me to a small consulting room in which, after hearing the symptoms I recounted to him, he laid out on the small table that separated us a Marseille tarot deck.
After the usual ritual passes and asking me to take part in the deck of cards, he began to lay the cards in the form of a cross and as he did so he was telling me what he “saw”. He agreed with the seeress that I had been subjected to witchcraft, but unlike her, he told me the work had been done near the sea, probably burying a photo of mine or some other belonging. He also told me that they had made me drink some kind of potion, something I did not remember, but I also could not rule out.
The cure to free me from that curse would take some days and of course a good amount of money. I would have to take part in a ceremony that I myself had to perform at a crossroads at midnight, bursting five coconuts against the ground. Another day, we would have a santería session and finally a liberation with white gunpowder.
I did the coconut ritual taking advantage of the noise of the fireworks and the disorder of that year's Christmas Eve and I did in fact feel a little foolish about what I was doing but still I fulfilled the task, such was my desire to shake off the spell that had gotten the better of me through my own scoundrelry. A few days later I went back to the “Hermano Juan”'s house for the other two ceremonies.
For the first of them, the brujo took me to the third floor of the house, where he had a kind of temple dedicated to santería, which struck me as a bit macabre. The place was full of images of saints, strange humanoid figures, rocks of different sizes, crosses, indigenous articles and many candles. He made me sit in a plastic chair located in the center of the dark room and began to make strange chants and invocations in which he mixed Spanish with words in languages I could not understand.
All of a sudden he took a bottle of aguardiente that had some herbs of different kinds mixed with the liquor and he took a swig of it, but without ingesting the drink, instead, as if he were a human sprayer, he spat the mixture on me in repeated occasions. Then he asked me to position myself facing an altar that had more images, candles and rocks but also some shells, fruits and an image of the Yoruba deity Yemayá.
Similarly to what he did with the aguardiente, the brujo blew on me repeatedly with the smoke of his tobacco while he chanted chants and conjurations, each time more unsettling, with which he asked that the name of the person who had done the witchcraft on me be revealed. Then he showed me his tobacco and I don't know if it was the suggestion of the moment, but I remember noticing that a pair of letters had formed quite clearly on one of the sides of the cigar. They were marks formed by the combustion of the tobacco leaf but I could clearly see “C A”
I asked him what they meant and he told me they were the initials of the name of the person who had done the “work” on me. I would have expected to see an “A” and an “N” if it were the person I had always believed to have been the author of the attack, but the letters that appeared, and in that order, only corresponded to one important person in my life during those years: “Carolina Angélica”.
But that made no sense, did it? What if it had been Angélica herself who, trying to get away from me, had resorted to those arts. Truth is, I was more and more confused but the only thing I wanted was for the nightmares and that sensation of being pursued to end. The brujo also told me that the person who had been guilty would pay with her life for having done it. Then I was put on alert: santería had a reputation for being a very violent type of witchcraft. What if, by having gone to it, I were conjuring an irreversible harm upon someone who, after all, had been desired, whoever the author of the curse had been.
I asked the brujo to undo any vengeance, that my interest was only to free myself from the evil but that I didn't want anything bad to happen to anyone. “Hermano Juan” smiled with some sardonicism and told me that that was not something we could control, that it was the law of karma and that the punishment was managed “up above”. I always feared that by having gone to the santero, I might have caused some harm to myself or to another person, and that is why it affected me so much what happened a few months later when I learned through a social network that Nátaly had had a serious car accident. It was strange that someone would post photos of stitches and casts but there were the images. Seeing them, a cold ran through me from feet to head and I swallowed hard while I asked God that that incident had nothing to do with the ceremony I had taken part in and that Nátaly recovered satisfactorily.
The final part of the liberation with “Hermano Juan” turned out to be less sinister than the previous one, despite the prospect that it would involve gunpowder, which had me nervous: at least, this time the ceremony took place in a beautiful inner garden of the house and under an open sky. It was also shorter than I had anticipated since basically it only consisted of a few prayers while a circle of white gunpowder that was on the floor burned, in the center of which I lay. The only thing I felt was a gentle warmth traveling through my body as the gunpowder burned around me.
I handed the brujo the $600,000 he had charged me for the “treatment” and I left that house, promising myself never to go again to the services of a brujo nor to have anything more to do with the occult. How wrong I was!
I must say that after the liberation I felt much more peace than before, the nightmares ceased - at least for a while - and I set out on my new life in Bogotá, living with my parents and my sisters, enjoying my bachelor state and a job that gave me professional satisfaction.
In 2007, when I had already been living again in Bogotá for a year, I met Lina, with whom I had the longest emotional relationship up to that moment... that did not involve marriage or a pregnancy! It was the opportunity to see whether my bad habit of infidelity had been left behind definitively. After all, that had been caused by the witchcraft from which I had already freed myself.
Perhaps it is no surprise that the foregoing did not turn out that way. If I did not become a womanizer, I simply did not let pass the opportunities life offered me. While I was in a formal relationship with Lina, I saw myself on the sly with an ex-girlfriend, with a married woman at my work and even a couple of times, with Nátaly herself!
During those years, I started some businesses that had mixed results: one with resounding success, another with much more modest gains and a third that was a genuine economic disaster that was not made up for by the two previous ones and for which I once again needed my parents to come to my aid. To them I owe not having ended in bankruptcy in those years of squandering and hasty financial decisions.
I also made my first trips abroad, trying to discover new horizons and open up my world, but even in this, I also ignored the measures of austerity I would have had to adopt after my setbacks in business. I was trying to find a meaning to my life but I felt I was walking in circles that led nowhere: I was about to reach my first 30 years without economic or emotional stability but even more importantly: without feeling like a good example or even a good influence in my daughter's life.
My relationship with Lina ended and, surprisingly, it was not because of my infidelities, since apparently I had become an even more efficient liar than before, but because of a total disconnection in our ways of seeing life. Soon I found myself just like a couple of years before: with inconsequential company, debts at the bank and without finding a purpose for my life. The nightmares had also returned and little by little that emptiness in the chest came back that I felt for the first time after my separation from Angélica.
However, this time it was not because of my separation from Lina, which although it was painful, did not come close to being as hard as what I lived in Santa Marta. It was a feeling of discontent with myself, of living for the sake of living and of not having a reason to wake up each day. By that moment I already had clear that the answer would not be found in a Church nor in the consulting room of a brujo.
I had the fortune of meeting Jairo Martín during my years at the Universidad de Telecomunicaciones and immediately we formed a strong friendship. We shared our musical tastes, our sense of humor and creative mentality. We had part ways when I moved to Santa Marta but we always stayed in touch and since I returned to Bogotá we saw each other with some frequency.
In October of 2009, when I was going through a new existential crisis, I received a call from Martín on my cell phone. He was calling to ask me a favor but he did not have the opportunity to do so because when he asked me how I was doing, I let loose and told him everything I was feeling and thinking: my emotional circles, the apparently unattainable economic prosperity, my stormy nightmares and the sensation of not having a fixed course nor a purpose for my life.
Martín listened to me patiently and even completely forgot that he had called me to ask me for help with a possible job for his younger sister. Instead, he asked me, “Manolo, could it be that they did witchcraft on you?” I told him of my santería rite a couple of years before and he told me, “I believe they made it worse there. If you want to get that thing off your back, I can take you to the only person I know who can truly help you.”