Ducking underneath a dehydrated llama fetus, I stepped into the shop. The table out front had beckoned, piles of earthy powders, amulets, and bowls of dried frogs drawing me in. Bushel baskets, the kind used to pick apples back home in New Jersey, overflowed with bouquets of dried llama carcasses, smaller versions of those hanging from the ceiling.
I had found the Mercado de las Brujas—the “Witches’ Market,” in La Paz, Bolivia. I’d read about this place while researching my trip, fascinated by the cures it provided to shamans and local people. The llama fetuses were purchased to be buried under homes; offered to Pachamama, Mother Earth, in exchange for her protection.
I could use some magic, myself. It had been a rough five years, and I was still feeling my way through the rubble. From what I could tell, these women were healers, not witches. I knew the healing powers of women. I’d experienced them firsthand since my life had been upended.
“Hola,” I said in uneasy Spanish to the petite woman behind the counter. She wore a black bowler hat and long braids. I hurriedly searched Google Translate for the phrase “broken heart.”
“¿Tienes una cura para un corazón roto?” I stammered.
She nodded and reached for a two-inch vial on a shelf. Squinting, she shook it and handed it to me. Then, shaking her head and clicking tongue against teeth, she snatched it back, replacing it with another. Colourful pebbles, gold charms resembling a heart and a hand, and a coil of something that looked like stacked Cheerios swam together in a viscous liquid.
I handed her the equivalent of $2 USD in Bolivianos. If it works, it’s a bargain.
*****
Five years before, in New Jersey, I was at my regular Thursday yoga class, an advanced stretching class that hurt more than it healed. I didn’t like yoga. Its silence forced me, inside my head, to remember that I would return home to a dark, empty house. My husband of twenty years wasn’t there — he’d left the month prior.
Kitty, the instructor, placed a nubby, woollen blanket over me as I lay in darkness for Savasana. It was my first human contact in a week. As she dabbed lavender oil on my temples, one then the other, a lone tear slithered down the side of my face. She rose slightly, moving toward the next mat, then hesitated and returned, laying her hand on my shoulder and leaving it there.
*****
I met up with my tour in La Paz. Six men and six women, we immediately headed to Salar de Uyuni, the world’s largest salt flats. Our bus travelled easily for six hours until, suddenly, we reached an impasse — the desert road was barricaded with mounds of sand.
“They’re protesting lithium mining.” Explained Wendy, our guide, pointing at a group of men along the road. “It’s drying up the land.”
Lithium was liquid gold, powering batteries for cell phones, laptops and electric cars. Like so many elements in resource-rich Bolivia, foreign corporations mined the land without fairly compensating local people whose sweat bore out their riches. Generations of Bolivians faced poverty as they witnessed the theft of their assets. They were fed up, and I couldn’t blame them. Still, we were stuck on this road with no way out.
We sat on the bus for hours, chatting and getting to know each other, allied by our predicament.
“Where are we supposed to pee?” Asked a twenty-something woman from Seattle. Her boyfriend pointed to the quinoa plants that sprung like rainbow popsicles from the cracked earth. “Afterwards, you can drink water to celebrate.” He said, raising his water bottle in a hopeful toast.
Hours passed before saviours in 4x4s arrived in the darkness to rescue us, bypassing the sand mounds as they careened through the desert. We arrived at our hostel late at night, our shared adventure birthing familiarity and a common bond. We bunked in two rooms that night — men in one, women in the other. The accommodations were spare, as we’d been warned, but we didn’t care. We were just grateful to be off the bus.
None of us slept well that night thanks to snores, the rustle of sleeping bags, and the ever-flushing toilet in the dingy bathroom we six shared. At some point, it stopped flushing altogether and ran with a steady whoosh. In the morning, we all apologised, each thinking we were the one who had broken it.
I gave up sleep at 4:45 a.m. and padded quietly out in search of coffee. Wendy sat with Laureen, one of my bunkmates, on the saggy sofa in the common area, a pulse oximeter clipped on Laureen’s finger. She was assessing whether Laureen had altitude sickness or salmonella.
“I’ve been up since midnight,” Laureen said. “I’m sorry if I woke you.”
“You didn’t,” I assured her.
Confident that Laureen’s oxygen saturation was normal, Wendy sent her shivering back to bed. The others were rousing, so we briefed them.
“Here,” said Sarah, handing Laureen a packet. “Electrolytes. You can have them.”
“I have Tylenol,” offered Haley.
“Will Hot Hands help your chills?” I asked, handing over my packaged hand warmers.
It hadn’t taken us long to form a sisterhood I thought as the pink sunrise illuminated a flamboyance of flamingos in the shallow water outside the windows. Our instinct is to care for one another.
*****
On Wednesdays in New Jersey, Melissa brought me soup. I’d lost thirty pounds in two months, and it was still sloughing off, so she’d supplemented my diet of bone broth with chicken pastina soup from Sergio’s deli.
We’d walked and talked through February afternoons on Loantaka Trail, stepping gingerly over ice patches as clumps of snow fell from barren trees. Tears froze on my cheeks as she listened. Later that spring, as the ice melted and the divorce proceedings heated up, she’d accompanied me to Staples, where we’d photocopied stacks of credit card bills and bank statements.
On Fridays, Jocelyn picked me up in her red Tesla and drove me to Ride & Reflect, a spin class followed by more yoga. I hated the spin and yoga in equal measure, but they reminded me I wasn’t dead. One evening, we went to see a late-night movie after class, something I hadn’t done in years. Joce smuggled a flask of vodka into the theatre, and we giggled like high schoolers as we poured it into our Diet Cokes.
As green leaves morphed to yellow and red that autumn, falling from the trees in effigy to summer and my marriage, I turned 50. My friends had planned a dinner to celebrate the milestone, but I was too broken to celebrate. I called and cancelled dinner, resigned to spending the evening alone in my misery.
I’d wrapped myself in a worn pink afghan my mother had knitted, collapsing in sobs on the couch, when the doorbell rang. Gail and Andi stood on my porch with a bottle of rosé and a paper bag, its top folded and stapled.
“Kung pao and noodles,” Gail said, bag outstretched. She hugged me as the savoury smell of my favourite Chinese takeout wafted into the foyer. We poured wine and ate on paper plates, sitting cross-legged on the floor as they sat on either side of me, holding my hands while I cried.
My girlfriends healed me. They brought me back to life in the moments where I wished myself dead. In my darkest days, they held me up. They’d known I’d rise, even when I hadn’t known I could.
*****
Back in La Paz at the end of the tour, I returned to the Witches’ Market. Panting up the steep hill, I breathed the belching exhaust of the dented green and white buses rumbling past. A woman with a baby cocooned on her back in a pink, striped blanket pushed a wheelbarrow filled with puffed corn snacks, while “las brujas”, the witches, swept their stalls in fastidious preparation for the day’s work.
This time, I was in search of a token for Sophie, my college-aged daughter. She’d broken up with her boyfriend during my trip. It was their third break-up and not entirely unexpected. Still, she was heartbroken.
“Mom,” she’d cry-laughed on the phone to me after I’d told her about my visit to the Witches’ Market and the vial I’d bought to heal myself. “Can the witches give me something to replace him?” I went in search of a souvenir, something that would make her smile and mend her broken heart.
In the shop, I waited patiently while a man spoke rapid Spanish to the woman who’d helped me the week before. He pointed to his stomach and grimaced. She handed him a packet of powder, and he slipped a handful of Bolivianos into her palm. Then she turned her attention to me with a nod of recognition.
I explained through Google Translate that I needed something to help my daughter. She handed me a gold heart charm, then pointed at me. I looked at her quizzically until I realised she was offering a charm to help me find a boyfriend, too.
“No, no.” I shook my head. “Just my daughter.”
She persisted, pointing at me and handing over a second charm.
“Muchas gracias” I said, hesitating for a moment before paying her for two charms. Leaving the shop, I ducked back under the llama fetuses and rubbed the heart-shaped charm between my fingers. It had a raised image of a man and a woman, coupled, in its centre.
Silently, I thanked Pachamama for her ample blessings. But I didn’t need the charm, and I didn’t need a boyfriend. I’d found my healing in the women I’d met along the way. In the steady touch of my yoga instructor, the quiet showing up of my girlfriends, the care of travel-mates, in my relationship with my daughter, a new love for myself, the cures of the “witches” in La Paz — healers, like all women. I tucked the charm in my pocket and walked back down the hill. It was easier on the way back down.
