OLIVIA MUNOZ - AIRE

Olivia Muñoz is an Oakland-based writer and educator whose work has appeared in the Association of Mexican American Educators Journal and other publications. She worked as a journalist for The Associated Press, The Detroit News, and other news organizations. Olivia is working on her first book.

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Aire
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This is how it was when I met her: The door jingles as I make my way into her shop from the sideways sunshine of a late spring afternoon. Candles and bottles of liquid line the racks of the dim store. They promise money and love and darker desires as well. All things I don’t have and some I don’t want. La Buena Suerte. Control. La Santísima Muerte. It smells of incense. Loud laughter comes in from the back of the store. I ask a woman sitting off to the side: Laura? She yells the name to the back.
Laura’s whole family practices magic. Always a healer. A Tarot card reader since she was seven. She has a botánica called Yoli’s in Fresno’s Tower District, the funky core in the biggest of Central California’s sprawling agricultural towns. I visit her on four separate days: for a Tarot card reading, to buy candles, for a cleansing, and to talk about her life and mine.
 
Laura stops me from putting my purse on the floor of her makeshift office in the back of her shop. It is my first visit.
“Money will drain out of your life,” she says.
Of course, I knew that. I run through some of the other rules I know: When crossing a body of water with a sleeping child, you must make the sign of the cross over them three times. When someone is talking in their sleep, you must never startle them awake. Instead, squeeze their thumb until they wake. You must let your eyes cool before going outside after sleeping, reading, sewing, watching TV or anything else that involves focus. If you show a baby their reflection, they could go blind.
Laura will read my cards today. I part the deck and wait.
“There is a man in your life who is draining all your energy. There is no change in this situation,” she says. “I see no change.”
I see no man. Wait, never mind – got him. Yep, she’s right. OK, what else?
“You are in the arts?” she asks me.
Yes, I’m a writer.
“You like true stories?”
Yes.
“You like crime?”
Yes.
“You should be writing romance and stories about mothers.”
We go on like this. She makes some scary hits (“There is a geographical distance between you and your family”) and some grand misses (that nonsense about writing romance) but I don’t care. I know that part of the deal is that I’m supposed to submit to this – that  I’m supposed to believe that cards depicting The Fool, The Sun and various fairies will tell me something about who I am and where I’m headed.
Laura is 42, has chemically lightened hair and an accent I can’t place. She tells me her heritage includes Italian and South African ancestry and I want to believe her but she slips into Spanish so well.
“My father’s side is from Sicily. He practices Catholic religion. My mother’s father did Santeria,” she would later tell me.
I would love to dismiss her as just another fake mystic, but I am too much like the clientele who keep Laura busy on any given day. She is booked pretty solidly for readings and limpias – cleansings – though there are about half a dozen Tarot card readers in this part of town, a small stretch of coffee houses, restaurants, bars and other little shops. Most of her clientele is Spanish-speaking and immigrant. They come in looking for herbs, crystals and assurance. Laura gives them that: healing they’re used to, a mix of spiritualities that live in many Latino homes where the walls are held up by the Catholic saints that replaced African deities, where indigenous beliefs and cures live on as superstition and home remedies. Homes like those of my family.
 
I remember peeking into the bedroom I shared with my brother and my great aunt. Seeing my cousin Tina laid out on my brother’s He-Man comforter, underwear only, with the women giving her “ventosas.” They’d pray and rub her down with alcohol and then hold a lit match inside a drinking glass held upside down, floating above the back of her leg. My godmother would put the match out and quickly trap the heat on Tina’s leg with the glass, causing her skin to swell up and half fill the glass with her smooth, dark skin. This was done when someone was sick with what my family simply called “aire” – air. I knew it meant bad spirits, and though we prayed traditional Catholic rosaries, they were always supplemented with what my brother and I called “left over Indian stuff” from before the conquest. My godmother repeated the procedure on the back of Tina’s legs several times. Then she pinched her back. Finally, she pounded on it in sets of three – thooom, thoom, thoom… thoom, thoom, thoom – and everything was done.
 
“You want me to tell you my story? The story about what? About my life, about how I’m doing this? Or what?”
Yes, all of that, I say. Also, can I just hang out here for a while?
She considers the question and maybe my motive. It is my second visit there and she remembers my name.
“Olivia, OK… But my sessions are private. You understand that, right? You can’t come back here if someone else is back here.”
OK. I offer to help her sort through herbs she is bagging for individual sale. I am good with herbs – they were my mother’s specialty. I recite what I know in my head: A chamomile rinse for irritated eyes. Rose petal tea for tummy aches. Azares to calm a teenager’s “nerves.”
“You know, I learned from a lot of places, not just my family,” Laura starts.
She tells me she is a certified sign language interpreter, has a degree from the University of California, Los Angeles, in special behavior in disabled adults, plus another bachelor’s degree from UCLA in religion. She also studied for three years with the founder of modern pranic healing, a system of no-touch healing that claims to harmonize the body’s energy.
But it was her family’s influence that drew her back to spiritual healing after working for a dozen years in Fresno group homes and as a sign language interpreter for the Fresno Unified School District.
“When my mother died, I was 16. She had this big cabinet. It had all her books, her potions – all the tools that we use in magical ways,” Laura tells me. We are arranging the black candles my mother always told me to stay away from.
“In my family there are six men and ten women who practice. I am only the third person in my family to get permission to practice outside the family. I had to get permission from the family cult.”
What do you practice?
“It’s a lot of things. It’s magic, yes, but it’s science, too.”
“You see, we have two kinds of energy in the body,” she explains “The physical one is the one your brain makes. That’s when your brain communicates in a chemical reaction and stimulates electricity that travels through your nerves and gives action to your body.”
Her hands move rapidly as she grows more comfortable. They arc into large sweeps in the air and then her fingers create staccato points that emphasize her speech. When she is done, she rests them casually on her legs, which she never crosses. She leans in to talk.
“The astro energy – that’s prana, your spiritual energy.”
Prana is a Sanskrit word that means in turn soul, life-force, energy and simply, air.
“I can put my hands close to you and you can feel my heat. You feel it? That is prana,” she says.
Laura’s gaze is piercing though not intimidating. Still, I feel her looking inside of me.
She insists she did not want to do this for a living.
“I always had a lot of manifestations in my life, but I think to myself, no, I’m not going to do it, I’m not going to do it.”
“But magic is a strong draw, hard to shake,” she says.
We finish bagging the dried herbs, I buy a good luck candle and leave her store.
 
It’s early August in central Mexico, a time of sticky hot nights broken up by the occasional mid-day thunderstorm – weather not unlike the Midwestern summer we had left in Michigan. My brother is about 12, so I’m probably 14, and he is curled up on my grandmother’s antique loveseat. He’s been throwing up. My Tía Raquel is trying to cure him. She fills a five-gallon bucket with water and drags it into the living room. Tells me to turn out the lights. It’s just us three. She thinks bad winds hit him and is going to draw them out. My brother lies on his side and my aunt makes a funnel out of my newspaper. She sticks the coiled up end into my brother’s ear and lights the rim above on fire. The wind howls outside. The flame on the edge of the sports page burns and then rises high as the winds leave my brother’s head. When it’s burned halfway down she dunks it into the bucket of water, one element putting out the other. I don’t want to believe in the cure, only want to be mad that my newspaper was used in this, but my brother gets better, doesn’t even need any of the Pepto-Bismol my mom packed for the month-long trip. This is the only time I’ve seen anyone do this ritual.
 
I show up for a third visit to Laura’s shop. She smiles and says hello. I am here for a limpia – more than a cleansing, a soul retrieval. In many traditional Mexican limpias, the healer will spit alcohol at you, dust you down with plants and rub eggs on you, but Laura uses only crystals and metals. Thank God.
I take off my shoes and all jewelry. Laura instructs me to sit, tells me not to cross my legs. She sprays the air with perfumed water. She gives me a long, white crystal spike to hold between both hands.
“The crystal will take all your negative energy.”
She says some things in a language I don’t understand. She takes a copper claw-looking thing and puts it over my head three times quickly. I don’t feel anything and I tell her. She assures me that I will feel lighter later.            
 
It’s my last visit to Laura’s shop. The fourth day, my lucky number. We talk about God.
“People believe in a big form of energy – like God. Like the big God. The one that’s formed everything. You can believe that. Your energy and faith in something, it moves the world,” she says.
“Life has energy around it. The only thing that can move everything around us is energy. That’s true. If we don’t have energy it’s nothing there, nothing. Absolutely nothing.”
I tell her that I’ve always been a pretty even person but that lately my lows have been very low and my highs really high.
“You can be depressed one day and that’s because you have more negative energy in your body,” she says. “Unfortunately, the human wants to feel it or see it to believe.”
Yeah, I want to feel it, I say. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t.
“Well, don’t believe what people tell you, believe what you feel,” she says. “Life is meant to be lived like that.”
 
“Here, you can do it,” my godmother is pushing a large kitchen knife into my hand. “Be careful…”
I am about seven years old and standing on the ledge of my godmother’s porch. It is summer and dark storm clouds are rolling in on us. I know that a child can “cut” a storm to keep it from ripping trees apart in our yard and flooding our basements. My boy cousins were always the ones to try to cut the storm – they always wanted to hold the knife – but they play around too much, my godmother says. They can’t take anything seriously.
“Olivia es más calmada,” she says. Olivia is calmer.
So, I hold the knife and make the sign of the cross with it, three times, slow. And I do it. I cut the storm.
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