The idea that so many of his countrymen turned to witch doctors to cure their ailments had unsettled Toño for several days. What was most repugnant to him was the apparently widespread belief in Peru that if a witch or shaman passed a guinea pig over a person’s naked body, the creature would die as soon as it touched the skin beneath which an infected organ lay. For hours, the patient would have to lie still and allow that filthy cousin of the rat to caress his bare skin. The mere thought of it repelled him.
And all of this took place in cabins or miserable, filthy rooms, because these people with so-called magic powers were poor and had learned their trade from their parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents in lessons passed on in silence. Their work was outside of the law, like drug dealing—and that was another aspect of his homeland that depressed him. Marijuana, pills, cigarettes dipped in who knew what, easy to make, easy to buy, sold cheap to addicts in the street, given away outside the doorways of schools to create future addicts … In principle, Toño thought it was people’s right to ruin their lives with drugs—to hell with them, was his attitude—but children needed to be cared for until they were old enough to make responsible and realistic decisions about these things.
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