As she stretched her arms, her hair fell partially loose. She was wearing a soiled headband tied over her forehead. Her hair was long and graying and seemed dirty and matted. I could see the white hairs against the dark brown of the headband. She smiled at me and sort of nodded her head. All her teeth seemed to be missing; I could see the black hole of her toothless mouth. She covered her face with her hand and laughed. She took off her sandals and walked into the house without giving me time to say anything. Rosa followed her.
I was dumbfounded. Dona Soledad had implied that Josefina was the same age as Lidia and Rosa. I turned to Lidia. She was peering at me.
“I had no idea she was that old,” I said.
“Yes, she’s pretty old,” she said in a matter-of-fact tone.
“Does she have a child?” I asked.
“Yes, and she takes him everywhere. She never leaves him with us. She’s afraid we are going to eat him.”
“Is it a boy?”
“A boy.”
“How old is he?”
“She’s had him for some time. But I don’t know his age. We thought that she shouldn’t have a child at her age. But she didn’t pay any attention to us.”
“Whose child is he?”
“Josefina’s, of course.”
“I mean, who’s the father?”
“The Nagual, who else?”
I thought that that development was quite extravagant and very unnerving.
“I suppose anything is possible in the Nagual’s world,” I said.
I meant it more as a thought to myself than a statement made to Lidia.
“You bet,” she said, and laughed.
The oppressiveness of those eroded hills became unbearable. There was something truly abhorrent about that area, and Josefina had been the final blow. On top of having an ugly, old, smelly body and no teeth, she also seemed to have some sort of facial paralysis. The muscles on the left side of her face appeared to be injured, a condition which created a most unpleasant distortion of her left eye and the left side of her mouth. My oppressive mood plummeted to one of sheer anguish. For an instant I toyed with the idea, so familiar by then, of running to my car and driving away.
I complained to Lidia that I did not feel well. She laughed and said that Josefina had no doubt scared me.
“She has that effect on people,” she said. “Everybody hates her guts. She’s uglier than a cockroach.”
“I remember seeing her once,” I said, “but she was young.”
“Things change,” Lidia said philosophically, “one way or another. Look at Soledad. What a change, eh? And you yourself have changed. You look more massive than I remember you. You are looking more and more like the Nagual.”
I wanted to say that the change in Josefina was abhorrent but I was afraid that she might overhear me.
I looked at the eroded hills across the valley. I felt like fleeing from them.
“The Nagual gave us this house,” she said, “but it is not a house for rest. We had another house before that was truly beautiful. This is a place to steam up. Those mountains over there will drive you nuts.”
Her boldness in reading my feelings gave me a respite. I did not know what to say.
“We are all naturally lazy,” she went on. “We don’t like to strain ourselves. The Nagual knew that, so he must have figured that this place would drive us up the walls.”
She stood up abruptly and said that she wanted something to eat. We went to the kitchen, a semienclosed area with only two walls. At the open end, to the right of the door, there was an earthen stove; at the other end, where the two walls met, there was a large dining area with a long table and three benches. The floor was paved with smooth river rocks. The flat roof was about ten feet high and was resting on the two walls and on thick supporting beams on the open sides.
Lidia poured me a bowl of beans and meat from a pot which cooked on a very low fire. She heated up some tortillas over the fire. Rosa came in and sat down next to me and asked Lidia to serve her some food.
I became immersed in watching Lidia use a ladle to scoop the beans and meat. She seemed to have an eye for the exact amount. She must have been aware that I was admiring her maneuvers. She took two or three beans from Rosa’s bowl and returned them to the pot.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Josefina coming into the kitchen. I did not look at her, though. She sat facing me across the table. I had a squeamish feeling in my stomach. I felt that I could not eat with that woman looking at me. To ease my tension I joked with Lidia that there were still two extra beans in Rosa’s bowl that she had overlooked. She scooped up two beans with the ladle with a precision that made me gasp. I laughed nervously, knowing that once Lidia sat down I would have to move my eyes from the stove and acknowledge the presence of Josefina.
I finally and reluctantly had to look across the table at Josefina. There was a dead silence. I stared at her incredulously. My mouth fell open. I heard the loud laughter of Lidia and Rosa. It took an endless moment for me to put my thoughts and feelings in some sort of order. Whoever was facing me was not the Josefina I had seen just awhile ago, but a very pretty girl. She did not have Indian features as Lidia and Rosa did. She seemed to be more Latin than Indian. She had a light olive complexion, a very small mouth and a finely chiseled nose, small white teeth and short, black, curly hair. She had a dimple on the left side of her face, which gave a definite cocki-ness to her smile.
She was the girl I had met briefly years ago. She held my scrutiny. Her eyes were friendly. I became possessed by degrees with some uncontrollable nervousness. I ended up desperately clowning about my genuine bewilderment.
They laughed like children. After their laughter had subsided I wanted to know what was the point of Josefina’s his-trionic display.
“She’s practicing the art of stalking,” Lidia said. “The Nagual taught us to baffle people so they wouldn’t notice us. Josefina is very pretty and if she walks alone at night, no one will bother her if she is ugly and smelly, but if she goes out as she really is, well, you yourself can tell what would happen.”
Josefina nodded affirmatively and then contorted her face into the ugliest grimace possible.
“She can hold that face all day,” Lidia said.
I contended that if I lived around that area I would certainly notice Josefina in her disguise more readily than if she did not have one.
“That disguise was just for you,” Lidia said, and all three of them laughed. “And look how it baffled you. You noticed her child even more than you noticed her.”
Lidia went into their room and brought out a package of rags that looked like a bundled-up child and threw it on the table in front of me. I laughed uproariously with them.
“Do all of you have particular disguises?” I asked.
“No. Only Josefina. No one around here knows her as she really is,” Lidia replied.
Josefina nodded and smiled but she remained silent. I liked her tremendously. There was something so very innocent and sweet about her.
“Say something, Josefina,” I said, grabbing her by her forearms.
She looked at me bewildered, and recoiled. I thought that I had gotten carried away by my elation and perhaps grabbed her too hard. I let her go. She sat up straight. She contorted her small mouth and thin lips and produced a most grotesque outburst of grunts and shrieks.
Her whole face suddenly changed. A series of ugly, involuntary spasms marred her tranquil expression of a moment before.
I looked at her, horrified. Lidia pulled me by the sleeve.
“Why do you have to scare her, stupid?” she whispered. “Don’t you know that she became mute and can’t talk at all?”
Josefina obviously understood her and seemed bent on protesting. She clenched her fist at Lidia and let out another outburst of extremely loud and horrifying shrieks, and then choked and coughed. Rosa began to rub her back. Lidia tried to do the same but Josefina nearly hit her in the face.
Lidia sat down next to me and made a gesture of impotence. She shrugged her shoulders.
“She’s that way,” Lidia whispered to me.
Josefina turned to her. Her face was contorted in a most ugly grimace of anger. She opened her mouth and bellowed at the top of her voice some more frightening, guttural sounds.