She scrutinized me, apparently waiting for a question or a comment. I had none.
“Now I’ve told you everything about being complete and incomplete,” she said. “And I’ve told you just like the Nagual told me. It didn’t mean anything to me at that time, and it doesn’t mean anything to you now.”
I had to laugh at the way she patterned herself after don Juan.
“An incomplete person has a hole in the stomach,” she went on. “A sorcerer can see it as plainly as you can see my head. When the hole is on the left side of one’s stomach, the child who created that hole is of the same sex. If it is on the right side, the child is of the opposite sex. The hole on the left side is black, the one on the right is dark brown.”
“Can you see that hole in anyone who has had children?”
“Sure. There are two ways of seeing it. A sorcerer may see it in dreaming or by looking directly at a person. A sorcerer who sees has no problems in viewing the luminous being to find out if there is a hole in the luminosity of the body. But even if the sorcerer doesn’t know how to see, he can look and actually distinguish the darkness of the hole through the clothing.”
She stopped talking. I urged her to go on.
“The Nagual told me that you write and then you don’t remember what you wrote,” she said with a tone of accusation.
I became entangled in words trying to defend myself. Nonetheless, what she had said was the truth. Don Juan’s words always had had a double effect on me: once when I heard for the first time whatever he had said, and then when I read at home whatever I had written down and had forgotten about.
Talking to la Gorda, however, was intrinsically different. Don Juan’s apprentices were not in any way as engulfing as he was. Their revelations, although extraordinary, were only missing pieces to a jigsaw puzzle. The unusual character of those pieces was that with them the picture did not become clearer but that it became more and more complex.
“You had a brown hole in the right side of your stomach,” she continued. “That means that a woman emptied you. You made a female child.
“The Nagual said that I had a huge black hole myself, because I made two women. I never saw the hole, but I’ve seen other people with holes like mine.”
“You said that I had a hole; don’t I have it anymore?”
“No. It’s been patched. The Nagual helped you to patch it. Without his help you would be more empty than you are now.”
“What kind of patch is it?”
“A patch in your luminosity. There is no other way of saying it. The Nagual said that a sorcerer like himself can fill up the hole anytime. But that that filling is only a patch without luminosity. Anyone who sees or does dreaming can tell that it looks like a lead patch on the yellow luminosity of the rest of the body.
“The Nagual patched you and me and Soledad. But then he left it up to us to put back the shine, the luminosity.”
“How did he patch us?”
“He’s a sorcerer, he put things in our bodies. He replaced us. We are no longer the same. The patch is what he put there himself.”
“But how did he put those things there and what were they?”
“What he put in our bodies was his own luminosity and he used his hand to do that. He simply reached into our bodies and left his fibers there. He did the same with all of his six children and also with Soledad. All of them are the same. Ex-cept Soledad; she’s something else.”
La Gorda seemed unwilling to go on. She vacillated and al-most began to stutter.
“What is dona Soledad?” I insisted.
“It’s very hard to tell,” she said after considerable coaxing. “She is the same as you and me, and yet she’s different. She has the same luminosity, but she’s not together with us. She goes in the opposite direction. Right now she’s more like you. Both of you have patches that look like lead. Mine is gone and I’m again a complete, luminous egg. That is the reason I said that you and I will be exactly the same someday when you become complete again. Right now what makes us almost the same is the Nagual’s luminosity and the fact that both of us are going in the same direction and that we both were empty.”
“What does a complete person look like to a sorcerer?” I asked.
“Like a luminous egg made out of fibers,” she said. “All the fibers are complete; they look like strings, taut strings. It looks as if the strings have been tightened like a drum is tightened.
“On an empty person, on the other hand, the fibers are crumpled up at the edges of the hole. When they have had many children, the fibers don’t look like fibers anymore. Those people look like two chunks of luminosity, separated by blackness. It is an awesome sight. The Nagual made me see them one day when we were in a park in the city.”
“Why do you think the Nagual never told me about all this?”
“He told you everything, but you never understood him correctly. As soon as he realized that you were not understanding what he was saying, he was compelled to change the subject. Your emptiness prevented you from understanding. The Nagual said that it was perfectly natural for you not to understand. Once a person becomes incomplete he’s actually empty like a gourd that has been hollowed out. It didn’t mat-ter to you how many times he told you that you were empty; it didn’t matter that he even explained it to you. You never knew what he meant, or worse yet, you didn’t want to know.”
La Gorda was treading on dangerous ground. I tried to head her off with another question, but she rebuffed me.
“You love a little boy and you don’t want to understand what the Nagual meant,” she said accusingly. “The Nagual told me that you have a daughter you’ve never seen, and that you love that little boy. One took your edge, the other pinned you down. You have welded them together.”
I had to stop writing. I crawled out of the cave and stood up. I began to walk down the steep incline to the floor of the gully. La Gorda followed me. She asked me if I was upset by her directness. I did not want to lie.
“What do you think?” I asked.
“You’re fuming!” she exclaimed and giggled with an abandon that I had witnessed only in don Juan and don Genaro.
She seemed about to lose her balance and grabbed my left arm. In order to help her get down to the floor of the gully, I lifted her up by her waist. I thought that she could not have weighed more than a hundred pounds. She puckered her lips the way don Genaro used to and said that her weight was a hundred and fifteen. We both laughed at once. It was a mo-ment of direct, instant communication.
“Why does it bother you so much to talk about these things?” she asked.
I told her that once I had had a little boy whom I had loved immensely. I felt the imperative to tell her about him. Some extravagant need beyond my comprehension made me open up with that woman who was a total stranger to me.
As I began to talk about that little boy, a wave of nostalgia enveloped me; perhaps it was the place or the situation or the time of the day. Somehow I had merged the memory of that little boy with the memory of don Juan, and for the first time in all the time I had not seen him I missed don Juan. Lidia had said that they never missed him because he was always with them; he was their bodies and their spirits. I had known instantly what she meant. I felt the same way myself. In that gully, however, an unknown feeling had overtaken me. I told la Gorda that I had never missed don Juan until that moment. She did not answer. She looked away.
Possibly my feeling of longing for those two people had to do with the fact that both of them had produced catharses in my life. And both of them were gone. I had not realized until that moment how final that separation was. I said to la Gorda that that little boy had been, more than anything else, my friend, and that one day he was whisked away by forces I could not control. That was perhaps one of the greatest blows I had ever received. I even went to see don Juan to ask his assistance. It was the only time I had ever asked him for help. He listened to my plea and then he broke into uproarious laughter. His reaction was so unexpected that I could not even get angry. I could only comment on what I thought was his insensitivity.