“What do you want me to do?” he asked.
I said that since he was a sorcerer perhaps he could help me to regain my little friend for my solace.
“You’re wrong. A warrior doesn’t seek anything for his solace,” he said in a tone that did not admit reproach.
Then he proceeded to smash my arguments. He said that a warrior could not possibly leave anything to chance, that a warrior actually affected the outcome of events by the force of his awareness and his unbending intent. He said that if I would have had the unbending intent to keep and help that child, I would have taken measures to assure his stay with me. But as it was, my love was merely a word, a useless outburst of an empty man. He then told me something about emptiness and completeness, but I did not want to hear it. All I felt was a sense of loss, and the emptiness that he had mentioned, I was sure, referred to the feeling of having lost someone irreplace-able.
“You loved him, you honored his spirit, you wished him well, now you must forget him,” he said.
But I had not been able to do so. There was something terribly alive in my emotions even though time had mellowed them. At one point I thought I had forgotten, but then one night an incident produced the deepest emotional upheaval in me. I was walking to my office when a young Mexican woman approached me. She had been sitting on a bench, waiting for a bus. She wanted to know if that particular bus went to a children’s hospital. I did not know. She explained that her little boy had had a high temperature for a long time and she was worried because she did not have any money. I moved toward the bench and saw a little boy standing on the seat with his head against the back of the bench. He was wearing a jacket and short pants and a cap. He could not have been more than two years old. He must have seen me, for he walked to the edge of the bench and put his head against my leg.
“My little head hurts,” he said to me in Spanish.
His voice was so tiny and his dark eyes so sad that a wave of irrepressible anguish welled up in me. I picked him up and drove him and his mother to the nearest hospital. I left them there and gave the mother enough money to pay the bill. But I did not want to stay or to know any more about him. I wanted to believe that I had helped him, and that by doing so I had paid back to the spirit of man.
I had learned the magical act of “paying back to the spirit of man” from don Juan. I had asked him once, overwhelmed by the realization that I could never pay him back for all he had done for me, if there was anything in the world I could do to even the score. We were leaving a bank, after exchanging some Mexican currency.
“I don’t need you to pay me back,” he said, “but if you still want to pay back, make your deposit to the spirit of man. That’s always a very small account, and whatever one puts in it is more than enough.”
By helping that sick child I had merely paid back to the spirit of man for any help that my little boy may receive from strangers along his path.
I told la Gorda that my love for him would remain alive for the rest of my life even though I would never see him again. I wanted to tell her that the memory I had of him was buried so deep that nothing could touch it, but I desisted. I felt it would have been superfluous to talk about it. Besides, it was getting dark and I wanted to get out of that gully.
“We better go,” I said. “I’ll take you home. Maybe some other time we can talk about these things again.”
She laughed the way don Juan used to laugh at me. I had apparently said something utterly funny.
“Why do you laugh, Gorda?” I asked.
“Because you know yourself that we can’t leave this place just like that,” she said. “You have an appointment with power here. And so do 1.”
She walked back to the cave and crawled in.
“Come on in,” she yelled from inside. “There is no way to leave.”
I reacted most incongruously. I crawled in and sat next to her again. It was evident that she too had tricked me. I had not come there to have any confrontations. I should have been furious. I was indifferent instead. I could not lie to myself that I had only stopped there on my way to Mexico City. I had gone there compelled by something beyond my comprehension.
She handed me my notebook and motioned me to write. She said that if I wrote I would not only relax myself but I would also relax her.
“What is this appointment with power?” I asked.
“The Nagual told me that you and I have an appointment here with something out there. You first had an appointment with Soledad and then one with the little sisters. They were supposed to destroy you. The Nagual said that if you survived their assaults I had to bring you here so that we together could keep the third appointment.”
“What kind of appointment is it?”
“I really don’t know. Like everything else, it depends on us. Right now there are some things out there that have been waiting for you. I say that they have been waiting for you because I come here by myself all the time and nothing ever happens. But tonight is different. You are here and those things will come.”
“Why is the Nagual trying to destroy me?” I asked.
“He’s not trying to destroy anybody!” la Gorda exclaimed in protest. “You are his child. Now he wants you to be himself. More himself than any of us. But to be a true Nagual you have to claim your power. Otherwise he wouldn’t have been so careful in setting up Soledad and the little sisters to stalk you. He taught Soledad how to change her shape and rejuvenate herself. He made her construct a devilish floor in her room. A floor no one can oppose. You see, Soledad is empty, so the Nagual set her up to do something gigantic. He gave her a task, a most difficult and dangerous task, but the only one which was suited for her, and that was to finish you off. He told her that nothing could be more difficult than for one sorcerer to kill another. It’s easier for an average man to kill a sorcerer or for a sorcerer to kill an average man, but two sorcerers don’t fit well at all. The Nagual told Soledad that her best bet was to surprise you and scare you. And that’s what she did. The Nagual set her up to be a desirable woman so she could lure you into her room, and there her floor would have bewitched you, because as I’ve said, no one, but no one, can stand up to that floor. That floor was the Nagual’s masterpiece for Soledad. But you did something to her floor and Soledad had to change her tactics in accordance with the Nagual’s instructions. He told her that if her floor failed and she could not frighten and surprise you, she had to talk to you and tell you everything you wanted to know. The Nagual trained her to talk very well as her last resource. But Soledad could not overpower you even with that.”
“Why was it so important to overpower me? “
She paused and peered at me. She cleared her throat and sat up straight. She looked up at the low roof of the cave and ex-haled noisily through her nose.
“Soledad is a woman like myself,” she said. “I’ll tell you something about my own life and maybe you’ll understand her.
“I had a man once. He got me pregnant when I was very young and I had two daughters with him. One after the other. My life was hell. That man was a drunkard and beat me day and night. And I hated him and he hated me. And I got fat like a pig. One day another man came along and told me that he liked me and wanted me to go with him to work in the city as a paid servant. He knew I was a hardworking woman and only wanted to exploit me. But my life was so miserable that I fell for it and went with him. He was worse than the first man, mean and fearsome. He couldn’t stand me after a week or so. And he used to give me the worst beatings you can imagine. I thought he was going to kill me and he wasn’t even drunk, and all because I hadn’t found work. Then he sent me to beg on the streets with a sick baby. He would pay the child’s mother something from the money I got. And then he would beat me because I hadn’t made enough. The child got sicker and sicker and I knew that if it died while I was begging, the man would kill me. So one day when I knew that he was not there I went to the child’s mother and gave her her baby and some of the money I had made that day. That was a lucky day for me; a kind foreign lady had given me fifty pesos to buy medicine for the baby.