I asked la Gorda what the Nagual would have said if I had told him that I knew parents with much more spirit and edge than their children.
She laughed, covering her face in a gesture of sham embarrassment.
“You can ask me,” she said giggling. “You want to hear what I think?”
“Of course I want to hear it.”
“Those people don’t have more spirit, they merely had a lot of vigor to begin with and have trained their children to be obedient and meek. They have frightened their children all their lives, that’s all.”
I described to her the case of a man I knew, a father of four, who at the age of fifty-three changed his life completely. That entailed leaving his wife and his executive job in a large corpo-ration after more than twenty-five years of building a career and a family. He chucked it all very daringly and went to live on an island in the Pacific.
“You mean he went there all by himself?” la Gorda asked with a tone of surprise.
She had destroyed my argument. I had to admit that the man had gone there with his twenty-three-year-old bride.
“Who no doubt is complete,” la Gorda added.
I had to agree with her again.
“An empty man uses the completeness of a woman all the time,” she went on. “A complete woman is dangerous in her completeness, more so than a man. She is unreliable, moody, nervous, but also capable of great changes. Women like that can pick themselves up and go anywhere. They’ll do nothing there, but that’s because they had nothing going to begin with. Empty people, on the other hand, can’t jump like that anymore, but they’re more reliable. The Nagual said that empty people are like worms that look around before moving a bit and then they back up and then they move a little bit more again. Complete people always jump, somersault and almost always land on their heads, but it doesn’t matter to them.
“The Nagual said that to enter into the other world one has to be complete. To be a sorcerer one has to have all of one’s luminosity: no holes, no patches and all the edge of the spirit. So a sorcerer who is empty has to regain completeness. Man or woman, they must be complete to enter into that world out there, that eternity where the Nagual and Genaro are now waiting for us.”
She stopped talking and stared at me for a long moment. There was barely enough light to write.
“But how did you regain your completeness?” I asked.
She jumped at the sound of my voice. I repeated my question. She stared up at the roof of the cave before answering me.
“I had to refuse those two girls,” she said. “The Nagual once told you how to do that but you didn’t want to hear it. His point was that one has to steal that edge back. He said that we got it the hard way by stealing it and that we must recover it the same way, the hard way.
“He guided me to do that, and the first thing he made me do was to refuse my love for those two children. I had to do that in dreaming. Little by little I learned not to like them, but the Nagual said that that was useless, one has to learn not to care and not not to like. Whenever those girls meant nothing to me I had to see them again, lay my eyes and my hands on them. I had to pat them gently on the head and let my left side snatch the edge out of them.”
“What happened to them?”
“Nothing. They never felt a thing. They went home and are now like two grown-up persons. Empty like most people around them. They don’t like the company of children because they have no use for them. I would say that they are better off. I took the craziness out of them. They didn’t need it, while I did. I didn’t know what I was doing when I gave it to them. Besides, they still retain the edge they stole from their father. The Nagual was right: no one noticed the loss, but I did notice my gain. As I looked out of this cave I saw all my illusions lined up like a row of soldiers. The world was bright and new. The heaviness of my body and my spirit had been lifted off and I was truly a new being.”
“Do you know how you took your edge from your children?”
“They are not my children! I have never had any. Look at me.”
She crawled out of the cave, lifted her skirt and showed me her naked body. The first thing I noticed was how slender and muscular she was.
She urged me to come closer and examine her. Her body was so lean and firm that I had to conclude she could not possibly have had children. She put her right leg on a high rock and showed me her vagina. Her drive to prove her change was so intense that I had to laugh to bridge my nervousness. I said that I was not a doctor and therefore I could not tell, but that I was sure she must be right.
“Of course I’m right,” she said as she crawled back into the cave. “Nothing has ever come out of this womb.”
After a moment’s pause she answered my question, which I had already forgotten under the onslaught of her display.
“My left side took my edge back,” she said. “All I did was to go and visit the girls. I went there four or five times to allow them time to feel at ease with me. They were big girls and were going to school. I thought I would have to fight not to like them, but the Nagual said that it didn’t matter, that I should like them if I wanted to. So I liked them. But my liking them was just like liking a stranger. My mind was made up, my purpose was unbending. I want to enter into the other world while I’m still alive, as the Nagual told me. In order to do that I need all the edge of my spirit. I need my completeness. Nothing can turn me away from that world! Nothing!”
She stared at me defiantly.
“You have to refuse both, the woman who emptied you and the little boy who has your love, if you are seeking your completeness. The woman you can easily refuse. The little boy is something else. Do you think that your useless affection for that child is so worthy as to keep you from entering into that realm?”
I had no answer. It was not that I wanted to think it over. It was rather that I had become utterly confused.
“Soledad has to take her edge out of Pablito if she wants to enter into the nagual,” she went on. “How in the hell is she going to do that? Pablito, no matter how weak he is, is a sorcerer. But the Nagual gave Soledad a unique chance. He said to her that her only moment would come when you walked into the house, and for that moment he not only made us move out into the other house, but he made us help her widen the path to the house, so you could drive your car to the very door. He told her that if she lived an impeccable life she would bag you, and suck away all your luminosity, which is all the power the Nagual left inside your body. That would not be difficult for her to do. Since she’s going in the opposite direction, she could drain you to nothing. Her great feat was to lead you to a moment of helplessness.
“Once she had killed you, your luminosity would have increased her power and she would then have come after us. I was the only one who knew that. Lidia, Josefina and Rosa love her. I don’t. I knew what her designs were. She would have taken us one by one, in her own time, since she had nothing to lose and everything to gain. The Nagual said to me that there was no other way for her. He entrusted me with the girls and told me what to do in case Soledad killed you and came after our luminosity. He figured that I had a chance to save myself and to save perhaps one of the three. You see, Soledad is not a bad woman at all; she’s simply doing what an impeccable warrior would do. The little sisters like her more than they like their own mothers. She’s a real mother to them. That was, the Nagual said, the point of her advantage. I haven’t been able to pull the little sisters away from her, no matter what I do. So if she had killed you, she would then have taken at least two of those three trusting souls. Then without you in the picture Pablito is nothing. Soledad would have squashed him like a bug. And then with all her completeness and power she would have entered into that world out there. If I had been in her place I would’ve tried to do exactly as she did.