“So you see, it was all or nothing for her. When you first arrived everyone was gone. It looked as if it was the end for you and for some of us. But then at the end it was nothing for her and a chance for the sisters. The moment I knew that you had succeeded I told the three girls that now it was their turn. The Nagual had said that they should wait until the morning to catch you unawares. He said that the morning was not a good time for you. He commanded me to stay away and not interfere with the sisters and to come in only if you would try to injure their luminosity.”
“Were they supposed to kill me too?”
“Well, yes. You are the male side of their luminosity. Their completeness is at times their disadvantage. The Nagual ruled them with an iron hand and balanced them, but now that he’s gone they have no way of leveling off. Your luminosity could do that for them.”
“How about you, Gorda? Are you supposed to finish me off too?”
“I’ve told you already that I’m different. I am balanced. My emptiness, which was my disadvantage, is now my advantage. Once a sorcerer regains his completeness he’s balanced, while a sorcerer who was always complete is a bit off. Like Genaro was a bit off. But the Nagual was balanced because he had been incomplete, like you and me, even more so than you and me. He had three sons and one daughter.
“The little sisters are like Genaro, a bit off. And most of the times so taut that they have no measure.”
“How about me, Gorda? Do I also have to go after them?”
“No. Only they could have profited by sucking away your luminosity. You can’t profit at all by anyone’s death. The Nagual left a special power with you, a balance of some kind, which none of us has.”
“Can’t they learn to have that balance?”
“Sure they can. But that has nothing to do with the task the little sisters had to perform. Their task was to steal your power. For that, they became so united that they are now one single being. They trained themselves to sip you up like a glass of soda. The Nagual set them up to be deceivers of the highest order, especially Josefina. She put on a show that was peerless. Compared to their art, Soledad’s attempt was child’s play. She’s a crude woman. The little sisters are true sorceresses. Two of them gained your confidence, while the third shocked you and rendered you helpless. They played their cards to perfection. You fell for it all and nearly succumbed. The only flaw was that you injured and cured Rosa’s luminosity the night before and that made her jumpy. Had it not been for her nervousness and her biting your side so hard, chances are you wouldn’t be here now. I saw everything from the door. I came in at the precise moment you were about to annihilate them.”
“But what could I do to annihilate them?”
“How could I know that? I’m not you.”
“I mean what did you see me doing?”
“I saw your double coming out of you.” “What did it look like?”
“It looked like you, what else? But it was very big and menacing. Your double would have killed them. So I came in and interfered with it. It took the best of my power to calm you down. The sisters were no help. They were lost. And you were furious and violent. You changed colors right in front of us twice. One color was so violent that I feared you would kill me too.”
“What color was it, Gorda?”
“White, what else? The double is white, yellowish white, like the sun.”
I stared at her. The smile was very new to me.
“Yes,” she continued, “we are pieces of the sun. That is why we are luminous beings. But our eyes can’t see that luminosity because it is very faint. Only the eyes of a sorcerer can see it, and that happens after a lifetime struggle.”
Her revelation had taken me by total surprise. I tried to reorganize my thoughts in order to ask the most appropriate question.
“Did the Nagual ever tell you anything about the sun?” I asked.
“Yes. We are all like the sun but very, very faint. Our light is too weak, but it is light anyway.”
“But, did he say that the sun was perhaps the nagual?” I insisted desperately.
La Gorda did not answer. She made a series of involuntary noises with her lips. She was apparently thinking how to an-swer my probe. I waited, ready to write it down. After a long pause she crawled out of the cave.
“I’ll show you my faint light,” she said matter-of-factly.
She walked to the center of the narrow gully in front of the cave and squatted. From where I was I could not see what she was doing so I had to get out of the cave myself. I stood ten or twelve feet away from her. She put her hands under her skirt, while she was still squatting. Suddenly, she stood up. Her hands were loosely clasped into fists; she raised them over her head and snapped her fingers open. I heard a quick, bursting sound and I saw sparks flying from her fingers. She again clasped her hands and then snapped them open and another volley of much larger sparks flew out of them. She squatted once more and reached under her skirt. She seemed to be pulling something from her pubis. She repeated the snapping movement of her fingers as she threw her hands over her head, and I saw a spray of long, luminous fibers flying away from her fingers. I had to tilt my head up to see them against the already dark sky. They appeared to be long, fine filaments of a reddish light. After a while they faded and disappeared.
She squatted once again, and when she let her fingers open a most astonishing display of lights emanated from them. The sky was filled with thick rays of light. It was a spellbinding sight. I became engrossed in it; my eyes were fixed. I was not paying attention to la Gorda. I was looking at the lights. I heard a sudden outcry that forced me to look at her, just in time to see her grab one of the lines she was creating and spin to the very top of the canyon. She hovered there for an instant like a dark, huge shadow against the sky, and then descended to the bottom of the gully in spurts or small leaps or as if she were coming down a stairway on her belly.
I suddenly saw her standing over me. I had not realized that I had fallen on my seat. I stood up. She was soaked in perspiration and was panting, trying to catch her breath. She could not speak for a long time. She began to jog in place. I did not dare to touch her. Finally she seemed to have calmed down enough to crawl back into the cave. She rested for a few minutes.
Her actions had been so fast that I had hardly had any time to evaluate what had happened. At the moment of her display I had felt an unbearable, ticklish pain in the area just below my navel. I had not physically exerted myself and yet I was also panting.
“I think it’s time to go to our appointment,” she said, out of breath. “My flying opened us both. You felt my flying in your belly; that means you are open and ready to meet the four forces.”
“What four forces are you talking about?”
“The Nagual’s and Genaro’s allies. You’ve seen them. They are horrendous. Now they are free from the Nagual’s and Genaro’s gourds. You heard one of them around Soledad’s house the other night. They are waiting for you. The mo-ment the darkness of the day sets in, they’ll be uncontainable. One of them even came after you in the daytime at Soledad’s place. Those allies now belong to you and me. We will take two each. I don’t know which ones. And I don’t know how, either. All the Nagual told me was that you and I would have to tackle them by ourselves.”
“Wait, wait! ” I shouted.
She did not let me speak. She gently put her hand over my mouth. I felt a pang of terror in the pit of my stomach. I had been confronted in the past with some inexplicable phenomena which don Juan and don Genaro had called their allies. There were four of them and they were entities, as real as anything in the world. Their presence was so outlandish that it would create an unparalleled state of fear in me every time I perceived them. The first one I had encountered was don Juan’s; it was a dark, rectangular mass, eight or nine feet high and four or five feet across. It moved with the crushing weight of a giant boulder and breathed so heavily that it reminded me of the sound of bellows. I had always encountered it at night, in the darkness. I had fancied it to be like a door that walked by pivoting on one corner and then on the other.