I had never wanted to believe I was having hallucinations, but I did not want to accept that there were allies, either. My rational background was unbending. I could not bridge the gap. This time, however, everything was different, and the thought that there were actually beings on this earth that were from another world without being aliens to the earth was more than I could bear. I said to la Gorda, half in jest, that secretly I would have given anything to be crazy. That would have absolved some part of me from the crushing responsibility of revamping my understanding of the world. The irony of it was that I could not have been more willing to revamp my understanding of the world, on an intellectual level, that is. But that was not enough. That had never been enough. And that had been my insurmountable obstacle all along, my deadly flaw. I had been willing to dally in don Juan’s world in a semiconvinced fashion; therefore, I had been a quasi-sorcerer. All my efforts had been no more than my inane eagerness to fence with the intellect, as if I were in academia where one can do that very thing from 8: 00 a. m. to 5: 00 p. m., at which time, duly tired, one goes home. Don Juan used to say as a joke that, after arranging the world in a most beautiful and enlightened manner, the scholar goes home at five o’clock in order to forget his beautiful arrangement.
While la Gorda made us some food I worked feverishly on my notes. I felt much more relaxed after eating. La Gorda was in the best of spirits. She clowned, the way don Genaro used to, imitating the gestures I made while I wrote.
“What do you know about the allies, Gorda?” I asked.
“Only what the Nagual told me,” she replied. “He said that the allies were forces that a sorcerer learns to control. He had two inside his gourd and so did Genaro.”
“How did they keep them inside their gourds?”
“No one knows that. All the Nagual knew was that a tiny, perfect gourd with a neck must be found before one could harness the allies.”
“Where can one find that kind of gourd?”
“Anywhere. The Nagual left word with me, in case we survived the attack of the allies, that we should start looking for the perfect gourd, which must be the size of the thumb of the left hand. That was the size of the Nagual’s gourd.”
“Have you seen his gourd?”
“No. Never. The Nagual said that a gourd of that kind is not in the world of men. It’s like a little bundle that one can distinguish hanging from their belts. But if you deliberately look at it you will see nothing.
“The gourd, once it is found, must be groomed with great care. Usually sorcerers find gourds like that on vines in the woods. They pick them and dry them and then they hollow them out. And then they smooth them and polish them. Once the sorcerer has his gourd he must offer it to the allies and entice them to live there. If the allies consent, the gourd disappears from the world of men and the allies become an aid to the sorcerer. The Nagual and Genaro could make their allies do anything that needed to be done. Things they themselves could not do. Such as, for instance, sending the wind to chase me or sending that chicken to run inside Lidia’s blouse.”
I heard a peculiar, prolonged hissing sound outside the door. It was the exact sound I had heard in dona Soledad’s house two days before. This time I knew it was the jaguar. The sound did not scare me. In fact, I would have stepped out to see the jaguar had la Gorda not stopped me.
“You’re still incomplete,” she said. “The allies would feast on you if you go out by yourself. Especially that daring one that’s prowling out there now.”
“My body feels very safe,” I protested.
She patted my back and held me down against the bench on which I was writing.
“You’re not a complete sorcerer yet,” she said. “You have a huge patch in your middle and the force of those allies would yank it out of place. They are no joke.”
“What are you supposed to do when an ally comes to you in this fashion?”
“I don’t bother with them one way or another. The Nagual taught me to be balanced and not to seek anything eagerly. Tonight, for instance, I knew which allies would go to you, if you can ever get a gourd and groom it. You may be eager to get them. I’m not. Chances are I’ll never get them myself. They are a pain in the neck.”
“Why?”
“Because they are forces and as such they can drain you to nothing. The Nagual said that one is better off with nothing except one’s purpose and freedom. Someday when you’re complete, perhaps we’ll have to choose whether or not to keep them.”
I told her that I personally liked the jaguar even though there was something overbearing about it. She peered at me. There was a look of surprise and bewilderment in her eyes.
“I really like that one,” I said.
“Tell me what you saw,” she said.
I realized at that moment that I had automatically assumed that she had seen the same things I had. I described in great detail the four allies as I had seen them. She listened more than attentively; she appeared to be spellbound by my description.
“The allies have no form,” she said when I had finished. “They are like a presence, like a wind, like a glow. The first one we found tonight was a blackness that wanted to get in-side my body. That’s why I screamed. I felt it reaching up my legs. The others were just colors. Their glow was so strong, though, that it made the trail look as if it were daytime.”
Her statements astounded me. I had finally accepted, after years of struggle and purely on the basis of our encounter with them that night, that the allies had a consensual form, a substance which could be perceived equally by everyone’s senses.
I jokingly told la Gorda that I had already written in my notes that they were creatures with form.
“What am I going to do now?” I asked in a rhetorical sense.
“It’s very simple,” she said. “Write that they are not.”
I thought that she was absolutely right.
“Why do I see them as monsters?” I asked.
“That’s no mystery,” she said. “You haven’t lost your hu-man form yet. The same thing happened to me. I used to see the allies as people; all of them were Indian men with horrible faces and mean looks. They used to wait for me in deserted places. I thought they were after me as a woman. The Nagual used to laugh his head off at my fears. But still I was half dead with fright. One of them used to come and sit on my bed and shake it until I would wake up. The fright that that ally used to give me was something that I don’t want repeated, even now that I’m changed. Tonight I think I was as afraid of the allies as I used to be.”
“You mean that you don’t see them as human beings anymore?”
“No. Not anymore. The Nagual told you that an ally is formless. He is right. An ally is only a presence, a helper that is nothing and yet it is as real as you and me.”
“Have the little sisters seen the allies?”
“Everybody has seen them one time or another.”
“Are the allies just a force for them too?”
“No. They are like you; they haven’t lost their human form yet. None of them has. For all of them, the little sisters, the Genaros and Soledad, the allies are horrendous things; with them the allies are malevolent, dreadful creatures of the night. The sole mention of the allies sends Lidia and Josefina and Pablito into a frenzy. Rosa and Nestor are not that afraid of them, but they don’t want to have anything to do with them, either. Benigno has his own designs so he’s not concerned with them. They don’t bother him, or me, for that matter. But the others are easy prey for the allies, especially now that the allies are out of the Nagual’s and Genaro’s gourds. They come all the time looking for you.
“The Nagual told me that as long as one clings to the hu-man form, one can only reflect that form, and since the allies feed directly onto our life-force in the middle of the stomach, they usually make us sick, and then we see them as heavy, ugly creatures.”
“Is there something that we can do to protect ourselves, or to change the shape of those creatures?”