A sudden knock at the front door interrupted her. La Gorda stood up and went over to unlatch the door. It was Lidia. She greeted me very formally and asked la Gorda to go with her. They left together.
I welcomed being alone. I worked on my notes for hours. The open-air dining area was cool and had very good light.
La Gorda returned around noon. She asked me if I wanted to eat. I was not hungry, but she insisted that I eat. She said that contacts with the allies were very debilitating, and that she felt very weak herself.
After eating I sat down with la Gorda and was getting ready to ask her about “dreaming” when the front door opened loudly and Pablito walked in. He was panting. He obviously had been running and appeared to be in a state of great excitation. He stood at the door for a moment, catching his breath. He hadn’t changed much. He seemed a bit older, or heavier, or perhaps only more muscular. He was, however, still very lean and wiry. His complexion was pale, as if he had not been in the sun for a long time. The brownness of his eyes was accen-tuated by a faint mark of weariness in his face. I remembered Pablito as having a beguiling smile; as he stood there looking at me, his smile was as charming as ever. He ran over to where I was sitting and grasped my forearms for a moment, without saying a word. I stood up. He then shook me gently and embraced me. I myself was utterly delighted to see him. I was jumping up and down with an infantile joy. I did not know what to say to him. He finally broke the silence.
“Maestro,” he said softly, nodding his head slightly as if he were bowing to me.
The title of “maestro,” teacher, caught me by surprise. I turned around as if I were looking for someone else who was just behind me. I deliberately exaggerated my movements to let him know that I was mystified. He smiled, and the only thing that occurred to me was to ask him how he knew I was there.
He said that he, Nestor and Benigno had been forced to return because of a most unusual apprehension, which made them run day and night without any pause. Nestor had gone to their own house to find out if there was something there that would account for the feeling that had driven them. Benigno had gone to Soledad’s place and he himself had come to the girls’ house.
“You hit the jackpot, Pablito,” la Gorda said, and laughed.
Pablito did not answer. He glared at her.
“I’ll bet that you’re working yourself up to throw me out,” he said in a tone of great anger.
“Don’t fight with me, Pablito,” la Gorda said, unruffled.
Pablito turned to me and apologized, and then added in a very loud voice, as if he wanted someone else in the house to hear him, that he had brought his own chair to sit on and that he could put it wherever he pleased.
“There’s no one else around here except us,” la Gorda said softly, and chuckled.
“I’ll bring in my chair anyway,” Pablito said. “You don’t mind, Maestro, do you?”
I looked at la Gorda. She gave me an almost imperceptible go-ahead sign with the tip of her foot.
“Bring it in. Bring anything you want,” I said.
Pablito stepped out of the house.
“They’re all that way,” la Gorda said, “all three of them.”
Pablito came back a moment later carrying an unusual-looking chair on his shoulders. The chair was shaped to follow the contour of his back, so when he had it on his shoulders, upside down, it looked like a backpack.
“May I put it down?” he asked me.
“Of course,” I replied, moving the bench over to make room.
He laughed with exaggerated ease.
“Aren’t you the Nagual?” he asked me, and then looked at la Gorda and added, “Or do you have to wait for orders?”
“I am the Nagual,” I said facetiously in order to humor him.
I sensed that he was about to pick a fight with la Gorda; she must have sensed it too, for she excused herself and went out the back.
Pablito put his chair down and slowly circled around me as if he were inspecting my body. Then he took his low-back narrow chair in one hand, turned it around and sat down, resting his folded arms on the back of the chair that was made to allow him the maximum comfort as he sat astride it. I sat down facing him. His mood had changed completely the instant la Gorda left.
“I must ask you to forgive me for acting the way I did,” he said smiling. “But I had to get rid of that witch.”
“Is she that bad, Pablito?”
“You can bet on that,” he replied.
To change the subject I told him that he looked very fine and prosperous.
“You look very fine yourself. Maestro,” he said.
“What’s this nonsense of calling me Maestro?” I asked in a joking tone.
“Things are not the same as before,” he replied. “We are in a new realm, and the Witness says that you’re a maestro now, and the Witness cannot be wrong. But he will tell you the whole story himself. He’ll be here shortly, and will he be glad to see you again. I think that by now he must have felt that you are here. As we were coming back, all of us had the feeling that you might be on your way, but none of us felt that you had already arrived.”
I told him then that I had come for the sole purpose of see-ing him and Nestor, that they were the only two people in the world with whom I could talk about our last meeting with don Juan and don Genaro, and that I needed more than anything else to clear up the uncertainties that that last meeting had created in me.
“We’re bound to one another,” he said. “I’ll do anything I can to help. You know that. But I must warn you that I’m not as strong as you would want me to be. Perhaps it would be better if we didn’t talk at all. But, on the other hand, if we don’t talk we’ll never understand anything.”
In a careful and deliberate manner I formulated my query. I explained that there was one single issue at the crux of my rational predicament.
“Tell me, Pablito,” I said, “did we truly jump with our bodies into the abyss?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I really don’t know.”
“But you were there with me.”
“That’s the point. Was I really there?”
I felt annoyed at his cryptic replies. I had the sensation that if I would shake him or squeeze him, something in him would be set free. It was apparent to me that he was deliberately withholding something of great value. I protested that he would choose to be secretive with me when we had a bond of total trust.
Pablito shook his head as if silently objecting to my accusation.
I asked him to recount to me his whole experience, starting from the time prior to our jump, when don Juan and don Genaro had prepared us together for the final onslaught.
Pablito’s account was muddled and inconsistent. All he could remember about the last moments before we jumped into the abyss was that after don Juan and don Genaro had said good-bye to both of us and had disappeared into the darkness, his strength waned, he was about to fall on his face, but I held him by his arm and carried him to the edge of the abyss and there he blacked out.
“What happened after you blacked out, Pablito?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did you have dreams or visions? What did you see?”
“As far as I’m concerned I had no visions, or if I did I couldn’t pay any attention to them. My lack of impeccability makes it impossible for me to remember them.”
“And then what happened?”
“I woke up at Genaro’s old place. I don’t know how I got there.”
He remained quiet, while I frantically searched in my mind for a question, a comment, a critical statement or anything that would add extra breadth to his statements. As it was, nothing in Pablito’s account was usable to buttress what had happened to me. I felt cheated. I was almost angry with him. My feelings were a mixture of pity for Pablito and myself and at the same time a most intense disappointment.
“I’m sorry I’m such a letdown to you,” Pablito said.
My immediate reaction to his words was to cover up my feelings and assure him that I was not disappointed at all.
“I am a sorcerer,” he said, laughing, “a poor one, but enough of a one to know what my body tells me. And right now it tells me that you are angry with me.”