“One of us here is a fool!” Benigno said in a booming voice without opening his eyes.
The sound of his voice was so outlandish that I jumped away from him. His thoroughly unexpected statement, plus my reaction to it, made all of them laugh. Benigno opened one eye and looked at me for an instant and then buried his face in his arms.
“Do you know why we called Juan Matus the Nagual?” Nestor asked me.
I said that I had always thought that that was their nice way of calling don Juan a sorcerer.
Benigno laughed so loudly that the sound of his laughter drowned out everybody else’s. He seemed to be enjoying himself immensely. He rested his head on my shoulder as if it were a heavy object he could no longer support.
“The reason we called him the Nagual,” Nestor went on, “is because he was split in two. In other words, any time he needed to, he could get into another track that we don’t have ourselves; something would come out of him, something that was not a double but a horrendous, menacing shape that looked like him but was twice his size. We call that shape the nagual and anybody who has it is, of course, the Nagual.
“The Nagual told us that all of us can have that shape com-ing out of our heads if we wanted to, but chances are that none of us would want to. Genaro didn’t want it, so I think we don’t want it, either. So it appears that you’re the one who’s stuck with it.”
They cackled and yelled as if they were corraling a herd of cattle. Benigno put his arms around my shoulders without opening his eyes and laughed until tears were rolling down his cheeks.
“Why do you say that I am stuck with it?” I asked Nestor.
“It takes too much energy,” he said, “too much work. I don’t know how you can still be standing.
“The Nagual and Genaro split you once in the eucalyptus grove. They took you there because eucalyptuses are your trees. I was there myself and I witnessed when they split you and pulled your nagual out. They pulled you apart by the ears until they had split your luminosity and you were not an egg anymore, but two long chunks of luminosity. Then they put you together again, but any sorcerer that sees can tell that there is a huge gap in the middle.”
“What’s the advantage of being split?”
“You have one car that hears everything and one eye that sees everything and you will always be able to go an extra mile in a moment of need. That splitting is also the reason why they told us that you are the Maestro.
“They tried to split Pablito but it looks like it failed. He’s too pampered and has always indulged like a bastard. That’s why he’s so screwed up now.”
“What’s a double then?”
“A double is the other, the body that one gets in dreaming. It looks exactly like oneself.”
“Do all of you have a double?”
Nestor scrutinized me with a look of surprise.
“Hey, Pablito, tell the Maestro about our doubles,” he said laughing.
Pablito reached across the table and shook Benigno.
“You tell him, Benigno,” he said. “Better yet, show it to him.”
Benigno stood up, opened his eyes as wide as he could and looked at the roof, then he pulled down his pants and showed me his penis.
The Genaros went wild with laughter.
“Did you really mean it when you asked that, Maestro?” Nestor asked me with a nervous expression.
I assured him that I was deadly serious in my desire to know anything related to their knowledge. I went into a long eluci-dation of how don Juan had kept me outside of their realm for reasons I could not fathom, thus preventing me from knowing more about them.
“Think of this,” I said. “I didn’t know until three days ago that those four girls were the Nagual’s apprentices, or that Benigno was don Genaro’s apprentice.”
Benigno opened his eyes.
“Think of this yourself,” he said. “I didn’t know until now that you were so stupid.”
He closed his eyes again and all of them laughed insanely. I had no choice but to join them.
“We were just teasing you. Maestro,” Nestor said in way of an apology. “We thought that you were teasing us, rubbing it in. The Nagual told us that you see. If you do, you can tell that we are a sorry lot. We don’t have the body of dreaming. None of us has a double.”
In a very serious and earnest manner Nestor said that something had come in between them and their desire to have a double. I understood him as saying that a sort of barrier had been created since don Juan and don Genaro had left. He thought that it might be the result of Pablito flubbing his task. Pablito added that since the Nagual and Genaro had gone, something seemed to be chasing them, and even Benigno, who was living in the southernmost tip of Mexico at that time, had to return. Only when the three of them were together did they feel at ease.
“What do you think it is?” I asked Nestor.
“There is something out there in that immensity that’s pulling us,” he replied. “Pablito thinks it’s his fault for antagonizing those women.”
Pablito turned to me. There was an intense glare in his eyes.
“They’ve put a curse on me. Maestro,” he said. “I know that the cause of all our trouble is me. I wanted to disappear from these parts after my fight with Lidia, and a few months later I took off for Veracruz. I was actually very happy there with a girl I wanted to marry. I got a job and was doing fine until one day I came home and found that those four mannish freaks, like beasts of prey, had tracked me down by my scent. They were in my house tormenting my woman. That bitch Rosa put her ugly hand on my woman’s belly and made her shit in the bed, just like that. Their leader. Two Hundred and Twenty Buttocks, told me that they had walked across the continent looking for me. She just grabbed me by the belt and pulled me out. They pushed me to the bus depot to bring me here. I got madder than the devil but I was no match for Two Hundred and Twenty Buttocks. She put me on the bus. But on our way here I ran away. I ran through bushes and over hills until my feet got so swollen that I couldn’t get my shoes off. I nearly died. I was ill for nine months. If the Witness hadn’t found me, I would have died.”
“I didn’t find him,” Nestor said to me. “La Gorda found him. She took me to where he was and between the two of us we carried him to the bus and brought him here. He was de-lirious and we had to pay an extra fare so that the bus driver would let him stay on the bus.”
In a most dramatic tone Pablito said that he had not changed his mind; he still wanted to die.
“But why?” I asked him.
Benigno answered for him in a booming, guttural voice.
“Because his pecker doesn’t work,” he said.
The sound of his voice was so extraordinary that for an instant I had the impression that he was talking inside a cavern. It was at once frightening and incongruous. I laughed almost out of control.
Nestor said that Pablito had attempted to fulfill his task of establishing sexual relations with the women, in accordance with the Nagual’s instructions. He had told Pablito that the four corners of his world were already set in position and all he had to do was to claim them. But when Pablito went to claim his first corner, Lidia, she nearly killed him. Nestor added that it was his personal opinion as a witness of the event that the reason Lidia rammed him with her head was because Pablito could not perform as a man, and rather than being embarrassed by the whole thing, she hit him.
“Did Pablito really get sick as a result of that blow or was he pretending?” I asked half in jest.
Benigno answered again in the same booming voice.
“He was just pretending!” he said. “All he got was a bump on the head! “
Pablito and Nestor cackled and yelled.
“We don’t blame Pablito for being afraid of those women,” Nestor said. “They are all like the Nagual himself, fearsome warriors. They’re mean and crazy.”
“Do you really think they’re that bad?” I asked him.
“To say they’re bad is only one part of the whole truth,” Nestor said. “They’re just like the Nagual. They’re serious and gloomy. When the Nagual was around, they used to sit close to him and stare into the distance with half-closed eyes for hours, sometimes for days.”