“Is it true that Josefina was really crazy a long time ago?” I asked.
“That’s a laugh,” Pablito said. “Not a long time ago; she’s crazy now. She’s the most insane of the bunch.”
I told them what she had done to me. I thought that they would appreciate the humor of her magnificent performance. But my story seemed to affect them the wrong way. They listened to me like frightened children; even Benigno opened his eyes to listen to my account.
“Wow!” Pablito exclaimed. “Those bitches are really aw-ful. And you know that their leader is Two Hundred and Twenty Buttocks. She’s the one that throws the rock and then hides her hand and pretends to be an innocent little girl. Be careful of her, Maestro.”
“The Nagual trained Josefina to be anything,” Nestor said. “She can do anything you want: cry, laugh, get angry, anything.”
“But what is she like when she is not acting?” I asked Nestor.
“She’s just crazier than a bat,” Benigno answered in a soft voice. “I met Josefina the first day she arrived. I had to carry her into the house. The Nagual and I used to tie her down to her bed all the time. Once she began to cry for her friend, a little girl she used to play with. She cried for three days. Pablito consoled her and fed her like a baby. She’s like him. Both of them don’t know how to stop once they begin.”
Benigno suddenly began to sniff the air. He stood up and went over to the stove.
“Is he really shy?” I asked Nestor.
“He’s shy and eccentric,” Pablito answered. “He’ll be that way until he loses his form. Genaro told us that we will lose our form sooner or later, so there is no point in making ourselves miserable in trying to change ourselves the way the Nagual told us to. Genaro told us to enjoy ourselves and not worry about anything. You and the women worry and try; we on the other hand, enjoy. You don’t know how to enjoy things and we don’t know how to make ourselves miserable. The Nagual called making yourself miserable, impeccability; we call it stupidity, don’t we?”
“You are speaking for yourself, Pablito,” Nestor said.
“Benigno and I don’t feel that way.” Benigno brought a bowl of food over and placed it in front of me. He served everyone. Pablito examined the bowls and asked Benigno where he had found them. Benigno said that they were in a box where la Gorda had told him she had stored them. Pablito confided in me that those bowls used to belong to them before their split.
“We have to be careful,” Pablito said in a nervous tone. “These bowls are no doubt bewitched. Those bitches put something in them. I’d rather eat out of la Gorda’s bowl.”
Nestor and Benigno began to eat. I noticed then that Benigno had given me the brown bowl. Pablito seemed to be in a great turmoil. I wanted to put him at ease but Nestor stopped me.
“Don’t take him so seriously,” he said. “He loves to be that way. He’ll sit down and eat. This is where you and the women fail. There is no way for you to understand that Pablito is like that. You expect everybody to be like the Nagual. La Gorda is the only one who’s unruffled by him, not because she understands but because she has lost her form.”
Pablito sat down to eat and among the four of us we finished a whole pot of food. Benigno washed the bowls and carefully put them back in the box and then all of us sat down comfortably around the table.
Nestor proposed that as soon as it got dark we should all go for a walk in a ravine nearby, where don Juan, don Genaro and I used to go. I felt somehow reluctant. I did not feel confident enough in their company. Nestor said that they were used to walking in the darkness and that the art of a sorcerer was to be inconspicuous even in the midst of people. I told him what don Juan had once said to me, before he had left me in a deserted place in the mountains not too far from there. He had demanded that I concentrate totally on trying not to be obvious. He said that the people of the area knew everyone by sight. There were not very many people, but those who lived there walked around all the time and could spot a stranger from miles away. He told me that many of those people had firearms and would have thought nothing of shooting me.
“Don’t be concerned with beings from the other world,” don Juan had said laughing. “The dangerous ones are the Mexicans.”
“That’s still valid,” Nestor said. “That has been valid all the time. That’s why the Nagual and Genaro were the artists they were. They learned to become unnoticeable in the middle of all this. They knew the art of stalking.”
It was still too early for our walk in the dark. I wanted to use the time to ask Nestor my critical question. I had been avoiding it all along; some strange feeling had prevented me from asking. It was as if I had exhausted my interest after Pablito’s reply. But Pablito himself came to my aid and all of a sudden he brought up the subject as if he had been reading my mind.
“Nestor also jumped into the abyss the same day we did,” he said. “And in that way he became the Witness, you became the Maestro and I became the village idiot.”
In a casual manner I asked Nestor to tell me about his jump into the abyss. I tried to sound only mildly interested. But Pablito was aware of the true nature of my forced indifference. He laughed and told Nestor that I was being cautious because I had been deeply disappointed with his own account of the event.
“I went over after you two did,” Nestor said, and looked at me as if waiting for another question.
“Did you jump immediately after us?” I asked.
“No. It took me quite a while to get ready,” he said. “Ge-naro and the Nagual didn’t tell me what to do. That day was a test day for all of us.”
Pablito seemed despondent. He stood up from his chair and paced the room. He sat down again, shaking his head in a gesture of despair.
“Did you actually see us going over the edge?” I asked Nestor.
“I am the Witness,” he said. “To witness was my path of knowledge; to tell you impeccably what I witness is my task.”
“But what did you really see?” I asked.
“I saw you two holding each other and running toward the edge,” he said. “And then I saw you both like two kites against the sky. Pablito moved farther out in a straight line and then fell down. You went up a little and then you moved away from the edge a short distance, before falling down.”
“But, did we jump with our bodies?” I asked.
“Well, I don’t think there was another way to do it,” he said, and laughed.
“Could it have been an illusion?” I asked.
“What are you trying to say. Maestro?” he asked in a dry tone.
“I want to know what really happened,” I said.
“Did you by any chance black out, like Pablito?” Nestor asked with a glint in his eye.
I tried to explain to him the nature of my quandary about the jump. He could not hold still and interrupted me. Pablito intervened to bring him to order and they became involved in an argument. Pablito squeezed himself out of it by walking half seated around the table, holding onto his chair.
“Nestor doesn’t see beyond his nose,” he said to me. “Benigno is the same. You’ll get nothing from them. At least you got my sympathy.”
Pablito cackled, making his shoulders shiver, and hid his face with Benigno’s hat.
“As far as I’m concerned, you two jumped,” Nestor said to me in a sudden outburst. “Genaro and the Nagual had left you with no other choice. That was their art, to corral you and then lead you to the only gate that was open. And so you two went over the edge. That was what I witnessed. Pablito says that he didn’t feel a thing; that is questionable. I know that he was perfectly aware of everything, but he chooses to feel and say that he wasn’t.”
“I really wasn’t aware,” Pablito said to me in an apologetic tone.
“Perhaps,” Nestor said dryly. “But I was aware myself, and I saw your bodies doing what they had to do, jump.”
Nestor’s assertions put me in a strange frame of mind. All along I had been seeking validation for what I had perceived myself. But once I had it, I realized that it made no difference. To know that I had jumped and to be afraid of what I had perceived was one thing; to seek consensual validation was another. I knew then that one had no necessary correlation with the other. I had thought all along that to have someone else corroborate that I had taken that plunge would absolve my intellect of its doubts and fears. I was wrong. I became instead more worried, more involved with the issue.