“Why do you have to come in like that?” he asked in a pleading tone. “You were listening from the other room, weren’t you?”
She said that she had been in the house only a few minutes and then she stepped out to the kitchen. And the reason she stayed quiet was not so much to listen but to exercise her ability to be inconspicuous. Her presence had created a strange lull. I wanted to pick up again the flow of Nestor’s revelations, but before I could say anything la Gorda said that the little sisters were on their way to the house and would be coming through the door any min-ute. The Genaros stood up at once as if they had been pulled by the same string. Pablito put his chair on his shoulder.
“Let’s go for a hike in the dark. Maestro,” Pablito said to me.
La Gorda said in a most imperative tone that I could not go with them yet because she had not finished telling me everything the Nagual had instructed her to tell me.
Pablito turned to me and winked.
“I’ve told you,” he said. “They’re bossy, gloomy bitches. I certainly hope you’re not like that. Maestro.”
Nestor and Benigno said good night and embraced me. Pablito just walked away carrying his chair like a backpack. They went out through the back.
A few seconds later a horribly loud bang on the front door made la Gorda and me jump to our feet. Pablito walked in again, carrying his chair.
“You thought I wasn’t going to say good night, didn’t you?” he asked me and left laughing.
5
The Art of Dreaming
The next day I was by myself all morning. I worked on my notes, in the afternoon I used my car to help la Gorda and the little sisters transport the furniture from dona Soledad’s house to their house.
In the early evening la Gorda and I sat in the dining area alone. We were silent for a while. I was very tired.
La Gorda broke the silence and said that all of them had been too complacent since the Nagual and Genaro had left. Each of them had been absorbed in his or her particular tasks. She said that the Nagual had commanded her to be an impas-sionate warrior and to follow whatever path her fate selected for her. If Soledad had stolen my power, la Gorda had to flee and try to save the little sisters and then join Benigno and Nestor, the only two Genaros who would have survived. If the little sisters had killed me, she had to join the Genaros because the little sisters would have had no more need to be with her. If I had not survived the attack of the allies and she did, she had to leave that area and be on her own. She told me, with a glint in her eye, that she had been sure that neither one of us would survive, and that that was why she had said good-bye to her sisters, to her house and to the hills.
“The Nagual told me that in case you and I survived the allies,” she went on, “I have to do anything for you, because that would be my warrior’s path. That was why I interfered with what Benigno was doing to you last night. He was pressing on your chest with his eyes. That is his art as a stalker. You saw Pablito’s hand earlier yesterday; that was also part of the same art.”
“What art is that, Gorda?”
“The art of the stalker. That was the Nagual’s predilection and the Genaros are his true children at that. We, on the other hand, are dreamers. Your double is dreaming.”
What she was saying was new to me. I wanted her to eluci-date her statements. I paused for a moment to read what I had written in order to select the most appropriate question. I told her that I first wanted to find out what she knew about my double and then I wanted to know about the art of stalking.
“The Nagual told me that your double is something that takes a lot of power to come out,” she said. “He figured that you might have enough energy to get it out of you twice. That’s why he set up Soledad and the little sisters either to kill you or to help you.”
La Gorda said that I had had more energy than the Nagual thought, and that my double came out three times. Apparently Rosa’s attack had not been a thoughtless action; on the contrary, she had very cleverly calculated that if she injured me, I would have been helpless: the same ploy dona Soledad had tried with her dog. I had given Rosa a chance to strike me when I yelled at her, but she failed to injure me. My double came out and injured her instead. La Gorda said that Lidia had told her that Rosa did not want to wake up when all of us had to rush out of Soledad’s house, so Lidia squeezed the hand that had been injured. Rosa did not feel any pain and knew in an instant that I had cured her, which meant to them that I had drained my power. La Gorda affirmed that the little sisters were very clever and had planned to drain me of power; to that effect they had kept on insisting that I cure Soledad. As soon as Rosa realized that I had also cured her, she thought that I had weakened myself beyond repair. All they had to do was to wait for Josefina in order to finish me off.
“The little sisters didn’t know that when you cured Rosa and Soledad you also replenished yourself,” la Gorda said, and laughed as if it were a joke. “That was why you had enough energy to get your double out a third time when the little sisters tried to take your luminosity.”
I told her about the vision I had had of dona Soledad huddled against the wall of her room, and how I had merged that vision with my tactile sense and ended up feeling a viscous substance on her forehead.
“That was true seeing,” la Gorda said. “You saw Soledad in her room although she was with me around Genaro’s place, and then you saw your nagual on her forehead.”
I felt compelled at that point to recount to her the details of my whole experience, especially the realization I had had that I was actually curing dona Soledad and Rosa by touching the viscous substance, which I felt was part of me.
“To see that thing on Rosa’s hand was also true seeing,” she said. “And you were absolutely right, that substance was yourself. It came out of your body and it was your nagual. By touching it, you pulled it back.”
La Gorda told me then, as though she were unveiling a mystery, that the Nagual had commanded her not to disclose the fact that since all of us had the same luminosity, if my nagual touched one of them, I would not get weakened, as would ordinarily be the case if my nagual touched an average man.
“If your nagual touches us,” she said, giving me a gentle slap on the head, “your luminosity stays on the surface. You can pick it up again and nothing is lost.”
I told her that the content of her explanation was impossible for me to believe. She shrugged her shoulders as if saying that that was not any of her concern. I asked her then about her usage of the word nagual. I said that don Juan had explained the nagual to me as being the indescribable principle, the source of everything.
“Sure,” she said smiling. “I know what he meant. The na-gual is in everything.”
I pointed out to her, a bit scornfully, that one could also say the opposite, that the tonal is in everything. She carefully explained that there was no opposition, that my statement was correct, the tonal was also in everything. She said that the tonal which is in everything could be easily apprehended by our senses, while the nagual which is in everything manifested itself only to the eye of the sorcerer. She added that we could stumble upon the most outlandish sights of the tonal and be scared of them, or awed by them, or be indifferent to them, because all of us could view those sights. A sight of the nagual, on the other hand, needed the specialized senses of a sorcerer in order to be seen at all. And yet, both the tonal and the nagual were present in everything at all times. It was appropriate, therefore, for a sorcerer to say that “looking” consisted in viewing the tonal which is in everything, and “seeing,” on the other hand, consisted in viewing the nagual which also is in everything. Accordingly, if a warrior observed the world as a human being, he was looking, but if he observed it as a sorcerer, he was “seeing,” and what he was “seeing” had to be properly called the nagual.