She then reiterated the reason, which Nestor had given me earlier, for calling don Juan the Nagual and confirmed that I was also the Nagual because of the shape that came out of my head.
I wanted to know why they had called the shape that had come out of my head the double. She said that they had thought they were sharing a private joke with me. They had always called that shape the double, because it was twice the size of the person who had it.
“Nestor told me that that shape was not such a good thing to have,” I said.
“It’s neither good nor bad,” she said. “You have it and that makes you the Nagual. That’s all. One of us eight had to be the Nagual and you’re the one. It might have been Pablito or me or anyone.”
“Tell me now, what is the art of stalking?” I asked.
“The Nagual was a stalker,” she said, and peered at me. “You must know that. He taught you to stalk from the beginning.”
It occurred to me that what she was referring to was what don Juan had called the hunter. He had certainly taught me to be a hunter. I told her that don Juan had shown me how to hunt and make traps. Her usage of the term stalker, however, was more accurate.
“A hunter just hunts,” she said. “A stalker stalks anything, including himself.”
“How does he do that?”
“An impeccable stalker can turn anything into prey. The Nagual told me that we can even stalk our own weaknesses.”
I stopped writing and tried to remember if don Juan had ever presented me with such a novel possibility: to stalk my weaknesses. I could not recall him ever putting it in those terms.
“How can one stalk one’s weaknesses, Gorda?”
“The same way you stalk prey. You figure out your routines until you know all the doing of your weaknesses and then you come upon them and pick them up like rabbits inside a cage.”
Don Juan had taught me the same thing about routines, but in the vein of a general principle that hunters must be aware of. Her understanding and application of it, however, were more pragmatic than mine.
Don Juan had said that any habit was, in essence, a “doing, “and that a doing needed all its parts in order to function. If some parts were missing, a doing was disassembled. By doing, he meant any coherent and meaningful series of actions. In other words, a habit needed all its component actions in order to be a live activity.
La Gorda then described how she had stalked her own weakness of eating excessively. She said that the Nagual had suggested she first tackle the biggest part of that habit, which was connected with her laundry work; she ate whatever her customers fed her as she went from house to house delivering her wash. She expected the Nagual to tell her what to do, but he only laughed and made fun of her, saying that as soon as he would mention something for her to do, she would fight not to do it. He said that that was the way human beings are; they love to be told what to do, but they love even more to fight and not do what they are told, and thus they get entangled in hating the one who told them in the first place.
For many years she could not think of anything to do to stalk her weakness. One day, however, she got so sick and tired of being fat that she refused to eat for twenty-three days. That was the initial action that broke her fixation. She then had the idea of stuffing her mouth with a sponge to make her customers believe that she had an infected tooth and could not eat. The subterfuge worked not only with her customers, who stopped giving her food, but with her as well, as she had the feeling of eating as she chewed on the sponge. La Gorda laughed when she told me how she had walked around with a sponge stuffed in her mouth for years until her habit of eat-ing excessively had been broken.
“Was that all you needed to stop your habit?” I asked.
“No. I also had to learn how to eat like a warrior.”
“And how does a warrior eat?”
“A warrior eats quietly, and slowly, and very little at a time. I used to talk while I ate, and I ate very fast, and I ate lots and lots of food at one sitting. The Nagual told me that a warrior eats four mouthfuls of food at one time. A while later he eats another four mouthfuls and so on.
“A warrior also walks miles and miles every day. My eating weakness never let me walk. I broke it by eating four mouthfuls every hour and by walking. Sometimes I walked all day and all night. That was the way I lost the fat on my buttocks.”
She laughed at her own recollection of the nickname don Juan had given her.
“But stalking your weaknesses is not enough to drop them,” she said. “You can stalk them from now to doomsday and it won’t make a bit of difference. That’s why the Nagual didn’t want to tell me what to do. What a warrior really needs in order to be an impeccable stalker is to have a purpose.”
La Gorda recounted how she had lived from day to day, before she met the Nagual, with nothing to look forward to. She had no hopes, no dreams, no desire for anything. The opportunity to eat, however, was always accessible to her; for some reason that she could not fathom, there had been plenty of food available to her every single day of her life. So much of it, in fact, that at one time she weighed two hundred and thirty-six pounds.
“Eating was the only thing I enjoyed in life,” la Gorda said. “Besides, I never saw myself as being fat. I thought I was rather pretty and that people liked me as I was. Everyone said that I looked healthy.
“The Nagual told me something very strange. He said that I had an enormous amount of personal power and due to that I had always managed to get food from friends while the relatives in my own house were going hungry.
“Everybody has enough personal power for something. The trick for me was to pull my personal power away from food to my warrior’s purpose.”
“And what is that purpose, Gorda?” I asked half in jest.
“To enter into the other world,” she replied with a grin and pretended to hit me on top of my head with her knuckles, the way don Juan used to do when he thought I was indulging.
There was no more light for me to write. I wanted her to bring a lantern but she complained that she was too tired and had to sleep a bit before the little sisters arrived.
We went into the front room. She gave me a blanket, then wrapped herself in another one and fell asleep instantly. I sat with my back against the wall. The brick surface of the bed was hard even with four straw mats. It was more comfortable to lie down. The moment I did I fell asleep.
I woke up suddenly with an unbearable thirst. I wanted to go to the kitchen to drink some water but I could not orient myself in the darkness. I could feel la Gorda bundled up in her blanket next to me. I shook her two or three times and asked her to help me get some water. She grumbled some unintelligible words. She apparently was so sound asleep that she did not want to wake up. I shook her again and suddenly she woke up; only it was not la Gorda. Whoever I was shaking yelled at me in a gruff, masculine voice to shut up. There was a man there in place of la Gorda! My fright was instantaneous and uncontrollable. I jumped out of bed and ran for the front door. But my sense of orientation was off and I ended up out in the kitchen. I grabbed a lantern and lit it as fast as I could. La Gorda came out of the outhouse in the back at that moment and asked me if there was something wrong. I nervously told her what had happened. She seemed a bit disoriented herself. Her mouth was open and her eyes had lost their usual sheen. She shook her head vigorously and that seemed to restore her alertness. She took the lantern and we walked into the front room.
There was no one in the bed. La Gorda lit three more lanterns. She appeared to be worried. She told me to stay where I was, then she opened the door to their room. I noticed that there was light coming from inside. She closed the door again and said in a matter-of-fact tone not to worry, that it was nothing, and that she was going to make us something to eat. With the speed and efficiency of a short-order cook she made some food. She also made a hot chocolate drink with cornmeal. We sat across from each other and ate in complete silence.