The night was cold. It looked as if it was going to rain. The three kerosene lanterns that she had brought to the dining area cast a yellowish light that was very soothing. She took some boards that were stacked up on the floor, against the wall, and placed them vertically in a deep groove on the transverse supporting beam of the roof. There was a long slit in the floor parallel to the beam that served to hold the boards in place. The result was a portable wall that enclosed the dining area.
“Who was in the bed?” I asked.
“In bed, next to you, was Josefina, who else?” she replied as if savoring her words, and then laughed. “She’s a master at jokes like that. For a moment I thought it was something else, but then I caught the scent that Josefina’s body has when she’s carrying out one of her pranks.”
“What was she trying to do? Scare me to death?” I asked.
“You’re not their favorite, you know,” she replied. “They don’t like to be taken out of the path they’re familiar with. They hate the fact that Soledad is leaving. They don’t want to understand that we are all leaving this area. It looks like our time is up. I knew that today. As I left the house I felt that those barren hills out there were making me tired. I had never felt that way until today.”
“Where are you going to go?”
“I don’t know yet. It looks as if that depends on you. On your power.”
“On me? In what way, Gorda?”
“Let me explain. The day before you arrived the little sisters and I went to the city. I wanted to find you in the city because I had a very strange vision in my dreaming. In that vision I was in the city with you. I saw you in my vision as plainly as I see you now. You didn’t know who I was but you talked to me. I couldn’t make out what you said. I went back to the same vision three times but I was not strong enough in my dreaming to find out what you were saying to me. I figured that my vision was telling me that I had to go to the city and trust my power to find you there. I was sure that you were on your way.”
“Did the little sisters know why you took them to the city?” I asked.
“I didn’t tell them anything,” she replied. “I just took them there. We wandered around the streets all morning.”
Her statements put me in a very strange frame of mind. Spasms of nervous excitation ran through my entire body. I had to stand up and walk around for a moment. I sat down again and told her that I had been in the city the same day, and that I had wandered around the marketplace all afternoon looking for don Juan. She stared at me with her mouth open.
“We must have passed each other,” she said and sighed. “We were in the market and in the park. We sat on the steps of the church most of the afternoon so as not to attract attention to ourselves.”
The hotel where I had stayed was practically next door to the church. I remembered that I had stood for a long time looking at the people on the steps of the church. Something was pulling me to examine them. I had the absurd notion that both don Juan and don Genaro were going to be among those people, sitting like beggars just to surprise me.
“When did you leave the city?” I asked.
“We left around five o’clock and headed for the Nagual’s spot in the mountains,” she replied.
I had also had the certainty that don Juan had left at the end of the day. The feelings I had had during that entire episode of looking for don Juan became very clear to me. In light of what she had told me I had to revise my stand. I had conveniently explained away the certainty I had had that don Juan was there in the streets of the city as an irrational expectation, a result of my consistently finding him there in the past. But la Gorda had been in the city actually looking for me and she was the being closest to don Juan in temperament. I had felt all along that his presence was there. La Gorda’s statement had merely confirmed something that my body knew beyond the shadow of a doubt.
I noticed a flutter of nervousness in her body when I told her the details of my mood that day.
“What would’ve happened if you had found me?” I asked.
“Everything would’ve been changed,” she replied. “For me to find you would’ve meant that I had enough power to move forward. That’s why I took the little sisters with me. All of us, you, me and the little sisters, would’ve gone away together that day.”
“Where to, Gorda?”
“Who knows? If I had the power to find you I would’ve also had the power to know that. It’s your turn now. Perhaps you will have enough power now to know where we should go. Do you see what I mean?”
I had an attack of profound sadness at that point. I felt more acutely than ever the despair of my human frailty and temporariness. Don Juan had always maintained that the only de-terrent to our despair was the awareness of our death, the key to the sorcerer’s scheme of things. His idea was that the a wareness of our death was the only thing that could give us the strength to withstand the duress and pain of our lives and our fears of the unknown. But what he could never tell me was how to bring that awareness to the foreground. He had insisted, every time I had asked him, that my volition alone was the deciding factor; in other words, I had to make up my mind to bring that awareness to bear witness to my acts. I thought I had done so. But confronted with la Gorda’s determination to find me and go away with me, I realized that if she had found me in the city that day I would never have returned to my home, never again would I have seen those I held dear. I had not been prepared for that. I had braced myself for dying, but not for disappearing for the rest of my life in full awareness, without anger or disappointment, leaving behind the best of my feelings.
I was almost embarrassed to tell la Gorda that I was not a warrior worthy of having the kind of power that must be needed to perform an act of that nature: to leave for good and to know where to go and what to do.
“We are human creatures,” she said. “Who knows what’s waiting for us or what kind of power we may have?”
I told her that my sadness in leaving like that was too great. The changes that sorcerers went through were too drastic and too final. I recounted to her what Pablito had told me about his unbearable sadness at having lost his mother.
“The human form feeds itself on those feelings,” she said dryly. “I pitied myself and my little children for years. I couldn’t understand how the Nagual could be so cruel to ask me to do what I did: to leave my children, to destroy them and to forget them.”
She said that it took her years to understand that the Nagual also had had to choose to leave the human form. He was not being cruel. He simply did not have any more human feelings. To him everything was equal. He had accepted his fate. The problem with Pablito, and myself for that matter, was that neither of us had accepted our fate. La Gorda said, in a scornful way, that Pablito wept when he remembered his mother, his Manuelita, especially when he had to cook his own food. She urged me to remember Pablito’s mother as she was: an old, stupid woman who knew nothing else but to be Pablito’s servant. She said that the reason all of them thought he was a coward was because he could not be happy that his servant Manuelita had become the witch Soledad, who could kill him like she would step on a bug.
La Gorda stood up dramatically and leaned over the table until her forehead was almost touching mine.
“The Nagual said that Pablito’s good fortune was extraordinary,” she said. “Mother and son fighting for the same thing. If he weren’t the coward he is, he would accept his fate and oppose Soledad like a warrior, without fear or hatred. In the end the best would win and take all. If Soledad is the winner, Pablito should be happy with his fate and wish her well. But only a real warrior can feel that kind of happiness.”