“How does dona Soledad feel about all this?”
“She doesn’t indulge in her feelings,” la Gorda replied and sat down again. “She has accepted her fate more readily than any one of us. Before the Nagual helped her she was worse off than myself. At least I was young; she was an old cow, fat and tired, begging for her death to come. Now death will have to fight to claim her.”
The time element in dona Soledad’s transformation was a detail that had puzzled me. I told la Gorda that I remembered having seen dona Soledad no more than two years before and she was the same old lady I had always known. La Gorda said that the last time I had been in Soledad’s house, under the impression that it was still Pablito’s house, the Nagual had set them up to act as if everything were the same. Dona Soledad greeted me, as she always did, from the kitchen, and I really did not face her. Lidia, Rosa, Pablito and Nestor played their roles to perfection in order to keep me from finding out about their true activities.
“Why would the Nagual go to all that trouble, Gorda?”
“He was saving you for something that’s not clear yet. He kept you away from every one of us deliberately. He and Genaro told me never to show my face when you were around.”
“Did they tell Josefina the same thing? “
“Yes. She’s crazy and can’t help herself. She wanted to play her pranks on you. She used to follow you around and you never knew it. One night when the Nagual had taken you to the mountains, she nearly pushed you down a ravine in the darkness. The Nagual found her in the nick of time. She doesn’t do those things out of meanness, but because she en-joys being that way. That’s her human form. She’ll be that way until she loses it. I’ve told you that all six of them are a bit off. You must be aware of that so as not to be caught in their webs. If you do get caught, don’t get angry. They can’t help themselves.”
She was silent for a while. I caught the almost imperceptible sign of a flutter in her body. Her eyes seemed to get out of focus and her mouth dropped as if the muscles of her jaw had given in. I became engrossed in watching her. She shook her head two or three times.
“I’ve just seen something,” she said. “You’re just like the little sisters and the Genaros.”
She began to laugh quietly. I did not say anything. I wanted her to explain herself without my meddling.
“Everybody gets angry with you because it hasn’t dawned on them yet that you’re no different than they are,” she went on. “They see you as the Nagual and they don’t understand that you indulge in your ways just like they do in theirs.”
She said that Pablito whined and complained and played at being a weakling. Benigno played the shy one, the one who could not even open his eyes. Nestor played to be the wise one, the one who knows everything. Lidia played the tough woman who could crush anyone with a look. Josefina was the crazy one who could not be trusted. Rosa was the bad-tem- pered girl who ate the mosquitoes that bit her. And I was the fool that came from Los Angeles with a pad of paper and lots of wrong questions. And all of us loved to be the way we were.
“I was once a fat, smelly woman,” she went on after a pause. “I didn’t mind being kicked around like a dog as long as I was not alone. That was my form.
“I will have to tell everybody what I have seen about you so they won’t feel offended by your acts.”
I did not know what to say. I felt that she was undeniably right. The important issue for me was not so much her accurateness but the fact that I had witnessed her arriving at her unquestionable conclusion.
“How did you see all that?” I asked.
“It just came to me,” she replied.
“How did it come to you?”
“I felt the feeling of seeing coming to the top of my head, and then I knew what I’ve just told you.”
I insisted that she describe to me every detail of the feeling of seeing that she was alluding to. She complied after a mo-ment’s vacillation and gave me an account of the same ticklish sensation I had become so aware of during my confrontations with dona Soledad and the little sisters. La Gorda said that the sensation started on the top of her head and then went down her back and around her waist to her womb. She felt it inside her body as a consuming ticklishness, which turned into the knowledge that I was clinging to my human form, like all the rest, except that my particular way was incomprehensible to them.
“Did you hear a voice telling you all that?” I asked.
“No. I just saw everything I’ve told you about yourself,” she replied.
I wanted to ask her if she had had a vision of me clinging to something, but I desisted. I did not want to indulge in my usual behavior. Besides, I knew what she meant when she said that she “saw.” The same thing had happened to me when I was with Rosa and Lidia. I suddenly “knew” where they lived; I had not had a vision of their house. I simply felt that I knew it.
I asked her if she had also felt a dry sound of a wooden pipe being broken at the base of her neck.
“The Nagual taught all of us how to get the feeling on top of the head,” she said. “But not everyone of us can do it. The sound behind the throat is even more difficult. None of us has ever felt it yet. It’s strange that you have when you’re still empty.”
“How does that sound work?” I asked. “And what is it?”
“You know that better than I do. What more can I tell you?” she replied in a harsh voice.
She seemed to catch herself being impatient. She smiled sheepishly and lowered her head.
“I feel stupid telling you what you already know,” she said. “Do you ask me questions like that to test if I have really lost my form?”
I told her that I was confused, for I had the feeling that I knew what that sound was and yet it was as if I did not know anything about it, because for me to know something I actually had to be able to verbalize my knowledge. In this case, I did not even know how to begin verbalizing it. The only thing I could do, therefore, was to ask her questions, hoping that her answers would help me.
“I can’t help you with that sound,” she said.
I experienced a sudden and tremendous discomfort. I told her that I was habituated to dealing with don Juan and that I needed him then, more than ever, to explain everything to me.
“Do you miss the Nagual?” she asked.
I said that I did, and that I had not realized how much I missed him until I was back again in his homeland.
“You miss him because you’re still clinging to your human form,” she said, and giggled as if she were delighted at my sadness.
“Don’t you miss him yourself, Gorda?”
“No. Not me. I’m him. All my luminosity has been changed; how could I miss something that is myself?”
“How is your luminosity different?”
“A human being, or any other living creature, has a pale yellow glow. Animals are more yellow, humans are more white. But a sorcerer is amber, like clear honey in the sunlight. Some women sorceresses are greenish. The Nagual said that those are the most powerful and the most difficult.”
“What color are you, Gorda?”
“Amber, just like you and all the rest of us. That’s what the Nagual and Genaro told me. I’ve never seen myself. But I’ve seen everyone else. All of us are amber. And all of us, with the exception of you, are like a tombstone. Average human be-ings are like eggs; that’s why the Nagual called them luminous eggs. Sorcerers change not only the color of their luminosity but their shape. We are like tombstones; only we are round at both ends.”
“Am I still shaped like an egg, Gorda?”
“No. You’re shaped like a tombstone, except that you have an ugly, dull patch in your middle. As long as you have that patch you won’t be able to fly, like sorcerers fly, like I flew last night for you. You won’t even be able to drop your hu-man form.”
I became entangled in a passionate argument not so much with her as with myself. I insisted that their stand on how to regain that alleged completeness was simply preposterous. I told her that she could not possibly argue successfully with me that one had to turn one’s back to one’s own children in order to pursue the vaguest of all possible goals: to enter into the world of the nagual. I was so thoroughly convinced that I was right that I got carried away and shouted angry words at her. She was not in any way flustered by my outburst.