I asked Lidia if they had had a worthy opponent themselves.
“We are not as dumb as you are,” she said. “We never needed anyone to spur us.”
“Pablito is that dumb,” Rosa said. “Soledad is his opponent. I don’t know how worthy she is, though. But as the saying goes, if you can’t feed on a capon, feed on an onion.”
They laughed and banged on the table.
I asked them if any of them knew the sorceress don Juan had pitted me against, la Catalina.
They shook their heads negatively.
“I know her,” la Gorda said from the stove. “She’s from the Nagual’s cycle, but she looks as if she’s thirty.”
“What is a cycle, Gorda?” I asked.
She walked over to the table and put her foot on the bench and rested her chin on her arm and knee.
“Sorcerers like the Nagual and Genaro have two cycles,” she said. “The first is when they’re human, like ourselves. We are in our first cycle. Each of us has been given a task and that task is making us leave the human form. Eligio, the five of us, and the Genaros are of the same cycle.
“The second cycle is when a sorcerer is not human anymore, like the Nagual and Genaro. They came to teach us, and after they taught us they left. We are the second cycle to them.
“The Nagual and la Catalina are like you and Lidia. They are in the same positions. She’s a scary sorceress, just like Lidia.”
La Gorda went back to the stove. The little sisters seemed nervous.
“That must be the woman who knows power plants,” Lidia said to la Gorda.
La Gorda said that she was the one. I asked them if the Nagual had ever given them power plants.
“No, not to us three,” Lidia replied. “Power plants are given only to empty people. Like yourself and la Gorda.”
“Did the Nagual give you power plants, Gorda?” I asked loudly.
La Gorda raised two fingers over her head.
“The Nagual gave her his pipe twice,” Lidia said. “And she went off her rocker both times.”
“What happened, Gorda?” I asked.
“I went off my rocker,” she said as she walked over to the table. “Power plants were given to use because the Nagual was putting a patch on our bodies. Mine hooked fast, but yours was difficult. The Nagual said that you were crazier than Josefina, and impossible like Lidia, and he had to give you a lot of them.”
La Gorda explained that power plants were used only by sorcerers who had mastered their art. Those plants were such a powerful affair that in order to be properly handled, the most impeccable attention was needed on the part of the sorcerer. It took a lifetime to train one’s attention to the degree needed. La Gorda said that complete people do not need power plants, and that neither the little sisters nor the Genaros had ever taken them, but that someday when they had perfected their art as dreamers, they would use them to get a final and total boost, a boost of such magnitude that it would be impossible for us to understand.
“Would you and I take them too?” I asked la Gorda.
“All of us,” she replied. “The Nagual said that you should understand this point better than any of us.”
I considered the issue for a moment. The effect of psychotropic plants had indeed been terrifying for me. They seemed to reach a vast reservoir in me, and extract from it a total world. The drawback in taking them had been the toll they took on my physical well-being and the impossibility of controlling their effect. The world they plunged me into was unamenable and chaotic. I lacked the control, the power, in don Juan’s terms, to make use of such a world. If I would have the control, however, the possibilities would be staggering to the mind.
“I took them, myself,” Josefina said all of a sudden. “When I was crazy the Nagual gave me his pipe, to cure me or kill me. And it cured me! “
“The Nagual really gave Josefina his smoke,” la Gorda said from the stove and then came over to the table. “He knew that she was pretending to be crazier than she was. She’s always been a bit off, and she’s very daring and indulges in herself like no one else. She always wanted to live where nobody would bother her and she could do whatever she wanted. So the Nagual gave her his smoke and took her to live in a world of her liking for fourteen days, until she was so bored with it that she got cured. She cut her indulging. That was her cure.”
La Gorda went back to the stove. The little sisters laughed and patted one another on the back.
I remembered then that at dona Soledad’s house Lidia had not only intimated that don Juan had left a package for me but she had actually shown me a bundle that had made me think of the sheath in which don Juan used to keep his pipe. I reminded Lidia that she had said that they would give me that package when la Gorda was present.
The little sisters looked at one another and then turned to la Gorda. She made a gesture with her head. Josefina stood up and went to the front room. She returned a moment later with the bundle that Lidia had shown me.
I had a pang of anticipation in the pit of my stomach. Josefina carefully placed the bundle on the table in front of me. All of them gathered around. She began to untie it as cere-moniously as Lidia had done the first time. When the package was completely unwrapped, she spilled the contents on the table. They were menstruation rags.
I got flustered for an instant. But the sound of la Gorda’s laughter, which was louder than the others’, was so pleasing that I had to laugh myself.
“That’s Josefina’s personal bundle,” la Gorda said. “It was her brilliant idea to play on your greed for a gift from the Nagual, in order to make you stay.”
“You have to admit that it was a good idea,” Lidia said to me.
She imitated the look of greed I had on my face when she was opening the package and then my look of disappointment when she did not finish.
I told Josefina that her idea had indeed been brilliant, that it had worked as she had anticipated, and that I had wanted that package more than I would care to admit.
“You can have it, if you want it,” Josefina said and made everybody laugh.
La Gorda said that the Nagual had known from the beginning that Josefina was not really ill, and that that was the rea-son it had been so difficult for him to cure her. People who are actually sick are more pliable. Josefina was too aware of everything and very unruly and he had had to smoke her a great many times.
Don Juan had once said the same thing about me, that he had smoked me. I had always believed that he was referring to having used psychotropic mushrooms to have a view of me.
“How did he smoke you?” I asked Josefina.
She shrugged her shoulders and did not answer.
“The same way he smoked you,” Lidia said. “He pulled your luminosity and dried it with the smoke from a fire that he had made.”
I was sure that don Juan had never explained such a thing to me. I asked Lidia to tell me what she knew about the subject. She turned to la Gorda.
“Smoke is very important for sorcerers,” la Gorda said. “Smoke is like fog. Fog is of course better, but it’s too hard to handle. It’s not as handy as smoke is. So if a sorcerer wants to see and know someone who is always hiding, like you and Josefina, who are capricious and difficult, the sorcerer makes a fire and lets the smoke envelop the person. Whatever they’re hiding comes out in the smoke.”
La Gorda said that the Nagual used smoke not only to “see” and know people but also to cure. He gave Josefina smoke baths; he made her stand or sit by the fire in the direction the wind was blowing. The smoke would envelop her and make her choke and cry, but her discomfort was only temporary and of no consequence; the positive effects, on the other hand, were a gradual cleansing of the luminosity.
“The Nagual gave all of us smoke baths,” la Gorda said. “He gave you even more baths than Josefina. He said that you were unbearable, and you were not even pretending, like she was.”
It all became clear to me. She was right; don Juan had made me sit in front of a fire hundreds of times. The smoke used to irritate my throat and eyes to such a degree that I dreaded to see him begin to gather dry twigs and branches. He said that I had to learn to control my breathing and feel the smoke while I kept my eyes closed; that way I could breathe without choking.