Dona Soledad was right; it was useless to try. A wave of sadness enveloped me. Somehow I knew my end was near. In a fit of sheer desperation I told dona Soledad that I was going to get a knife from the kitchen and kill the dog, or be killed by him, and I would have done that had it not been that there was not a single metal object in the entire house.
“Didn’t the Nagual teach you to accept your fate?” dona Soledad asked as she trailed behind me. “That one out there is no ordinary dog. That dog has power. He is a warrior. He will do what he has to do. Even kill you.”
I had a moment of uncontrollable frustration and grabbed her by the shoulders and growled. She did not seem surprised or affected by my sudden outburst. She turned her back to me and dropped her shawl to the floor. Her back was very strong and beautiful. I had an irrepressible urge to hit her, but I ran my hand across her shoulders instead. Her skin was soft and smooth. Her arms and shoulders were muscular without being big. She seemed to have a minimal layer of fat that rounded off her muscles and gave her upper body the appearance of smoothness, and yet when I pushed on any part of it with the tips of my fingers I could feel the hardness of unseen muscles below the smooth surface. I did not want to look at her breasts.
She walked to a roofed, open area in back of the house that served as a kitchen. I followed her. She sat down on a bench and calmly washed her feet in a pail. While she was putting on her sandals, I went with great trepidation into a new outhouse that had been built in the back. She was standing by the door when I came out.
“You like to talk,” she said casually, leading me into her room. “There is no hurry. Now we can talk forever.”
She picked up my writing pad from the top of her chest of drawers, where she must have placed it herself, and handed it to me with exaggerated care. Then she pulled up her bedspread and folded it neatly and put it on top of the same chest of drawers. I noticed then that the two chests were the color of the walls, yellowish white, and the bed without the spread was pinkish red, more or less the color of the floor. The bedspread, on the other hand, was dark brown, like the wood of the ceiling and the wood panels of the windows.
“Let’s talk,” she said, sitting comfortably on the bed after taking off her sandals.
She placed her knees against her naked breasts. She looked like a young girl. Her aggressive and commandeering manner had subdued and changed into charm. At that moment she was the antithesis of what she had been earlier. I had to laugh at the way she was urging me to write. She reminded me of don Juan.
“Now we have time,” she said. “The wind has changed. Didn’t you notice it?”
I had. She said that the new direction of the wind was her own beneficial direction and thus the wind had turned into her helper.
“What do you know about the wind, dona Soledad?” I asked as I calmly sat down on the foot of her bed.
“Only what the Nagual taught me,” she said. “Each one of us, women that is, has a peculiar direction, a particular wind. Men don’t. I am the north wind; when it blows I am different. The Nagual said that a warrior can use her particular wind for whatever she wants. I used it to trim my body and remake it. Look at me! I am the north wind. Feel me when I come through the window.”
There was a strong wind blowing through the window, which was strategically placed to face the north.
“Why do you think men don’t have a wind?” I asked.
She thought for a moment and then replied that the Nagual had never mentioned why.
“You wanted to know who made this floor,” she said, wrapping her blanket around her shoulders. “I made it myself. It took me four years to put it down. Now this floor is like myself.”
As she spoke I noticed that the converging lines in the floor were oriented to originate from the north. The room, however, was not perfectly aligned with the cardinal points; thus her bed was at odd angles with the walls and so were the lines in the clay slabs.
“Why did you make the floor red, dona Soledad?”
“That’s my color. I am red, like red dirt. I got the red clay in the mountains around here. The Nagual told me where to look and he also helped me carry it, and so did everyone else. They all helped me.”
“How did you fire the clay?”
“The Nagual made me dig a pit. We filled it with firewood and then stacked up the clay slabs with flat pieces of rock in between them. I closed the pit with a lid of dirt and wire and set the wood on fire. It burned for days.”
“How did you keep the slabs from warping?”
“I didn’t. The wind did that, the north wind that blew while the fire was on. The Nagual showed me how to dig the pit so it would face the north and the north wind. He also made me leave four holes for the north wind to blow into the pit. Then he made me leave one hole in the center of the lid to let the smoke out. The wind made the wood burn for days; after the pit was cold again I opened it and began to polish and even out the slabs. It took me over a year to make enough slabs to finish my floor.”
“How did you figure out the design?”
“The wind taught me that. When I made my floor the Nagual had already taught me not to resist the wind. He had showed me how to give in to my wind and let it guide me. It took him a long time to do that, years and years. I was a very difficult, silly old woman at first; he told me that himself and he was right. But I learned very fast. Perhaps because I’m old and no longer have anything to lose. In the beginning, what made it even more difficult for me was the fear I had. The mere presence of the Nagual made me stutter and faint. The Nagual had the same effect on everyone else. It was his fate to be so fearsome.”
She stopped talking and stared at me.
“The Nagual is not human,” she said.
“What makes you say that?”
“The Nagual is a devil from who knows what time.”
Her statements chilled me. I felt my heart pounding. She certainly could not have found a better audience. I was intrigued to no end. I begged her to explain what she meant by that.
“His touch changed people,” she said. “You know that. He changed your body. In your case, you didn’t even know that he was doing that. But he got into your old body. He put something in it. He did the same with me. He left something in me and that something took over. Only a devil can do that. Now I am the north wind and I fear nothing, and no one. But before he changed me I was a weak, ugly old woman who would faint at the mere mention of his name. Pablito, of course, was no help to me because he feared the Nagual more than death itself.
“One day the Nagual and Genaro came to the house when I was alone. I heard them by the door, like prowling jaguars. I crossed myself; to me they were two demons, but I came out to see what I could do for them. They were hungry and I gladly fixed food for them. I had some thick bowls made out of gourd and I gave each man a bowl of soup. The Nagual didn’t seem to appreciate the food; he didn’t want to eat food prepared by such a weak woman and pretended to be clumsy and knocked the bowl off the table with a sweep of his arm. But the bowl, instead of turning over and spilling all over the floor, slid with the force of the Nagual’s blow and fell on my foot, without spilling a drop. The bowl actually landed on my foot and stayed there until I bent over and picked it up. I set it up on the table in front of him and told him that even though I was a weak woman and had always feared him, my food had good feelings.