“From that very moment the Nagual changed toward me. The fact that the bowl of soup fell on my foot and didn’t spill proved to him that power had pointed me out to him. I didn’t know that at the time and I thought that he changed toward me because he felt ashamed of having refused my food. I thought nothing of his change. I still was petrified and couldn’t even look him in the eye. But he began to take more and more notice of me. He even brought me gifts: a shawl, a dress, a comb and other things. That made me feel terrible. I was ashamed because I thought that he was a man looking for a woman. The Nagual had young girls, what would he want with an old woman like me? At first I didn’t want to wear or even consider looking at his gifts, but Pablito prevailed on me and I began to wear them. I also began to be even more afraid of him and didn’t want to be alone with him. I knew that he was a devilish man. I knew what he had done to his woman.”
I felt compelled to interrupt her. I told her that I had never known of a woman in don Juan’s life.
“You know who I mean,” she said.
“Believe me, dona Soledad, I don’t.”
“Don’t give me that. You know that I’m talking about la Gorda.”
The only “la Gorda” I knew of was Pablito’s sister, an enormously fat girl nicknamed Gorda, Fatso. I had had the feeling, although no one ever talked about it, that she was not really dona Soledad’s daughter. I did not want to press her for any more information. I suddenly remembered that the fat girl had disappeared from the house and nobody could or dared to tell me what had happened to her.
“One day I was alone in the front of the house,” dona Soledad went on. “I was combing my hair in the sun with the comb that the Nagual had given me; I didn’t realize that he had arrived and was standing behind me. All of a sudden I felt his hands grabbing me by the chin. I heard him say very softly that I shouldn’t move because my neck might break. He twisted my head to the left. Not all the way but a bit. I be-came very frightened and screamed and tried to wriggle out of his grip, but he held my head firmly for a long, long time.
“When he let go of my chin, I fainted. I don’t remember what happened then. When I woke up I was lying on the ground, right here where I’m sitting now. The Nagual was gone. I was so ashamed that I didn’t want to see anyone, especially la Gorda. For a long time I even thought that the Nagual had never twisted my neck and I had had a nightmare.”
She stopped. I waited for an explanation of what had happened. She seemed distracted, pensive perhaps.
“What exactly happened, dona Soledad?” I asked, incapable of containing myself. “Did he do something to you?”
“Yes. He twisted my neck in order to change the direction of my eyes,” she said and laughed loudly at my look of surprise.
“I mean, did he… ?”
“Yes. He changed my direction,” she went on, oblivious to my probes. “He did that to you and to all the others.”
“That’s true. He did that to me. But why do you think he did that?”
“He had to. That is the most important thing to do.”
She was referring to a peculiar act that don Juan had deemed absolutely necessary. I had never talked about it with anyone. In fact, I had almost forgotten about it. At the beginning of my apprenticeship, he once built two small fires in the mountains of northern Mexico. They were perhaps twenty feet apart. He made me stand another twenty feet away from them, holding my body, especially my head, in a most relaxed and natural position. He then made me face one fire, and coming from behind me, he twisted my neck to the left, and aligned my eyes, but not my shoulders, with the other fire. He held my head in that position for hours, until the fire was ex-tinguished. The new direction was the southeast, or rather he had aligned the second fire in a southeasterly direction. I had understood the whole affair as one of don Juan’s inscrutable peculiarities, one of his nonsensical rites.
“The Nagual said that all of us throughout our lives develop one direction to look,” she went on. “That becomes the direction of the eyes of the spirit. Through the years that direction becomes overused, and weak and unpleasant, and since we are bound to that particular direction we become weak and unpleasant ourselves. The day the Nagual twisted my neck and held it until I fainted out of fear, he gave me a new direction.”
“What direction did he give you?”
“Why do you ask that?” she said with unnecessary force. “Do you think that perhaps the Nagual gave me a different direction?”
“I can tell you the direction that he gave me,” I said.
“Never mind,” she snapped. “He told me that himself.”
She seemed agitated. She changed position and lay on her stomach. My back hurt from writing. I asked her if I could sit on her floor and use the bed as a table. She stood up and handed me the folded bedspread to use as a cushion.
“What else did the Nagual do to you?” I asked.
“After changing my direction the Nagual really began to talk to me about power,” she said, lying down again. “He mentioned things in a casual way at first, because he didn’t know exactly what to do with me. One day he took me for a short walking trip in the sierras. Then another day he took me on a bus to his homeland in the desert. Little by little I became accustomed to going away with him.”
“Did he ever give you power plants?”
“He gave me Mescalito, once when we were in the desert. But since I was an empty woman Mescalito refused me. I had a horrid encounter with him. It was then that the Nagual knew that he ought to acquaint me with the wind instead. That was, of course, after he got an omen. He had said, over and over that day, that although he was a sorcerer that had learned to see, if he didn’t get an omen he had no way of knowing which way to go. He had already waited for days for a certain indication about me. But power didn’t want to give it. In desperation, I suppose, he introduced me to his guaje, and I saw Mescalito.”
I interrupted her. Her use of the word “guaje,” gourd, was confusing to me. Examined in the context of what she was telling me, the word had no meaning. I thought that perhaps she was speaking metaphorically, or that gourd was a euphemism.
“What is a guaje, dona Soledad?”
There was a look of surprise in her eyes. She paused before answering.
“Mescalito is the Nagual’s guaje,” she finally said.
Her answer was even more confusing. I felt mortified by the fact that she really seemed concerned with making sense to me. When I asked her to explain further, she insisted that I knew everything myself. That was don Juan’s favorite strata-gem to foil my probes. I said to her that don Juan had told me that Mescalito was a deity, or force contained in the peyote buttons. To say that Mescalito was his gourd made absolutely no sense.
“The Nagual can acquaint you with anything through his gourd,” she said after a pause. “That is the key to his power. Anyone can give you peyote, but only a sorcerer, through his gourd, can acquaint you with Mescalito.”
She stopped talking and fixed her eyes on me. Her look was ferocious.
“Why do you have to make me repeat what you already know?” she asked in an angry tone.
I was completely taken aback by her sudden shift. A moment before she had been almost sweet.
“Never mind my changes of mood,” she said, smiling again. “I’m the north wind. I’m very impatient. All my life I never dared to speak my mind. Now I fear no one. I say what I feel. To meet with me you have to be strong.”
She slid closer to me on her stomach.
“Well, the Nagual acquainted me with the Mescalito that came out of his gourd,” she went on. “But he couldn’t guess what would happen to me. He expected something like your own meeting or Eligio’s meeting with Mescalito. In both cases he was at a loss and let his gourd decide what to do next. In both cases his gourd helped him. With me it was different; Mescalito told him never to bring me around. The Nagual and I left that place in a great hurry. We went north instead of coming home. We took a bus to go to Mexicali, but we got out in the middle of the desert. It was very late. The sun was setting behind the mountains. The Nagual wanted to cross the road and go south on foot. We were waiting for some speed-ing cars to go by, when suddenly he tapped my shoulder and pointed toward the road ahead of us. I saw a spiral of dust. A gust of wind was raising dust on the side of the road. We watched it move toward us. The Nagual ran across the road and the wind enveloped me. It actually made me spin very gently and then it vanished. That was the omen the Nagual was waiting for. From then on we went to the mountains or the desert for the purpose of seeking the wind. The wind didn’t like me at first, because I was my old self. So the Nagual endeavored to change me. He first made me build this room and this floor. Then he made me wear new clothes and sleep on a mattress instead of a straw mat. He made me wear shoes, and have drawers full of clothes. He forced me to walk hundreds of miles and taught me to be quiet. I learned very fast. He also made me do strange things for no reason at all.