a sorcerer or for a sorcerer to kill an average man, but two
sorcerers don’t fit well at all. The Nagual told Soledad that her
best bet was to surprise you and scare you. And that’s what
she did. The Nagual set her up to be a desirable woman so she
could lure you into her room, and there her floor would have
bewitched you, because as I’ve said, no one, but no one, can
stand up to that floor. That floor was the Nagual’s masterpiece
for Soledad. But you did something to her floor and Soledad
had to change her tactics in accordance with the Nagual’s in-
structions. He told her that if her floor failed and she could
not frighten and surprise you, she had to talk to you and tell
you everything you wanted to know. The Nagual trained her
to talk very well as her last resource. But Soledad could not
overpower you even with that.
Why was it so important to overpower me?
She paused and peered at me. She cleared her throat and sat
up straight. She looked up at the low roof of the cave and ex-
haled noisily through her nose.
Soledad is a woman like myself, she said. I’ll tell you
something about my own life and maybe you’ll understand
her.
I had a man once. He got me pregnant when I was very
young and I had two daughters with him. One after the other.
My life was hell. That man was a drunkard and beat me day
and night. And I hated him and he hated me. And I got fat
like a pig. One day another man came along and told me that
he liked me and wanted me to go with him to work in the city
as a paid servant. He knew I was a hardworking woman and
only wanted to exploit me. But my life was so miserable that
I fell for it and went with him. He was worse than the first
man, mean and fearsome. He couldn’t stand me after a week
or so. And he used to give me the worst beatings you can
imagine. I thought he was going to kill me and he wasn’t even
drunk, and all because I hadn’t found work. Then he sent me
to beg on the streets with a sick baby. He would pay the
child’s mother something from the money I got. And then he
would beat me because I hadn’t made enough. The child got
sicker and sicker and I knew that if it died while I was beg-
ging, the man would kill me. So one day when I knew that he
was not there I went to the child’s mother and gave her her
baby and some of the money I had made that day. That was a
lucky day for me; a kind foreign lady had given me fifty pesos
to buy medicine for the baby.
I had been with that horrible man for three months and I
thought it had been twenty years. I used the money to go back
to my home. I was pregnant again. The man had wanted me to
have a child of my own, so that he would not have to pay for
one. When I got to my hometown I tried to go back to see my
children, but they had been taken away by their father’s
family. All the family got together under the pretense that
they wanted to talk to me, but instead they took me to a
deserted place and beat me with sticks and rocks and left me
for dead.
La Gorda showed me the many scars on her scalp.
To this day I don’t know how I made it back to town. I
even lost the child I had in my womb. I went to an aunt I still
had; my parents were dead. She gave me a place to rest and
she tended to me. She fed me, the poor soul, for two months
before I could get up.
Then one day my aunt told me that that man was in town
looking for me. He had talked to the police and had said that
he had given me money in advance to work and that I had run
away, stealing the money after I had killed a woman’s baby. I
knew that the end had come for me. But my luck turned right
again and I caught a ride in the truck of an American. I saw
the truck coming on the road and I lifted my hand in despera-
tion and the man stopped and let me get on. He drove me all
the way to this part of Mexico. He dropped me in the city. I
didn’t know a soul. I roamed all over the place for days like a
crazy dog, eating garbage from the street. That was when my
luck turned for the last time.
I met Pablito, with whom I have a debt that I can’t pay
back. Pablito took me to his carpentry shop and gave me a
corner there to put my bed. He did that because he felt sorry
for me. He found me in the market after he stumbled and fell
on top of me. I was sitting there begging. A moth or a bee, I
don’t know which, flew to him and hit him in the eye. He
turned around on his heels and stumbled and fell right on top
of me. I thought he would be so mad that he would hit me,
but he gave me some money instead. I asked him if he could
give me work. That was when he took me to his shop and set
me up with an iron and an ironing board to do laundry.
I did very well. Except that I got fatter, because most of
the people I washed for fed me with their leftovers. Sometimes
I ate sixteen times a day. I did nothing else but eat. Kids in the
street used to taunt me and sneak behind me and step on my
heels and then someone would push me and I would fall.
Those kids made me cry with their cruel jokes, especially
when they used to spoil my wash on purpose.
One day, very late in the afternoon, a weird old man came
over to see Pablito. I had never seen that man before. I had
never known that Pablito was in cahoots with such a scary,
awesome man. I turned my back to him and kept on working.
I was alone there. Suddenly I felt the hands of that man on my
neck. My heart stopped. I could not scream, I couldn’t even
breathe. I fell down and that awful man held my head, maybe
for an hour. Then he left. I was so frightened that I stayed
where I had fallen until the next morning. Pablito found me
there; he laughed and said that I should be very proud and
happy because that old man was a powerful sorcerer and was
one of his teachers. I was dumbfounded; I couldn’t believe
Pablito was a sorcerer. He said that his teacher had seen a
perfect circle of moths flying over my head. He had also seen
my death circling around me. And that was why he had acted
like lightning and had changed the direction of my eyes.
Pablito also said that the Nagual had laid his hands on me and
had reached into my body and that soon I would be different.
I had no idea what he was talking about. I had no idea what
that crazy old man had done, either. But it didn’t matter to me.
I was like a dog that everyone kicked around. Pablito had been
the only person who had been kind to me. At first I had
thought he wanted me for his woman. But I was too ugly and
fat and smelly. He just wanted to be kind to me.
The crazy old man came back another night and grabbed
me again by the neck from behind. He hurt me terribly. I
cried and screamed. I didn’t know what he was doing. He
never said a word to me. I was deathly afraid of him. Then,
later on he began to talk to me and told me what to do with
my life. I liked what he said. He took me everywhere with
him. But my emptiness was my worst enemy. I couldn’t accept
his ways, so one day he got sick and tired of pampering me
and sent the wind after me. I was in the back of Soledad’s
house by myself that day, and I felt the wind getting very
strong. It was blowing through the fence. It got into my eyes.
I wanted to get inside the house, but my body was frightened
and instead of walking through the door I walked through the