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 sor-
cerer. 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 per-
fected 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 psycho-
tropic 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 con-
trolling 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. Jose-
fina 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 begin-
ning 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 every-
thing 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 sub-
ject. 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.
La Gorda said that smoke had helped Josefina to be ethereal
and very elusive, and that no doubt it had helped me to cure
my madness, whatever it was.
The Nagual said that smoke takes everything out of you,
la Gorda went on. It makes you clear and direct.
I asked her if she knew how to bring out with the smoke
whatever a person was hiding. She said that she could easily do
it because of having lost her form, but that the little sisters and
the Genaros, although they had seen the Nagual and Genaro
do it scores of times, could not yet do it themselves.
I was curious to know why don Juan had never mentioned
the subject to me, in spite of the fact that he had smoked me
like dry fish hundreds of times.
He did, la Gorda said with her usual conviction. The
Nagual even taught you fog gazing. He told us that once you
smoked a whole place in the mountains and saw what was
hiding behind the scenery. He said that he was spellbound
himself.
I remembered an exquisite perceptual distortion, a hallucina-
tion of sorts, which I had had and thought was the product of
a play between a most dense fog and an electrical storm that
was occurring at the same time. I narrated to them the episode
and added that don Juan had never really directly taught me
anything about the fog or the smoke. His procedure had been
to build fires or to take me into fog banks.
La Gorda did not say a word. She stood up and went back
to the stove. Lidia shook her head and clicked her tongue.
You sure are dumb, she said. The Nagual taught you