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 in-
trigued 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.
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 Sole-
dad 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 hap-
pened. 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 begin-
ning 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 re-
laxed 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