le  boy  is something else. Do  you  think that your
useless affection  for that  child is so worthy as to keep you from entering
into that realm?"
     I  had no answer. It was  not that  I wanted to  think it over. It  was
rather that I had become utterly confused.
     "Soledad has to take her edge out of Pablito if she wants to enter into
the nagual," she went on. "How in the hell is she going to do that? Pablito,
no  matter how weak he  is, is  a  sorcerer. But the  Nagual gave  Soledad a
unique  chance. He  said  to  her that her only moment would  come when  you
walked into the house, and for that moment he not only made us move out into
the other house, but he made us help her widen the path to the house, so you
could drive  your car to the  very door.  He  told  her that if she lived an
impeccable life she would bag you, and suck away  all your luminosity, which
is  all the  power  the  Nagual  left inside your  body. That would  not  be
difficult for  her to do. Since  she's going in the opposite direction,  she
could  drain you to nothing.  Her great feat was to lead you to a moment  of
helplessness.
     "Once  she had  killed you, your luminosity  would  have  increased her
power and she  would then have  come after  us.  I was the only one who knew
that. Lidia,  Josefina and Rosa love  her. I don't. I knew  what her designs
were.  She  would have taken us one  by one, in her own time, since  she had
nothing to lose and everything to gain. The Nagual said to me that there was
no other way for her. He entrusted me with the  girls and told me what to do
in case Soledad killed you and came after our  luminosity. He figured that I
had a chance to save myself  and to  save perhaps one of the three. You see,
Soledad is not  a bad  woman at all; she's simply doing what  an  impeccable
warrior would do. The little sisters like her more than  they like their own
mothers. She's a real mother to them. That  was, the Nagual  said, the point
of  her advantage. I haven't been able to pull  the little sisters away from
her, no matter what I do. So if she  had  killed  you,  she would  then have
taken at least two of those three  trusting  souls. Then  without you in the
picture Pablito is nothing. Soledad would have squashed him like  a bug. And
then  with all her  completeness and power she would  have entered into that
world out  there. If I had been in her place I would've  tried to do exactly
as she did.
     "So  you see,  it was all or  nothing for her. When you  first  arrived
everyone  was gone.  It looked  as if it was the end for you and for some of
us. But then at the end it was nothing for her and a chance for the sisters.
The moment I  knew that you had succeeded I told the three girls that now it
was their  turn. The Nagual had said that they should wait until the morning
to catch you unawares. He said that the morning was not a good time for you.
He commanded me to stay away and not interfere with the  sisters and to come
in only if you would try to injure their luminosity."
     "Were they supposed to kill me too?"
     "Well,  yes.  You  are  the  male  side   of  their  luminosity.  Their
completeness is at times their  disadvantage. The Nagual ruled them with  an
iron  hand  and  balanced them, but now that he's gone they  have no  way of
leveling off. Your luminosity could do that for them."
     "How about you, Gorda? Are you supposed to finish me off too?"
     "I've told you already that I'm different. I am balanced. My emptiness,
which was my disadvantage, is  now my advantage. Once a sorcerer regains his
completeness he's  balanced, while a  sorcerer who was always  complete is a
bit off. Like Genaro was a  bit off. But  the Nagual was balanced because he
had been incomplete, like you and me, even more  so than you and  me. He had
three sons and one daughter.
     "The  little  sisters are like Genaro, a bit off. And most of the times
so taut that they have no measure."
     "How about me, Gorda? Do I also have to go after them?"
     "No. Only they could have profited by sucking away your luminosity. You
can't profit at all by  anyone's death. The Nagual left a special power with
you, a balance of some kind, which none of us has."
     "Can't they learn to have that balance?"
     "Sure they can.  But  that has nothing to  do with the  task the little
sisters had  to perform. Their task was to steal your power. For  that, they
became so united that they are now one single being. They trained themselves
to  sip you up like  a glass of soda. The Nagual set them up to be deceivers
of  the highest  order,  especially  Josefina.  She put  on a show that  was
peerless. Compared to their art, Soledad's attempt was child's play. She's a
crude woman.  The  little sisters  are true sorceresses. Two  of them gained
your confidence, while the third shocked you and rendered you helpless. They
played their cards to perfection. You fell for it  all and nearly succumbed.
The only flaw was  that  you injured and  cured Rosa's  luminosity the night
before and that made her jumpy. Had it not been  for her nervousness and her
biting your side  so  hard, chances  are you wouldn't  be  here  now.  I saw
everything from  the door. I came in at the precise moment you were about to
annihilate them."
     "But what could I do to annihilate them?"
     "How could I know that? I'm not you."
     "I mean what did you see me doing?"
     "I saw your double coming out of you." "What did it look like?"
     "It looked like you, what else? But it  was very big and menacing. Your
double would have killed them. So I came in and interfered  with it. It took
the best of my power to calm you down. The sisters  were no help. They  were
lost. And you were furious and violent. You changed colors right in front of
us twice. One color was so violent that I feared you would kill me too."
     "What color was it, Gorda?"
     "White, what else? The double is white, yellowish white, like the sun."
     I stared at her. The smile was very new to me.
     "Yes," she continued, "we  are  pieces of the sun. That  is why  we are
luminous beings. But our eyes can't see  that luminosity  because it is very
faint.  Only the eyes of a sorcerer can see it, and  that  happens  after  a
lifetime struggle."
     Her revelation had taken me by total surprise. I tried to reorganize my
thoughts in order to ask the most appropriate question.
     "Did the Nagual ever tell you anything about the sun?" I asked.
     "Yes. We are all like the sun  but very,  very faint.  Our light is too
weak, but it is light anyway."
     "But, did  he say  that the  sun  was perhaps the nagual?"  I  insisted
desperately.
     La Gorda did not  answer. She  made a series of involuntary noises with
her  lips.  She was  apparently thinking how to answer  my probe. I  waited,
ready to write it down. After a long pause she crawled out of the cave.
     "I'll show you my faint light," she said matter-of-factly.
     She  walked to the center of the narrow gully in front  of the cave and
squatted. From where I  was  I could not see what she was doing so I  had to
get out  of  the cave myself. I stood ten or twelve  feet away from her. She
put her hands under her skirt, while  she was still squatting. Suddenly, she
stood up. Her hands  were loosely clasped  into fists; she raised  them over
her head and snapped her fingers open. I heard a quick, bursting sound and I
saw sparks flying from  her  fingers. She again clasped her  hands  and then
snapped them open and another volley of much larger sparks flew out of them.
She squatted once more and reached under her skirt. She seemed to be pulling
something from  her pubis. She repeated the snapping movement of her fingers
as she  threw her hands over  her  head, and I saw a spray of long, luminous
fibers flying away from her fingers. I had to  tilt my head  up to  see them
against the already dark sky. They appeared to be long, fine  filaments of a
reddish light. After a while they faded and disappeared.
     She squatted  once  again, and when she  let  her  fingers open a  most
astonishing display of  lights emanated from them.  The sky was filled  with
thick rays of light. It was a spellbinding sight. I became  engrossed in it;
my eyes were fixed. I was not paying attention to la Gorda. I was looking at
the lights. I  heard a sudden outcry that forced me to look  at her, just in
time to see her grab one of the lines she was creating and spin  to the very
top of the canyon. She hovered there for an instant like a dark, huge shadow
against  the sky, and then descended to the bottom of the gully in spurts or
small leaps or as if she were coming down a stairway on her belly.
     I  suddenly saw her standing over  me.  I had  not realized that  I had
fallen  on my  seat. I  stood  up. She was soaked  in  perspiration and  was
panting,  trying to catch her breath. She could not speak for  a long  time.
She began to jog in place. I did  not dare  to touch her. Finally she seemed
to have calmed down enough to crawl back into the cave. She rested for a few
minutes.
     Her actions had been so fast that I had hardly had any time to evaluate
what had happened.  At the moment of her display  I  had felt an unbearable,
ticklish pain in the area just below my navel.  I had not physically exerted
myself and yet I was also panting.
     "I think it's time to go  to our appointment," she said, out of breath.
"My flying opened us both. You felt my flying in  your belly; that means you
are open and ready to meet the four forces."
     "What four forces are you talking about?"
     "The  Nagual's  and  Genaro's  allies.  You've  seen  them.   They  are
horrendous. Now  they  are  free from  the Nagual's and Genaro's gourds. You
heard one of them around  Soledad's house the other night.  They are waiting
for  you.  The  moment  the  darkness  of  the  day   sets  in,  they'll  be
uncontainable. One  of them even came after you in the daytime at  Soledad's
place. Those allies now belong to you and me. We will take two each. I don't
know  which ones. And  I don't know how, either. All the  Nagual told me was
that you and I would have to tackle them by ourselves."
     "Wait, wait! " I shouted.
     She did not let me speak. She gently put her hand over my mouth. I felt
a pang of terror in the pit of my stomach. I had been confronted in the past
with some inexplicable phenomena  which don  Juan and  don Genaro had called
their  allies.  There were four of them and they  were entities, as real  as
anything in the world. Their presence was so outlandish that it would create
an unparalleled state of fear in  me every  time I perceived them. The first
one I had encountered was don Juan's; it was a dark, rectangular mass, eight
or  nine feet high and four or five feet across. It moved with  the crushing
weight of a giant boulder and breathed so heavily that it reminded me of the
sound  of bellows. I  had always encountered it at night, in the darkness. I
had fancied it to be  like a door that walked by pivoting on one  corner and
then on the other.
     The  second  ally I  came across was don Genaro's. It was a long-faced,
bald-headed,  extraordinarily  tall,   glowing  man,  with  thick  lips  and
enormous,  droopy eyes. He always wore pants that  were  too  short for  his
long, skinny legs.
     I had seen those two allies a great many times while in  the company of
don  Juan and don  Genaro.  The sight  of  them  would  invariably  cause an
irreconcilable separation  between my  reason  and my perception. On the one
hand, I had no rational ground whatsoever to believe that what was happening
to  me  was  actually taking place,  and  on the other  hand,  there  was no
possible way of discarding the truthfulness of my perception.
     Since  they had  always  appeared  while don Juan and  don Genaro  were
around,  I  had filed them away as products of  the powerful  influence that
those two men had had on my suggestible personality.  In my understanding it
was either  that, or  that don Juan  and  don Genaro had in their possession
forces they called  their  allies, forces which were  capable of manifesting
themselves to me as those horrendous entities.
     A  feature of the  allies was that they never  allowed me to scrutinize
them thoroughly. I had tried various times to  focus my  undivided attention
on them, but every time I would get dizzy and disassociated.
     The other two  allies were more  elusive. I had seen them  only once, a
gigantic black  jaguar with yellow glowing  eyes, and a  ravenous,  enormous
coyote.  The  two  beasts were  ultimately aggressive  and overpowering. The
jaguar was don Genaro's and the coyote was don Juan's.
     La  Gorda crawled out of the cave. I followed  her. She led the way. We
walked out of the gully and reached a long, rocky plain. She stopped and let
me  step ahead. I told her  that if she was going  to let  me lead us I  was
going to  try to get to the car. She shook her head  affirmatively and clung
to  me. I could feel her clammy  skin. She seemed to be in  a state of great
agitation. It was perhaps a mile to where we had left the car, and to  reach
it we had to cross the deserted, rocky plain. Don Juan had shown me a hidden
trail  among some  big  boulders, almost on the  side of  the  mountain that
flanked the plain toward the  east. I  headed for  that  trail. Some unknown
urge was guiding  me;  otherwise I would have  taken the  same trail we  had
taken before when we had crossed the plain on the level ground.
     La Gorda seemed to  be anticipating something awesome. She grabbed onto
me. Her eyes were wild.
     "Are we going the right way?" I asked.
     She did not answer. She pulled her shawl and twisted it until it looked
like a long,  thick rope. She  encircled my waist  with it, crossed over the
ends and encircled herself. She tied a knot and  thus had  us bound together
in a band that looked like a figure eight.
     "What did you do this for?" I asked.
     She shook her head. Her teeth chattered but she could not  say a  word.
Her fright seemed to be extreme. She  pushed me to keep on  walking. I could
not help wondering why I was not scared out of my wits myself.
     As we reached the high trail  the  physical exertion began to take  its
toll on me. I was wheezing and had to breathe through my mouth.  I could see
the  shape of the  big boulders. There was no  moon but the sky was so clear
that there was  enough light to distinguish shapes.  I  could hear  la Gorda
also wheezing.
     I  tried  to  stop  to catch my breath but she pushed  me gently as she
shook her head negatively. I wanted to make a joke to break the tension when
I heard a strange thumping noise. My head moved involuntarily to my right to
allow my left ear  to scan the  area. I stopped breathing for an instant and
then  I clearly  heard that  someone  else besides la  Gorda and myself  was
breathing heavily. I checked again to make sure before I told her. There was
no doubt that that massive shape was there among the boulders. I put my hand
on la Gorda's  mouth  as we kept  on moving  and  signaled her  to  hold her
breath. I could tell that the massive  shape was very close. It seemed to be
sliding as quietly as it could. It was wheezing softly.
     La Gorda was startled. She squatted  and pulled me down with her by the
shawl tied around my waist. She put her hands  under her  skirt for a moment
and then stood up;  her hands were clasped and  when she snapped her fingers
open a volley of sparks flew from them.
     "Piss in your hands," la Gorda whispered through clenched teeth.
     "Hub?" I said, unable to comprehend what she wanted me to do.
     She  whispered her order  three  or four times with increasing urgency.
She  must have  realized I  did  not know what she wanted, for  she squatted
again and  showed  that she was urinating  in  her hands.  I  stared  at her
dumbfounded as she made her urine fly like reddish sparks.
     My mind  went blank. I did not know which was more absorbing, the sight
la  Gorda  was creating with her urine, or the  wheezing of  the approaching
entity.  I  could not decide  on  which  of  the  two  stimuli  to  focus my
attention; both were enthralling.
     "Quickly! Do it in your hands!" la Gorda grumbled between her teeth.
     I heard her, but my attention was dislocated.  With an  imploring voice
la  Gorda added that my sparks would make the approaching creature, whatever
it was,  retreat. She began  to whine and I began to feel desperate. I could
not only hear but I could sense with my whole body the approaching entity. I
tried  to  urinate  in  my  hands;   my  effort  was   useless.  I  was  too
self-conscious and nervous.  I became possessed by la  Gorda's agitation and
struggled desperately to urinate.  I  finally did  it.  I snapped my fingers
three or four times, but nothing flew out of them.
     "Do it again," la Gorda said. "It takes a while to make sparks."
     I told her that I had used up all the urine  I had. There was  the most
intense look of despair in her eyes.
     At that instant I saw  the massive, rectangular shape moving toward us.
Somehow it did not seem menacing to me, although la Gorda was about to faint
out of fear.
     Suddenly she untied her  shawl  and leaped onto a  small  rock that was
behind me and hugged me  from behind,  putting her chin on my head. She  had
practically  climbed on  my  shoulders.  The  instant that we  adopted  that
position the shape ceased moving. It kept  on wheezing,  perhaps twenty feet
away from us.
     I  felt a  giant tension that seemed  to  be focused in  my midsection.
After a while I knew  without the shadow of  a doubt that if we remained  in
that position we would have drained our energy and  fallen prey  to whatever
was stalking us.
     I told her that we were going to run for our lives. She shook her  head
negatively. She seemed to have regained  her  strength  and confidence.  She
said then that we  had to bury our heads in our arms and lie  down with  our
thighs against our stomachs. I  remembered  then that years  before don Juan
had  made  me do the same thing one night when  I  was caught in a  deserted
field in northern Mexico by something  equally unknown and yet  equally real
to my senses. At that  time don Juan  had said  that fleeing was useless and
the only thing one could do  was  to  remain on the  spot in the position la
Gorda had just prescribed.
     I was about to kneel down when I had the unexpected feeling that we had
made a terrible mistake in leaving the cave. We had to  go back to it at any
cost.
     I looped la Gorda's shawl over my shoulders and under my  arms. I asked
her to hold the tips above my head, climb to my shoulders and stand on them,
bracing herself by pulling up the ends of the  shawl and fastening it like a
harness. Years  before don  Juan  had told  me  that one should meet strange
events, such as  the  rectangular  shape in  front  of  us, with  unexpected
actions. He said that once he himself stumbled upon  a deer that "talked" to
him, and he stood on  his head for the duration of that event, as a means of
assuring his survival and to ease the strain of such an encounter.
     My idea  was to try  to walk around  the rectangular shape, back to the
cave, with la Gorda standing on my shoulders.
     She whispered that the cave  was out  of the question.  The Nagual  had
told her not to remain there at all. I argued, as I fixed the shawl for her,
that my body had  the certainty that in the cave we would be all  right. She
replied that that was true, and it would  work except  that  we had no means
whatever  to control those forces. We needed a special container, a gourd of
some sort, like those I had seen dangling from  don Juan's  and don Genaro's
belts.
     She took off her shoes and climbed on my shoulders  and stood there.  I
held  her by her calves. As she pulled on  the ends of the shawl I  felt the
tension of the band under  my armpits. I  waited until  she  had  gained her
balance. To walk in the darkness  carrying one hundred and fifteen pounds on
my shoulders was no  mean feat. I went very  slowly.  I counted twenty-three
paces  and I had  to  put  her  down. The  pain  on my shoulder  blades  was
unbearable. I  told her that  although she was  very slender, her weight was
crushing my collarbone.
     The interesting part, however,  was that  the rectangular  shape was no
longer in sight. Our strategy  had worked. La Gorda suggested that she carry
me on her shoulders for a stretch. I found the idea ludicrous; my weight was
more than what her small frame could stand.  We decided to walk  for a while
and see what happened.
     There was a  dead  silence around us. We walked  slowly,  bracing  each
other. We  had moved  no  more than  a few yards when I again began  to hear
strange breathing noises, a soft,  prolonged  hissing like the  hissing of a
feline.  I  hurriedly  helped her to get back  on  my shoulders  and  walked
another ten paces.
     I knew we  had to maintain the  unexpected as a  tactic if we wanted to
get out of that place. I was trying to  figure out another set of unexpected
actions we could use instead  of la Gorda standing on my shoulders, when she
took off her long dress. In one single movement she was naked. She scrambled
on the ground looking for  something. I heard a cracking sound and she stood
up holding  a  branch from a low bush. She manoeuvred  her  shawl around  my
shoulders and  neck and made a sort  of  riding  support where she could sit
with  her legs wrapped  around  my waist, like a child riding piggyback. She
then put the branch inside her dress and held it above  her  head. She began
to twirl the branch, giving the dress a strange bounce. To  that effect  she
added a whistle, imitating the peculiar cry of a night owl.
     After a hundred yards or so  I heard the same sounds coming from behind
us and  from  the sides. She changed to another birdcall,  a piercing  sound
similar to that  made by  a peacock. A few minutes later the  same birdcalls
were echoing all around us.
     I had witnessed a similar phenomenon of birdcalls being answered, years
before with don Juan. I had thought at the time that perhaps the sounds were
being produced by don Juan who was hiding nearby in the darkness, or even by
someone closely associated with him, such as don Genaro, who was aiding  him
in  creating an insurmountable fear in me, a  fear that made me run in total
darkness without even  stumbling. Don Juan had called that particular action
of running in darkness the gait of power.
     I asked la Gorda if she knew how to do the gait of power. She said yes.
I told her that we were going to try it, even though I was not at all sure I
could  do it. She said that it was  neither the time nor the  place for that
and pointed in front of us. My heart, which had been beating fast all along,
began  to pound wildly  inside my chest. Right ahead of us, perhaps ten feet
away, and smack in the middle of  the trail was one  of don Genaro's allies,
the strange glowing man, with the long  face and the  bald head. I  froze on
the spot. I heard la Gorda's shriek as though it  were coming from far away.
She frantically pounded  on my sides  with her fists.  Her  action  broke my
fixation on the man. She turned  my head to the left and then  to the right.
On my  left  side,  almost touching my leg, was the black mass  of  a  giant
feline   with  glaring   yellow  eyes.  To  my   right  I  saw  an  enormous
phosphorescent coyote. Behind us, almost touching la Gorda's  back,  was the
dark rectangular shape.
     The man turned his  back to us and began to  move  on the trail. I also
began to walk. La Gorda kept on shrieking and whining. The rectangular shape
was almost grabbing  her  back. I heard it  moving with crushing thumps. The
sound of  its  steps  reverberated on the hills around us. I could  feel its
cold breath on my neck. I knew that la Gorda was about to go mad. And so was
1. The feline and the coyote were almost rubbing my legs. I could hear their
hissing  and  growling increasing in volume.  I had,  at  that  moment,  the
irrational  urge to  make a certain sound don Juan had taught me. The allies
answered me. I kept  on frantically making  the sound and they  answered  me
back. The tension diminished by degrees,  and  before we  reached the road I
was part of a most extravagant scene. La Gorda was riding piggyback, happily
bouncing her dress over  her head  as if  nothing had ever happened, keeping
the  bounces in rhythm with the sound I was making, while four  creatures of
another world answered me back as  they moved at my pace, flanking us on all
four sides.
     We got to the road in  that fashion. But I did not want to leave. There
seemed to be something missing. I stayed motionless with la Gorda on my back
and  made  a very special tapping sound  don Juan had taught me. He had said
that it was the call of moths. In  order to produce it  one had  to use  the
inside edge of the left hand and the lips.
     As soon as I made  it everything seemed to come to rest peacefully. The
four entities answered  me, and as they  did I knew which were the ones that
would go with me.
     I  then  walked to the  car and  eased  la  Gorda off  my back onto the
driver's  seat and pushed her over  to her  side.  We drove away in absolute
silence. Something  had touched me somewhere and my thoughts had been turned
off.
     La Gorda suggested that we go to don Genaro's place instead of  driving
to her house. She said that Benigno, Nestor ami Pablito lived there but they
were out of town. Her suggestion appealed to me.
     Once we were in the house la Gorda lit a lantern. The place looked just
as it  had the last time I had visited don  Genaro. We sat on  the  floor. I
pulled up a bench and put my writing pad on it. I was not tired and I wanted
to write but I could not do it. I could not write at all.
     "What did the Nagual tell you about the allies?" I asked.
     My  question  seemed to catch her off  guard. She  did  not know how to
answer.
     "I can't think," she finally said.
     It was as though she had never experienced that state before. She paced
back and forth in front of me. Tiny beads of perspiration had formed  on the
tip of her nose and on her upper lip.
     She  suddenly grabbed me by the hand and  practically pulled  me out of
the house. She led me to a nearby ravine and there she got sick.
     My stomach felt queasy.  She said that  the pull of the allies had been
too great and  that  I  should  force myself to throw  up. I stared at  her,
waiting  for a further explanation.  She took my head in her hands and stuck
her finger  down my throat, with the certainty  of  a  nurse dealing  with a
child,  and actually made me vomit. She explained  that human  beings  had a
very delicate glow around the stomach  and that  that glow  was always being
pulled by everything around. At times when the pull was too great, as in the
case of contact with the allies, or even in the case of contact  with strong
people,  the  glow  would  become  agitated,  change  color  or   even  fade
altogether.  In such  instances the  only thing one could  do was  simply to
throw up.
     I felt better but not quite myself yet. I had a  sense of tiredness, of
heaviness  around my eyes. We walked back to  the  house. As we reached  the
door la Gorda sniffed the air like a dog and said that she knew which allies
were  mine.  Her  statement,  which  ordinarily  would  have  had  no  other
significance than the one she alluded  to, or the one I myself read into it,
had the  special  quality of a cathartic device.  It  made  me  explode into
thoughts. All at once, my usual intellectual deliberations  came into being.
I felt myself leaping in the air, as if thoughts had an energy of their own.
     The first thought that came  to my mind was that the allies were actual
entities, as  I had  suspected without ever  daring  to  admit it,  even  to
myself.  I had seen  them and  felt them and communicated  with them. I  was
euphoric. I embraced la Gorda and began  to explain  to her the  crux  of my
intellectual  dilemma. I had seen  the allies without the aid of don Juan or
don Genaro and that act  made all the difference in the world  to me. I told
la Gorda that  once  when I had reported to don Juan that I had  seen one of
the allies  he had laughed and urged me not to take myself  so seriously and
to disregard what I had seen.
     I  had never wanted to  believe I was having hallucinations,  but I did
not  want  to accept that there were allies, either. My rational  background
was unbending. I  could not bridge  the gap.  This time, however, everything
was different, and the thought that there were actually beings on this earth
that were from another world without being aliens to the earth was more than
I could bear. I  said to la  Gorda, half in jest, that secretly I would have
given  anything to  be crazy. That would  have absolved some part of me from
the crushing responsibility of revamping my understanding of the world.  The
irony  of  it was  that I could not  have been  more  willing  to  revamp my
understanding of the world, on an intellectual level, that  is. But that was
not enough. That had never  been enough. And that had been my insurmountable
obstacle all  along,  my  deadly flaw. I had been  willing  to dally in  don
Juan's  world  in   a  semiconvinced  fashion;  therefore,  I  had   been  a
quasisorcerer. All my efforts had been  no  more than my inane eagerness  to
fence  with the intellect,  as if  I were in academia where one can  do that
very thing from 8: 00 a. m. to 5:  00  p. m., at which time, duly tired, one
goes home. Don Juan used to say as a joke that, after arranging the world in
a  most beautiful and enlightened  manner,  the  scholar  goes home at  five
o'clock in order to forget his beautiful arrangement.
     While la Gorda made us some food  I worked  feverishly  on my notes.  I
felt much more relaxed after eating. La  Gorda was  in  the best of spirits.
She clowned, the way don Genaro used to, imitating the gestures I made while
I wrote.
     "What do you know about the allies, Gorda?" I asked.
     "Only what  the Nagual told me," she  replied. "He said that the allies
were  forces that a sorcerer learns to  control. He had two inside his gourd
and so did Genaro."
     "How did they keep them inside their gourds?"
     "No one knows that. All the Nagual knew was  that a tiny, perfect gourd
with a neck must be found before one could harness the allies."
     "Where can one find that kind of gourd?"
     "Anywhere. The Nagual left word with me, in case we survived the attack
of  the allies,  that we should start looking  for the perfect gourd,  which
must be the size of the thumb of the  left  hand. That  was  the size of the
Nagual's gourd."
     "Have you seen his gourd?"
     "No. Never.  The Nagual said  that  a gourd of  that kind is not in the
world  of men.  It's like  a little bundle that one can distinguish  hanging
from their belts. But if you deliberately look at it you will see nothing.
     "The gourd, once it is found, must be groomed with great care.  Usually
sorcerers find  gourds like that on vines in the woods.  They  pick them and
dry them and then they hollow them out. And then they smooth them and polish
them.  Once the sorcerer has  his  gourd he  must offer it to the allies and
entice them to live there. If the allies consent,  the gourd disappears from
the  world of men and the  allies become  an aid to the sorcerer. The Nagual
and  Genaro could  make their allies do  anything that  needed  to  be done.
Things they themselves could not do. Such as, for instance, sending the wind
to chase me or sending that chicken to run inside Lidia's blouse."
     I heard  a peculiar,  prolonged hissing sound outside the  door. It was
the exact sound I  had heard in dona  Soledad's house  two days before. This
time I knew it was the jaguar. The sound did not scare  me. In fact, I would
have stepped out to see the jaguar had la Gorda not stopped me.
     "You're still incomplete," she said. "The  allies would feast on you if
you go out by yourself. Especially that daring one that's prowling out there
now."
     "My body feels very safe," I protested.
     She  patted my back and held  me down  against the bench on which I was
writing.
     "You're not a complete sorcerer  yet," she said. "You have a huge patch
in  your middle  and the force of those allies would  yank it  out of place.
They are no joke."
     "What  are  you  supposed  to  do when  an ally  comes to  you  in this
fashion?"
     "I don't  bother with them one  way or another. The Nagual taught me to
be balanced and not to seek anything eagerly. Tonight, for instance,  I knew
which allies would go  to you, if you can ever get a gourd and groom it. You
may  be eager to get them. I'm not. Chances are I'll  never get them myself.
They are a pain in the neck."
     "Why?"
     "Because they are forces and as such they can drain you to nothing. The
Nagual  said that one is better off  with  nothing except one's  purpose and
freedom. Someday when you're complete, perhaps we'll have  to choose whether
or not to keep them."
     I  told her that I personally  liked the jaguar  even though there  was
something  overbearing about  it. She  peered  at  me.  There  was a look of
surprise and bewilderment in her eyes.
     "I really like that one," I said.
     "Tell me what you saw," she said.
     I realized at that moment that I had automatically assumed that she had
seen the same things I had. I described in great detail the four allies as I
had  seen  them. She  listened more  than attentively;  she  appeared to  be
spellbound by my description.
     "The allies have no form," she said when I had finished. "They are like
a presence, like a wind, like  a glow. The first one we found  tonight was a
blackness that  wanted to get inside my body. That's why I screamed.  I felt
it reaching  up my legs.  The others  were  just colors. Their  glow  was so
strong, though, that it made the trail look as if it were daytime."
     Her statements  astounded me. I  had  finally accepted, after years  of
struggle and purely on the basis of our encounter with them that night, that
the allies  had a  consensual form, a substance  which  could  be  perceived
equally by everyone's senses.
     I  jokingly told la Gorda that  I had already  written in my notes that
they were creatures with form.
     "What am I going to do now?" I asked in a rhetorical sense.
     "It's very simple," she said. "Write that they are not."
     I thought that she was absolutely right.
     "Why do I see them as monsters?" I asked.
     "That's  no mystery," she  said. "You haven't lost your human form yet.
The same thing  happened to me. I  used to see  the allies as people; all of
them were Indian men with  horrible faces and mean looks. They  used to wait
for  me in deserted places. I thought  they were after  me  as  a woman. The
Nagual used  to  laugh his head off  at my fears. But still I was half  dead
with fright. One of them used to come and sit on my bed and shake it until I
would wake  up. The fright that that ally used to give me was something that
I don't want repeated, even now that I'm changed.  Tonight I  think I was as
afraid of the allies as I used to be."
     "You mean that you don't see them as human beings anymore?"
     "No.  Not anymore. The Nagual told you that an  ally is formless. He is
right. An ally is only a presence, a helper that is nothing and yet it is as
real as you and me."
     "Have the little sisters seen the allies?"
     "Everybody has seen them one time or another."
     "Are the allies just a force for them too?"
     "No. They are like you; they haven't lost their human form yet. None of
them has. For all of them, the little  sisters, the Genaros and Soledad, the
allies are horrendous things; with them  the allies are malevolent, dreadful
creatures of the night.  The sole  mention  of  the  allies sends Lidia  and
Josefina and Pablito into a  frenzy. Rosa and  Nestor are not that afraid of
them,  but they don't want to have anything to do with them, either. Benigno
has his own designs so he's not concerned with them.  They don't bother him,
or  me, for that matter.  But  the others  are  easy prey  for  the  allies,
especially now that the allies are out of the Nagual's and  Genaro's gourds.
They come all the time looking for you.
     "The Nagual  told me that as long as one clings to  the human form, one
can  only reflect  that form, and since the  allies  feed directly  onto our
life-force in the middle of the stomach, they usually make us sick, and then
we see them as heavy, ugly creatures."
     "Is  there something that we can do to  protect ourselves, or to change
the shape of those creatures?"
     "What all of you have to do is lose your human forms."
     "What do you mean?"
     My question did not seem to have any meaning  for her. She stared at me
blankly as if waiting for me to clarify what I had just said. She closed her
eyes for a moment.
     "You don't know about the human  mold and the human form, do  you?" she
asked.
     I stared at her.
     "I've just seen that you know nothing about them," she said and smiled.
     "You are absolutely right," I said.
     "The Nagual told me that the human form is a force," she said. "And the
human mold is.  .  . well.  . .  a  mold.  He  said that  everything  has  a
particular  mold. Plants have molds, animals  have molds, worms have  molds.
Are you sure the Nagual never showed you the human mold?"
     I told  her  that he had sketched  the  concept,  but in  a  very brief
manner, once when he had tried to explain something about a dream I had had.
In  the dream in  question I had  seen a  man who  seemed to  be  concealing
himself  in the darkness of a narrow gully. To find him there  scared  me. I
looked at him for a moment and then the man stepped forward and made himself
visible  to me. He was naked and his body glowed.  He seemed to be delicate,
almost frail. I liked his eyes.  They were friendly and  profound. I thought
that they were very kind. But then he stepped back into the  darkness of the
gully and his eyes  became like  two  mirrors,  like the eyes of a ferocious
animal.
     Don Juan said that I had encountered the  human mold  in "dreaming." He
explained that sorcerers have the avenue of their "dreaming" to lead them to
the mold, and that the mold of men was definitely an entity, an entity which
could be seen by  some of us at certain times when we are imbued with power,
and by all of us for sure at the  moment of our death. He described the mold
as  being the  source, the origin  of man, since, without the mold  to group
together the force of life, there was no  way  for  that  force to  assemble
itself into the shape of man.
     He  interpreted  my  dream as  a brief  and extraordinarily  simplistic
glance at the mold. He said that my dream had restated the fact that I was a
simpleminded and very earthy man.
     La  Gorda laughed and  said that she would  have  said  the  same thing
herself. To see the mold as  an average naked man and  then as an animal had
been indeed a very simplistic view view of the mold.
     "Perhaps  it  was  just  a stupid, ordinary  dream," I said, trying  to
defend myself.
     "No," she said with a large grin. "You see, the human mold glows and it
is always found in water holes and narrow gullies."
     "Why in gullies and water holes?" I asked.
     "It  feeds on water. Without water  there is no  mold," she replied. "I
know that  the Nagual took  you to water holes regularly in hopes of showing
yon the  mold. But your  emptiness prevented  you from  seeing anything. The
same  thing  happened to  me. He used to make me lie naked on a rock in  the
very center of a particular dried-up water hole,  but  all I did was to feel
the presence of something that scared me out of my wits."
     "Why does emptiness prevent one from seeing the mold?"
     "The Nagual said  that everything in the world is a force,  a pull or a
push. In order for us to be pushed or pulled we need to be like a sail, like
a  kite in the wind. But  if we have a hole in the middle of our luminosity,
the force goes through it and never acts upon us.
     "The Nagual told me  that  Genaro liked you very much and tried to make
you aware of the hole in your middle. He used  to fly his sombrero as a kite
to tease you; he even pulled you  from that hole until you had diarrhea, but
you never caught on to what he was doing."
     "Why didn't they tell me as plainly as you have told me?"
     "They did, but you didn't notice their words."
     I foun