augh.  I caught a warning from  la Gorda. She pretended to be scratching
the top of her head with the back of her left hand, which was clawed.
     I  answered  Lidia  the same way  la  Gorda had: "Good  evening to you,
Lidia."
     She sat down at the end of the table to the right of me. I did not know
whether or not to start up a conversation. I was about to say something when
la Gorda tapped my leg  with her knee,  and  with a subtle movement  of  her
eyebrows signaled  me to listen. I heard  again the muffled sound  of a long
dress  as it  touched  the floor.  Josefina  stood for a moment at  the door
before walking toward the  table. She greeted Lidia, la  Gorda and myself in
that order. I could not keep a straight face with her.  She was also wearing
a long dress, a shawl and no shoes, but  in  her case the dress was three or
four sizes larger and she had put a  thick  padding into  it. Her appearance
was thoroughly incongruous; her face was lean and young, but her body looked
grotesquely bloated.
     She  took a bench and  placed it  at the left  end of the table and sat
down. All three of  them  looked  extremely serious. They were sitting  with
their legs pressed together and their backs very straight.
     I  heard once more the  rustle  of a dress  and Rosa  come out. She was
dressed just like the others  and  was  also barefoot. Her greeting  was  as
formal  and the  order naturally included Josefina. Everyone answered her in
the same formal tone. She sat across the table facing me. All of us remained
in absolute silence for quite a while.
     La Gorda spoke suddenly, and the  sound of her voice made everyone else
jump. She said,  pointing to me, that the Nagual was going to  show them his
allies, and that he was going to use his special call to bring them into the
room.
     I  tried  to make a joke and said that the Nagual was not  there, so he
could not bring any  allies. I thought they were  going  to laugh. La  Gorda
covered her  face and the little sisters glared at me. La Gorda put her hand
on my  mouth and whispered in my ear that it was absolutely necessary that I
refrain  from saying idiotic things. She looked right into my eyes  and said
that I had to call the allies by making the moths' call.
     I reluctantly began. But no sooner had I started than the spirit of the
occasion  took over and I found that in a  matter of seconds I  had given my
maximum  concentration to producing the  sound. I modulated  its outflow and
controlled the  air being expelled from my lungs  in  order  to  produce the
longest possible tapping. It sounded very melodious.
     I  took  an  enormous gasp  of  air  to start a new  series. I  stopped
immediately. Something outside the house was answering my call.  The tapping
sounds  came  from  all  around  the house, even  from the roof.  The little
sisters stood up and  huddled like  frightened children around la  Gorda and
myself.
     "Please, Nagual, don't bring  anything  into  the house," Lidia pleaded
with me.
     Even  la Gorda seemed a  bit frightened. She gave  me a  strong command
with her hand  to  stop. I  had not  intended to keep on producing the sound
anyway. The allies,  however, either  as formless forces or as  beings  that
were prowling  outside the door,  were  not dependent on my tapping sound. I
felt  again, as  I  had  felt two  nights  before in don  Genaro's house, an
unbearable pressure, a heaviness leaning against  the  entire house. I could
sense it  in my navel as an itch, a nervousness that soon turned  into sheer
physical anguish.
     The three little  sisters were  beside themselves with fear, especially
Lidia and Josefina. Both of them were whining like wounded dogs. All of them
surrounded me and then clung  to me. Rosa crawled under the table and pushed
her head up between  my  legs.  La Gorda stood behind  me  as calmly as  she
could.  After  a  few moments  the hysteria  and fear  of  those three girls
mounted  to enormous proportions. La Gorda leaned over and whispered  that I
should make the opposite sound, the sound that  would disperse them. I had a
moment of supreme uncertainty. I really  did  not know any  other sound. But
then I had a quick sensation of ticklishness on the top of my head, a shiver
in my body,  and  I remembered out of  nowhere a peculiar whistling that don
Juan  used  to  perform at  night  and had  endeavored to  teach me. He  had
presented it to me as a means to keep one's balance while walking so  as not
to stray away from the trail in the darkness.
     I began my whistling and the pressure in my umbilical region ceased. La
Gorda smiled and sighed with relief  and the little  sisters moved away from
my  side, giggling  as  if all of it had  been  merely a joke. I  wanted  to
indulge in some soulsearching deliberations about the abrupt transition from
the  rather pleasant exchange  I was having with la Gorda to that  unearthly
situation. For an instant I pondered over whether or not the whole thing was
a ploy on their part. But I was too weak. I felt I was about to pass out. My
ears were buzzing. The  tension around  my  stomach  was so intense  that  I
believed I was going to become ill right there. I rested my head on the edge
of  the table. After a  few  minutes, however, I was again relaxed enough to
sit up straight.
     The three girls seemed to have forgotten  how frightened they had been.
In fact, they were laughing and pushing  each other as they  each tied their
shawls around their hips.  La Gorda did  not seem  nervous nor  did she seem
relaxed. Rosa  was pushed at one moment by the other two  girls and fell off
the  bench where all three of  them were sitting. She landed on her  seat. I
thought that she was going  to get furious but she giggled. I  looked  at la
Gorda  for directions. She Was sitting with a very  straight back.  Her eyes
were  half-closed, fixed on Rosa.  The  little  sisters were  laughing  very
loudly,  like  nervous  schoolgirls.  Lidia  pushed  Josefina  and sent  her
tumbling over  the  bench to fall next  to  Rosa on  the floor. The  instant
Josefina was on the floor  their laughter  stopped. Rosa  and Josefina shook
their bodies, making an incomprehensible movement with  their buttocks; they
moved them  from side to side as if they were grinding something against the
floor.  Then they sprang up like  two  silent jaguars  and took Lidia by the
arms. All three of them, without  making the  slightest noise, spun around a
couple of times. Rosa and Josefina lifted Lidia  by the armpits and  carried
her as they tiptoed two  or three times around the  table. Then all three of
them  collapsed as if they had springs on their knees that had contracted at
the  same time. Their long dresses puffed up, giving them the appearance  of
huge balls.
     As soon  as  they were on the floor they became even more quiet.  There
was no other sound except the soft swishing of their dresses as  they rolled
and crawled. It was as if I were watching a three-dimensional movie with the
sound turned off.
     La  Gorda, who had  been quietly  sitting  next  to me  watching  them,
suddenly stood up and with the agility of an  acrobat ran toward the door of
their room at the corner of the dining area. Before she reached the door she
tumbled on her right side and shoulder just enough to  turn over  once, then
stood  up, pulled by the momentum of her rolling,  and flung  open the door.
She performed all her movements with absolute quietness.
     The  three girls rolled and crawled into the room like giant pill bugs.
La Gorda signaled me to come over to where she was;  we entered the room and
she had me sit on the floor with my back against the  frame of the door. She
sat to my right with her back also  against the frame. She made me interlock
my fingers and then placed my hands over my belly button.
     I was  at first  forced to divide my  attention between la  Gorda,  the
little sisters  and  the room.  But  once la Gorda had  arranged  my sitting
position, my attention was taken up by  the room. The three girls were lying
in the middle of a large, white, square  room with a brick floor. There were
four gasoline  lanterns,  one  on each  wall, placed on built-in  supporting
ledges approximately six feet above the ground. The room had no ceiling. The
supporting beams of the  roof had been darkened and that gave  the effect of
an enormous room with no top. The  two doors were placed on the very corners
opposite each other. As I looked at the closed door across from where I was,
I  noticed  that the walls  of the room were oriented to follow the cardinal
points. The door where we were was at the northwest corner.
     Rosa,  Lidia  and  Josefina  rolled counterclockwise  around  the  room
several times. I strained to hear the swish of their dresses but the silence
was  absolute.  I  could  only hear la Gorda breathing.  The little  sisters
finally stopped and sat down with their backs against the wall, each under a
lantern. Lidia sat at the east wall, Rosa, at the north and Josefina, at the
west.
     La Gorda  stood up, closed the  door behind  us and  secured it with an
iron bar. She made me slide over a few inches, without changing my position,
until I was sitting with my  back against the door. Then she silently rolled
the length of  the  room and sat down  underneath  the lantern on the  south
wall; her getting into that sitting position seemed to be the cue.
     Lidia stood up and began to walk  on  the  tips of  her  toes along the
edges of the room, close to the walls. It was not a walk proper but rather a
soundless sliding. As she increased  her speed she began to move  as if  she
were  gliding,  stepping on  the angle between the floor and the  walls. She
would jump over  Rosa, Josefina, la Gorda  and  myself every time she got to
where we were sitting. I felt her long dress brushing me every time she went
by. The  faster she ran, the higher  she got on the wall. A moment came when
Lidia was actually running silently around the four  walls of the room seven
or  eight feet above the floor. The sight  of  her, running perpendicular to
the walls, was so unearthly that it bordered on the grotesque. Her long gown
made the  sight even more  eerie. Gravity did not seem to have any effect on
Lidia, but  it did  on her long skirt; it dragged downward.  I felt it every
time she passed over my head, sweeping my face like a hanging drape.
     She had captured  my attentiveness at  a level I could not imagine. The
strain of giving her my undivided attention was so great that I began to get
stomach  convulsions; I  felt her  running  with  my  stomach. My eyes  were
getting out of focus. With the last bit of my remaining concentration, I saw
Lidia walk down on the east wall diagonally and come to a halt in the middle
of the room.
     She was panting, out  of  breath, and drenched in perspiration  like la
Gorda had been  after her flying display. She could hardly keep her balance.
After a moment she walked to her place at the east wall and collapsed on the
floor like a wet rag. I thought she had fainted, but then I noticed that she
was deliberately breathing through her mouth.
     After some minutes of  stillness, long enough  for Lidia to recover her
strength and sit up  straight, Rosa stood up and  ran without making a sound
to the center of the room, turned on her heels and ran back to where she had
been sitting. Her running allowed her to gain the necessary momentum to make
an  outlandish jump. She  leaped  up in the air, like a  basketball  player,
along the vertical span of the wall, and her hands went beyond the height of
the wall, which was perhaps ten feet. I saw her  body  actually hitting  the
wall, although there was  no corresponding crashing sound. I expected her to
rebound to the floor with the force of the impact, but  she remained hanging
there, attached to the wall like a pendulum.  From where I sat it looked  as
if she  were  holding a  hook  of  some  sort in her  left  hand. She swayed
silently in a pendulum-like motion for a moment and then catapulted  herself
three or four feet over  to her left by pushing her body  away from the wall
with  her right arm, at the  moment in which  her  swing was the widest. She
repeated the swaying and catapulting  thirty or forty times. She went around
the  whole room  and then she went  up  to the beams of the  roof where  she
dangled precariously, hanging from an invisible hook.
     While she was on the beams I became aware that what I had thought was a
hook in  her left hand was actually some quality of  that hand that made  it
possible for her to suspend her weight from it. It was the same hand she had
attacked me with two nights before.
     Her display ended with her dangling from the beams over the very center
of the room. Suddenly she let go. She fell down from  a height of fifteen or
sixteen feet. Her long dress flowed upward and gathered around her head. For
an instant, before she landed without a  sound, she looked  like an umbrella
turned inside out by the force of the wind; her thin, naked body looked like
a stick attached to the dark mass of her dress.
     My  body felt the impact of her plummeting down, perhaps more than  she
did herself.  She landed in a squat position and remained motionless, trying
to catch her breath. I was sprawled out on  the floor with painful cramps in
my stomach.
     La Gorda rolled across  the  room, took her shawl and tied it around my
umbilical region, like a band, looping it around my body two or three times.
She rolled back to the south wall like a shadow.
     While she had been  arranging the  shawl  around  my waist, I  had lost
sight of Rosa. When I looked up she was again  sitting by  the north wall. A
moment  later, Josefina  quietly  moved to the center of the room. She paced
back and forth with noiseless steps, between where Lidia was sitting and her
own spot at  the  west wall. She  faced me all the  time.  Suddenly, as  she
approached  her  spot, she raised her  left forearm  and placed it right  in
front of her face, as if she wanted to block me from her view. She hid  half
of her face for an instant behind her forearm. She  lowered it and raised it
again, that  time  hiding her  entire  face. She  repeated  the movement  of
lowering  and  raising  her  left  forearm  countless  times, as  she  paced
soundlessly  from one  side of the room  to the other. Every time she raised
her forearm a bigger portion of her body disappeared from my  view. A moment
came when she had hidden her entire body, puffed up with clothes, behind her
thin forearm.
     It  was  as if by blocking  her view  of my body, sitting ten to twelve
feet away from her, a thing she could have easily done with the width of her
forearm, she also made me block  the view of her body,  a  thing which could
not possibly be done with just the width of her forearm.
     Once she had hidden her  entire body, all I was able to make out  was a
silhouette  of a forearm suspended in midair, bouncing  from one side of the
room to the other, and at one point I could hardly see the arm itself.
     I felt a revulsion, an unbearable nausea. The bouncing forearm depleted
me of energy. I  slid down  on my side, unable to keep my balance. I saw the
arm falling  to the ground.  Josefina was  lying on  the floor  covered with
garments, as if her puffed-up clothes had exploded. She lay on her back with
her arms spread out.
     It took  a long  time to get back my physical balance. My clothes  were
soaked in perspiration. I was not the only one  affected. All of  them  were
exhausted  and  drenched in  sweat. La Gorda  was the most  poised,  but her
control  seemed to be on the verge of collapsing. I could hear all of  them,
including la Gorda, breathing through their mouths.
     When  I was in full control again everybody sat on her spot. The little
sisters were looking at me fixedly.  I saw out of the corner of my  eye that
la Gorda's eyes were half-closed. She suddenly rolled noiselessly to my side
and whispered in my ear that I should begin to make my moth call, keeping it
up until the allies had rushed into the house and were about to take us.
     I had a  moment of vacillation. She  whispered that there was no way to
change  directions, and  that we had  to  finish what we  had started. After
untying her shawl from my waist, she rolled back to her spot and sat down.
     I put my left hand to my lips and tried to produce the tapping sound. I
found it very difficult at first. My lips were dry and my hands were sweaty,
but after an initial clumsiness, a feeling of vigor and well-being came over
me. I produced the most flawless tapping noise I had  ever done. It reminded
me of the tapping noise I had been hearing all  along as a response to mine.
As  soon as  I  stopped to  breathe,  I could hear  the tapping sound  being
answered from all directions.
     La Gorda signaled me  to go on  with it. I produced three more  series.
The last one was utterly mesmeric. I  did  not need to  intake a gulp of air
and let it out in small spurts, as I had been doing all along. This time the
tapping sound came out  of my mouth freely.  I did not even have to  use the
edge of my hand to produce it.
     La Gorda  suddenly rushed to  me, lifted me up bodily by my armpits and
pushed  me to  the  middle  of  the room. Her  action  disrupted my absolute
concentration. I noticed that Lidia was holding  onto my right arm, Josefina
to my left, and Rosa had backed  up  against the front of me and was holding
me by the waist with her arms extended backward. La Gorda was in back of me.
She  ordered me to put my arms behind and grab onto her shawl, which she had
looped around her neck and shoulders like a harness.
     I noticed  at  that moment that something besides us was  there  in the
room, but I could not tell what it was. The little sisters were shivering. I
knew that they were aware of something which I  was unable to distinguish. I
also knew  that la  Gorda  was going to try to do what she had  done in  don
Genaro's house. All of a sudden, I felt the wind of the eye  -- door pulling
us. I  grabbed  onto la  Gorda's shawl with all my strength while the little
sisters grabbed  onto me. I felt that we were spinning, tumbling and swaying
from side to side like a giant, weightless leaf.
     I opened my eyes and  saw that we were like a  bundle.  We were  either
standing up or we were lying horizontally in the air. I could not tell which
because I had no sensorial point  of reference. Then, as suddenly as we  had
been lifted off, we were dropped. I sensed our  falling  in my midsection. I
yelled with  pain and  my screams  were  united  with  those  of the  little
sisters. The insides of my knees hurt. I felt an unbearable jolt on my legs;
I thought I must have broken them.
     My next  impression was that  something was getting inside my  nose. It
was very dark and  I was lying on my back. I sat up. I realized then that la
Gorda was tickling my nostrils with a twig.
     I did not feel  exhausted or even mildly tired. I jumped to my feet and
only  then was I stricken by the realization that we  were not in the house.
We were on a hill, a rocky, barren hill. I took a step and nearly fell down.
I had  stumbled over a body. It was  Josefina. She was extremely hot  to the
touch.  She seemed to  be feverish. I tried to make  her sit up, but she was
limp. Rosa was next to her. As a  contrast, her body was icy cold. I put one
on top of the other and rocked  them. That motion brought them back to their
senses.
     La Gorda had found Lidia and was making her walk. After  a few minutes,
all of us were standing. We were perhaps half a mile east of the house.
     Years before don Juan had produced in me a similar experience  but with
the aid  of a psychotropic plant. He seemingly made me fly  and  I landed  a
distance from his house.  At the  time, I had tried to explain the  event in
rational terms, but there was no ground for rational explanations and, short
of accepting that I had flown,  I had to fall back onto the only two avenues
left open: I could explain it all by  arguing that don  Juan had transported
me to the distant field while I  was  still unconscious under the  effect of
the psychotropic  alkaloids of  that plant; or  by  arguing  that  under the
influence of the alkaloids I had believed what don Juan  was ordering  me to
believe, that I was flying.
     This time I had no other recourse but to brace myself for accepting, on
its face value, that I had flown. I wanted to indulge in doubts and began to
wonder about the possibilities of the four girls carrying me to that hill. I
laughed loudly, incapable  of containing  an obscure delight. I was having a
relapse of my old malady. My reason, which had been blocked off temporarily,
was beginning to take hold of me again. I wanted to defend it. Or perhaps it
would  be more appropriate to say, in  light of  the outlandish  acts I  had
witnessed  and  performed since  my  arrival,  that my reason was  defending
itself, independently of the more complex whole that seemed to be the "me" I
did  not  know. I  was  witnessing, almost in  the  fashion of an interested
observer, how  my  reason  struggled  to  find  suitable  rationales,  while
another,  much  larger portion  of  me  could  not  have  cared  less  about
explaining anything.
     La Gorda made  the three girls line up. She then pulled me to her side.
All of them folded their arms behind their  backs. La Gorda made me  do  the
same.  She stretched  my arms as  far back as they would go and then made me
bend  them  and grab each  forearm as tightly as  possible  as close  to the
elbows  as  I   could.  That  created  a  great  muscular  pressure  at  the
articulations  of  my  shoulders. She pushed my  trunk forward  until  I was
almost stooping. Then she made a peculiar birdcall. That was a signal. Lidia
started walking. In the darkness her movements reminded me of an ice skater.
She walked swiftly and silently and in a few minutes she disappeared from my
view.
     La  Gorda made two  more  birdcalls, one after  the other, and Rosa and
Josefina took off in the same manner Lidia had. La  Gorda told me to  follow
close to her. She made one more birdcall and we both started walking.
     I was  surprised at the ease with which I walked. My entire balance was
centered in my legs. The fact that I had my arms  behind my back, instead of
hindering  my movements, aided me in maintaining a strange equilibrium.  But
above all what surprised me the most was the quietness of my steps.
     When we reached the road we began  to walk normally. We passed two  men
going in the  opposite direction. La Gorda  greeted them and  they  answered
back. When we arrived  at the  house we found the little sisters standing by
the door, not daring to go in.  La Gorda told them that although I could not
control the allies I could either call them or tell them to leave, and  that
the allies would not bother us any longer. The girls believed her, something
I myself could not do in that instance.
     We went  inside.  In  a  very quiet and efficient  manner all  of  them
undressed, drenched themselves with  cold water and put on a fresh change of
clothes.  I did the same. I put on the  old clothes I used to  keep  in  don
Juan's house, which la Gorda brought to me in a box.
     All of us were in high spirits. I asked la  Gorda to explain to me what
we had done.
     "We'll talk about that later," she said in a firm tone.
     I remembered then that the packages  I  had for them  were still in the
car. I thought that while la Gorda was cooking some food for us it would  be
a good opportunity to  distribute them. I went out and got them  and brought
them into the  house. I placed them  on the  table. Lidia asked me if  I had
already assigned the  gifts as she had suggested. I said that  I wanted them
to pick one they liked. She declined. She said that no doubt I had something
special for Pablito  and  Nestor  and a bunch of trinkets for them, which  I
would throw on the table with the intention that they fight over them.
     "Besides,  you  didn't bring anything  for Benigno," Lidia said as  she
came to my side and looked  at me with mock seriousness. "You can't hurt the
Genaros' feelings by giving two gifts for three."
     They all laughed.  I  felt embarrassed.  She was  absolutely  right  in
everything that she had said.
     "You are careless,  that's why I've never liked you," Lidia said to me,
changing her smile into a frown. "You have  never greeted me with  affection
or respect. Every  time we saw each other you only  pretended to be happy to
see me."
     She  imitated my  obviously  contrived effusive greeting,  a greeting I
must have given her countless times in the past.
     "Why didn't you ever ask me what I was doing here?" Lidia asked me.
     I stopped writing to consider her point. It had never occurred to me to
ask her anything. I told  her  that I had no excuse. La Gorda interceded and
said that the reason that  I  had never said more  than  two words to either
Lidia or Rosa each time  I saw them  was because I was accustomed to talking
only to women that I was enamored of, in one way or  another. La Gorda added
that  the  Nagual had told them that  if  I would ask them anything directly
they were  supposed  to answer my questions,  but as long  as I did not ask,
they were not supposed to mention anything.
     Rosa said that  she did not like me  because I was  always laughing and
trying to be funny. Josefina  added  that since  I had never  seen her,  she
disliked me just for fun, for the hell of it.
     "I  want you to know that I don't accept you as the Nagual," Lidia said
to me. "You're  too dumb. You know nothing. I know more than you do. How can
I respect you?"
     Lidia added that as far as she was  concerned I  could go back  where I
came from or go jump in a lake for that matter.
     Rosa and Josefina did not say a  word. Judging  by the serious and mean
expressions on their faces, however, they seemed to agree with Lidia.
     "How can  this  man lead us?"  Lidia asked la Gorda. "He's  not  a true
nagual. He's a man. He's going to make us into idiots like himself."
     As she was  talking I  could  see the  mean  expressions on Rosa's  and
Josefina's faces getting even harder.
     La Gorda intervened and explained  to them what  she had "seen" earlier
about me.  She  added that  since  she had  recommended  to  me  not to  get
entangled in their webs, she was recommending the same thing to them, not to
get entangled in mine.
     After Lidia's initial display of genuine and  well-founded animosity, I
was flabbergasted  to see how easily she  acquiesced  to la Gorda's remarks.
She smiled at me. She even came and sat next to me.
     "You're really like us, eh?" she asked in a tone of bewilderment.
     I did not know what to say. I was afraid of blundering.
     Lidia was  obviously the leader of the little sisters. The  moment  she
smiled at  me the other two  seemed to  be  infused instantly  with the same
mood.
     La  Gorda told  them not to mind my  pencil  and  paper  and my  asking
questions and that  in return  I would  not  be  flustered when  they became
involved in doing what they loved the most, to indulge in themselves.
     The  three of them sat close to me. La Gorda walked  over to the table,
got  the  packages and  took them out to my car. I asked Lidia to forgive me
for my inexcusable blunderings of the  past and asked all of them to tell me
how they  had become don  Juan's apprentices. In order  to make them feel at
ease  I gave  them an account of how I had met don Juan. Their accounts were
the same as what dona Soledad had already told me.
     Lidia said that all of them had been free to leave don Juan's world but
their  choice had  been  to  stay.  She,  in  particular,  being  the  first
apprentice, was given an opportunity to go away. After the Nagual and Genaro
had cured her, the  Nagual had pointed to the door  and told her that if she
did not go through it then, the door would close her in and would never open
again.
     "My  fate  was sealed when that door  closed,"  Lidia said to me. "Just
like what happened to you. The Nagual told me that after he had put a  patch
on you, you had a chance to leave but you didn't want to take it."
     I remembered  that particular decision more vividly than anything else.
I  recounted  to  them how  don Juan had tricked me  into believing  that  a
sorceress was after him, and then he  gave me the  choice  of either leaving
for good or staying to  help him wage a war against  his attacker. It turned
out that his  alleged attacker was  one of his confederates. By  confronting
her, on what I thought was don Juan's  behalf, I turned  her against  me and
she became what he called my "worthy opponent."
     I asked Lidia if they had had a worthy opponent themselves.
     "We  are not as dumb as you are," she said. "We  never needed anyone to
spur us."
     "Pablito is that dumb,"  Rosa  said. "Soledad is his opponent.  I don't
know how worthy she is, though. But as the saying goes, if you can't feed on
a capon, feed on an onion."
     They laughed and banged on the table.
     I asked them if any of them knew  the sorceress  don Juan had pitted me
against, la Catalina.
     They shook their heads negatively.
     "I  know her," la Gorda said from the stove.  "She's from  the Nagual's
cycle, but she looks as if she's thirty."
     "What is a cycle, Gorda?" I asked.
     She  walked over to the table and  put her foot on the bench and rested
her chin on her arm and knee.
     "Sorcerers like the Nagual and Genaro have two cycles,"  she said. "The
first is when they're human, like ourselves. We are in our first cycle. Each
of us has been given a task and that task is making us leave the human form.
Eligio, the five of us, and the Genaros are of the same cycle.
     "The  second cycle is when a sorcerer  is not  human anymore, like  the
Nagual  and  Genaro.  They came to teach  us, and after they  taught us they
left. We are the second cycle to them.
     "The Nagual  and la Catalina are  like you and Lidia.  They  are in the
same positions. She's a scary sorceress, just like Lidia."
     La Gorda went back to the stove. The little sisters seemed nervous.
     "That must  be  the  woman who knows power plants,"  Lidia  said to  la
Gorda.
     La Gorda said that she was the one. I asked them if the Nagual had ever
given them power plants.
     "No, not to us  three," Lidia  replied. "Power plants are given only to
empty people. Like yourself and la Gorda."
     "Did the Nagual give you power plants, Gorda?" I asked loudly.
     La Gorda raised two fingers over her head.
     "The Nagual gave her his pipe twice," Lidia said. "And she went off her
rocker both times."
     "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 sorcerer. 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 perfected  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 psychotropic 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
controlling  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.  Josefina
carefully  placed  the  bundle on  the table  in  front of  me.  All of them
gathered  around. She began to untie it as ceremoniously 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  beginning  that
Josefina  was  not really ill,  and that  that was the reason it had been so
difficult for him to  cure  her.  People  who are  actually  sick  are  more
pliable. Josefina was too aware of everything 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 subject. 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  hallucination 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 everything. How
do you think you saw what you have just told us about?"
     There was an abyss between our understanding of how to teach something.
I told them that if I were to teach them something I knew, such  as  how  to
drive a car, I would go step by step, making sure that they understood every
facet of the whole procedure.
     La Gorda returned to the table.
     "That's only  if  the  sorcerer is teaching something about the tonal,"
she said. "When  the sorcerer is dealing with the  nagual,  he must give the
instruction, which is to show the mystery to the warrior.  And that's all he
has to  do.  The warrior who  receives the mysteries must claim knowledge as
power, by doing what he has been shown.
     "The  Nagual  showed  you more mysteries than all of  us  together. But
you're lazy,  like Pablito,  and  prefer to  be confused. The  tonal and the
nagual are two different worlds. In one you talk, in the other you act."
     At the  moment  she spoke,  her words made absolute sense to me. I knew
what she was talking about. She went back to the stove, stirred something in
a pot and came back again.
     "Why are you so dumb?" Lidia bluntly asked me.
     "He's empty," Rosa replied.
     They made me stand up and  forced themselves to squint  as they scanned
my body with their eyes. All of them touched my umbilical region.
     "But why are you still empty?" Lidia asked.
     "You know what to do, don't you?" Rosa added.
     "He was crazy," Josefina said to them. "He must still be crazy now."
     La  Gorda  came to my aid and told them that I was still empty for  the
same reason they still had their for