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That enables us to see ourselves and our surroundings for what they really are: breathtaking events that bloom into transitory existence once, and are never to be repeated again.
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"There is nothing any one of us would do to keep you against your will in this magical world," she said, smiling:
"And yet we would do any imaginable or unimaginable thing to help you stay in it."
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"The only thing I cannot and will not do, and neither will Isidore Baltazar for that matter, is to help you be your old ugly, greedy, indulgent self. That would be a travesty."
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Isidoro Baltazar's office-studio consisted of one rectangular room overlooking a parking lot, a small kitchen, and a pink-tiled bathroom. He took me there the night we returned from Sonora. Too exhausted to notice anything, I followed him up the two flights of stairs, along a darkly carpeted corridor to apartment number 8. The instant my head hit the pillow, I was asleep and dreamt that we were still on the road. We had driven nonstop all the way from Sonora, alternating with each other at the wheel and pausing only to eat or fill up the gas tank.
The apartment was sparsely furnished. Beside the twin bed, he had a long, masonite folding picnic table that served as his desk, a folding chair, and two metal filing cabinets in which he kept his field notes. Several suits and half a dozen shirts hung in the two big closets in the hall. The rest of the space was taken up by books. They were stacked up in piles. There were no bookcases. The books appeared to have never been touched, let alone read. The cupboards in the kitchen were also crammed with books, except for one shelf, which had been set aside for a plate, a mug, a knife, a fork, and a spoon. On the gas stove stood a kettle and a saucepan.
Within three weeks I found myself a new apartment, about a mile down the street from the UCLA campus, right around the corner from his office-studio. Yet I continued to spend most of my time at his place. He had set up a second twin bed for me, a card table, and a folding chair- identical to his- at the other end of the room.
In the six months that followed, Sonora became a mythological place for me. Having no longer any desire to block away my experiences, I juxtaposed the memories of the two times I had been there. But hard as I tried, I couldn't remember a thing about the eleven days I had lost: one during the first trip, ten during the second.
Isidoro Baltazar plainly refused even to mention the idea of having lost those days. At times, I was in total agreement with him: The absurdity of considering those days lost simply because I couldn't remember them became so plain to me that I was filled with gratitude toward him for attaching no importance to the matter. It was clear that he was protecting me. At other times, however, for no reason at all, I nursed a deep resentment. It was his duty to help me, to clarify the mystery for me, I repeated to myself, until I was convinced he was purposely hiding things from me.
"You'll drive yourself nuts if you keep harping on it," he finally said one day. "And all your turmoil will be for nothing, because it will resolve nothing." He hesitated for a moment, as if reluctant to voice what he was about to say next, then shrugged and added in a challenging tone, "Why don't you use the same energy in a more practical manner, like lining up and examining your bad habits."
Instead of admitting to such a notion, I immediately counter-attacked with the other complaint that had been brewing inside me. I still hadn't met the other young women who had been entrusted to him by the old nagual.
He had told me so much about them that I felt I already knew them. Whenever I had asked him about them, he had answered my questions at great length. He spoke rapturously about them. With profound and obviously sincere admiration, he had said that an outsider would describe them as attractive, intelligent, accomplished- they all possessed advanced university degrees- self-assured, and fiercely independent.
To him, however, they were much more than that: They were magical beings who shared his destiny.
They were linked to him by ties of affection and commitment that had nothing to do with the social order.
They shared in common their search for freedom.
Once, I even gave him an ultimatum. "You've got to take me to them, or else."
Isidoro Baltazar laughed gaily, a deep, chuckling laugh. "All I can tell you is that nothing is as you imagine," he said. "And there is no way to tell when you will finally meet them. You'll just have to wait."
"I've waited long enough!" I shouted. Seeing no reaction on his face, I added derisively, "You're deluding yourself if you believe that I will find a bunch of women in Los Angeles. I don't even know where to start looking."
"You'll find them the way you found me," he stated, "the way you found Mariano Aureliano."
I regarded him suspiciously. I couldn't help but suspect that there was a sort of secret malice about him. "I wasn't looking for you," I pointed out peevishly. "Nor was I looking for Mariano Aureliano. Believe me, meeting you and him was purely accidental."
"There are no accidental meetings in the sorcerers' world," he noted casually. I was on the verge of telling him that I didn't need this kind of advice when he added in a serious voice, "You'll meet them when the time is right. You don't have to go looking for them."
Facing the wall, I counted to ten, then turned toward him smiling and said sweetly, "The problem with you is that you're a typical Latin. Tomorrow is always good enough for you. You've no concept of getting things done." I raised my voice to prevent him from interrupting me. "My insistence on meeting your friends is to speed things up."
"To speed things up?" he repeated uncomprehendingly. "What's there to speed up?"
"You have been telling me almost daily that there is so little left," I reminded him. "You, yourself, are always talking about how important it is for me to meet them, and yet you act as if you had an eternity before you."
"I tell you this constantly because I want you to hurry and clean your inner being, not because I want meaningless acts done as fast as you can," he said impatiently. "It isn't up to me to introduce them to you. If it were up to me, I wouldn't be sitting here listening to your inanities." He closed his eyes and sighed exaggeratedly in mock resignation. He smiled, then mumbled softly, "You're too dumb to see what's happening."
"Nothing is happening," I retorted, stung by his insult. "I'm not as stupid as you think. I've noticed this air of ambivalence about your reactions toward me. Sometimes I have the distinct impression that you don't know what to do with me."
"I know exactly what to do," he contradicted me.
"Then why do you always appear undecided when I propose something?" The words had escaped me as if of their own accord.
Isidore Baltazar looked sharply at me. For a moment I expected that he would attack me with those quick, harsh words he could use, demolish me with some sharp criticism. But his voice was surprisingly gentle when he said that I was quite right in my assessment.
"I always wait till events make a choice for me," he affirmed. "And then I move with speed and vigor. I will leave you behind if you don't watch out."
"I'm already far behind," I said in a self-pitying tone. "Since you won't help me find these women, I'm doomed to remain behind."
"But this is not the real pressing problem," he said. "You haven't yet made your decision, that's the trouble." He lifted his brows expectantly, as if waiting for my impending outburst.
"I don't know what you mean. What is it I have to decide?"
"You haven't decided to join the sorcerers' world. You're standing at the threshold, looking in, waiting to see what's going to happen. You're waiting for something practical that will make it worth your while."
Words of protest rose in my throat. But before I could give vent to my profound indignation, he said that I had the mistaken idea that moving into a new apartment and leaving my old life-style behind was a change.
"What is it then?" I asked sarcastically.
"You haven't left anything behind, except your belongings," he said, ignoring my tone. "For some people that is a gigantic step. For you, though, it's nothing. You don't care about possessions."
"No, I don't," I agreed, then insisted that regardless of what he believed, I had made my decision to join the sorcerers' world a long time ago. "Why do you think I'm sitting here if I haven't joined yet?"
"You have certainly joined it in body," he stated, "but not in spirit. Now you are waiting for some kind of map, some comforting blueprint before you make your final decision. Meanwhile, you'll go on humoring them. The main problem with you is that you want to be convinced that the sorcerers' world has something to offer."
"Doesn't it?" I blurted out.
Isidoro Baltazar turned to me, his face crinkling with delight. "Yes, it has something very special to offer. It's called freedom. However, there's no guarantee that you'll succeed in attaining it; that any of us, for that matter, will succeed."
I nodded thoughtfully, then asked him what I had to do to convince him that I had indeed joined the sorcerers' world.
"You don't have to convince me. You have to convince the spirit. You have to close the door behind you."
"What door?"
"The one you still keep open. The door that will permit you to escape if things are not to your liking or don't fit your expectations."
"Are you saying that I will leave?"
He regarded me with an enigmatic expression, then shrugged his shoulders and in a voice that was but a mere murmur said, "That's between you and the spirit."
"But if you yourself believe that--"
"I don't believe anything," he cut me short. "You came into this world the way everybody else did. It was none of anybody's doing. And it will be none of anybody's doing if you or anyone else decides to leave."
I gazed at him in confusion. "But surely you'll try to convince... if I..." I stammered.
He shook his head before I finished speaking. "I will not convince you or anyone else. There will be no power in your decision if you need to be propped up every time you falter or doubt."
"But who will help me?" I asked, stricken.
"I will. I'm your servant." He smiled, not cynically but shyly and sweetly. "But I serve the spirit first. A warrior is not a slave but a servant of the spirit. Slaves have no choice; servants do. Warriors' choice is to serve impeccably.
"My help is exempt from calculation," he continued. "I cannot invest in you, and neither, of course, can you invest in me or in the sorcerers' world. This is the basic premise of that world: Nothing is done in it that might be construed as useful; only strategic acts are permitted. This is what the nagual Juan Matus taught me and the way I live: A sorcerer practices what he or she preaches. And yet nothing is done for practical reasons. When you get to understand and practice this, you will have closed the door behind you."
A long, breathless silence settled between us. I changed positions on the bed where I was sitting. Thoughts swarmed into my head. Perhaps none of the sorcerers would believe me, but I had certainly changed, a change that had been almost imperceptible at first. I noticed it because it had to do with the most difficult thing some of us women can encounter: jealousy and the need to know.
My fits of jealously were a pretense, not necessarily a conscious one, but nevertheless there was something of a posturing about them. Something in me demanded that I be jealous of all the other women in Isidore Baltazar's life. But then something in me was keenly aware that the new nagual's life wasn't the life of an ordinary man, not even one who might have many wives. Our relation, if it could be called that, did not fit into any kind of habitual, known mold, no matter how I tried to make it fit into that mold. In order for jealousy and possessiveness to have a grasp, it needs a mirror; not only one's own, but one's partner's as well. And Isidore Baltazar no longer mirrored the drives, needs, feelings, and emotions of a man.
My need to know about Isidore Baltazar's life was an overpowering need: It simply consumed me that he never allowed me a real entry into his private world. And yet I did nothing about it. It would have been quite simple to follow him or to snoop through his papers and find out once and for all who he really was, I often reminded myself. But I couldn't do it. Something in me knew that I could not proceed with him as I normally would have done. What stopped me, more than any sense of propriety, was the trust he had bestowed on me. He had given me complete access to his belongings, and that made him, not only in practice but even in my thoughts, inviolable.
I laughed out loud. I did understand what a warrior's strategic act was. Isidore Baltazar was wrong. He was taking my lifelong habit of moodiness and Germanic finickiness as lack of commitment. It didn't matter. I knew that I had at least begun to understand and practice the warrior's strategy, at least when he was present- not necessarily present in the studio but present in Los Angeles. In his absence, however, I often began to falter, and when I did, I usually went to sleep in his studio.
One night, as I was inserting my key in the lock, I felt an arm reach out and pull me in.
I screamed in terror. "What... what...," I stammered as the hand that was holding my arm let go of me.
Trying to regain my balance, I leaned against the wall. My heart thumped wildly.
"Florinda!" I stared at her, bewildered. She had on a long robe, gathered at the waist. Her hair hung loose down the sides and back. I wondered whether she was real or merely a shadowy apparition, rimmed by the faint light behind her shoulders. I moved toward her and surreptitiously touched her sleeve.
"Is that you, Florinda? Or am I dreaming?"
"It's the real thing, dear. The real me."
"How did you get here? Are you all by yourself?" I was well aware of the futility of asking her that.
"Had I known that you would come, I would have started earlier with my cleaning," I said, trying to smile. My lips stuck to my teeth. "I love to clean Isidore Baltazar's studio at night. I always clean at night."
Instead of making any remark, Florinda turned sideways, so the light hit her face.
A wicked smile of delight dawned in her eyes. "I told you never to follow any one of us or come uninvited. You're lucky," she said. "You're lucky it wasn't someone else who pulled you in here tonight."
"Who else could have pulled me in?" I asked with a bravado I was far from feeling.
Florinda gazed at me for a moment longer, then turned around and said over her shoulder, "Someone who wouldn't have cared if you had died of fright."
She moved her head slightly, so her profile was outlined by the faint light. She laughed softly, and, waving her hand in the air as if to brush away the words, she traveled the length of the room to the small kitchen. She seemed not to walk but to glide in a sort of undeliberate dance. It made her long white hair, hanging unbraided down her back, shimmer like a silvery curtain in the uncertain light.
Trying to imitate her graceful walk, I followed behind her. "I do have a key, you know," I said. "I've been coming here every day, at any hour, since we returned from Sonora. In fact, I practically live here."
"Didn't Isidore Baltazar tell you not to come here while he's in Mexico?" Florinda's tone was even, almost casual. She was not accusing me, yet I felt she was.
"He might have mentioned something," I remarked with studied indifference. Seeing that she frowned, I felt compelled to defend myself. I told her that I was often there by myself and that I didn't think it would make any difference whether Isidore Baltazar was five miles or five hundred miles away. Emboldened by her repeated nods, I confided that besides doing my schoolwork there, I spent hours rearranging the books in the closets. I had been restacking them by author and subject matter. "Some of the books are so new the pages are still uncut," I explained. "I've been separating them. In fact, that's what I came here to do tonight."
"At three in the morning?" she exclaimed.
Blushing, I nodded. "There are plenty of pages still to cut. It takes forever in that one has to be very careful not to damage the pages. It's soothing work, though. It helps me sleep."
"Extraordinary," Florinda said softly.
Encouraged by her obvious approval, I went on talking. "I'm sure you can understand what being here does to me," I said. "In this apartment, I feel detached from my old life, from everything and everyone but Isidore Baltazar and his magical world. The very air fills me with a sense of utter remoteness."
I sighed, long and loudly. "Here I never feel alone, even though most of the time I'm here by myself. Something about the atmosphere of this apartment reminds me of the witches' house. That same coldness and lack of feeling, which at first I had found so disturbing, permeates the walls. And it's precisely this lack of warmth, this remoteness, that I seek day and night. I find it oddly reassuring. It gives me strength."
"Incredible," Florinda whispered as if in disbelief and took the kettle to the sink.
She said something, which I didn't hear above the splash of water, then put the water-filled kettle on the stove.
"I'm so happy that you feel so at home here," she said, sighing dramatically. "The security you must feel in such a little nest, knowing you have a companion." She added in a most facetious tone that I should do everything I could to make Isidore Baltazar happy and that included sexual practices, which she described with horrendous directness.
Stupefied to hear such things, I stared at her open-mouthed. With the assuredness and efficiency of someone familiar with the peculiar setup of the kitchen, she produced the two mugs, my special teapot, and the bag of chocolate chip cookies I kept hidden in the cupboards behind the thick German and French Cassels' dictionaries.
Smiling, Florinda turned to me and asked abruptly, "Whom did you expect to find here tonight?"
"Not you!" I blurted out, realizing too late that my answer had given me away. I went into a lengthy and elaborate elucidation of why I believed I might find there, if not all of them, then at least one of the other young women.
"They will cross your path when the time is right," Florinda said. "It isn't up to you to force an encounter with them."
Before I knew what I was saying, I found myself blaming her, as well as Mariano Aureliano and Isidore Baltazar, for my sneakiness. I told her that it was impractical- not to mention impossible- for them to expect me to wait until some unknown women crossed my path and to believe that I would actually recognize them by something so inconceivable as their inner glow. As usual, the more I complained, the better I felt.
Florinda ignored me. "One, two spoonfuls, and one for the pot," she chanted in an exaggerated British accent as she measured out the tea.
Then in a most casual manner she remarked that the only capricious and impractical thing was for me to think of and treat Isidore Baltazar as a man.
"I don't know what you mean," I said defensively.
She gazed at me intently until I blushed. "You know exactly what I mean," she stated, then poured the tea into the mugs.
With a quick gesture of her chin she indicated which of the two I should take. With the bag of cookies in her hand she sat on Isidore Baltazar's bed, the one nearest to the kitchen. Slowly, she sipped her tea. I sat beside her and did the same.
"You haven't changed at all," she said all of a sudden.
"That's pretty much what Isidore Baltazar said to me some days ago," I retorted. "I know, however, that I've changed a great deal."
I told her that my world had been turned upside down since my return from Sonora. At great length I explained about finding a new apartment, about moving and leaving everything I owned behind.
She did not so much as nod but sat there silent and stiff like a stone.
"Actually, I can't take much credit for disrupting routines or becoming inaccessible," I conceded, laughing nervously and faltering on through her silence:
"Anyone in close contact with Isidore Baltazar will forget that there are boundaries between night and day, between weekdays and holidays."
I glanced at her sideways, pleased with my words. "Time just flows by and gives way to some..." but I couldn't finish the sentence: I had been hit by a strange thought.
Nobody, in my memory, had ever told me about disrupting routines or becoming inaccessible.
I regarded Florinda intently, then my glance wavered involuntarily. Was it her doing? I asked myself. Where did I get these ideas? And what was even more baffling, I knew exactly what these ideas meant.
"This should be a warning that something is just about to pop out of you," Florinda said, as if she had followed my train of thoughts.
She went on to say that whatever I had done so far in dreams hadn't imbued my waking hours with the necessary hardness, the necessary self-discipline needed to fare in the sorcerers' world.
"I've never done anything like this in my life," I said. "Give me a break. I am new at it."
"Of course," she readily agreed.
She reclined her head against the pillows and closed her eyes.
She was silent for so long I thought she had fallen asleep, and thus I was startled when she said, "A real change is not a change of mood or attitude or outlook. A real change involves a total transformation of the self."
Seeing that I was about to interrupt her, she pressed her finders against my lips and added, "The kind of change I'm talking about cannot be accomplished in three months or in a year or in ten. It will take a lifetime."
She said that it was extraordinarily difficult to become something different than what one was raised to be.
"The world of sorcerers is a dream; a myth: yet it is as real as the everyday world," Florinda proceeded:
"In order to perceive and to function in the sorcerers' world, we have to take off the everyday mask that has been strapped to our faces since the day we were born and put on the second mask; the mask that enables us to see ourselves and our surroundings for what they really are: breathtaking events that bloom into transitory existence once, and are never to be repeated again.
"You'll have to make that mask yourself." She settled more comfortably on the bed and, cupping her hands around the mug, which I had refilled, took noisy little sips.
"How do I make this mask?" I asked.
"By dreaming your other self," she murmured:
"Certainly not by just having a new address, new clothes, new books."
She glanced at me sideways and grinned mockingly. "And certainly not by believing you have a new man."
Before I could deny her brutal accusation, she said that outwardly I was a fluid person, capable of moving at great speed. But inside I was rigid and stiff.
As Isidore Baltazar had remarked already, she, too, maintained that it was fallacious for me to believe that moving into a new apartment and compulsively giving away all I possessed was a change.
I bowed my head, accepting her criticism. I had always had an urge to get rid of things. And as she had pointed out, it was basically a compulsion. To my parents' chagrin, I had periodically disposed of my clothes and toys since early childhood. My joy at seeing my room and closets neatly arranged and nearly empty surpassed the joy of having things.
Sometimes my compulsion was so overpowering that I thinned out my parents' and brothers' closets as well. Hardly ever were these items missed, for I always made sure to get rid of clothes I hadn't seen anyone wear for a while. Quite a few times, nevertheless, the whole household would explode in sudden and total confusion as my father went from room to room, opening wardrobes and yelling, searching for a specific shirt or a pair of pants.
Florinda laughed, then got to her feet and moved to the window overlooking the alley. She stared at the black-out curtain as though she could see through it.
Glancing backward over her shoulder, she said that for a woman it is a great deal easier than for a man to break ties with family and past.
"Women," she maintained, "are not accountable. This lack of accountability gives women a great deal of fluidity.
"Unfortunately, women rarely, if ever, make use of this advantage."
She moved about the room, her hand trailing over the large metal filing cabinet and over the folding card table.
"The hardest thing to grasp about the sorcerers' world is that it offers total freedom." She turned to face me and added softly, "But freedom is not free."
"What does freedom cost?"
She said, "Freedom will cost you the mask you have on; The mask that feels so comfortable and is so hard to shed off; not because it fits so well, but because you have been wearing it for so long."
She stopped pacing about the room and came to stand in front of the card table.
"Do you know what freedom is?" she asked rhetorically. "Freedom is the total absence of concern about yourself," she said, sitting beside me on the bed.
"And the best way to quit being concerned with yourself is to be concerned about others."
"I am," I assured her. "I constantly think of Isidore Baltazar and his women."
"I'm sure you do," Florinda readily agreed.
She shook her head and yawned. "It's time for you to begin to shape your new mask; the mask that cannot have anyone's imprint but your own.
"It has to be carved in solitude. Otherwise it won't fit properly. Otherwise there will always be times when the mask will feel too tight, too loose, too hot, too cold ..." Her voice trailed off as she went on enumerating the most outlandish discomforts.
A long silence ensued, and then in that same sleepy voice she said, "To choose the sorcerers' world is not just a matter of saying you have. You have to act in that world.
"In your case, you have to dream. Have you dreamt-awake since your return?"
In a thoroughly morose mood, I admitted that I hadn't.
"Then you haven't made your decision yet," she observed severely. "You are not carving your new mask. You are not dreaming your other self.
"Sorcerers are bound to their world solely through their impeccability."
A definite gleam appeared in her eyes as she added, "Sorcerers have no interest to convert anyone to their views.
"There are no gurus or wise men among sorcerers, only naguals.
"They are the leaders, not because they know more or because they are in any way better sorcerers, but simply because they have more energy.
"I'm not necessarily referring to physical strength," she qualified, "but to a certain configuration of their being that permits them to help anyone break the parameters of perception."
"If sorcerers are not interested in converting anyone to their views, why then is Isidore Baltazar the old nagual's apprentice?" I interrupted her.
"Isidore Baltazar appeared in the sorcerers' world the same way you did," she said. "Whatever it was that brought him could not be ignored by Mariano Aureliano. It was his duty to teach Isidore Baltazar all he knew about the sorcerers' world."
She explained that no one had been looking for Isidore Baltazar or for me. Whatever had brought us into their world had nothing to do with anyone's doing or volition.
"There is nothing any one of us would do to keep you against your will in this magical world," she said, smiling:
"And yet we would do any imaginable or unimaginable thing to help you stay in it."
Florinda turned sideways as if she wanted to hide her face from me.
An instant later she looked back over her shoulder. Something cold and detached showed in her eyes, and the change of expression was altogether so remarkable that I was frightened. Instinctively, I moved away from her.
"The only thing I cannot and will not do, and neither will Isidore Baltazar, for that matter, is to help you be your old ugly, greedy, indulgent self. That would be a travesty."
As if to soften the insult, she put her arm around my shoulders and hugged me.
"I'll tell you what you need," she whispered; but then was silent for so long I thought she had forgotten what she was going to say.
"You need a good night's sleep," she finally murmured.
"I'm not in the least tired," I retorted.
My response was automatic, and I realized that most of my responses were contradictions of what was being said. For me, it was a matter of principle to be right.
Florinda laughed softly, then embraced me again. "Don't be so Germanic," she murmured. "And don't expect everything to be spelled out clearly and precisely to you."
She added that nothing in the sorcerers' world was clear and precise: Instead, things unfolded slowly and vaguely.
"Isidore Baltazar will help you," she assured me. "However, do remember that he won't help you in the way you expect to be helped."
"What do you mean?" I asked, disentangling myself from her arms so I could look at her.
"He will not tell you what you want to hear. He will not tell you how to behave, for, as you already know, there are neither rules nor regulations in the sorcerers' world."
She giggled gleefully, seemingly enjoying my growing frustration.
"Always remember, there are only improvisations," she added, then, yawning widely, she stretched out fully on the bed and reached for one of the neatly folded blankets stacked on the floor.
Before she covered herself, she rose up on her elbow and looked at me closely. There was something hypnotic about her sleepy voice as she told me that I should always bear in mind that I traveled on the same warrior's path as Isidore Baltazar.
She closed her eyes, and in a voice that was almost too faint to be heard said, "Never lose sight of him. His actions will guide you in so artful a manner that you won't even notice it. He's an impeccable and peerless warrior."
I urgently shook her arm. I was afraid she would fall asleep before she finished talking.
Without opening her eyes, Florinda said, "If you watch him carefully, you'll see that Isidore Baltazar doesn't seek love or approval.
"You'll see that he remains impassive under any conditions.
"He doesn't demand anything, yet he is willing to give anything of himself.
"He avidly seeks a signal from the spirit in the form of a kind word; an appropriate gesture... and when he gets it, he expresses his thanks by redoubling his efforts.
"Isidore Baltazar doesn't judge. He fiercely reduces himself to nothing in order to listen, to watch, so that he can conquer and be humbled by his conquest; or be defeated and enhanced by his defeat.
"If you watch carefully, you'll see that Isidore Baltazar doesn't surrender. He may be vanquished, but he'll never surrender.
"And above all, Isidore Baltazar is free."
I was dying to interrupt her, to cry out that she had already told me all that, but before I could ask her anything else, Florinda was sound asleep.
Afraid I might miss her in the morning if I returned to my apartment, I sat down on the other bed.
Strange thoughts rushed into my awareness.
I relaxed. I let myself go completely as I realized that they were disconnected from the rest of my normal thoughts.
I saw them like beams of light, flashes of intuition.
Following one of those flashes of intuition, I decided to feel with my seat the bed I was sitting on. And to my dumbfounded surprise, my buttocks felt as if they had sunk into the bed itself.
For an instant, I was the bed, and the bed was reaching out to touch my buttocks. I relished this sensation for quite some time.
I knew then that I was dreaming, and I understood with complete clarity that I had just felt what Esperanza had described as 'my feeling being thrown back at me.'
And then my whole being melted, or better yet, it exploded.
I wanted to laugh out loud for the sheer joy of it, but I didn't want to wake Florinda. I had remembered it all!
Now I had no difficulty whatsoever in recalling what I had done in the witches' house in those ten lost days. I had dreamt!
Under Esperanza's watchful eye, I had dreamt on and on of waking up in the witches' house or in Esperanza's place or sometimes in other places I couldn't quite see at the moment.
Clara had insisted that before any particular thing I saw in dreams could be fixed permanently in my memory, I needed to see it twice.
I had seen all the women more than twice: They were permanently etched in my memory.
As I sat there on the bed watching Florinda sleep, I remembered the other women of the sorcerers' party with whom I had interacted in a dreamlike state during those forgotten days.
I saw them clearly, as if they had conjured themselves up before me; or rather, as if I had been transported, bodily, back to those events.
The most striking to me was Nelida, who looked so much like Florinda that at first I believed she was her twin. Not only was she is tall and thin as Florinda, but she had the same color eyes, hair, ind complexion: Even their expressions were the same. Temperamentally, they were alike, too, except that Nelida came across as more subdued, less forceful. She seemed to lack Florinda's wisdom and energetic force. And yet there was a patient, silent strength to Nelida that was very reassuring.
Hermelinda could have easily passed as Carmela's younger sister. Her thin, five-foot two-inch body was delicately rounded and so were her exquisite manners. She appeared to be less self-assured than Carmela. She was soft-spoken and moved in quick jerks that somehow meshed into gracefulness. Her companions told me that her shyness and quietness brought out the best in others and that she could not handle a group or even two people at the same time.
Clara and Delia made a stupendous team of pranksters. They weren't really as big as they first appeared. It was their robustness, their vigor and energy, that made one think they were large, indestructible women. And they did play the most delightful competitive games. They paraded their outlandishly eccentric outfits at he slightest opportunity. Both played the guitar very well and had beautiful voices to match: They sang, one trying to outdo the other, not only in Spanish, but in English, German, French, and Italian as well. Their repertoire included ballads, folk songs, every conceivable popular song including the latest pop songs. I only had to hum or recite the first line of a song and either Clara or Delia would immediately finish the whole song for me. And then they had their poem writing contests, writing verse to the occasion.
They had written poems to me and slipped them under my door, unsigned. I had to guess who had written the poem. Each claimed that if I truly loved her, as she loved me, I would intuitively know the author.
What made their competitiveness delightfully appealing was the fact that there was no edge to it. It was meant to entertain, not to put each other down. Needless to say, Clara and Delia had as much fun as their audience.
If they took a liking to someone, as they seemed to have done with me, there was no limit to their affection and loyalty. Both of them defended me with an astonishing perseverance, even when I was in the wrong. In their eyes, I was perfect and could do no wrong. From them I learned that it was a dual responsibility to uphold that trust. It wasn't that I was afraid of disappointing them and tried to live up to their expectations, but rather, it was the most natural thing for me to believe that I was perfect and to behave with them in an impeccable manner.
The strangest among all the women sorcerers was my dreaming teacher, Zuleica, who never taught me anything. She didn't even speak to me or perhaps hadn't noticed that I existed.
Zuleica was, just like Florinda, very beautiful; perhaps not as striking, but beautiful in a more ethereal way. She was petite: Her dark eyes with the winged eyebrows and the small, perfect nose and mouth were framed by wavy dark hair that was turning grey. It accentuated her aura of other-worldliness.
Hers was not an average beauty, but a sublime one, tempered by her relentless self-control. She was keenly aware of the comic element of being beautiful and appealing in the eyes of others.
She had learned to recognize it and used it as if it were a prize she had won. She was, therefore, totally indifferent to anything or anyone.
Zuleica had learned to be a ventriloquist and had turned it into a superior art. According to her, words voiced by moving the lips become more confusing than they really are.
I was delighted by Zuleica's habit of talking, as a ventriloquist, to walls, tables, china, or any other object in front of her, and so I kept on following her around whenever she made an appearance. She walked through the house without seeming to touch the ground, without seeming to stir the air. When I asked the other sorcerers whether this was an illusion, they explained that Zuleica abhorred leaving footprints.
After I had met and interacted with all the women, they explained to me the difference between the dreamers and the stalkers. They called it the two planets.
Florinda, Carmela, Zoila, and Delia were stalkers: forceful beings with a great deal of physical energy; go-getters; inexhaustible workers; specialists on that extravagant state of awareness they called dreaming-awake.
The other planet- the dreamers- was composed of the other four women: Zuleica, Nelida, Hermelinda, and Clara. They had a more ethereal quality. It was not that they were less forceful or less energetic: It was rather that their energy was simply less apparent. They projected a sense of other-worldliness even when engaged in the most mundane activities. They were the specialists on another peculiar state of awareness they called 'dreaming in worlds other than this world.' I was told that this was the most complex state of awareness women could reach.
When the dreamers and the stalkers worked together, the stalkers were like a protective, hard, outer layer that hid a deep core. The dreamers were that deep core: They were like a soft matrix that cushioned the hard, outer layer.
During those days in the witches' house, I was taken care of as if I were their most precious concern: They cossetted and fussed over me as if I were a baby. They cooked me my favorite foods. They made me the most elegant and well-fitting clothes I had ever had. They showered me with presents, outright silly things and valuable jewels, which they put away, waiting for the day I would wake up, they said.
There were two more women in the sorcerers' world. They were both stalkers: two fat girls, Martha and Teresa. Both were lovely to look at and had glorious appetites to match. Not that they fooled anyone, but they kept a cache of cookies, chocolates, and assorted candies hidden in a secret compartment in the pantry. To my great delight, they made me privy from the very beginning to their secret cache and encouraged me to dip freely into it, which, of course, I did.
Martha was the older of the two. She was in her mid-twenties, an exotic blend of German and Indian blood. Her color, if not altogether white, was pale. Her luxurious black hair was soft and wavy and framed a high-cheeked, broad face. Her slanted eyes were a brilliant green-blue, and her ears were small and delicate, like a cat's, soft and almost rosily transparent.
Martha was given to long, sorrowful sighs- Germanic, she claimed- and to moody silences, a heritage of her Indian soul. She had recently begun to take lessons on the violin, which she would practice at any hour of the day. Instead of anyone criticizing her or getting angry, they unanimously agreed that Martha had a great ear for music.
Teresa was barely five feet tall, but her bulk made her seem much taller. Rather than looking Mexican, she looked like an Indian from India. Her flawless skin was a rich, creamy light brown. Her almond-shaped eyes, liquid and dark, were framed by long, curly lashes, so heavy they kept her lids low, giving her a dreamy, far-away expression. Her gentleness and sweet disposition made one want to protect her.
Teresa was artistic, too. She painted watercolors late in the afternoon. With her easel before her, her brushes and tray with paint and water at the ready, she would sit for hours in the yard, waiting for the light and shadows to be just right. Then, with Zen-like control and fluidity, she would dash across the page with her paint-dipped brushes.
The bulk of my hidden memories had surfaced. I was exhausted. The rhythm of Florinda's faint snoring rising and falling across the room like a distant echo was mesmerizing.
When I opened my eyes, the first thing I did was to call out her name. She didn't answer.
The bed was empty. The yellow sheet, tucked tightly under the mattress, showed no evidence that anyone had sat, let alone slept, there. The two pillows were back to their usual position- plopped against the wall- and the blanket she had used was stacked with the others on the floor.
Eagerly, I searched the apartment for a clue, some indication that she had indeed been there.
I found nothing, not even a long grey hair in the bathroom.