HTML EDITOR:
"It's very hard to teach something so unsubstantial as dreaming," Esperanza said. "Especially to women.
"We women are extremely coy and clever: After all, we've been slaves all our lives.
"We know how to precisely manipulate things when we don't want anything to upset what we have worked so hard to obtain: our status quo."
...
Esperanza explained, "To reach a point of detachment, where the self is just an idea that can be changed at will, is a true act of sorcery; and the most difficult of all.
"When the idea of the self retreats, sorcerers have the energy to align themselves with intent and be more than what we believe is normal.
END HTML EDITOR
The caretaker was dozing on his favorite bench in the shade of the zapote tree.
That's all he had been doing for the past two days.
He no longer swept the patios or raked the leaves outside but instead sat for hours on that bench, dozing or staring into the distance, as if he had a secret understanding with something that only he could see.
Everything had changed in the house.
'Did I do wrong to come to see them?' I asked myself incessantly. I felt, as usual, guilty and defensive.
All I did was to sleep uninterrupted for hours on end.
When awake, however, I was disturbingly aware that nothing was the same.
Aimlessly, I wandered about the house, but it was to no avail. Something seemed to have fled from the house.
The caretaker's long and loud sigh intruded on my thoughts.
Unable to contain my anxiety any longer, I pushed my book aside, rose to my feet, and covered the short distance between us.
"Won't you rake and burn some leaves today?" I asked.
He looked up, startled, but did not answer.
He was wearing sunglasses. I couldn't see the expression in his eyes through the dark lenses.
I didn't know whether to stay or to leave or to wait for his reply.
Afraid he might doze off again, I asked in a loud, impatient tone, "Is there a reason why you aren't raking and burning leaves any longer?"
He parried my question with one of his own, "Have you seen or heard a leaf fall for the past two days?"
His eyes seemed to drill through me as he lifted his glasses.
It was the seriousness of his tone and demeanor rather than his statement which I found ridiculous; that compelled me to answer. "No," I said.
He beckoned to me to sit beside him on the bench.
Leaning close to me, he whispered in my ear, "These trees know exactly when to let go of their leaves."
He glanced all around him, as if he were afraid we might be overheard, then added in that same confidential whisper, "And now the trees know that there's no need for their leaves to fall."
"Leaves wilt and fall, regardless of anything," I pronounced pompously. "It's a law of nature."
"These trees are utterly capricious," he maintained stubbornly. "They have a mind of their own. They don't follow the laws of nature."
"What has prompted the trees not to drop any leaves?" I asked, trying to keep an earnest expression.
"That's a good question," he mused, rubbing his chin thoughtfully:
"I'm afraid I don't know the answer yet. The trees haven't told me."
He smiled at me inanely and added, "I've already told you, these trees are temperamental."
Before I had a chance to retort, he asked, out of the blue, "Did you make yourself your lunch?"
His abrupt change of subject took me by surprise.
"I did," I admitted, then hesitated for a moment.
An almost defiant mood took hold of me. "I don't care all that much about food. I'm quite used to eating the same food day in and day out. If it weren't for the fact that I get pimples, I would live on chocolates and nuts."
Throwing all caution to the winds, I began to complain.
I told the caretaker that I wished the women would talk to me. "I would appreciate if they'd let me know what is going on. Anxiety is taking its toll on me."
After I had said all I wanted to say, I felt much better; much relieved.
"Is it true that they are leaving forever?" I asked.
"They have already left forever," the caretaker said.
Seeing my noncomprehending expression, he added, "But you knew that, didn't you? You're just making conversation with me, aren't you?"
Before I had a chance to recover from my shock, he asked me in a genuinely puzzled tone, "Why should this be shocking to you?"
He paused for a moment, as if to give me time to think, then answered the question himself. "Ah, I've got it!
"You are furious because they took Isidore Baltazar with them." He patted me repeatedly on my back, as though to emphasize each word.
His gaze told me that he didn't care if I gave in to either anger or tears.
To know that I had no audience gave me an instantaneous sense of equanimity.
"I didn't know that," I murmured. "I swear, I didn't know it."
I stared at him in mute despair.
I felt all the blood drain from my face. My knees ached. My chest was so tight I couldn't breathe.
Knowing that I was about to faint, I held on to the bench with both hands.
I heard the caretaker's voice like a distant sound. "No one nows if he'll ever be back. Not even I know that."
Leaning toward me, he added, "My personal opinion is that he has gone with them temporarily, but he'll come back; if not right away, some day. That's my opinion."
I searched his eyes, wondering whether he was mocking me.
His cheerful face radiated sheer goodwill and honesty, and his eyes were as guileless as a child's.
"However, when he returns, he won't be Isidore Baltazar anymore," the caretaker warned me. "The Isidore Baltazar you knew, think is already gone.
"And do you know what's the saddest part?" He paused, then answered his own question. "You took him so for granted that you didn't even thank him for all his care; his help, his affection for you.
"Our great tragedy is to be buffoons, oblivious to anything else, except our buffoonery."
I was too devastated to say a word.
Abruptly, the caretaker rose to his feet.
Without another word, as if he were too embarrassed to stay with me, he walked toward the path that led to the other house.
"You can't just leave me here by myself," I shouted after him.
He turned, waved at me, and then began to laugh. It was a loud, joyful sound that raised echoes across the chaparral.
He waved once again, then vanished, as if the bushes had swallowed him.
Incapable of following him, I waited for him to return or to appear suddenly in front of me and scare me half to death. I was almost bracing myself for a fright I intuited in my body more than I anticipated in my mind.
As it had happened before, I didn't see or hear Esperanza approach, but I sensed her presence.
I turned around and there she was, sitting on the bench under the zapote tree.
I became elated just watching her.
"I thought I was never going to see you again," I sighed. "I had nearly resigned myself to it. I thought you were gone."
"Goodness gracious!" she chided me in mock consternation.
"Are you really Zuleica?" I blurted out.
"Not a chance," she retorted. "I am Esperanza.
"What are you doing? Driving yourself nuts with questions no one can answer?"
Never in my life have I been so close to a total breakdown as at that moment.
I felt that my mind was not going to take in all that pressure. I was going to be ripped apart by my anguish and turmoil.
"Brace yourself, girl," Esperanza said harshly. "The worst is yet to come.
"But we can't spare you. To stop the pressure now, because you're about to go bonkers, is unthinkable to sorcerers.
"It's your challenge to be tested today. You either live or you die; and I don't mean this metaphorically."
"I'll never see Isidore Baltazar?" I asked, hardly able to speak through my tears.
"I can't lie to you to spare your feelings.
"No, he'll never be back.
"Isidore Baltazar was only a moment of sorcery. A dream that passed after being dreamed. Isidore Baltazar, as the dream, is gone already."
A small, almost wistful smile curved her lips. "What I don't know yet," she continued, "is if the man, the new nagual, is gone forever as well.
"You understand, of course, that even if he returns, he won't be Isidore Baltazar. He'll be someone else you have to meet all over again."
"Would he be unknown to me?" I asked, not quite sure whether I wanted to know.
"I don't know, my child," she said with the weariness of uncertainty. "I simply don't know.
"I am a dream myself; and so is the new nagual.
"Dreams like us are impermanent, for it is our impermanence that allows us to exist.
"Nothing holds us, except the dream."
Blinded by my tears, I could barely see her.
"To ease your pain, sink deeper into yourself," she said softly:
"Sit up with your knees raised and grab your ankles with crossed arms, right ankle with the left hand. Put your head on your knees and let the sadness go.
"Let the earth soothe your pain. Let the earth's healing force come to you."
I sat on the ground in exactly the manner she prescribed.
Within moments my sadness vanished.
A deep bodily sensation of well-being replaced my anguish.
I lost sight of myself, in any context except the context of the moment at hand. Without my subjective memory I had no pain.
Esperanza patted the place beside her on the bench.
As soon as I was seated, she took my hand in hers and rubbed it for an instant as if she were massaging it, then said that it was quite a fleshy hand for being so bony.
She turned the palm up and studied it intently. She didn't say a word, but gently curled my hand into a fist.
We sat in silence for a long time. It was late afternoon. Nothing could be heard but the rhythmic sound of leaves moved by the breeze.
As I stared at her, a most uncanny certainty possessed me: I knew that Esperanza and I had already talked at length about my coming to the witches' house and the sorcerers' departure.
"What is it with me, Esperanza?" I asked. "Am I dreaming?"
"Well," she began slowly. There was a gleam in her eyes as she proposed I test the dream. "Sit on the ground and test it."
I did. All I felt was the coldness of the rock I had sat on. No feeling was sent back to me.
"I'm not dreaming," I asserted. "Then why do I feel that we've already talked?"
I searched her face to see if I could find a clue to my dilemma stamped on her features.
"This is the first time I've seen you since my arrival, but I feel we've been together every day," I mumbled, more to myself than to be heard. "It's been seven days now."
"It's been much longer. But you must resolve this puzzle yourself, with minimal help," Esperanza said.
I nodded in agreement.
There was so much I wanted to ask, but I knew and accepted that it would be useless to talk. I knew without knowing how I knew it that we had already covered all my questions. I was saturated with answers.
Esperanza regarded me thoughtfully, as if she doubted my realization.
Then, very slowly, enunciating her words carefully, she said, "I want you to know that the awareness you have gotten here, no matter how deep and permanent it may seem to you, is only temporary.
"You'll get back to your nonsense soon enough. That's our women's fate; to be especially difficult."
"I think you are wrong," I protested. "You don't know me at all."
"It's precisely because I know you that I'm saying this."
She paused for a moment, and when she spoke again her voice was harsh and serious. "Women are very cagey. Remember, being reared to be a servant makes you extremely shifty and clever."
Her explosive, resonant laughter erased any desire I might have had to protest.
"The best thing you can do is not to say anything," she declared.
Taking my hand, she pulled me up and suggested that we go to the small house for a long, much-needed talk.
We didn't go inside the house but sat down on a bench by the front door.
Silently, we just sat there for nearly an hour.
Then Esperanza turned toward me: She didn't seem to see me. In fact, I wondered if she had forgotten that I had come with her and was sitting beside her.
Without acknowledging my presence, she stood up and moved a few steps away from me and gazed at the other house, nestled among a clump of trees. It was quite a while before she said, "I'm going far."
I couldn't tell whether it was hope, excitement, or apprehension that gave me a strangely sickening sensation in the pit of my stomach.
I knew that she wasn't referring to distance in terms of miles but in terms of other worlds.
"I don't care how far we're going," I said with a bravado I was far from feeling.
I desperately wished to know, but didn't dare ask, what would be at the end of our journey.
Esperanza smiled and opened her arms wide as if to embrace the setting sun.
The sky in the west was a fiery red; the distant mountains, a shadowy purple. A light breeze swept through the trees: The leaves shimmered and rustled.
A silent hour went by, and then all was still. The spell of twilight immobilized everything around us. Every sound and movement ceased: The contours of bushes, trees, and hills were so precisely defined, they appeared to have been etched against the sky.
I moved closer to Esperanza as the shadows crawled up on us and blackened the sky.
The sight of the other silent house, with its lights twinkling like glowworms in the dark, aroused some deeply buried emotion within me.
The emotion wasn't connected to any particular feeling of the moment, but to a vaguely sad, nostalgic memory buried in childhood.
I must have been totally engrossed in my reveries: Suddenly I found, myself walking alongside Esperanza.
My tiredness, my former anxiety, had all vanished.
Filled with an overwhelming sense of vigor, I walked in a kind of ecstasy, a silent happiness, my feet drawn forward but not by my volition alone.
The path we were walking on ended abruptly.
The ground rose and trees stretched high above us. Huge boulders were scattered here and there. From somewhere in the distance came the sound of running water, like a soft, comforting chant.
Sighing with sudden fatigue, I leaned against one of the boulders and wished that this was the end of our journey.
"We haven't reached our destination yet!" Esperanza shouted.
She was already halfway up some rocks and she moved with the agility of a goat.
She didn't wait for me. She didn't even look back to see if I was following her.
My short rest had robbed me of my last strength. Gasping for breath, I slipped repeatedly on the stones as I scrambled after her.
Halfway up, the trail continued around a huge boulder. The dry and brittle vegetation gave way to luscious growth, dark in the early evening light. The air, too, was no longer the same: It was humid and, for me, easier to breathe.
Esperanza moved unerringly along a narrow path: It was full of shadows, full of silences and rustlings.
She knew each of the night's mysterious sounds. She identified each of its pulsating croaks, cries, calls, and hisses.
The path came to an end in front of some steps cut into the rock. The steps led to a concealed mound of stones.
"Pick one," she ordered, "and put it in your pocket."
Worn as smooth as pebbles in a brook, the stones all looked the same at first.
Upon closer examination, however, I discovered that they were all different. Some were so smooth and shiny they appeared to have been polished in a tumbler.
It took me quite some time until I found one I liked.
It was heavy, yet it fit easily in my palm. Its light brown, bulky mass was wedge-shaped and crisscrossed by almost translucent milky veins.
Startled by a noise, I almost dropped the stone. "Someone is following us," I whispered.
"Nobody is following us!" Esperanza exclaimed, with a look halfway between amusement and incredulity.
Seeing me draw back behind a tree, she giggled softly and said that it was probably a toad jumping through the underbrush.
I wanted to tell her that toads don't jump in the darkness, but I wasn't sure it was true. It surprised me that I hadn't just said it with the most absolute certainty; as was my habit.
"Something is wrong with me, Esperanza," I said in an alarmed tone of voice. "I'm not myself."
"There is nothing wrong with you, dear," she assured me absentmindedly. "In fact, you are more yourself than ever."
"I feel strange..." My voice trailed off.
I had begun to see a pattern in what had been happening to me since the first time I arrived at the witches' house.
"It's very hard to teach something so unsubstantial as dreaming," Esperanza said. "Especially to women.
"We women are extremely coy and clever: After all, we've been slaves all our lives.
"We women know how to precisely manipulate things when we don't want anything to upset what we have worked so hard to obtain: our status quo."
"Do you mean that men don't?"
"They certainly do, but they are more overt. Women fight underhandedly.
"Their preferred fighting technique is the slave's maneuver: to turn the mind off.
"They hear without paying attention. They look without seeing."
She added that to instruct women was an accomplishment worthy of praise.
"We like the openness of your fighting," she went on. "There is high hope for you.
"What we fear the most is the agreeable woman who doesn't mind the new, and does everything you ask her to do; then turns around and denounces you as soon as she gets tired or bored with the newness."
"I think I am beginning to understand," I mused uncertainly.
"Of course you have begun to understand!" Her assertion was so comically triumphant, I had to laugh:
"You have even begun to understand what intent is."
"You mean I am beginning to be a sorceress?" I asked.
My whole body shook as I tried to suppress a fit of giggles.
"Since you arrived here, you've been dreaming-awake on and off," Esperanza stated. "That's why you fall asleep so much."
There was no mockery; not even a trace of condescension in her smiling face.
We walked in silence for a while, and then she said that the difference between a sorcerer and an ordinary person was that the sorcerer could enter into a state of dreaming-awake at will.
She tapped my arm repeatedly, as if to emphasize her point, and in a confidential tone added, "And you are dreaming-awake because, in order to help you hone your energy, we have created a bubble around you since the first night you arrived."
Esperanza went on to say that from the moment they first met me, they had nicknamed me Fosforito, little match. "You burn too fast and uselessly."
She gestured for me to remain quiet and added that I didn't know how to focus my energy.
"Your energy is deployed to protect and uphold the idea of yourself."
Again she motioned me to be silent, said that what we think is our personal self is, in actuality, only an idea: She claimed that the bulk of our energy is consumed in defending that idea.
Esperanza's eyebrows lifted a little, an elated grin spreading across her face.
Esperanza explained, "To reach a point of detachment, where the self is just an idea that can be changed at will, is a true act of sorcery; and the most difficult of all.
"When the idea of the self retreats, sorcerers have the energy to align themselves with intent and be more than what we believe is normal.
"Women, because they have a womb, can focus their attention with great facility on something outside their dreams while dreaming," she explained:
"That's precisely what you have been doing all along, unbeknownst to yourself. That object becomes a bridge that connects you to intent."
"And what object do I use?"
There was a flicker of impatience in her eyes. Then she said that it was usually a window or a light or even the bed.
"You're so good at it that it is second nature with you," she assured me:
"That's why you have nightmares.
"I told you all this when you were in a deep state of dreaming-awake, and you understood: As long as you refuse to focus your attention on any object prior to sleeping, you don't have bad dreams.
"You are cured, aren't you?" she asked.
My initial reaction, of course, was to contradict her.
However, upon a moment's thought, I could only agree with her: After my meeting with them in Sonora, I had been fairly free from nightmares.
"You'll never be really free from them as long as you persist in being yourself," she pronounced:
"What you should do, of course, is to exploit your dreaming talents deliberately and intelligently.
"That's why you're here. And the first lesson is that a woman must, through her womb, focus her attention on an object.
"Not an object from the dream itself, but an independent one, one from the world prior to the dream.
"Yet, it isn't the object that matters," she hastened to point out:
"What's important is the deliberate act of focusing on it, at will, prior to the dream and while continuing the dream."
She warned me that although it sounded simple enough, it was a formidable task that might take me years to accomplish.
"What normally happens is that one awakens the instant one focuses one's attention on the outside object," she said.
"What does it mean to use the womb?" I interjected. "And how is it done?"
"You are a woman," Esperanza said softly. "You know how to feel with your womb."
I wanted to contradict her, to explain that I didn't know anything.
Before I could do so, however, she went on to explain that in a woman, feelings originate in the womb.
"In men," she claimed, "feelings originate in the brain."
Esperanza poked me in the stomach and added, "Think about it.
"A woman is heartless except with her brood because her feelings are coming from her womb.
"In order to focus your attention with your womb, get an object and put it on your belly or rub it on your genitalia."
Esperanza laughed uproariously at my look of dismay, then, in between fits of laughter, chided me:
"I wasn't that bad. I could have said that you need to smear the object with your juices, but I didn't.
Her tone serious again, she continued, "Once you establish a deep familiarity with the object it will always be there to serve you as a bridge."
We walked in silence for a stretch, and Esperanza was seemingly deep in thought.
I was itching to say something, yet knew that I didn't have anything to say.
When Esperanza finally spoke, her voice was stern, demanding.
"There is no more time for you to waste," she said:
"It's very natural that in our stupidity we screw things up. Sorcerers know this better than anyone else.
"But sorcerers also know that there are no second chances.
"You must learn control and discipline because you have no more leeway for mistakes.
"You screwed up, you know. You didn't even know that Isidore Baltazar had left."
My ethereal dike that was holding the avalanche of feelings broke down.
My memory was restored and sadness overtook me.
My sadness became so intense that I didn't even notice I had sat and was sinking into the ground as if it were made out of sponge.
Finally, the ground swallowed me.
It was not a suffocating, claustrophobic experience because the sensation of sitting on the surface coexisted simultaneously with the awareness of being swallowed by the earth; a dual sensation that made me yell, "I'm dreaming now!"
That loudly spoken announcement triggered something within me: A new landslide of different memories flooded in on top of me.
I knew what was wrong with me: I had screwed up and had no energy to dream.
Every night since my arrival, I had dreamt the same dream, which I had forgotten about until that very moment.
I dreamt that all the women sorcerers came to my room and drilled me in the sorcerers' rationales.
They told me, on and on, that dreaming is the secondary function of the womb- the primary being reproduction and whatever is related to it.
They told me that dreaming is a natural function in women; a pure corollary of energy.
And given enough energy, the body of a woman by itself will awake the womb's secondary functions; and the woman will dream inconceivable dreams.
The dreaming energy needed, however, is like aid to an underdeveloped country: It never arrives.
Something in the overall order of our social structures prevents that energy from being free so women can dream.
Were that energy free, the women sorcerers told me, it would simply overthrow the 'civilized' order of things.
But women's great tragedy is that their social conscience completely dominates their individual conscience.
Women fear being different and don't want to stray too far from the comforts of the known. The social pressures put upon them not to deviate are simply too overpowering.
And rather than change, women acquiesce to what has been ordained: 'Women exist to be at the service of man.'
Thus, women can never dream sorcery dreams although they have the organic disposition for it.
Womanhood has destroyed women's chances: Whether it be tinted with a religious or a scientific slant, it still brands women with the same seal:
Women's main function is to reproduce, and whether they have achieved a degree of political, social, or economic equality is ultimately immaterial.
The women sorcerers told me all this every night.
The more I remembered and understood their words, the greater was my sorrow.
My grief was no longer for me alone, but for all of us; a race of schizoid beings trapped in a social order that has shackled us to our own incapacities.
If we ever break free, it is only momentarily; a shortlived clarity before we plunge willingly or forced back into the darkness.
"Stop this sentimental garbage," I heard a man's voice say. I looked up and saw the caretaker bending over; peering at me.
"How did you get here?" I asked. I was perplexed and a little flustered:
"You've been following us?" More than a question, it was accusation.
"Yes, I've been following you in particular," he leered at me.
I searched his face. I didn't believe him.
I knew he was poking at me, yet I was neither annoyed nor frightened by the intense glint in his eyes.
"Where is Esperanza?" I asked. She was nowhere in sight. "Where did she...?" I stammered nervously, unable to get the words out.
"She's around," he said, smiling:
"Don't worry. I'm also your teacher. You are in good hands."
Hesitantly, I put my hand in his. Effortlessly, he pulled me up to a flat boulder overlooking a large, oval-shaped pool of water.
The pool was fed by a murmuring stream trickling from somewhere in the darkness.
"And now, take off your clothes," he said. "It's time for your cosmic bath!"
"My what?" Certain that he was joking, I began to laugh.
But he was serious.
He tapped me repeatedly on the arm, just like Esperanza did, and urged me to take off my clothes.
Before I knew what he was doing, he had already untied the laces on my sneakers.
"We don't have all that much time," he admonished, then pressed me to get on with it.
The look he gave me was cold, clinical, impersonal: I might have been the toad Esperanza had claimed was jumping around.
The sheer idea of getting into that dark, cold water, infested, no doubt, with all sorts of slimy creatures, was appalling to me.
Eager to put an end to that preposterous situation, I sidled down the boulder and stuck my toes into the water.
"I don't feel a thing!" I cried out, shrinking back in horror. "What's going on? This is not water!"
"Don't be childish," the caretaker scolded me. "Of course it's water. You just don't feel it, that's all."
I opened my mouth to let out an imprecation but controlled myself in time. My horror had vanished.
"Why don't I feel the water?" I asked, trying hard to gain time.
I knew that stalling for time was a useless affair because I had no doubt that I was going to end up in the water whether I felt the water or not. However, I had no intention of giving in gracefully.
"Is this waterless water some kind of a purification liquid?" I asked.
After a long silence, charged with menacing possibilities, he said that I might call it a purification liquid.
He emphasized, "However, I should warn you that there isn't a ritual capable of purifying anyone.
"Purification has to come from within. It's a private and lonely struggle."
"Then why do you want me to get into this water, which is slimy even if I don't feel it?" I said with all the force I could invoke.
His lips twitched as if he were about to laugh, but seemingly reluctant to give in, his face grew grave again, and he said, "I'm going to dive into that pool with you."
And without any further hesitation he completely undressed.
He stood in front of me, barely five feet away, stark naked.
In that strange light that was neither day nor night, I could see with utter clarity every inch of his body.
He didn't make bashful attempts to cover his nakedness.
Quite the opposite; he seemed to be more than proud of his maleness and paraded it in front of me with defiant insolence.
"Hurry up and take off your clothes," he urged me. "We don't have much time."
"I'm not going to do that. It's insane!" I protested.
"You are going to do that.
"It's a decision you'll make all by yourself."
He spoke without vehemence, without anger, yet with quiet determination.
"Tonight, in this strange world, you will know that there is only one way to behave: the sorcerers' way."
He stared at me with a curious mixture of compassion and amusement.
With a grin that was meant to reassure me but didn't, the caretaker said that jumping into the pool would jolt me.
It would shift something within me. "This shift will serve you, at a later time, to understand what we are and what we do."
A fleeting smile lit up his face as he hastened to point out that jumping into the water would not give me the energy to dream-awake on my own.
He warned me that it would certainly take a long time to save and hone my energy, and that I might never succeed.
"There are no guarantees in the sorcerers' world," he said.
Then he conceded that jumping into the pool might shift my attention away from my everyday concerns: the concerns expected of a woman of my age; of my time.
"Is this a sacred pool?" I asked.
His brows shot up in obvious surprise. "It's a sorcerers' pool," he explained, gazing at me steadily.
He must have seen that my decision had been made, for he unfastened the watch around my wrist.
"The pool is neither holy nor evil."
He shrugged his thin shoulders and fastened my watch around his own wrist.
"Now look at your watch," he ordered me. "It's been yours for many years. Feel it on my wrist."
He chuckled as he started to say something and decided against it. "Well, go on, take off your clothes."
"I think I'll just wade in with my clothes on," I mumbled.
Although I wasn't prudish, I somehow resisted the idea of standing naked in front of him.
He pointed out that I would need dry clothes when I got out of the water. "I don't want you to catch pneumonia."
A wicked smile dawned in his eyes. "This is real water even though you don't feel it," he said.
Reluctantly, I took off my jeans and shirt.
"Your panties too," he said.
I walked around the grassy edge of the pool, wondering whether I should just dive in and get it over with or whether I should get wet little by little, cupping water in my hands, letting it trickle down my legs, my arms, my stomach, and, last, over my heart, as I remembered old women doing in Venezuela before wading into the sea.
"Here I go!" I cried out, but instead of jumping in I turned to look at the caretaker.
His immobility frightened me.
He seemed to have turned into stone, so still and erect did he sit on the boulder.
Only his eyes seemed to have life: They shone in a curiously compelling way, without any source of light to account for it.
It astounded more than saddened me to see tears trickling down his cheeks.
Without knowing why, I, too, began to weep, silently.
His tears made their way down, I thought, into my watch on his wrist.
I felt the eerie weight if his conviction, and suddenly my fear and my indecision were gone, and I dove into the pool.
The water was not slimy but transparent like silk; and green.
I wasn't cold. As the caretaker had claimed, I didn't feel the water.
In fact, I didn't feel anything: It was as if I were a disembodied awareness swimming in the center of a pool of water that did feel liquid but not wet.
I noticed that light emanated from the depths of the water.
I jumped up like a fish to gather impetus, then dove in search if the light.
I came up for air. "How deep is this pool?"
"As deep as the center of the earth." Esperanza's voice was clear and loud; it carried such certainty that, just to be myself, I wanted to contradict her.
But there was something uneasy in the air that stopped me; some unnatural stillness, some tension that was suddenly broken by a crisp, rustling sound all around us; a sort of warning whisper; a rushing, ominous warning that something was odd.
Standing on the exact same spot where the caretaker had stood was Esperanza. She was stark naked.
"Where is the caretaker?" I shouted in a panic-stricken voice.
"I am the caretaker," she said.
Convinced that those two were playing some horrendous trick on me, I propelled myself, with one great sidestroke, toward the overhanging boulder Esperanza was standing on.
"What's going on?" I demanded to know in a voice that was but a whisper, for I could hardly breathe.
Gesturing for me to remain still, she moved toward me with that boneless, uncoiling movement so characteristic of her.
She craned her neck to look at me, then stepped closer and showed me my watch strapped around her wrist.
"I am the caretaker," she repeated.
I nodded automatically.
But then, right there in front of me, instead of Esperanza, was the caretaker, naked as he had been before, pointing at my watch on his wrist.
I didn't look at the watch: All my attention was focused on his sexual organs.
I reached out to touch him, to see if perhaps he was a hermaphrodite. He wasn't.
With my hand still probing, I felt, more than saw, his body fold into itself, and I was touching a woman's vagina.
I parted the lips to make sure the penis was not hidden somewhere in there.
"Esperanza..." My voice faded as something clamped around my neck.
I was conscious of the water parting as something pulled me into the depths of the pool.
I felt cold. It wasn't a physical coldness but rather the awareness of the absence of warmth, of light, of sound; the absence of any human feeling in that world where that pool existed.
I awoke to the faint sound of snoring: Zuleica was sleeping beside me on a straw mat laid on the ground. She looked as beautiful as ever, young and strong, yet vulnerable- unlike the other women sorcerers- in spite of the harmony and power she exuded.
I watched her for a moment then sat up as all the events of the night came flooding into my mind. I wanted to shake her awake and demand that she tell me what had happened, when I noticed that we were not by the pool up in the hills but in the exact same spot where we had been sitting earlier, by the front door of the real witches' house.
Wondering whether it had all been a dream, I gently shook her by the shoulder.
"Ah, you finally woke up," she murmured sleepily.
"What happened?" I asked. "You have to tell me everything."
"Everything?" she repeated, yawning noisily.
"Everything that happened at the pool," I snapped impatiently.
Again she yawned, and then she giggled. Studying my watch, which was on her wrist, she said that something in me had shifted more than she had anticipated. "The sorcerers' world has a natural barrier that dissuades timid souls," she explained. "Sorcerers need tremendous strength to handle it. You see, it's populated by monsters, flying dragons, and demonic beings, which, of course, are nothing but impersonal energy. We, driven by our fears, make that impersonal energy into hellish creatures."
"But what about Esperanza and the caretaker?" I interrupted her. "I dreamt that both were really you."
"They are," she said, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. "I've just told you. You shifted deeper than I anticipated and entered into what dreamers call dreaming in worlds other than this world.
"You and I were dreaming in a different world. That's why you didn't feel the water. That's the world where the nagual Elias found all his inventions. In that world, I can be either a man or a woman. And just like the nagual Elias brought his inventions to this world, I bring either Esperanza or the caretaker. Or rather, my impersonal energy does that."
I couldn't put my thoughts or feelings into words. An incredible urge to run away screaming took hold of me, but I couldn't put it into action. My motor control was no longer a volitional matter with me. Trying to rise and scream, I collapsed on the ground.
Zuleica wasn't in the least concerned or moved by my condition. She went on talking as if she hadn't seen my knees give, as if I weren't lying sprawled on the ground like a rag doll. "You're a good dreamer. After all, you've been dreaming with monsters all your life. Now it's time you acquired the energy to dream like sorcerers do, to dream about impersonal energy."
I wanted to interrupt her, to tell her that there was nothing impersonal about my dream of Esperanza and the caretaker; that, in fact, it was worse than the monsters of my nightmares, but I couldn't speak.
"Tonight, your watch brought you back from the deepest dream you have ever had," Zuleica continued, indifferent to the weird sounds emerging from my throat. "And you even have a rock to prove it."
She came to where I lay openmouthed, staring at her. She felt in my pocket. She was right. There it was; the rock I had picked from the pile of stones.