Version 2007.03.13

## “Being in Dreaming: An Initiation into the Sorcerers' World” - ©1991 by Florinda Donner

### Chapter 13

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With great equanimity, he said, ""Nothing these sorcerers do is just to entertain themselves, or to impress someone, or to give way to their compulsiveness. Everything they do or say has a reason- a purpose."

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Whenever I was fully awake, I didn't quite remember about those lost days, except that I knew, with absolute certainty, that they were not lost. Something had happened to me during that time; something with an inward meaning that escaped me.

I didn't make a conscious effort to recapture all those vague memories. I simply knew they were there half-hidden like people one knows slightly but whose names one can't exactly recall.

I have never been a good sleeper, but from that night on- since Florinda's appearance at Isidore Baltazar's studio- I went to sleep at all hours just to dream.

I simply passed out every time I lay down, and slept for inordinately long stretches of time. I even put on weight, which unfortunately didn't go to the right places.

Yet I never dreamt with the sorcerers.

One afternoon I awoke abruptly to a loud clatter. Isidore Baltazar had dropped the kettle in the sink. My head hurt, my eyes were blurred. I had the immediate memory of a terrible dream that just as quickly escaped recall. I was sweating heavily.

"It's all your fault," I yelled at him. "If you would only help me, I wouldn't be sleeping my life away." I wanted to rant, to give in to my frustration and impatience. But it suddenly flashed through my mind that I couldn't do that because I could no longer enjoy my complaining as I used to.

His face was radiant with pleasure, as though I had spoken my thoughts out loud. He grabbed his chair, sat astride it, and said, "You know that I cannot help you. Women have a different dreaming avenue. I can't even conceive what women do to dream."

"You ought to know, with so many women in your world," I retorted churlishly.

He laughed: Nothing seemed to alter his good spirits.

"I can't even begin to conceive what women do to dream," he went on:

"Males have to struggle incessantly to arrange their attention in dreams: Women don't struggle, but they do have to acquire inner discipline."

His smile was brilliant as he added, "There is one thing that might help you. Don't approach dreaming in your usual compulsive manner. Let it come to you."

I opened and closed my mouth, then quickly my astonishment turned to rage. My former insight forgotten, I put on my shoes and stomped out in a huff, making sure to bang the door behind me. His laughter followed me all the way to my car in the parking lot below.

Dejected, feeling utterly unloved, alone, and above all, sorry for myself, I drove to the beach. It was deserted. It was raining at the beach. There was no wind, and the rain fell very gently, very straight.

There was something peaceful about the hushed sound of the lapping waves and the rain hitting the water. I took off my shoes, tucked up my pants, and walked until I was washed clean of my indulgent moods.

I knew that I was rid of them because I heard from the whispering, lapping waves Florinda's words, "It's a solitary fight."

I wasn't threatened: I simply accepted that I was indeed alone; and it was this acquiescence that brought me the conviction of what I had to do. And since I am not one to wait, I acted immediately.

After leaving a note under Isidore Baltazar's door- I didn't want him to talk me out of it- I set out for the witches' house. I drove all night, all the way to Tucson. I checked in at a motel, slept most of the day, then late in the afternoon set out again, taking the same route Isidore Baltazar had followed on our return trip.

My sense of direction is poor, yet that route is imprinted deep within me. With a baffling assurance, I knew exactly what roads to take; where to turn. I reached the witches' house in no time at all. I didn't bother to check my watch, for I didn't want to lose the feeling that no time had elapsed between the time I got into my car in Tucson and my arrival at the witches' house.

That there was no one at the house didn't bother me in the least. I was aware that no direct, formal invitation had been extended to me; but I remembered clearly that Nelida had told me, as she hid in a drawer a small basket with the gifts they had all given me, that I should come back any time I wished.

Nelida's words rang in my ears: "Day or night, this basket will pull you safely in."

With an assurance that ordinarily only comes from practice, I went directly to the room Esperanza had given me. The white, flouncy hammock was ready, as if waiting for me.

A vague uneasiness finally took hold of me, but I wasn't nearly as scared as I should have been. Not quite relaxed, I lowered myself in the hammock, one leg outside to rock myself back and forth.

"To hell with my fears," I cried out and pulled my leg in and stretched out luxuriously like a cat until all my joints cracked.

"Oh, you've made it back safely," a voice said to me from the corridor.

I didn't see her and I didn't necessarily recognize her voice, yet I knew it was Nelida. I waited expectantly for her to come in, but she didn't.

"Your food is in the kitchen," I heard her say. Her steps moved away from my door, down the corridor.

I jumped up and dashed after her. "Wait, wait, Nelida!" I shouted.

There was no one in the hall or in the rooms I passed on my way to the kitchen. There was no one in the whole house, for that matter. Yet, I was sure they were there. I heard their voices, their laughter, the clatter of dishes, of pots and pans.

I spent the next few days in a perpetual state of anticipation, waiting for something significant to occur.

I couldn't imagine what was supposed to happen, but I knew that it had to be connected with the women.

For some unfathomable reason, the women didn't want to be seen. Their astoundingly furtive behavior kept me in the corridors it all hours, prowling noiselessly, like a shadow.

Regardless of the ingeniously sneaky schemes I devised to surprise the women, I never caught so much as a glimpse of them. They glided in and out of their rooms, in and out of the house, as if in between worlds, leaving in their wake the sound of their voices and laughter.

Sometimes I wondered whether the women were indeed there; whether the sounds of footsteps, of murmurs and giggles, were but figments of my imagination.

Whenever I was about to believe it was my imagination, I would hear one of them tinkering on the patio. Then, seized by renewed fervor, expectation, and excitement, I would run to the back of the house, only to discover that once again I had been outwitted.

At those times I was convinced that the women, being real witches, had some kind of a bat-like internal echo location system that alerted them to my sounds.

My disappointment at not being able to catch them in front of the stove always vanished at the sight of the exotic little meals they left behind for me. The deliciousness of the dishes amply compensated for the meagerness of the portions. With great gusto I ate their wonderful food. Yet I was still hungry.

One day just before twilight, I heard a man's voice softly calling my name from the back of the house. I jumped out of my hammock and ran down the corridor. I was so glad to see the caretaker, I nearly jumped on him like a dog does. Unable to contain my joy, I kissed him on the cheeks.

"Watch out, nibelunga." He said this in the same voice and manner of Isidore Baltazar. I sprang back, my eyes wide with surprise. He winked at me and added, "Don't get carried away, because the next thing you know, you'll be taking advantage of me."

For an instant I didn't know what to make of his words. But then he laughed, and patted my back reassuringly. I completely relaxed.

"It's good to see you," he said softly.

"It's wonderful to see you!" I giggled self-consciously, then asked him where everybody else was.

"Oh, they are around," he said vaguely. "At the moment they are mysteriously inaccessible, but ever present." Seeing my disappointment he added, "Have patience."

"I know they are around," I murmured. "They leave food for me." I glanced over my shoulder to ham it up and confided, "But I'm still hungry. The portions are too little."

According to the caretaker, this was the natural condition of power food: One could never get enough of it. He said that he cooked his own food- rice and beans with either chunks of pork, beef, or chicken- and ate only once a day but never at the same hour.

He took me then to his quarters. He lived in the large, cluttered room behind the kitchen, amidst the odd wood and iron sculptures, where the air, thick with the scents of jasmine and eucalyptus, hung heavy and motionless around the drawn curtains. He slept on a cot, which he kept folded in the armoire when it was not in use, and ate his meal at a small chippendale table with spindly legs.

He confided that he, like the mysterious women, disliked routines. Day or night, morning or afternoon, was all the same to him.

He swept the patios and raked the leaves outside the clearing whenever he felt like doing so. Whether there were blossoms or leaves on the ground was immaterial.

In the days that followed, I had a hellish time trying to adjust to this seemingly unstructured way of life. Out of compulsion, rather than out of any desire to be useful, I helped the caretaker with his chores. Also, I invariably accepted his invitations to share his meals. His food was as delicious as his company.

Convinced that he was more than the caretaker, I did my best to get him off-guard with my devious questions; a useless technique, for I never got any satisfactory answers.

"Where do you come from?" I bluntly asked him one day while we were eating.

He looked up from his plate, and as if he had been expecting an outright interrogation, he dutifully pointed to the mountains toward the east, framed by the open window like a painting.

"The Bacatete Mountains?" My voice betrayed my disbelief. "But you're not an Indian," I mumbled disconcertedly. "The way I see it, only the nagual Mariano Aureliano, Delia Flores, and Genaro Flores are Indians."

Emboldened by the surprised, expectant look on his face, I added that, in my opinion, Esperanza transcended racial categories. I leaned across the table and in a secretive tone confided to him what I had already told Florinda. "Esperanza wasn't born like a human being. She was established by an act of witchcraft. She is the very devil."

Leaning back in his chair, the caretaker shrieked with joy. "And what do you have to say about Florinda? Did you know she's French? Or rather, her parents were French. They were from the families that came to Mexico with Maximilian and Carlota."

"She's very beautiful," I murmured, trying to remember when, exactly, in the eighteen hundreds the Austrian prince was sent by Napoleon to Mexico.

"You haven't seen her when she's all dolled up," the caretaker gushed. "She's something else. Age means nothing to her."

"Carmela told me that I am like Florinda," I said in a fit of vanity and wishful thinking.

Propelled by the laughter bubbling up inside him, the caretaker sprang up from his chair. "That'll be the day." He said the words with no particular feeling, as though he didn't care in the least how they would be received.

Irritated by his remark; his lack of feeling, I glared at him with ill-concealed animosity. Then, eager to change the subject, I asked him about the nagual Mariano Aureliano. "Where exactly does he come from?"

"Who knows where naguals come from?" he muttered, moving toward the window.

For a long while he gazed at the distant mountains, then he turned toward me once again and said, "Some people say that naguals come from hell itself. I believe it. Some people say that naguals are not even human." Again he paused, and I wondered if the long silence was to be repeated.

As if sensing my impatience, he came to sit beside me and added, "If you ask me, I'd say that naguals are superhuman. That's the reason they know everything about human nature. You can't lie to a nagual. They see through you. They see through anything. They even see through space to other worlds in this world, and to other worlds out of this world."

I moved uneasily in my chair, wishing he would stop talking. I regretted engaging him in this conversation. There was no doubt in my mind that the man was insane.

"No, I'm not insane," he assured me, and I let out a loud shriek.

"I'm saying things that you've never heard before, that's all."

Feeling oddly on the defensive, I blinked repeatedly. But my uneasiness gave me a surge of courage, and I asked him point blank, "Why are they hiding from me?"

"It's obvious," he shot back, then seeing that it wasn't at all obvious to me, he added, "You should know it. You and your kind are the crew, not me. I'm not one of them. I'm merely the caretaker. I oil the machine."

"You're getting me more confused than I was," I muttered, irritated. Then a momentary flash of insight hit me. "Who are the crew you are referring to?"

"All the women you met the last time you were here. The dreamers and the stalkers. They told me that the stalkers are your kind, and you are one of them."

He poured himself a glass of water and went with it to the window. He took a few sips then informed me that the nagual Mariano Aureliano had tried out my stalking abilities in Tucson, Arizona, when he sent me into the coffee shop to put a cockroach in my food. The caretaker turned his back to the window, looked straight into my face, and added, "You failed."

"I don't want to hear about that nonsense," I cut him short. I had no desire to hear the rest of the story.

His face crinkled with mischief. "But then, after your failure, you exonerated yourself by kicking and yelling at the nagual Mariano Aureliano without shame or regard. Stalkers," he stressed, "are people who have a knack for dealing with people."

I opened my mouth to say that I didn't understand a word he was saying, but quickly shut it again.

"What has been baffling," he went on, "is that you are a great dreamer. If it wouldn't be for that, you'd be like Florinda- less the height and the looks, of course."

Smiling venomously, I cursed the old creep silently.

"Do you remember how many women were there at the picnic?" he asked all of a sudden.

I closed my eyes to better visualize the picnic. I clearly saw six women sitting on the canvas cloth, spread out under the eucalyptus trees. Esperanza wasn't there, but Carmela, Zoila, Delia, and Florinda were.

"Who were the other two?" I asked, more mystified than ever.

"Ah," he murmured appreciatively, a brilliant smile creasing his face. "Those two were dreamers from another world. You saw them clearly, but then they disappeared, and your mind didn't acknowledge their vanishing because it was simply too outlandish."

I nodded absentmindedly, unable to conceive that I had actually seen only four women, when I knew that there had been six.

The thought must have seeped through to him, for he said that it was only natural to have focused on the four. "The other two are your source of energy. They are incorporeal and not from this world."

Lost and bewildered, all I could do was stare at him: I had no more questions to ask.

"Since you are not in the planet of the dreamers," he clarified, "your dreams are nightmares, and your transitions between dreams and reality are very unstable and dangerous to you and to the other dreamers. So Florinda has taken it upon herself to buffer and protect you."

I rose with such impetus my chair turned over. "I don't want to know anything else!" I cried out. Just in time, I stopped myself from blurting out that I was better off not knowing about their mad ways and rationales.

The caretaker took me by the hand and walked with me outside, across the clearing, across the chaparral to the back of the small house.

"I need you to help me with the generator," he said. "It needs fixing."

I laughed out loud and told him that I didn't know anything about generators. Only when he opened the trap door of a concrete encasement did I realize that the electric current for the lights in the house was generated there. I had completely taken for granted that the electrical lights and appliances of rural Mexico were like those I was familiar with.

From that day on, I tried not to ask him too many questions. I felt that I was not prepared for his answers. Our meetings acquired the nature of a ritual in which I did my best to match the old man's exquisite usage of the Spanish language. I spent hours pouring over the various dictionaries in my room, searching for new and often archaic words with which to impress him.

One afternoon, as I was waiting for the caretaker to bring in the food- it was the first time since I discovered his room that I was alone in it- I remembered the old, strange mirror. I carefully examined its spotty, misty surface.

"You'll get trapped in the mirror if you look at yourself too much," a voice behind me said.

Expecting to see the caretaker, I turned around, but there was no one in the room.

In my eagerness to reach the door, I almost knocked over the wood and iron sculpture behind me.

Automatically, I reached out to steady it, but before I so much as touched it, the figure seemed to spin away from me in an odd circular motion, then came to its original position with an astonishingly human sigh.

"What's the matter?" the caretaker asked, stepping into the room. He placed a large tray on the rickety table and, looking up into my ashen face, asked once more what was wrong with me.

"Sometimes, I've the feeling that these monstrosities are alive, watching me," I said, gesturing with my chin toward the nearby sculpture.

Noticing his grave, unsmiling face, I hastened to reassure him that I didn't mean monstrous in terms of ugliness but rather in terms of being big.

I took several deep, shuddering breaths and repeated that his sculptures gave me the impression of being alive.

Glancing furtively around himself and lowering his voice to a barely audible whisper, he said, "They are alive."

I felt so uncomfortable that I began to babble about the afternoon I first discovered his room; how I had been lured to it by an eerie-sounding murmur that turned out to be the wind pushing the curtain through a broken window.

"Yet at the time I believed it to be a monster," I confided, giggling nervously. "An alien presence feeding on the twilight shadows."

Chewing his lower lip, the caretaker regarded me with keen eyes. Then his gaze drifted unfocused around the room. "We better sit down to eat," he finally said. "We don't want to let our food get cold."

He held out the chair for me, and as soon as I was comfortably seated, he added in a vibrant tone, "You're quite right to call them presences, for they are not sculptures. They are inventions."

He confided in a conspiratorial tone, "They were conceived from patterns glimpsed at in another world, by a great nagual."

"By Mariano Aureliano?" I asked.

He shook his head and said, "By a much older nagual, named Elias."

"Why are these inventions in your room?" I asked. "Did this great nagual make them for you?"

"No," he said. "I only take care of them."

Rising, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a neatly folded white handkerchief and proceeded to dust the nearby invention with it.

"Since I'm the caretaker, it falls upon me to take care of them. One day, with the help of all these sorcerers you've already met, I will deliver these inventions where they belong."

"And where is that?"

"Infinity, the cosmos, the vacuum."

"How do you propose to take them there?"

"Through the same power that got them here in the first place: the power of dreaming-awake."

"If you dream like these sorcerers dream," I began cautiously, trying hard to conceal the triumph in my voice, "then you must also be a sorcerer yourself."

"I am, but I am not like them."

His candid admission confused me. "What's the difference?"

"Ah!" he exclaimed knowingly. "All the difference in the world. But I can't explain it now. If I do, you'd get even more morose and angry. Someday, though, you'll know all about it by yourself, without anyone having to tell you."

I could feel the wheels churning in my head as I desperately tried to come up with something else to say; another question to ask.

"Can you tell me how the nagual Elias came to have the inventions?"

"He saw them in his dreaming and captured them," the caretaker confided.

"Some of them are copies, done by him, of inventions he couldn't cart away.

"Others are the real thing; inventions transported by that great nagual all the way to here."

I didn't believe a word he said, yet I couldn't help but add, "Why did the nagual Elias bring them?"

"Because the inventions themselves asked him to."

"Why did they?"

The caretaker dismissed my probings with a wave of his hand and urged me to eat my food.

His unwillingness to satisfy my curiosity only piqued my interest. I couldn't imagine why he didn't want to talk about the contraptions when he was so good at evasive answers: He could have told me anything.

The instant we finished our meal, he asked me to retrieve his cot from the armoire.

Knowing his preference, I unfolded it for him in front of the curtained French door.

Sighing contentedly, he lay down, resting his head on the rectangular little pillow that was attached to one end of the cot. It was filled with dried beans and maize kernels. According to him, the pillow ensured sweet dreams.

"I'm ready for my nap now," he said, loosening the belt on his pants. It was his polite way of dismissing me.

Peeved by his refusal to talk about the inventions, I piled our plates on the tray and stormed out of the room. His snores followed me all the way to the kitchen.

That night I awoke to the strumming of a guitar. Automatically, I reached for the flashlight I kept beside my low-hanging hammock and checked my watch. It was a bit past midnight. I wrapped my blanket tightly around me and tiptoed out into the corridor that led to the inside patio.

On the patio, sitting on a rush chair, was a man playing a guitar. I couldn't see his face, but I knew it was the same man Isidororo Baltazar and I had seen and heard the first time I was there.

As he had done then, the man stopped playing the moment he saw me. He got up from his chair and went inside the house.

As soon as I was back in my room, his plucking resumed. I was about to doze off when I heard him sing in a clear, strong voice. He sang to the wind, beckoning it to come from across miles of silence and emptiness.

As if responding to his haunting invocation, the wind gathered force. It whistled through the chaparral. It tore the withered leaves from the trees and swept them into rustling heaps against the walls of the house.

On an impulse, I opened the door to the patio. The wind filled the room with an unspeakable sadness, not the sadness of tears but the melancholic solitariness of the desert, of dust and ancient shadows. The wind circled around the room like smoke. I inhaled it with every breath. It sat heavy in my lungs, yet the deeper I breathed, the lighter I felt.

I went outside and, squeezing between the tall bushes, made my way to the back of the house. The white-washed walls caught the moonlight and reflected it brightly onto the windswept ground of the wide clearing.

Afraid I might be seen, I darted from fruit tree to fruit tree, hiding in the dark shadows cast by the moonlight until I reached the two blooming orange trees outside the wall guarding the path to the little house.

The wind brought the sound of giggles and dim murmurings from across the chaparral. Daringly, I dashed along the path, only to lose my nerve once I reached the front door of the small, dark house.

Quivering with excitement, I inched my way to an open window. I recognized Delia's and Florinda's voices, but the window was too high for me to see what the women were doing.

I listened, expecting to hear something profound; to be transported by some mind-shattering revelation that would help me resolve what I had come there for- my inability to dream.

But I only heard gossip. I became so engrossed in their malicious insinuations that I laughed out loud several times, forgetting that I was eavesdropping.

At first I thought they were gossiping about outsiders, but then I realized they were talking about the women dreamers, and their most insidious remarks were directed against Nelida.

They said that she had so far been unable, after so many years, to break away from the grip of the world. Not only was she vain- they claimed she spent all day in front of the mirror- but she was lusty as well. She did everything in her power to be a sexually desirable woman in order to entice the nagual Mariano Aureliano. Someone pointed out, cattily, that, after all, she was the only one who could accommodate his enormous, intoxicating organ.

Then they talked about Clara. They called her a pompous elephant who believed that it was her duty to bestow blessings on everyone. The recipient of her attention was, at the moment, the nagual Isidore Baltazar, and the treat was her naked body. He wasn't to have it, only to see it. Once in the morning and again once at night she would regale him with the sight of her nakedness. She was convinced that by doing this, she would ensure the young nagual's sexual prowess.

The third woman they talked about was Zuleica. They said that she had delusions of being a saint and the Virgin Mary. Her so-called spirituality was nothing but craziness. Periodically she would lose her marbles; and whenever she had one of her fits of insanity, she would clean the house from top to bottom, even the rocks in the patio or around the grounds.

Then there was Hermelinda. She was described as being very sober, very proper, the paragon of middle-class values. As Nelida, she was incapable, after so many years, of stopping herself from seeking to be the perfect woman, the perfect homemaker. Although she couldn't cook or sew or embroider or play the piano to entertain her guests, Hermelinda wanted to be known, they said in between fits of giggles, as the paragon of good femininity, just as Nelida wanted to be known as the paragon of naughty femininity.

If the two of them would only combine their talents, one voice remarked, then they would have the perfect woman to please the master; perfect in the kitchen and in the living room, wearing an apron or an evening dress, and perfect in bed with her legs up whenever the master wanted it.

When they grew silent, I ran back to the house, to my room and into my hammock, but hard as I tried, I could no longer go back to sleep.

I felt that some kind of a protective bubble had burst around me, obliterating my sense of delight; of enchantment at being at the witches' house. All I could think of was that, by my own doings this time, I was stuck there in Sonora with a bunch of crazy old women who did nothing else but gossip when I could have been in Los Angeles having fun.

I had come looking for advice. Instead, I was ignored; reduced to the company of a senile old man who I believed to be a woman.

By the time I sat down to eat with the caretaker in the morning, I had driven myself into such a state of righteous indignation that I couldn't swallow a bite.

"What's the matter?" the old man asked, gazing at me intently. Normally, he avoided direct eye contact. "Aren't you hungry?"

I glared back at him. Giving up any attempt at self-control, I unburdened all my pent-up anger and frustration.

As I went on complaining, I had a flash of sobriety: I told myself that I shouldn't blame the old man, that I should be grateful, for he had shown me nothing but kindness.

But it was too late to stop myself. My petty grievances had acquired a life of their own. My voice became shriller still as I magnified and deformed the events of the past few days. With malicious satisfaction, I told him that I had eavesdropped on the women.

"They don't want to help me in the least," I asserted with resonant authority. "All they do is gossip. They said horrible things about the women dreamers."

"What did you hear them say?"

With great relish I told him everything. I surprised myself with my extraordinary power to recollect every detail of the women's wicked remarks.

"Obviously, they were talking about you," he declared the moment I finished my account. "In a symbolic fashion, of course." He waited for the words to sink in, and before I could protest, he asked innocently, "Aren't you quite a bit like all this?"

"Like hell I am!" I exploded. "And don't give me any psychological shit. I won't take this kind of crap; not even from an educated man, much the less from you, you fucking peon."

The caretaker's eyes opened wide in bewilderment and his frail shoulders sagged. I felt no sympathy for him, only pity for myself. I had wasted my time telling him what I had heard.

I was about to say what a mistake it had been for me to make that long, arduous journey and all for nothing, when the caretaker looked at me with such contempt that I felt ashamed of my outburst.

"If you hold your temper, you'll understand that nothing these sorcerers do is just to entertain themselves, or to impress someone; or to give way to their compulsiveness," he said with great equanimity. "Everything they do or say has a reason- a purpose."

He stared at me with an intensity that made me want to move away, but I couldn't. "Don't go around thinking that you're here on a vacation," he stressed. "For the sorcerers you've fallen prey to, there are no holidays."

"What are you trying to tell me?" I demanded angrily. "Don't beat around the bush, just say it."

"How can anyone be more clear?" His voice was deceptively mellow and loaded with more meaning than I could fathom. "The witches already told you last night what you are. They used the four women of the dreamers' planet as a false front to describe to you, the eavesdropper, what you really are: a slut, with delusions of grandeur."

So great was my shock, I was momentarily stunned. Then anger, hot as lava, shot through my whole body.

"You miserable, insignificant piece of shit," I yelled and kicked him in the groin. Before my kick had landed I already had a flash image of the little old bastard on the ground, wriggling with pain, except that my kick never landed anywhere but in the air. With the speed of a prize fighter he had jumped out of the way.

He smiled with his mouth, but his eyes were flat and cold as he watched me puffing and groaning. "You are playing on the nagual Isidore Baltazar all those tricks the witches talked about. You were trained for it. Think about it. Don't just get angry."

I opened my mouth to say something, but no sound emerged. It wasn't so much his words that had left me speechless as his devastatingly indifferent, icy tone. I would have preferred he had yelled at me, for then I would have known how to react: I would have yelled louder.

There was no point in fighting him. He wasn't right, I assured myself. He was simply a senile man with a bitter tongue. No, I wasn't going to get mad at him, but I wasn't going to take him seriously either.

"I hope you're not going to weep," he warned me before I recovered from my shock.

Despite my determination not to get mad at the senile bastard, my face grew red with anger. "Of course, I'm not," I snapped.

Before I tried another kick, I yelled at him that since he was only a chicken-shit servant he deserved to be beaten for his impertinence, but the hard, relentless expression in his eyes made me lose my momentum.

Without the faintest change in his courteous yet inexpressive tone, somehow he managed to convince methat I should apologize to him.

"I'm sorry," I finally said, and truly meant it. "My bad temper and bad manners always get the best of me."

"I know it: They all warned me about you," he said seriously, then added, smiling, "Eat your food."

I was ill at ease all through the meal. Chewing slowly, I watched him surreptitiously.

Although he didn't make the slightest effort to be friendly, I knew that he wasn't angry with me. I tried to comfort myself with that thought, but I didn't find it very comforting.

I sensed that his lack of concern wasn't deliberate or studied. He wasn't punishing me. Nothing of what I had said or done would have had any effect on him.

I swallowed the last bite and said the first thing that entered into my head with an assurance that astonished me, "You're not the caretaker."

He looked at me and asked, "And who do you think I am?" His face relaxed into an amused grin.

His smile made me lose all caution. A tremendous recklessness came over me. I blurted out- and naturally as an insult- that he was a woman, that he was Esperanza.

Relieved that I had finally gotten it off my chest, I sighed loudly and added, "That's why you're the only one who has a mirror: You need to look convincing as either a man or a woman."

"The Sonoran air must have affected you," he mused. "It's a known fact that the thin desert air affects people in the most peculiar manner."

He reached for my wrist and held it in a tight grip as he added, "Or it is perhaps your nature to be mean and onerous and blurt out with an air of absolute authority anything that enters your head?"

Chuckling, the caretaker leaned closer toward me, and suggested that I take a nap with him. "It'll do us a lot of good. We're both onerous," he said.

"So that's it!" I exclaimed, uncertain whether I should take offense or laugh at his suggestion. "You want me to sleep with you, eh?" I added that Esperanza had already warned me about him.

"Why do you object to taking a nap with me if you believe me to be Esperanza?" he asked, rubbing the nape of my neck. His hand was warm and soothing.

"I don't object," I defended myself feebly. "I simply hate naps. I never take a nap. I was told that even as a baby I hated naps."

I spoke rapidly and nervously, tripping over my words, repeating myself. I wanted to get up and leave, but the slight pressure of his hand on my neck kept me pinned down to the chair.

"I know that you're Esperanza," I insisted rashly. "I recognize her touch: It has the same soothing effect as yours."

I could feel my head sway, and my eyes closed against my will.

"So it has," he agreed gently. "It'll do you good to lie down, even if only for a moment."

Taking my silence for acquiescence, he went to the armoire and pulled out his cot and two blankets. He gave me one.

It was a time of endless surprises for me. Without knowing why, I lay down without protest.

Through half-closed lids, I watched him stretch until all his joints cracked.

He shook off his boots, unfastened his belt, then lowered himself on the cot next to me.

Under the cover of his thin cotton blanket, he wiggled out of his pants, casually dropping them on the floor, next to his boots.

He lifted his blanket and showed himself to me.

Blushing, I stared at him with wild curiosity and wonder.

His naked body, like Esperanza's, was the antithesis of what I had taken it to be. His body was supple, hairless, and smooth. He was thin as a reed and yet muscular. And he was definitely a male and young!

I didn't even pause to think, but holding my breath, I gingerly lifted my blanket.

The sound of a woman's faint giggle made me close my eyes and pretend I was asleep.

But knowing that she wasn't going to come into the room, I relaxed.

Putting my arms behind my head I became absorbed in an uncanny sense that the caretaker and the faint giggles coming from the corridor had restored a balance; had renewed the magic bubble all around me.

What exactly I meant by this, I didn't know, except that the more my body relaxed, the closer I was getting to an answer.