Version 2007.03.16

## “The Sorcerers' Crossing: A Woman's Journey” - ©1992 by Taisha Abelar

### Chapter 2

After more than three hours of continuous driving, we stopped for lunch in the city of Guaymas.

As I waited for our food to arrive, I glanced out the window at the narrow street flanking the bay.

A group of shirtless boys were kicking a ball; elsewhere, workers were laying bricks at a construction site; others were taking their noon break, leaning against piles of unopened sacks of cement, sipping sodas from bottles.

I couldn't help but think that in Mexico everything seemed extra loud and dusty.

"In this restaurant, they serve the most delicious turtle soup," Clara said, regaining my attention.

Just then a smiling waitress with a silver front tooth placed two bowls of soup on the table.

Clara politely exchanged a few words with her in Spanish before the waitress hurried off to serve other customers.

"I've never had turtle soup before," I said, picking up a spoon and examining it to see if it was clean.

"You're in for a real treat," Clara said, watching me wipe my spoon with a paper napkin.

Reluctantly, I tasted a spoonful. The bits of white meat floating in a creamy tomato base were indeed delicious.

I took several more spoonfuls of soup, then asked, "Where do they get the turtles?"

Clara pointed out the window. "Right from the bay."

A handsome, middle-aged man sitting at the table next to ours turned to me and winked.

His gesture, I thought, was more an attempt at being humorous than a sexual innuendo.

He leaned toward me as if we had been addressing him. "The turtle you're eating now was a big one," he said in accented English.

Clara looked at me and raised an eyebrow as if she couldn't believe the audacity of the stranger.

"This turtle was big enough to feed a dozen hungry people," the man went on. "They catch the turtles in the sea. It takes several men to haul one in."

"I suppose they harpoon them like whales," I remarked.

The man deftly moved his chair to our table. "No, I believe they use large nets," he said. "Then they club them to render them unconscious before slitting open their bellies. That way, the meat doesn't get too tough."

My appetite flew out the window. The last thing I wanted was for an insensitive assertive stranger to join us at our table, yet I didn't know how to handle the situation.

"Since we're on the subject of food, Guaymas is famous for its jumbo shrimp," the man continued with a disarming smile. "Let me order some for the two of you."

"I've already done that," Clara said cuttingly.

Just then our waitress returned bringing a plate of the largest shrimp I had ever seen. It was enough for a banquet, certainly much more than Clara and I could possibly eat, no matter how hungry we were.

Our unwanted companion looked at me waiting to be invited to join our meal.

If I had been alone, he would have succeeded in attaching himself to me against my will.

But Clara had other plans and reacted in a decisive manner.

She jumped up with feline agility, loomed over the man and looked straight down into his eyes.

"Buzz off, you creep!!" she yelled in Spanish. "How dare you sit at our table. My niece is no frigging whore!"

Her stance was so powerful and her tone of voice so shocking that everything in the room came to a halt.

All eyes were focused on our table.

The man cowered so pitifully that I felt sorry for him. He just slid out of the chair and half crawled out of the restaurant.

"I know that you're trained to let men get the best of you, just because they're men," Clara said to me after she had sat down again:

"You've always been nice to men, and they've milked you for everything you had. Don't you know that men feed off women's energy!"

I was too embarrassed to argue with her. I felt every eye in the room was on me.

"You let them push you around because you feel sorry for them," Clara continued:

"In your heart of hearts you're desperate to take care of a man, any man.

"If that idiot had been a woman, you yourself would never have let her sit down at our table."

My appetite was spoiled beyond repair. I became moody, pensive.

"I see I've hit a sore spot," Clara said with a smirk.

"You made a scene; you were rude," I said reproachfully.

"Definitely," she replied, laughing. "But I also scared him half to death."

Her face was so open and she seemed to be so happy that I finally had to laugh, remembering how shocked the man had been.

"I'm just like my mother," I grumbled. "She succeeded in making me a mouse when it comes to men."

The moment I voiced that thought, my depression vanished and I felt hungry again. I polished off almost the whole plate of shrimp.

"There's no feeling comparable to starting a new turn with a full stomach," Clara declared.

A pang of fear made the shrimp sit heavy in my stomach.

Because of all the excitement, it hadn't occurred to me to ask Clara about her house. Maybe it was a shack, like the ones I had seen earlier while driving through the Mexican towns.

What kind of food would I be eating? Perhaps this was going to be my last good meal.

Would I be able to drink the water? I envisioned myself coming down with acute intestinal problems.

I didn't know how to ask Clara about my accommodations without sounding insulting or ungrateful. Clara looked at me critically. She seemed to sense my turmoil.

"Mexico is a harsh place," she said. "You can't let your guard down for an instant. But you'll get used to it.

"The northern part of the country is even more rugged than the rest. People flock to the north in search of work or as a stopping place before crossing the U.S. border.

"They come by trainloads. Some stay, others travel inland in boxcars to work in the huge agricultural enterprises owned by private corporations.

"But there just isn't enough food or work for everyone, so the majority go as braceros to the United States."

I finished every drop of the soup, feeling guilty about leaving anything behind.

"Tell me more about this area, Clara."

"All the Indians here are Yaquis who were relocated in Sonora by the Mexican government."

"Do you mean they have not always been here?"

"This is their ancestral homeland," Clara said, "but in the twenties and thirties, they were uprooted and sent by the tens of thousands to central Mexico. Then in the late forties, they were brought back to the Sonoran Desert."

Clara poured some mineral water into her glass and then filled mine.

"It's hard to live in the Sonoran Desert," she said. "As you saw while driving, the land here is rugged and inhospitable.

"Yet the Indians had no choice but to settle around the shambles of what was once the Yaqui River. There, in ancient times, the original Yaquis built their sacred towns and lived in them for hundreds of years until the Spaniards came."

"Will we drive by those towns?" I asked.

"No. We don't have time. I want to get to Navojoa before dark. Maybe someday we can take a trip to visit these sacred towns."

"Why are those towns sacred?"

"Because for the Indians the location of each town along the river symbolically corresponds to a spot in their mythical world. These sites, like the lava mountains in Arizona, are places of power.

"The Indians have a very rich mythology. They believe they can step in and out of a dream world at a moment's notice. You see, their concept of reality is not like ours.

"According to the Yaqui myths, those towns also exist in the other world," Clara went on, "and it is from that ethereal realm that they receive their power. They call themselves the people without reason, to differentiate themselves from us, the people with reason."

"What sort of power do they get?" I asked.

"Their magic, their sorcery, their knowledge: All of that comes down to them directly from the dream world.

"That world is described in their legends and stories. The Yaqui Indians have a rich, extensive oral history."

I looked around the crowded restaurant. I wondered which of the people sitting at the tables, if any, were Indians, and which were Mexican.

Some of the men were tall and wiry, while others were short and stocky. All the people looked foreign to me, and I felt secretly superior and distinctly out of place.

Clara finished the shrimp along with the beans and rice. I felt bloated myself, but in spite of my protests, she insisted on ordering caramel custard for dessert.

"You'd better fill up," she said with a wink. "You never know when you'll have your next meal or what it will consist of. Here in Mexico we always eat the kill of the day."

I knew she was teasing me, and yet I sensed truth in her words.

Earlier I had seen a dead donkey hit by a car on the highway. I knew that the rural areas lack refrigeration and therefore people eat whatever meat is available.

I couldn't help wondering what my next meal would be. Silently, I decided to limit my stay with Clara to only a couple of days.

In a more serious tone, Clara continued her discussion. "Things went from bad to worse for the Indians here," she said. "When the government built a dam as part of a hydroelectric project, it changed the course of the Yaqui River so drastically that the people had to pack up and settle elsewhere."

The harshness of this kind of life clashed with my own upbringing where there was always enough food and comfort. I wondered if coming to Mexico wasn't the expression of a deep desire, on my part, for a complete change.

All my life I had been searching for adventure, yet now that I was in its clutches, a dread of the unknown filled me.

I took a bite of the caramel custard and put out of my mind that dread which had sprouted since meeting Clara in the Arizona desert.

I was glad to be in her company. At the moment, I was well-fed on jumbo shrimp and turtle soup, and even though, as Clara herself had intimated, this might be my last good meal, I decided I would have to trust her and allow the adventure to unfold.

Clara insisted on paying the bill.

We filled up the cars with gasoline and were on the road again.

After driving for several more hours, we arrived at Navojoa. We didn't stop but went through it, leaving the Pan American Highway to turn onto a gravel road heading east.

It was midafternoon. I wasn't tired at all: In fact, I had enjoyed the remainder of the trip.

The further south we drove, the more a sense of happiness and well-being replaced my habitual neurotic and depressed state.

After more than one hour of a bumpy ride, Clara veered off the road and signaled for me to follow.

We coasted on hard ground along a high wall topped by a flowering bougainvillaea.

We parked in a clearing of well-packed earth at the end of the wall.

"This is where I live," she called to me as she eased herself out of the driver's seat.

I walked to her car. She looked tired and seemed to have grown bigger. "You look as fresh as when we started," she commented. "Ah, the marvels of youth!"

On the other side of the wall, completely hidden by trees and dense shrubs, loomed a huge house with a tile roof, barred windows and several balconies.

In a daze, I followed Clara through a wrought-iron gate, past a brick patio and through a heavy wooden door into the back of the house.

The terra-cotta tile floor of the cool, empty hall enhanced the starkness of the whitewashed walls and the dark natural wood beams of the ceiling.

We walked through it into a spacious living room.

The white walls were bordered with exquisitely painted tiles.

Two immaculate beige couches and four armchairs were arranged in a cluster around a heavy wooden coffee table.

On top of the table were some open magazines in English and Spanish.

I had the impression that someone had just been reading them, sitting in one of the armchairs, but had left in a hurry when we entered through the back door.

"What do you think of my house?" Clara asked, beaming proudly.

"It's fantastic," I said. "Who would have thought there'd be such a house way out here in the wilderness?"

Then my envious self reared its head and I became utterly ill at ease. The house was the kind of house I had always dreamed of owning, yet knew I would never be able to afford.

Clara said, "You can't imagine how accurate you are in describing this place as fantastic.

"All I can tell you about the house is that, like those lava mountains we saw this morning, it is imbued with power. A silent exquisite power runs through the house like an electric current runs through wires."

Upon hearing this, an inexplicable thing happened: My envy disappeared. It vanished totally with the last word she said.

"Now I'll show you to your bedroom," she announced. "And I'll also set up some ground rules you must observe while you're here as my guest.

"Any part of the house which is to the right and to the back of this living room is yours to use and explore, and that includes the grounds.

"But you must not enter any of the bedrooms, except of course, yours. There you can use anything you want. You can even break things in fits of anger or love them in outbursts of affection.

"The left side of the house, however, is not accessible to you at any time, in any way, shape or form. So stay out of it."

I was shocked by her bizarre request yet I assured her that I understood perfectly, and I would acquiesce to her wishes.

My real feelings were that her request was rude and arbitrary. In fact, the more she warned me to stay away from certain parts of the house, the more curious I became to see them.

Clara seemed to have thought of something else and added, "Of course, you can use the living room: You can even sleep here on the sofa if you're too tired or lazy to go to your bedroom.

"Another part you can't use, however, is the grounds in front of the house and also the main door. It's locked for the time being, so always enter the house through the back door."

Clara didn't give me time to respond. She ushered me down a long corridor past several closed doors, which she said were bedrooms and therefore forbidden to me, to a large bedroom.

The first thing I noticed upon entering was the ornate wooden double bed. It was covered with a beautiful crocheted off-white bedspread.

Next to a window on the wall facing the back of the house stood a hand-carved, mahogany etagere filled to capacity with antique objects, porcelain vases and figurines, cloisonne boxes and tiny bowls.

On the other wall was a matching armoire, which Clara opened. Hanging inside were women's vintage dresses, coats, hats, shoes, parasols, canes; all of them seemed to be exquisite hand-picked items.

Before I could ask Clara where she had gotten those beautiful things, she closed the doors.

"Feel free to use anything you wish," she said. "These are your clothes, and this is your room for as long as you stay in this house."

She then glanced over her shoulder as if someone else were in the room and added, "And who can tell how long that will be!"

It appeared that she was talking about an extended visit.

I felt my palms sweat as I awkwardly told her that I could, at best, stay for only a few days.

Clara assured me that I would be perfectly safe with her there; much safer, in fact, than anywhere else. She added that it would be foolish for me to pass up this opportunity to broaden my knowledge.

"But I've got to look for a job," I said by way of an excuse. "I don't have any money."

"Don't worry about money," she said. "I'll lend you whatever you need or give it to you. It's no problem."

I thanked her for her offer, but informed her that I had been brought up to believe that to accept money from a stranger was highly improper no matter how well-meaning the offer was.

She rebuffed me, saying, "I think what's the matter with you, Taisha, is that you got angry when I requested that you don't use the left side of the house or the main door.

"I know that you felt I was being arbitrary and excessively secretive. Now you don't want to stay more than a polite day or two. Maybe you even think I'm an eccentric old woman with a few bats in the belfry?"

"No, no, Clara, it's not that. I've got to pay my rent. If I don't find a job soon I won't have any money, and to accept money from anyone is out of the question for me." '

"Do you mean that you didn't get offended by my request to avoid certain parts of the house?"

"Of course not."

"Didn't you get curious to know why I made the request?"

"Yes, I was curious."

"Well, the reason is that other people live on that side of the house."

"Your relatives, Clara?"

"Yes. We are a large family. There are, in fact, two families living here."

"Are they both large families?"

"They are. Each has eight members, making sixteen people all together."

"And they all live on the left side of the house, Clara?" In all my life I had never heard of such an odd arrangement.

"No. Only eight live there. The other eight are my immediate family and they live with me on the right side of the house.

"You are my guest, so you must stay on the right side. It's very important that you understand this. It may be unusual, but it's not incomprehensible."

I marveled at her power over me. Her words put my emotions at ease, but they didn't calm my mind.

I understood then that in order to react intelligently in any situation, I needed a conjunction of both an alarmed mind and unsettled emotions.

Otherwise, I remained passive, waiting for the next external impulse to sway me.

Being with Clara had made me understand that in spite of my protest to the contrary; in spite of my struggle to be different; independent, I was incapable of thinking clearly or of making my own decisions.

Clara gave me a most peculiar look, as if she were following my unvoiced thoughts. I tried to mask my confusion by hurriedly saying, "Your house is beautiful, Clara. Is it very old?"

"Of course," she said, but didn't explain whether she meant that it was a beautiful house or that it was very old.

With a smile she added, "Now that you've seen the house- that is, half of it- we have a little business to take care of."

She removed a flashlight from one of the cabinets, and from the armoire she took out a padded Chinese jacket and a pair of hiking boots. She told me that I had to put them on after we had a snack, because we were going for a walk.

"But we just got here," I protested. "Won't it be dark soon?"

"Yes. But I want to take you to a look-out point in the hills from where you can see the entire house and grounds.

"It's best to first see the house at this time of the day. We all had our first glimpse of it in the twilight."

"Who do you mean when you say 'we'?" I asked.

"The sixteen people that live here, naturally, All of us do exactly the same things."

"All of you have the same professions?" I asked, unable to hide

my surprise.

"Good gracious, no," she said, bringing her hand to her face as she laughed:

"I mean that whatever any one of us has to obligatorily do, the rest of us have to do too. Each one of us had to first see the house and grounds in the twilight, so that is the time you must view it, too."

"Why are you including me in this, Clara?"

"Let's just say for now it's because you are my guest."

"Am I going to meet your relatives later on?"

"You'll get to know all of them, "she assured me. "At the moment, there is no one in the house except the two of us, and a guard dog."

"Are they away on a trip?"

"Exactly, all of them have left for an extended journey and here I am guarding the house with the dog."

"When are you expecting them back?"

"It'll be a matter of weeks yet, maybe even months."

"Where did they go?"

"We are always on the move. Sometimes I leave for months at a time, and someone else stays behind to look after the property."

I was about to ask again where they went, but she answered my question. "They all went to India," she said.

"All fifteen of them?" I asked incredulously.

"Isn't that remarkable? It'll cost a fortune!" She said that in a tone of voice that was such a caricature of me and my inner feelings of envy that I had to laugh in spite of myself.

Then the thought struck me that it wouldn't be safe to be alone in such a remote, empty house with only Clara for company.

"We are alone but there's nothing to fear in this house," she said with a curious finality. "Except maybe the dog.

"When we return from our walk, I'll introduce you to him.

"You've got to be very calm to meet him. He'll see right through you, and attack if he senses any hostility, or that you're afraid."

"But I am afraid," I blurted out. I was already starting to shake.

I hated dogs ever since I was a child, when one of my father's Doberman pinschers jumped on me and pushed me to the ground.

The dog didn't actually bite me, she just growled and showed me her pointed teeth.

I screamed for help, for I was too terrified to move. I was so frightened I wet my pants. I still remember how my brothers made fun of me when they saw me, calling me a baby that should be wearing diapers.

"I don't like dogs one bit, myself," Clara said, "but the dog we have is not really a dog. He is something else."

She had sparked my interest, but that didn't dispel my sense of foreboding.

"If you want to freshen up first, I'll accompany you to the outhouse just in case the dog is prowling around," she said.

I nodded. I was tired and irritable. The impact of the long drive had finally caught up with me.

I wanted to wash the dust of the road from my face and comb the tangles out of my stringy hair.

Clara led me through a different corridor, then out to the back. There were two small buildings some distance from the main house.

"That's my gymnasium," she said, pointing at one of them. "It is off limits to you, too, unless I care to invite you in someday."

"Is that where you practice martial arts?"

"It is," Clara said dryly. "The other building is the outhouse.

"I'll wait for you in the living room, where we can have some sandwiches.

"But don't bother about fixing your hair," she said, as if noticing my preoccupation, "there are no mirrors here.

"Mirrors are like clocks. They record the passage of time. And what's important is to reverse it."

I wanted to ask her what she meant by reversing time, but she prodded me toward the outhouse.

Inside, I found several doors. Since Clara hadn't made any stipulations about the left and right sides of this building, and since I didn't know where the toilet was, I explored all of it.

On one side of the central hall, there were six small water closets, each with a low wooden toilet the height for squatting.

What made them unusual was that I didn't notice the distinct odor of a septic tank, nor the overpowering stench of lime-filled dirt holes.

I could hear water running underneath the wooden toilets, but I couldn't tell how or from where it was led in.

On the other side of the hall, there were three identical beautifully tiled rooms.

Each contained a free-standing antique tub and a long chest on top of which sat a pitcher filled with water and a matching porcelain basin.

There were no mirrors in those rooms, or any stainless-steel fixtures on which I could have caught my reflection. In fact, there was no plumbing at all.

I poured water into a basin, splashed my face with it, then ran my wet fingers through my tangled hair.

Instead of using one of the soft white Turkish towels for fear I would dirty it, I wiped my hands with some tissues that were in a box on the chest.

I took several deep breaths and rubbed my tense neck before going out to face Clara again.

I found her in the living room arranging flowers in a blue and white Chinese vase. The magazines that had been open earlier were neatly stacked and next to them was a plate of food.

Clara smiled when she saw me. "You look as fresh as a daisy," she said. "Have a sandwich.

"Soon it will be twilight. We have no time to lose."