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For days on end, I had pondered the meaning of the stories I had heard. I thought I understood what was meant by a link, or a witch's shadow, or the wheel of chance; but, I still wanted dona Mercedes or Candelaria to clarify things.
I had accepted from the beginning that I was not there to interpret what I was experiencing in terms of my academic training, however, I could not help seeing things in terms of what I had learned in the nagual's world.
Florinda would have explained it all in terms of 'intent': a universal, abstract force responsible for molding everything in the world we live in.
Being an abstract force, its molding power is ordinarily outside the reach of man, yet under special circumstances it allows itself to be manipulated. And that is what gives us the false impression that people or things grant us wishes.
Compared to Florinda- and I could not avoid making the comparison- dona Mercedes and Candelaria were more simple pragmatists.
They did not have an overall encompassing understanding of their actions. They understood whatever they did, as mediums, witches, and healers, in terms of separate, concrete events loosely connected with one another.
For instance, dona Mercedes was giving me concrete examples of ways of manipulating something nameless. The act of manipulating it, she called a witch's shadow. The result of that manipulation she called a link, a continuity, a turn of the wheel of chance.
"It was certainly the mask that granted Lorenzo's wish," dona Mercedes said with absolute conviction. "I have known other, very similar instances of things granting wishes."
"But tell me, dona Mercedes, which is the important factor, the thing itself or the person who has the wish?"
"The thing itself," she replied. "If Lorenzo had not had that mask, he could have spent his life panting over Birgit Briceno; and that would have been all his wish amounted to. A witch would say that the mask, not Lorenzo, made the link."
"Would you still call it a witch's shadow, even if there was no witch involved?"
"A witch's shadow is only a name. All of us have a bit of a witch in us. Lorenzo is definitely not a spiritualist or a healer, yet he has a certain power to bewitch. Not enough, though, to make a link, to move the wheel of chance; but with the aid of the mask, it was a different story."