Great Expectations. Level 4 (+ Audio CD)

To cure the actor was an impossibility, and the only thing that he could do as a nagual was to arrest the bleeding, which he did. He saw fit to make then a proposition to the actor. "I'm leaving at five in the morning for the mountains," he said. "Be at the entrance of the town. Don't fail. If you fail to come, you will die, sooner than you think. Your only recourse is to go with me. I'll never be able to cure you, but I will be able to deviate your inexorable walk to the abyss that marks the end of life. All of us human beings go inexorably into that abyss sooner or later. I will head you off to walk the enormous extent of that crack, either to the left or to the right of it. As long as you don't fall, you will live. You'll never be well, but you'll live." The nagual Elias didn't have great expectations about the actor, who was lazy, slovenly, self-indulgent, perhaps even a coward. He was quite surprised when the next day at five in the morning he found the actor waiting for him at the edge of the town. He took him to the mountains, and in time, the actor became the nagual Julian – a tubercular man who was never cured, but who lived to be perhaps one hundred and seven years old, always walking along the edge of the abyss. "Of course, it is of supreme importance to you," Florinda said to me once, "that you examine the walk of the nagual Julian along the edge of the abyss ...»