“If you are in agreement with this, return to see me tomorrow at noon.”
As I left the alley for the street, I was overwhelmed with a fatigue so profound that I could barely lift my arm to hail a taxi. At home, I collapsed on the bed without having the energy even to remove my shoes. I slept from four in the afternoon until eleven o’clock the next morning. Leaping out of bed, I washed myself and brushed my teeth in minutes and ran out of the house in order to arrive on time. As soon as I knocked at the steel-plated door, my anxiety vanished and I was filled with a strange calm.
Doña Magdalena, completely naked, opened the door. Normally, my reaction to a naked woman was either arousal if she was beautiful or disgust if she was ugly, but the naked Magdalena seemed to be dressed in her very soul. Her calm, dignity, and harmony of movement and the even brown of her skin made her seem like an ancient idol made of baked clay. She was so natural that I felt ashamed of my own embarrassment, aware of the contempt I carried in my own body and the sexual labeling I projected upon my flesh. The truth was that I had always considered my body as a kind of tumor of my intellect, doomed to degenerate into a wrinkled shell, a nest of maggots.
“That’s enough, young man. Stop torturing yourself. We shall begin the work with the ornaments that cover you. Your costumes are your dark night, and by removing them, you will see the first gleams of dawn. Now take off that watch and stop measuring time!”
The authority of her command put me in a sort of trance. I lost any sense of haste and was filled with the slowness of a dream. Floating as gracefully as a dust mote in a sunbeam, Magdalena began to remove my leather jacket. She opened it inch by inch, as if peeling off a skin, making each second an eternity. As the articles of my clothing came off piece by piece, they took on diverse forms, like black amoebas. I was aware of the multitude of movements that were involved in taking my arm out of a sleeve. Undressing at this extremely slow pace became an art, a combination of dance and sculpture that gave a sense of the sacred to the clothing itself.
“You arrived covered with the remains of a murdered animal. Its pain has mingled with your body, invading your flesh and settling in your soul. The entire skin is an eye that absorbs the world. Be careful of the materials you use to cover yourself. Every object has its own history. Linen, silk, cotton, and wool are pure materials that will not stain your mind. The others are full of a guile that attacks your cells, unbalancing your nervous system and injecting suffering into your blood.”
Entranced by her extremely slow gestures and her voice, as delicate and deep as a lake, I felt that I was becoming lost in a labyrinth of clouds. . When I awoke, I was standing naked. Magdalena finished arranging my clothes, folding them with as much care as someone making origami figures.
“Clothing used without consciousness is a mere disguise. Holy men and women do not dress in order to appear, but in order to be. Clothes possess a form of life. When they correspond to your essence, they give you energy and become allies. When they correspond to your distorted personality, they drain your vital forces. And even when they are your allies, if you do not care for them and respect them, they will retaliate by disturbing your mind. Now do you understand why we fold our garments so carefully, as we might fold a flag or a sacred vestment? Follow me; I’m going to give you a bath.”
“But Magdalena, I washed my entire body before I came here.”
“Which one? You have seven, and the one you take for real is a corpse. . so come with me and behave like a corpse!”
I didn’t know how to respond. I did as she asked, abandoning my own will and collapsing on the floor. She took hold of me in a very precise way and, lifting me up with no difficulty, carried me into the other space behind the curtain, and put me into a bathtub full of lukewarm water.
“Your ancestors followed the custom of washing their dead before burial. This was not because they saw them as dirty, but was followed in order to free their physical and six nonphysical bodies from distorted attachments to matter.”
She rubbed me vigorously with soap and rinsed me from head to toe seven times. She did this with such strength and meticulous care that I felt lighter with each washing and breathed more easily. Then she took me out of the bath and applied a perfumed oil that smelled of incense.
“This is galbanum, my boy. Jewish priests used it to anoint their golden altars. Every human body is an altar.”
I stood on my tiptoes, filled with a sense of happiness. I felt like dancing.
“Don’t celebrate your victory yet. You feel good now, but you’ll feel much better when I’ve finished scraping you.”
Scraping me? Ignoring my astonishment, she had me sit on the massage table. She took a bone knife and, using its dulled point, she proceeded to scrape my skin, inch by inch, as if removing an invisible crust.
“Over the years, countless fears have condensed under your skin in the form of tiny grains: the fear of dying, of seeing loved ones die, of losing your identity, your territory, work, health. . Also, the auras of the six subtle bodies have been inhibited in their expression, which makes them fold in on themselves, forming an invisible armor attached to the skin, preventing us from union with the true world — not the world we think of, but the one that thinks us. This armor encloses you and separates you from others, from the planet, and from the cosmos. It makes you live in the darkness of hell instead of the light of the soul, which is union. You will come to realize that the human soul is immense. This scraping will take at least three hours — and even then, one session will not be enough to rid you of fear and free you from your fleshly prison. We will have to do this at least nine times.”
Humming a lullaby and with infinite patience, she scraped my entire body, including my scalp, teeth, tongue, palate, ears, nails, penis, testicles, and anus. She was so sure and precise in her actions that I never felt the slightest tickle, even on the soles of my feet. She dug the knife in with confidence at just the right depth to dissolve the grains. It was painless, neither too soft nor too hard. Her hands seemed like those of a master sculptor who removes only what is unnecessary in order to reveal the work of art already contained in the material.
It was night when I returned home. I had only a mango for dinner, and I was so full of energy that I did not fall asleep until dawn. I arose at eight o’clock the next morning, feeling not the slightest lack of sleep.
For the next nine days, doña Magdalena repeated the scraping, digging a little deeper each time with the dull point of the knife. My opacity was disappearing; I began to feel more and more transparent. I saw the city and its inhabitants in a different way. I had ceased to criticize, ceased to feel my own guilt. Like a huge breath of wind, the joy of life had swept away my habitual anguish.
Every time I visited her, Magdalena’s personality — and even her physical appearance — changed like the clouds. I was incapable of grasping her mind. Once, I heard her say: “I am an empty chair.” With her hands, she infused me with the sublime, injecting her humble wisdom into my heart. I thought of certain insects who place their larvae in the body of others so that they can feed on their blood and emerge later into splendid offspring. After a total of ten scrapings, she cleaned my ears with a little stick, anointed them with perfume, and finally rubbed honey in them.
“Now I can really speak to you, for your ears are softened to hear my words. Concentrate yourself. Realize how you treat yourself: like a machine or a donkey to be punished. We allow our body to see, hear, feel, and savor things — but its touch stirs up unwholesome associations. Even when we are naked, we are wearing gloves. Civilization has turned our hands into tools, weapons, fingers made to push buttons. Like clever animals, we serve words, but our words serve only concepts. They have ceased to communicate soul. My son, you do not have two hands; you have two guilt-ridden pairs of pliers. Whenever you touch, you steal. You must relearn to feel your hands. Let me see you open them. . spread out your fingers, stretch out your palms fully. You see? You can’t do it completely. You have trouble letting go of what you think is yours. You are lugging around an invisible corpse: your security, your fears of possessing nothing, of losing what you think is necessary. You content yourself with a handful of coins, not realizing that all the money on the planet belongs to you.