The Second Ring of Power (15 page)

I heard Lidia and Rosa giggling. I did not look at them because my total
attention had been
taken by assault. The woman in front of me was
absolutely the most disgusting, foul creature I
had ever seen.
She untied the bundle of firewood and dropped it on the floor with a loud
clatter. I
jumped involuntarily, due in part to the loud noise and
in part to the fact that the woman nearly
fell on my lap,
pulled by the weight of the wood.

She looked at me for an instant and then lowered her eyes, seemingly
embarrassed by her
clumsiness. She straightened her back and sighed
with apparent relief. Obviously, the load had been too great for her old body.

As she stretched her arms, her hair fell partially loose. She was
wearing a soiled headband tied
over her forehead. Her hair was long
and graying and seemed dirty and matted. I could see the
white
hairs against the dark brown of the headband. She miled at me and sort of
nodded her head. All her teeth seemed to be missing; I could see the black hole
of her toothless mouth. She covered her face with her hand and laughed. She
took off her sandals and walked into the house without giving me time to say
anything. Rosa followed her.

I was dumbfounded. Dona Soledad had implied that Josefina was the same
age as Lidia and
Rosa. I turned to Lidia. She was peering at me.

"I had no idea she was that old," I said.

"Yes, she's pretty old," she said in a matter-of-fact tone.

"Does she have a child?" I asked.

"Yes, and she takes him everywhere. She never leaves him with us.
She's afraid we are going to eat him."

"Is it a boy?"

"A
boy."

"How old is he?"

"She's had him for some time. But I don't know his age. We thought
that she shouldn't have a
child at her age. But she didn't pay
any attention to us."

"Whose child is he?"

"Josefina's, of course."

"I mean, who's the father?"

"The Nagual, who else?"

I thought that that development was quite extravagant and very
unnerving.

"I suppose anything is possible in the Nagual's world," I
said.

I meant it more as a thought to myself than a statement made to Lidia.

"You bet," she said, and laughed.

The oppressiveness of those eroded hills became unbearable. There was
something truly
abhorrent about that area, and Josefina had been
the final blow. On top of having an ugly, old, smelly body and no teeth, she
also seemed to have some sort of facial paralysis. The muscles on
the
left side of her face appeared to be injured, a condition which created a most
unpleasant
distortion of her left eye and the left side of her
mouth. My oppressive mood plummeted to one of sheer anguish. For an instant I
toyed with the idea, so familiar by then, of running to my car and
driving
away.

I complained to Lidia that I did not feel well. She laughed and said
that Josefina had no doubt
scared me.

"She has that effect on people," she said. "Everybody
hates her guts. She's uglier than a
cockroach."

"I remember seeing her once," I said, "but she was
young."

"Things change," Lidia said philosophically, "one way or
another. Look at Soledad. What a
change, eh? And you yourself have changed. You look more massive than I
remember you. You are looking more and more like the Nagual."

I wanted to say that the change in Josefina was abhorrent but I was
afraid that she might
overhear me.

I looked at the eroded hills across the valley. I felt like fleeing from
them.

"The Nagual gave us this house," she said, "but it is
not a house for rest. We had another
house before that was truly
beautiful. This is a place to steam up. Those mountains over there will
drive
you nuts."

Her boldness in reading my feelings gave me a respite. I did not know
what to say.

"We are all naturally lazy," she went on. "We don't like
to strain ourselves. The Nagual knew
that, so he must have figured
that this place would drive us up the walls."

She stood up abruptly and said that she wanted something to eat. We
went to the kitchen, a
semienclosed area with only two walls.
At the open end, to the right of the door, there was an
earthen
stove; at the other end, where the two walls met, there was a large dining area
with a long table and three benches. The floor was paved with smooth river
rocks. The flat roof was about ten
feet high and was resting on the
two walls and on thick supporting beams on the open sides.

Lidia poured me a bowl of beans and meat from a pot which cooked on a
very low fire. She
heated up some tortillas over the fire. Rosa came in and sat down next to me and asked Lidia to
serve her some
food.

I became immersed in watching Lidia use a ladle to scoop the beans and
meat. She seemed to have an eye for the exact amount. She must have been aware
that I was admiring her maneuvers.
She took two or three beans from
Rosa's bowl and returned them to the pot.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Josefina coming into the kitchen. I
did not look at her,
though. She sat facing me across the
table. I had a squeamish feeling in my stomach. I felt that I
could
not eat with that woman looking at me. To ease my tension I joked with Lidia
that there
were still two extra beans in Rosa's bowl that she had
overlooked. She scooped up two beans with
the ladle with
a precision that made me gasp. I laughed nervously, knowing that once Lidia sat
down I would have to move my eyes from the stove and acknowledge the
presence of Josefina.

I finally and reluctantly had to look across the table at Josefina.
There was a dead silence. I stared at her incredulously. My mouth fell open. I
heard the loud laughter of Lidia and Rosa. It took an endless moment for me to
put my thoughts and feelings in some sort of order. Whoever
was
facing me was not the Josefina I had seen just awhile ago, but a very pretty
girl. She did not have Indian features as Lidia and Rosa did. She seemed to be
more Latin than Indian. She had a
light olive complexion, a very
small mouth and a finely chiseled nose, small white teeth and
short,
black, curly hair. She had a dimple on the left side of her face, which gave a
definite cockiness to her smile.

She was the girl I had met briefly years ago. She held my scrutiny. Her
eyes were friendly. I
became possessed by degrees with some
uncontrollable nervousness. I ended up desperately clowning about my genuine
bewilderment.

They laughed like children. After their laughter had subsided I wanted
to know what was the
point of Josefina's histrionic display.

"She's practicing the art of stalking," Lidia said. "The
Nagual taught us to baffle people so
they wouldn't notice us.
Josefina is very pretty and if she walks alone at night, no one will bother
her
if she is ugly and smelly, but if she goes out as she really is, well, you
yourself can tell what
would happen."

Josefina nodded affirmatively and then contorted her face into the
ugliest grimace possible.
"She can hold that face all
day," Lidia said.

I contended that if I lived around that area I would certainly notice
Josefina in her disguise
more readily than if she did not have
one.

"That disguise was just for you," Lidia said, and all three of
them laughed. "And look how it baffled you. You noticed her child even
more than you noticed her."

Lidia went into their room and brought out a package of rags that looked
like a bundled-up
child and threw it on the table in front of me. I
laughed uproariously with them.

"Do all of you have particular disguises?" I asked.

"No. Only Josefina. No one around here knows her as she really
is," Lidia replied.
Josefina nodded and smiled but she
remained silent. I liked her tremendously. There was
something so
very innocent and sweet about her.

"Say something, Josefina," I said, grabbing her by her
forearms.

She looked at me bewildered, and recoiled. I thought that I had gotten
carried away by my
elation and perhaps grabbed her too hard. I let
her go. She sat up straight. She contorted her small
mouth and thin
lips and produced a most grotesque outburst of grunts and shrieks.

Her whole face suddenly changed. A series of ugly, involuntary spasms
marred her tranquil
expression of a moment before.

I looked at her, horrified. Lidia pulled me by the sleeve.

"Why do you have to scare her, stupid?" she whispered.
"Don't you know that she became
mute and can't talk at
all?"

Josefina obviously understood her and seemed bent on protesting. She
clenched her fist at
Lidia and let out another outburst of
extremely loud and horrifying shrieks, and then choked and
coughed.
Rosa began to rub her back. Lidia tried to do the same but Josefina nearly hit
her in the
face.

Lidia sat down next to me and made a gesture of impotence. She shrugged
her shoulders.
"She's that way," Lidia whispered to me.

Josefina turned to her. Her face was contorted in a most ugly grimace of
anger. She opened her mouth and bellowed at the top of her voice some more
frightening, guttural sounds.

Lidia slid off the bench and in a most unobtrusive manner left the
kitchen area.

Rosa
held Josefina by the arm. Josefina seemed to be the
epitome of fury. She moved her mouth and contorted her face. In a matter of
minutes she had lost all the beauty and innocence
that had
enchanted me. I did not know what to do. I tried to apologize but Josefina's
inhuman
sounds drowned out my words. Finally Rosa took her into
the house.

Lidia returned and sat across the table from me.

"Something went wrong up here," she said, touching her head.

"When did it happen?" I asked.

"A long time ago. The Nagual must have done something to her,
because all of a sudden she
lost her speech."

Lidia seemed sad. I had the impression that her sadness showed against
her desire. I even felt
tempted to tell her not to struggle so
hard to hide her emotions.

"How does Josefina communicate with you people?" I asked.
"Does she write?"

"Come on, don't be silly. She doesn't write. She's not you. She
uses her hands and feet to tell us what she wants."

Josefina and Rosa came back to the kitchen. They stood by my side. I
thought that Josefina
was again the picture of innocence and
candor. Her beatific expression did not give the slightest
inkling
of the fact that she could become so ugly, so fast. Looking at her I had the
sudden
realization that her fabulous ability for gestures
undoubtedly was intimately linked to her aphasia.
I reasoned that only a person who
had lost her capacity to verbalize could be so versed in mimicry.

Rosa
said to me that Josefina had confided that she wished
she could talk, because she liked
me very much.

"Until you came she was happy the way she was," Lidia said in
a harsh voice.

Josefina shook her head affirmatively, corroborating Lidia's statement,
and went into a mild outburst of sounds.

"I wish la Gorda was here," Rosa said. "Lidia always gets
Josefina angry."

"I don't mean to!" Lidia protested.

Josefina smiled at her and extended her arm to touch her. It seemed as
if she were attempting to apologize. Lidia brushed her hand away.

"Why, you mute imbecile," she muttered.

Josefina did not get angry. She looked away. There was so much sadness
in her eyes that I did not want to look at her. I felt compelled to intercede.

"She thinks she's the only woman in the world who has
problems," Lidia snapped at me. "The
Nagual told us
to drive her hard and without mercy until she no longer feels sorry for herself."
Rosa looked at me and reaffirmed Lidia's claim with a nod of her head.

Lidia turned to Rosa and ordered her to leave Josefina's side. Rosa moved away complyingly and sat on the bench next to me.

"The Nagual said that one of these days she will talk again,"
Lidia said to me.

"Hey!" Rosa said, pulling my sleeve. "Maybe you're the
one who'll make her talk."

"Yes! " Lidia exclaimed as if she had had the same thought.
"Maybe that's why we had to wait
for you."