The Second Ring of Power (16 page)

"It's so clear!" Rosa added with the expression of having had
a true revelation.

Both of them jumped to their feet and embraced Josefina.

"You're going to talk again!" Rosa exclaimed as she shook
Josefina by the shoulders.

Josefina opened her eyes and rolled them. She started making faint,
muffled sighs, as if she
were sobbing, and ended up running
back and forth, crying like an animal. Her excitation was so
great
that she seemed to have locked her jaws open. I honestly thought that she was
on the brink
of a nervous breakdown. Lidia and Rosa ran to her side
and helped her close her mouth. But they did not try to calm her down.

"You're going to talk again! You're going to talk again!" they
shouted.

Josefina sobbed and howled in a manner that sent chills down my spine.

I was absolutely confounded. I tried to talk sense to them. I appealed
to their reason, but then I
realized that they had very little of
it, by my standards. I paced back and forth in front of them,
trying
to figure out what to do.

"You are going to help her, aren't you?" Lidia demanded.

"Please, sir, please," Rosa pleaded with me.

I told them that they were crazy, that I could not possibly know what to
do. And yet, as I
talked I noticed that there was a funny feeling of
optimism and certainty in the back of my mind. I wanted to discard it at first,
but it took hold of me. Once before I had had a similar feeling in
relation
to a dear friend of mine who was mortally ill. I thought I could make her well
and
actually leave the hospital where she lay dying. I even
consulted don Juan about it.

"Sure. You can cure her and make her walk out of that death
trap," he said.

"How?" I asked him.

"It's a very simple procedure," he said. "All you have
to do is remind her that she's an
incurable patient. Since she's
a terminal case she has
power
. She has nothing to lose anymore.
She's
lost everything already. When one has nothing to lose, one becomes courageous.
We are
timid only when there is something we can still cling
to."

"But is it enough just to remind her of that?"

"No. That will give her the boost she needs. Then she has to push
the disease away with her
left hand. She must push her arm out
in front of her with her hand clenched as if she were holding
a
knob. She must push on and on as she says out, out, out. Tell her that, since
she has nothing else
to do, she must dedicate every second
of her remaining life to performing that movement. I assure
you
that she can get up and walk away, if she wants to."

"It sounds so simple," I said.

Don Juan chuckled.

"It seems simple," he said, "but it isn't. In order to do
this your friend needs an impeccable
spirit."

He looked at me for a long time. He seemed to be measuring the concern
and sadness I felt for
my friend.

"Of course," he added, "if your friend had an impeccable
spirit she wouldn't be there in the
first place."

I told my friend what don Juan had said. But she was already too weak
even to attempt to
move her arm.

In Josefina's case my rationale for my secret confidence was the fact
that she was a warrior
with an impeccable spirit. Would it be
possible, I silently asked myself, to apply the same hand
movement
to her?

I told Josefina that her incapacity to speak was due to some sort of
blockage.
"Yes, yes, it's a blockage," Lidia and Rosa
repeated after me.

I explained to Josefina the arm movement and told her that she had to
push that blockage by
moving her arm in that fashion.

Josefina's eyes were transfixed. She seemed to be in a trance. She moved
her mouth, making
barely audible sounds. She tried moving her arm,
but her excitation was so intense that she flung
her arm
without any coordination. I tried to redirect her movements, but she appeared
to be so
thoroughly befuddled that she could not even hear what I
was saying. Her eyes went out of focus
and I knew she
was going to faint. Rosa apparently realized what was happening; she jumped
away
and grabbed a cup of water and sprinkled it over Josefina's face. Josefina's
eyes rolled back,
showing the whites of her eyes. She blinked
repeatedly until she could focus her eyes again. She moved her mouth, but she
made no sound.

"Touch her throat!" Rosa yelled at me.

"No! No!" Lidia shouted back. "Touch her head. It's in
her head, you dummy! "
She grabbed my hand and I reluctantly
let her place it on Josefina's head.

Josefina shivered, and little by little she let out a series of faint
sounds. Somehow they seemed to me more melodious than the inhuman sounds she
made before.

Rosa
also must have noticed the difference.

"Did you hear that? Did you hear that?" she asked me in a
whisper.

But whatever the difference might have been, Josefina let out another
series of sounds more
grotesque than ever. When she quieted
down, she sobbed for a moment and then entered into
another state
of euphoria. Lidia and Rosa finally quieted her. She plunked down on the bench,
apparently exhausted. She could barely lift her eyelids to look at me.
She smiled meekly.

"I am so very, very sorry," I said and held her hand.

Her whole body vibrated. She lowered her head and began to weep again. I
felt a surge of
ultimate empathy for her. At that moment I would
have given my life to help her.

She sobbed uncontrollably as she tried to speak to me. Lidia and Rosa
appeared to be so
caught up in her drama that they were making the
same gestures with their mouths.

"For heaven's sake, do something!" Rosa exclaimed in a
pleading voice.

I experienced an unbearable anxiety. Josefina stood up and embraced me,
or rather clung to
me in a frenzy and pushed me away from the table. At that instant Lidia
and Rosa, with
astounding agility, speed and
control, grabbed me by the shoulders with both hands and at the
same time hooked the heels of my feet with their
feet. The weight of Josefina's body and her
embrace, plus the speed of Lidia's and Rosa's maneuver, rendered me
helpless. They all moved at
once,
and before I knew what was happening, they had laid me on the floor with
Josefina on top
of me. I felt her
heart pounding. She held on to me with great force; the sound of her heart reverberated
in my ears. I felt it pounding in my own chest. I tried to push her away but
she held
on fast. Rosa and Lidia had
me pinned down on the floor with their weight on my arms and legs.
Rosa
cackled
insanely and began nibbling on my side. Her small, sharp teeth chattered as her
jaws snapped open and shut with
nervous spasms.

All at once I had a monstrous sensation of pain, physical revulsion and
terror. I lost my breath. My eyes could not focus. I knew that I was passing
out. I heard then the dry, cracking sound of a
pipe breaking
at the base of my neck and felt the ticklish sensation on top of my head,
running
like a shiver through my entire body. The next thing I
knew I was looking at them from the other side of the kitchen. The three girls
were staring at me while they lay on the floor.

"What are you people doing?" I heard someone say in a loud,
harsh, commanding voice.

I then had an inconceivable feeling. I felt Josefina let go of me and
stand up. I was lying on
the floor, and yet I was also standing
a distance away from them, looking at a woman I had never
seen
before. She was by the door. She walked toward me and stopped six or seven feet
away. She
stared at me for a moment. I knew immediately that she
was la Gorda. She demanded to know
what was going on.

"We were just playing a little joke on him," Josefina said
clearing her throat. "I was pretending to be mute."

The three girls huddled up close together and began to laugh. La Gorda
remained impassive,
looking at me.

They had tricked me! I found my stupidity and gullibility so outrageous
that I had a fit of
hysterical laughter, which was almost out of
control. My body shivered.

I knew that Josefina had not just been playing, as she had claimed. The
three of them had
meant business. I had actually felt Josefina's
body as a force that, in fact, was getting inside my
own body. Rosa's nibbling on my side, which undoubtedly was a ruse to distract my attention,
coincided
with the sensation I had had that Josefina's heart was pounding inside my
chest.

I heard la Gorda urging me to calm down.

I had a nervous flutter in my midsection and then a quiet, calm anger
swept over me. I loathed
them. I had had enough of them. I
would have picked up my jacket and writing pad and walked out of the house had
it not been that I was not quite myself yet. I was somewhat dizzy and my
senses
were definitely out of line. I had had the sensation that when I had first
looked at the girls from across the kitchen, I was actually viewing them from a
position above my eye level, from a
place close to the ceiling. But something even more
disconcerting was that I had actually
perceived
that the ticklish sensation on top of my head was what scooped me from
Josefina's
embrace. It was not as if
something came out from the top of my head; something actually did
come out from the top of my head.

A few years before, don Juan and don Genaro had manoeuvred my perception
and I had had
an impossible double sensation: I felt that don Juan had
fallen on top of me and pinned me to the
ground, while
at the same time I felt I was still standing up. I was actually in both places
at once.
In sorcerers' terms I could say that my body had stored
the memory of that double perception and
seemed to have
repeated it. There were, however, two new things that had been added to my
bodily
memory this time. One was that the ticklish sensation I had become so aware of
during the
course of my confrontations with those women was the
vehicle to arriving at that double
perception; and the other was
that the sound at the base of my neck let loose something in me that
was
capable of coming out of the top of my head.

After a minute or two I definitely felt that I was coming down from
near the ceiling until I was
standing on the floor. It took a while
for my eyes to adjust to seeing at my normal eye level.

As I looked at the four women I felt naked and vulnerable. I then had an
instant of
disassociation, or lack of perceptual continuity. It was
as if I had shut my eyes, and some force
suddenly had
made me twirl a couple of times. When I opened my eyes the girls were staring
at
me with their mouths open. But somehow I was myself
again.

The first thing I noticed about la Gorda was her eyes: very dark and
calm. She seemed to be
examining me from head to toe. Her eyes
scanned my body the same way don Juan's used to. In
fact, her eyes
had the same calmness and force. I knew why she was the best. The thought that
came to my mind was that don Juan must have left her his eyes.

She was slightly taller than the other three girls. She had a lean,
dark body and a superb back.
I noticed the graceful line of her
broad shoulders when she half turned her upper body to face the
three
girls.

She gave them an unintelligible command and the three of them sat down
on a bench, right
behind her. She was actually shielding them from me
with her body.

She turned to face me again. Her expression was one of utmost
seriousness, but without a
trace of gloom or heaviness. She did
not smile and yet she was friendly. She had very pleasant
features:
a nicely shaped face, neither round nor angular; a small mouth with thin lips;
a broad
nose; high cheekbones; and long, jet-black hair.

I could not help noticing her beautiful, muscular hands which she kept
clasped in front of her,
over her umbilical region. The backs of
her hands were turned to me. I could see her muscles
being contracted
rhythmically as she clasped her palms.

She was wearing a long, faded orange cotton dress with long sleeves and
a brown shawl.
There was something terribly calming and final
about her. I felt the presence of don Juan. My
body relaxed.