The Second Ring of Power (17 page)

"Sit down, sit down," she said to me in a coaxing tone.

I walked back to the table. She pointed out a place for me to sit, but I
remained standing.
She smiled for the first time and her eyes became
softer and shinier. She was not as pretty as
Josefina, and
yet she was the most beautiful of all of them.

We were quiet for a moment. In terms of an explanation she said that
they had done their best
in the years since the Nagual left, and that because of
their dedication they had become
accustomed
to the task that he had left for them to perform.

I did not quite understand what she was talking about, but as she spoke
I felt more than ever the presence of don Juan. It was not that she was copying
his manners, or the inflection of his
voice. She had an inner control
that made her act the way don Juan did. Their similarity was from the inside
out.

I told her that I had come because I needed Pablito's and Nestor's
help. I said that I was rather
slow or even stupid in understanding
the ways of sorcerers, but that I was sincere, and yet all of them had treated
me with malice and deceitfulness.

She began to apologize but I did not let her finish. I picked up my
things and went out the
front door. She ran after me. She was
not preventing me from leaving but rather she was talking
very
fast, as if she needed to say all she could before I drove away.

She said that I had to hear her out, and that she was willing to ride
with me until she had told me everything the Nagual had entrusted her to tell
me.

"I'm going to Mexico City," I said.

"I'll ride with you to Los Angeles if necessary," she said,
and I knew that she meant it.
"All right," I said just to
test her, "get in the car."

She vacillated for an instant, then she stood silently and faced her
house. She put her clasped
hands just below her navel. She turned
and faced the valley and did the same movement with her
hands.

I knew what she was doing. She was saying good-bye to her house and to
those awesome
round hills that surrounded it.

Don Juan had taught me that good-bye gesture years before. He had
stressed that it was an
extremely powerful gesture, and that a
warrior had to use it sparingly. I had had very few
occasions to
perform it myself.

The good-bye movement la Gorda was executing was a variant of the one
don Juan had taught
me. He had said that the hands were clasped as in
prayer, either gently or with great speed, even
producing a
clapping sound. Done either way, the purpose of clasping the hands was to
imprison
the feeling that the warrior did not wish to leave
behind. As soon as the hands had closed in and
captured that
feeling, they were taken with great force to the middle of the chest, at the
level of
the heart. There the feeling became a dagger and the
warrior stabbed himself with it, as if holding the dagger with both hands.

Don Juan had told me that a warrior said good-bye in that fashion only
when he had reason to
feel he might not come back.

La Gorda's good-bye enthralled me.

"Are you saying good-bye?" I asked out of curiosity.

"Yes," she said dryly.

"Don't you put your hands to your chest?" I asked.

"Men do that. Women have wombs. They store their feelings
there."

"Aren't you suppose to say good-bye like that only when you're not
coming back?" I asked.
"Chances are I may not come
back," she replied. "I'm going with you."

I had an attack of unwarranted sadness, unwarranted in the sense that I
did not know that
woman at all. I had only doubts and suspicions
about her. But as I peered into her clear eyes I had
a sense of
ultimate kinship with her. I mellowed. My anger had disappeared and given way
to a strange sadness. I looked around, and I knew that those mysterious,
enormous, round hills were ripping me apart.

"Those hills over there are alive," she said, reading my
thoughts.

I turned to her and told her that both the place and the women had
affected me at a very deep
level, a level I could not ordinarily
conceive. I did not know which was more devastating, the
place
or the women. The women's onslaughts had been direct and terrifying, but the
effect of
those hills was a constant, nagging apprehension, a
desire to flee from them. When I told that to la Gorda she said that I was
correct in assessing the effect of that place, that the Nagual had left them
there because of that effect, and that I should not blame anyone for what had
happened, because the Nagual himself had given those women orders to try to do
away with me.

"Did he give orders like that to you too?" I asked.

"No, not to me. I'm different than they are," she said.
"They are sisters. They are the same,
exactly the
same. Just like Pablito, Nestor and Benigno are the same. Only you and I can be
exactly the same. We are not now because you're still incomplete. But
someday we will be the
same, exactly the same."

"I've been told that you're the only one who knows where the
Nagual and Genaro are now," I
said.

She peered at me for a moment and shook her head affirmatively.

"That's right," she said. "I know where they are. The
Nagual told me to take you there if I
can."

I told her to stop beating around the bush and to reveal their exact
whereabouts to me
immediately. My demand seemed to plunge her into
chaos. She apologized and reassured me that
later on, when
we were on our way, she would disclose everything to me. She begged me not to
ask
her about them anymore because she had strict orders not to mention anything
until the right
moment.

Lidia and Josefina came to the door and stared at me. I hurriedly got
in the car. La Gorda got in after me, and as she did I could not help observing
that she had entered the car as she would
have entered a
tunnel. She sort of crawled in. Don Juan used to do that. I jokingly said once,
after
I had seen him do it scores of times, that it was more
functional to get in the way I did. I thought
that perhaps
his lack of familiarity with automobiles was responsible for his strange way of
entering. He explained then that the car was a cave and that caves had
to be entered in that
fashion if we were going to use them.
There was an inherent spirit to caves, whether they were
natural
or man-made, and that that spirit had to be approached with respect. Crawling
was the
only way of showing that respect.

I was wondering whether or not to ask la Gorda if don Juan had
instructed her about such
details, but she spoke first. She said
that the Nagual had given her specific instructions about
what
to do in case I would survive the attacks of dona Soledad and the three girls.
Then she
casually added that before I headed for Mexico City we had to go to a specific place in the mountains where don Juan and I used to
go, and that there she would reveal all the information
the
Nagual had never disclosed to me.

I had a moment of indecision, and then something in me which was not my
reason made me
head for the mountains. We drove in complete
silence. I attempted at various opportune moments
to start up a
conversation, but she turned me down every time with a strong shake of her
head.
Finally she seemed to have gotten tired of my trying and
said forcefully that what she had to say
required a
place
of power
and until we were in one we had to abstain from draining ourselves
with useless talk.

After a long drive and an exhausting hike away from the road, we
finally reached our
destination. It was late afternoon. We were in a
deep canyon. The bottom of it was already dark,
while the sun was
still shining on the top of the mountains above it. We walked until we came to
a
small cave a few feet up the north side of the canyon, which ran from east to
west. I used to
spend a great deal of time there with don Juan.

Before we entered the cave, la Gorda carefully swept the floor with
branches, the way don
Juan used to, in order to clear the
ticks and parasites from the rocks. Then she cut a large heap of
small
branches with soft leaves from the surrounding bushes and placed them on the
rock floor
like a mat.

She motioned me to enter. I had always let don Juan enter first as a
sign of respect. I wanted to
do the same with her, but she declined.
She said I was the Nagual. I crawled into the cave the
same way she
had crawled into my car. I laughed at my inconsistency. I had never been able
to
treat my car as a cave.

She coaxed me to relax and make myself comfortable.

"The reason the Nagual could not reveal all his designs to you was
because you're
incomplete," la Gorda said all of a sudden.
"You still are, but now after your bouts with Soledad
and
the sisters, you are stronger than before."

"What's the meaning of being incomplete? Everyone has told me that
you're the only one who
can explain that," I said.

"It's a very simple matter," she said. "A complete
person is one who has never had children." She paused as if she were
allowing me time to write down what she had said. I looked up from
my
notes. She was staring at me, judging the effect of her words.

"I know that the Nagual told you exactly what I've just said,"
she continued. "You didn't pay any attention to him and you probably
haven't paid any attention to me, either."

I read my notes out loud and repeated what she had said. She giggled.

"The Nagual said that an incomplete person is one who has had children,"
she said as if
dictating to me.

She scrutinized me, apparently waiting for a question or a comment. I
had none.

"Now I've told you everything about being complete and
incomplete," she said. "And I've told you just like the Nagual told
me. It didn't mean anything to me at that time, and it doesn't mean
anything
to you now."

I had to laugh at the way she patterned herself after don Juan.

"An incomplete person has a hole in the stomach," she went on.
"A sorcerer can see it as
plainly as you can see my head. When
the hole is on the left side of one's stomach, the child who
created
that hole is of the same sex. If it is on the right side, the child is of the
opposite sex. The hole on the left side is black, the one on the right is dark
brown."

"Can you see that hole in anyone who has had children?"

"Sure. There are two ways of
seeing
it. A sorcerer may
see
it in dreaming or by looking
directly at a person. A sorcerer who
sees has no problems in viewing the luminous being to find out if there is a
hole in the luminosity of the body. But even if the sorcerer doesn't know how
to
see, he can look and actually distinguish the darkness of
the hole through the clothing."

She stopped talking. I urged her to go on.

"The Nagual told me that you write and then you don't remember what
you wrote," she said
with a tone of accusation.

I became entangled in words trying to defend myself. Nonetheless, what
she had said was the
truth. Don Juan's words always had had
a double effect on me: once when I heard for the first
time whatever
he had said, and then when I read at home whatever I had written down and had
forgotten
about.

Talking to la Gorda, however, was intrinsically different. Don Juan's
apprentices were not in
any way as engulfing as he was. Their
revelations, although extraordinary, were only missing
pieces to a
jigsaw puzzle. The unusual character of those pieces was that with them the
picture
did not become clearer but that it became more and more
complex.

"You had a brown hole in the right side of your stomach," she
continued. "That means that a
woman emptied you. You made a
female child.

"The Nagual said that I had a huge black hole myself, because I
made two women. I never saw
the hole, but I've seen other people
with holes like mine."

"You said that I had a hole; don't I have it anymore?"

"No. It's been patched. The Nagual helped you to patch it. Without
his help you would be
more empty than you are now."

"What kind of patch is it?"