The Second Ring of Power (18 page)

"A patch in your luminosity. There is no other way of saying it.
The Nagual said that a
sorcerer like himself can fill up the
hole anytime. But that that filling is only a patch without
luminosity.
Anyone who sees or does dreaming can tell that it looks like a lead patch on
the
yellow luminosity of the rest of the body.

"The Nagual patched you and me and Soledad. But then he left it up
to us to put back the
shine, the luminosity."

"How did he patch us?"

"He's a sorcerer, he put things in our bodies. He replaced us. We
are no longer the same. The
patch is what he put there
himself."

"But how did he put those things there and what were they?"

"What he put in our bodies was his own luminosity and he used his
hand to do that. He simply
reached into our bodies and left his
fibers there. He did the same with all of his six children and
also
with Soledad. All of them are the same. Except Soledad; she's something
else."
La Gorda seemed unwilling to go on. She vacillated and
almost began to stutter.
"What is dona Soledad?" I
insisted.

"It's very hard to tell," she said after considerable coaxing.
"She is the same as you and me, and yet she's different. She has the same
luminosity, but she's not together with us. She goes in the opposite direction.
Right now she's more like you. Both of you have patches that look like
lead.
Mine is gone and I'm again a complete, luminous egg. That is the reason I said
that you and
I will be exactly the same someday when you become
complete again. Right now what makes us
almost the
same is the Nagual's luminosity and the fact that both of us are going in the
same
direction and that we both were empty."

"What does a complete person look like to a sorcerer?" I
asked.

"Like a luminous egg made out of fibers," she said. "All
the fibers are complete; they look like
strings, taut
strings. It looks as if the strings have been tightened like a drum is
tightened.

"On an empty person, on the other hand, the fibers are crumpled up
at the edges of the hole. When they have had many children, the fibers don't
look like fibers anymore. Those people look like two chunks of luminosity,
separated by blackness. It is an awesome sight. The Nagual made
me
see
them one day when we were in a park in the city."

"Why do you think the Nagual never told me about all this?"

"He told you everything, but you never understood him correctly.
As soon as he realized that
you were not understanding what he was
saying, he was compelled to change the subject. Your
emptiness
prevented you from understanding. The Nagual said that it was perfectly natural
for
you not to understand. Once a person becomes incomplete
he's actually empty like a gourd that has been hollowed out. It didn't matter
to you how many times he told you that you were empty;
it didn't
matter that he even explained it to you. You never knew what he meant, or worse
yet,
you didn't want to know."

La Gorda was treading on dangerous ground. I tried to head her off with
another question, but
she rebuffed me.

"You love a little boy and you don't want to understand what the
Nagual meant," she said
accusingly. "The Nagual told me
that you have a daughter you've never seen, and that you love
that
little boy. One took your edge, the other pinned you down. You have welded them
together."

I had to stop writing. I crawled out of the cave and stood up. I began
to walk down the steep
incline to the floor of the gully. La
Gorda followed me. She asked me if I was upset by her directness. I did not
want to lie.

"What do you think?" I asked.

"You're fuming!" she exclaimed and giggled with an abandon
that I had witnessed only in don
Juan and don Genaro.

She seemed about to lose her balance and grabbed my left arm. In order
to help her get down
to the floor of the gully, I lifted
her up by her waist. I thought that she could not have weighed
more
than a hundred pounds. She puckered her lips the way don Genaro used to and
said that her weight was a hundred and fifteen. We both laughed at once. It was
a moment of direct, instant communication.

"Why does it bother you so much to talk about these things?"
she asked.

I told her that once I had had a little boy whom I had loved immensely.
I felt the imperative to
tell her about him. Some extravagant
need beyond my comprehension made me open up with that
woman who was
a total stranger to me.

As I began to talk about that little boy, a wave of nostalgia enveloped
me; perhaps it was the
place or the situation or the time of
the day. Somehow I had merged the memory of that little boy
with
the memory of don Juan, and for the first time in all the time I had not seen
him I missed don
Juan. Lidia had said that they never missed him
because he was always with them; he was their
bodies and
their spirits. I had known instantly what she meant. I felt the same way
myself. In that
gully, however, an unknown feeling had overtaken
me. I told la Gorda that I had never missed
don Juan until
that moment. She did not answer. She looked away.

Possibly my feeling of longing for those two people had to do with the
fact that both of them
had produced catharses in my life. And
both of them were gone. I had not realized until that
moment how
final that separation was. I said to la Gorda that that little boy had been,
more than
anything else, my friend, and that one day he was
whisked away by forces I could not control.
That was
perhaps one of the greatest blows I had ever received. I even went to see don
Juan to
ask his assistance. It was the only time I had ever
asked him for help. He listened to my plea and
then he broke
into uproarious laughter. His reaction was so unexpected that I could not even
get
angry. I could only comment on what I thought was his
insensitivity.

"What do you want me to do?" he asked.

I said that since he was a sorcerer perhaps he could help me to regain
my little friend for my
solace.

"You're wrong. A warrior doesn't seek anything for his
solace," he said in a tone that did not
admit reproach.

Then he proceeded to smash my arguments. He said that a warrior could
not possibly leave
anything to chance, that a warrior actually
affected the outcome of events by the force of his
awareness and
his unbending intent. He said that if I would have had the unbending intent to
keep
and help that child, I would have taken measures to
assure his stay with me. But as it was, my
love was
merely a word, a useless outburst of an empty man. He then told me something
about emptiness and completeness, but I did not want to hear it. All I felt was
a sense of loss, and the
emptiness that he had mentioned, I was
sure, referred to the feeling of having lost someone irreplaceable.

"You loved him, you honored his spirit, you wished him well, now
you must forget him," he
said.

But I had not been able to do so. There was something terribly alive in
my emotions even
though time had mellowed them. At one point I
thought I had forgotten, but then one night an
incident
produced the deepest emotional upheaval in me. I was walking to my office when
a
young Mexican woman approached me. She had been sitting on a bench,
waiting for a bus. She
wanted to know if that particular bus
went to a children's hospital. I did not know. She explained that her little
boy had had a high temperature for a long time and she was worried because she
did not have any money. I moved toward the bench and saw a little boy standing
on the seat with his
head against the back of the bench. He
was wearing a jacket and short pants and a cap. He could
not
have been more than two years old. He must have seen me, for he walked to the
edge of the bench and put his head against my leg.

"My little head hurts," he said to me in Spanish.

His voice was so tiny and his dark eyes so sad that a wave of irrepressible
anguish welled up
in me. I picked him up and drove him and his
mother to the nearest hospital. I left them there and
gave the
mother enough money to pay the bill. But I did not want to stay or to know any
more
about him. I wanted to believe that I had helped him, and
that by doing so I had paid back to the
spirit of man.

I had learned the magical act of "paying back to the spirit of
man" from don Juan. I had asked him once, overwhelmed by the realization
that I could never pay him back for all he had done for
me,
if there was anything in the world I could do to even the score. We were
leaving a bank, after
exchanging some Mexican currency.

"I don't need you to pay me back," he said, "but if you
still want to pay back, make your
deposit to the spirit of man.
That's always a very small account, and whatever one puts in it is
more
than enough."

By helping that sick child I had merely paid back to the spirit of man
for any help that my
little boy may receive from strangers
along his path.

I told la Gorda that my love for him would remain alive for the rest of
my life even though I would never see him again. I wanted to tell her that the
memory I had of him was buried so deep that nothing could touch it, but I
desisted. I felt it would have been superfluous to talk about it.
Besides,
it was getting dark and I wanted to get out of that gully.

"We better go," I said. "I'll take you home. Maybe some
other time we can talk about these
things again."

She laughed the way don Juan used to laugh at me. I had apparently said
something utterly
funny.

"Why do you laugh, Gorda?" I asked.

"Because you know yourself that we can't leave this place just like
that," she said. "You have an appointment with
power
here. And
so do I."

She walked back to the cave and crawled in.

"Come on in," she yelled from inside. "There is no way to
leave."

I reacted most incongruously. I crawled in and sat next to her again.
It was evident that she too
had tricked me. I had not come there to
have any confrontations. I should have been furious. I
was
indifferent instead. I could not lie to myself that I had only stopped there on
my way to
Mexico City
. I had gone there compelled by
something beyond my comprehension.

She handed me my notebook and motioned me to write. She said that if I
wrote I would not
only relax myself but I would also relax her.

"What is this appointment with power?" I asked.

"The Nagual told me that you and I have an appointment here with
something out there. You
first had an appointment with Soledad and then one with the little sisters. They were supposed to
destroy
you. The Nagual said that if you survived their assaults I had to bring you
here so that we
together could keep the third appointment."

"What kind of appointment is it?"

"I really don't know. Like everything else, it depends on us.
Right now there are some things
out there that have been waiting for
you. I say that they have been waiting for you because I come
here
by myself all the time and nothing ever happens. But tonight is different. You
are here and
those things will come."

"Why is the Nagual trying to destroy me?" I asked.

"He's not trying to destroy anybody!" la Gorda exclaimed in
protest. "You are his child. Now
he wants you to be himself. More
himself than any of us. But to be a true Nagual you have to
claim
your power. Otherwise he wouldn't have been so careful in setting up Soledad and the little
sisters to stalk you. He taught Soledad how to change
her shape and rejuvenate herself. He made
her construct a
devilish floor in her room. A floor no one can oppose. You see, Soledad is empty,
so the Nagual set her up to do something gigantic. He
gave her a task, a most difficult and
dangerous task, but the only
one which was suited for her, and that was to finish you off. He told
her
that nothing could be more difficult than for one sorcerer to kill another.
It's easier for an
average man to kill a sorcerer or for a sorcerer
to kill an average man, but two sorcerers don't fit
well at all.
The Nagual told Soledad that her best bet was to surprise you and scare you. And
that's what she did. The Nagual set her up to be a desirable woman so
she could lure you into her room, and there her floor would have bewitched you,
because as I've said, no one, but no one, can
stand up to
that floor. That floor was the Nagual's masterpiece for Soledad. But you did
something
to her floor and Soledad had to change her tactics in accordance with the
Nagual's
instructions. He told her that if her floor failed and
she could not frighten and surprise you, she had to talk to you and tell you
everything you wanted to know. The Nagual trained her to talk
very
well as her last resource. But Soledad could not overpower you even with
that."