The Second Ring of Power (19 page)

"Why was it so important to overpower me? "

She paused and peered at me. She cleared her throat and sat up straight.
She looked up at the
low roof of the cave and exhaled
noisily through her nose.

"Soledad is a woman like myself," she said. "I'll tell
you something about my own life and
maybe you'll understand her.

"I had a man once. He got me pregnant when I was very young and I
had two daughters with him. One after the other. My life was hell. That man was
a drunkard and beat me day and night. And I hated him and he hated me. And I
got fat like a pig. One day another man came along and
told me that he
liked me and wanted me to go with him to work in the city as a paid servant. He
knew I was a hardworking woman and only wanted to exploit me. But my life was
so miserable
that I fell for it and went with him. He was worse than
the first man, mean and fearsome. He
couldn't stand me after a week
or so. And he used to give me the worst beatings you can imagine.
I
thought he was going to kill me and he wasn't even drunk, and all because I
hadn't found work.
Then he sent me to beg on the streets with a sick baby. He would pay the
child's mother
something from the money I
got. And then he would beat me because I hadn't made enough. The
child got sicker and sicker and I knew that if it
died while I was begging, the man would kill me. So one day when I knew that he
was not there I went to the child's mother and gave her her baby
and some of the money I had made that day. That
was a lucky day for me; a kind foreign lady had
given me fifty pesos to buy medicine for the baby.

"I had been with that horrible man for three months and I thought
it had been twenty years. I
used the money to go back to my home. I
was pregnant again. The man had wanted me to have a
child of my
own, so that he would not have to pay for one. When I got to my hometown I
tried to
go back to see my children, but they had been taken away
by their father's family. All the family
got together
under the pretense that they wanted to talk to me, but instead they took me to
a
deserted place and beat me with sticks and rocks and left me for
dead."

La Gorda showed me the many scars on her scalp.

"To this day I don't know how I made it back to town. I even lost
the child I had in my womb.
I went to an aunt I still had; my
parents were dead. She gave me a place to rest and she tended to
me.
She fed me, the poor soul, for two months before I could get up."

"Then one day my aunt told me that that man was in town looking
for me. He had talked to the
police and had said that he had given
me money in advance to work and that I had run away, stealing the money after I
had killed a woman's baby. I knew that the end had come for me. But
my
luck turned right again and I caught a ride in the truck of an American. I saw
the truck coming
on the road and I lifted my hand in desperation
and the man stopped and let me get on. He drove
me all the way
to this part of Mexico. He dropped me in the city. I didn't know a soul. I
roamed all over the place for days like a crazy dog, eating garbage from the
street. That was when my
luck turned for the last time.

"I met Pablito, with whom I have a debt that I can't pay back.
Pablito took me to his carpentry
shop and gave me a corner there to put
my bed. He did that because he felt sorry for me. He
found me in
the market after he stumbled and fell on top of me. I was sitting there
begging. A
moth or a bee, I don't know which, flew to him and hit
him in the eye. He turned around on his
heels and
stumbled and fell right on top of me. I thought he would be so mad that he
would hit
me, but he gave me some money instead. I asked him if he
could give me work. That was when he took me to his shop and set me up with an
iron and an ironing board to do laundry.

"I did very well. Except that I got fatter, because most of the
people I washed for fed me with
their leftovers. Sometimes I ate
sixteen times a day. I did nothing else but eat. Kids in the street
used
to taunt me and sneak behind me and step on my heels and then someone would
push me and I would fall. Those kids made me cry with their cruel jokes,
especially when they used to
spoil my wash on purpose.

"One day, very late in the afternoon, a weird old man came over to
see Pablito. I had never
seen that man before. I had never known
that Pablito was in cahoots with such a scary, awesome
man. I turned
my back to him and kept on working. I was alone there. Suddenly I felt the
hands of
that man on my neck. My heart stopped. I could not
scream, I couldn't even breathe. I fell down
and that awful
man held my head, maybe for an hour. Then he left. I was so frightened that I
stayed
where I had fallen until the next morning. Pablito found me there; he laughed
and said that
I should be very proud and happy because that old man was
a powerful sorcerer and was one of
his teachers. I was dumbfounded;
I couldn't believe Pablito was a sorcerer. He said that his
teacher had seen a
perfect circle of moths flying over my head. He had also seen my death
circling around me. And that was why he had acted
like lightning and had changed the direction of my eyes. Pablito also said that
the Nagual had laid his hands on me and had reached into my
body and that soon I would be different. I had no
idea what he was talking about. I had no idea
what that crazy old man
had done, either. But it didn't matter to me. I was like a dog that
everyone kicked around. Pablito had been the only
person who had been kind to me. At first I had
thought he wanted me for his woman. But I was too ugly and fat and
smelly. He just wanted to be
kind to
me.

"The crazy old man came back another night and grabbed me again by
the neck from behind.
He hurt me terribly. I cried and
screamed. I didn't know what he was doing. He never said a word
to
me. I was deathly afraid of him. Then, later on he began to talk to me and told
me what to do
with my life. I liked what he said. He took me
everywhere with him. But my emptiness was my
worst enemy. I
couldn't accept his ways, so one day he got sick and tired of pampering me and
sent
the wind after me. I was in the back of Soledad's house by myself that day, and
I felt the
wind getting very strong. It was blowing through the fence.
It got into my eyes. I wanted to get
inside the house, but my body
was frightened and instead of walking through the door I walked
through
the gate in the fence. The wind pushed me and made me twirl. I tried to go back
to the
house, but it was useless. I couldn't break the force of
the wind. It pushed me over the hills and
off the road
and I ended up in a deep hole, a hole like a tomb. The wind kept me there for
days
and days, until I had decided to change and accept my
fate without recrimination. Then the wind
stopped and
the Nagual found me and took me back to the house. He told me that my task was
to
give what I didn't have, love and affection, and that I
had to take care of the sisters, Lidia and
Josefina,
better than if they were myself. I understood then what the Nagual had been
saying to
me for years. My life had been over a long time ago. He
had offered me a new life and that life
had to be
completely new. I couldn't bring to that new life my ugly old ways. That first
night he
found me, the moths had pointed me out to him; I had no
business rebelling against my fate.

I began my change by taking care of Lidia and Josefina better than I
took care of myself. I did
everything the Nagual told me, and one
night in this very gully in this very cave I found my
completeness.
I had fallen asleep right here where I am now and then a noise woke me up. I
looked
up and saw myself as I had once been, thin, young, fresh. It was my spirit that
was coming
back to me. At first it didn't want to come closer
because I still looked pretty awful. But then it
couldn't help
itself and came to me. I knew right then, and all at once, what the Nagual had
struggled for years to tell me. He had said that when one has a child that
child takes the edge of
our spirit. For a woman to have a girl
means the end of that edge. To have had two as I did meant
the
end of me. The best of my strength and my illusions went to those girls. They
stole my edge,
the Nagual said, in the same way I had stolen it
from my parents. That's our fate. A boy steals the
biggest part of
his edge from his father, a girl from her mother. The Nagual said that people
who have had children could tell, if they aren't as stubborn as you, that
something is missing in them.
Some craziness, some nervousness, some
power that they had before is gone. They used to have it, but where is it now?
The Nagual said that it is in the little child running around the house, full
of
energy, full of illusions. In other words, complete. He said that if we watch
children we can tell
that they are daring, they move in leaps. If we watch their
parents we can see that they are
cautious
and timid. They don't leap anymore. The Nagual told me we explain that by
saying that the parents are grown-ups and have responsibilities. But that's not
true. The truth of the matter is
that
they have lost their edge."

I asked la Gorda what the Nagual would have said if I had told him that
I knew parents with
much more spirit and edge than their children.

She laughed, covering her face in a gesture of sham embarrassment.

"You can ask me," she said giggling. "You want to hear
what I think?"

"Of course I want to hear it."

"Those people don't have more spirit, they merely had a lot of
vigor to begin with and have
trained their children to be obedient
and meek. They have frightened their children all their lives,
that's
all."

I described to her the case of a man I knew, a father of four, who at
the age of fifty-three
changed his life completely. That
entailed leaving his wife and his executive job in a large
corporation
after more than twenty-five years of building a career and a family. He chucked
it all
very daringly and went to live on an island in the
Pacific.

"You mean he went there all by himself?" la Gorda asked with a
tone of surprise.

She had destroyed my argument. I had to admit that the man had gone
there with his twenty-
three-year-old bride.

"Who no doubt is complete," la Gorda added.

I had to agree with her again.

"An empty man uses the completeness of a woman all the time,"
she went on. "A complete woman is dangerous in her completeness, more so
than a man. She is unreliable, moody, nervous,
but also
capable of great changes. Women like that can pick themselves up and go
anywhere. They'll do nothing there, but that's because they had nothing going
to begin with. Empty people, on the other hand, can't jump like that anymore,
but they're more reliable. The Nagual said that
empty people
are like worms that look around before moving a bit and then they back up and
then
they move a little bit more again. Complete people
always jump, somersault and almost always
land on their
heads, but it doesn't matter to them.

"The Nagual said that to enter into the other world one has to be
complete. To be a sorcerer
one has to have all of one's
luminosity: no holes, no patches and all the edge of the spirit. So a
sorcerer
who is empty has to regain completeness. Man or woman, they must be complete to
enter into that world out there, that eternity where the Nagual and Genaro are
now waiting for
us."

She stopped talking and stared at me for a long moment. There was
barely enough light to
write.

"But how did you regain your completeness?" I asked.

She jumped at the sound of my voice. I repeated my question. She stared
up at the roof of the
cave before answering me.

"I had to refuse those two girls," she said. "The Nagual
once told you how to do that but you didn't want to hear it. His point was that
one has to steal that edge back. He said that we got it the
hard
way by stealing it and that we must recover it the same way, the hard way.

"He guided me to do that, and the first thing he made me do was to
refuse my love for those
two children. I had to do that in
dreaming
.
Little by little I learned not to like them, but the
Nagual said
that that was useless, one has to learn not to care and not not to like.
Whenever those
girls meant nothing to me I had to see them again,
lay my eyes and my hands on them. I had to
pat them gently
on the head and let my left side snatch the edge out of them."