The Second Ring of Power (22 page)

The man turned his back to us and began to move on the trail. I also
began to walk. La Gorda kept on shrieking and whining. The rectangular shape
was almost grabbing her back. I heard it moving with crushing thumps. The sound
of its steps reverberated on the hills around us. I could
feel
its cold breath on my neck. I knew that la Gorda was about to go mad. And so
was 1. The feline and the coyote were almost rubbing my legs. I could hear
their hissing and growling
increasing in volume. I had, at that
moment, the irrational urge to make a certain sound don Juan had taught me. The
allies answered me. I kept on frantically making the sound and they answered
me
back. The tension diminished by degrees, and before we reached the road I was
part of a most
extravagant scene. La Gorda was riding piggyback,
happily bouncing her dress over her head as if
nothing had
ever happened, keeping the bounces in rhythm with the sound I was making, while
four creatures of another world answered me back as they moved at my pace,
flanking us on all
four sides. We got to the road in that fashion. But
I did not want to leave. There seemed to be
something missing. I stayed
motionless with la Gorda on my back and made a very special
tapping sound don Juan had taught me. He had said
that it was the call of moths. In order to
produce it one had to use the inside edge of the left hand and the lips.

As soon as I made it everything seemed to come to rest peacefully. The
four entities answered
me, and as they did I knew which were
the ones that would go with me.

I then walked to the car and eased la Gorda off my back onto the
driver's seat and pushed her over to her side. We drove away in absolute
silence. Something had touched me somewhere and
my thoughts
had been turned off.

La Gorda suggested that we go to don Genaro's place instead of driving
to her house. She said
that Benigno, Nestor ami Pablito lived
there but they were out of town. Her suggestion appealed
to me.

Once we were in the house la Gorda lit a lantern. The place looked just
as it had the last time I
had visited don Genaro. We sat on the
floor. I pulled up a bench and put my writing pad on it. I
was
not tired and I wanted to write but I could not do it. I could not write at
all.

"What did the Nagual tell you about the allies?" I asked.

My question seemed to catch her off guard. She did not know how to
answer.

"I can't think," she finally said.

It was as though she had never experienced that state before. She paced
back and forth in front
of me. Tiny beads of perspiration had
formed on the tip of her nose and on her upper lip.

She suddenly grabbed me by the hand and practically pulled me out of
the house. She led me
to a nearby ravine and there she got
sick.

My stomach felt queasy. She said that the pull of the allies had been
too great and that I should
force myself to throw up. I stared at
her, waiting for a further explanation. She took my head in
her
hands and stuck her finger down my throat, with the certainty of a nurse
dealing with a child,
and actually made me vomit. She
explained that human beings had a very delicate glow around
the
stomach and that that glow was always being pulled by everything around. At
times when the
pull was too great, as in the case of contact with
the allies, or even in the case of contact with
strong people,
the glow would become agitated, change color or even fade altogether. In such
instances the only thing one could do was simply to throw up.

I felt better but not quite myself yet. I had a sense of tiredness, of
heaviness around my eyes.
We walked back to the house. As we
reached the door la Gorda sniffed the air like a dog and said
that
she knew which allies were mine. Her statement, which ordinarily would have had
no other
significance than the one she alluded to, or the one I
myself read into it, had the special quality of
a cathartic
device. It made me explode into thoughts. All at once, my usual intellectual
deliberations
came into being. I felt myself leaping in the air, as if thoughts had an energy
of their
own.

The first thought that came to my mind was that the allies were actual
entities, as I had
suspected without ever daring to admit it, even to
myself. I had seen them and felt them and
communicated
with them. I was euphoric. I embraced la Gorda and began to explain to her the
crux
of my intellectual dilemma. I had seen the allies without the aid of don Juan
or don Genaro
and that act made all the difference in the world to me.
I told la Gorda that once when I had
reported to don Juan that I had
seen one of the allies he had laughed and urged me not to take myself so
seriously and to disregard what I had seen.

I had never wanted to believe I was having hallucinations, but I did not
want to accept that
there were allies, either. My rational background
was unbending. I could not bridge the gap. This
time, however,
everything was different, and the thought that there were actually beings on
this
earth that were from another world without being aliens
to the earth was more than I could bear. I
said to la
Gorda, half in jest, that secretly I would have given anything to be crazy.
That would
have absolved some part of me from the crushing
responsibility of revamping my understanding
of the world.
The irony of it was that I could not have been more willing to revamp my
understanding of the world, on an intellectual level, that is. But that was not
enough. That had never been enough. And that had been my insurmountable
obstacle all along, my deadly flaw. I
had been willing to dally in don
Juan's world
in a semiconvinced fashion; therefore, I had been a
quasi-sorcerer. All my efforts had been no
more than my
inane eagerness to fence with the intellect, as if I were in academia where one
can do that very thing from 8: 00 a. m. to 5: 00 p. m., at which time, duly
tired, one goes home. Don Juan used to say as a joke that, after arranging the
world in a most beautiful and enlightened manner, the scholar goes home at five
o'clock in order to forget his beautiful arrangement.

While la Gorda made us some food I worked feverishly on my notes. I
felt much more relaxed
after eating. La Gorda was in the best
of spirits. She clowned, the way don Genaro used to,
imitating the
gestures I made while I wrote.

"What do you know about the allies, Gorda?" I asked.

"Only what the Nagual told me," she replied. "He said
that the allies were forces that a
sorcerer learns to control. He
had two inside his gourd and so did Genaro."

"How did they keep them inside their gourds?"

"No one knows that. All the Nagual knew was that a tiny, perfect
gourd with a neck must be
found before one could harness the
allies."

"Where can one find that kind of gourd?"

"Anywhere. The Nagual left word with me, in case we survived the
attack of the allies, that we
should start looking for the perfect
gourd, which must be the size of the thumb of the left hand.
That
was the size of the Nagual's gourd."

"Have you seen his gourd?"

"No. Never. The Nagual said that a gourd of that kind is not in the
world of men. It's like a little bundle that one can distinguish hanging from
their belts. But if you deliberately look at it you will see nothing.

"The gourd, once it is found, must be groomed with great care.
Usually sorcerers find gourds
like that on vines in the woods. They
pick them and dry them and then they hollow them out. And
then
they smooth them and polish them. Once the sorcerer has his gourd he must offer
it to the
allies and entice them to live there. If the allies
consent, the gourd disappears from the world of men and the allies become an
aid to the sorcerer. The Nagual and Genaro could make their allies
do
anything that needed to be done. Things they themselves could not do. Such as,
for instance,
sending the wind to chase me or sending that chicken to
run inside Lidia's blouse."

I heard a peculiar, prolonged hissing sound outside the door. It was the
exact sound I had heard in dona Soledad's house two days before. This time I
knew it was the jaguar. The sound did not scare me. In fact, I would have
stepped out to see the jaguar had la Gorda not stopped me.

"You're still incomplete," she said. "The allies would
feast on you if you go out by yourself.
Especially that
daring one that's prowling out there now."

"My body feels very safe," I protested.

She patted my back and held me down against the bench on which I was
writing.

"You're not a complete sorcerer yet," she said. "You have
a huge patch in your middle and the
force of those allies would yank
it out of place. They are no joke."

"What are you supposed to do when an ally comes to you in this
fashion?"

"I don't bother with them one way or another. The Nagual taught me
to be balanced and not to
seek anything eagerly. Tonight, for
instance, I knew which allies would go to you, if you can ever
get
a gourd and groom it. You may be eager to get them. I'm not. Chances are I'll
never get them
myself. They are a pain in the neck."

"Why?"

"Because they are forces and as such they can drain you to nothing.
The Nagual said that one is better off with nothing except one's purpose and
freedom. Someday when you're complete, perhaps we'll have to choose whether or
not to keep them."

I told her that I personally liked the jaguar even though there was
something overbearing
about it. She peered at me. There was a
look of surprise and bewilderment in her eyes.

"I really like that one," I said.

"Tell me what you saw," she said.

I realized at that moment that I had automatically assumed that she had
seen the same things I
had. I described in great detail the
four allies as I had seen them. She listened more than
attentively;
she appeared to be spellbound by my description.

"The allies have no form," she said when I had finished.
"They are like a presence, like a
wind, like a
glow. The first one we found tonight was a blackness that wanted to get inside
my
body. That's why I screamed. I felt it reaching up my
legs. The others were just colors. Their
glow was so
strong, though, that it made the trail look as if it were daytime."

Her statements astounded me. I had finally accepted, after years of
struggle and purely on the
basis of our encounter with them that
night, that the allies had a consensual form, a substance
which
could be perceived equally by everyone's senses.

I jokingly told la Gorda that I had already written in my notes that
they were creatures with
form.

"What am I going to do now?" I asked in a rhetorical sense.

"It's very simple," she said. "Write that they are
not."

I thought that she was absolutely right.

"Why do I see them as monsters?" I asked.

"That's
no mystery," she said. "You haven't lost your human form yet. The
same thing
happened to me. I used to see
the allies as people; all of them were Indian men with horrible faces
and mean looks. They used to wait for me in
deserted places. I thought they were after me as a
woman. The Nagual used to laugh his head off at
my fears. But still I was half dead with fright. One of them used to come and
sit on my bed and shake it until I would wake up. The fright that
that ally used to give me was something that I
don't want repeated, even now that I'm changed. Tonight I think I was as afraid
of the allies as I used to be."

"You mean that you don't see them as human beings anymore?"

"No. Not anymore. The Nagual told you that an ally is formless. He
is right. An ally is only a
presence, a helper that is nothing and
yet it is as real as you and me."

"Have the little sisters seen the allies?"

"Everybody has seen them one time or another."

"Are the allies just a force for them too?"

"No. They are like you; they haven't lost their human form yet.
None of them has. For all of them, the little sisters, the Genaros and Soledad, the allies are horrendous things; with them the
allies are
malevolent, dreadful creatures of the night. The sole mention of the allies
sends Lidia
and Josefina and Pablito into a frenzy. Rosa and Nestor
are not that afraid of them, but they don't
want to have
anything to do with them, either. Benigno has his own designs so he's not
concerned
with them. They don't bother him, or me, for that
matter. But the others are easy prey for the
allies,
especially now that the allies are out of the Nagual's and Genaro's gourds.
They come all
the time looking for you.