The Second Ring of Power (26 page)

He laughed with exaggerated ease.

"Aren't you the Nagual?" he asked me, and then looked at la
Gorda and added, "Or do you
have to wait for orders?"

"I am the Nagual," I said facetiously in order to humor him.

I sensed that he was about to pick a fight with la Gorda; she must have
sensed it too, for she
excused herself and went out the back.

Pablito put his chair down and slowly circled around me as if he were
inspecting my body.
Then he took his low-back narrow chair in one
hand, turned it around and sat down, resting his
folded arms on
the back of the chair that was made to allow him the maximum comfort as he sat
astride
it. I sat down facing him. His mood had changed completely the instant la Gorda
left.

"I must ask you to forgive me for acting the way I did," he
said smiling. "But I had to get rid of that witch."

"Is she that bad, Pablito?"

"You can bet on that," he replied.

To change the subject I told him that he looked very fine and
prosperous.

"You look very fine yourself. Maestro," he said.

"What's this nonsense of calling me Maestro?" I asked in a
joking tone.

"Things are not the same as before," he replied. "We are
in a new realm, and the Witness says
that you're a maestro now, and
the Witness cannot be wrong. But he will tell you the whole story
himself.
He'll be here shortly, and will he be glad to see you again. I think that by
now he must have felt that you are here. As we were coming back, all of us had
the feeling that you might be
on your way, but none of us felt that
you had already arrived."

I told him then that I had come for the sole purpose of seeing him and
Nestor, that they were
the only two people in the world with
whom I could talk about our last meeting with don Juan
and don Genaro,
and that I needed more than anything else to clear up the uncertainties that
that
last meeting had created in me.

"We're bound to one another," he said. "I'll do anything
I can to help. You know that. But I
must warn you that I'm not as
strong as you would want me to be. Perhaps it would be better if we didn't talk
at all. But, on the other hand, if we don't talk we'll never understand
anything."

In a careful and deliberate manner I formulated my query. I explained
that there was one
single issue at the crux of my rational
predicament.

"Tell me, Pablito," I said, "did we truly jump with our
bodies into the abyss?" "I don't know," he said. "I really
don't know."

"But you were there with me."

"That's the point. Was I really there?"

I felt annoyed at his cryptic replies. I had the sensation that if I
would shake him or squeeze
him, something in him would be set
free. It was apparent to me that he was deliberately
withholding
something of great value. I protested that he would choose to be secretive with
me
when we had a bond of total trust.

Pablito shook his head as if silently objecting to my accusation.

I asked him to recount to me his whole experience, starting from the
time prior to our jump,
when don Juan and don Genaro had
prepared us together for the final onslaught.

Pablito's
account was muddled and inconsistent. All he could remember about the last
moments before we jumped into the abyss was that
after don Juan and don Genaro had said good
bye to both of us and had disappeared into the darkness, his strength
waned, he was about to fall
on his
face, but I held him by his arm and carried him to the edge of the abyss and
there he
blacked out.

"What happened after you blacked out, Pablito?"

"I don't know."

"Did you have dreams or visions? What did you see?"

"As far as I'm concerned I had no visions, or if I did I couldn't
pay any attention to them. My
lack of impeccability makes it
impossible for me to remember them."

"And then what happened?"

"I woke up at Genaro's old place. I don't know how I got
there."

He remained quiet, while I frantically searched in my mind for a
question, a comment, a
critical statement or anything that would
add extra breadth to his statements. As it was, nothing in
Pablito's
account was usable to buttress what had happened to me. I felt cheated. I was
almost
angry with him. My feelings were a mixture of pity for
Pablito and myself and at the same time a
most intense
disappointment.

"I'm sorry I'm such a letdown to you," Pablito said.

My immediate reaction to his words was to cover up my feelings and
assure him that I was not
disappointed at all.

"I am a sorcerer," he said, laughing, "a poor one, but
enough of a one to know what my body
tells me. And right now it tells
me that you are angry with me."

"I'm not angry, Pablito!" I exclaimed.

"That's what your reason says, but not your body," he said.
"Your body is angry. Your reason,
however, finds
no reason to feel anger toward me, so you're caught in a cross fire. The least
I can
do for you is to untangle this. Your body is angry
because it knows that I am not impeccable and
that only an
impeccable warrior can help you. Your body is angry because it feels that I am wasting
myself. It knew all that the minute I walked through that door."

I did not know what to say. I felt a flood of post-fact realizations.
Perhaps he was right in
saying that my body knew all that. At
any rate, his directness in confronting me with my feelings
had
blunted the edge of my frustration. I began to wonder if Pablito was not just
playing a game
with me. I told him that being so direct and bold
he could not possibly be as weak as he pictured
himself to be.

"My weakness is that I'm made to have longings," he said
almost in a whisper. "I'm even to the
point where I
long for my life as an ordinary man. Can you believe that?"

"You can't be serious, Pablito! " I exclaimed.

"I am," he replied. "I long for the grand privilege of
walking the face of the earth as an
ordinary man, without this
awesome burden."

I found his stand simply preposterous and caught myself exclaiming over
and over that he
could not possibly be serious. Pablito looked at
me and sighed. I was overtaken by a sudden apprehension. He seemed to be on the
verge of tears. My apprehension gave way to an intense
feeling of
empathy. Neither of us could help each other.

La Gorda came back to the kitchen at that moment. Pablito seemed to
experience an
instantaneous revitalization. He jumped to his feet and
stomped on the floor.

"What the hell do you want?" he yelled in a shrill, nervous
voice. "Why are you snooping
around?"

La Gorda addressed me as if he did not exist. She politely said that
she was going to Soledad's
house.

"What the hell do we care where you go?" he yelled. "You
can go to hell for that matter."
He stomped on the floor like a
spoiled child while la Gorda stood there laughing.

"Let's get out of this house. Maestro," he said loudly.

His sudden shift from sadness to anger fascinated me. I became engrossed
in watching him.

One of the features that I had always admired was his nimbleness; even
when he stomped his feet his movements had grace.

He suddenly reached across the table and nearly snatched my writing pad
away from me. He
grabbed it with the thumb and index finger of his
left hand. I had to hold onto it with both hands,
using all my
strength. There was such an extraordinary force in his pull that if he had
really
wanted to take it he could have easily jerked it away
from my grip. He let go, and as he retrieved
his hand I saw a fleeting image of
an extension to it. It happened so fast that I could have
explained it as a visual distortion on my part, a
product of the jolt of having to stand up halfway,
drawn by the force of his pull. But I had learned
by then that I could neither behave with those
people in my accustomed manner, nor could I explain anything in my
accustomed manner, so I
did not even
try.

"What's that in your hand, Pablito?" I asked.

He recoiled in surprise and hid his hand behind his back. He had a blank
expression and
mumbled that he wanted us to leave that house
because he was becoming dizzy.

La Gorda began to laugh loudly and said that Pablito was as good a
deceiver as Josefina,
maybe even better, and that if I
pressed him to tell me what was in his hand he would faint and
Nestor
would have to tend to him for months.

Pablito began to choke. His face became almost purple. La Gorda told
him in a nonchalant
tone to cut out the acting because he had no
audience; she was leaving and I did not have much
patience. She
then turned to me and told me in a most commanding tone to stay there and not
go to the Genaros' house.

"Why in the hell not?" Pablito yelled and jumped in front of
her as if trying to stop her from
leaving. "What gall!
Telling the Maestro what to do! "

"We had a bout with the allies in your house last night," la
Gorda said to Pablito matter-of-
factly. "The Nagual and I are
still weak from that. If I were you, Pablito, I would put my attention to work.
Things have changed. Everything has changed since he came."

La Gorda left through the front door. I became aware then that indeed
she looked very tired.
Her shoes seemed too tight, or perhaps
she was so weak that her feet dragged a little bit. She seemed small and frail.

I thought that I must have looked as tired. Since there were no mirrors
in their house, I had the
urge to go outside and look at myself
in the side mirror of my car. I perhaps would have done it
but
Pablito thwarted me. He asked me in the most earnest tone not to believe a word
of what she had said about his being a deceiver. I told him not to worry about
that.

"You don't like la Gorda at all, do you?" I asked.

"You can say that again," he replied with a fierce look.
"You know better than anyone alive
the kind of
monsters those women are. The Nagual told us that one day you were going to
come
here just to fall into their trap. He begged us to be on
the alert and warn you about their designs.
The Nagual said
that you had one out of four chances: If out power was high we could bring you
here
ourselves and warn you and save you; if our power was low we ourselves would
arrive here
just in time to see your corpse; the third chance was to
find you either the slave to the witch
Soledad or the
slave of those disgusting, mannish women; the fourth chance and the faintest
one of all was to find you alive and well.

"The Nagual told us that in case you survived, you would then be
the Nagual and we should
trust you because only you could help
us."

"I'll do anything for you, Pablito. You know that."

"Not just for me. I'm not alone. The Witness and Benigno are with
me. We are together and
you have to help all of us."

"Of course, Pablito. That goes without saying."

"People around here have never bothered us. Our problems are with
those ugly, mannish
freaks. We don't know what to do with them. The
Nagual gave us orders to stay around them no
matter what. He
gave me a personal task but I've failed at it. I was very happy before. You
remember. Now I can't seem to manage my life anymore."

"What happened, Pablito?"

"Those witches drove me from my house. They took over and pushed
me out like trash. I now
live in Genaro's house with Nestor and
Benigno. We even have to cook our own meals. The Nagual knew that this might happen
and gave la Gorda the task of mediating between us and those three bitches. But
la Gorda is still what the Nagual used to call her, Two Hundred and
Twenty
Buttocks. That was her nickname for years and years, because she tipped the
scales at
two hundred and twenty pounds."

Pablito chuckled at his recollection of la Gorda.

"She was the fattest, smelliest slob you'd ever want to see,"
he went on. "Today she's half her
real size, but
she's still the same fat, slow woman up there in her head, and she can't do a
thing for us. But you're here now. Maestro, and our worries are over. Now we
are four against four."