The Second Ring of Power (32 page)

Benigno, who was sitting across the table from me, suddenly stood up and
came to my side.
He sat to my left and whispered very softly in my
ear that perhaps the two old men had instructed
me but I did
not remember, or that they had not said anything about it so I would not fix my
attention on it once I had found it.

"Why was the dome so important?" I asked Nestor.

"Because that's where the Nagual and Genaro are now," he
replied.

"And where's that dome?" I asked.

"Somewhere on this earth," he said.

I had to explain to them at great length that it was impossible that a
structure of that magnitude
could exist on our planet. I said that
my vision was more like a dream and domes of that height
could
exist only in fantasies. They laughed and patted me gently as if they were
humoring a child.

"You want to know where Eligio is," Nestor said all of a
sudden. "Well, he is in the white
vaults of that
dome with the Nagual and Genaro."

"But that dome was a vision," I protested.

"Then Eligio is in a vision," Nestor said. "Remember
what Benigno just said to you. The
Nagual and Genaro didn't tell
you to find that dome and go back to it over and over. If they had,
you
wouldn't be here. You'd be like Eligio, in the dome of that vision. So you see,
Eligio did not die like a man in the street dies. He simply did not return from
his jump."

His claim was staggering to me. I could not brush aside the memory of
the vividness of the
visions I had had, but for some
strange reason I wanted to argue with him. Nestor, without giving
me
time to say anything, drove his point a notch further. He reminded me of one of
my visions:
the next to the last. That particular one had been the
most nightmarish of them all. I had found myself being chased by a strange,
unseen creature. I knew that it was there but I could not see it,

not because it was invisible but because the world I was in was so
incredibly unfamiliar that I could not tell what anything was. Whatever the
elements of my vision were, they were certainly not from this earth. The
emotional distress I experienced upon being lost in such a place was almost
more than I could bear. At one moment, the surface where I stood began to
shake. I felt
that it was caving in under my feet and I grabbed a sort
of branch, or an appendage of a thing that reminded me of a tree, which was
hanging just above my head on a horizontal plane. The instant I
touched
it, the thing wrapped around my wrist, as if had been filled with nerves that
sensed everything. I felt that I was being hoisted to a tremendous height. I
looked down and saw an
incredible animal; I knew it was the
unseen creature that had been chasing me. It was coming out
of
a surface that looked like the ground. I could see its enormous mouth open like
a cavern. I
heard a chilling, thoroughly unearthly roar, something
like a shrill, metallic gasp, and the tentacle
that had me
caught unraveled and I fell into that cavernous mouth, I saw every detail of
that
mouth as I was falling into it. Then it closed with me
inside. I felt an instantaneous pressure that
mashed my body.

"You have already died," Nestor said. "That animal ate
you. You ventured beyond this world and found horror itself. Our life and our
death are no more and no less real than your short life in
that
place and your death in the mouth of that monster. This life that we are having
now is only a
long vision. Don't you see?"

Nervous spasms ran through my body.

"I didn't go beyond this world," he went on, "but I know
what I'm talking about. I don't have
tales of horror like you. All I
did was to visit Porfirio ten times. If it had been up to me I would've
gone
there forever, but my eleventh bounce was so powerful that it changed my
direction. I felt
that I had overshot Porfirio's hut, and instead of
finding myself at his door, I found myself in the
city, very close to the place of a
friend of mine. I thought it was funny. I knew that I was
journeying between the tonal and the nagual.
Nobody had said to me that the journeys had to be
of any special kind. So I got curious and decided
to see my friend. I began to wonder if I really
would get to see him. I came to his house and knocked on the door just
as I had knocked scores of
times.
His wife let me in as she had always done and sure enough my friend was home. I
told him
that I had come to the city
on business and he even paid me some money he owed me. I put the
money in my pocket. I knew that my friend, and
his wife, and the money, and his house, and the
city were just like Porfirio's hut, a vision. I knew that a force beyond
me was going to disintegrate
me any
moment. So I sat down to enjoy my friend to the fullest. We laughed and joked.
And I dare say that I was funny and light and charming. I stayed there for a
long time, waiting for the jolt; since it didn't come I decided to leave. I
said good-bye and thanked him for the money and
for his friendship. I walked away. I wanted to see the city before the
force took me away. I
wandered around all night. I walked all the way to
the hills overlooking the city, and at the
moment
the sun rose a realization struck me like a thunderbolt. I was back in the
world and the
force that will
disintegrate me was at ease and was going to let me stay for a while. I was
going to see my homeland and this marvelous earth for a while longer. What a
great joy. Maestro! But I
couldn't
say that I had not enjoyed Porfirio's friendship. Both visions are equal, but I
prefer the
vision of my form and my
earth. It's my indulging perhaps."

Nestor stopped talking and all of them stared at me. I felt threatened
as I had never been
before. Some part of me was in awe of what he had
said, another wanted to fight with him. I
began to argue
with him without any sense. My inane mood lasted for a few moments, then I
became
aware that Benigno was looking at me with a very mean expression. He had fixed
his
eyes on my chest. I felt that something ominous was
suddenly pressing on my heart. I began to
perspire as if
a heater were right in front of my face. My ears began to buzz.

La Gorda walked up to me at that precise moment. She was a most
unexpected sight. I was sure that the Genaros felt the same way. They stopped
what they were doing and looked at her.

Pablito was the first to recover from his surprise.

"Why do you have to come in like that?" he asked in a
pleading tone. "You were listening from the other room, weren't you?"

She said that she had been in the house only a few minutes and then she
stepped out to the
kitchen. And the reason she stayed quiet was not so
much to listen but to exercise her ability to be
inconspicuous.
Her presence had created a strange lull. I wanted to pick up again the flow of
Nestor's revelations, but before I could say anything la Gorda said that the
little sisters were on
their way to the house and would be
coming through the door any minute. The Genaros stood up
at
once as if they had been pulled by the same string. Pablito put his chair on
his shoulder.

"Let's go for a hike in the dark. Maestro," Pablito said to
me.

La Gorda said in a most imperative tone that I could not go with them yet
because she had not
finished telling me everything the Nagual had
instructed her to tell me.

Pablito turned to me and winked.

"I've told you," he said. "They're bossy, gloomy bitches.
I certainly hope you're not like that.
Maestro."

Nestor and Benigno said good night and embraced me. Pablito just walked
away carrying his
chair like a backpack. They went out through the
back.

A few seconds later a horribly loud bang on the front door made la
Gorda and me jump to our
feet. Pablito walked in again, carrying
his chair.

"You thought I wasn't going to say good night, didn't you?" he
asked me and left laughing.

The next day I was by myself all morning. I worked on my notes, in the
afternoon I used my
car to help la Gorda and the little sisters
transport the furniture from dona Soledad's house to their
house.

In the early evening la Gorda and I sat in the dining area alone. We
were silent for a while. I
was very tired.

La Gorda broke the silence and said that all of them had been too
complacent since the Nagual
and Genaro had left. Each of them had
been absorbed in his or her particular tasks. She said that
the
Nagual had commanded her to be an impassionate warrior and to follow whatever
path her
fate selected for her. If Soledad had stolen my power, la
Gorda had to flee and try to save the little sisters and then join Benigno and
Nestor, the only two Genaros who would have survived. If
the
little sisters had killed me, she had to join the Genaros because the little
sisters would have
had no more need to be with her. If I had not
survived the attack of the allies and she did, she had to leave that area and
be on her own. She told me, with a glint in her eye, that she had been sure
that
neither one of us would survive, and that was why she had said good-bye to her
sisters, to her
house and to the hills.

"The Nagual told me that in case you and I survived the
allies," she went on, "I have to do
anything for
you, because that would be my warrior's path. That was why I interfered with
what
Benigno was doing to you last night. He was pressing on
your chest with his eyes. That is his art as a stalker. You saw Pablito's hand
earlier yesterday; that was also part of the same art."

"What art is that, Gorda?"

"The art of the stalker. That was the Nagual's predilection and
the Genaros are his true
children at that. We, on the other
hand, are dreamers. Your
double
is
dreaming
."

What she was saying was new to me. I wanted her to elucidate her
statements. I paused for a
moment to read what I had written in
order to select the most appropriate question. I told her that
I
first wanted to find out what she knew about my
double
and then I wanted
to know about the art of stalking.

"The Nagual told me that your
double
is something that
takes a lot of power to come out," she
said. "He
figured that you might have enough energy to get it out of you twice. That's
why he set
up Soledad and the little sisters either to kill you or
to help you."

La Gorda said that I had had more energy than the Nagual thought, and
that my double came out three times. Apparently Rosa's attack had not been a
thoughtless action; on the contrary, she
had very
cleverly calculated that if she injured me, I would have been helpless: the
same ploy
dona Soledad had tried with her dog. I had given Rosa a chance to strike me when I yelled at her, but she failed to injure me. My double
came out and injured her instead. La Gorda said that Lidia
had
told her that Rosa did not want to wake up when all of us had to rush out of Soledad's house,
so Lidia squeezed the hand that had been injured. Rosa did not feel any pain and knew in an
instant that I had cured her, which
meant to them that I had drained my power. La Gorda affirmed
that
the little sisters were very clever and had planned to drain me of power; to
that effect they
had kept on insisting that I cure Soledad. As soon
as Rosa realized that I had also cured her, she thought that I had weakened
myself beyond repair. All they had to do was to wait for Josefina in order to
finish me off.

"The little sisters didn't know that when you cured Rosa and Soledad you also replenished
yourself," la Gorda said, and laughed as if it
were a joke. "That was why you had enough energy to get your
double
out a third time when the little sisters tried to take your luminosity."

I told her about the vision I had had of dona Soledad huddled against
the wall of her room, and
how I had merged that vision with my
tactile sense and ended up feeling a viscous substance on
her
forehead.

"That was true
seeing
," la
Gorda said. "You
saw
Soledad
in
her room although she was with
me around Genaro's place, and then you
saw
your
nagual on her forehead."

I felt compelled at that point to recount to her the details of my
whole experience, especially
the realization I had had that I was actually
curing dona Soledad and Rosa by touching the
viscous
substance, which I felt was part of me.