The Second Ring of Power (33 page)

"To
see
that thing on Rosa's hand was
also true
seeing
," she said. "And you were
absolutely right, that substance was yourself. It came out of your body and it
was your nagual. By touching
it, you pulled it back."

La Gorda told me then, as though she were unveiling a mystery, that the
Nagual had
commanded her not to disclose the fact that since all of
us had the same luminosity, if my nagual
touched one of
them, I would not get weakened, as would ordinarily be the case if my nagual
touched an average man.

"If your nagual touches us," she said, giving me a gentle slap
on the head, "your luminosity
stays on the surface. You can
pick it up again and nothing is lost."

I told her that the content of her explanation was impossible for me to
believe. She shrugged
her shoulders as if saying that that
was not any of her concern. I asked her then about her usage of
the
word "nagual". I said that don Juan had explained the nagual to me as
being the indescribable
principle, the source of everything.

"Sure," she said smiling. "I know what he meant. The
nagual is in everything."

I pointed out to her, a bit scornfully, that one could also say the
opposite, that the tonal is in
everything. She carefully explained
that there was no opposition, that my statement was correct,
the
tonal was also in everything. She said that the tonal which is in everything
could be easily
apprehended by our senses, while the nagual which
is in everything manifested itself only to the
eye of the
sorcerer. She added that we could stumble upon the most outlandish sights of
the tonal
and be scared of them, or awed by them, or be indifferent
to them, because all of us could view
those sights. A sight of the
nagual, on the other hand, needed the specialized senses of a sorcerer
in
order to be seen at all. And yet, both the tonal and the nagual were present in
everything at all
times. It was appropriate, therefore, for a
sorcerer to say that "looking" consisted in viewing the
tonal
which is in everything, and "seeing," on the other hand, consisted in
viewing the nagual which also is in everything. Accordingly, if a warrior
observed the world as a human being, he
was looking,
but if he observed it as a sorcerer, he was "seeing," and what he was
"seeing" had to be properly called the nagual.

She then reiterated the reason, which Nestor had given me earlier, for
calling don Juan the
Nagual and confirmed that I was also the Nagual because of the shape that came
out of my head.

I wanted to know why they had called the shape that had come out of my
head the
double
. She
said that they
had thought they were sharing a private joke with me. They had always called
that
shape the
double
,
because it was twice the size of the person who had it.

"Nestor told me that that shape was not such a good thing to
have," I said.

"It's neither good nor bad," she said. "You have it and
that makes you the Nagual. That's all.
One of us
eight had to be the Nagual and you're the one. It might have been Pablito or me
or
anyone."

"Tell me now, what is the art of stalking?" I asked.

"The Nagual was a stalker," she said, and peered at me.
"You must know that. He taught you
to stalk from
the beginning."

It occurred to me that what she was referring to was what don Juan had
called the hunter. He
had certainly taught me to be a hunter.
I told her that don Juan had shown me how to hunt and make traps. Her usage of
the term stalker, however, was more accurate.

"A hunter just hunts," she said. "A stalker stalks
anything, including himself." "How does he do that?"

"An impeccable stalker can turn anything into prey. The Nagual
told me that we can even
stalk our own weaknesses."

I stopped writing and tried to remember if don Juan had ever presented
me with such a novel
possibility: to stalk my weaknesses. I
could not recall him ever putting it in those terms.

"How can one stalk one's weaknesses, Gorda?"

"The same way you stalk prey. You figure out your routines until
you know all the doing of
your weaknesses and then you come upon
them and pick them up like rabbits inside a cage."

Don Juan had taught me the same thing about routines, but in the vein
of a general principle that hunters must be aware of. Her understanding and
application of it, however, were more
pragmatic than mine.

Don Juan had said that any habit was, in essence, a
"doing,"and that a doing needed all its
parts in order
to function. If some parts were missing, a
doing
was
disassembled. By
doing
, he
meant any
coherent and meaningful series of actions. In other words, a habit needed all
its
component actions in order to be a live activity.

La Gorda then described how she had stalked her own weakness of eating
excessively. She said that the Nagual had suggested she first tackle the
biggest part of that habit, which was
connected with her laundry work;
she ate whatever her customers fed her as she went from house
to
house delivering her wash. She expected the Nagual to tell her what to do, but
he only laughed
and made fun of her, saying that as soon as he
would mention something for her to do, she would
fight not to
do it. He said that that was the way human beings are; they love to be told
what to do,
but they love even more to fight and not do what they
are told, and thus they get entangled in
hating the one
who told them in the first place.

For many
years she could not think of anything to do to stalk her weakness. One day,
however, she got so sick and tired of being fat
that she refused to eat for twenty-three days. That was the initial action that
broke her fixation. She then had the idea of stuffing her mouth with a
sponge to make her customers believe that she had
an infected tooth and could not eat. The
subterfuge worked not only with her customers, who stopped giving her
food, but with her as
well, as she
had the feeling of eating as she chewed on the sponge. La Gorda laughed when
she told me how she had walked around with a sponge stuffed in her mouth for
years until her habit of eating excessively had been broken.

"Was that all you needed to stop your habit?" I asked.

"No. I also had to learn how to eat like a warrior."

"And how does a warrior eat?"

"A warrior eats quietly, and slowly, and very little at a time. I
used to talk while I ate, and I ate
very fast, and I ate lots and
lots of food at one sitting. The Nagual told me that a warrior eats four
mouthfuls
of food at one time. A while later he eats another four mouthfuls and so on.

"A warrior also walks miles and miles every day. My eating
weakness never let me walk. I
broke it by eating four mouthfuls every
hour and by walking. Sometimes I walked all day and all
night.
That was the way I lost the fat on my buttocks."

She laughed at her own recollection of the nickname don Juan had given
her.

"But stalking your weaknesses is not enough to drop them," she
said. "You can stalk them
from now to doomsday and it won't make
a bit of difference. That's why the Nagual didn't want to
tell
me what to do. What a warrior really needs in order to be an impeccable stalker
is to have a
purpose."

La Gorda recounted how she had lived from day to day, before she met the
Nagual, with
nothing to look forward to. She had no hopes, no dreams,
no desire for anything. The opportunity
to eat,
however, was always accessible to her; for some reason that she could not fathom,
there
had been plenty of food available to her every single day
of her life. So much of it, in fact, that at one time she weighed two hundred
and thirty-six pounds.

"Eating was the only thing I enjoyed in life," la Gorda said.
"Besides, I never saw myself as
being fat. I thought I was
rather pretty and that people liked me as I was. Everyone said that I
looked
healthy.

"The Nagual told me something very strange. He said that I had an
enormous amount of
personal power and due to that I had always managed
to get food from friends while the relatives in my own house were going hungry.

"Everybody has enough personal power for something. The trick for
me was to pull my
personal power away from food to my warrior's
purpose."

"And what is that purpose, Gorda?" I asked half in jest.

"To enter into the other world," she replied with a grin and
pretended to hit me on top of my
head with her knuckles, the way don
Juan used to do when he thought I was indulging.

There was no more light for me to write. I wanted her to bring a
lantern but she complained
that she was too tired and had to sleep
a bit before the little sisters arrived.

We went into the front room. She gave me a blanket, then wrapped
herself in another one and
fell asleep instantly. I sat with my
back against the wall. The brick surface of the bed was hard
even
with four straw mats. It was more comfortable to lie down. The moment I did I
fell asleep.

I woke up suddenly with an unbearable thirst. I wanted to go to the
kitchen to drink some
water but I could not orient myself in
the darkness. I could feel la Gorda bundled up in her
blanket next
to me. I shook her two or three times and asked her to help me get some water.
She
grumbled some unintelligible words. She apparently was so
sound asleep that she did not want to wake up. I shook her again and suddenly
she woke up; only it was not la Gorda. Whoever I was
shaking yelled
at me in a gruff, masculine voice to shut up. There was a man there in place of
la Gorda! My fright was instantaneous and uncontrollable. I jumped out of bed
and ran for the front
door. But my sense of orientation was
off and I ended up out in the kitchen. I grabbed a lantern
and
lit it as fast as I could. La Gorda came out of the outhouse in the back at
that moment and
asked me if there was something wrong. I nervously
told her what had happened. She seemed a
bit disoriented
herself. Her mouth was open and her eyes had lost their usual sheen. She shook
her
head vigorously and that seemed to restore her alertness. She took the lantern
and we walked
into the front room.

There was no one in the bed. La Gorda lit three more lanterns. She
appeared to be worried.
She told me to stay where I was, then
she opened the door to their room. I noticed that there was
light
coming from inside. She closed the door again and said in a matter-of-fact tone
not to worry,
that it was nothing, and that she was going to make us
something to eat. With the speed and
efficiency of a short-order cook
she made some food. She also made a hot chocolate drink with
cornmeal.
We sat across from each other and ate in complete silence.

The night was cold. It looked as if it was going to rain. The three
kerosene lanterns that she
had brought to the dining area cast a
yellowish light that was very soothing. She took some
boards that
were stacked up on the floor, against the wall, and placed them vertically in a
deep
groove on the transverse supporting beam of the roof.
There was a long slit in the floor parallel to
the beam that
served to hold the boards in place. The result was a portable wall that
enclosed the dining area.

"Who was in the bed?" I asked.

"In bed, next to you, was Josefina, who else?" she replied as
if savoring her words, and then
laughed. "She's a master at jokes
like that. For a moment I thought it was something else, but then
I
caught the scent that Josefina's body has when she's carrying out one of her
pranks."

"What was she trying to do? Scare me to death?" I asked.

"You're not their favorite, you know," she replied. "They
don't like to be taken out of the path
they're
familiar with. They hate the fact that Soledad is leaving. They don't want to
understand
that we are all leaving this area. It looks like our time
is up. I knew that today. As I left the house
I felt that
those barren hills out there were making me tired. I had never felt that way
until today."
"Where are you going to go?"