The Second Ring of Power (34 page)

"I don't know yet. It looks as if that depends on you. On your
power."

"On me? In what way, Gorda?"

"Let me explain. The day before you arrived the little sisters and
I went to the city. I wanted to find you in the city because I had a very
strange vision in my
dreaming
. In that vision I was in the city with
you. I saw you in my vision as plainly as I see you now. You didn't know who I
was but
you talked to me. I couldn't make out what you said. I
went back to the same vision three times but I was not strong enough in my
dreaming
to find out what you were saying to me. I figured
that my vision
was telling me that I had to go to the city and trust my
power
to find
you there. I
was sure that you were on your way."

"Did the little sisters know why you took them to the city?" I
asked.

"I didn't tell them anything," she replied. "I just took
them there. We wandered around the
streets all morning."

Her statements put me in a very strange frame of mind. Spasms of
nervous excitation ran
through my entire body. I had to stand
up and walk around for a moment. I sat down again and
told her that
I had been in the city the same day, and that I had wandered around the
marketplace
all afternoon looking for don Juan. She stared at me with
her mouth open.

"We must have passed each other," she said and sighed.
"We were in the market and in the park. We sat on the steps of the church
most of the afternoon so as not to attract attention to
ourselves."

The hotel where I had stayed was practically next door to the church. I
remembered that I had
stood for a long time looking at the
people on the steps of the church. Something was pulling me
to
examine them. I had the absurd notion that both don Juan and don Genaro were
going to be
among those people, sitting like beggars just to surprise
me.

"When did you leave the city?" I asked.

"We left around five o'clock and headed for the Nagual's spot in
the mountains," she replied.

I had also had the certainty that don Juan had left at the end of the
day. The feelings I had had
during that entire episode of looking
for don Juan became very clear to me. In light of what she had told me I had to
revise my stand. I had conveniently explained away the certainty I had had that
don Juan was there in the streets of the city as an irrational expectation, a
result of my consistently finding him there in the past. But la Gorda had been
in the city actually looking for
me and she was the being closest to don Juan in temperament.
I had felt all along that his
presence was
there. La Gorda's statement had merely confirmed something that my body knew
beyond the shadow of a doubt.

I noticed a flutter of nervousness in her body when I told her the
details of my mood that day.
"What would've happened if you had
found me?" I asked.

"Everything would've been changed," she replied. "For me
to find you would've meant that I
had enough
power
to move
forward. That's why I took the little sisters with me. All of us, you,
me
and the little sisters, would've gone away together that day."

"Where to, Gorda?"

"Who knows? If I had the
power
to find you I would've also
had the
power
to know that. It's your turn now. Perhaps you will have
enough
power
now to know where we should go. Do you
see
what I mean?"

I had an attack of profound sadness at that point. I felt more acutely
than ever the despair of
my human frailty and temporariness.
Don Juan had always maintained that the only deterrent to
our
despair was the awareness of our death, the key to the sorcerer's scheme of
things. His idea was that the awareness of our death was the only thing that
could give us the strength to withstand the duress and pain of our lives and
our fears of the unknown. But what he could never
tell me was
how to bring that awareness to the foreground. He had insisted, every time I
had
asked him, that my volition alone was the deciding
factor; in other words, I had to make up my
mind to bring
that awareness to bear witness to my acts. I thought I had done so. But
confronted with la Gorda's determination to find me and go away with me, I
realized that if she had found me
in the city that day I would
never have returned to my home, never again would I have seen those
I held dear. I had not
been prepared for that. I had braced myself for dying, but not for
disappearing for the rest of my life in full
awareness, without anger or disappointment, leaving
behind the best of my feelings.

I was almost embarrassed to tell la Gorda that I was not a warrior
worthy of having the kind of
power that must be needed to perform
an act of that nature: to leave for good and to know where
to
go and what to do.

"We are human creatures," she said. "Who knows what's
waiting for us or what kind of power
we may have?"

I told her that my sadness in leaving like that was too great. The
changes that sorcerers went
through were too drastic and too
final. I recounted to her what Pablito had told me about his
unbearable
sadness at having lost his mother.

"The human form feeds itself on those feelings," she said dryly.
"I pitied myself and my little
children for years. I couldn't
understand how the Nagual could be so cruel to ask me to do what I
did:
to leave my children, to destroy them and to forget them."

She said that it took her years to understand that the Nagual also had
had to choose to leave
the human form. He was not being
cruel. He simply did not have any more human feelings. To
him
everything was equal. He had accepted his fate. The problem with Pablito, and
myself for
that matter, was that neither of us had accepted our
fate. La Gorda said, in a scornful way, that
Pablito wept
when he remembered his mother, his Manuelita, especially when he had to cook
his
own food. She urged me to remember Pablito's mother as
she was: an old, stupid woman who knew nothing else but to be Pablito's
servant. She said that the reason all of them thought he was
a
coward was because he could not be happy that his servant Manuelita had become
the witch Soledad, who could kill him like she would step on a bug.

La Gorda stood up dramatically and leaned over the table until her
forehead was almost
touching mine.

"The Nagual said that Pablito's good fortune was
extraordinary," she said. "Mother and son fighting for the same
thing. If he weren't the coward he is, he would accept his fate and oppose
Soledad
like a warrior, without fear or hatred. In the end the best would win and take
all. If
Soledad
is the winner, Pablito should be happy
with his fate and wish her well. But only a real
warrior can
feel that kind of happiness."

"How does dona Soledad feel about all this?"

"She doesn't indulge in her feelings," la Gorda replied and
sat down again. "She has accepted
her fate more
readily than any one of us. Before the Nagual helped her she was worse off than
myself. At least I was young; she was an old cow, fat and tired, begging
for her death to come. Now death will have to fight to claim her."

The time element in dona Soledad's transformation was a detail that had
puzzled me. I told la
Gorda that I remembered having seen
dona Soledad no more than two years before and she was
the same old
lady I had always known. La Gorda said that the last time I had been in
Soledad's
house, under the impression that it was still Pablito's
house, the Nagual had set them up to act as
if everything
were the same. Dona Soledad greeted me, as she always did, from the kitchen,
and I
really did not face her. Lidia, Rosa, Pablito and Nestor
played their roles to perfection in order to
keep me from
finding out about their true activities.

"Why would the Nagual go to all that trouble, Gorda?"

"He was saving you for something that's not clear yet. He kept you
away from every one of us
deliberately. He and Genaro told me
never to show my face when you were around."
"Did they
tell Josefina the same thing? "

"Yes. She's crazy and can't help herself. She wanted to play her
pranks on you. She used to
follow you around and you never knew
it. One night when the Nagual had taken you to the
mountains, she
nearly pushed you down a ravine in the darkness. The Nagual found her in the
nick
of time. She doesn't do those things out of meanness, but because she enjoys
being that way.
That's her human form. She'll be that way until she
loses it. I've told you that all six of them are a bit off. You must be aware
of that so as not to be caught in their webs. If you do get caught, don't get
angry. They can't help themselves."

She was silent for a while. I caught the almost imperceptible sign of a
flutter in her body. Her
eyes seemed to get out of focus and
her mouth dropped as if the muscles of her jaw had given in.
I
became engrossed in watching her. She shook her head two or three times.

"I've just
seen
something," she said. "You're just
like the little sisters and the Genaros."

She began to laugh quietly. I did not say anything. I wanted her to
explain herself without my
meddling.

"Everybody gets angry with you because it hasn't dawned on them
yet that you're no different
than they are," she went on.
"They see you as the Nagual and they don't understand that you
indulge
in your ways just like they do in theirs."

She said that Pablito whined and complained and played at being a
weakling. Benigno played
the shy one, the one who could not
even open his eyes. Nestor played to be the wise one, the one
who
knows everything. Lidia played the tough woman who could crush anyone with a
look.
Josefina was the crazy one who could not be trusted. Rosa was the bad-tempered girl who ate the
mosquitoes that bit her. And I was the
fool that came from Los Angeles with a pad of paper and lots of wrong questions.
And all of us loved to be the way we were.

"I was once a fat, smelly woman," she went on after a pause.
"I didn't mind being kicked
around like a dog as long as I was not
alone. That was my form.

"I will have to tell everybody what I have
seen
about you
so they won't feel offended by your
acts."

I did not know what to say. I felt that she was undeniably right. The
important issue for me
was not so much her accurateness but
the fact that I had witnessed her arriving at her unquestionable conclusion.

"How did you
see
all that?" I asked.

"It just came to me," she replied.

"How did it come to you?"

"I felt the feeling of seeing coming to the top of my head, and
then I knew what I've just told
you."

I insisted that she describe to me every detail of the feeling of
seeing
that she was alluding to.
She complied after a moment's
vacillation and gave me an account of the same ticklish sensation
I
had become so aware of during my confrontations with dona Soledad and the
little sisters. La
Gorda said that the sensation started on the top
of her head and then went down her back and
around her
waist to her womb. She felt it inside her body as a consuming ticklishness,
which
turned into the knowledge that I was clinging to my
human form, like all the rest, except that my
particular way
was incomprehensible to them.

"Did you hear a voice telling you all that?" I asked.

"No. I just
saw
everything I've told you about
yourself," she replied.

I wanted to ask her if she had had a vision of me clinging to something,
but I desisted. I did
not want to indulge in my usual
behavior. Besides, I knew what she meant when she said that she
"saw."
The same thing had happened to me when I was with Rosa and Lidia. I suddenly
"knew"
where they lived; I had not had a vision of their
house. I simply felt that I knew it.

I asked her if she had also felt a dry sound of a wooden pipe being
broken at the base of her
neck.

"The Nagual taught all of us how to get the feeling on top of the
head," she said. "But not
everyone of us can do it. The
sound behind the throat is even more difficult. None of us has ever
felt
it yet. It's strange that you have when you're still empty."