The Second Ring of Power (37 page)

Rosa, Lidia and Josefina rolled counterclockwise around the room
several times. I strained to hear the swish of their dresses but the silence
was absolute. I could only hear la Gorda breathing.
The little
sisters finally stopped and sat down with their backs against the wall, each
under a
lantern. Lidia sat at the east wall, Rosa, at the north
and Josefina, at the west.

La Gorda stood up, closed the door behind us and secured it with an iron
bar. She made me slide over a few inches, without changing my position, until I
was sitting with my back against
the door. Then she silently rolled the
length of the room and sat down underneath the lantern on
the
south wall; her getting into that sitting position seemed to be the cue.

Lidia stood up and began to walk on the tips of her toes along the
edges of the room, close to
the walls. It was not a walk proper
but rather a soundless sliding. As she increased her speed she began to move as
if she were gliding, stepping on the angle between the floor and the walls. She
would jump over Rosa, Josefina, la Gorda and myself every time she got
to where we were
sitting. I felt her long dress brushing me every
time she went by. The faster she ran, the higher
she got on the
wall. A moment came when Lidia was actually running silently around the four
walls of the room seven or eight feet above the floor. The sight of her,
running perpendicular to
the walls, was so unearthly that it
bordered on the grotesque. Her long gown made the sight even
more
eerie. Gravity did not seem to have any effect on Lidia, but it did on her long
skirt; it
dragged downward. I felt it every time she passed over
my head, sweeping my face like a hanging
drape.

She had captured my attentiveness at a level I could not imagine. The
strain of giving her my
undivided attention was so great that
I began to get stomach convulsions; I felt her running with my stomach. My eyes
were getting out of focus. With the last bit of my remaining concentration,
I
saw Lidia walk down on the east wall diagonally and come to a halt in the
middle of the room.

She was panting, out of breath, and drenched in perspiration like la
Gorda had been after her
flying display. She could hardly keep
her balance. After a moment she walked to her place at the
east
wall and collapsed on the floor like a wet rag. I thought she had fainted, but
then I noticed
that she was deliberately breathing through her
mouth.

After some minutes of stillness, long enough for Lidia to recover her
strength and sit up
straight, Rosa stood up and ran without making a
sound to the center of the room, turned on her
heels and ran
back to where she had been sitting. Her running allowed her to gain the
necessary
momentum to make an outlandish jump. She leaped up in the
air, like a basketball player, along
the vertical span of the wall, and her hands went
beyond the height of the wall, which was
perhaps
ten feet. I saw her body actually hitting the wall, although there was no
corresponding
crashing sound. I
expected her to rebound to the floor with the force of the impact, but she
remained hanging there, attached to the wall like
a pendulum. From where I sat it looked as if she
were holding a hook of some sort in her left hand. She swayed silently
in a pendulum-like motion for a moment and then catapulted herself three or
four feet over to her left by pushing her body
away from the wall with her right arm, at the moment in which her swing
was the widest. She repeated the swaying and catapulting thirty or forty times.
She went around the whole room and
then
she went up to the beams of the roof where she dangled precariously, hanging
from an
invisible hook.

While she was on the beams I became aware that what I had thought was a
hook in her left
hand was actually some quality of that hand that
made it possible for her to suspend her weight
from it. It was
the same hand she had attacked me with two nights before.

Her display ended with her dangling from the beams over the very center
of the room.
Suddenly she let go. She fell down from a height of
fifteen or sixteen feet. Her long dress flowed
upward and
gathered around her head. For an instant, before she landed without a sound,
she looked like an umbrella turned inside out by the force of the wind; her
thin, naked body looked
like a stick attached to the dark mass
of her dress.

My body felt the impact of her plummeting down, perhaps more than she
did herself. She
landed in a squat position and remained motionless,
trying to catch her breath. I was sprawled out on the floor with painful cramps
in my stomach.

La Gorda rolled across the room, took her shawl and tied it around my
umbilical region, like a
band, looping it around my body two or
three times. She rolled back to the south wall like a
shadow.

While she had been arranging the shawl around my waist, I had lost
sight of Rosa. When I
looked up she was again sitting by the
north wall. A moment later, Josefina quietly moved to the
center
of the room. She paced back and forth with noiseless steps, between where Lidia
was
sitting and her own spot at the west wall. She faced me
all the time. Suddenly, as she approached
her spot, she
raised her left forearm and placed it right in front of her face, as if she
wanted to
block me from her view. She hid half of her face for an
instant behind her forearm. She lowered it
and raised it
again, that time hiding her entire face. She repeated the movement of lowering
and
raising her left forearm countless times, as she paced
soundlessly from one side of the room to the
other. Every
time she raised her forearm a bigger portion of her body disappeared from my
view.
A moment came when she had hidden her entire body, puffed
up with clothes, behind her thin
forearm.

It was as if by blocking her view of my body, sitting ten to twelve
feet away from her, a thing
she could have easily done with the
width of her forearm, she also made me block the view of her
body,
a thing which could not possibly be done with just the width of her forearm.

Once she had hidden her entire body, all I was able to make out was a
silhouette of a forearm
suspended in midair, bouncing from one
side of the room to the other, and at one point I could hardly see the arm
itself.

I felt a revulsion, an unbearable nausea. The bouncing forearm depleted
me of energy. I slid down on my side, unable to keep my balance. I saw the arm
falling to the ground. Josefina was
lying on the floor covered with
garments, as if her puffed-up clothes had exploded. She lay on her
back
with her arms spread out.

It took a long time to get back my physical balance. My clothes were
soaked in perspiration. I
was not the only one affected. All of
them were exhausted and drenched in sweat. La Gorda was
the
most poised, but her control seemed to be on the verge of collapsing. I could
hear all of them,
including la Gorda, breathing through their mouths.

When I was in full control again everybody sat on her spot. The little
sisters were looking at
me fixedly. I saw out of the corner of
my eye that la Gorda's eyes were half-closed. She suddenly rolled noiselessly
to my side and whispered in my ear that I should begin to make my moth call,
keeping
it up until the allies had rushed into the house and were about to take us.

I had a moment of vacillation. She whispered that there was no way to
change directions, and that we had to finish what we had started. After untying
her shawl from my waist, she rolled back to her spot and sat down.

I put my left hand to my lips and tried to produce the tapping sound. I
found it very difficult at
first. My lips were dry and my hands
were sweaty, but after an initial clumsiness, a feeling of
vigor
and well-being came over me. I produced the most flawless tapping noise I had
ever done.
It reminded me of the tapping noise I had been hearing
all along as a response to mine. As soon
as I stopped to
breathe, I could hear the tapping sound being answered from all directions.

La Gorda signaled me to go on with it. I produced three more series. The
last one was utterly
mesmeric. I did not need to intake a
gulp of air and let it out in small spurts, as I had been doing
all
along. This time the tapping sound came out of my mouth freely. I did not even
have to use
the edge of my hand to produce it.

La Gorda suddenly rushed to me, lifted me up bodily by my armpits and
pushed me to the
middle of the room. Her action disrupted my
absolute concentration. I noticed that Lidia was holding onto my right arm,
Josefina to my left, and Rosa had backed up against the front of me
and
was holding me by the waist with her arms extended backward. La Gorda was in
back of me. She ordered me to put my arms behind and grab onto her shawl, which
she had looped around her
neck and shoulders like a harness.

I noticed at that moment that something besides us was there in the
room, but I could not tell
what it was. The little sisters were
shivering. I knew that they were aware of something which I
was
unable to distinguish. I also knew that la Gorda was going to try to do what
she had done in
don Genaro's house. All of a sudden, I felt the
wind of the eye-door pulling us. I grabbed onto la
Gorda's shawl
with all my strength while the little sisters grabbed onto me. I felt that we
were
spinning, tumbling and swaying from side to side like a
giant, weightless leaf.

I opened my eyes and saw that we were like a bundle. We were either
standing up or we were
lying horizontally in the air. I could
not tell which because I had no sensorial point of reference.
Then,
as suddenly as we had been lifted off, we were dropped. I sensed our falling in
my
midsection. I yelled with pain and my screams were
united with those of the little sisters. The
insides of my
knees hurt. I felt an unbearable jolt on my legs; I thought I must have broken
them.

My next impression was that something was getting inside my nose. It was
very dark and I
was lying on my back. I sat up. I realized then that la Gorda was tickling my
nostrils with a twig.

I did not feel exhausted or even mildly tired. I jumped to my feet and
only then was I stricken
by the realization that we were not in
the house. We were on a hill, a rocky, barren hill. I took a
step
and nearly fell down. I had stumbled over a body. It was Josefina. She was
extremely hot to
the touch. She seemed to be feverish. I tried to
make her sit up, but she was limp. Rosa was next
to her. As a
contrast, her body was icy cold. I put one on top of the other and rocked them.
That
motion brought them back to their senses.

La Gorda had found Lidia and was making her walk. After a few minutes,
all of us were
standing. We were perhaps half a mile east of the
house.

Years before don Juan had produced in me a similar experience but with
the aid of a psychotropic plant. He seemingly made me fly and I landed a
distance from his house. At the
time, I had tried to explain the event
in rational terms, but there was no ground for rational
explanations
and, short of accepting that I had flown, I had to fall back onto the only two
avenues
left open: I could explain it all by arguing that don
Juan had transported me to the distant field
while I was
still unconscious under the effect of the psychotropic alkaloids of that plant;
or by
arguing that under the influence of the alkaloids I had
believed what don Juan was ordering me to
believe, that I
was flying.

This time I had no other recourse but to brace myself for accepting, on
its face value, that I
had flown. I wanted to indulge in
doubts and began to wonder about the possibilities of the four
girls
carrying me to that hill. I laughed loudly, incapable of containing an obscure
delight. I was
having a relapse of my old malady. My reason,
which had been blocked off temporarily, was
beginning to take hold of me again.
I wanted to defend it. Or perhaps it would be more
appropriate to say, in light of the outlandish acts I had witnessed and
performed since my arrival,
that my
reason was defending itself, independently of the more complex whole that
seemed to be
the "me" I did
not know. I was witnessing, almost in the fashion of an interested observer,
how my reason struggled to find suitable rationales, while another, much larger
portion of me could
not have cared
less about explaining anything.