The Second Ring of Power (39 page)

The little sisters looked at one another and then turned to la Gorda.
She made a gesture with her head. Josefina stood up and went to the front room.
She returned a moment later with the bundle that Lidia had shown me.

I had a pang of anticipation in the pit of my stomach. Josefina carefully
placed the bundle on the table in front of me. All of them gathered around. She
began to untie it as ceremoniously as
Lidia had done the first time.
When the package was completely unwrapped, she spilled the contents on the
table. They were menstruation rags.

I got flustered for an instant. But the sound of la Gorda's laughter,
which was louder than the
others', was so pleasing that I had to
laugh myself.

"That's Josefina's personal bundle," la Gorda said. "It
was her brilliant idea to play on your
greed for a
gift from the Nagual, in order to make you stay."

"You have to admit that it was a good idea," Lidia said to me.

She imitated the look of greed I had on my face when she was opening
the package and then
my look of disappointment when she did
not finish.

I told Josefina that her idea had indeed been brilliant, that it had
worked as she had
anticipated, and that I had wanted that package
more than I would care to admit.

"You can have it, if you want it," Josefina said and made
everybody laugh.

La Gorda said that the Nagual had known from the beginning that
Josefina was not really ill, and that that was the reason it had been so
difficult for him to cure her. People who are actually sick are more pliable.
Josefina was too aware of everything and very unruly and he had had to
smoke
her a great many times.

Don Juan had once said the same thing about me, that he had smoked me.
I had always
believed that he was referring to having used
psychotropic mushrooms to have a view of me.
"How did
he smoke you?" I asked Josefina.

She shrugged her shoulders and did not answer.

"The same way he smoked you," Lidia said. "He pulled
your luminosity and dried it with the
smoke from a fire that he had
made."

I was sure that don Juan had never explained such a thing to me. I asked
Lidia to tell me what she knew about the subject. She turned to la Gorda.

"Smoke is very important for sorcerers," la Gorda said.
"Smoke is like fog. Fog is of course better, but it's too hard to handle.
It's not as handy as smoke is. So if a sorcerer wants to
see
and
know
someone who is always hiding, like you and Josefina, who are capricious and
difficult, the
sorcerer makes a fire and lets the smoke envelop
the person. Whatever they're hiding comes out in the smoke."

La Gorda said that the Nagual used smoke not only to "see"
and know people but also to cure.
He gave Josefina smoke baths; he
made her stand or sit by the fire in the direction the wind was
blowing.
The smoke would envelop her and make her choke and cry, but her discomfort was
only
temporary
and of no consequence; the positive effects, on the other hand, were a gradual
cleansing of the luminosity.

"The Nagual gave all of us smoke baths," la Gorda said.
"He gave you even more baths than
Josefina. He
said that you were unbearable, and you were not even pretending, like she
was."

It all became clear to me. She was right; don Juan had made me sit in
front of a fire hundreds
of times. The smoke used to irritate my
throat and eyes to such a degree that I dreaded to see him
begin
to gather dry twigs and branches. He said that I had to learn to control my
breathing and
feel the smoke while I kept my eyes closed; that way I
could breathe without choking.

La Gorda said that smoke had helped Josefina to be ethereal and very
elusive, and that no
doubt it had helped me to cure my
madness, whatever it was.

"The Nagual said that smoke takes everything out of you," la
Gorda went on. "It makes you
clear and direct."

I asked her if she knew how to bring out with the smoke whatever a
person was hiding. She
said that she could easily do it
because of having lost her form, but that the little sisters and the
Genaros,
although they had seen the Nagual and Genaro do it scores of times, could not
yet do it
themselves.

I was curious to know why don Juan had never mentioned the subject to
me, in spite of the
fact that he had smoked me like dry fish hundreds
of times.

"He did," la Gorda said with her usual conviction. "The
Nagual even taught you fog gazing.
He told us that once you smoked
a whole place in the mountains and
saw
what was hiding behind the
scenery. He said that he was spellbound himself."

I remembered an exquisite perceptual distortion, a hallucination of
sorts, which I had had and
thought was the product of a play
between a most dense fog and an electrical storm that was
occurring
at the same time. I narrated to them the episode and added that don Juan had
never
really directly taught me anything about the fog or the
smoke. His procedure had been to build fires or to take me into fog banks.

La Gorda did not say a word. She stood up and went back to the stove.
Lidia shook her head
and clicked her tongue.

"You sure are dumb," she said. "The Nagual taught you
everything. How do you think you
saw
what you have
just told us about?"

There was an abyss between our understanding of how to teach something.
I told them that if I were to teach them something I knew, such as how to drive
a car, I would go step by step, making
sure that they
understood every facet of the whole procedure.

La Gorda returned to the table.

"That's only if the sorcerer is teaching something about the
tonal," she said. "When the
sorcerer is dealing with the
nagual, he must give the instruction, which is to show the mystery to the
warrior. And that's all he has to do. The warrior who receives the mysteries
must claim knowledge as power, by doing what he has been shown.

"The Nagual showed you more mysteries than all of us together. But
you're lazy, like Pablito,
and prefer to be confused. The tonal
and the nagual are two different worlds. In one you talk, in the other you
act."

At the moment she spoke, her words made absolute sense to me. I knew
what she was talking
about. She went back to the stove,
stirred something in a pot and came back again.

"Why are you so dumb?" Lidia bluntly asked me.

"He's empty," Rosa replied.

They made me stand up and forced themselves to squint as they scanned my
body with their
eyes. All of them touched my umbilical region.

"But why are you still empty?" Lidia asked.

"You know what to do, don't you?" Rosa added.

"He was crazy," Josefina said to them. "He must still be
crazy now."

La Gorda came to my aid and told them that I was still empty for the
same reason they still
had their form. All of us secretly did
not want the world of the nagual. We were afraid and had
second
thoughts. In short, none of us was better than Pablito.

They did not say a word. All three of them seemed thoroughly
embarrassed.

"Poor little Nagual," Lidia said to me with a tone of genuine
concern. "You're as scared as we
are. I pretend to be tough, Josefina
pretends to be crazy, Rosa pretends to be ill-tempered and you
pretend
to be dumb."

They laughed, and for the first time since I had arrived they made a
gesture of comradeship
toward me. They embraced me and put
their heads against mine.

La Gorda sat facing me and the little sisters sat around her. I was
facing all four of them.

"Now we can talk about what happened tonight," la Gorda said.
"The Nagual told me that if
we survived the last contact with the
allies we wouldn't be the same. The allies did something to us tonight. They
have hurled us away."

She gently touched my writing hand.

"Tonight was a special night for you," she went on.
"Tonight all of us pitched in to help you,
including the
allies. The Nagual would have liked it. Tonight you
saw
all
the way through."

"I did?" I asked.

"There you go again," Lidia said, and everybody laughed.

"Tell me about my
seeing
,
Gorda," I insisted. "You know that I'm dumb. There should be no
misunderstandings
between us."

"All right," she said. "I see what you mean. Tonight you
saw
the
little sisters."

I said to
them that I had also witnessed incredible acts performed by don Juan and don
Genaro. I had seen them as plainly as I had seen
the little sisters and yet don Juan and don Genaro
had always concluded that I had not seen. I
failed, therefore, to determine in what way could the
acts of the little sisters be different.

"You mean you didn't
see
how they were
holding onto the lines of the world?" She asked.
"No, I
didn't."

"You didn't
see
them slipping
through the crack between the worlds?"

I narrated to them what I had witnessed. They listened in silence. At
the end of my account la
Gorda seemed to be on the verge of
tears.

"What a pity! " she exclaimed.

She stood up and walked around the table and embraced me. Her eyes were
clear and restful. I knew she bore no malice toward me.

"It's our fate that you are plugged up like this," she said.
"But you're still the Nagual to us. I
won't hinder
you with ugly thoughts. You can at least be assured of that."

I knew that she meant it. She was speaking to me from a level that I
had witnessed only in don
Juan. She had repeatedly explained her
mood as the product of having lost her human form; she
was indeed a
formless warrior. A wave of profound affection for her enveloped me. I was
about
to weep. It was at the instant that I felt she was a most
marvelous warrior that quite an intriguing
thing happened
to me. The closest way of describing it would be to say that I felt that my
ears had
suddenly popped. Except that I felt the popping in the
middle of my body, right below my navel,
more acutely
than in my ears. Right after the popping everything became clearer; sounds,
sights,
odors. Then I felt an intense buzzing, which oddly
enough did not interfere with my hearing
capacity; the
buzzing was loud but did not drown out any other sounds. It was as if I were
hearing
the buzzing with some part of me other than my ears. A
hot flash went through my body. And
then I suddenly recalled
something I had never seen. It was as though an alien memory had taken
possession
of me.

I remembered Lidia pulling herself from two horizontal, reddish ropes as
she walked on the
wall. She was not really walking; she was actually
gliding on a thick bundle of lines that she held
with her feet.
I remembered seeing her panting with her mouth open, from the exertion of
pulling the reddish ropes. The reason I could not hold my balance at the end of
her display was because I
was seeing her as a light that went
around the room so fast that it made me dizzy; it pulled me
from
the area around my navel.

I remembered Rosa's actions and Josefina's as well. Rosa had actually
brachiated, with her left arm holding onto long, vertical, reddish fibers that
looked like vines dropping from the dark roof. With her right arm she was also
holding some vertical fibers that seemed to give her stability. She
also
held onto the same fibers with her toes. Toward the end of her display she was
like a phosphorescence on the roof. The lines of her body had been erased.

Josefina was hiding herself behind some lines that seemed to come out of
the floor. What she
was doing with her raised forearm was moving the
lines together to give them the necessary
width to
conceal her bulk. Her puffed-up clothes were a great prop; they had somehow
contracted her luminosity. The clothes were bulky only for the eye that looked.
At the end of her display
Josefina, like Lidia and Rosa, was
just a patch of light. I could switch from one recollection to the
other
in my mind.

When I told them about my concurrent memories the little sisters looked
at me bewildered. La
Gorda was the only one who seemed to be
following what was happening to me. She laughed with true delight and said that
the Nagual was right in saying that I was too lazy to remember
what
I had "seen"; therefore, I only bothered with what I had looked at.