The Second Ring of Power (41 page)

La Gorda stood up and said that I had understood everything, and that
it was time for us to eat.
She served us the food that she had
cooked. I did not feel like eating. At the end of the meal she
stood
up and came to my side.

"I think it's time for you to leave," she said to me.

That seemed to be a cue for the little sisters. They also stood up.

"If you stay beyond this moment, you won't be able to leave
anymore," la Gorda went on.
"The Nagual gave you freedom
once, but you chose to stay with him. He told me that if we all
survive
the last contact with the allies I should feed all of you, make you feel good
and then say
good-bye to all of you. I figure that the little sisters
and myself have no place to go, so there is no
choice for us.
But you are different."

The little sisters surrounded me and each said good-bye to me.

There was a monstrous irony in that situation. I was free to leave but
I had no place to go.
There was no choice for me, either.
Years before don Juan gave me a chance to back out, I stayed
because
already then I had no place to go.

"We choose only once," he had said then. "We choose
either to be warriors or to be ordinary
men. A second
choice does not exist. Not on this earth."

"You have to leave later on today," la Gorda said to me right
after breakfast. "Since you have decided to go with us, you have committed
yourself to helping us fulfill our new task. The Nagual
left
me in charge only until you came. He entrusted me, as you already know, with
certain things
to tell you. I've told you most of them. But there
are still some I couldn't mention to you until you
made your
choice. Today we will take care of them. Right after that you must leave in
order to
give us time to get ready. We need a few days to settle
everything and to prepare to leave these
mountains
forever. We have been here a very long time. It's hard to break away. But
everything has come to a sudden end. The Nagual warned us of the total change
that you would bring,
regardless of the outcome of your
bouts, but I think no one really believed him."

"I fail to see why you have to change anything," I said.

"I've explained it to you already," she protested. "We
have lost our old purpose. Now we have
a new one and
that new purpose requires that we become as light as the breeze. The breeze is
our
new mood. It used to be the hot wind. You have changed
our direction."

"You are talking in circles, Gorda."

"Yes,
but that's because you're empty. I can't make it any clearer. When you return,
the
Genaros will show you the art of the
stalker and right after that all of us will leave. The Nagual
said that if you decide to be with us the first
thing I should tell you is that you have to remember
your bouts with Soledad and the little sisters
and examine every single thing that happened to you
with them, because everything is an omen of what
will happen to you on your path. If you are
careful and impeccable, you'll find that those bouts were gifts of
power."

"What's dona Soledad going to do now?"

"She's leaving. The little sisters have already helped her to take
her floor apart. That floor aided her to reach her attention of the nagual. The
lines had power to do that. Each of them
helped her
gather a piece of that attention. To be incomplete is no handicap to reaching
that
attention for some warriors. Soledad was transformed
because she got to that attention faster than any of us. She doesn't have to
gaze at her floor anymore to go into that other world, and now that there is no
more need for the floor, she has returned it to the earth where she got
it."

"You are really determined to leave, Gorda, aren't you?"

"All of us are. That's why I'm asking you to go away for a few days
to give us time to pull
down everything we have."

"Am I the one who has to find a place for all of you, Gorda?"

"If you were an impeccable warrior you would do just that. But
you're not an impeccable
warrior, and neither are we. But still
we will have to do our best to meet our new challenge."

I felt an oppressive sense of doom. I have never been one to thrive on
responsibilities. I
thought that the commitment to guide them was a
crushing burden that I could not handle.

"Maybe we don't have to do anything," I said.

"Yes. That's right," she said, and laughed. "Why don't
you tell yourself that over and over until you feel safe? The Nagual told you
time and time again that the only freedom warriors have is to
behave
impeccably."

She told me how the Nagual had insisted that all of them understand
that not only was
impeccability freedom but it was the only way to
scare away the human form.

I narrated to her the way don Juan made me understand what was meant by
impeccability. He
and I were hiking one day through a very steep
ravine when a huge boulder got loose from its matrix on the rock wall and came
down with a formidable force and landed on the floor of the canyon, twenty or
thirty yards from where we were standing. The size of the boulder made its fall
a very impressive event. Don Juan seized the opportunity to create a
dramatic lesson. He said that
the force that rules our destinies is
outside of ourselves and has nothing to do with our acts or
volition.
Sometimes that force would make us stop walking on our way and bend over to tie
our
shoelaces,
as I had just done. And by making us stop, that force makes us gain a precious
moment. If we had kept on walking, that enormous
boulder would have most certainly crushed us
to death. Some other day, however, in another ravine the same outside
deciding force would make us stop again to bend over and tie our shoelaces
while another boulder would get loose precisely
above where we are standing. By making us stop, that force would have
made us lose a precious
moment. That
time if we had kept on walking, we would have saved ourselves. Don Juan said
that in view of my total lack of control over the
forces which decide my destiny, my only possible
freedom in that ravine consisted in my tying my shoelaces impeccably.

La Gorda seemed to be moved by my account. For an instant she held my
face in her hands
from across the table.

"Impeccability for me is to tell you, at the right time, what the
Nagual told me to tell you," she
said. "But
power
has to time perfectly what I have to reveal to yon, or it won't have any
effect."
She paused in a dramatic fashion. Her delay was very
studied but terribly effective with me.
"What is
it?" I asked desperately.

She did not answer. She took me by the arm and led me to the area just
outside the front door.
She made me sit on the hard-packed
ground with my back against a thick pole about one and a half feet high that
looked like a tree stump which had been planted in the ground almost against
the
wall of the house. There was a row of five such poles planted about two feet
apart. I had
meant to ask la Gorda what their function was. My first
impression had been that a former owner
of the house
had tied animals to them. My conjecture seemed incongruous, however, because
the
area just outside the front door was a kind of roofed
porch.

I told la Gorda my supposition as she sat down next to me to my left,
with her back against another pole. She laughed and said that the poles were
indeed used for tying animals of sorts, but not by a former owner, and that she
had nearly broken her back digging the holes for them.

"What do you use them for?" I asked.

"Let's say that we tie ourselves to them," she replied.
"And this brings me to the next thing the Nagual asked me to tell you. He
said that because you were empty he had to gather your second
attention,
your attention of the nagual, in a way different than ours. We gathered that
attention through dreaming and you did it with his power plants. The Nagual
said that his power plants gathered the menacing side of your second attention
in one clump, and that's the shape that came out of your head. He said that
that's what happens to sorcerers when they are given power plants. If they
don't die, the power plants spin their second attention into that awful shape
that comes out of their heads.

"Now we're coming to what he wanted you to do. He said that you
must change directions
now and begin gathering your second
attention in another way, more like us. You can't keep on the path of knowledge
unless you balance your second attention. So far, that attention of yours
has
been riding on the Nagual's power, but now you are alone. That's what he wanted
me to tell
you."

"How do I balance my second attention?"

"You have to do
dreaming
the way we do it.
Dreaming
is the only way to gather the second attention without injuring it, without
making it menacing and awesome. Your second attention is
fixed
on the awful side of the world; ours is on the beauty of it. You have to change
sides and
come with us. That's what you chose last night when you
decided to go with us."

"Could that shape come out of me at any time?"

"No. The Nagual said that it won't come out again until you're as
old as he is. Your nagual has
already come out as many times as was
needed. The Nagual and Genaro have seen to that. They
used to tease
it out of you. The Nagual told me that sometimes you were a hair away from
dying
because your second attention is very indulging. He said
that once you even scared him; your nagual attacked him and he had to sing to
it to calm it down. But the worst thing happened to you
in Mexico City; there he pushed you one day and you went into an office and in that office
you
went through the crack between the worlds. He intended
only to dispel your attention of the tonal;
you were
worried sick over some stupid thing. But when he shoved you, your whole tonal
shrunk
and your entire being went through the crack. He had a
hellish time finding you. He told me that
for a moment he
thought you had gone farther than he could reach. But then he
saw
you
roaming
around aimlessly and he brought you back. He told me that
you went through the crack around
ten in the morning. So, on that
day, ten in the morning became your new time."

"My new time for what?"

"For everything. If you remain a man you will die around that
time. If you become a sorcerer
you will leave this world around that
time.

"Eligio also went on a different path, a path none of us knew
about. We met him just before he
left. Eligio was a most marvelous
dreamer. He was so good that the Nagual and Genaro used to take him through the
crack and he had the power to withstand it, as if it were nothing. He didn't
even pant. The Nagual and Genaro gave him a final boost with power plants. He
had the control and the power to handle that boost. And that's what sent him to
wherever he is."

"The Genaros told me that Eligio jumped with Benigno. Is that
true?"

"Sure. By the time Eligio had to jump, his second attention had
already been in that other
world. The Nagual said that yours had also been there, but
that for you it was a nightmare
because you
had no control. He said that his power plants had made you lopsided; they had
made
you cut through your attention
of the tonal and had put you directly in the realm of your second
attention, but without any mastery over that
attention. The Nagual didn't give power plants to
Eligio until the very last."

"Do you think that my second attention has been injured,
Gorda?"

"The Nagual never said that. He thought you were dangerously
crazy, but that has nothing to
do with power plants. He said that both
of your attentions are unmanageable. If you could
conquer them
you'd be a great warrior."

I wanted her to tell me more on the subject. She put her hand on my
writing pad and said that
we had a terribly busy day ahead of us
and we needed to store energy in order to withstand it. We
had,
therefore, to energize ourselves with the sunlight. She said that the
circumstances required
that we take the sunlight with the left
eye. She began to move her head slowly from side to side as she glanced
directly into the sun through her half-closed eyes.

A moment later Lidia, Rosa and Josefina joined us. Lidia sat to my
right, Josefina sat next to her, while Rosa sat next to la Gorda. All of them
were resting their backs against the poles. I was in the middle of the row.