The Second Ring of Power (45 page)

"What do the shadows tell you?"

"Everything I want to know. They tell me things because they have
heat, or cold, or because they move, or because they have colors. I don't know
yet all the things that colors and heat and
cold mean. The
Nagual left it up to me to learn."

"How do you learn?"

"In my
dreaming
. Dreamers must gaze in order to do
dreaming
and then they must look for
their dreams in their gazing. For
example, the Nagual made me gaze at the shadows of rocks, and
then
in my
dreaming
I found out that those shadows had light, so I looked for
the light in the
shadows from then on until I found it. Gazing and
dreaming
go together. It took me a lot of
gazing at shadows to get my
dreaming
of shadows going. And then it took me a lot of
dreaming
and
gazing to get the two together and really
see
in the shadows what I was
seeing
in my
dreaming
. See what I mean? Everyone of us does the same. Rosa's dreaming is about trees
because she's a tree gazer and Josefina's is about
clouds because she's a cloud gazer. They gaze at trees and clouds until they
match their
dreaming
"

Rosa and Josefina shook their heads in agreement.

"What about la Gorda?" I asked.

"She's a flea gazer," Rosa said, and all of them laughed.

"La Gorda doesn't like to be bitten by fleas," Lidia
explained. "She is formless and can gaze at
anything, but
she used to be a rain gazer."

"What about Pablito?"

"He gazes at women's crotches," Rosa answered with a deadpan
expression.

They laughed. Rosa slapped me on the back.

"I understand that since he's your partner he's taking after
you," she said.

They banged on the table and shook the benches with their feet as they
laughed.

"Pablito
is a rock gazer," Lidia said. "Nestor is a rain and plant gazer and
Benigno is a
distance gazer. But don't ask
me any more about gazing because I will lose my
power
if I tell you
more."

"How come la Gorda tells me everything?"

"La Gorda lost her form," Lidia replied. "Whenever I
lose mine I'll tell you everything too. But by then you won't care to hear it.
You care only because you're stupid like us. The day we
lose
our form we'll all stop being stupid."

"Why do you ask so many questions when you know all this?" Rosa asked.

"Because he's like us," Lidia said. "He's not a true
nagual. He's still a man."

She turned and faced me. For an instant her face was hard and her eyes
piercing and cold, but
her expression softened as she spoke to
me.

"You and Pablito are partners," she said. "You really
like him, don't you?"

I thought for a moment before I answered. I told her that somehow I
trusted him implicitly.
For no overt reason at all I had a
feeling of kinship with him.

"You like him so much that you fouled him up," she said in an
accusing tone. "On that
mountaintop where you jumped, he was
getting to his second attention by himself and you forced
him
to jump with you."

"I only held him by the arm," I said in protest.

"A sorcerer doesn't hold another sorcerer by the arm," she
said. "Each of us is very capable.
You don't need
any of us three to help you. Only a sorcerer who
sees
and is formless
can help. On
that mountaintop where you jumped, you were supposed to
go first. Now Pablito is tied to you. I
suppose you
intended to help us in the same way. God, the more I think about you, the more
I despise you."

Rosa and Josefina mumbled their agreement. Rosa stood up and faced me
with rage in her
eyes. She demanded to know what I intended to do
with them. I said that I intended to leave very
soon. My
statement seemed to shock them. They all spoke at the same time. Lidia's voice
rose
above the others. She said that the time to leave had
been the night before, and that she had hated it the moment I decided to stay.
Josefina began to yell obscenities at me.

I felt a sudden shiver and stood up and yelled at them to be quiet with
a voice that was not my
own. They looked at me horrified. I
tried to look casual, but I had frightened myself as much as I had frightened
them.

At that moment la Gorda stepped out to the kitchen as if she had been
hiding in the front room
waiting for us to start a fight. She
said that she had warned all of us not to fall into one another's
webs.
I had to laugh at the way she scolded us as if we were children. She said that
we owed
respect to each other, that respect among warriors was a
most delicate matter. The little sisters knew how to behave like warriors with
each other, so did the Genaros among themselves, but
when I would
come into either group, or when the two groups got together, all of them
ignored
their warrior's knowledge and behaved like slobs.

We sat down. La Gorda sat next to me. After a moment's pause Lidia
explained that she was afraid I was going to do to them what I had done to
Pablito. La Gorda laughed and said that she would never let me help any of them
in that manner. I told her that I could not understand what I
had
done to Pablito that was so wrong. I had not been aware of what I had done, and
if Nestor had
not told me I would never have known that I had actually
picked Pablito up. I even wondered if Nestor had perhaps exaggerated a bit, or
that maybe he had made a mistake.

La Gorda said that the Witness would not make a stupid mistake like
that, much less
exaggerate it, and that the Witness was the most
perfect warrior among them.

"Sorcerers don't help one another like you helped Pablito,"
she went on. "You behaved like a man in the street. The Nagual had taught
us all to be warriors. He said that a warrior had no
compassion for
anyone. For him, to have compassion meant that you wished the other person to
be
like you, to be in your shoes, and you lent a hand just for that purpose. You
did that to Pablito.
The hardest thing in the world is for a
warrior to let others be. When I was fat I worried because Lidia and Josefina
did not eat enough. I was afraid that they would get ill and die from not
eating. I did my utmost to fatten them and I meant only the best. The
impeccability of a warrior is to let
them be and to support them in
what they are. That means, of course, that you trust them to be
impeccable
warriors themselves."

"But what if they are not impeccable warriors?" I said.

"Then it's your duty to be impeccable yourself and not say a
word," she replied. "The Nagual said that only a sorcerer who
sees
and is formless can afford to help anyone. That's why he helped
us
and made us what we are. You don't think that you can go around picking people
up off the
street to help them, do you?"

Don Juan had already put me face to face with the dilemma that I could
not help my fellow beings in any way. In fact, to his understanding, every
effort to help on our part was an arbitrary act guided by our own self-interest
alone.

One day when I was with him in the city, I picked up a snail that was in
the middle of the
sidewalk and tucked it safely under some vines. I
was sure that if I had left it in the middle of the
sidewalk,
people would sooner or later have stepped on it. I thought that by moving it to
a safe
place I had saved it.

Don Juan pointed out that my assumption was a careless one, because I
had not taken into consideration two important possibilities. One was that the
snail might have been escaping a sure
death by poison under the leaves
of the vine, and the other possibility was that the snail had
enough
personal power to cross the sidewalk. By interfering I had not saved the snail
but only
made it lose whatever it had so painfully gained.

I wanted, of course, to put the snail back where I had found it, but he
did not let me. He said
that it was the snail's fate that an
idiot crossed its path and made it lose its momentum. If I left it
where
I had put it, it might be able again to gather enough power to go wherever it
was going.

I thought I had understood his point. Obviously I had only given him a
shallow agreement.
The hardest thing for me was to let others be.

I told them the story. La Gorda patted my back.

"We're all pretty bad," she said. "All five of us are
awful people who don't want to understand. I've gotten rid of most of my ugly
side, but not all of it yet. We are rather slow, and in comparison
to
the Genaros we are gloomy and domineering. The Genaros, on the other hand, are
all like
Genaro; there is very little awfulness in them."

The little sisters shook their heads in agreement.

"You are the ugliest among us," Lidia said to me. "I
don't think we're that bad in comparison
to you."

La Gorda giggled and tapped my leg as if telling me to agree with
Lidia. I did, and all of them
laughed like children.

We remained silent for a long time.

"I'm getting now to the end of what I had to tell you," la
Gorda said all of a sudden.

She made all of us stand up. She said that they were going to show me
the Toltec warrior's
power stand. Lidia stood by my right
side, facing me. She grabbed my hand with her right hand,
palm
to palm, but without interlocking the fingers. Then she hooked my arm right
above the
elbow with her left arm and held me tightly against her
chest. Josefina did exactly the same thing
on my left
side. Rosa stood face to face with me and hooked her arms under my armpits and
grabbed
my shoulders. La Gorda came from behind me and embraced me at my waist,
interlocking
her fingers over my navel.

All of us were about the same height and they could press their heads
against my head. La
Gorda spoke very softly behind my left ear, but
loud enough for all of us to hear her. She said that
we were going
to try to put our second attention in the Nagual's power place, without anyone
or
anything prodding us. This time there was no teacher to
aid us or allies to spur us. We were going to go there just by the force of our
desire.

I had the invincible urge to ask her what I should do. She said that I
should let my second
attention focus on what I had gazed at.

She explained that the particular formation which we were in was a
Toltec power
arrangement. I was at that moment the center and binding
force of the four corners of the world.
Lidia was the
east, the weapon that the Toltec warrior holds in his right hand; Rosa was the
north, the shield harnessed on the front of the warrior; Josefina was the west,
the spirit catcher that the
warrior holds in his left hand; and la
Gorda was the south, the basket which the warrior carries on
his
back and where he keeps his power objects. She said that the natural position of
every warrior
was to face the north, since he had to hold the weapon,
the east, in his right hand. But the
direction that we ourselves had
to face was the south, slightly toward the east; therefore, the act of
power
that the Nagual had left for us to perform was to change directions.

She reminded me that one of the first things that the Nagual had done to
us was to turn our
eyes to face the southeast. That had been the way
he had enticed our second attention to perform
the feat which
we were going to attempt then. There were two alternatives to that feat. One
was for all of us to turn around to face the south, using me as an axis, and in
so doing change around
the basic value and function of all of
them. Lidia would be the west, Josefina, the east, Rosa, the
south
and she, the north. The other alternative was for us to change our direction
and face the
south but without turning around. That was the
alternative of power, and it entailed putting on out
second face.

I told la Gorda that I did not understand what our second face was. She
said that she had been
entrusted by the Nagual to try getting
the second attention of all of us bundled up together, and that every Toltec
warrior had two faces and faced two opposite directions. The second face was
the
second attention.

La Gorda suddenly released her grip. All the others did the same. She
sat down again and motioned me to sit by her. The little sisters remained
standing. La Gorda asked me if everything
was clear to
me. It was, and at the same time it was not. Before I had time to formulate a
question,
she blurted out that one of the last things the Nagual had entrusted her to
tell me was that I had to change my direction by summing up my second attention
together with theirs, and put on my power face to see what was behind me.