The Second Ring of Power (38 page)

La Gorda made the three girls line up. She then pulled me to her side.
All of them folded their
arms behind their backs. La Gorda made
me do the same. She stretched my arms as far back as
they would go
and then made me bend them and grab each forearm as tightly as possible as
close
to the
elbows as I could. That created a great muscular pressure at the articulations
of my
shoulders. She pushed my trunk
forward until I was almost stooping. Then she made a peculiar
birdcall. That was a signal. Lidia started
walking. In the darkness her movements reminded me of
an ice skater. She walked swiftly and silently
and in a few minutes she disappeared from my
view.

La Gorda made two more birdcalls, one after the other, and Rosa and
Josefina took off in the same manner Lidia had. La Gorda told me to follow
close to her. She made one more birdcall and we both started walking.

I was surprised at the ease with which I walked. My entire balance was
centered in my legs.
The fact that I had my arms behind my
back, instead of hindering my movements, aided me in
maintaining a
strange equilibrium. But above all what surprised me the most was the quietness
of
my steps.

When we reached the road we began to walk normally. We passed two men
going in the
opposite direction. La Gorda greeted them and they
answered back. When we arrived at the house
we found the
little sisters standing by the door, not daring to go in. La Gorda told them
that
although I could not control the allies I could either
call them or tell them to leave, and that the
allies would
not bother us any longer. The girls believed her, something I myself could not
do in
that instance.

We went inside. In a very quiet and efficient manner all of them
undressed, drenched themselves with cold water and put on a fresh change of
clothes. I did the same. I put on the old
clothes I used
to keep in don Juan's house, which la Gorda brought to me in a box.
All
of us were in high spirits. I asked la Gorda to explain to me what we had done.
"We'll talk about that later," she said in a firm tone.

I remembered then that the packages I had for them were still in the
car. I thought that while la
Gorda was cooking some food for us it
would be a good opportunity to distribute them. I went out
and
got them and brought them into the house. I placed them on the table. Lidia
asked me if I had
already assigned the gifts as she had suggested. I
said that I wanted them to pick one they liked.

She declined. She said that no doubt I had something special for
Pablito and Nestor and a bunch
of trinkets for them, which I would
throw on the table with the intention that they fight over them.

"Besides,
you didn't bring anything for Benigno," Lidia said as she came to my side
and
looked at me with mock seriousness.
"You can't hurt the Genaros' feelings by giving two gifts for
three."

They all laughed. I felt embarrassed. She was absolutely right in everything
that she had said.

"You are careless, that's why I've never liked you," Lidia
said to me, changing her smile into a
frown. "You have never
greeted me with affection or respect. Every time we saw each other you only
pretended to be happy to see me."

She imitated my obviously contrived effusive greeting, a greeting I must
have given her
countless times in the past.

"Why didn't you ever ask me what I was doing here?" Lidia
asked me.

I stopped writing to consider her point. It had never occurred to me to
ask her anything. I told
her that I had no excuse. La Gorda
interceded and said that the reason that I had never said more
than
two words to either Lidia or Rosa each time I saw them was because I was
accustomed to talking only to women that I was enamored of, in one way or
another. La Gorda added that the
Nagual had told them that if I would
ask them anything directly they were supposed to answer my
questions,
but as long as I did not ask, they were not supposed to mention anything.

Rosa
said that she did not like me because I was always
laughing and trying to be funny.
Josefina added that since I had never
seen her, she disliked me just for fun, for the hell of it.

"I want you to know that I don't accept you as the Nagual,"
Lidia said to me. "You're too
dumb. You know nothing. I know
more than you do. How can I respect you?"

Lidia added that as far as she was concerned I could go back where I
came from or go jump in a lake for that matter.

Rosa and Josefina did not say a word. Judging by the serious and mean
expressions on their
faces, however, they seemed to agree
with Lidia.

"How can this man lead us?" Lidia asked la Gorda. "He's
not a true nagual. He's a man. He's
going to make us into idiots
like himself."

As she was talking I could see the mean expressions on Rosa's and
Josefina's faces getting even harder.

La Gorda intervened and explained to them what she had "seen"
earlier about me. She added
that since she had recommended to me
not to get entangled in their webs, she was recommending
the
same thing to them, not to get entangled in mine.

After Lidia's initial display of genuine and well-founded animosity, I
was flabbergasted to see
how easily she acquiesced to la Gorda's
remarks. She smiled at me. She even came and sat next to
me.

"You're really like us, eh?" she asked in a tone of
bewilderment.

I did not know what to say. I was afraid of blundering.

Lidia was obviously the leader of the little sisters. The moment she
smiled at me the other two
seemed to be infused instantly with the
same mood.

La Gorda told them not to mind my pencil and paper and my asking
questions and that in
return I would not be flustered when
they became involved in doing what they loved the most, to
indulge
in themselves.

The three of them sat close to me. La Gorda walked over to the table,
got the packages and
took them out to my car. I asked Lidia
to forgive me for my inexcusable blunderings of the past and asked all of them
to tell me how they had become don Juan's apprentices. In order to make
them
feel at ease I gave them an account of how I had met don Juan. Their accounts
were the
same as what dona Soledad had already told me.

Lidia said that all of them had been free to leave don Juan's world but
their choice had been to
stay. She, in particular, being the
first apprentice, was given an opportunity to go away. After the
Nagual
and Genaro had cured her, the Nagual had pointed to the door and told her that
if she did not go through it then, the door would close her in and would never
open again.

"My fate was sealed when that door closed," Lidia said to me.
"Just like what happened to
you. The Nagual told me that after he
had put a patch on you, you had a chance to leave but you
didn't
want to take it."

I remembered that particular decision more vividly than anything else. I
recounted to them
how don Juan had tricked me into believing that a
sorceress was after him, and then he gave me
the choice of
either leaving for good or staying to help him wage a war against his attacker.
It
turned out that his alleged attacker was one of his
confederates. By confronting her, on what I
thought was don
Juan's behalf, I turned her against me and she became what he called my
"worthy
opponent."

I asked Lidia if they had had a worthy opponent themselves.

"We are not as dumb as you are," she said. "We never
needed anyone to spur us."

"Pablito is that dumb," Rosa said. "Soledad is his
opponent. I don't know how worthy she is,
though. But as
the saying goes, if you can't feed on a capon, feed on an onion."

They laughed and banged on the table.

I asked them if any of them knew the sorceress don Juan had pitted me
against, la Catalina.
They shook their heads negatively.

"I know her," la Gorda said from the stove. "She's from
the Nagual's cycle, but she looks as if
she's
thirty."

"What is a cycle, Gorda?" I asked.

She walked over to the table and put her foot on the bench and rested
her chin on her arm and
knee.

"Sorcerers like the Nagual and Genaro have two cycles," she
said. "The first is when they're
human, like ourselves. We are in
our first cycle. Each of us has been given a task and that task is
making
us leave the human form. Eligio, the five of us, and the Genaros are of the
same cycle.

"The second cycle is when a sorcerer is not human anymore, like the
Nagual and Genaro.
They came to teach us, and after they taught us
they left. We are the second cycle to them.

"The Nagual and la Catalina are like you and Lidia. They are in the
same positions. She's a
scary sorceress, just like Lidia."

La Gorda went back to the stove. The little sisters seemed nervous.

"That must be the woman who knows power plants," Lidia said to
la Gorda.

La Gorda said that she was the one. I asked them if the Nagual had ever
given them power
plants.

"No, not to us three," Lidia replied. "Power plants are
given only to empty people. Like
yourself and la Gorda."

"Did the Nagual give you power plants, Gorda?" I asked loudly.

La Gorda raised two fingers over her head.

"The Nagual gave her his pipe twice," Lidia said. "And
she went off her rocker both times."
"What
happened, Gorda?" I asked.

"I went off my rocker," she said as she walked over to the
table. "Power plants were given to
use because the
Nagual was putting a patch on our bodies. Mine hooked fast, but yours was
difficult.
The Nagual said that you were crazier than Josefina, and impossible like Lidia,
and he had to give you a lot of them."

La Gorda explained that power plants were used only by sorcerers who had
mastered their art.
Those plants were such a powerful affair that in
order to be properly handled, the most
impeccable
attention was needed on the part of the sorcerer. It took a lifetime to train
one's
attention to the degree needed. La Gorda said that
complete people do not need power plants, and
that neither
the little sisters nor the Genaros had ever taken them, but that someday when
they had perfected their art as dreamers, they would use them to get a final
and total boost, a boost of such
magnitude that it would be impossible
for us to understand.

"Would you and I take them too?" I asked la Gorda.

"All of us," she replied. "The Nagual said that you
should understand this point better than any
of us."

I considered the issue for a moment. The effect of psychotropic plants
had indeed been
terrifying for me. They seemed to reach a vast
reservoir in me, and extract from it a total world. The drawback in taking them
had been the toll they took on my physical well-being and the impossibility of
controlling their effect. The world they plunged me into was unamenable and
chaotic.
I lacked the control, the
power
, in don Juan's terms, to make use of
such a world. If I would have the control, however, the possibilities would be
staggering to the mind.

"I took them, myself," Josefina said all of a sudden.
"When I was crazy the Nagual gave me
his pipe, to
cure me or kill me. And it cured me! "

"The Nagual really gave Josefina his smoke," la Gorda said
from the stove and then came over to the table. "He knew that she was
pretending to be crazier than she was. She's always been a bit
off,
and she's very daring and indulges in herself like no one else. She always
wanted to live
where nobody would bother her and she could do
whatever she wanted. So the Nagual gave her
his smoke and
took her to live in a world of her liking for fourteen days, until she was so
bored
with it that she got cured. She cut her indulging. That
was her cure."

La Gorda went back to the stove. The little sisters laughed and patted
one another on the back.

I remembered then that at dona Soledad's house Lidia had not only
intimated that don Juan
had left a package for me but she had
actually shown me a bundle that had made me think of the
sheath
in which don Juan used to keep his pipe. I reminded Lidia that she had said
that they
would give me that package when la Gorda was present.