The Second Ring of Power (2 page)

She came closer to me. She smiled and put her right hand on the back of
my left arm, grabbing
it gently.

"That's for sure," she whispered in my ear.

Her smile froze and her eyes became glazed. She was so close to me that
I felt her breasts
rubbing my left shoulder. My discomfort increased
as I tried to convince myself that there was no
reason for
alarm. I repeated to myself over and over that I really had never known
Pablito's
mother, and that in spite of her odd behavior she was
probably being her normal self. But some
frightened part of me knew that
those were only bracing thoughts with no substance at all,
because no matter how much I may have glossed over
her person, not only did I remember her
very well but I had known her very well. She represented to me the
archetype of a mother; I
thought her
to be in her late fifties or even older. Her weak muscles moved her bulky
weight with
extreme difficulty. Her
hair had a lot of gray in it. She was, as I remembered her, a sad, somber
woman
with kind, handsome features, a dedicated, suffering mother, always in the
kitchen,
always tired. I also remembered her
to be a very gentle and unselfish woman, and a very timid one, timid to the
point of being thoroughly subservient to anyone who happened to be around.
That
was the picture I had of her, reinforced throughout years of casual contact.
That day
something was terribly different.
The woman I was confronting did not at all fit the image I had
of Pablito's mother, and yet she was the same
person, leaner and stronger, looking twenty years
younger, than the last time I had seen her. I felt
a shiver in my body.

She moved a couple of steps in front of me and faced me.

"Let me look at you," she said. "The Nagual told us that
you're a devil."

I remembered then that all of them, Pablito, his mother, his sisters
and Nestor, had always
seemed unwilling to voice don Juan's
name and called him "the Nagual," a usage which I myself
adopted
when talking with them.

She daringly put her hands on my shoulders, something she had never
done before. My body
tensed. I really did not know what to
say. There was a long pause that allowed me to take stock of
myself.
Her appearance and behavior had frightened me to the point that I had forgotten
to ask
about Pablito and Nestor.

"Tell me, where is Pablito?" I asked her with a sudden wave of
apprehension.

"Oh, he's gone to the mountains," she responded in a
noncommittal tone and moved away
from me.

"And where is Nestor?"

She rolled her eyes as if to show her indifference.

"They are together in the mountains," she said in the same tone.

I felt genuinely relieved and told her that I had known without the
shadow of a doubt that they
were all right.

She glanced at me and smiled. A wave of happiness and ebullience came
upon me and I
embraced her. She boldly returned the embrace and held
me; that act was so outlandish that it
took my breath
away. Her body was rigid. I sensed an extraordinary strength in her. My heart
began
to pound. I gently tried to push her away as I asked her if Nestor was still
seeing don
Genaro and don Juan. During our farewell meeting don Juan
had expressed doubts that Nestor
was ready to finish his apprenticeship.

"Genaro has left forever," she said letting go of me.

She fretted nervously with the edge of her blouse.

"How about don Juan?"

"The Nagual is gone too," she said, puckering her lips.

"Where did they go?"

"You mean you don't know?"

I told her that both of them had said good-bye to me two years before,
and that all I knew was that they were leaving at that time. I had not really
dared to speculate where they had gone. They
had never told
me their whereabouts in the past, and I had come to accept the fact that if
they
wanted to disappear from my life all they had to do was
to refuse to see me.

"They're not around, that's for sure," she said, frowning,
"And they won't be coming back,
that's also for sure."

Her voice was extremely unemotional. I began to feel annoyed with her. I
wanted to leave.

"But you're here," she said, changing her frown into a smile.
"You must wait for Pablito and
Nestor. They've been dying to see
you."

She held my arm firmly and pulled me away from my car. Compared to the
way she had been
in the past, her boldness was astounding.

"But first, let me show you my friend," she said and forcibly
led me to the side of the house.

There was a fenced area, like a small corral. A huge male dog was
there. The first thing that
attracted my attention was his healthy,
lustrous, yellowish-brown fur. He did not seem to be a
mean dog. He
was not chained and the fence was not high enough to hold him. The dog remained
impassive as we got closer to him, not even wagging his tail. Dona
Soledad pointed to a good-
sized cage in the back. A coyote was
curled up inside.

"That's my friend," she said. "The dog is not. He belongs
to my girls."

The dog looked at me and yawned. I liked him. I had a nonsensical
feeling of kinship with
him.

"Come, let's go into the house," she said, pulling me by the
arm.

I hesitated. Some part of me was utterly alarmed and wanted to get out
of there quickly, and yet another part of me would not have left for the world.

"You're not afraid of me, are you?" she asked in an accusing
tone.

"I most certainly am!" I exclaimed.

She giggled, and in a most comforting tone she declared that she was a
clumsy, primitive
woman who was very awkward with words, and that
she hardly knew how to treat people. She
looked
straight into my eyes and said that don Juan had commissioned her to help me,
because he
worried about me.

"He told us that you're not serious and go around causing a lot of
trouble to innocent people,"
she said.

Up to that point her assertions had been coherent to me, but I could
not conceive don Juan
saying those things about me.

We went inside the house. I wanted to sit down on the bench, where
Pablito and I usually sat.
She stopped me.

"This is not the place for you and me," she said. "Let's
go to my room."

"I'd rather sit here," I said firmly. "I know this spot
and I feel comfortable on it."

She clicked her lips in disapproval. She acted like a disappointed
child. She contracted her
upper lip until it looked like the flat
beak of a duck.

"There is something terribly wrong here," I said. "I
think I am going to leave if you don't tell
me what's going
on."

She became very flustered and argued that her trouble was not knowing
how to talk to me. I
confronted her with her unmistakable
transformation and demanded that she tell me what had
happened. I had
to know how such a change had come about.

"If I tell you, will you stay?" she asked in a child's voice.

"I'll have to."

"In that case I'll tell you everything. But it has to be in my
room."

I had a moment of panic. I made a supreme effort to calm myself and we
walked into her room. She lived in the back, where Pablito had built a bedroom
for her. I had once been in the
room while it was being built and also
after it was finished, just before she moved in. The room
looked
as empty as I had seen it before, except that there was a bed in the very
center of it and
two nobtrusive chests of drawers by the door. The
whitewash of the walls had faded into a very
soothing
yellowish white. The wood of the ceiling had also weathered. Looking at the
smooth,
clean walls I had the impression they were scrubbed
daily with a sponge. The room looked more like a monastic cell, very frugal and
ascetic. There were no ornaments of any sort. The windows
had
thick, removable wood panels reinforced with an iron bar. There were no chairs
or anything
to sit on.

Dona Soledad took my writing pad away from me, held it to her bosom and
then sat down on
her bed, which was made up of two thick mattresses
with no box springs. She indicated that I
should sit down
next to her.

"You and I are the same," she said as she handed me my
notebook.

"I beg your pardon?"

"You and I are the same," she repeated without looking at me.

I could not figure out what she meant. She stared at me, as if waiting
for a response.
"Just what is that supposed to mean, dona Soledad?" I asked.

My question seemed to baffle her. Obviously she expected me to know what
she meant. She
laughed at first, but then, when I insisted that I
did not understand, she got angry. She sat up straight and accused me of being
dishonest with her. Her eyes flared with rage; her mouth
contracted
in a very ugly gesture of wrath that made her look extremely old.

I honestly was at a loss and felt that no matter what I said it would be
wrong. She also seemed
to be in the same predicament. Her
mouth moved to say something but her lips only quivered. At
last
she muttered that it was not impeccable to act the way I did at such a serious
moment. She turned her back to me.

"Look at me, dona Soledad!" I said forcefully. "I'm not
mystifying you in any sense. You must
know something that I know
nothing about."

"You talk too much," she snapped angrily. "The Nagual
told me never to let you talk. You
twist everything."

She jumped to her feet and stomped on the floor, like a spoiled child.
I became aware at that moment that the room had a different floor. I remembered
it to be a dirt floor, made from the dark
soil of the
area. The new floor was reddish pink. I momentarily put off a confrontation
with her
and walked around the room. I could not imagine how I
could have missed noticing the floor
when I first entered. It was
magnificent. At first I thought that it was red clay that had been laid
like
cement, when it was soft and moist, but then I saw that there were no cracks in
it. Clay would
have dried, curled up, cracked, and clumps would
have formed. I bent down and gently ran my
fingers over
it. It was as hard as bricks. The clay had been fired. I became aware then that
the
floor was made of very large flat slabs of clay put
together over a bed of soft clay that served as a matrix. The slabs made a most
intricate and fascinating design, but a thoroughly unobtrusive one,
unless one paid
deliberate attention to it. The skill with which the slabs had been placed in
position indicated to me a very well-conceived
plan. I wanted to know how such big slabs had
been fired without being warped. I turned around to ask dona Soledad. I quickly desisted. She
would not have
known what I was talking about. I paced over the floor again. The clay was a
bit
rough, almost like sandstone. It
made a perfect slide-proof surface.

"Did Pablito put down this floor?" I asked.

She did not answer.

"It's a superb piece of work," I said. "You should be
very proud of him."

I had no doubt that Pablito had done it. No one else could have had the
imagination and the
capacity to conceive of it. I figured that he must
have made it during the time I had been away.
But on second
thought I realized that I had never entered dona Soledad's room since it had
been
built, six or seven years before.

"Pablito! Pablito! Bah!" she exclaimed in an angry, raspy
voice. "What makes you think he's the only one who can make things?"

We exchanged a long, sustained look, and all of a sudden I knew that it
was she who had made
the floor, and that don Juan had put
her up to it.

We stood quietly, looking at each other for some time. I felt it would
have been thoroughly
superfluous to ask if I was correct.

"I made it myself," she finally said in a dry tone. "The
Nagual told me how."

Her statements made me feel euphoric. I practically lifted her up in an
embrace. I twirled her around. All I could think to do was to bombard her with
questions. I wanted to know how she had made the slabs, what the designs
represented, where she got the clay. But she did not share my
exhilaration.
She remained quiet and impassive, looking at me askance from time to time.