The Second Ring of Power (5 page)

At that moment dona Soledad jumped onto the roof and lay next to me. She
wanted to help me
tease the dog. I told her that she could not stay
on the roof because when the dog came out I was going to get in the car and
drive away. I thanked her for her help and said that she should go back
in
the house. She shrugged her shoulders, jumped down and went back to the door. I
pushed
down the release again and with my cap I teased the dog.
I snapped it around his eyes, in front of
his muzzle.
The dog's fury was beyond anything I had seen but he would not leave the seat.
Finally
his massive jaws jerked the stick out of my grip. I climbed down to retrieve it
from
underneath the car. Suddenly I heard dona Soledad screaming.

"Watch out! He's getting out! "

I glanced up at the car. The dog was squeezing himself over the seat. He
had gotten his hind
paws caught in the steering wheel; except for that,
he was almost out.

I dashed to the house and got inside just in time to avoid being run
down by that animal. His
momentum was so powerful that he rammed
against the door.

As she secured the door with its iron bar dona Soledad said in a
cackling voice, "I told you it
was useless."

She cleared her throat and turned to look at me.

"Can you tie the dog with a rope?" I asked.

I was sure that she would give me a meaningless answer, but to my
amazement she said that
we should try everything, even luring
the dog into the house and trapping him there.

Her idea appealed to me. I carefully opened the front door. The dog was
no longer there. I
ventured out a bit more. There was no sight of
him. My hope was that the dog had gone back to
his corral. I
was going to wait another instant before I made a dash for my car, when I heard
a
deep growl and saw the massive head of the beast inside my car. He had
crawled back onto the
front seat.

Dona Soledad was right; it was useless to try. A wave of sadness
enveloped me. Somehow I
knew my end was near. In a fit of sheer
desperation I told dona Soledad that I was going to get a
knife
from the kitchen and kill the dog, or be killed by him, and I would have done
that had it not
been that there was not a single metal object in
the entire house.

"Didn't the Nagual teach you to accept your fate?" dona Soledad asked as she trailed behind
me. "That one out there is no
ordinary dog. That dog has power. He is a warrior. He will do what
he
has to do. Even kill you."

I had a moment of uncontrollable frustration and grabbed her by the
shoulders and growled.
She did not seem surprised or affected
by my sudden outburst. She turned her back to me and
dropped her
shawl to the floor. Her back was very strong and beautiful. I had an
irrepressible urge
to hit her, but I ran my hand across her shoulders
instead. Her skin was soft and smooth. Her arms
and shoulders
were muscular without being big. She seemed to have a minimal layer of fat that
rounded off her muscles and gave her upper body the appearance of
smoothness, and yet when I
pushed on any part of it with the tips
of my fingers I could feel the hardness of unseen muscles
below
the smooth surface. I did not want to look at her breasts.

She walked to a roofed, open area in back of the house that served as a
kitchen. I followed her.
She sat down on a bench and calmly
washed her feet in a pail. While she was putting on her
sandals,
I went with great trepidation into a new outhouse that had been built in the
back. She was
standing by the door when I came out.

"You like to talk," she said casually, leading me into her
room. "There is no hurry. Now we
can talk forever."

She picked up my writing pad from the top of her chest of drawers, where
she must have
placed it herself, and handed it to me with exaggerated
care. Then she pulled up her bedspread and folded it neatly and put it on top
of the same chest of drawers. I noticed then that the two chests were the color
of the walls, yellowish white, and the bed without the spread was pinkish
red,
more or less the color of the floor. The bedspread, on the other hand, was dark
brown, like the wood of the ceiling and the wood panels of the windows.

"Let's talk," she said, sitting comfortably on the bed after
taking off her sandals.

She placed her knees against her naked breasts. She looked like a young
girl. Her aggressive
and commandeering manner had subdued
and changed into charm. At that moment she was the antithesis of what she had
been earlier. I had to laugh at the way she was urging me to write. She
reminded
me of don Juan.

"Now we have time," she said. "The wind has changed.
Didn't you notice it?"

I had. She said that the new direction of the wind was her own
beneficial direction and thus the wind had turned into her helper.

"What do you know about the wind, dona Soledad?" I asked as I
calmly sat down on the foot
of her bed.

"Only what the Nagual taught me," she said. "Each one of
us, women that is, has a peculiar
direction, a particular wind.
Men don't. I am the north wind; when it blows I am different. The
Nagual
said that a warrior can use her particular wind for whatever she wants. I used
it to trim my
body and remake it. Look at me! I am the north wind. Feel
me when I come through the
window."

There was a strong wind blowing through the window, which was
strategically placed to face
the north.

"Why do you think men don't have a wind?" I asked.

She thought for a moment and then replied that the Nagual had never
mentioned why.

"You wanted to know who made this floor," she said, wrapping
her blanket around her
shoulders. "I made it myself. It
took me four years to put it down. Now this floor is like myself."

As she spoke I noticed that the converging lines in the floor were
oriented to originate from
the north. The room, however, was not
perfectly aligned with the cardinal points; thus her bed
was
at odd angles with the walls and so were the lines in the clay slabs.

"Why did you make the floor red, dona Soledad?"

"That's my color. I am red, like red dirt. I got the red clay in
the mountains around here. The
Nagual told me where to look and he
also helped me carry it, and so did everyone else. They all
helped me."

"How did you fire the clay?"

"The Nagual made me dig a pit. We filled it with firewood and then
stacked up the clay slabs
with flat pieces of rock in between
them. I closed the pit with a lid of dirt and wire and set the
wood
on fire. It burned for days."

"How did you keep the slabs from warping?"

"I didn't. The wind did that, the north wind that blew while the
fire was on. The Nagual
showed me how to dig the pit so it
would face the north and the north wind. He also made me
leave
four holes for the north wind to blow into the pit. Then he made me leave one
hole in the
center of the lid to let the smoke out. The wind made
the wood burn for days; after the pit was
cold again I
opened it and began to polish and even out the slabs. It took me over a year to
make
enough slabs to finish my floor."

"How did you figure out the design?"

"The wind taught me that. When I made my floor the Nagual had
already taught me not to
resist the wind. He had showed me how
to give in to my wind and let it guide me. It took him a
long
time to do that, years and years. I was a very difficult, silly old woman at
first; he told me
that himself and he was right. But I learned very
fast. Perhaps because I'm old and no longer have
anything to
lose. In the beginning, what made it even more difficult for me was the fear I
had.
The mere presence of the Nagual made me stutter and
faint. The Nagual had the same effect on
everyone else.
It was his fate to be so fearsome."

She stopped talking and stared at me.

"The Nagual is not human," she said.

"What makes you say that?"

"The Nagual is a devil from who knows what time."

Her statements chilled me. I felt my heart pounding. She certainly could
not have found a
better audience. I was intrigued to no end. I
begged her to explain what she meant by that.

"His touch changed people," she said. "You know that. He
changed your body. In your case, you didn't even know that he was doing that.
But he got into your old body. He put something in it. He did the same with me.
He left something in me and that something took over. Only a devil
can
do that. Now I am the north wind and I fear nothing, and no one. But before he
changed me I
was a weak, ugly old woman who would faint at the mere
mention of his name. Pablito, of
course, was no help to me because he
feared the Nagual more than death itself.

"One day the Nagual and Genaro came to the house when I was alone.
I heard them by the
door, like prowling jaguars. I crossed myself; to
me they were two demons, but I came out to see what I could do for them. They
were hungry and I gladly fixed food for them. I had some thick
bowls
made out of gourd and I gave each man a bowl of soup. The Nagual didn't seem to
appreciate the food; he didn't want to eat food prepared by such a weak
woman and pretended to
be clumsy and knocked the bowl off the
table with a sweep of his arm. But the bowl, instead of
turning
over and spilling all over the floor, slid with the force of the Nagual's blow
and fell on my
foot, without spilling a drop. The bowl actually
landed on my foot and stayed there until I bent
over and
picked it up. I set it up on the table in front of him and told him that even
though I was a
weak woman and had always feared him, my food had
good feelings.

"From that very moment the Nagual changed toward me. The fact that
the bowl of soup fell on
my foot and didn't spill proved to him
that power had pointed me out to him. I didn't know that at the time and I
thought that he changed toward me because he felt ashamed of having refused my
food.
I thought nothing of his change. I still was petrified and couldn't even look
him in the eye.
But he began to take more and more notice of me. He
even brought me gifts: a shawl, a dress, a
comb and other
things. That made me feel terrible. I was ashamed because I thought that he was
a
man looking for a woman. The Nagual had young girls, what would he want
with an old woman
like me? At first I didn't want to wear or even
consider looking at his gifts, but Pablito prevailed
on me and I
began to wear them. I also began to be even more afraid of him and didn't want
to be
alone with him. I knew that he was a devilish man. I knew
what he had done to his woman."

I felt compelled to interrupt her. I told her that I had never known of
a woman in don Juan's
life.

"You know who I mean," she said.

"Believe me, dona Soledad, I don't."

"Don't give me that. You know that I'm talking about la
Gorda."

The only "la Gorda" I knew of was Pablito's sister, an
enormously fat girl nicknamed Gorda,
Fatso. I had had the feeling,
although no one ever talked about it, that she was not really dona
Soledad
's
daughter. I did not want to press her for any more information. I suddenly
remembered that the fat girl had disappeared from the house and nobody could or
dared to tell me what had
happened to her.

"One day I was alone in the front of the house," dona Soledad went on. "I was combing my hair in the sun with the comb that the Nagual had
given me; I didn't realize that he had arrived
and was
standing behind me. All of a sudden I felt his hands grabbing me by the chin. I
heard him
say very softly that I shouldn't move because my neck
might break. He twisted my head to the
left. Not all
the way but a bit. I became very frightened and screamed and tried to wriggle
out of
his grip, but he held my head firmly for a long, long
time.

"When he let go of my chin, I fainted. I don't remember what
happened then. When I woke up
I was lying on the ground, right here
where I'm sitting now. The Nagual was gone. I was so
ashamed that I
didn't want to see anyone, especially la Gorda. For a long time I even thought
that the Nagual had never twisted my neck and I had had a nightmare."