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 be-hind 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 prod-ding 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 to-ward 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.