The Art of Dreaming (33 page)

Having had
all the possible worldly reasons for feeling anguish stripped off me a long
time ago, all I had been left with was concern for myself. And I gave myself to
it shamelessly. One last indulging for the road: the fear of dying at the hands
of the death defier. I became so afraid that I got sick to my stomach. I tried
to apologize, but don Juan laughed.

"You're
not in any way unique at barfing out of fear," he said. "When I met
the death defier, I wet my pants. Believe me."

I waited in
silence for a long, unbearable moment.

"Are
you ready?" he asked. I said yes. And he added, standing up, "Let's
go then and find out how you are going to stand up in the firing line."

He led the
way back to the church. To the best of my ability, all I remember of that walk,
to this day, is that he had to drag me bodily the whole way. I do not remember
arriving at the church or entering it. The next thing I knew, I was kneeling on
a long, worn-out wooden pew next to the woman I had seen earlier. She was
smiling at me. Desperately, I looked around, trying to spot don Juan, but he
was nowhere in sight. I would have flown like a bat out of hell had the woman
not restrained me by grabbing my arm.

"Why
should you be so afraid of poor little me?" the woman asked me in English.

I stayed
glued to the spot where I was kneeling. What had taken me entirely and
instantaneously was her voice. I cannot describe what it was about its raspy
sound that called out the most recondite memories in me. It was as if I had
always known that voice.

I remained
there immobile, mesmerized by that sound. She asked me something else in
English, but I could not make out what she was saying. She smiled at me,
knowingly.

"It's
all right," she whispered in Spanish. She was kneeling to my right.
"I understand real fear. I live with it."

I was about
to talk to her when I heard the emissary's voice in my ear. "It's the voice
of Hermelinda, your wet nurse," it said. The only thing I had ever known
about Hermelinda was the story I was told of her being accidentally killed by a
runaway truck. That the woman's voice would stir such deep, old memories was
shocking to me. I experienced a momentary agonizing anxiety.

"I am
your wet nurse!" the woman exclaimed softly. "How extraordinary! Do
you want my breast?" Laughter convulsed her body.

I made a
supreme effort to remain calm, yet I knew that I was quickly losing ground and
in no time at all was going to take leave of my senses.

"Don't
mind my joking," the woman said in a low voice. "The truth is that I
like you very much. You are bustling with energy. And we are going to get along
fine."

Two older
men knelt down right in front of us. One of them turned curiously to look at
us. She paid no attention to him and kept on whispering in my ear.

"Let
me hold your hand," she pleaded. But her plea was like a command. I
surrendered my hand to her, unable to say no.

"Thank
you. Thank you for your confidence and your trust in me," she whispered.

The sound
of her voice was driving me mad. Its raspiness was so exotic, so utterly
feminine. Not under any circumstances would I have taken it for a man's voice
laboring to sound womanly. It was a raspy voice, but not a throaty or
harsh-sounding one. It was more like the sound of bare feet softly walking on
gravel.

I made a
tremendous effort to break an invisible sheet of energy that seemed to have
enveloped me. I thought I succeeded. I stood up, ready to leave, and I would
have had not the woman also stood up and whispered in my ear, "Don't run
away. There is so much I have to tell you."

I
automatically sat down, stopped by curiosity. Strangely, my anxiety was
suddenly gone, and so was my fear. I even had enough presence to ask the woman,
"Are you really a woman?"

She
chuckled softly, like a young girl. Then she voiced a convoluted sentence.

"If
you dare to think that I would transform myself into a fearsome man and cause
you harm, you are gravely mistaken," she said, accentuating even more that
strange, mesmeric voice. "You are my benefactor. I am your servant, as I
have been the servant of all the naguals who preceded you."

Gathering
all the energy I could, I spoke my mind to her.

"You
are welcome to my energy," I said. "It's a gift from me to you, but I
don't want any gifts of power from you. And I really mean this."

"I
can't take your energy for free," she whispered. "I pay for what I
get, that's the deal. It's foolish to give your energy for free."

"I've
been a fool all my life. Believe me," I said. "I can surely afford to
make you a gift. I have no problem with it. You need the energy, take it. But I
don't need to be saddled with unnecessaries. I have nothing and I love
it."

"Perhaps,"
she said pensively.

Aggressively,
I asked her whether she meant that perhaps she would take my energy or that she
did not believe I had nothing and loved it.

She giggled
with delight and said that she might take my energy since I was so generously offering
it but that she had to make a payment. She had to give me a thing of similar
value.

As I heard
her speak, I became aware that she spoke Spanish with a most extravagant
foreign accent. She added an extra phoneme to the middle syllable of every
word. Never in my life had I heard anyone speak like that.

"Your
accent is quite extraordinary," I said. "Where is it from?"

"From
nearly eternity," she said and sighed. We had begun to connect. I
understood why she sighed. She was the closest thing to permanent, while I was
temporary. That was my advantage. The death defier had worked herself into a
corner, and I was free.

I examined
her closely. She seemed to be between thirty-five and forty years old. She was
a dark, thoroughly Indian woman, almost husky, but not fat or even hefty. I
could see that the skin of her forearms and hands was smooth, the muscles, firm
and youthful. I judged that she was five feet, six or seven inches tall. She
wore a long dress, a black shawl, and guaraches. In her kneeling position, I
could also see her smooth heels and part of her powerful calves. Her midsection
was lean. She had big breasts that she could not or perhaps did not want to
hide under her shawl. Her hair was jet black and tied in a long braid. She was
not beautiful, but she was not homely either. Her features were in no way
outstanding. I felt that she could not possibly have attracted anybody's
attention, except for her eyes, which she kept low, hidden beneath downcast
eyelids. Her eyes were magnificent, clear, peaceful. Apart from don Juan's, I
had never seen eyes more brilliant, more alive.

Her eyes
put me completely at ease. Eyes like that could not be malevolent. I had a
surge of trust and optimism and the feeling that I had known her all my life.
But I was also very conscious of something else: my emotional instability. It
had always plagued me in don Juan's world, forcing me to be like a yo-yo. I had
moments of total trust and insight only to be followed by abject doubts and
distrust. This event was not going to be different. My suspicious mind suddenly
came up with the warning thought that I was falling under the woman's spell.

"You
learned Spanish late in life, didn't you?" I said, just to get out from
under my thoughts and to avoid her reading them.

"Only
yesterday," she retorted and broke into a crystalline laughter, her small,
strangely white teeth, shining like a row of pearls.

People
turned to look at us. I lowered my forehead as if in deep prayer. The woman
moved closer to me.

"Is
there a place where we could talk?" I asked.

"We are
talking here," she said. "I have talked here with all the naguals of
your line. If you whisper, no one will know we are talking."

I was dying
to ask her about her age. But a sobering memory came to my rescue. I remembered
a friend of mine who for years had been setting up all kinds of traps to make
me confess my age to him. I detested his petty concern, and now I was about to
engage in the same behavior. I dropped it instantly.

I wanted to
tell her about it, just to keep the conversation going. She seemed to know what
was going through my mind. She squeezed my arm in a friendly gesture, as if to
say that we had shared a thought.

"Instead
of giving me a gift, can you tell me something that would help me in my
way?" I asked her.

She shook
her head. "No," she whispered. "We are extremely different. More
different than I believed possible."

She got up
and slid sideways out of the pew. She deftly genuflected as she faced the main
altar. She crossed herself and signaled me to follow her to a large side altar
to our left.

We knelt in
front of a life-size crucifix. Before I had time to say anything, she spoke.

"I've
been alive for a very, very long time," she said. "The reason I have
had this long life is that I control the shifts and movements of my assemblage
point. Also, I don't stay here in your world too long. I have to save the
energy I get from the naguals of your line."

"What
is it like to exist in other worlds?" I asked.

"It's
like in your
dreaming
, except that I have more mobility. And I can stay
longer anywhere I want. Just like if you would stay as long as you wanted in
any of your dreams."

"When
you are in this world, are you pinned down to this area alone?"

"No. I
go everywhere I want."

"Do
you always go as a woman?"

"I've
been a woman longer than a man. Definitely, I like it much better. I think I've
nearly forgotten how to be a man. I am all female!"

She took my
hand and made me touch her crotch. My heart was pounding in my throat. She was
indeed a female.

"I
can't just take your energy," she said, changing the subject. "We
have to strike another kind of agreement."

Another
wave of mundane reasoning hit me then. I wanted to ask her where she lived when
she was in this world. I did not need to voice my question to get an answer.

"You're
much, much younger than I," she said, "and you already have
difficulty telling people where you live. And even if you take them to the
house you own or pay rent on, that's not where you live."

"There
are so many things I want to ask you, but all I do is think stupid thoughts,"
I said.

"You
don't need to ask me anything," she went on. "You already know what I
know. All you needed was a jolt in order to claim what you already know. I am
giving you that jolt."

Not only
did I think stupid thoughts but I was in a state of such suggestibility that no
sooner had she finished saying that I knew what she knew than I felt I knew
everything, and I no longer needed to ask any more questions. Laughingly, I
told her about my gullibility.

"You're
not gullible," she assured me with authority. "You know everything,
because you're now totally in the second attention. Look around!"

For a
moment, I could not focus my sight. It was exactly as if water had gotten into
my eyes. When I arranged my view, I knew that something portentous had happened.
The church was different, darker, more ominous, and somehow harder. I stood up
and took a couple of steps toward the nave. What caught my eye were the pews;
they were made not out of lumber but out of thin, twisted poles. These were
homemade pews, set inside a magnificent stone building. Also, the light in the
church was different. It was yellowish, and its dim glow cast the blackest
shadows I had ever seen. It came from the candles of the many altars. I had an
insight about how well candlelight mixed with the massive stone walls and
ornaments of a colonial church.

The woman
was staring at me; the brightness of her eyes was most remarkable. I knew then
that I was
dreaming
and she was directing the dream. But I was not
afraid of her or of the dream. I moved away from the side altar and looked
again at the nave of the church. There were people kneeling in prayer there.

Lots of
them, strangely small, dark, hard people. I could see their bowed heads all the
way to the foot of the main altar. The ones who were close to me stared at me,
obviously, in disapproval. I was gaping at them and at everything else. I could
not hear any noise, though. People moved, but there was no sound.

"I
can't hear anything," I said to the woman, and my voice boomed, echoing as
if the church were a hollow shell.

Nearly all
the heads turned to look at me. The woman pulled me back into the darkness of
the side altar.

"You
will hear if you don't listen with your ears," she said. "Listen with
your
dreaming
attention."

It appeared
that all I needed was her insinuation. I was suddenly flooded by the droning
sound of a multitude in prayer. I was instantly swept up by it. I found it the
most exquisite sound I had ever heard. I wanted to rave about it to the woman,
but she was not by my side. I looked for her. She had nearly reached the door.
She turned there to signal me to follow her. I caught up with her at the
portico. The streetlights were gone. The only illumination was moonlight. The
facade of the church was also different; it was unfinished. Square blocks of
limestone lay everywhere. There were no houses or buildings around the church.
In the moonlight the scene was eerie.