I hadn't seen Clara for three days. Some mysterious errand was keeping her away.
It was her habit now, without a word of warning, to leave me alone in the house for days at a time with only Manfred for company.
Although I had the whole house to myself, I never dared to venture beyond the living room, my bedroom, Clara's gymnasium, the kitchen and of course the outhouse.
There was something about Clara's house and grounds, especially when Clara was away, that filled me with an irrational fear.
The result was that when I was alone, I kept a strict routine, which I found comforting.
I used to wake up around nine, make my breakfast in the kitchen on a hot plate because I still didn't know how to light the wood-burning stove, pack a light lunch, then go to the cave to recapitulate, or take a long hike with Manfred.
I would return in the late afternoon to practice kung fu forms in Clara's martial arts gymnasium.
The gym was a big hall with a vaulted ceiling, a varnished wooden floor and a standing black-lacquer rack on which a variety of martial arts weapons were displayed.
Along the wall opposite the door was a raised platform covered with straw mats.
I had once asked Clara what the platform was for.
She had said it was where she did her meditation.
I had never seen Clara meditate because whenever she went into the building by herself, she always locked the door.
Every time I had asked her what kind of meditation she practiced, she had refused to elaborate on it.
The only thing I ever found but was that she called it 'dreaming.'
Clara had allowed me free access to her gymnasium whenever she wasn't using it herself.
When I was alone in the house, I gravitated to that room, finding there emotional solace for it was imbued with Clara's presence and power.
It was there that she taught me a most intriguing style of kung fu.
I had never been interested in Chinese martial arts because my Japanese karate teachers had always insisted that its movements were too elaborate and cumbersome to be of any practical value.
Systematically they ran down the Chinese styles and elevated their own, saying that although karate had its roots in the Chinese styles, its forms and applications were thoroughly altered and perfected in Japan.
Ignorant of martial arts, I believed my teachers and totally discounted all other styles.
Consequently, I didn't know what to make of Clara's kung fu style.
In spite of my ignorance, one thing was obvious: She was an indisputable master of it.
After working out for an hour or so in Clara's gymnasium, I would change clothes and go to the kitchen to eat.
Invariably, my food would be there, set on the table, but I was always so famished after exercising that I just wolfed down whatever had been prepared without speculating how it got there.
Clara had told me, when I questioned her about it, that when she was gone the caretaker came to the house to cook my meals.
He must have also done the laundry besause I would find my clothes neatly folded in a pile at the door of my bedroom: All I had to do was iron them.
One evening after a heavy workout which Manfred looked on growling critically from time to time; I had such a surplus of energy that I decided to break my routine and return to the cave in the darkness to continue recapitulating.
I was in such a hurry to get there that I forgot to bring my flashlight.
It was a cloudy night. Yet despite the total darkness, I didn't stumble on anything along the path.
I got to the cave and recapitulated; visualizing and breathing in memories of all my karate instructors and every demonstration and tournament I had participated in.
It took me most of the night, but when I had finished I felt thoroughly cleansed of the prejudices that I had inherited from my teachers as part of my training.
The following day Clara still hadn't returned, so I went to the cave a bit later than usual.
As I walked home in daylight, I tried a deliberate exercise. I walked on the same path I had walked every day, only this time I kept my eyes shut to simulate darkness.
Because it had only occurred to me later that it had been very unusual to have walked all the way to the cave the night before without tripping, I wanted to see if I could walk without stumbling.
But with my eyes shut, I fell several times over stumps and rocks, and badly bruised my shin.
I was on the living room floor putting bandages on my abrasions when Clara unexpectedly walked in the door. "What happened to you?" she asked with a look of surprise. "Were you and the dog fighting?"
At that very instant, Manfred ambled into the room. He barked gruffly, as if offended.
I was convinced that he had understood what Clara had said.
Clara stood in front of him, bowed slightly from the waist, the way an Oriental student bows to his master, and voiced a most convoluted bilingual apology.
She said, "I am extremely sorry, my dear señor, for having spoken so lightly about your irreproachable behavior and your exquisite manners; and above all, your superior consideration that makes you un señor entre señores, el mãs ilustre entre todos ellos- a lord among lords, the most illustrious of them all."
I was absolutely bewildered. I thought Clara had lost her mind during her three days' absence.
I had never heard her speaking like this before. I wanted to laugh, but her serious expression made my laugh stick in my throat.
She was about to begin another barrage of apologies when Manfred yawned, looked at her bored, turned around, and left the room.
Clara sat down on the couch, her body shaking with muffled laughter. "When he's offended, the only way to get rid of him is to bore him to death with apologies," she confided.
I hoped that Clara would tell me where she had been for the past three days.
I waited for a moment in case she would bring up the subject of her absence, but she didn't.
I told her that while she was gone, Manfred had come every day to visit me at the recapitulation cave; and that it was as if he went there from time to time to check if I was all right.
Again I wanted Clara to say something about the nature of her trip, but instead she said without surprise, "Yes, he's very solicitous, and extremely considerate of others.
"Therefore he expects the same treatment from them; and if he even suspects that he's not getting it, he becomes rabid.
"When he's in that mood, he's deadly dangerous.
"Remember that night he nearly snapped your head off when you called him a toad-dog?"
I wanted to change the subject.
I didn't like to think of Manfred as a mad dog. Over the past months, he had become more a friend than a beast.
He was such a friend that the unsettling certainty he was the only one who truly understood me had taken possession of me.
"You haven't said what happened to your legs," Clara reminded me.
I told her about my failed attempt at walking with my eyes shut. I explained that I had had no difficulty walking in the dark the night before.
She looked at the scratches and welts on my legs and patted my head as if I were Manfred.
"Last night, you weren't making a project out of walking," she said:
"You were determined to get to the cave, so your feet automatically took you there.
"This afternoon, you were consciously trying to replicate last night's walking, but you failed miserably because your mind got in the way."
She thought for a moment then added, "Or perhaps you weren't listening to the voice of the spirit that could have guided you safely."
She puckered up her lips in a childish gesture of impatience as I told her that I hadn't been aware of any voices; but that sometimes in the house, I thought I heard strange whisperings; although I was convinced that that was only the wind blowing through the empty hallway.
"We've agreed that you weren't going to take anything I say literally, unless I tell you beforehand to do so," Clara reminded me sternly:
"By emptying your warehouse, you are changing your inventory.
"Now there is room for something new, such as walking in darkness; so I thought that perhaps there might also be room for the voice of the spirit."
I was trying so hard to figure out what Clara was saying, that my forehead must have been furrowed.
Clara sat down In her favorite chair and patiently began to explain what she meant.,
"Before you came to this house, your inventory had nothing on dogs being more than dogs.
"But then you met Manfred and meeting him forced you to modify that part of your inventory." She shook her hand like an Italian and said, "Capisce?"
"You mean Manfred is the voice of the spirit?" I asked, dumbfounded.
Clara laughed so hard that she could barely speak. "No, it's not quite what I mean. It's something more abstract," she mumbled.
She suggested I take out my mat from the closet. "Let's go to the patio and sit under the zapote tree," she said as she was getting some salve from a cabinet:
"The twilight is the best time to listen for the voice of the spirit."
I unrolled my mat under the huge tree covered with peachlike green fruits.
Clara massaged some salve into my bruised skin. It hurt fearsomely, but I tried not to wince.
When she had finished, I noticed that the biggest welt had almost disappeared.
She leaned back and propped her back against the thick tree trunk.
"Everything has a form," she began, "but besides the outer shape, there is an inner awareness that rules things.
"This silent awareness is the spirit.
"It is an all-encompassing force that manifests itself differently in different things.
"This energy communicates with us."
She told me to relax and to take deep breaths because she was going to show me how to exercise my inner hearing, "For it is with the inner ear," she said, "that one is able to discern the spirit's biddings.
"When you breathe, allow the energy to flow out of your ears," she continued.
"How do I do that?" I asked.
"When you exhale, fix your attention on the openings of your ears and use your intent and your concentration to direct the flow."
She monitored my attempts for a while, correcting me as I went along.
"Exhale through your nose with your mouth closed and the tip of your tongue touching your palate," she said. "Exhale noiselessly."
After a few attempts, I could feel my ears pop and my sinuses clear. Then she instructed me to rub the palms of my hands together until they were hot and to place them over my ears with my fingertips almost touching, at the back of my head.
I did as she instructed. Clara suggested I massage my ears using a gentle circular pressure.
Then, with my ears still covered and my index fingers crossed over the middle fingers, I was to repeatedly tap behind each ear by snapping my index fingers in unison.
As I flicked my fingers, I heard a sound like a muffled bell reverberating inside my head.
I repeated the tapping eighteen times as she had instructed.
When I removed my hands I noticed I could distinctly hear the faintest sounds in the surrounding vegetation, while before, everything had been undifferentiated and muffled.
"Now, with your ears clear, perhaps you'll be able to hear the voice of the spirit," Clara said:
"But don't expect a shout from the treetops.
"What we call the voice of the spirit is more of a feeling; or it can be an idea that suddenly pops into your head.
"Sometimes it can be like a longing to go somewhere vaguely familiar, or a longing to do something also vaguely familiar."
Perhaps it was the power of her suggestion that made me hear a soft murmur around me.
As I began paying closer attention to it, the murmur turned into human voices speaking in the distance.
I could distinguish women's crystalline laughter, and a man's voice, a rich baritone, singing.
I heard the sounds as if the wind was carrying them to me in spurts.
I strained to make out what the voices were saying, and the more I listened to the wind, the more elated I became.
Some ebullient energy inside me made me jump up.
I was so happy that I wanted to play, to dance, and to run around like a child.
And without realizing what I was doing, I began to sing and leap and twirl around the patio like a ballerina until I had completely exhausted myself.
When I finally came to sit down next to Clara, I was perspiring, but it was not a healthy physical sweat.
It was more like the cold sweat of exhaustion.
Clara too was out of breath, from laughing at my antics.
I had succeeded in making an utter fool of myself, jumping and cavorting around the patio.
"I don't know what came over me," I said at a loss for an explanation.
"Describe what happened," Clara said in a serious tone.
When I refused out of embarrassment, she added, "Otherwise, I'll be forced to view you as being a bit... well, batty in the belfry, if you know what I mean."
I told her that I had heard the most haunting laughter and singing, and that it actually drove me to dance around.
"Do you think I'm going crazy?" I asked, concerned.
"If I were you, I wouldn't worry about it," she said. "Your cavorting was a natural reaction to hearing the voice of the spirit."
"It was not a voice; it was lots of voices," I corrected her.
"There you go again, the literal-minded Miss Perfect," she scoffed.
She explained that llteral-mindedness is a major item of our inventory, and that we have to be aware of it to bypass it.
The voice of the spirit is an abstraction that has nothing to do with voices, and yet we may at times hear voices.
She said that in my case, since I was raised a devout Catholic, my own way of readapting my inventory would be to turn the spirit into a sort of guardian angel; a kind, protective male that watches over me.
"But the spirit is not anybody's guardian," she went on:
"It is an abstract force, neither good nor evil; A force that has no interest whatsoever in us, but that nevertheless responds to our power.
"Not to our prayers, mind you, but to our power.
"Remember that the next time you feel like praying for forgiveness!"
I asked, alarmed, "But isn't the spirit kind and forgiving?"
Clara said that sooner or later I was going to discard all my preconceptions about good and evil; God and religion, and think only in terms of a completely new inventory.
"Do you mean good and evil don't exist?" I asked, armed with the ready-made barrage of logical arguments about free will and the existence of evil I had learned throughout my years of Catholic schooling.
Before I could even begin to present my case, Clara said, "This is where my companions and I differ from the established order.
"I've told you that for us freedom is to be free from humanness.
"That includes God, good and evil, the saints, the Virgin and the Holy Ghost.
"We believe that a nonhuman inventory is the only possible freedom for human beings.
"If our warehouses are going to remain filled to capacity with the desires, feelings, ideas and objects of our human inventory, where is our freedom then?
"Do you see what I mean?"
I understood her, but not as clearly as I would have liked to; partly because I was still resisting the idea of relinquishing my humanness; and also because I hadn't yet recapitulated all the religious preconceptions handed down to me by the Catholic school system.
I was also accustomed to never thinking of anything that didn't pertain to me directly.
As I tried to find flaws with her reasoning, Clara jolted me out of my mental speculations with a tap on my ribs.
She said that she was going to show me another exercise for stopping thoughts and for feeling energy lines, otherwise I would be doing what I had always done: be enthralled with the idea of myself.
Clara told me to sit in a cross-legged position and lean sideways as I inhaled, first to the right, then to the left, and to feel how I was being pulled by a horizontal line extending out of the opening of my ears.
She said that, surprisingly, the line didn't sway with the motion of one's body but remained perfectly horizontal, and that this was one of the mysteries she and her cohorts had uncovered.
"Leaning in this manner," she explained, "moves our awareness- which normally is always directed to the front- to the side."
She ordered me to loosen my jaw muscles by chewing and swallowing saliva three times.
"What does this do?" I asked, swallowing with a gulp. "The chewing and swallowing brings some of the energy lodged in the head down to the stomach, lessening the load on the brain,"
She said with a chuckle. "In your case, you should do this maneuver often."
I wanted to get up and walk around because my legs were falling asleep, but Clara demanded that I remain seated for a while longer and practice this exercise.
I leaned to both sides, trying as hard as I could to feel that elusive horizontal line, but I couldn't feel it.
I did manage, however, to stop my thoughts from their usual avalanche.
Perhaps an hour passed with me sitting in total silence without any thoughts at all.
Around us, I could hear crickets chirping and leaves rustling, but no more voices were brought by the wind.
For a while I listened to Manfred's barking coming from his room at the side of the house.
Then, as if moved by an unvoiced command, thoughts rushed in my mind again.
I became aware of what had been their complete absence; and how peaceful total silence had been.
My restless body movements must have cued Clara, for she began to speak again. "The voice of the spirit comes from nowhere," she continued:
"It comes from the depth of silence; from the realm of not-being.
"That voice can only be heard when we are absolutely quiet and balanced."
She explained that the two opposing forces that move us, male and female, positive and negative, light and dark, have to be kept in balance so that an opening is created in the energy that surrounds us; an opening through which our awareness can slip.
It is through this opening in the energy encompassing us that the spirit manifests itself.
"Balance is what we are after," she went on. "But balance doesn't only mean an equal portion of each force.
"It also means that as the portions are made equal, the new, balanced combination gains momentum and begins to move by itself."
Clara searched my face in the darkness, I felt, for signs of comprehension.
Finding none, she said almost cuttingly, "We are not that intelligent, are we?"
I felt my whole body tense at her remark.
I told her that in all my life nobody had ever accused me of not being intelligent.
My parents, my teachers had always praised me for being one of the brightest students in the class. When it came to report cards, I nearly made myself ill by studying to make sure I had better grades than my brothers.
Clara sighed and listened patiently to my lengthy reaffirmation of my intelligence.
Before I had exhausted my arguments to convince her that she was wrong, she conceded, "Yes, you are intelligent, but everything you've said refers only to the world of everyday life.
"More than intelligent, you are studious, industrious and cunning. Wouldn't you agree?"
I had to agree with her in spite of myself, because my own reason told me that if I had truly been as intelligent as I claimed, I wouldn't have had to nearly kill myself studying.
"In order to be intelligent in my world," Clara explained, "you must be able to concentrate; to fix your attention on any concrete thing as well as on any abstract manifestation."
"What kind of abstract manifestations are you talking about, Clara?" I asked.
"An opening in the energy field around us is an abstract manifestation," she said:
"But don't expect to feel it or see it in the same manner you feel and see the concrete world. Something else takes place."
Clara stressed that for us to fix our attention on any abstract manifestation, we have to merge the known with the unknown in a spontaneous amalgamation.
In this way, we can engage our reason, yet at the same time be indifferent to it.
Clara told me then to stand up and walk around. "Now that it's dark, try walking without looking at the ground," she said. "Not as a conscious exercise, but as a sorcery not-doing."
I wanted to ask her to explain what she meant by a sorcery not-doing, but I knew that if she did, I would be consciously thinking about her explanation and gauging my performance against this new concept, even if I wasn't sure what it meant.
I did recall, however, that she had used the term "not-doing" before; and in spite of my reluctance to ask questions, I still tried to remember what she had told me about it.
For me, knowledge, even if it was minimal and faulty, was better than none for it gave me a sense of control; whereas no knowledge left me feeling completely vulnerable.
"Not-doing is a term that comes to us from our own sorcery tradition," Clara went on, obviously aware of my need for explanations:
"It refers to everything that is not included in the inventory that was forced upon us.
"When we engage any item of our forced inventory, we are doing.
"Anything we do that is not part of that inventory is not-doing."
Any degree of relaxation I had achieved was abrupdy disrupted by the statement she had just made.
"What did you mean, Clara, when you referred to your tradition as sorcery?" I demanded.
"You catch every detail when you want to, Taisha.
"No wonder your ears are So big," she said laughing; and didn't answer me right away.
I stared at her, waiting for her reply.
Finally she said, "I wasn't going to tell you about this yet, but since it slipped out, let me just say that the art of freedom is a product of sorcerers' intent."
"What sorcerers are you talking about?"
"There have been people here in Mexico, and there still are, who are concerned with final questions. My magical family and I call them sorcerers.
"From them we have inherited all the ideas I am acquainting you with.
"You already know about the recapitulation. Not-doing is another of those ideas."
"But who are these people, Clara?"
"You'll know all there is to know about them soon," she assured me. "For now, let's just practice one of their not-doings."
She said that not-doing at this particular moment would be, for example, to force myself to trust the spirit implicitly by letting go of my calculating mind.
"Don't just pretend to trust while secretly harboring doubts," Clara warned me:
"Only when your positive and negative forces are in perfect accord will you be capable of either feeling or seeing the opening in the energy around you; or walking with your eyes closed, and be assured of success."
I took a few deep breaths and began walking, not looking at the ground but with my hands outstretched in front of me in case I bumped into things.
For a while I kept stumbling, and on one occasion I tripped over a potted plant and would have fallen had Clara not grabbed my arm.
Gradually I began to stumble less and less, until I had no trouble walking smoothly.
It was as if my feet could see clearly everything on the patio and knew exactly where to step and where not to step.