The
Universal Shift of Consciousness
Fourth
Lot of Books by
Carlos
Castaneda
You are not
Your Physical Body; You are Not the Physical Matter: You are Energy !
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Carlos
Castaneda
"Eagle's Gift"
Sixth book in the series.
Index:
Prologue.........................................................................................3
Part 1: The Other Self
1. The Fixation of the Second
Attention........................................6
2. Seeing
Together........................................................................16
3. Quasi Memories of the Other
Self............................................26
4. Crossing the Boundaries of
Affection......................................35
5. The Horde of Angry
Sorcerers.................................................46
Part 2: The Art of Dreaming
6. Losing the Human
Form..........................................................58
7. Dreaming
Together..................................................................66
8. The Right and the Left Side
Awareness..................................78
Part 3: The Eagle's Gift
9. The Rule of the
Nagual............................................................88
10. The Nagual's Party of
Warriors..............................................97
11. The Nagual
Woman.............................................................109
12. The Not-Doings of Silvio
Manuel.......................................118
13. The Intricacies of
Dreaming................................................126
14.
Florinda................................................................................136
15. The Plumed
Serpent..........................................................152
2
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Prologue
Although I am an anthropologist, this is not strictly an
anthropological work; yet it has its
roots in cultural anthropology, for it began years ago as field
research in that discipline. I was
interested at that time in studying the uses of medicinal plants among
the Indians of the
Southwest and northern Mexico.
My research evolved into something else over the years as a consequence
of its own
momentum and of my own growth. The study of medicinal plants was
superseded by the study
of a belief system which seemed to cut across the boundaries of at
least two different cultures.
The person responsible for this shift of emphasis in my work was a
Yaqui Indian from
northern Mexico, don Juan Matus, who later introduced me to don Genaro
Flores, a Mazatec
Indian from central Mexico. Both of them were practitioners of an
ancient knowledge, which in
our time is commonly known as sorcery, and which is thought to be a
primitive form of medical
or psychological science, but which in fact is a tradition of extremely
self-disciplined
practitioners and extremely sophisticated praxes.
The two men became my teachers rather than my informants, but I still
persisted, in a
haphazard way, in regarding my task as a work in anthropology; I spent
years trying to figure out
the cultural matrix of that system, perfecting a taxonomy, a
classificatory scheme, a hypothesis
of its origin and dissemination. All were futile efforts in view of the
fact that in the end, the
compelling inner forces of that system derailed my intellectual pursuit
and turned me into a
participant.
Under the influence of these two powerful men my work has been
transformed into an
autobiography, in the sense that I have been forced from the moment I
became a participant to
report what happens to me. It is a peculiar autobiography because I am
not reporting about what
happens to me in my everyday life as an average man, nor am I reporting
about my subjective
states generated by daily living. I am reporting, rather, on the events
that unfold in my life as a
direct result of having adopted an alien set of interrelated ideas and
procedures. In other words,
the belief system I wanted to study swallowed me, and in order for me
to proceed with my
scrutiny I have to make an extraordinary daily payment, my life as a
man in this world.
Due to these circumstances I am now faced with the special problem of
having to explain
what it is that I am doing. I am very far away from my point of origin
as an average Western
man or as an anthropologist, and I must first of all reiterate that
this is not a work of fiction.
What I am describing is alien to us; therefore, it seems unreal.
As I enter deeper into the intricacies of sorcery, what at first
appeared to be a system of
primitive beliefs and practices has now turned out to be an enormous
and intricate world. In
order to become familiar with that world and to report about it, I have
to use myself in
increasingly complex and more refined ways. Whatever happens to me is
no longer something I
can predict, nor anything congruous with what other anthropologists
know about the belief
systems of the Indians of Mexico. I find myself, consequently, in a
difficult position; all I can do
under the circumstances is present what happened to me as it happened.
I cannot give any other
assurance of my good faith, except to reassert that I do not live a
dual life, and that I have
committed myself to following the principles of don Juan's system in my
everyday existence.
After don Juan Matus and don Genaro Flores, the two Mexican Indian
sorcerers who tutored
3
me, had explained their knowledge to me to their own satisfaction, they
said goodbye and left. I
understood that from then on my task was to assemble by myself what I
had learned from them.
In the course of fulfilling this task I went back to Mexico and found
out that don Juan and
don Genaro had nine other apprentices of sorcery; five women and four
men. The oldest woman
was named Soledad; the next was Maria Elena, nicknamed "la Gorda," the
other three women,
Lydia, Rosa, and Josefina, were younger, and were called "the little
sisters." The four men, in
order of age, were Eligio, Benigno, Nestor, and Pablito; the latter
three men were called "the
Genaros" because they were very close to don Genaro.
I had already known that Nestor, Pablito, and Eligio, who was no longer
around, were
apprentices, but I had been led to believe that the four girls were
Pablito's sisters, and that Sole
dad was their mother. I knew Soledad slightly over the years and had
always called her dona
Soledad, as a sign of respect, since she was closer to don Juan in age.
Lydia and Rosa had also
been introduced to me, but our relationship had been too brief and
casual to afford me an
understanding of who they really were. I knew la Gorda and Josefina
only by name. I had met
Benigno but had no idea that he was connected to don Juan and don
Genaro.
For reasons that were incomprehensible to me, all of them seemed to
have been waiting, in
one way or another, for my return to Mexico. They informed me that I
was supposed to take the
place of don Juan as their leader, their Nagual. They told me that don
Juan and don Genaro had
disappeared from the face of the earth, and so had Eligio. The women
and the men believed that
the three of them had not died - they had entered another world,
different from the world of our
everyday life, yet equally real.
The women - especially dona Soledad - clashed violently with me from
our first meeting.
They were, nevertheless, instrumental in producing a catharsis in me.
My contact with them
resulted in a mysterious effervescence in my life. From the moment I
met them drastic changes
took place in my thinking and my understanding. All this did not
happen, however, on a
conscious level - if anything, after my first visit to them I found
myself more confused than ever,
yet in the midst of the chaos I encountered a surprisingly solid base.
In the impact of our clash I
found in myself resources I had not imagined I possessed.
La Gorda and the three little sisters were consummate dreamers; they
voluntarily gave me
pointers and showed me their own accomplishments. Don Juan had
described the art of
dreaming as the capacity to utilize one's ordinary dreams and transform
them into controlled
awareness by virtue of a specialized form of attention, which he and
don Genaro called the
second attention.
I expected that the three Genaros were going to teach me their
accomplishments in another
aspect of don Juan's and don Genaro's teachings, "the art of stalking".
The art of stalking was
introduced to me as a set of procedures and attitudes that enabled one
to get the best out of any
conceivable situation. But whatever the three Genaros told me about
stalking did not have the
cohesion or the force I had anticipated. I concluded that either the
men were not really
practitioners of that art, or they simply did not want to show it to me.
I stopped my inquiries in order to give everyone a chance to feel
relaxed with me, but all of
the men and women sat back and trusted that since I was no longer
asking questions I was finally
behaving like a Nagual. Each of them demanded my guidance and counsel.
In order to comply I was obliged to undertake a total review of
everything don Juan and don
Genaro had taught me, to go deeper still into the art of sorcery.
4
Part 1: The Other
Self
5
1. The Fixation of The Second
Attention
It was midafternoon when I got to where la Gorda and the little sisters
lived. La Gorda was
alone, sitting outside by the door, gazing into the distant mountains.
She was shocked to see me.
She explained that she had been completely absorbed in a memory and for
a moment she had
been on the verge of remembering something very vague that had to do
with me.
Later that night, after dinner, la Gorda, the three little sisters, the
three Genaros, and I sat on
the floor of la Gorda's room. The women sat together.
For some reason, although I had been with each one of them an equal
length of time, I had
isolated la Gorda as the recipient of all my concern. It was as if the
others did not exist for me. I
speculated that perhaps it was because la Gorda reminded me of don
Juan, while the others did
not. There was something very easy about her, yet that easiness was not
so much in her actions as
it was in my feelings for her.
They wanted to know what I had been doing. I told them that I had just
been in the city of
Tula, Hidalgo, where I had visited some archaeological ruins. I had
been most impressed with a
row of four colossal, columnlike figures of stone, called the
Atlanteans," which stand on the flat
top of a pyramid.
Each one of the almost cylindrical figures, measuring fifteen feet in
height and three feet
across, is made of four separate pieces of basalt carved to represent
what archaeologists think are
Toltec warriors carrying their war paraphernalia. Twenty feet behind
each of the front figures on
the top of the pyramid, there is another row of four rectangular
columns of the same height and
width as the first, also made of four separate pieces of stone.
The awe-inspiring setting of the Atlanteans was enhanced by what a
friend, who had guided
me through the site, had told me about them. He said that a custodian
of the ruins had revealed to
him that he had heard the Atlanteans walking at night, making the
ground underneath them
shake.
I asked the Genaros for comments on what my friend had said. They acted
shy and giggled. I
turned to la Gorda, who was sitting beside me, and asked her directly
for her opinions.
"I've never seen those figures," she said. "I've never been in Tula.
Just the idea of going to that
town scares me."
"Why does it scare you, Gorda?" I asked.
"Something happened to me in the ruins of Monte Alban in Oaxaca," she
said. "I used to go to
roam around those ruins even after the Nagual Juan Mat us told me not
to set foot in them. I don't
know why but I loved that place. Every time I was in Oaxaca I would go
there. Because women
alone are always harassed, I would usually go with Pablito, who is very
daring. But once I went
there with Nestor. He saw a glitter on the ground. We dug a little and
found a strange rock that fit
in the palm of my hand; a hole had been neatly drilled into the rock. I
wanted to put my finger
through it, but Nestor stopped me. The rock was smooth and made my hand
very hot. We didn't
know what to do with it. Nestor put it inside his hat and we carried it
as if it were a live animal."
All of them started to laugh. There seemed to be a concealed joke in
what la Gorda was telling
me.
"Where did you take it?" I asked her.
"We brought it here to this house," she replied, and that statement
elicited uncontainable
laughter from the others. They coughed and choked laughing,
"The joke is on la Gorda," Nestor said. "You've got to understand that
she's muleheaded like
no one else. The Nagual had already told her not to fool around with
rocks, or bones, or any other
thing she might find buried in the ground. But she used to sneak behind
his back and get all kinds
of crap.
6
"That day in Oaxaca she insisted on carrying that godawful thing. We
got on the bus with it
and brought it all the way to this town and then right into this room."
"The Nagual and Genaro had gone on a trip," la Gorda said. "I got
daring and put my finger
through the hole and realized that the rock had been cut to be held in
the hand. Right away I
could feel the feeling of whoever had held that rock. It was a power
rock. My mood changed. I
became frightened. Something awesome began to lurk in the dark,
something that had no shape
or color. I couldn't be alone. I would wake up screaming and after a
couple of days I couldn't
sleep any more. Everybody took turns keeping me company, day and night."
"When the Nagual and Genaro came back," Nestor said, "the Nagual sent
me with Genaro to
put the rock back in the exact place where it had been buried. Genaro
worked for three days to
pinpoint the spot. And he did it."
"What happened to you, Gorda, after that?" I asked her.
"The Nagual buried me," she said. "For nine days I was naked inside a
dirt coffin."
There was another explosion of laughter among them.
"The Nagual told her that she couldn't get out of it," Nestor
explained. "Poor Gorda had to piss
and shit inside her coffin. The Nagual pushed her inside a box that he
made with branches and
mud. There was a little door on the side for her food and water. The
rest of it was sealed."
"Why did he bury her?" I asked.
"That's the only way to protect anyone," Nestor said. "She had to be
placed under the ground so
the earth would heal her. There is no better healer than the earth;
besides, the Nagual had to
fend off the feeling of that rock, which was focused on la Gorda. The
dirt is a screen, it doesn't
allow anything to go through, either way. The Nagual knew that she
couldn't get worse by
being buried for nine days; she could only get better. Which she did."
"How did it feel to be buried like that, Gorda?" I asked.
"I nearly went crazy," she said. "But that was just my indulging. If
the Nagual hadn't put me in
there, I would have died. The power of that rock was too great for me;
its owner had been a very
large man. I could tell that his hand was twice the size of mine. He
held on to that rock for dear
life, and in the end someone killed him. His fear terrified me. I could
feel something coming at
me to eat my flesh. That was what the man felt. He was a man of power,
but someone even more
powerful got him.
"The Nagual said that once you have an object of that kind, it brings
disaster because its power
enters into challenges with other objects of its kind, and the owner
becomes either a pursuer or a
victim. The Nagual said that it is the nature of such objects to be at
war, because the part of our
attention which focuses on them to give them power is a very dangerous,
belligerent part."
"La Gorda is very greedy," Pablito said. "She figured that if she could
find something which
already had a great deal of power in it, she'd be a winner because
nowadays no one is interested
in challenging power."
La Gorda assented with a movement of her head.
"I didn't know that one could pick up other things besides the power
that the objects have," she
said. "When I first put my finger through the hole and held the rock my
hand got hot and my arm
began to vibrate. I felt truly strong and big. I'm sneaky so no one
knew that I was holding the
rock in my hand. After a few days of holding it the real horror began.
I could feel that somebody
had gone after the owner of the rock. I could feel his fright. He was
doubtlessly a very powerful
sorcerer and whoever was after him wanted not only to kill him but to
eat his flesh. That really
scared me. I should've dropped the rock then, but the feeling I was
having was so new that I kept
the rock clutched in my hand like a damn fool. When I finally dropped
it, it was too late.
Something in me was hooked. I had visions of men coming at me, men
dressed in strange
7
clothes. I felt they were biting me, tearing the flesh of my legs with
sharp little knives and with
their teeth. I went berserk!"
"How did don Juan explain those visions?" I asked her.
"He said that she no longer had defenses," Nestor said. "And because of
that she could pick up
that man's fixation, his second attention, which had been poured into
that rock. When he was
being killed he held on to the rock in order to gather all his
concentration. The Nagual said that
the man's power went out of his body into his rock; he knew what he was
doing, he didn't want
his enemies to benefit by devouring his flesh. The Nagual also said
that the ones who killed him
knew this, that's why they were eating him alive, to get whatever power
was left. They must have
buried the rock to avoid trouble. And la Gorda and I, like two idiots,
found it and dug it up."
La Gorda shook her head affirmatively three or four times. She had a
very serious expression.
"The Nagual told me that the second attention is the most fierce thing
there is," she said. "If it
is focused on objects, there is nothing more horrendous."
"What's horrible is that we cling," Nestor said. "The man who owned the
rock was clinging to
his life and to his power; that's why he was horrified at feeling his
flesh eaten away. The Nagual
said that if the man would've let go of his possessiveness and
abandoned himself to his death,
whatever it may have been, there wouldn't have been any fear in him."
The conversation faded. I asked the others if they had anything to say.
The little sisters glared
at me. Benigno giggled and hid his face with his hat.
"Pablito and I have been in the pyramids of Tula," he finally said.
"We've been in all the
pyramids there are in Mexico. We like them."
"Why did you go to all the pyramids?" I asked him.
"I really don't know why we went to them," he said. "Perhaps it was
because the Nagual Juan
Mat us told us not to."
"How about you, Pablito?" I asked.
"I went there to learn," he replied huffily, and laughed. "I used to
live in the city of Tula. I
know those pyramids like the back of my hand. The Nagual told me that
he also used to live
there. He knew everything about the pyramids. He was a Toltec himself."
I realized then that it had been more than curiosity that made me go to
the archaeological site
in Tula. The main reason I had accepted my friend's invitation was
because at the time of my first
visit to la Gorda and the others, they had told me something which don
Juan had never even
mentioned to me, that he considered himself a cultural descendant of
the Toltecs. Tula had been
the ancient epicenter of the Toltec empire.
"What do you think about the Atlanteans walking around at night?" I
asked Pablito.
"Sure, they walk at night," he said. "Those things have been there for
ages. No one knows who
built the pyramids, the Nagual Juan Matus himself told me that the
Spaniards were not the first to
discover them. The Nagual said there were others before them. God knows
how many."
"What do you think those four figures of stone represent?" I asked.
"They are not men, but women," he said. "That pyramid is the center of
order and stability.
Those figures are its four corners; they are the four winds, the four
directions. They are the
foundation, the basis of the pyramid. They have to be women, mannish
women, if you want to
call them that. As you yourself know, we men are not that hot. We are a
good binding, a glue to
hold things together, but that's all. The Nagual Juan Matus said that
the mystery of the pyramid is
its structure. The four corners have been elevated to the top. The
pyramid itself is the man,
supported by his female warriors; a male who has elevated his
supporters to the highest place.
See what I mean?"
I must have had a look of perplexity on my face. Pablito laughed. It
was a polite laughter.
8
"No. I don't see what you mean, Pablito," I said. "But that's because
don Juan never told me
anything about it. The topic is completely new to me. Please tell me
everything you know."
"The Atlanteans are the nagual; they are dreamers. They represent the
order of the second
attention brought forward, that's why they're so fearsome and
mysterious. They are creatures of
war but not of destruction.
"The other row of columns, the rectangular ones, represent the order of
the first attention, the
tonal. They are stalkers, that's why they are covered with
inscriptions. They are very peaceful
and wise, the opposite of the front row."
Pablito stopped talking and looked at me almost defiantly, then he Woke
into a smile.
I thought he was going to go on to explain what he had said, but he
remained silent as if
waiting for my comments.
I told him how mystified I was and urged him to continue talking. He
seemed undecided,
stared at me for a moment, and took a deep breath. He had hardly begun
to speak when the
voices of the rest of them were raised in a clamor of protest.
"The Nagual already explained that to all of us," la Gorda said
impatiently. "What's the point
of making him repeat it?"
I tried to make them understand that I really had no conception of what
Pablito was talking
about. I prevailed on him go on with his explanation. There was another
wave of voices speaking
at the same time. Judging by the way the little sisters glared at me,
they were getting very angry,
especially Lydia.
"We don't like to talk about those women," la Gorda said to me in a
conciliatory tone. "Just
the thought of the women of the pyramid makes us very nervous."
"What's the matter with you people?" I asked. "Why are you acting like
this?"
"We don't know," la Gorda replied. "It's just a feeling that all of us
have, a very disturbing
feeling. We were fine until a moment ago when you started to ask
questions about those women."
La Gorda's statements were like an alarm signal. All of them stood up
and advanced
menacingly toward me, talking in loud voices.
It took me a long time to calm them and make them sit down. The little
sisters were very upset
and their mood seemed to influence la Gorda's. The three men showed
more restraint. I faced
Nestor and asked him bluntly to explain to me why the women were so
agitated. Obviously I was
unwittingly doing something to aggravate them.
"I really don't know what it is," he said. "I'm sure none of us here
knows what is the matter
with us, except that we all feel very sad and nervous."
"Is it because we're talking about the pyramids?" I asked him.
"It must be," he replied somberly. "I myself didn't know that those
figures were women."
"Of course you did, you idiot," Lydia snapped.
Nestor seemed to be intimidated by her outburst. He recoiled and smiled
sheepishly at me.
"Maybe I did," he conceded. "We're going through a very strange period
in our lives. None of
us knows anything for sure any more. Since you came into our lives we
are unknown to
ourselves."
A very oppressive mood set in. I insisted that the only way to dispel
it was to talk about those
mysterious columns on the pyramids.
The women protested heatedly. The men remained silent. I had the
feeling that they were
affiliated in principle with the women but secretly wanted to discuss
the topic, just as I did.
"Did don Juan tell you anything else about the pyramids, Pablito?" I
asked.
My intention was to steer the conversation away from the specific topic
of the Atlanteans, and
yet stay near it.
"He said one specific pyramid there in Tula was a guide," Pablito
replied eagerly.
9
From the tone of his voice I deduced that he really wanted to talk. And
the attentiveness of the
other apprentices convinced me that covertly all of them wanted to
exchange opinions.
"The Nagual said that it was a guide to the second attention," Pablito
went on, "but that it was
ransacked and everything destroyed. He told me that some of the
pyramids were gigantic notdoings.
They were not lodgings but places for warriors to do their dreaming and
exercise their
second attention. Whatever they did was recorded in drawings and
figures that were put on the
walls.
"Then another kind of warrior must've come along, a kind who didn't
approve of what the
sorcerers of the pyramid had done with their second attention, and
destroyed the pyramid and all
that was in it.
"The Nagual believed that the new warriors must've been warriors of the
third attention, just as
he himself was; warriors who were appalled by the evilness of the
fixation of the second
attention. The sorcerers of the pyramids were too busy with their
fixation to realize what was
going on. When they did, it was too late."
Pablito had an audience. Everyone in the room, myself included, was
fascinated with what he
was saying. I understood the ideas he was presenting because don Juan
had explained them to
me. Don Juan had said that our total being consists of two perceivable
segments. The first is the
familiar physical body, which all of us can perceive; the second is the
luminous body, which is a
cocoon that only seers can perceive, a cocoon that gives us the
appearance of giant luminous
eggs. He had also said that one of the most important goals of sorcery
is to reach the luminous
cocoon; a goal which is fulfilled through the sophisticated use of
dreaming and through a
rigorous, systematic exertion he called not-doing. He defined not-doing
as an unfamiliar act
which engages our total being by forcing it to become conscious of its
luminous segment.
In order to explain these concepts, don Juan made a three part, uneven
division of our
consciousness. He called the smallest the first attention, and said
that it is the consciousness that
every normal person has developed in order to deal with the daily
world; it encompasses the
awareness of the physical body. Another larger portion he called the
second attention, and
described it as the awareness we need in order to perceive our luminous
cocoon and to act as
luminous beings. He said that the second attention remains in the
background for the duration of
our lives, unless it is brought forth through deliberate training or by
an accidental trauma, and
that it encompasses the awareness of the luminous body. He called the
last portion, which was
the largest, the third attention - an immeasurable consciousness which
engages undefinable
aspects of the awareness of the physical and the luminous bodies.
I asked him if he himself had experienced the third attention. He said
that he was on the
periphery of it, and that if he ever entered it completely I would know
it instantly, because all of
him would become what he really was, an outburst of energy. He added
that the battlefield of
warriors was the second attention, which was something like a training
ground for reaching the
third attention. It was a state rather difficult to arrive at, but very
fruitful once it was attained.
"The pyramids are harmful," Pablito went on. "Especially to unprotected
sorcerers like
ourselves. They are worse yet to formless warriors like la Gorda. The
Nagual said that there is
nothing more dangerous than the evil fixation of the second attention.
When warriors learn to
focus on the weak side of the second attention nothing can stand in
their way. They become
hunters of men, ghouls. Even if they are no longer alive, they can
reach for their prey through
time as if they were present here and now; because prey is what we
become if we walk into one
of those pyramids. The Nagual called them traps of the second
attention."
"What exactly did he say would happen?" la Gorda asked.
"The Nagual said that we could stand perhaps one visit to the
pyramids," Pablito explained.
"On the second visit we would feel a strange sadness. It would be like
a cold breeze that would
10
make us listless and fatigued; a fatigue that soon turns into bad luck.
In no time at all we'll be
jinxed; everything will happen to us. In fact, the Nagual said that our
own streaks of bad luck
were due to our willfulness in visiting those ruins against his
recommendations.
"Eligio, for instance, never disobeyed the Nagual. You wouldn't catch
him dead in there;
neither did this Nagual here, and they were always lucky, while the
rest of us were jinxed,
especially la Gorda and myself. Weren't we even bitten by the same dog?
And didn't the same
beams of the kitchen roof get rotten twice and fall on us?"
"The Nagual never explained this to me," la Gorda said.
"Of course he did," Pablito insisted,
"If I had known how bad it was, I wouldn't have set foot in those
damned places," la Gorda
protested.
'The Nagual told every one of us the same things," Nestor said. "The
problem is that every one
of us was not listening attentively, or rather every one of us listened
to him in his own way, and
heard what he wanted to hear. The Nagual said that the fixation of the
second attention has two
faces. The first and easiest face is the evil one. It happens when
dreamers use their dreaming to
focus their second attention on the items of the world, like money and
power over people. The
other face is the most difficult to reach and it happens when dreamers
focus their second
attention on items that are not in or from this world, such as the
journey into the unknown.
Warriors need endless impeccability in order to reach this face."
I said to them that I was sure that don Juan had selectively revealed
certain things to some of
us and other things to others. I could not, for instance, recall don
Juan ever discussing the evil
face of the second attention with me. I told them then what don Juan
said to me in reference to
the fixation of attention in general.
He stressed to me that all archaeological ruins in Mexico, especially
the pyramids, were
harmful to modern man. He depicted the pyramids as foreign expressions
of thought and action.
He said that every item, every design in them, was a calculated effort
to record aspects of
attention which were thoroughly alien to us. For don Juan it was not
only ruins of past cultures
that held a dangerous element in them; anything which was the object of
an obsessive concern
had a harmful potential.
We had discussed this in detail once. It was a reaction he had to some
comments I had made
about my being at a loss as to where to store my field notes safely. I
regarded them in a most
possessive manner and was obsessed with their security.
"What should I do?" I asked him.
"Genaro once gave you the solution," he replied. "You thought, as you
always do, that he was
joking, He never jokes. He told you that you should write with the tip
of your finger instead of a
pencil. You didn't take him up on that, because you can't imagine that
this is the not-doing of
taking notes."
I argued that what he was proposing had to be a joke. My self-image was
that of a social
scientist who needed to record everything that was said and done in
order to draw verifiable
conclusions. For don Juan one thing had nothing to do with the other.
To be a serious student had
nothing to do with taking notes. I personally could not see a solution;
don Genaro's suggestion
seemed to me humorous, not a real possibility.
Don Juan argued his point further. He said that taking
notes was a way of engaging the first attention in the task of
remembering, that I took notes in
order to remember what was said and done. Don Genaro's recommendation
was not a joke
because writing with the tip of my finger on a piece of paper, as the
not-doing of taking notes,
would force my second attention to focus on remembering, and I would
not accumulate sheets of
11
paper. Don Juan thought that the end result would be more accurate and
more powerful than
taking notes. It had never been done as far as he knew, but the
principle was sound.
He pressed me to do it for a while. I became disturbed. Taking notes
acted not only as a
mnemonic device, but soothed me as well. It was my most serviceable
crutch. To accumulate
sheets of paper gave me a sense of purpose and balance.
"When you worry about what to do with your sheets," don Juan explained,
"you are focusing a
very dangerous part of yourself on them. All of us have that dangerous
side, that fixation. The
stronger we become, the more deadly that side is. The recommendation
for warriors is not to have
any material things on which to focus their power, but to focus it on
the spirit, on the true flight
into the unknown, not on trivial shields. In your case, your notes are
your shield. They won't let
you live in peace."
I seriously felt that I had no way on earth to disassociate myself from
my notes. Don Juan then
conceived of a task for me in lieu of a not-doing proper. He said that
for someone who was as
possessive as I was, the most appropriate way of freeing myself from my
notebooks would be to
disclose them, to throw them in the open, to write a book. I thought at
the time that that was a
bigger joke than taking notes with the tip of my finger.
"Your compulsion to possess and hold on to things is not unique," he
said. "Everyone who
wants to follow the warrior's path, the sorcerer's way, has to rid
himself of this fixation.
"My benefactor told me that there was a time when warriors did have
material objects on
which they placed their obsession. And that gave rise to the question
of whose object would be
more powerful, or the most powerful of them all. Remnants of those
objects still remain in the
world, the leftovers of that race for power. No one can tell what kind
of fixation those objects
must have received. Men infinitely more powerful than you poured all
the facets of their
attention on them. You have merely begun to pour your puny worry on
your notes. You haven't
gotten yet to other levels of attention. Think how horrible it would be
if you would find yourself
at the end of your trail as a warrior, still carrying your bundles of
notes on your back. By that
time the notes will be alive, especially if you learn to write with
your fingertip and still have to
pile up sheets. Under those conditions it wouldn't surprise me in the
least if someone found your
bundles walking around."
"It is easy for me to understand why the Nagual Juan Matus didn't want
us to have
possessions," Nestor said after I had finished talking. "We are all
dreamers. He didn't want us to
focus our dreaming body on the weak face of the second attention.
"I didn't understand his maneuvers at the time. I resented the fact
that he made me get rid of
everything I had. I thought he was being unfair. My belief was that he
was trying to keep Pablito
and Benigno from envying me, because they had nothing themselves. I was
well-off in
comparison. At the time, I had no idea that he was protecting my
dreaming body."
Don Juan had described dreaming to me in various ways. The most obscure
of them all now
appears to me as being the one that defines it best. He said that
dreaming is intrinsically the notdoing
of sleep. And as such, dreaming affords practitioners the use of that
portion of their lives
spent in slumber. It is as if the dreamers no longer sleep. Yet no
illness results from it. The
dreamers do not lack sleep, but the effect of dreaming seems to be an
increase of waking time,
owing to the use of an alleged extra body, the dreaming body.
Don Juan had explained to me that the dreaming body is sometimes called
the "double" or the
"other," because it is a perfect replica of the dreamer's body. It is
inherently the energy of a
luminous being, a whitish, phantomlike emanation, which is projected by
the fixation of the
second attention into a three-dimensional image of the body. Don Juan
explained that the
dreaming body is not a ghost, but as real as anything we deal with in
the world. He said that the
second attention is unavoidably drawn to focus on our total being as a
field of energy, and
12
transforms that energy into anything suitable. The easiest thing is of
course the image of the
physical body, with-which we are already thoroughly familiar from our
daily lives and the use of
our first attention. What channels the energy of our total being to
produce anything that might be
within the boundaries of possibility is known as will. Don Juan could
not say what those
boundaries were, except that at the level of luminous beings the range
is so broad that it is futile
to try to establish limits - thus, the energy of a luminous being can
be transformed through will
into anything.
"The Nagual said that the dreaming body gets involved and attaches
itself to anything,"
Benigno said. "It doesn't have sense. He told me that men are weaker
than women because a
man's dreaming body is more possessive."
The little sisters agreed in unison with a movement of their heads. La
Gorda looked at me and
smiled.
"The Nagual told me that you're the king of possessiveness," she said
to me. "Genaro said that
you even say goodbye to your turds before you flush them down."
The little sisters rolled down on their sides laughing. The Genaros
made obvious efforts to
contain themselves. Nestor, w ho was sitting by my side, patted my knee.
The Nagual and Genaro used to tell great stories about you," he said.
"They entertained us for
years with tales about a weird guy they knew. We know now that it was
you."
I felt a wave of embarrassment. It was as if don Juan and don Genaro
had betrayed me,
laughing at me in front of the apprentices. Self-pity took over. I
began to complain. I said out
loud that they had been predisposed to be against me, to think that I
was a fool.
"That's not true," Benigno said. "We are delighted that you are with
us."
"Are we?" Lydia snapped.
All of them became involved in a heated argument. The men and the women
were divided.
La Gorda did not join either group. She stayed sitting by my side,
while the others had stood up
and were shouting.
"We're going through a difficult time," la Gorda said to me in a low
voice. "We've done a lot
of dreaming and yet it isn't enough for what we need."
"What do you need, Gorda?" I asked.
"We don't know," she said. "We were hoping that you would tell us that."
The little sisters and the Genaros sat down again in order to listen to
what la Gorda was
saying to me.
"We need a leader," she went on. "You are the Nagual, but you're not a
leader."
"It takes time to make a perfect Nagual," Pablito said. "The Nagual
Juan Matus told me that
he himself was crappy in his youth, until something shook him out of
his complacency."
"I don't believe it," Lydia shouted. "He never told me
that."
"He said that he was very crummy," la Gorda added in a low voice.
"The Nagual told me that in his youth he was a jinx, just like me,"
Pablito said. "He was also
told by his benefactor not to set foot in those pyramids and because of
that he practically lived
there, until he was driven away by a horde of phantoms."
APParently no one else knew the story. They perked up.
"I had completely forgotten about that," Pablito explained. "I've only
just remembered it now.
It was just like what happened to la Gorda. One day after the Nagual
had finally become a
formless warrior, the evil fixations of those warriors who had done
their dreaming and other notdoings
in the pyramids came after him. They found him while he was working in
the field. He
told me that he saw a hand coming out of the loose dirt in a fresh
furrow to grab the leg of his
13
pants. He thought that it was a fellow worker who had been accidentally
buried. He tried to dig
him out. Then he realized that he was digging into a dirt coffin: a man
was buried there. The
Nagual said that the man was very thin and dark and had no hair. The
Nagual tried frantically to
patch up the dirt coffin. He didn't want his fellow workers to see it
and he didn't want to injure the
man by digging him out against his will. He was working so hard that he
didn't even notice that
the other workers had gathered around him. By then the Nagual said that
the dirt coffin had
collapsed and the dark man was sprawled on the ground, naked. The
Nagual tried to help him up
and asked the men to give him a hand. They laughed at him. They thought
he was drunk, having
the d.t.'s, because there was no man, or dirt coffin or anything like
that in the field.
"The Nagual said that he was shaken, but he didn't dare tell his
benefactor about it. It didn't
matter because at night a whole flock of phantoms came after him. He
went to open the front
door after someone knocked and a horde of naked men with glaring yellow
eyes burst in. They
threw him to the floor and piled on top of him. They would have crushed
every bone in his body
had it not been for the swift actions of his benefactor. He saw the
phantoms and pulled the
Nagual to safety, to a hole in the ground, which he always kept
conveniently at the back of his
house. He buried the Nagual there while the ghosts squatted around
waiting for their chance.
The Nagual told me that he had become so frightened that he would
voluntarily go back into
his dirt coffin every night to sleep, long after the phantoms had
vanished."
Pablito stopped talking. Everyone seemed to be getting ready to leave.
They fretted and
changed position as if to show that they were tired of sitting.
I then told them that I had had a very disturbing reaction upon hearing
my friend's statements
about the Atlanteans walking at night in the pyramids of Tula. I had
not recognized the depth at
which I had accepted what don Juan and don Genaro had taught me until
that day. I realized that
I had completely suspended judgment, even though it was clear in my
mind that the possibility
these colossal figures of stone could walk did not enter into the realm
of serious speculation. My
reaction was a total surprise to me.
I explained to them at great length that the idea of the Atlanteans
walking at night was a clear
example of the fixation of the second attention. I had arrived at that
conclusion using the
following set of premises: First, that we are not merely whatever our
common sense requires us to
believe we are. We are in actuality luminous beings, capable of
becoming aware of our
luminosity. Second, that as luminous beings aware of our luminosity, we
are capable of
unraveling different facets of our awareness, or our attention, as don
Juan called it. Third, that the
unraveling could be brought about by a deliberate effort, as we were
trying to do ourselves, or
accidentally, through a bodily trauma. Fourth, that there had been a
time when sorcerers
deliberately placed different facets of their attention on material
objects. Fifth, that the
Atlanteans, judging by their awe-inspiring setting, must have been
objects of fixation for
sorcerers of another time.
I said that the custodian who had given my friend the information had
undoubtedly unraveled
another facet of his attention; he might have unwittingly become, if
only for a moment, a receptor
for the projections of ancient sorcerers' second attention. It was not
so farfetched to me then that
the man may have visualized the fixation of those sorcerers.
If those sorcerers were members of don Juan's and don Genaro's
tradition, they must have
been impeccable practitioners, in which case there would have been no
limit to what they could
accomplish with the fixation of their second attention. If they
intended that the Atlanteans should
walk at night, then the Atlanteans would walk at night.
As I talked, the three little sisters became very angry and agitated
with me. When I finished,
Lydia accused me of doing nothing else but talking. Then they got up
and left without even
14
saying goodbye. The men followed them, but stopped at the door and
shook hands with me. La
Gorda and I remained in the room.
"There is something very wrong with those women," I said.
"No. They're just tired of talking," la Gorda said. "They expect some
action from you."
"How come the Genaros are not tired of talking?" I asked.
"They are more stupid than the women," she replied dryly.
"How about you, Gorda?" I asked. "Are you also tired of talking?"
"I don't know what I am," she said solemnly. "When I am with you I'm
not tired, but when I
am with the little sisters I'm dead tired, just like them."
During the following uneventful days I stayed with them, it was obvious
that the little sisters
were thoroughly hostile to me. The Genaros tolerated me in an offhand
way. Only la Gorda
seemed to be aligned with me. I began to wonder why. I asked her about
it before I left for Los
Angeles.
"I don't know how it is possible, but I'm used to you," she said. "It's
as if you and I are
together, while the little sisters the Genaros are in a different
world."
15
2. Seeing Together
For several weeks after my return to Los Angeles I had a sense of mild
discomfort which I
explained away as a dizziness or a sudden loss of breath due to
physical exertion. It reached a
climax one night when I woke up terrified, unable to breathe. The
physician I went to see
diagnosed my trouble as hyperventilation, most likely caused by
tension. He prescribed a
tranquilizer and suggested breathing into a paper bag if the attack
should ever occur again.
I decided to return to Mexico to seek la Gorda's counsel. After I had
told her the doctor's
diagnosis, she calmly assured me that no illness was involved, that I
was finally losing my
shields, and that what I was experiencing was the "loss of my human
form" and the entrance into
a new state of separation from human affairs.
"Don't fight it," she said. "Our natural reaction is to struggle
against it. In doing so we dispel
it. Let go of your fear and follow the loss of your human form step by
step."
She added that in her case the disintegration of her human form began
in her womb, with a
severe pain and an inordinate pressure that shifted slowly in two
directions, down her legs and up
to her throat. She also said that the effects are felt immediately.
I wanted to record every nuance of my entrance into that new state. I
prepared myself to write
down a detailed account of whatever took place, but to my utter chagrin
nothing more happened.
After a few days of fruitless expectation I gave up on la Gorda's
explanation and concluded that
the doctor had correctly diagnosed my condition. It was perfectly
understandable to me. I was
carrying a responsibility that generated unbearable tension. I had
accepted the leadership that the
apprentices believed belonged to me, but I had no idea how to lead.
The pressure in my life also showed in a more serious way. My usual
level of energy was
dropping steadily. Don Juan would have said that I was losing my
personal power and that
eventually I would lose my life. Don Juan had set me up to live
exclusively by means of personal
power, which I understood to be a state of being, a relationship of
order between the subject and
the universe, a relationship that cannot be disrupted without resulting
in the subject's death. Since
there was no foreseeable way to change my situation, I had concluded
that my life was coming to
an end. My feeling of being doomed seemed to infuriate all the
apprentices. I decided to get away
from them for a couple of days to dispel my gloom and their tension.
When I came back I found them standing outside the front door of the
little sisters' house as if
they had been waiting for me. Nestor ran to my car and before I even
turned the motor off he
blurted out that Pablito had run away. He had gone to die, Nestor said,
in the city of Tula, the
place of his ancestors. I was appalled. I felt guilty.
La Gorda did not share my concern. She was beaming, exuding contentment.
"That little pimp is better off dead," she said. "All of us are going
to live together
harmoniously now, as we should. The Nagual told us that you were going
to bring change into
our lives. Well, you did. Pablito is not bugging us any longer. You got
rid of him. Look how
happy we are. We are better off without him."
I was outraged by her callousness. I stated as forcefully as I could
that don Juan had given all
of us, in a most painstaking manner, the format of a warrior's life. I
stressed that the warrior's
impeccability demanded that I not let Pablito die just like that.
"And what do you think you're going to do?" la Gorda
asked.
"I'm going to take one of you to live with him," I said, "until the day
when all of you,
including Pablito, can move out of here."
They laughed at me, even Nestor and Benigno, who I thought were closest
to Pablito. La
16
Gorda laughed longer than anyone else, obviously challenging me.
I turned to Nestor and Benigno for moral support. They looked away.
I appealed to la Gorda's superior understanding. I pleaded with her. I
used all the arguments I
could think of. She looked at me with utter contempt.
"Let's get going," she said to the others.
She gave me the most vacuous smile. She shrugged her shoulders and made
a vague
puckering gesture with her lips.
"You're welcome to come with us," she said to me, "providing that you
don't ask questions or
talk about that little pimp."
"You are a formless warrior, Gorda," I said. "You told me that
yourself. Why, then, do you
judge Pablito?"
La Gorda did not answer. But she acknowledged the blow. She frowned and
avoided my gaze.
"La Gorda is with us!" Josefina yelled in a high-pitched voice.
The three little sisters gathered around la Gorda and pulled her inside
the house. I followed
them. Nestor and Benigno also went inside.
"What are you going to do, take one of us by force?" la Gorda asked me.
I told all of them that I considered it my duty to help Pablito and
that I would do the same for
any one of them.
"You really think you can pull this off?" la Gorda asked me, her eyes
flaring with anger.
I wanted to roar with rage as I had once done in their presence, but
the circumstances were
different. I could not do it.
"I'm going to take Josefina with me," I said. "I am the Nagual."
La Gorda gathered the three little sisters and shielded them with her
body. They were about to
join hands. Something in me knew that if they did, their combined
strength would have been
awesome and my efforts to take Josefina would have been useless. My
only chance was to strike
before they had a chance to group. I pushed Josefina with the palms of
my hands and sent her
reeling to the center of the room. Before they had time to regroup
themselves, I hit Lydia and
Rosa. They bent over with pain. La Gorda came at me with a fury I had
never witnessed in her. It
was like the attack of a savage beast. Her whole concentration was on a
single thrust of her body.
If she had struck me, I would have been killed. She missed my chest by
inches. I grabbed her
from behind in a bear hug and we tumbled down. We rolled over and over
until we were utterly
exhausted. Her body relaxed. She began to caress the back of my hands,
which were tightly
clasped around her stomach.
I noticed then that Nestor and Benigno were standing by the door. They
both seemed to be on
the verge of becoming physically ill.
La Gorda smiled shyly and whispered in my ear that she w as glad I had
overcome her.
I took Josefina to Pablito. I felt that she was the only one of the
apprentices who genuinely
needed someone to look after her and Pablito resented her the least. I
was sure that his sense of
chivalry would force him to reach out to her since she would be in need
of help.
A month later I returned once more to Mexico. Pablito and Josefina had
returned. They were
living together at don Genaro's house and shared it with Benigno and
Rosa. Nestor and Lydia
lived at Soledad's place, and la Gorda lived alone in the little
sisters' house.
"Do our new living arrangements surprise you?" la Gorda asked.
My surprise was more than evident. I wanted to know all the
implications of this new
organization.
La Gorda let me know in a dry tone that there were no implications that
she knew of. They
had chosen to live in couples but not as couples. She added that,
contrary to what I might think,
17
they were impeccable warriors.
The new format was rather pleasant. Everybody seemed to be completely
relaxed. There was
no more bickering or outbursts of competitive behavior among them. They
had also taken to
dressing in the Indian apparel typical of that region. The women wore
dresses with full gathered
skirts that almost touched the ground. They wore dark shawls and their
hair in braids, except for
Josefina, who always wore a hat. The men wore thin, white pajama-like
pants and shirts, and
straw hats. All of them wore homemade sandals.
I asked la Gorda the reason for their new way of dressing. She said
that they were getting
ready to leave. Sooner or later, with my help or by themselves, they
were going to leave that
valley. They would be going into a new world, a new life. When they did
that they would
acknowledge the change; the longer they wore their Indian clothes, the
more drastic the change
would be when they put on city clothes. She added that they had been
taught to be fluid, at ease in
whatever situation they found themselves, and that I had been taught
the same. My challenge was
to deal with them with ease regardless of what they did to me. Their
challenge in turn was to
leave their valley and settle down elsewhere to find out if they could
be as fluid as warriors
should be.
I asked for her honest opinion about our chances of succeeding. She
said that failure was
written all over our faces.
La Gorda changed the subject abruptly and told me that in her dreaming
she had found herself
staring at a gigantic narrow gorge between two enormous round
mountains; she thought that the
two mountains were familiar to her, and wanted me to drive her to a
nearby town. She believed,
without knowing why, that the two mountains were located there, and
that the message from her
dreaming was that both of us should go there.
We left at the crack of dawn. I had driven through that town before. It
was very small and I
had never noticed anything in its surroundings that even came close to
la Gorda's vision. There
were only eroded hills around it. It turned out that the two mountains
were not there, or if they
were, we could not find them.
During the two hours that we spent in that town, however, both of us
had a feeling that we
knew something undefined, a feeling which turned at times into a
certainty and then receded
again into the darkness to become merely annoyance and frustration.
Visiting that town unsettled
us in mysterious ways; or rather, for unknown reasons we became very
agitated. I was in the
throes of a most illogical conflict. I did not remember having ever
stopped in that town, and yet I
could have sworn that I had not only been there, but had lived there
for a time. It was not a clear
memory; I did not remember the streets or the houses. What I felt was a
vague but strong
apprehension that something was going to become clear in my mind. I was
not sure what, a
memory perhaps. At moments that vague apprehension became paramount,
especially when I
saw a particular house. I parked in front of it. La Gorda and I looked
at it from the car for perhaps
an hour, yet neither of us suggested leaving the car to go into it.
Both of us were very edgy. We began to talk about her vision of the two
mountains; our
conversation soon turned into an argument. She thought I had not taken
her dreaming seriously.
Our tempers flared and we ended up yelling at each other, not so much
out of anger as out of
nervousness. I caught myself and stopped.
On our way back, I parked the car on the side of the dirt road. We got
out to stretch our legs.
We walked for a while; it was too windy to enjoy it. La Gorda still
seemed to be agitated. We
went back to the car and sat inside.
"If you would only rally your knowledge," la Gorda said in a pleading
tone. "You would
know that losing the human form ..."
18
She stopped in midsentence; my frown must have brought her up short.
She was cognizant of
my struggle. If there was any knowledge in me that I could have
consciously rallied, I would
have done it already.
"But we are luminous beings," she said in the same pleading tone.
"There is so much more to
us. You are the Nagual. There is even more to you."
"What do you think I should do?" I asked.
"You must let go of your desire to cling," she said. "The very same
thing happened to me. I
held on to things, such as the food I liked, the mountains where I
lived, the people I used to enjoy
talking to. But most of all I clung to the desire to be liked."
I told her that her advice was meaningless to me, for I was not aware
of holding on to
anything. She insisted that somehow I knew that I was putting up
barriers to losing my human
form.
"Our attention is trained to focus doggedly," she went on. "That is the
way we maintain the
world. Your first attention has been taught to focus on something
that's quite strange to me, but
very familiar to you."
I told her that my mind dwells on abstractions - not abstractions like
mathematics, for
instance, but rather propositions of reasonableness.
"Now is the time to let go of all that," she said. "In order to lose
your human form you should
let go of all that ballast. You counterbalance so hard that you
paralyze yourself."
I was in no mood to argue. What she called losing the human form was a
concept too vague
for immediate consideration. I was concerned with what we had
experienced in that town. La
Gorda did not want to talk about it.
"The only thing that counts is that you rally your knowledge,", she
said. "You can do it if you
need to, like that day when Pablito ran away and you and I came to
blows."
La Gorda said that what had happened on that day was an example of
"rallying one's
knowledge." Without being thoroughly aware of what I was doing, I had
performed complex
maneuvers which required seeing.
"You did not just attack us," she said. "You saw."
She was right, in a manner of speaking. Something quite out of the
ordinary had taken place
on that occasion. I had considered it in great detail, confining it,
however, to purely personal
speculation. I had no adequate explanation for it, outside of saying
that the emotional charge of
the moment had affected me in inconceivable ways.
When I stepped inside their house and faced the four women I became
aware in one split
second that I was able to shift my ordinary way of perceiving. I saw
four amorphous blobs of
very intense amber light in front of me. One of them was more mellow,
more pleasing. The other
three were unfriendly, sharp, whitish-amber glows. The mellow glow was
la Gorda. And at that
moment the three unfriendly glows were looming menacingly over her.
The blob of whitish luminosity closest to me, which was Josefina, was a
bit off-balance. It was
leaning over, so I gave it a push. I kicked the other two in a
depression they each had on their
right side. I had no conscious idea that I should kick them there. I
simply found the indentation
convenient - somehow it invited me to put my foot in it. The result was
devastating. Lydia and
Rosa fainted on the spot. I had kicked each of them on their right
thigh. It was not a kick that
could have broken any bones, I only pushed the blobs of light in front
of me with my foot.
Nonetheless, it was as if I had given them a ferocious blow in the most
vulnerable part of their
bodies.
La Gorda was right, I had rallied some knowledge I was not aware of. If
that was called
seeing, the logical conclusion for my intellect would be to say that
seeing is a bodily knowledge.
19
The predominance of the visual sense in us influences this bodily
knowledge and makes it seem
to be eye-related. What I experienced was not altogether visual. I saw
the blobs of light with
something else besides my eyes, since I was conscious that the four
women were in my field of
vision during the entire time I dealt with them. The blobs of light
were not even superimposed on
them. The two sets of images were separate. What complicated the issue
for me was the matter of
time. Everything was compressed into a few seconds. If I did shift from
one scene to the other,
the shift must have been so fast that it became meaningless, thus I can
only recall perceiving two
separate scenes simultaneously.
After I had kicked the two blobs of light, the mellow one - la Gorda -
came toward me. It did
not come straight at me, but angled to my left from the moment it
started to move; it obviously
intended to miss me, so when the glow passed by I grabbed it. As I
rolled over and over on the
floor with it, I felt I was melting into it. That was the only time I
really lost the sense of
continuity. I again became aware of myself while la Gorda was caressing
the backs of my hands.
"In our dreaming, the little sisters and I have learned to join hands,"
la Gorda said. "We know
how to make a line. Our problem that day was that we had never made
that line outside our room.
That was why they dragged me inside. Your body knew what it meant for
us to join hands. If we
had done it, I would have been under their control. They are more
fierce than I am. Their bodies
are tightly sealed; they are not concerned with sex. I am. That makes
me weaker. I'm sure that
your concern with sex is what makes it very difficult for you to rally
your knowledge."
She went on talking about the debilitating effects of having sex. I
felt ill at ease. I tried to steer
the conversation away from that topic, but she seemed determined to go
back to it regardless of
my discomfort.
"Let's you and I drive to Mexico City," I said in desperation.
I thought I would shock her. She did not answer. She puckered her lips,
squinting her eyes.
She contracted the muscles of her chin, pushing her upper lip until it
bulged under her nose. Her
face became so contorted that I was taken aback. She reacted to my
surprise and relaxed her
facial muscles.
"Come on, Gorda," I said. "Let's go to Mexico City."
"Sure. Why not?" she said. "What do I need?"
I did not expect that reaction and ended up shocked myself.
"Nothing," I said. "We'll go as we are."
Without saying another word, she slumped on the seat and we drove off
toward Mexico City.
It was still early, not even midday. I asked her if she would dare to
go to Los Angeles with me.
She was pensive for a moment.
"I've just asked my luminous body that question," she said.
"What did it say?"
"It said only if power permits it."
There was such a wealth of feeling in her voice that I stopped the car
and hugged her. My
affection for her at that moment was so deep that I got frightened. It
had nothing to do with sex or
the need of psychological reinforcement; it was a feeling that
transcended everything I knew.
Embracing la Gorda brought back the sense I had had earlier, that
something in me which was
bottled up, pushed into recesses I could not consciously reach, was
about to come out. I almost
knew then what it was, but I lost it when I reached for it.
La Gorda and I arrived in the city of Oaxaca in the early evening. I
parked my car on a side
street and then we walked to the center of town, to the plaza. We
looked for the bench where don
Juan and don Genaro used to sit. It was unoccupied. We sat there in
reverent silence. Finally la
Gorda said that she had been there with don Juan many times as well as
with someone else she
20
could not remember. She was not sure whether that was something she had
merely dreamed.
"What did you do with don Juan on this bench?" I asked.
"Nothing. We just sat waiting for the bus, or for the lumber truck that
would give us a ride up
the mountains," she replied.
I told her that when I sat on that bench with don Juan we would talk
for hours.
I recounted for her the great predilection that he had for poetry, and
how I used to read it to
him when we had nothing else to do. He would listen to poems on the
premise that only the first
or sometimes the second stanza was worthwhile reading; the rest he
found to be indulgence on
the poet's part. There were very few poems, of the hundreds I must have
read to him, that he
listened to all the way through. At first I read to him what I liked;
my preference was for abstract,
convoluted, cerebral poetry. Later he made me read over and over what
he liked. In his opinion a
poem had to be compact, preferably short. And it had to be made up of
precise poignant images
of great simplicity.
In the late afternoon, sitting on that bench in Oaxaca, a poem by Cesar
Vallejo always seemed
to sum up for him a special feeling of longing. I recited it to la
Gorda from memory, not so much
for her benefit as for mine.
I wonder what she is doing at this hour
my Andean and sweet Rita
of reeds and wild cherry trees.
Now that this weariness chokes me, and blood dozes off,
like lazy brandy inside me.
I wonder what she is doing with those hands
that in attitude of penitence
used to iron starchy whiteness,
in the afternoons.
Now that this rain is taking away my desire to go on.
I wonder what has become of her skirt with lace;
of her toils; of her walk;
of her scent of spring sugar cane from that place.
She must be at the door,
gazing at a fast moving cloud.
A wild bird on the tile roof will let out a call;
and shivering she will say at last, "Jesus, it's cold!"
The memory of don Juan was incredibly vivid. It was not a memory on the
level of my
thought, nor was it on the level of my conscious feelings. It was an
unknown kind of memory that
made me weep. Tears were streaming from my eyes, but they were not
soothing at all.
The last hour of the afternoon had always had special significance for
don Juan. I had
accepted his regard for that hour, and his conviction that if something
of importance were to
come to me, it would have to be at that time.
La Gorda put her head on my shoulder. I rested my head on her head. We
remained in that
position for a while. I felt relaxed; the agitation had been driven
away from me. It was strange
that the single act of resting my head on la Gorda's would bring such
peace. I wanted to make a
joke and tell her that we should tie our heads together. Then I knew
that she would actually take
21
me up on that. My body shook with laughter and I realized that I was
asleep, yet my eyes were
open; if I had really wanted to, I could have stood up. I did not want
to move, so I remained there
fully awake and yet asleep. I saw people walking by and staring at us.
I did not mind that in the
least. Ordinarily I would have objected to being noticed. Then all at
once the people in front of
me changed into very large blobs of white light. I was facing the
luminous eggs in a sustained
fashion for the first time in my life! Don Juan had told me that human
beings appear to the seer as
luminous eggs. I had experienced flashes of that perception, but never
before had I focused my
vision on them as I was doing that day.
The blobs of light were quite amorphous at first. It was as if my eyes
were not properly
focused. But then, at one moment, it was as if I had finally arranged
my vision and the blobs of
white light became oblong luminous eggs. They were big, in fact, they
were enormous, perhaps
seven feet high by four feet wide or even larger.
At one moment I noticed that the eggs were no longer moving. I saw a
solid mass of
luminosity in front of me. The eggs were watching me; looming
dangerously over me. I moved
deliberately and sat up straight. La Gorda was sound asleep on my
shoulder. There was a group
of adolescents around us. They must have thought that we were drunk.
They were mimicking us.
The most daring adolescent was feeling la Gorda's breasts. I shook her
and woke her up. We
stood up in a hurry and left. They followed us, taunting us and yelling
obscenities. The presence
of a policeman on the corner dissuaded them from continuing with their
harassment. We walked
in complete silence from the plaza to where I had left my car. It was
almost evening. Suddenly la
Gorda grabbed my arm. Her eyes were wild, her mouth open. She pointed.
"Look! Look!" she yelled. "There's the Nagual and Genaro!"
I saw two men turning the corner a long block ahead of us. La Gorda
took off in a fast run.
Running after her, I asked her if she was sure. She was beside herself.
She said that when she had
looked up, both don Juan and don Genaro were staring at her. The moment
her eyes met theirs
they moved away.
When we reached the corner ourselves, the two men were still the same
distance away from
us. I could not distinguish their features. They were dressed like
rural Mexican men. They were
wearing straw hats. One was husky, like don Juan, the other was thin,
like don Genaro. The two
men went around another corner and we again ran noisily after them. The
street they had turned
onto was deserted and led to the outskirts of town. It curved slightly
to the left. The two men were
just where the street curved. Right then something happened that made
me feel it was possible
they might really be don Juan and don Genaro. It was a movement that
the smaller man made. He
turned three-quarter profile to us and tilted his head as if telling us
to follow, something don
Genaro used to do to me whenever we were out in the woods. He always
walked ahead of me,
daring, coaxing me with a movement of his head to catch up with him.
La Gorda began to yell at the top of her voice. "Nagual! Genaro! Wait!"
She ran ahead of me. They were walking very fast toward some shacks
that were half-visible
in the semi-darkness. They must have entered one of them or turned into
any of a number of
pathways; suddenly they were out of sight.
La Gorda stood there and bellowed their names without any bashfulness.
People came out to
see who was yelling. I held her until she calmed down.
"They were right in front of me," she said, crying. "Not even ten feet
away. When I yelled and
called your attention to them they were a block away in one instant."
I tried to appease her. She was in a high state of nervousness. She
clung to me shivering. For
some indiscernible reason I was absolutely sure that the two men were
not don Juan and don
Genaro; therefore, I could not share la Gorda's agitation. She said
that we had to drive back home,
that power would not permit her to go to Los Angeles or even to Mexico
City with me. It was not
22
time yet for her journey. She was convinced that seeing them had been
an omen. They had
disappeared pointing toward the east, toward her hometown.
I did not have any objections to starting back that very moment. After
all the things that had
happened to us that day I should have been dead tired. Instead I was
vibrating with a most
extravagant vigor, reminiscent of times with don Juan when I had felt
like ramming walls with
my shoulders.
On our way back to my car I was again filled with the most passionate
affection for la Gorda.
I could never thank her enough for her help. I thought that whatever
she had done to help me see
the luminous eggs had worked. She had been so courageous, risking
ridicule and even bodily
harm by sitting on that bench. I expressed my thanks to her. She looked
at me as if I were crazy
and then broke into a belly laugh.
"I thought the same thing about you," she said. "I thought you had done
it just for me. I too
saw luminous eggs. This was the first time for me also. We have seen
together! Like the Nagual
and Genaro used to do."
As I opened the door of the car for la Gorda, the full impact of what
we had done struck me.
Up to that point I had been numb, something in me had slowed down. Now
my euphoria was as
intense as la Gorda's agitation had been a short while before. I wanted
to run in the street and
shout. It was la Gorda's turn to contain me. She squatted and rubbed my
calves. Strangely
enough, I calmed down immediately. I found that it was difficult for me
to talk. My thoughts
were running ahead of my ability to verbalize them. I did not want to
drive back to her hometown
right away. There seemed to be still so much more to do. Since I could
not explain clearly what I
wanted, I practically dragged a reluctant Gorda back to the plaza, but
there were no empty
benches at that hour. I was famished so I pulled her into a restaurant.
She thought she could not
eat but when they brought the food she turned out to be as hungry as I
was. Eating relaxed us
completely.
We sat on the bench later that night. I had refrained from talking
about what happened to us
until we had a chance to sit there. La Gorda was at first unwilling to
say anything. My mind was
in a peculiar state of exhilaration. I had had similar moments with don
Juan, but associated, as a
rule, with the aftereffects of hallucinogenic plants.
I began by describing to la Gorda what I had seen. The feature of those
luminous eggs that had
impressed me the most was their movements. They did not walk. They
moved in a floating
manner, yet they were grounded. The way they moved was not pleasing.
Their movements were
stilted, wooden, and jerky. When they were in motion the whole egg
shape became smaller and
rounder; they seemed to jump or jerk, or shake up and down with great
speed. The result was a
most annoying nervous shivering. Perhaps the closest I can get to
describing the physical
discomfort caused by their motion would be to say that I felt as if the
images on a moving picture
screen had been speeded up.
Another thing that had intrigued me was that I could not detect any
legs. I had once seen a
ballet production in which the dancers mimicked the movement of
soldiers on ice skates; for that
effect they wore loose tunics that hung all the way to the floor. There
was no way to see their
feet: thus the illusion that they were gliding on ice. The luminous
eggs that paraded in front of me
gave the impression that they were sliding on a rough surface. Their
luminosity shook up and
down almost imperceptibly, yet enough to make me nearly ill. When the
eggs were in repose they
became elongated. Some of them were so long and rigid that they brought
to mind the idea of a
wooden icon.
Another even more disturbing feature of the luminous eggs was the
absence of eyes. I had
never realized so acutely how we are drawn to the eyes of living
beings. The luminous eggs were
23
thoroughly alive; they were observing me with great curiosity. I could
see them jerking up and
down, leaning over to watch me, but without any eyes.
Many of those luminous eggs had black spots on them, huge spots below
the midsection.
Others did not. La Gorda had told me that reproduction affects the
bodies of both men and
women by causing a hole to appear below the stomach, but the spots on
those luminous eggs did
not seem like holes to me. They were areas with no luminosity, but
there was no depth to them.
Those that had the black spots seemed to be mellow, tired; the crest of
their egg shape was
wilted, it looked opaque in comparison to the rest of their glow. The
ones without spots, on the
other hand, were dazzlingly bright. I fancied them to be dangerous.
They were vibrant, filled
with energy and whiteness.
La Gorda said that the instant I rested my head on her she also entered
into a state that
resembled dreaming. She was awake, yet she could not move. She was
conscious that people
were milling around us. Then she saw them turning into luminous blobs
and finally into eggshaped
creatures. She did not know that I was also seeing. She had thought at
first that I was
watching over her, but at one moment the pressure of my head was so
heavy that she concluded
quite consciously that I too must have been seeing. Only after I
straightened up and caught the
young man fondling her as she seemed to sleep did I have an inkling of
what might be happening
to her.
Our visions differed in that she could distinguish men from women by
the shape of some
filaments that she called "roots." Women, she said, had thick bundles
of filaments that resembled
a lion's tail; they grew inward from the place of the genitalia. She
explained that those roots were
the givers of life. The embryo, in order to accomplish its growth,
attaches itself to one of those
nurturing roots and thoroughly consumes it, leaving only a hole. Men,
on the other hand, had
short filaments that were alive and floating almost separately from the
luminous mass of their
bodies.
I asked her what in her opinion was the reason we had seen together.
She declined to make
any comment, but she coaxed me to go ahead with my speculations. I told
her that the only thing
that occurred to me was the obvious: emotions must have been a factor.
After la Gorda and I had sat down on don Juan's favorite bench in the
late afternoon that day,
and I had recited the poem that he liked, I was highly charged with
emotion. My emotions must
have prepared my body. But I also had to consider the fact that from
doing dreaming I had
learned to enter into a state, of total quietness. I was able to turn
off my internal dialogue and
remain as if I were inside a cocoon, peeking out of a hole. In that
state I could either let go of
some control I had and enter into dreaming, or I could hold on to that
control and remain passive,
thoughtless, and without desires. I did not think, however, that those
were the significant factors.
I believed the catalyst was la Gorda. I thought it was what I felt for
her which had created the
conditions for seeing.
La Gorda laughed shyly when I told her what I believed.
"I don't agree with you," she said. "I think what has happened is that
your body has started to
remember."
"What do you mean by that, Gorda?" I asked.
There was a long pause. She seemed to be either fighting to say
something she did not want to
say, or she was desperately trying to find the appropriate word.
"There are so many things that I know," she said, "and yet I don't know
what I know. I
remember so many things that I finally end up remembering nothing. I
think you are in the same
predicament yourself."
I assured her that I was not aware of it. She refused to believe me.
24
"At times I really believe you don't know," she said. "At other times I
believe you are playing
with us. The Nagual told me that he himself didn't know. A lot of
things that he told me about
you are coming back to me now."
"What does it mean that my body has begun to remember?" I insisted.
"Don't ask me that," she said with a smile. "I don't know what you are
supposed to remember,
or what that remembering is like. I've never done it, myself. I know
that much."
"Is there anybody among the apprentices who could tell me?" I asked.
"No one," she said. "I think I'm a courier to you, a courier who can
bring you only half a
message this time."
She stood up and begged me to drive her back to her hometown. I was too
exhilarated to leave
then. We walked around the plaza at my suggestion. Finally we sat down
on another bench.
"Isn't it strange to you that we could see together with such ease?" la
Gorda asked.
I did not know what she had in mind. I was hesitant in answering.
"What would you say if I told you that I think we've seen together
before?" la Gorda asked,
carefully voicing her words.
I could not understand what she meant. She repeated the question one
more time and I still
could not get her meaning.
"When could we have seen together before?" I asked. "Your question
doesn't make sense."
"That's the point," she replied. "It doesn't make sense, and yet I have
the feeling we have seen
together before."
I felt a chill and stood up. I remembered again the sensation I had had
in that town. La Gorda
opened her mouth to say something but stopped herself in mid-sentence.
She stared at me,
bewildered, put her hand to my lips, and then practically dragged me to
the car.
I drove all night. I wanted to talk, to analyze, but she fell asleep as
if purposely avoiding any
discussion. She was right, of course. Of the two of us, she was the one
who was cognizant of the
danger of dissipating a mood through overanalyzing it.
As she got out of the car, when we arrived at her house, she said that
we could not talk at all
about what happened to us in Oaxaca.
"Why is that, Gorda?" I asked.
"I don't want to waste our power," she said. "That's the sorcerer's
way. Never waste your
gains."
"But if we don't talk about it, we'll never know what really happened
to us," I protested.
"We have to keep quiet for at least nine days," she said.
"Can we talk about it, just between the two of us?" I asked.
"A talk between the two of us is precisely what we must avoid," she
said. "We're vulnerable.
We must allow ourselves time to heal."
25
3. Quasi Memories of The
Other Self
"Can you tell us what's going on?" Nestor asked me when all of us were
together that night.
"Where did you two go yesterday?"
I had forgotten la Gorda's recommendation that we not talk about what
had happened to us. I
began to tell them that we had gone first to the nearby town and we had
found a most intriguing
house there.
All of them seemed to have been touched by a sudden tremor. They perked
up, looked at one
another, and then they stared at la Gorda as if waiting for her to tell
them about it.
"What kind of a house was it?" Nestor asked.
Before I had time to answer, la Gorda interrupted me. She began to talk
in a hurried almost
incoherent manner. It was evident to me that she was improvising. She
even used words and
phrases in the Mazatec language. She gave me furtive glances that
spelled out a silent plea not to
say anything about it.
"How about your dreaming, Nagual?" she asked me with the relief of
someone who has found
the way out. "We'd like to know everything you do. I think it's very
important that you tell us."
She leaned over and as casually as she could she whispered in my ear
that because of what had
happened to us in Oaxaca I had to tell them about my dreaming.
"Why would it be important to you?" I said loudly.
"I think we are very close to the end," la Gorda said solemnly.
"Everything you say or do to us
is of key importance now."
I related to them the events of what I considered my true dreaming. Don
Juan had told me that
there was no point in emphasizing the trials. He gave me a rule of
thumb; if I should have the
same vision three times, he said, I had to pay extraordinary attention
to it; otherwise, a neophyte's
attempts were merely a stepping stone to building the second attention.
I dreamed once that I woke up and jumped out of bed only to be
confronted by myself still
sleeping in bed. I watched myself asleep and had the self-control to
remember that I was
dreaming. I followed then the directions don Juan had given me, which
were to avoid sudden
jolts or surprises, and to take everything with a grain of salt. The
dreamer has to get involved,
don Juan said, in dispassionate experimentations. Rather than examining
his sleeping body, the
dreamer walks out of the room. I suddenly found myself, without knowing
how, outside my
room. I had the absolutely clear sensation that I had been placed there
instantaneously. When I
first stood outside my door, the hall and the staircase were
monumental. If anything really scared
me that night, it was the size of those structures, which in real life
were thoroughly
commonplace; the hall was about fifty feet long and the staircase had
sixteen steps.
I could not conceive how to cover the enormous distances I was
perceiving. I vacillated, then
something made me move. I did not walk, though. I did not feel my
steps. Suddenly I was
holding on the the railing. I could see my hands and forearms but I did
not feel them. I was
holding on by the force of something that had nothing to do with my
musculature as I know it.
The same thing happened when I tried to go down the stairs. I did not
know how to walk. I just
could not take a step. It was as if my legs were welded together. I
could see my legs by leaning
over, but I could not move them forward or laterally, nor could I lift
them up toward my chest. I
seemed to be stuck to the top step. I felt I was like those inflated
plastic dolls that can lean in any
direction until they are horizontal, only to be pulled upright again by
the weight of their heavy
rounded bases.
I made a supreme effort to walk and bounced from step to step like a
clumsy ball. It took an
incredible degree of attention to get to the ground floor. I could not
describe it in any other way.
26
Some form of attentiveness was required to maintain the bounds of my
vision, to prevent it from
disintegrating into the fleeting images of an ordinary dream.
When I finally got to the street door I could not open it. I tried
desperately, but to no avail;
then I recalled that I .had gotten out of my room by gliding out of it
as if the door had been open.
All I needed was to recall that feeling of gliding and suddenly I was
out in the street. It looked
dark - a peculiarly lead-gray darkness that did not permit me to
perceive any colors. My interest
was drawn immediately to an enormous lagoon of brightness right in
front of me, at my eye level.
I deduced rather than perceived that it was the street light, since I
knew there was one right on the
corner, twenty feet above the ground. I knew then that I could not make
the perceptual
arrangements needed in order to judge up, or down, or here, or there.
Everything seemed to be
extraordinarily present. I had no mechanism, as in ordinary life, to
arrange my perception.
Everything was there in the foreground and I had no volition to
construct an adequate screening
procedure.
I stayed in the street, bewildered, until I began to have the sensation
that I was levitating. I
held on to the metal pole that supported the light and the street sign
on the corner. A strong
breeze was lifting me up. I was sliding up the pole until I could
plainly see the name of the street:
Ashton.
Months later, when I again found myself in a dream looking at my
sleeping body, I already
had a repertoire of things to do. In the course of my regular dreaming
I had learned that what
matters in that state was volition, the corporeality of the body has no
significance. It is simply a
memory that slows down the dreamer. I glided out of the room without
hesitation, since I did not
have to act out the motions of opening a door or walking in order to
move. The hall and staircase
were not as enormous as they appeared to be the first time. I glided
through with great ease and
ended up in the street where I willed myself to move three blocks. I
became aware then that the
lights were still very disturbing sights. If I focused my attention on
them, they became pools of
immeasurable size. The other elements of that dream were easy to
control. The buildings were
extraordinarily large, but their features were familiar. I pondered
what to do. And then, quite
casually, I realized that if I did not stare at things but only glanced
at them, just as we do in our
daily world, I could arrange my perception. In other words, if I
followed don Juan's suggestions
to the letter and took my dreaming for granted, I could use the
perceptual biases of my everyday
life. After a few moments the scenery became, if not completely
familiar, controllable.
The next time I had a similar dream I went to my favorite coffee shop
on the corner. The
reason I selected it was because I was used to going there all the time
in the very early hours of
the morning. In my dreaming I saw the usual waitresses who worked the
graveyard shift; I saw a
row of people eating at the counter, and right at the very end of the
counter I saw a peculiar
character, a man I saw nearly every day walking aimlessly around the
UCLA campus. He was the
only person who actually looked at me. The instant I came in he seemed
to sense me. He turned
around and stared at me.
I found the same man in my waking hours a few days later in the same
coffee shop in the
early hours of the morning. He took one look at me and seemed to
recognize me. He looked
horrified and ran away without giving me a chance to talk to him.
I came back once more to the same coffee shop and that was when the
course of my dreaming
changed. As I was watching the restaurant from across the street, the
scene altered. I could not
see the familiar buildings any more. Instead I saw primeval scenery. It
was no longer night. It
was bright daylight and I was looking at a lush valley. Swampy,
deep-green, reedlike plants grew
all over. Next to me there was a rock ledge eight to ten feet high. A
huge saber-toothed tiger was
sitting there. I was petrified. We looked at each other fixedly for a
long time. The size of that
27
beast was striking, yet it was not grotesque or out of proportion. It
had a splendid head, big eyes
the color of dark honey, massive paws, an enormous rib cage. What
impressed me the most was
the color of its fur. It was uniformly dark brown, almost chocolate.
Its color reminded me of
roasted coffee beans, only lustrous; it had strangely longish fur, not
matted or ratty. It did not
look like a puma's fur, or a wolf's or a polar bear's either. It looked
like something I had never
seen before.
From that time on, it became routine for me to see the tiger. At times
the scenery was cloudy
and chilly. I could see rain in the valley, thick, copious rain. At
other times the valley was bathed
in sunlight. Quite often I would see other saber-toothed tigers in the
valley. I could hear their
unique squeaking roar - a most nauseating sound to me.
The tiger never touched me. We stared at each other from ten to twelve
feet away. Yet I could
tell what he wanted. He was showing me how to breathe in a specific
manner. It got to the point
in my dreaming where I could imitate the tiger's breathing so well that
I felt I was turning into
one. I told the apprentices that a tangible result of my dreaming was
that my body became more
muscular.
After listening to my account, Nestor marveled at how different their
dreaming was from
mine. They had particular dreaming tasks. His was to find cures for
anything that ailed the human
body. Benigno's task was to predict, foresee, find a solution for
anything that was of human
concern. Pablito's task was to find ways to build. Nestor said that
those tasks were the reason why
he dealt with medicinal plants, Benigno had an oracle, and Pablito was
a carpenter. He added that,
so far, they had only scratched the surface of their dreaming and that
they had nothing of
substance to report.
"You may think that we've done a great deal," he went on, "but we
haven't. Genaro and the
Nagual did everything for us and for these four women. We've done
nothing on our own yet."
"It seems to me that the Nagual set you up differently," Benigno said,
speaking very slowly
and deliberately. "You must've been a tiger and you are definitely
going to turn into one again.
That's what happened to the Nagual, he had been a crow already and
while in this life he turned
into one again."
"The problem is that that kind of tiger doesn't exist any more," Nestor
said. "We never heard
what happens in that case."
He swept his head around to include all of them with his gesture.
"I know what happens," la Gorda said. "I remember that the Nagual Juan
Matus called that
ghost dreaming. He said that none of us has ever done ghost dreaming
because we are not violent
or destructive. He never did it himself. And he said that whoever does
it is marked by fate to have
ghost helpers and allies."
"What does that mean, Gorda?" I asked.
"It means that you're not like us," she replied somberly.
La Gorda seemed to be very agitated. She stood up and paced up and down
the room four or
five times before she sat down again by my side.
There was a gap of silence in the conversation. Josefina mumbled
something unintelligible.
She also seemed to be very nervous. La Gorda tried to calm her down,
hugging her and patting
her back.
"Josefina has something to tell you about Eligio," la Gorda said to me.
Everyone looked at Josefina without saying a word, a question in their
eyes.
"In spite of the fact that Eligio has disappeared from the face of the
earth," la Gorda went on,
"he is still one of us. And Josefina talks to him all the time."
The rest of them suddenly became attentive. They looked at one another
and then they looked
28
at me.
"They meet in dreaming," la Gorda said dramatically.
Josefina took a deep breath, she seemed to be the epitome of
nervousness. Her body shook
convulsively. Pablito lay on top of her on the floor and began
breathing hard with his diaphragm,
pushing it in and out, forcing her to breathe in unison with him.
"What's he doing?" I asked la Gorda.
"What's he doing! Can't you see?" she replied sharply.
I whispered to her that I was aware that he was trying to make her
relax, but that his procedure
was novel to me. She said that Pablito was giving Josefina energy by
placing his midsection,
where men have a surplus of it, over Josefina's womb, where women store
their energy.
Josefina sat up and smiled at me. She seemed to be perfectly relaxed.
"I do meet Eligio all the time," she said. "He waits for me every day."
"How come you've never told us that?" Pablito asked in a huffy tone.
"She told me," la Gorda interrupted, and then went into a lengthy
explanation of what it meant
to all of us that Eligio was available. She added that she had been
waiting for a sign from me to
disclose Eligio's words.
"Don't beat around the bush, woman!" Pablito yelled. "Tell us his
words."
"They are not for you!" la Gorda yelled back.
"Who are they for, then?" Pablito asked.
"They are for the Nagual," la Gorda yelled, pointing at me.
La Gorda apologized for raising her voice. She said that whatever
Eligio had said was
complex and mysterious and she could not make heads or tails of it.
"I just listened to him. That's all I was able to do, listen to him,"
she continued.
"Do you mean you also meet Eligio?" Pablito asked in a tone that was a
mixture of anger and
expectation.
"I do," la Gorda replied in almost a whisper. "I couldn't talk about it
because I had to wait for
him."
She pointed to me and then pushed me with both hands. I momentarily
lost my balance and
tumbled down on my side.
"What is this? What are you doing to him?" Pablito asked in a very
angry voice. "Was that a
display of Indian love?"
I turned to la Gorda. She made a gesture with her lips to tell me to be
quiet.
"Eligio says that you are the Nagual, but you are not for us," Josefina
said to me.
There was dead silence in the room. I did not know what to make of
Josefina's statement. I had
to wait until someone else talked.
"Do you feel relieved?" la Gorda prodded me.
I said to all of them that I did not have any opinions one way or the
other. They looked like
children, bewildered children. La Gorda had the air of a mistress of
ceremonies who is
thoroughly embarrassed.
Nestor stood up and faced la Gorda. He spoke a phrase in Mazatec to
her. It had the sound of a
command or a reproach.
"Tell us everything you know, Gorda," he went on in Spanish. "You have
no right to play with
us, to hold back something so important, just for yourself."
La Gorda protested vehemently. She explained that she was holding on to
what she knew
because Eligio had asked her to do so. Josefina assented with a nod of
her head.
"Did he tell all this to you or to Josefina?" Pablito asked.
"We were together," la Gorda said in a barely audible whisper.
29
"You mean you and Josefina dream together!" Pablito exclaimed
breathlessly.
The surprise in his voice corresponded to the shock wave that seemed to
go through the rest
of them,
"What exactly has Eligio said to you two?" Nestor asked when the shock
had subsided.
"He said that I should try to help the Nagual remember his left side,"
la Gorda said.
"Do you know what she's talking about?" Nestor asked me.
There was no possibility that I would have known. I told them that they
should turn to
themselves for answers. But none of them voiced any suggestions.
"He told Josefina other things which she can't remember," la Gorda
said. "So we are in a real
fix. Eligio said that you are definitely the Nagual and you have to
help us, but that you are not for
us. Only upon remembering your left side can you take us to where we
have to go."
Nestor spoke to Josefina in a fatherly manner and urged her to remember
what Eligio had
said, rather than insisting that I should remember something which must
have been in some sort
of code, since none of us could make sense of it.
Josefina winced and frowned as if she were under a heavy weight that
was pushing her down.
She actually looked like a rag doll that was being compressed. I
watched in true fascination.
"I can't," she finally said. "I know what he's talking about when he
speaks to me, but I can't
say now what it is. It doesn't come out."
"Do you remember any words?" Nestor asked. "Any single words?"
She stuck her tongue out, shook her head from side to side, and
screamed at the same time.
"No. I can't," she said after a moment.
"What kind of dreaming do you do, Josefina?" I asked.
"The only kind I know," she snapped.
"I've told you how I do mine," I said. "Now tell me how you do yours."
"I close my eyes and I see this wall," she said. "It's like a wall of
fog. Eligio waits for me
there. He takes me through it and shows me things, I suppose. I don't
know what we do, but we
do things together. Then he brings me back to the wall and lets me go.
And I come back and
forget what I've seen."
"How did you happen to go with la Gorda?" I asked.
"Eligio told me to get her," she said. "The two of us waited for la
Gorda, and when she went
into her dreaming we snatched her and pulled her behind that wall.
We've done that twice."
"How did you snatch her?" I asked,
"I don't know!" Josefina replied. "But I'll wait for you and when you
do your dreaming I'll
snatch you and then you'll know."
"Can you snatch anyone?" I asked.
"Sure," she said, smiling. "But I don't do it because it's a waste. I
snatched la Gorda because
Eligio told me that he wanted to tell her something on account of her
being more levelheaded
than I am."
"Then Eligio must have told you the same things, Gorda," Nestor said
with a firmness that was
not familiar to me.
La Gorda made an unusual gesture of lowering her head, opening her
mouth on the sides,
shrugging her shoulders, and lifting her arms above her head.
"Josefina has just told you what happened," she said. "There is no way
for me to remember.
Eligio speaks with a different speed. He speaks but my body cannot
understand him. No. No. My
body cannot remember, that's what it is. I know he said that the Nagual
here will remember and
will take us to where we have to go. He couldn't tell me more because
there was so much to tell
and so little time. He said that somebody, and I don't remember who, is
waiting for me in
30
particular."
"Is that all he said?" Nestor insisted.
"The second time I saw him, he told me that all of us will have to
remember our left side,
sooner or later, if we want to get to where we have to go. But he is
the one who has to remember
first."
She pointed to me and pushed me again as she had done earlier. The
force of her shove sent
me tumbling like a ball.
"What are you doing this for, Gorda?" I asked, a bit annoyed at her.
"I'm trying to help you remember," she said. "The Nagual Juan Matus
told me that I should
give you a push from time to time in order to jolt you."
La Gorda hugged me in a very abrupt movement.
"Help us, Nagual" she pleaded. "We are worse off than dead if you
don't."
I was close to tears. Not because of their dilemma, but because I felt
something stirring inside
me. It was something that had been edging its way out ever since we
visited that town.
La Gorda's pleading was heartbreaking. I then had another attack of
what seemed to be
hyperventilation. A cold sweat enveloped me and then I got sick to my
stomach. La Gorda tended
to me with absolute kindness.
True to her practice of waiting before revealing a finding, la Gorda
would not consider
discussing our seeing together in Oaxaca. For days she remained aloof
and determinedly
uninterested. She would not even discuss my getting ill. Neither would
the other women. Don
Juan used to stress the need for waiting for the most appropriate time
to let go of something that
we hold. I understood the mechanics of la Gorda's actions, although I
found her insistence on
waiting rather annoying and not in accord with our needs. I could not
stay with them too long, so
I demanded that all of us should get together and share everything we
knew. She was inflexible.
"We have to wait," she said. "We have to give our bodies a chance to
come up with a solution.
Our task is the task of remembering, not with our minds but with our
bodies. Everybody
understands it like that."
She looked at me inquisitively. She seemed to be looking for a clue
that would tell her that I
too had understood the task. I admitted to being thoroughly mystified,
since I was the outsider. I
was alone, while they had one another for support.
"This is the silence of warriors," she said, laughing, and then added
in a conciliatory tone,
"This silence doesn't mean that we can't talk about something else."
"Maybe we should go back to our old discussion of losing the human
form," I said.
There was a look of annoyance in her eyes. I explained at length that,
especially when foreign
concepts were involved, meaning had to be continually clarified for me.
"What exactly do you want to know?" she asked.
"Anything that you may want to tell me," I said.
"The Nagual told me that losing the human form brings freedom," she
said. "I believe it. But I
haven't felt that freedom, not yet."
There was a moment of silence. She was obviously assessing my reaction.
"What kind of freedom is it, Gorda?" I asked.
"The freedom to remember your self," she said. "The Nagual said that
losing the human form
is like a spiral. It gives you the freedom to remember and this in turn
makes you even freer."
"Why haven't you felt that freedom yet?" I asked.
She clicked her tongue, shrugged her shoulders. She seemed confused or
reluctant to go on
with our conversation.
31
"I'm tied to you," she said. "Until you lose your human form in order
to remember, I won't be
able to know what that freedom is. But perhaps you won't be able to
lose your human form unless
you remember first. We shouldn't be talking about this anyway. Why
don't you go and talk to the
Genaros?"
She sounded like a mother sending her child out to play. I did not mind
it in the least. From
someone else, I could easily have taken the same attitude as arrogance
or contempt. I liked
being with her, that was the difference.
I found Pablito, Nestor, and Benigno in Genaro's house playing a
strange game. Pablito was
dangling about four feet above the ground inside something that seemed
to be a dark leather
harness strapped to his chest under his armpits. The harness resembled
a thick leather vest. As I
focused my attention on it, I noticed that Pablito was actually
standing on some thick straps that
looped down from the harness like stirrups. He was suspended in the
center of the room by two
ropes strung over a thick round transverse beam that supported the
roof. Each rope was attached
to the harness itself, over Pablito's shoulders, by a metal ring.
Nestor and Benigno each held a rope. They were standing, facing each
other, holding Pablito
in midair by the strength of their pull. Pablito was holding on with
all his strength to two long
thin poles that were planted in the ground and fitted comfortably in
his clasped hands. Nestor
was to Pablito's left and Benigno to his right.
The game seemed to be a three-sided tug-of-war, a ferocious battle
between the ones who
were tugging and the one who was suspended.
When I walked into the room, all I could hear was the heavy breathing
of Nestor and
Benigno. The muscles of their arms and necks were bulging with the
strain of pulling.
Pablito kept an eye on both of them, focusing on each one, one at a
time, with a split-second
glance. All three were so absorbed in their game that they did not even
notice my presence, or if
they did, they could not afford to break their concentration to greet
me.
Nestor and Benigno stared at each other for ten to fifteen minutes in
total silence. Then
Nestor faked letting his rope go. Benigno did not fall for it, but
Pablito did. He tightened the
grip of his left hand and braced his feet on the poles in order to
strengthen his hold. Benigno
used the moment to strike and gave a mighty tug at the precise instant
that Pablito eased his
grip.
Benigno's pull caught Pablito and Nestor by surprise. Benigno hung from
the rope with all his
weight. Nestor was outmaneuvered. Pablito fought desperately to balance
himself. It was useless.
Benigno won the round.
Pablito got out of the harness and came to where I was. I asked him
about their extraordinary
game. He seemed somehow reluctant to talk. Nestor and Benigno joined us
after putting their
gear away. Nestor said that their game had been designed by Pablito,
who found the structure in
dreaming and then constructed it as a game. At first it was a device
for tensing the muscles of two
of them at the same time. They used to take turns at being hoisted. But
then Benigno's dreaming
gave them the entry into a game where all three of them tensed their
muscles, and they sharpened
their visual prowess by remaining in a state of alertness, sometimes
for hours.
"Benigno thinks now that it is helping our bodies to remember," Nestor
went on. "La Gorda,
for instance, plays it in a weird way. She wins every time, no matter
what position she plays.
Benigno thinks that's because her body remembers."
I asked them if they also had the silence rule. They laughed. Pablito
said that la Gorda wanted
more than anything else to be like the Nagual Juan Matus. She
deliberately imitated him, up to
the most absurd detail.
"Do you mean we can talk about what happened the other night?" I asked,
almost bewildered,
32
since la Gorda had been so emphatically against it.
"We don't care," Pablito said. "You're the Nagual!"
"Benigno here remembered something real, real weird," Nestor said
without looking at me.
"I think it was a mixed-up dream, myself," Benigno said.
"But Nestor thinks it wasn't."
I waited impatiently. With a movement of my head, I urged them to go on.
"The other day he remembered you teaching him how to look for tracks in
soft dirt," Nestor
said.
"It must have been a dream," I said.
I wanted to laugh at the absurdity, but all three of them looked at me
with pleading eyes.
"It's absurd," I said.
"Anyway, I better tell you now that I have a similar recollection,"
Nestor said. "You took me
to some rocks and showed me how to hide. Mine was not a mixed-up dream.
I was awake. I was
walking with Benigno one day, looking for plants, and suddenly I
remembered you teaching me,
so I hid as you taught me and scared Benigno out of his wits."
"I taught you! How could that be? When?" I asked.
I was beginning to get nervous. They did not seem to be joking.
"When? That's the point," Nestor said. "We can't figure out when. But
Benigno and I know it
was you."
I felt heavy, oppressed. My breathing became difficult. I feared I was
going to get ill again. I
decided right then to tell them about what la Gorda and I had seen
together. Talking about it
relaxed me. At the end of my recounting I was again in control of
myself.
"The Nagual Juan Matus left us a little bit open," Nestor said. "All of
us can see a little. We
see holes in people who have had children and also, from time to time,
we see a little glow in
people. Since you don't see at all, it looks like the Nagual left you
completely closed so that you
will open yourself from within. Now you've helped la Gorda and she
either sees from within or
she's merely riding on your back."
I told them that what had happened in Oaxaca may have been a fluke.
Pablito thought that we should go to Genaro's favorite rock and sit
there with our heads
together. The other two found his idea brilliant. I had no objections.
Although we sat there for a
long time, nothing happened. We did get very relaxed, however.
While we were still sitting on the rock I told them about the two men
la Gorda had believed to
be don Juan and don Genaro. They slid down and practically dragged me
back to la Gorda's
house. Nestor was the most agitated. He was almost incoherent. All I
got out of them was that
they had been waiting for a sign of that nature.
La Gorda was waiting for us at the door. She knew what I had told them.
"I just wanted to give my body time," she said before we had said
anything. "I have to be dead
sure, which I am. It was the Nagual and Genaro."
"What's in those shacks?" Nestor asked.
"They didn't go inside them," la Gorda said. "They walked away toward
the open fields,
toward the east. In the direction of this town."
She seemed bent on appeasing them. She asked them to stay; they did not
want to. They
excused themselves and left. I was sure that they felt ill at ease in
her presence. She seemed to be
very angry. I rather enjoyed her explosions of temper, and this was
quite contrary to my normal
reactions. I had always felt edgy in the presence of anyone who was
upset, with the mysterious
exception of la Gorda.
During the early hours of the evening all of us congregated in la
Gorda's room. All of them
33
seemed preoccupied. They sat in silence, staring at the floor. La Gorda
tried to start a
conversation. She said that she had not been idle, that she had put two
and two together and had
come up with some solutions.
"This is not a matter of putting two and two together," Nestor said.
"This is a task of
remembering with the body."
It seemed that they had talked about it among themselves, judging by
the nods of agreement
Nestor had from the others. That left la Gorda and myself as the
outsiders.
"Lydia also remembers something," Nestor went on. "She thought it was
her stupidity, but
upon hearing what I've remembered she told us that this Nagual here
took her to a curer and left
her there to have her eyes cured."
La Gorda and I turned to Lydia. She lowered her head as if embarrassed.
She mumbled. The
memory seemed too painful for her. She said that when don Juan first
found her, her eyes were
infected and she could not see. Someone drove her in a car over a great
distance to the curer who
healed her. She had always been convinced that don Juan had done that,
but upon hearing my
voice she realized that it was I who had taken her there. The
incongruity of such a memory threw
her into agony from the first day she met me.
"My ears don't lie to me," Lydia added after a long silence. "It was
you who took me there."
"Impossible! Impossible!" I yelled.
My body began to shake, out of control. I had a sense of duality.
Perhaps what I call my
rational self, incapable of controlling the rest of me, took the seat
of a spectator. Some part of me
was watching as another part of me shook.
34
4. Crossing The Boundaries of
Affection
"What's happening to us, Gorda?" I asked after the others had gone home.
"Our bodies are remembering, but I just can't figure out what," she
said.
"Do you believe the memories of Lydia, Nestor, and Benigno?"
"Sure. They're very serious people. They don't just say things like
that for the hell of it."
"But what they say is impossible. You believe me, don't you, Gorda?"
"I believe that you don't remember, but then . . ."
She did not finish. She came to my side and began to whisper in my ear.
She said that there
was something that the Nagual Juan Matus had made her promise to keep
to herself until the time
was right, a trump card to be used only when there was no other way
out. She added in a
dramatic whisper that the Nagual had foreseen their new living
arrangement, which was the
result of my taking Josefina to Tula to be with Pablito. She said that
there was a faint chance that
we might succeed as a group if we followed the natural order of that
organization. La Gorda
explained that since we were divided into couples, we formed a living
organism. We were a
snake, a rattlesnake. The snake had four sections and was divided, into
two longitudinal halves,
male and female. She said that she and I made up the first section of
the snake, the head. It was a
cold, calculating, poisonous head. The second section, formed by Nestor
and Lydia, was the firm
and fair heart of the snake. The third was the belly - a shifty, moody,
untrustworthy belly made
up by Pablito and Josefina. And the fourth section, the tail, where the
rattle was located, was
formed by the couple who in real life could rattle on in their Tzotzil
language for hours on end,
Benigno and Rosa.
La Gorda straightened herself up from the position she had adopted to
whisper in my ear. She
smiled at me and patted me on the back.
"Eligio said one word that finally came back to me," she went on.
"Josefina agrees with me
that he said the word "trail" over and over. We are going to go on a
trail!"
Without giving me a chance to ask her any questions, she said that she
was going to sleep for
a while and then assemble everyone to go on a trip.
We started out before midnight, hiking in bright moonlight. Everyone of
the others had been
reluctant to go at first, but la Gorda very skillfully sketched out for
them don Juan's alleged
description of the snake. Before we started, Lydia suggested that we
provide ourselves with
supplies in case the trip turned out to be a long one. La Gorda
dismissed her suggestion on the
grounds that we had no idea about the nature of the trip. She said that
the Nagual Juan Matus had
once pointed out to her the beginning of a pathway and said that at the
right opportunity we
should place ourselves on that spot and let the power of the trail
reveal itself to us. La Gorda
added that it was not an ordinary goats' path but a natural line on the
earth which the Nagual had
said would give us strength and knowledge if we could follow it and
become one with it.
We moved under mixed leadership. La Gorda supplied the impetus and
Nestor knew the actual
terrain. She led us to a place in the mountains. Nestor took over then
and located a pathway. Our
formation was evident, the head taking the lead and the others
arranging themselves according to
the anatomical model of a snake: heart, intestines, and tail. The men
were to the right of the
women. Each couple was five feet behind the one in front of them.
We hiked as quickly and as quietly as we could. There were dogs barking
for a time; as we got
higher into the mountains there was only the sound of crickets. We
walked for a long while. All
of a sudden la Gorda stopped and grabbed my arm. She pointed ahead of
us. Twenty or thirty
yards away, right in the middle of the trail, there was the bulky
silhouette of an enormous man,
over seven feet tall. He was blocking our way. We grouped together in a
tight bunch. Our eyes
35
were fixed on the dark shape. He did not move. After a while, Nestor
alone advanced a few steps
toward him. Only then did the figure move. He came toward us. Gigantic
as he was, he moved
nimbly.
Nestor came back running. The moment he joined us, the man stopped.
Boldly, la Gorda took
a step toward him. The man took a step toward us. It was evident that
if we kept on moving
forward, we were going to clash with the giant. We were no match for
whatever it was. Without
waiting to prove it, I took the initiative and pulled everyone back and
quickly steered them away
from that place.
We walked back to la Gorda's house in total silence. It took us hours
to get there, We were
utterly exhausted. When we were safely sitting in her room, la Gorda
spoke.
"We are doomed," she said to me. "You didn't want us to move on. That
thing we saw on the
trail was one of your allies, wasn't it? They come out of their hiding
place when you pull them
out."
I did not answer. There was no point in protesting. I remembered the
countless times I had
believed that don Juan and don Genaro were in cahoots with each other.
I thought that while don
Juan talked to me in the darkness, don Genaro would put on a disguise
in order to scare me, and
don Juan would insist that it was an ally. The idea that there were
allies or entities at large that
escape our everyday attention had been too farfetched for me. But then
I had lived to find out that
the allies of don Juan's description existed in fact; there were, as he
had said, entities at large in
the world.
In an authoritarian outburst, rare to me in my everyday life, I stood
up and told la Gorda and
the rest of them that I had a proposition for them and they could take
it or leave it. If they were
ready to move out of there, I was willing to take the responsibility of
taking them somewhere
else. If they were not ready, I would feel exonerated from any further
commitment to them.
I felt a surge of optimism and certainty. None of them said anything.
They looked at me
silently, as if they were internally assessing my statements.
"How long would it take you to get your gear?" I asked.
"We have no gear," la Gorda said. "We'll go as we are. And we can go
right this minute if it is
necessary. But if we can wait three more days, everything will be
better for us."
"What about the houses that you have?" I asked.
"Soledad will take care of that," she said.
That was the first time dona Soledad's name had been mentioned since I
last saw her. I was so
intrigued that I momentarily forgot the drama of the moment. I sat
down. La Gorda was hesitant
to answer my questions about dona Soledad. Nestor took over and said
that dona Soledad was
around but that none of them knew much about her activities. She came
and went without giving
anyone notice, the agreement between them being that they would look
after her house and vice
versa. Dona Soledad knew that they had to leave sooner or later, and
she would assume the
responsibility of doing whatever was necessary to dispose of their
property.
"How will you let her know?" I asked.
"That's la Gorda's department," Nestor said. "We don't know where she
is."
"Where is dona Soledad, Gorda?" I asked.
"How in the hell would I know?" la Gorda snapped at me.
"But you're the one who calls her," Nestor said.
La Gorda looked at me. It was a casual look, yet it gave me a shiver. I
recognized that look,
but from where? The depths of my body stirred; my solar plexus had a
solidity I had never felt
before. My diaphragm seemed to be pushing up on its own. I was
pondering whether I should lie
down when suddenly I found myself standing.
36
"La Gorda doesn't know," I said. "Only I know where she is."
Everyone was shocked - I perhaps more than anyone else. I had made the
statement with no
rational foundation whatsoever. At the moment I was voicing it,
nevertheless, I had had the
perfect conviction that I knew where she was. It was like a flash that
crossed my consciousness. I
saw a mountainous area with very rugged, arid peaks; a scraggy terrain,
desolate and cold. As
soon as I had spoken, my next conscious thought was that I must have
seen that landscape in a
movie and that the pressure of being with these people was causing me
to have a breakdown.
I apologized to them for mystifying them in such a blatant although
unintentional manner. I
sat down again.
"You mean you don't know why you said that?" Nestor asked me.
He had chosen his words carefully. The natural thing to say, at least
for me, would have been,
"So you really don't know where she is." I told them that something
unknown had come upon me.
I described the terrain I had seen and the certainty I had had that
dona Soledad was there.
"That happens to us quite often," Nestor said.
I turned to la Gorda and she nodded her head. I asked for an
explanation.
"These crazy mixed-up things keep coming to our minds," la Gorda said.
"Ask Lydia, or Rosa,
or Josefina."
Since they had entered into their new living arrangement Lydia, Rosa,
and Josefina had not
said much to me. They had confined themselves to greetings and casual
comments about food or
the weather.
Lydia avoided my eyes. She mumbled that she thought at times that she
remembered other
things.
"Sometimes I can really hate you," she said to me. "I think, you are
pretending to be stupid.
Then I remember that you were very ill because of us. Was it you?"
"Of course it was him," Rosa said. "I too remember things. I remember a
lady who was kind
to me. She taught me how to keep myself clean, and this Nagual cut my
hair for the first time,
while the lady held me, because I was scared. That lady loved me. She
hugged me all the time.
She was very tall. I remember my face was on her bosom when she used to
hug me. She was the
only person who ever cared for me. I would've gladly gone to my death
for her."
"Who was that lady, Rosa?" la Gorda asked with bated breath.
Rosa pointed to me with a movement of her chin, a gesture heavy with
dejection and
contempt.
"He knows," she said.
All of them stared at me, waiting for an answer. I became angry and
yelled at Rosa that she
had no business making statements that were really accusations. I was
not in any way lying to
them.
Rosa was not flustered by my outburst. She calmly explained that she
remembered the lady
telling her that I would come back some day, after I had recovered from
my illness. Rosa
understood that the lady was taking care of me, nursing me back to
health; therefore, I had to
know who she was and where she was, since I seemed to have recovered.
"What kind of illness did I have, Rosa?" I asked.
"You got ill because you couldn't hold your world," she said with utter
conviction. "Someone
told me, I think a very long time ago, that you were not made for us,
just like Eligio told la
Gorda in dreaming. You left us because of it and Lydia never forgave
you. She'll hate you
beyond this world."
Lydia protested that her feelings for me had nothing to do with what
Rosa was saying. She
was merely short-tempered and easily got angry at my stupidities.
37
I asked Josefina if she also remembered me.
"I sure do," she said with a grin. "But you know me, I'm crazy. You
can't trust me. I'm not
dependable."
La Gorda insisted on hearing what Josefina remembered. Josefina was set
not to say anything
and they argued back and forth; finally Josefina spoke to me.
"What's the use of all this talk about remembering? It's just talk,"
she said. "And it isn't worth
a fig."
Josefina seemed to have scored a point with all of us. There was no
more to be said. They
were getting up to leave after having sat in polite silence for a few
minutes.
"I remember you bought me beautiful clothes," Josefina suddenly said to
me. "Don't you
remember when I fell down the stairs in one store? I nearly broke my
leg and you had to carry me
out."
Everybody sat down again and kept their eyes fixed on Josefina.
"I also remember a crazy woman," she went on. "She wanted to beat me
and used to chase me
all over the place until you got angry and stopped her."
I felt exasperated. Everyone seemed to be hanging on Josefina's words
when she herself had
told us not to trust her because she was crazy. She was right. Her
remembering was sheer
aberration to me.
"I know why you got ill, too," she went on. "I was there. But I can't
remember where. They
took you beyond that wall of fog to find this stupid Gorda. I suppose
she must have gotten lost.
You couldn't make it back. When they brought you out you were almost
dead."
The silence that followed her revelations was oppressive. I was afraid
to ask anything.
"I can't remember why on earth she went in there, or who brought you
back," Josefina
continued. "I do remember that you were ill and didn't recognize me any
more. This stupid Gorda
swears that she didn't know you when you first came to this house a few
months ago. I knew you
right away. I remembered you were the Nagual that got ill. You want to
know something? I think
these women are just indulging. And so are the men, especially that
stupid Pablito. They've got to
remember, they were there, too."
"Can you remember where we were?" I asked.
"No. I can't," Josefina said. "I'll know it if you take me there,
though. When we all were there,
they used to call us the drunkards because we were groggy. I was the
least dizzy of all, so I
remember pretty well."
"Who called us drunkards?" I asked.
"Not you, just us," Josefina replied. "I don't know who. The Nagual
Juan Matus, I suppose."
I looked at them and each one of them avoided my eyes.
"We are coming to the end," Nestor muttered, as if talking to himself.
"Our ending is staring
us in the eye."
He seemed to be on the verge of tears.
"I should be glad and proud that we have arrived at the end," he went
on. "Yet I'm sad. Can
you explain that, Nagual?"
Suddenly all of them were sad. Even defiant Lydia was sad.
"What's wrong with all of you?" I asked in a convivial tone. "What
ending are you talking
about?"
"I think everyone knows what ending it is," Nestor said. "Lately, I've
been having strange
feelings. Something is calling us. And we don't let go as we should. We
cling."
Pablito had a true moment of gallantry and said that la Gorda was the
only one among them
who did not cling to anything. The rest of them, he assured me, were
nearly hopeless egotists.
38
"The Nagual Juan Matus said that when it's time to go we will have a
sign," Nestor said.
"Something we truly like will come forth and take us."
"He said it doesn't have to be something great," Benigno added.
"Anything we like will do."
"For me the sign will come in the form of the lead soldiers I never
had," Nestor said to me. "A
row of Hussars on horseback will come to take me. What will it be for
you?"
I remembered don Juan telling me once that death might be behind
anything imaginable, even
behind a dot on my writing pad. He gave me then the definitive metaphor
of my death. I had told
him that once while walking on Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles I had
heard the sound of a
trumpet playing an old, idiotic popular tune. The music was coming from
a record shop across
the street. Never had I heard a more beautiful sound. I became
enraptured by it. I had to sit down
on the curb. The limpid brass sound of that trumpet was going directly
to my brain. I felt it just
above my right temple. It soothed me until I was drunk with it. When it
concluded, I knew that
there would be no way of ever repeating that experience, and I had
enough detachment not to
rush into the store and buy the record and a stereo set to play it on.
Don Juan said that it had been a sign given to me by the powers that
rule the destiny of men.
When the time comes for me to leave the world, in whatever form, I will
hear the same sound of
that trumpet, the same idiotic tune, the same peerless trumpeter.
The next day was a frantic day for them. They seemed to have endless
things to do. La Gorda
said that all their chores were personal and had to be performed by
each one of them without any
help. I welcomed being alone. I too had things to work out. I drove to
the nearby town that had
disturbed me so thoroughly. I went directly to the house that had held
such fascination for la
Gorda and myself; I knocked on the door. A lady answered. I made up a
story that I had lived in
that house as a child and wanted to look at it again. She was a very
gracious woman. She let me
go through the house, apologizing profusely for a nonexistent disorder.
There was a wealth of hidden memories in that house. They were there, I
could feel them, but
I could not remember anything.
The following day la Gorda left at dawn; I expected her to be gone all
day but she came back
at noon. She seemed very upset.
"Soledad has come back and wants to see you," she said flatly.
Without any word of explanation, she took me to dona Soledad's house.
Dona Soledad was
standing by the door. She looked younger and stronger than the last
time I had seen her. She bore
only the slightest resemblance to the lady I had known years before.
La Gorda seemed to be on the verge of crying. The tension we were going
through made her
mood perfectly understandable to me. She left without saying a word.
Dona Soledad said that she had only a little time to talk to me and
that she was going to use
every minute of it. She was strangely deferential. There was a tone of
politeness in every word
she said.
I made a gesture to interrupt her to ask a question. I wanted to know
where she had been. She
rebuffed me in a most delicate manner. She said that she had chosen her
words carefully and that
the lack of time would permit her only to say what was essential.
She peered into my eyes for a moment that seemed unnaturally long. That
annoyed me. She
could have talked to me and answered some questions in the same length
of time. She broke her
silence and spoke what I thought were absurdities. She said that she
had attacked me as I had
requested her to, the day we crossed the parallel lines for the first
time, and that she only hoped
her attack had been effective and served its purpose. I wanted to shout
that I had never asked her
to do anything of the sort. I did not know about parallel lines and
what she was saying was
nonsense. She pressed my lips with her hand. I recoiled automatically.
She seemed sad. She said
39
that there was no way for us to talk because at that moment we were on
two parallel lines and
neither of us had the energy to cross over; only her eyes could tell me
her mood.
For no reason, I began to feel relaxed, something inside me felt at
ease. I noticed that tears
were rolling down my cheeks. And then a most incredible sensation took
possession of me for a
moment, a short moment but long enough to jolt the foundations of my
consciousness, or of my
person, or of what I think and feel is myself. During that brief moment
I knew that we were very
close to each other in purpose and temperament. Our circumstances were
alike. I wanted to
acknowledge to her that it had been an arduous struggle, but the
struggle was not over yet. It
would never be over. She was saying goodbye because being the
impeccable warrior she was, she
knew that our paths would never cross again. We had come to the end of
a trail. A lost wave of
affiliation, of kinship, burst out from some unimaginable dark corner
of myself. That flash was
like an electric charge in my body. I embraced her; my mouth was
moving, saying things that had
no meaning to me. Her eyes lit up. She was also saying something I
could not understand. The
only sensation that was clear to me, that I had crossed the parallel
lines, had no pragmatic
significance. There was a welled-up anguish inside me pushing outward.
Some inexplicable force
was splitting me apart. I could not breathe and everything went black.
I felt someone moving me, shaking me gently. La Gorda's face came into
focus. I was lying in
dona Soledad's bed and la Gorda was sitting by my side. We were alone.
"Where is she?" I asked.
"She's gone," la Gorda replied.
I wanted to tell la Gorda everything. She stopped me. She opened the
door. All the apprentices
were outside waiting for me. They had put on their raunchiest clothes.
La Gorda explained that
they had torn up everything they had. It was late afternoon. I had been
asleep for hours. Without
talking, we walked to la Gorda's house, where I had my car parked. They
crammed inside like
children going on a Sunday drive.
Before I got into the car I stood gazing at the valley. My body rotated
slowly and made a
complete circle, as if it had a volition and purpose of its own. I felt
I was capturing the essence of
that place. I wanted to keep it with me because I knew unequivocally
that never in this life would
I see it again.
The others must have done that already. They were free of melancholy,
they were laughing,
teasing one another.
I started the car and drove away. When we reached the last bend in the
road the sun was
setting, and la Gorda yelled at me to stop. She got out and ran to a
small hill at the side of the
road. She climbed it and took a last look at her valley. She extended
her arms toward it and
breathed it in.
The ride down those mountains was strangely short and thoroughly
uneventful. Everybody
was quiet. I tried to get la Gorda into a conversation, but she flatly
refused. She said that the
mountains, being possessive, claimed ownership of them, and that if
they did not save their
energy, the mountains would never let them go.
Once we got to the lowlands they became more animated, especially la
Gorda. She seemed to
be bubbling with energy. She even volunteered information without any
coaxing on my part. One
of her statements was that the Nagual Juan Matus had told her, and
Soledad had confirmed, that
there was another side to us. Upon hearing it, the rest of them joined
in with questions and
comments. They were baffled by their strange memories of events that
could not logically have
taken place. Since some of them had first met me only months before,
remembering me in the
remote past was something beyond the bounds of their reason.
I told them then about my meeting with dona Soledad. I described my
feeling of having
40
known her intimately before, and my sense of having unmistakably
crossed what she called the
parallel lines. They reacted with confusion to my statement; it seemed
that they had heard the
term before but I was not sure they all understood what it meant. For
me it was a metaphor. I
could not vouch that it was the same for them.
When we were coming into the city of Oaxaca they expressed the desire
to visit the place
where la Gorda had said don Juan and don Genaro disappeared. I drove
directly to the spot. They
rushed out of the car and seemed to be orienting themselves, sniffing
at something, looking for
clues. La Gorda pointed in the direction she thought they had gone.
"You've made a terrible mistake, Gorda," Nestor said loudly. "That's
not the east, that's the
north."
La Gorda protested and defended her opinion. The women backed her, and
so did Pablito.
Benigno was noncommittal; he kept on looking at me as if I were going
to furnish the answer,
which I did. I referred to a map of the city of Oaxaca that I had in
the car. The direction la Gorda
was pointing was indeed north.
Nestor remarked that he had felt all along that their departure from
their town was not
premature or forced in any way; the timing was right. The others had
not, and their hesitation
arose from la Gorda's misjudgment. They had believed, as she herself
had, that the Nagual had
pointed toward their hometown, meaning that they had to stay put. I
admitted, as an afterthought,
that in the final analysis I was the one to blame because, although I
had had the map, I had failed
to use it at the time.
I then mentioned that I had forgotten to tell them that one of the men,
the one I had thought for
a moment was don Genaro, had beckoned us with a movement of his head.
La Gorda's eyes
widened with genuine surprise, or even alarm. She had not detected the
gesture, she said. The
beckoning had been only for me.
"That's it!" Nestor exclaimed. "Our fates are sealed!"
He turned to address the others. All of them were talking at once. He
made frantic gestures
with his hands to calm them.
"I only hope that all of you did whatever you had to do as if you were
never coming back," he
said. "Because we are never going back."
"Are you telling us the truth?" Lydia asked me with a fierce look in
her eyes, as the others
peered expectantly at me.
I assured them that I had no reason to make it up. The fact that I saw
that man gesturing to me
with his head had no significance whatsoever for me. Besides, I was not
even convinced that
those men were don Juan and don Genaro.
"You're very crafty," Lydia said. "You may just be telling us this so
that we will follow you
meekly."
"Now, wait a minute," la Gorda said. "This Nagual may be as crafty as
you like, but he'd never
do anything like that."
They all began talking at once. I tried to mediate and had to shout
over their voices that what I
had seen did not make any difference anyway.
Nestor very politely explained that Genaro had told them that when the
time came for them to
leave their valley he would somehow let them know with a movement of
his head. They quieted
down when I said that if their fates were sealed by that event, so was
mine; all of us were going
north.
Nestor then led us to a place of lodging, a boardinghouse where he
stayed when doing
business in the city. Their spirits were high, in fact too high for my
comfort. Even Lydia
embraced me, apologizing for being so difficult. She explained that she
had believed la Gorda
41
and therefore had not bothered to cut her ties effectively. Josefina
and Rosa were ebullient and
patted me on the back over and over. I wanted to talk with la Gorda. I
needed to discuss our
course of action. But there was no way to be alone with her that night.
Nestor, Pablito, and Benigno left in the early morning to do some
errands. Lydia, Rosa, and
Josefina also went out to go shopping. La Gorda requested that I help
her buy her new clothes.
She wanted me to pick out one dress for her, the perfect one to give
her the self-confidence she
needed to be a fluid warrior. I not only found a dress but an entire
outfit, shoes, nylons, and
lingerie.
I took her for a stroll. We meandered in the center of town like two
tourists, staring at the
Indians in their regional garments. Being a formless warrior, she was
already perfectly at ease in
her elegant outfit. She looked ravishing. It was as if she had never
dressed any other way. It was I
who could not get used to it.
The questions that I wanted to ask la Gorda, which should have poured
out of me, were
impossible to formulate. I had no idea what to ask her. I told her in
true seriousness that her new
appearance was affecting me. Very soberly, she said that the crossing
of boundaries was what had
affected me.
"We crossed some boundaries last night," she said. "Sole dad told me
what to expect, so I was
prepared. But you were not."
She began to explain softly and slowly that we had crossed some
boundaries of affection the
night before. She was enunciating every syllable as if she were talking
to a child or a foreigner.
But I could not concentrate. We went back to our lodgings. I needed to
rest, yet I ended up going
out again. Lydia, Rosa, and Josefina had not been able to find anything
and wanted something
like la Gorda's outfit.
By midafternoon I was back in the boardinghouse admiring the little
sisters. Rosa had
difficulty walking with high-heeled shoes. We were joking about her
feet when the door opened
slowly and Nestor made a dramatic entrance. He was wearing a tailored
dark-blue suit, light-pink
shirt, and blue necktie. His hair was neatly combed and a bit fluffy,
as if it had been blown dry.
He looked at the women and the women looked at him. Pablito came in,
followed by Benigno.
Both were dashing. Their shoes were brand new and their suits looked
custom made.
I could not get over everyone's adaptation to city clothes. They
reminded me so much of don
Juan. I was perhaps as shocked seeing the three Genaros in city clothes
as I had been when I saw
don Juan wearing a suit, yet I accepted their change instantly. On the
other hand, while I was not
surprised at the women's transformation, for some reason I could not
get accustomed to it.
I thought that the Genaros must have had a streak of sorcerers' luck in
order to find such
perfect fits. They laughed when they heard me raving about their luck.
Nestor said that a tailor
had made their suits months before.
"We each have another suit," he said to me. "We even have leather
suitcases. We knew our
time in these mountains was up. We are ready to go! Of course, you
first have to tell us where.
And also how long we are going to stay here."
He explained that he had old business accounts he had to close and
needed time. La Gorda
stepped in and with great certainty and authority stated that that
night we were going to go as far
away as power permitted; consequently they had until the end of the day
to settle their business.
Nestor and Pablito hesitated by the door. They looked at me, waiting
for confirmation. I thought
the least I could do was to be honest with them, but la Gorda
interrupted me just as I was about to
say that I was in limbo as to what exactly we were going to do.
"We will meet at the Nagual's bench at dusk," she said. "We'll leave
from there. We should do
whatever we have to or want to, until then, knowing that never again in
this life will we be back."
42
La Gorda and I were alone after everybody left. In an abrupt and clumsy
movement, she sat on
my lap. She was so light, I could make her thin body shake by
contracting the muscles of my
calves. Her hair had a peculiar perfume. I joked that the smell was
unbearable. She was laughing
and shaking when out of now here a feeling came to me - a memory? All
of a sudden I had
another Gorda on my lap, fat, twice the size of the Gorda I knew. Her
face was round and I was
teasing her about the perfume in her hair. I had the sensation that I
was taking care of her.
The impact of that spurious memory made me stand up. La Gorda fell
noisily to the floor. I
described what I had "remembered." I told her that I had seen her as a
fat woman only once, and
so briefly that I had no idea of her features, and yet I had just had a
vision of her face when she
was fat.
She did not make any comments. She took off her clothes and put on her
old dress again.
"I am not yet ready for it," she said, pointing at her new outfit. "We
still have one more thing
to do before we are free. According to the Nagual Juan Matus'
instructions, all of us must sit
together on a power spot of his choice."
"Where's that spot?"
"Somewhere in the mountains around here. It's like a door. The Nagual
told me that there was
a natural crack on that spot. He said that certain power spots are
holes in this world; if you are
formless you can go through one of those holes into the unknown, into
another world. That world
and this world we live in are on two parallel lines. Chances are that
all of us have been taken
across those lines at one time or another, but we don't remember.
Eligio is in that other world.
Sometimes we reach it through dreaming. Josefina, of course, is the
best dreamer among us. She
crosses those lines every day, but being crazy makes her indifferent,
even dumb, so Eligio helped
me to cross those lines thinking I was more intelligent, and I turned
out to be just as dumb. Eligio
wants us to remember our left side. Soledad told me that the left side
is the parallel line to the one
we are living in now. So if he wants us to remember it, we must have
been there. And not in
dreaming, either. That's why all of us remember weird things now and
then."
Her conclusions were logical given the premises she was working with. I
knew what she was
talking about; those occasional unsolicited memories reeked of the
reality of everyday life and
yet we could find no time sequence for them, no opening in the
continuum of our lives where we
could fit them.
La Gorda reclined on the bed. There was a worried look in her eyes.
"What bothers me is what to do to find that power spot," she said.
"Without it there is no
possible journey for us."
"What worries me is where I'm going to take all of you and what I'm
going to do with you," I
said.
"Soledad told me that we will go as far north as the border," la Gorda
said. "Some of us even
further north perhaps. But you won't go all the way through with us.
You have another fate."
La Gorda was pensive for a moment. She frowned with the apparent effort
of arranging her
thoughts.
"Soledad said that you will take me to fulfill my destiny," la Gorda
said. "I am the only one of
us who is in your charge."
Alarm must have been written all over my face. She smiled.
"Soledad also told me that you are plugged up," la Gorda went on. "You
have moments,
though, when you are a Nagual. The rest of the time, Soledad says, you
are like a crazy man who
is lucid only for a few moments and then reverts back to his madness."
Dona Soledad had used an appropriate image to describe me, one I could
understand. I must
have had a moment of lucidity for her when I knew I had crossed the
parallel lines. That same
43
moment, by my standards, was the most incongruous of all. Dona Soledad
and I were certainly
on two different lines of thought.
"What else did she tell you?" I asked.
"She told me I should force myself to remember," la Gorda said. "She
exhausted herself trying
to bring out my memory; that was why she couldn't deal with you."
La Gorda got up; she was ready to leave. I took her for a walk around
the city. She seemed
very happy. She went from place to place watching everything, feasting
her eyes on the world.
Don Juan had given me that image. He had said that a warrior knows that
he is waiting and
knows also what he is waiting for, and while he waits he feasts his
eyes on the world. For him the
ultimate accomplishment of a warrior was joy. That day in Oaxaca la
Gorda was following don
Juan's teachings to the letter.
In the late afternoon, before dusk, we sat down on don Juan's bench.
Benigno, Pablito, and
Josefina showed up first. After a few minutes the other three joined
us. Pablito sat down between
Josefina and Lydia and put his arms around them. They had changed back
into their old clothes.
La Gorda stood up and began to tell them about the power spot.
Nestor laughed at her and the rest of them joined him.
"Never again will you get us to fall for your bossiness," Nestor said.
"We are free of you. We
crossed the boundaries last night."
La Gorda was unruffled but the others were angry. I had to intervene. I
said loudly that I
wanted to know more about the boundaries we had crossed the night
before. Nestor explained
that that pertained only to them. La Gorda disagreed. They seemed to be
on the verge of fighting.
I pulled Nestor to the side and ordered him to tell me about the
boundaries.
"Our feelings make boundaries around anything," he said. "The more we
love, the stronger the
boundary is. In this case we loved our home; before we left it we had
to lift up our feelings. Our
feelings for our home went up to the top of the mountains to the west
from our valley. That was
the boundary and when we crossed the top of those mountains, knowing
that we'll never be back,
we broke it."
"But I also knew that I'd never be back," I said.
"You didn't love those mountains the way we did," Nestor replied.
"That remains to be seen," la Gorda said cryptically.
"We were under her influence," Pablito said, standing up and pointing
to la Gorda. "She had
us by the napes of our necks. Now I see how stupid we've been on
account of her. We can't cry
over spilled milk, but we'll never fall for it again."
Lydia and Josefina joined Nestor and Pablito. Benigno and Rosa looked
on as if the struggle
did not concern them any more.
I had right then another moment of certainty and authoritarian
behavior. I stood up and,
without any conscious volition, announced that I was taking charge and
that I relieved la Gorda of
any further obligation to make comments or to present her ideas as the
only solution. When I
finished talking I was shocked at my boldness. Everyone, including la
Gorda, was delighted.
The force behind my explosion had been first a physical sensation that
my sinuses were
opening, and second the certainty that I knew what don Juan had meant,
and exactly where the
place was that we had to visit before we could be free. As my sinuses
opened I had had a vision
of the house that had intrigued me.
I told them where we had to go. They accepted my directions without any
arguments or even
comments. We checked out of the boardinghouse and went to eat dinner.
Afterward we strolled
around the plaza until about eleven o'clock. I brought the car around,
they piled noisily inside,
and we were off. La Gorda remained awake to keep me company while the
rest of them went to
44
sleep, and then Nestor drove while la Gorda and I slept.
45
5. The Horde of Angry
Sorcerers
We were in the town at the crack of dawn. At that point I took the
wheel and drove toward the
house. A couple of blocks before we got there, la Gorda asked me to
stop. She got out of the car
and began to walk on the high sidewalk. One by one, all of them got
out. They followed la Gorda.
Pablito came to my side and said that I should park on the plaza, which
was a block away. I did
that. The moment I saw la Gorda turning the corner I knew that
something was wrong with her. She
was extraordinarily pale. She came to me and said in a whisper that she
was going to go to hear
early mass. Lydia also wanted to do that. Both of them walked across
the plaza and went inside
the church.
Pablito, Nestor, and Benigno were as somber as I had ever seen them.
Rosa was frightened,
her mouth open, her eyes fixed, unblinking, looking in the direction of
the house. Only Josefina
was beaming. She gave me a buddy-buddy slap on the back.
"You've done it, you son of a gun!" she exclaimed. "You've knocked the
tar out of these sons
of bitches."
She laughed until she was nearly out of breath.
"Is this the place, Josefina?" I asked.
"It surely is," she said. "La Gorda used to go to church all the time.
She was a real churchgoer
at that time."
"Do you remember that house over there?" I asked, pointing to it.
"That's Silvio Manuel's house," she said.
All of us jumped upon hearing the name. I felt something similar to a
mild shock of electric
current going through my knees. The name was definitely not familiar to
me, yet my body
jumped upon hearing it. Silvio Manuel was such a rare name; so liquid a
sound.
The three Genaros and Rosa were as perturbed as I was. I noticed that
they were pale. Judging
by what I felt, I must have been just as pale as they were.
"Who is Silvio Manuel?" I finally managed to ask Josefina.
"Now you got me," she said. "I don't know."
She reiterated that she was crazy and nothing that she said should be
taken seriously. Nestor
begged her to tell us whatever she remembered.
Josefina tried to think but she was not the person to perform well
under pressure. I knew that
she would do better if no one asked her. I proposed that we look for a
bakery or a place to eat.
"They didn't let me do much in that house, that's what I remember,"
Josefina said all of a
sudden.
She turned around as if looking for something, or as if she were
orienting herself.
"Something is missing here!" she exclaimed. "This is not quite the way
it used to be."
I attempted to help her by asking questions that I deemed appropriate,
such as whether houses
were missing or had been painted, or new ones built. But Josefina could
not figure out how it was
different.
We walked to the bakery and bought sweet rolls. As we were heading back
to the plaza to wait
for la Gorda and Lydia, Josefina suddenly hit her forehead as if an
idea had just struck her.
"I know what's missing!" she shouted. "That stupid wall of fog! It used
to be here then. It's
gone now."
All of us spoke at once, asking her about the wall, but Josefina went
on talking undisturbed, as
if we were not there.
"It was a wall of fog that went all the way up to the sky," she said.
"It was right here. Every
46
time I turned my head, there it was. It drove me crazy. That's right,
damn it. I wasn't nuts until I
was driven crazy by that wall. I saw it with my eyes closed or with my
eyes open. I thought that
wall was after me."
For a moment Josefina lost her natural vivaciousness. A desperate look
appeared in her eyes. I
had seen that look in people who were going through a psychotic
episode. I hurriedly suggested
that she eat her sweet roll. She calmed down immediately and began to
eat it.
"What do you think of all this, Nestor?" I asked.
"I'm scared," he said softly.
"Do you remember anything?" I asked him.
He shook his head negatively. I questioned Pablito and Benigno with a
movement of my
brows. They also shook their heads to say no.
"How about you, Rosa?" I asked.
Rosa jumped when she heard me addressing her. She seemed to have lost
her speech. She held
a sweet roll in her hand and stared at it, seemingly undecided as to
what to do with it.
"Of course she remembers," Josefina said, laughing, "but she's
frightened to death. Can't you
see that piss is even coming out her ears?"
Josefina seemed to think her statement was the ultimate joke. She
doubled up laughing and
dropped her roll on the ground. She picked it up, dusted it off, and
ate it.
"Crazy people eat anything," she said, slapping me on the back.
Nestor and Benigno seemed uncomfortable with Josefina's antics. Pablito
was delighted.
There was a look of admiration in his eyes. He shook his head and
clicked his tongue as if he
could not believe such grace.
"Let's go to the house," Josefina urged us. "I'll tell you all kinds of
things there."
I said that we should wait for la Gorda and Lydia; besides, it was
still too early to bother the
charming lady who lived there. Pablito said that in the course of his
carpentry business he had
been in the town and knew a house where a family prepared food for
transient people. Josefina
did not want to wait; for her, it was either going to the house or
going to eat. I opted for having
breakfast and told Rosa to go into the church to get la Gorda and
Lydia, but Benigno gallantly
volunteered to wait for them and take them to the breakfast place.
Apparently he too knew where
the place was.
Pablito did not take us directly there. Instead, at my request, we made
a long detour. There
was an old bridge at the edge of town that I wanted to examine. I had
seen it from my car the day
I had come with la Gorda. Its structure seemed to be colonial. We went
out on the bridge and then
stopped abruptly in the middle of it. I asked a man who was standing
there if the bridge was very
old. He said that he had seen it all his life and he was over fifty. I
thought that the bridge held a
unique fascination for me alone, but watching the others, I had to
conclude that they too had been
affected by it. Nestor and Rosa were panting, out of breath. Pablito
was holding on to Josefina;
she in turn was holding on to me.
"Do you remember anything, Josefina?" I asked.
"That devil Silvio Manuel is on the other side of this bridge," she
said, pointing to the other
end, some thirty feet away.
I looked Rosa in the eyes. She nodded her head affirmatively and
whispered that she had once
crossed that bridge in great fear and that something had been waiting
to devour her at the other
end.
The two men were no help. They looked at me, bewildered. Each said that
he was afraid for
no reason. I had to agree with them. I felt I would not dare cross that
bridge at night for all the
money in the world. I did not know why.
47
"What else do you remember, Josefina?" I asked.
"My body is very frightened now," she said. "I can't remember anything
else. That devil Silvio
Manuel is always in the darkness. Ask Rosa."
With a movement of my head, I invited Rosa to talk. She nodded
affirmatively three or four
times but could not vocalize her words. The tension I myself was
experiencing was uncalled for,
yet real. All of us were standing on that bridge, midway across,
incapable of taking one more step
in the direction Josefina had pointed. At last Josefina took the
initiative and turned around. We
walked back to the center of town. Pablito guided us then to a large
house. La Gorda, Lydia, and
Benigno were already eating; they had even ordered food for us. I was
not hungry. Pablito,
Nestor, and Rosa were in a daze; Josefina ate heartily. There was an
ominous silence at the table.
Everybody avoided my eyes when I tried to start a conversation.
After breakfast we walked to the house. No one said a word. I knocked
and when the lady
came out I explained to her that I wanted to show her house to my
friends. She hesitated for a
moment. La Gorda gave her some money and apologized for inconveniencing
her.
Josefina led us directly to the back. I had not seen that part of the
house when I was there
before. There was a cobbled courtyard with rooms arranged around it.
Bulky farming equipment
was stored away in the roofed corridors. I had the feeling I had seen
that courtyard when there
was no clutter in it. There were eight rooms, two on each of the four
sides of the courtyard.
Nestor, Pablito, and Benigno seemed to be on the brink of getting
physically ill. La Gorda was
perspiring profusely. She sat down with Josefina in an alcove in one of
the walls, while Lydia and
Rosa went inside one of the rooms. Suddenly Nestor seemed to have an
urge to find something
and disappeared into another of those rooms. So did Pablito and Benigno.
I was left alone with the lady. I wanted to talk to her, ask her
questions, see if she knew Silvio
Manuel, but I could not muster the energy to talk. My stomach was in
knots. My hands were
dripping perspiration. What oppressed me was an intangible sadness, a
longing for something not
present, unformulated.
I could not stand it. I was about to say goodbye to the lady and walk
out of the house when la
Gorda came to my side. She whispered that we should sit down in a large
room off a hall separate
from the courtyard. The room was visible from where we were standing.
We went there and
stepped inside. It was a very large, empty room with a high beamed
ceiling, dark but airy.
La Gorda called everyone to the room. The lady just looked at us but
did not come in herself.
Everyone seemed to know precisely where to sit. The Genaros sat to the
right of the door, on one
side of the room, and la Gorda and the three little sisters sat to the
left, on the other side. They sat
close to the walls. Although I would have liked to sit next to la
Gorda, I sat near the center of the
room. The place seemed right to me. I did not know why, but an ulterior
order seemed to have
determined our places.
While I sat there, a wave of strange feelings rolled over me. I was
passive and relaxed. I
fancied myself to be like a moving picture screen on which alien
feelings of sadness and longing
were being projected. But there was nothing I could recognize as a
precise memory. We stayed in
that room for over an hour. Toward the end I felt I was about to
uncover the source of the
unearthly sadness that was making me weep almost without control. But
then, as involuntarily as
we had sat there, we stood up and left the house. We did not even thank
the lady or say goodbye
to her.
We congregated in the plaza. La Gorda stated right away that because
she was formless she
was still in charge. She said that she was taking this stand because of
conclusions she had reached
in Silvio Manuel's house. La Gorda seemed to be waiting for comments.
The silence of the others
was unbearable to me. I finally had to say something.
48
"What are the conclusions you reached in that house, Gorda?" I asked.
"I think we all know what they are," she replied in a haughty tone.
"We don't know that," I said. "Nobody has said anything yet."
"We don't have to talk, we know," la Gorda said.
I insisted that I could not take such an important event for granted.
We needed to talk about
our feelings. As far as I was concerned, all I had gotten out of it was
a devastating sense of
sadness and despair.
"The Nagual Juan Matus was right," la Gorda said. "We had to sit on
that place of power to be
free. I am free now. I don't know how it happened but something was
lifted off me as I sat there."
The three women agreed with her. The three men did not. Nestor said
that he had been about
to remember actual faces, but that no matter how hard he had tried to
clear his view, something
thwarted him. All he had experienced was a sense of longing and sadness
at finding himself still
in the world. Pablito and Benigno said more or less the same thing.
"See what I mean, Gorda?" I said.
She seemed displeased; she puffed up as I had never seen her. Or had I
seen her all puffed-up
before, somewhere? She harangued the group. I could not pay attention
to what she was saying. I
was immersed in a memory that was formless, but almost within my grasp.
To keep it going it
seemed I needed a continuous flow from la Gorda. I was fixed on the
sound of her voice, her
anger. At a certain moment, when she was becoming more subdued, I
yelled at her that she was
bossy. She got truly upset. I watched her for a while. I was
remembering another Gorda, another
time; an angry, fat Gorda, pounding her fists on my chest. I remembered
laughing at seeing her
angry, humoring her like a child. The memory ended the moment la
Gorda's voice stopped. She
seemed to have realized what I was doing.
I addressed all of them and told them that we were in a precarious
position - something
unknown was looming over us.
"It's not looming over us," la Gorda said dryly. "It's hit us already.
And I think you know what
it is."
"I don't, and I think I'm also speaking for the rest of the men," I
said.
The three Genaros assented with a nod.
"We have lived in that house, while we were on the left side," la Gorda
explained. "I used to
sit in that alcove to cry because I couldn't figure out what to do. I
think if I could have stayed in
that room a bit longer today, I would've remembered it all. But
something pushed me out of
there. I also used to sit in that room when there were more people in
there. I couldn't remember
their faces, though. Yet other things became clear as I sat there
today. I'm formless. Things come
to me, good and bad. I, for instance, picked up my old arrogance and my
desire to brood. But I
also picked up other things, good things."
"Me too," Lydia said in a raspy voice.
"What are the good things?" I asked.
"I think I'm wrong in hating you," Lydia said. "My hatred will keep me
from flying away.
They told me that in that room, the men there and the women."
"What men and what women?" Nestor asked in a tone of fright.
"I was there when they were there, that's all I know," Lydia said. "You
also were there. All of
us were there."
"Who were those men and women, Lydia?" I asked.
"I was there when they were there, that's all I know," she repeated.
"How about you, Gorda?" I asked.
"I've told you already that I can't remember any faces or anything
specific," she said. "But I
49
know one thing: whatever we did in that house was on the left side. We
crossed, or somebody
made us cross, over the parallel lines. The weird memories we have come
from that time, from
that world."
Without any verbal agreement, we left the plaza and headed for the
bridge. La Gorda and
Lydia ran ahead of us. When we got there we found both of them standing
exactly where we
ourselves had stopped earlier.
"Silvio Manuel is the darkness," la Gorda whispered to me, her eyes
fixed on the other end of
the bridge.
Lydia was shaking. She also tried to talk to me. I could not understand
what she was
mouthing.
I pulled everyone back away from the bridge. I thought that perhaps if
we could piece together
what we knew about that place, we might have a composite that would
help us understand our
dilemma.
We sat on the ground a few yards away from the bridge. There were lots
of people milling
around but no one paid any attention to us.
"Who's Silvio Manuel, Gorda?" I asked.
"I never heard the name until now," she said. "I don't know the man,
yet I know him.
Something like waves came upon me when I heard that name. Josefina told
me the name when
we were in the house. From that moment on, things have started to come
to my mind and to my
mouth, just like Josefina. I never thought I would live to find myself
being like Josefina."
"Why did you say that Silvio Manuel is the darkness?" I asked.
"I have no idea," she said. "Yet all of us here know that that is the
truth."
She urged the women to speak up. No one uttered a word. I picked on
Rosa. She had been
about to say something three or four times. I accused her of holding
out on us. Her little body
convulsed.
"We crossed this bridge and Silvio Manuel waited for us at the other
end," she said in a voice
barely audible. "I went last. When he devoured the others I heard their
screams. I wanted to run
away but the devil Silvio Manuel was at both ends of the bridge. There
was no way to escape."
La Gorda, Lydia, and Josefina agreed. I asked whether it was just a
feeling that they had had
or an actual moment-to-moment memory of something. La Gorda said that
for her it had been
exactly as Rosa had described it, a moment-to-moment memory. The other
two agreed with her.
I wondered aloud what had happened with the people who lived around the
bridge. If the
women were screaming as Rosa said they were, the passersby must have
heard them; screaming
would have caused a commotion. For a moment I felt that the whole town
must have collaborated
in some plot. A chill ran through me. I turned to Nestor and bluntly
expressed the full scope of
my fear.
Nestor said that the Nagual Juan Matus and Genaro were indeed warriors
of supreme
accomplishment and as such they were solitary beings. Their contacts
with people were one-toone.
There was no possibility that the entire town or even the people who
lived around the bridge
were in collusion with them. For that to happen, Nestor said, all those
people would have to be
warriors, a most unlikely possibility. Josefina began to circle me,
looking me up and down with a
sneer.
"You certainly have gall," she said. "Pretending that you don't know
anything, when you were
here yourself. You brought us here! You pushed us onto this bridge!"
The eyes of the women became menacing. I turned to Nestor for
assistance.
"I don't remember a thing," he said. "This place scares me, that's all
I know."
Turning to Nestor was an excellent maneuver on my part. The women
lashed out at him.
50
"Of course you remember!" Josefina yelled. "All of us were here. What
kind of stupid ass are
you?"
My inquiry required a sense of order. I moved them away from the
bridge. I thought that,
being the active persons they were, they would find it more relaxing to
stroll and talk things out,
rather than sitting, as I would have preferred.
As we walked, the women's anger vanished as quickly as it had come.
Lydia and Josefina
became even more talkative. They stated over and over the sense they
had had that Silvio Manuel
was awesome. Nevertheless, neither of them could remember being
physically hurt; they only
remembered being paralyzed by fear. Rosa did not say a word, but
gestured her agreement with
everything the others said. I asked them if it had been night when they
tried to cross the bridge.
Both Lydia and Josefina said that it was daytime. Rosa cleared her
throat and whispered that it
was at night. La Gorda clarified the discrepancy, explaining that it
had been the morning twilight,
or just before.
We reached the end of a short street and automatically turned back
toward the bridge.
"It's simplicity itself," la Gorda said suddenly, as if she had just
thought it through. "We were
crossing, or rather Silvio Manuel was making us cross, the parallel
lines. That bridge is a power
spot, a hole in this world, a door to the other. We went through it. It
must have hurt us to go
through, because my body is scared. Silvio Manuel was waiting for us on
the other side. None of
us remembers his face, because Silvio Manuel is the darkness and never
would he show his face.
We could see only his eyes."
"One eye," Rosa said quietly, and looked away.
"Everyone here, including you," la Gorda said to me, "knows that Silvio
Manuel's face is in
darkness. One could only hear his voice - soft, like muffled coughing."
La Gorda stopped talking and began scrutinizing me in a way that made
me feel selfconscious.
Her eyes were cagey; she gave me the impression that she was holding
back
something she knew. I asked her. She denied it, but she admitted having
scores of feelings with
no foundation that she did not care to explain. I urged and then
demanded that the women make
an effort to recollect what had happened to them on the other side of
that bridge. Each of them
could remember only hearing the screams of the others.
The three Genaros remained outside our discussion. I asked Nestor if he
had any idea of what
had happened. His somber answer was that all of it was beyond his
understanding.
I came then to a quick decision. It seemed to me that the only avenue
open for us was to cross
that bridge. I rallied them to walk back to the bridge and go over it
as a group. The men agreed
instantaneously, the women did not. After exhausting all my reasonings
I finally had to push and
drag Lydia, Rosa, and Josefina. La Gorda was reluctant to go but seemed
intrigued by the
prospect. She moved along without helping me with the women, and so did
the Genaros; they
giggled nervously at my efforts to herd the little sisters, but they
did not move a finger to help.
We walked up to the point where we had stopped earlier. I felt there
that I was suddenly too weak
to hold the three women. I yelled at la Gorda to help. She made a
halfhearted attempt to catch
Lydia as the group lost its cohesion and everyone of them except la
Gorda scrambled, stumping
and puffing, to the safety of the street. La Gorda and I stayed as if
we were glued to that bridge,
incapable of going forward and begrudging having to retreat.
La Gorda whispered in my ear that I should not be afraid at all because
it had actually been I
who had been waiting for them on the other side. She added that she was
convinced I knew I was
Silvio Manuel's helper but that I did not dare to reveal it to anyone.
Right then a fury beyond my control shook my body. I felt that la Gorda
had no business
making those remarks or having those feelings. I grabbed her by the
hair and twirled her around.
I caught myself at the apex of my wrath and stopped. I apologized and
hugged her. A sober
51
thought came to my rescue. I said to her that being a leader was
getting on my nerves; the tension
was becoming more and more acute as we proceeded. She did not agree
with me. She held on
steadfastly to her interpretation that Silvio Manuel and I were utterly
close, and that upon being
reminded of my master I had reacted with anger. It was lucky that she
had been entrusted to my
care, she said; otherwise I probably would have thrown her off the
bridge.
We turned back. The rest of them were safely off the bridge, staring at
us with unmistakable
fear. A very peculiar state of timelessness seemed to prevail. There
were no people around. We
must have been on that bridge for at least five minutes and not a
single person had crossed it or
even come in sight. Then all of a sudden people were moving around as
on any thoroughfare
during the busy hours.
Without a word, we walked back to the plaza. We were dangerously weak.
I had a vague
desire to remain in the town a bit longer, but we got in the car and
drove east, toward the Atlantic
coast. Nestor and I took turns driving, stopping only for gasoline and
to eat, until we reached
Veracruz. That city was neutral ground for us. I had been there only
once; none of the others had
ever been there. La Gorda believed that such an unknown city was the
proper place to shed their
old wrappings. We checked into a hotel and there they proceeded to rip
their old clothes to
shreds. The excitation of a new city did wonders for their morale and
their feeling of well-being.
Our next stop was Mexico City. We stayed at a hotel by the Alameda Park
where don Juan
and I had once stayed. For two days we were perfect tourists. We
shopped and visited as many
tourist spots as possible. The women looked simply stunning. Benigno
bought a camera in a
pawn shop. He took four hundred and twenty-five shots without any film.
At one place, while we
were admiring the stupendous mosaics on the walls, a security guard
asked me where those
gorgeous foreign women were from. He assumed I was a tourist guide. I
told him that they were
from Sri Lanka. He believed me and marveled at the fact that they
almost looked Mexican.
The following day at ten o'clock in the morning we were at the airline
office into which don
Juan had once pushed me. When he shoved me I had gone in through one
door and come out
through another, not to the street, as I should have, but to a market
at least a mile away, where I
had watched the activities of the people there.
La Gorda speculated that the airline office was also, like that bridge,
a power spot, a door to
cross from one parallel line to the other. She said that evidently the
Nagual had pushed me
through that opening but I got caught midway between the two worlds, in
between the lines; thus
I had watched the activity in the market without being part of it. She
said that the Nagual, of
course, had intended to push me all the way through, but my willfulness
thwarted him and I
ended back on the line I came from, this world.
We walked from the airline office to the market and from there to the
Alameda Park, where
don Juan and I had sat after our experience at the office. I had been
in that park with don Juan
many times. I felt it was the most appropriate place to talk about the
course of our future actions.
It was my intention to summarize everything we had done in order to let
the power of that
place decide what our next step would be. After our deliberate attempt
at crossing the bridge, I
had tried unsuccessfully to think out a way to handle my companions as
a group. We sat on some
stone steps and I started off with the idea that for me knowledge was
fused with words. I told
them that it was my earnest belief that if an event or experience was
not formulated into a
concept, it was condemned to dissipate; I asked them therefore to give
me their individual
assessments of our situation.
Pablito was the first one to talk. I found that odd, since he had been
extraordinarily quiet up
until now. He apologized because what he was going to say was not
something he had
remembered or felt but a conclusion based on everything he knew. He
said that he saw no
52
problem in understanding what the women said had happened on that
bridge. It had been, Pablito
maintained, a matter of being compelled to cross from the right side,
the tonal, to the left side, the
nagual. What had scared everyone was the fact that someone else was in
control, forcing the
crossing. He saw no problem either in accepting that I had been the one
who had then helped
Silvio Manuel. He backed up his conclusion with the statement that only
two days earlier he had
seen me doing the same thing, pushing everyone onto the bridge. That
time I had had no one to
help me on the other side, no Silvio Manuel to pull them.
I tried to change the topic and began to explain to them that to forget
the way we had forgotten
was called amnesia. The little I knew about amnesia was not enough to
shed any light on our
case, but enough to make me believe that we could not forget as if on
command. I told them that
someone, possibly don Juan, must have done something unfathomable to
us. I wanted to find out
exactly what that had been.
Pablito insisted that it was important for me to understand that it was
I who had been in
cahoots with Silvio Manuel. He intimated then that Lydia and Josefina
had talked to him about
the role I had played in forcing them to cross the parallel lines.
I did not feel comfortable discussing that subject. I commented that I
had never heard about
the parallel lines until the day I spoke with dona Soledad; yet I had
had no qualms about
immediately adopting the idea. I told them that I knew in a flash what
she meant. I even became
convinced I had crossed them myself when I thought I remembered her.
Every one of the others,
with the exception of la Gorda, said that the first time they had heard
about parallel lines was
when I spoke of them. La Gorda said that she had first learned about
them from dona Soledad,
just before I did.
Pablito made an attempt to talk about my relationship with Silvio
Manuel. I interrupted him. I
said that while all of us were at the bridge trying to cross it, I had
failed to recognize that I - and
presumably all of them - had entered into a state of non-ordinary
reality. I only became aware of
the change when I realized that there were no other people on the
bridge. Only the eight of us had
stood there. It had been a clear day, but suddenly the skies became
cloudy and the light of the
midmorning turned to dusk. I had been so busy with my fears and
personalistic interpretations
then that I had failed to notice the awesome change. When we retreated
from the bridge I
perceived that other people were again walking around. But what had
happened to them when we
were attempting our crossing?
La Gorda and the rest of them had not noticed anything - in fact they
had not been aware of
any changes until the very moment I described them. All of them stared
at me with a mixture of
annoyance and fear. Pablito again took the lead and accused me of
trying to railroad them into
something they did not want. He was not specific about what that might
be, but his eloquence
was enough to rally the others behind him. Suddenly I had a horde of
angry sorcerers on me. It
took me a long time to explain my need to examine from every possible
point of view something
so strange and engulfing as our experience on the bridge. They finally
calmed down, not so much
because they were convinced, but from emotional fatigue. All of them,
la Gorda included, had
vehemently supported Pablito's stand.
Nestor advanced another line of reasoning. He suggested that I was
possibly an unwilling
envoy who did not fully realize the scope of my actions. He added that
he could not bring himself
to believe, as the others did, that I was aware that I had been left
with the task of misleading
them. He felt that I did not really know that I was leading them to
their destruction, yet I was
doing just that. He thought that there were two ways of crossing the
parallel lines, one by means
of someone else's power, and the other by one's own power. His final
conclusion was that Silvio
Manuel had made them cross by frightening them so intensely that some
of them did not even
53
remember having done it. The task left for them to accomplish was to
cross on their own power;
mine was to thwart them.
Benigno spoke then. He said that in his opinion the last thing don Juan
did to the male
apprentices was to help us cross the parallel lines by making us jump
into an abyss. Benigno
believed that we already had a great deal of knowledge about the
crossing but that it was not yet
time to accomplish it again. At the bridge they were incapable of
taking one more step because
the time was not right. They were correct, therefore, in believing that
I had tried to destroy them
by forcing them to cross. He thought that going over the parallel lines
in full awareness meant a
final step for all of them, a step to be taken only when they were
ready to disappear from this
earth.
Lydia faced me next. She did not make any assessments but challenged me
to remember how I
had first lured her to the bridge. She blatantly stated that I was not
the Nagual Juan Matus's
apprentice but Silvio Manuel's; that Silvio Manuel and I had devoured
each other's bodies.
I had another attack of rage, as with la Gorda on the bridge. I caught
myself in time. A logical
thought calmed me. I said to myself over and over that I was interested
in analyses.
I explained to Lydia that it was useless to taunt me like that. She did
not want to stop. She
yelled that Silvio Manuel was my master and that this was the reason I
was not part of them at all.
Rosa added that Silvio Manuel gave me everything I was.
I questioned Rosa's choice of words. I told her that she should have
said that Silvio Manuel
gave me everything I had. She defended her wording. Silvio Manuel had
given me what I was.
Even la Gorda backed her up and said that she remembered a time when I
had gotten so ill that I
had no resources left, everything in me was exhausted; it was then that
Silvio Manuel had taken
over and pumped new life into my body. La Gorda said that I was indeed
better off knowing my
true origins than proceeding, as I had done so far, on the assumption
that it was the Nagual Juan
Matus who had helped me. She insisted that I was fixed on the Nagual
because of his predilection
for words. Silvio Manuel, on the other hand, was the silent darkness.
She explained that in order
to follow him I would need to cross the parallel lines. But to follow
the Nagual Juan Matus, all I
needed to do was to talk about him.
What they were saying was nothing but nonsense to me. I was about to
make what I thought
was a very good point about it when my line of reasoning became
literally scrambled. I could not
think what my point had been, although only a second before, it was
clarity itself. Instead, a most
curious memory beset me. It was not a feeling of something, but the
actual hard memory of an
event. I remembered that once I was with don Juan and another man whose
face I could not
remember. The three of us were talking about something I was perceiving
as a feature of the
world. It was three or four yards to my right and it was an
inconceivable bank of yellowish fog
that, as far as I could tell, divided the world in two. It went from
the ground up to the sky, to
infinity. While I talked to the two men, the half of the world to my
left was intact and the half to
my right was veiled in fog. I remembered that I had oriented myself
with the aid of landmarks
and realized that the axis of the bank of fog went from east to west.
Everything to the north of
that line was the world as I knew it. I remembered asking don Juan what
had happened to the
world south of the line. Don Juan made me turn a few degrees to my
right, and I saw that the wall
of fog moved as I turned my head. The world was divided in two at a
level my intellect could not
comprehend. The division seemed real, but the boundary was not on a
physical plane; it had to be
somehow in myself. Or was it?
There was still one more facet to this memory. The other man said that
it was a great
accomplishment to divide the world in two, but it was an even greater
accomplishment when a
warrior had the serenity and control to stop the rotation of that wall.
He said that the wall was not
54
inside us; it was certainly out in the world, dividing it in two, and
rotating when we moved our
heads, as if it were stuck to our right temples. The great
accomplishment of keeping the wall from
turning enabled the warrior to face the wall and gave him the power to
go through it anytime he
so desired.
When I told the apprentices what I had just remembered, the women were
convinced that the
other man was Silvio Manuel. Josefina, as a connoisseur of the wall of
fog, explained that the
advantage Eligio had over everyone else was his capacity to make the
wall stand still so he could
go through it at will. She added that it is easier to pierce the wall
of fog in dreaming because then
it does not move.
La Gorda seemed to be touched by a series of perhaps painful memories.
Her body jumped
involuntarily until finally she exploded into words. She said that it
was no longer possible for her
to deny the fact that I was Silvio Manuel's helper. The Nagual himself
had warned her that I
would enslave her if she was not careful. Even Soledad had told her to
watch me because my
spirit took prisoners and kept them as servants, a thing only Silvio
Manuel would do. He had
enslaved me and I in turn would enslave anyone who came close to me.
She asserted that she had
lived under my spell up to the moment she sat in that room in Silvio
Manuel's house, when
something was suddenly lifted off her shoulders.
I stood up and literally staggered under the impact of la Gorda's
words. There was a vacuum
in my stomach. I had been convinced that I could count on her for
support under any conditions. I
felt betrayed. I thought it would be appropriate to let them know my
feelings, but a sense of
sobriety came to my rescue. I told them instead that it had been my
dispassionate conclusion, as a
warrior, that don Juan had changed the course of my life for the
better. I had assessed over and
over what he had done to me and the conclusion had always been the
same. He had brought me
freedom. Freedom was all I knew, all I could bring to anyone who might
come to me.
Nestor made a gesture of solidarity with me. He exhorted the women to
abandon their
animosity toward me. He looked at me with the eyes of one who does not
understand but wants
to. He said that I did not belong with them, that I was indeed a
solitary bird. They had needed me
for a moment in order to break their boundaries of affection and
routine. Now that they were free,
the sky was their limit. To remain with me would doubtlessly be
pleasant but deadly for them.
He seemed to be deeply moved. He came to my side and put his hand on my
shoulder. He said
that he had the feeling we were not going to see each other ever again
on this earth. He regretted
that we were going to part like petty people, bickering, complaining,
accusing. He told me that
speaking on behalf of the others, but not for himself, he was going to
ask me to leave, for we had
no more possibilities in being together. He added that he had laughed
at la Gorda for telling us
about the snake we had formed. He had changed his mind and no longer
found the idea
ridiculous. It had been our last opportunity to succeed as a group.
Don Juan had taught me to accept my fate in humbleness.
"The course of a warrior's destiny is unalterable," he once said to me.
"The challenge is how
far he can go within those rigid bounds, how impeccable he can be
within those rigid bounds. If
there are obstacles in his path, the warrior strives impeccably to
overcome them. If he finds
unbearable hardship and pain on his path, he weeps, but all his tears
put together could not move
the line of his destiny the breadth of one hair."
My original decision to let the power of that place point out our next
step had been correct. I
stood up. The others turned their heads away. La Gorda came to my side
and said, as if nothing
had happened, that I should leave and that she would catch up with me
and join me at a later
time. I wanted to retort that I saw no reason for her to join me. She
had chosen to join the others.
She seemed to read my feeling of having been betrayed. She calmly
assured me that we had to
55
fulfill our fate together as warriors and not as the petty people we
were.
56
Part 2: The Art of
Dreaming
57
6. Losing The Human Form
A few months later, after helping everyone to resettle in different
parts of Mexico, la Gorda
took up residence in Arizona. We began then to unravel the strangest
and most engulfing part of
our apprenticeship. At first our relationship was rather strained. It
was very difficult for me to
overcome my feelings about the way we had parted in the Alameda Park.
Although la Gorda
knew the whereabouts of the others, she never said anything to me. She
felt that it would have
been superfluous for me to know about their activities.
On the surface everything seemed to be all right between la Gorda and
me. Nevertheless, I
held a bitter resentment toward her for siding with the others against
me. I did not express it but it
was always there. I helped her and did everything for her as if nothing
had happened, but that
entered under the heading of impeccability. It was my duty; to fulfill
it, I would have gladly gone
to my death. I purposely absorbed myself in guiding and coaching her in
the intricacies of modern
city living; she was even learning English. Her progress was phenomenal.
Three months went by almost unnoticed. But one day, while I was in Los
Angeles, I woke up
in the early morning hours with an unbearable pressure in my head. It
was not a headache; it was
rather a very intense weight in my ears. I felt it also on my eyelids
and the roof of my mouth. I
knew I was feverish, but the heat was only in my head. I made a feeble
attempt to sit up. The
thought crossed my mind that I was having a stroke. My first reaction
was to call for help, but
somehow I calmed down and tried to let go of my fear. After a while the
pressure in my head
began to diminish but it also began to shift to my throat. I gasped for
air, gagging and coughing
for some time; then the pressure moved slowly to my chest, then to my
stomach, to my groin, to
my legs, and to my feet before it finally left my body.
Whatever had happened to me had taken about two hours to unfold. During
the course of
those two grueling hours it was as if something inside my body was
actually moving downward,
moving out of me. I fancied it to be rolling up like a carpet. Another
image that occurred to me
was of a blob moving inside the cavity of my body. I discarded that
image in favor of the first,
because the feeling was of something being coiled within itself. Just
like a carpet being rolled up,
it became heavier, thus more painful, as it went down. The two areas
where the pain became
excruciating were my knees and my feet, especially my right foot, which
remained hot for thirtyfive
minutes after all the pain and pressure had vanished.
La Gorda, upon hearing my report, said that this time for certain I had
lost my human form,
that I had dropped all my shields, or most of them. She was right.
Without knowing how or even
realizing what had happened, I found myself in a most unfamiliar state.
I felt detached, unbiased.
It did not matter what la Gorda had done to me. It was not that I had
forgiven her for her
reproachable behavior with me; it was as if there had never been any
betrayal. There was no overt
or covert rancor left in me, for la Gorda or for anyone else. What I
felt was not a willed
indifference, or negligence to act; neither was it alienation or even
the desire to be alone. It was
rather an alien feeling of aloofness, a capability of immersing myself
in the moment and having
no thoughts whatever about anything else. People's actions no longer
affected me, for I had no
more expectations of any kind. A strange peace had become the ruling
force in my life. I felt I
had somehow adopted one of the concepts of a warrior's life -
detachment. La Gorda said that I
had done more than adopt it; I had actually embodied it.
Don Juan and I had had long discussions on the possibility that someday
I would do just that.
He had said that detachment did not automatically mean wisdom, but that
it was, nonetheless, an
advantage because it allowed the warrior to pause momentarily to
reassess situations, to
reconsider positions. In order to use that extra moment consistently
and correctly, however, he
said that a warrior had to struggle unyieldingly for a lifetime.
58
I had despaired that I would ever experience that feeling. As far as I
could determine, there
was no way to improvise it. It had been useless for me to think about
its benefits, or to reason out
the possibilities of its advent. During the years I knew don Juan I had
certainly experienced a
steady lessening of personal ties with the world, but that had taken
place on an intellectual plane;
in my everyday life I was unchanged until the moment I lost my human
form.
I speculated with la Gorda that the concept of losing the human form
refers to a bodily
condition that besets the apprentice upon his reaching a certain
threshold in the course of
training. Be that as it may, the end result of losing the human form
for la Gorda and myself,
oddly enough, was not only the sought-after and coveted sense of
detachment, but also the
fulfillment of our elusive task of remembering. And again in this case,
the intellect played a
minimal part.
One night la Gorda and I were discussing a movie. She had gone to see
an X-rated movie and
I was eager to hear her description of it. She had not liked it at all.
She maintained that it was a
weakening experience because being a warrior entailed leading an
austere life in total celibacy,
like the Nagual Juan Matus.
I told her that I knew for a fact that don Juan liked women and was not
celibate, and that I
found that delightful.
''You're insane!" she exclaimed with a tinge of amusement in her voice.
"The Nagual was a
perfect warrior. He was not caught up in any webs of sensuality."
She wanted to know why I thought don Juan was not celibate. I told her
about an incident that
had taken place in Arizona at the beginning of my apprenticeship. I was
resting at don Juan's
house one day after an exhausting hike. Don Juan appeared to be
strangely nervous. He kept
getting up to look out the door. He seemed to be waiting for someone.
Then, quite abruptly, he
told me that a car had just come around the bend in the road and was
heading for the house. He
said that it was a girl, a friend of his, who was bringing him some
blankets. I had never seen don
Juan embarrassed, and I felt terribly sad to see him so upset that he
did not know what to do. I
thought that he did not want me to meet the girl. I suggested that I
might hide, but there was no
place to conceal myself in the room, so he made me lie down on the
floor and covered me with a
straw mat. I heard the sound of a car motor being turned off and then,
through the slits in the mat,
I saw a girl standing at the door. She was tall, slender, and very
young. I thought she was
beautiful. Don Juan was saying something to her in a low, intimate
voice. Then he turned and
pointed at me.
"Carlos is hiding under the mat," he said to the girl in a loud clear
voice. "Say hello to him."
The girl waved at me and said hello with the friendliest smile. I felt
stupid and angry at don
Juan for putting me in that embarrassing position. It seemed obvious to
me that he was trying to
alleviate his nervousness, or even worse, that he was showing off in
front of me.
When the girl left I angrily asked for an explanation. He candidly said
that he had gotten
carried away because my feet were showing and he did not know what else
to do. When I heard
this, his whole maneuver became clear; he had been showing off his
young friend to me. I could
not possibly have had my feet uncovered because they were tucked under
my thighs. I laughed
knowingly and don Juan felt obligated to explain that he liked women,
especially that girl.
I never forgot the incident. Don Juan never discussed it. Whenever I
brought it up he always
made me stop. I wondered almost obsessively about that young woman. I
had hopes that someday
she might look me up after reading my books.
La Gorda had become very agitated. She was pacing back and forth in the
room while I talked.
She was about to weep. I imagined all sorts of intricate networks of
relationships that might be at
stake. I thought la Gorda was possessive and was reacting like a woman
threatened by another
59
woman.
"Are you jealous, Gorda:" I asked.
"Don't be stupid," she said angrily. "I'm a formless warrior. I've no
envy or jealousy left in
me."
I brought up something that the Genaros had told me, that la Gorda was
the Nagual's woman.
Her voice became barely audible.
"I think I was," she said, and with a vague look, she sat on her bed.
"I have a feeling that I
was. I don't know how, though. In this life, the Nagual Juan Matus was
to me what he was to you.
He was not a man. He was the Nagual. He had no interest in sex."
I assured her that I had heard don Juan express his liking for that
girl.
"Did he say that he had sex with her?" la Gorda asked.
"No, he didn't, but it was obvious from the way he talked," I said.
"You would like the Nagual to be like you, wouldn't you?" she asked
with a sneer. "The
Nagual was an impeccable warrior."
I thought I was right and did not need to review my opinion. Just to
humor la Gorda, I said
that perhaps the young woman was don Juan's apprentice if not his
mistress.
There was a long pause. What I had said had a disturbing effect on me.
Until that moment I
had never thought about such a possibility. I had been locked into a
prejudgment, allowing
myself no room for revision.
La Gorda asked me to describe the young woman. I could not do it. I had
not really looked at
her features. I had been too annoyed, too embarrassed, to examine her
in detail. She also seemed
to have been struck by the awkwardness of the situation and had hurried
out of the house.
La Gorda said that without any logical reason she felt that the young
woman was a key figure
in the Nagual's life. Her statement led us to talking about don Juan's
known friends. We struggled
for hours trying to piece together all the information we had about his
associates. I told her about
the different times don Juan had taken me to participate in peyote
ceremonies. I described
everyone who was there. She recognized none of them. I realized then
that I might know more
people associated with don Juan than she did. But something I had said
triggered her recollection
of a time when she had seen a young woman driving the Nagual and Genaro
in a small white car.
The woman let the two men off at the door of la Gorda's house, and she
stared at la Gorda before
she drove away. La Gorda thought that the young woman was someone who
had given the
Nagual and Genaro a lift. I remembered then that I had gotten up from
under the straw mat at don
Juan's house just in time to see a white Volkswagen driving away.
I mentioned one more incident involving another of don Juan's friends,
a man who had given
me some peyote plants once in the market of a city in northern Mexico.
He had also obsessed me
for years. His name was Vicente. Upon hearing that name la Gorda's body
reacted as if a nerve
had been touched. Her voice became shrill. She asked me to repeat the
name and describe the
man. Again, I could not come up with any description. I had seen the
man only once, for a few
minutes, more than ten years before.
La Gorda and I went through a period of almost being angry, not at one
another but at
whatever was keeping us imprisoned.
The final incident that precipitated our full-fledged remembering came
one day when I had a
cold and was running a high fever. I had stayed in bed, dozing off and
on, with thoughts rambling
aimlessly in my mind. The melody of an old Mexican song had been
running through my head all
day. At one moment I was dreaming that someone was playing it on a
guitar. I complained about
the monotony of it, and whoever I was protesting to thrust the guitar
toward my stomach. I
jumped back to avoid being hit, and bumped my head on the wall and woke
up. It had not been a
60
vivid dream, only the tune had been haunting. I could not dispel the
sound of the guitar; it kept
running through my mind. I remained half awake, listening to the tune.
It seemed as if I were
entering into a state of dreaming - a complete and detailed dreaming
scene appeared in front of
my eyes. In the scene there was a young woman sitting next to me. I
could distinguish every
detail of her features. I did not know who she was, but seeing her
shocked me. I was fully awake
in one instant. The anxiety that that face created in me was so intense
that I got up and quite
automatically began to pace back and forth. I was perspiring profusely
and I dreaded to leave my
room. I could not call la Gorda for help either. She had gone back to
Mexico for a few days to see
Josefina. I tied a sheet around my waist to brace my midsection. It
helped to subdue some ripples
of nervous energy that went through me.
As I paced back and forth the image in my mind began to dissolve, not
into peaceful oblivion,
as I would have liked, but into an intricate, full-fledged memory. I
remembered that once I was
sitting on some sacks of wheat or barley stacked up in a grain bin. The
young woman was singing
the old Mexican song that had been running in my mind, while she played
a guitar. When I joked
about her playing, she nudged me in the ribs with the butt of the
guitar. There had been other
people sitting with me, la Gorda and two men. I knew those men very
well, but I still could not
remember who the young woman was. I tried but it seemed hopeless.
I lay down again drenched in a cold sweat. I wanted to rest for a
moment before I got out of
my soaked pajamas. As I rested my head on a high pillow, my memory
seemed to clear up further
and then I knew who the guitar player was. She was the Nagual woman;
the most important being
on earth for la Gorda and myself. She was the feminine analogue of the
Nagual man; not his wife
or his woman, but his counterpart. She had the serenity and command of
a true leader. Being a
woman, she nurtured us.
I did not dare to push my memory too far. I knew intuitively that I did
not have the strength to
withstand the full recollection. I stopped on the level of abstract
feelings. I knew that she was the
embodiment of the purest, most unbiased and profound affection. It
would be most appropriate to
say that la Gorda and I loved the Nagual woman more than life itself.
What on earth had
happened to us to have forgotten her?
That night lying on my bed I became so agitated that I feared for my
very life. I began to
chant some words which became a guiding force to me. And only when I
had calmed down did I
remember that the words I had said to myself over and over were also a
memory that had come
back to me that night; the memory of a formula, an incantation to pull
me through an upheaval,
such as the one I had experienced.
I am already given to the power that rules my fate.
And I cling to nothing, so I will have nothing to defend.
I have no thoughts, so I will see.
I fear nothing, so I will remember myself.
The formula had one more line, which at the time was incomprehensible
to me.
Detached and at ease,
I will dart past the Eagle to be free.
Being sick and feverish may have served as a cushion of sorts; it may
have been enough to
deviate the main impact of what I had done, or rather, of what had come
upon me, since I had not
61
intentionally done anything.
Up to that night, if my inventory of experience had been examined, I
could have accounted for
the continuity of my existence. The nebulous memories I had of la
Gorda, or the presentiment of
having lived in that house in the mountains of central Mexico were in a
way real threats to the
idea of my continuity, but nothing in comparison to remembering the
Nagual woman. Not so
much because of the emotions that the memory itself brought back, but
because I had forgotten
her; and not as one forgets a name or a tune. There had been nothing
about her in my mind prior
to that moment of revelation. Nothing! Then something came upon me, or
something fell off me,
and I found myself remembering a most important being who, from the
point of view of my
experiential self prior to that moment, 1 had never met.
I had to wait two more days for la Gorda's return before I could tell
her about my recollection.
The moment I described the Nagual woman la Gorda remembered her; her
awareness was
somehow dependent on mine.
"The girl I saw in the white car was the Nagual woman!" la Gorda
exclaimed. "She came back
to me and I couldn't remember her."
I heard the words and understood their meaning, but it took a long time
for my mind to focus
on what she had said. My attention wavered; it was as if a light was
actually placed in front of my
eyes and was being dimmed. I had the notion that if I did not stop the
dimming I would die.
Suddenly I felt a convulsion and I knew that I had put together two
pieces of myself that had
become separated; I realized that the young woman I had seen at don
Juan's house was the Nagual
woman.
In that moment of emotional upheaval la Gorda was no help to me. Her
mood was contagious.
She was weeping without restraint. The emotional shock of remembering
the Nagual woman had
been traumatic to her.
"How could I have forgotten her?" la Gorda sighed.
I caught a glint of suspicion in her eyes as she faced me.
"You had no idea that she existed, did you?" she asked.
Under any other conditions I would have thought that her question was
impertinent, insulting,
but I was wondering the same about her. It had occurred to me that she
might have known more
than she was revealing.
"No. I didn't," I said. "But how about you, Gorda? Did you know that
she existed?"
Her face had such a look of innocence and perplexity that my doubts
were dispelled.
"No," she replied. "Not until today. I know now for a fact that I used
to sit with her and the
Nagual Juan Matus on that bench in the plaza in Oaxaca. I always
remembered having done that,
and I remembered her features, but I thought I had dreamed it all. I
knew everything and yet I
didn't. But why did I think it was a dream?"
I had a moment of panic. Then I had the perfect physical certainty that
as she spoke a channel
opened somewhere in my body. Suddenly I knew that I also used to sit on
that bench with don
Juan and the Nagual woman. I remembered then a sensation I had
experienced on every one of
those occasions. It was a sense of physical contentment, happiness,
plenitude, that would be
impossible to imagine. I thought that don Juan and the Nagual woman
were perfect beings, and
that to be in their company was indeed my great fortune. Sitting on
that bench, flanked by the
most exquisite beings on earth, I experienced perhaps the epitome of my
human sentiments. One
time I told don Juan, and I meant it, that I wanted to die then, so as
to keep that feeling pure,
intact, free from disruption.
I told la Gorda about my memory. She said that she understood what I
meant. We were quiet
for a moment and then the thrust of our remembering swayed us
dangerously toward sadness,
62
even despair. I had to exert the most extraordinary control over my
emotions not to weep. La
Gorda was sobbing, covering her face with her forearm.
After a while we became more calm. La Gorda stared into my eyes. I knew
what she was
thinking. It was as if I could read her questions in her eyes. They
were the same questions that
had obsessed me for days. Who was the Nagual woman? Where had we met
her? Where did she
fit? Did the others know her too?
I was just about to voice my questions when la Gorda interrupted me.
"I really don't know," she said quickly, beating me to the question. "I
was counting on you to
tell me. I don't know why, but I feel that you can tell me what's what."
She was counting on me and I was counting on her. We laughed at the
irony of our situation. I
asked her to tell me everything she remembered about the Nagual woman.
La Gorda made efforts
to say something two or three times but seemed to be unable to organize
her thoughts.
"I really don't know where to start," she said. "I only know that I
loved her."
I told her that I had the same feeling. An unearthly sadness gripped me
every time I thought of
the Nagual woman. As I was talking my body began to shake.
"You and I loved her," la Gorda said. "I don't know why I'm saying
this, but I know that she
owned us."
I prodded her to explain that statement. She could not determine why
she had said it. She was
talking nervously, elaborating on her feelings. I could no longer pay
attention to her. I felt a
fluttering in my solar plexus. A vague memory of the Nagual woman
started to form. I urged la
Gorda to keep on talking, to repeat herself if she had nothing else to
say, but not to stop. The
sound of her voice seemed to act for me as a conduit into another
dimension, another kind of
time. It was as if blood was rushing through my body with an unusual
pressure. I felt a prickling
all over, and then I had an odd bodily memory. I knew in my body that
the Nagual woman was
the being who made the Nagual complete. She brought to the Nagual
peace, plenitude, a sense of
being protected, delivered.
I told la Gorda that I had the insight that the Nagual woman was don
Juan's partner. La Gorda
looked at me aghast. She slowly shook her head from side to side.
"She had nothing to do with the Nagual Juan Matus, you idiot," she said
with a tone of
ultimate authority. "She was for you. That's why you and I belonged to
her."
La Gorda and I stared into each other's eyes. I was certain that she
was involuntarily voicing
thoughts which rationally did not mean anything to her.
"What do you mean, she was for me, Gorda?" I asked after a long silence.
"She was your partner," she said. "You two were a team. And I was her
ward. And she
entrusted you to deliver me to her someday."
I begged la Gorda to tell me all she knew, but she did not seem to know
anything else. I felt
exhausted.
"Where did she go?" la Gorda said suddenly. "I just can't figure that
out. She was with you,
not with the Nagual. She should be here with us now."
She had then another attack of disbelief and fear. She accused me of
hiding the Nagual woman
in Los Angeles. I tried to ease her apprehensions. I surprised myself
by talking to la Gorda as if
she were a child. She listened to me with all the outward signs of
complete attention; her eyes,
however, were vacant, out of focus. It occurred to me then that she was
using the sound of my
voice just as I had used hers, as a conduit. I knew that she was also
aware of it. I kept on talking
until I had run out of things to say within the bounds of our topic.
Something else took place then,
and I found myself half listening to the sound of my own voice. I was
talking to la Gorda without
any volition on my part. Words that seemed to have been bottled up
inside me, now free, reached
63
indescribable levels of absurdity. I talked and talked until something
made me stop. I had
remembered that don Juan told the Nagual woman and me, on that bench in
Oaxaca, about a
particular human being whose presence had synthesized for him all that
he could aspire or expect
from human companionship. It was a woman who had been for him what the
Nagual woman was
for me, a partner, a counterpart. She left him, just as the Nagual
woman left me. His feelings for
her were unchanged and were rekindled by the melancholy that certain
poems evoked in him.
I also remembered that it was the Nagual woman who used to supply me
with books of
poetry. She kept stacks of them in the trunk of her car. It was at her
instigation that I read poems
to don Juan. Suddenly the physical memory of the Nagual woman sitting
with me on that bench
was so clear that I took an involuntary gasp of air, my chest swelled.
An oppressive sense of loss,
greater than any feeling I had ever had, took possession of me. I bent
over with a ripping pain in
my right shoulder blade. There was something else I knew, a memory
which part of me did not
want to release.
I became involved with whatever was left of my shield of
intellectuality, as the only means to
recover my equanimity. I said to myself over and over that la Gorda and
I had been operating all
along on two absolutely different planes. She remembered a great deal
more than I did, but she
was not inquisitive. She had not been trained to ask questions of
others or of herself. But then the
thought struck me that I was no better off; I still was as sloppy as
don Juan had once said I was. I
had never forgotten reading poetry to don Juan, and yet it had never
occurred to me to examine
the fact that I had never owned a book of Spanish poetry, nor did I
ever carry one in my car.
La Gorda brought me out of my ruminations. She was almost hysterical.
She shouted that she
had just figured out that the Nagual woman had to be somewhere very
near us. Just as we had
been left to find one another, the Nagual woman had been left to find
us. The force of her
reasoning almost convinced me. Something in me knew, nevertheless, that
it was not so. That
was the memory that was inside me, which I did not dare to bring out.
I wanted to start a debate with la Gorda, but there was no reason, my
shield of intellect and
words was insufficient to absorb the impact of remembering the Nagual
woman. Its effect was
staggering to me, more devastating than even the fear of dying.
"The Nagual woman is shipwrecked somewhere," la Gorda said meekly.
"She's probably
marooned and we're doing nothing to help her."
"No! No!" I yelled. "She's not here any more." I did not exactly know
why I had said that, yet
I knew that it was true. We sank for a moment into depths of melancholy
that would be
impossible to fathom rationally. For the first time in the memory of
the me I know, I felt a true,
boundless sadness, a dreadful incompleteness. There was a wound
somewhere in me that had
been opened again. This time I could not take refuge, as I had done so
many times in the past,
behind a veil of mystery and not knowing. Not to know had been bliss to
me. For a moment, I
was dangerously sliding into despondency. La Gorda stopped me.
"A warrior is someone who seeks freedom," she said in my ear. "Sadness
is not freedom. We
must snap out of it."
Having a sense of detachment, as don Juan had said, en tails having a
moment's pause to
reassess situations. At the depth of my sadness I understood what he
meant. I had the detachment;
it was up to me to strive to use that pause correctly.
I could not be sure whether or not my volition played a role, but all
of a sudden my sadness
vanished; it was as if it had never existed. The speed of my change of
mood and its thoroughness
alarmed me.
"Now you are where I am!" la Gorda exclaimed when I described what had
happened. "After
all these years I still haven't learned how to handle formlessness. I
shift helplessly from one
64
feeling to another in one instant. Because of my formlessness I could
help the little sisters, but I
was also at their mercy. Any one of them was strong enough to make me
sway from one extreme
to the other.
"The problem was that I lost my human form before you did. If you and I
had lost it together,
we could have helped each other; as it was, I went up and down faster
than I care to remember."
I had to admit that her claim of being formless had always seemed
spurious to me. In my
understanding, losing the human form included a necessary concomitant,
a consistency of
character, which was, in light of her emotional ups and downs, beyond
her reach. On account of
that, I had judged her harshly and unjustly. Having lost my human form,
I was now in a position
to understand that formlessness is, if anything, a detriment to
sobriety and levelheadedness. There
is no automatic emotional strength involved in it. An aspect of being
detached, the capacity to
become immersed in whatever one is doing, naturally extends to
everything one does, including
being inconsistent, and outright petty. The advantage of being formless
is that it allows us a
moment's pause, providing that we have the self-discipline and courage
to utilize it.
At last la Gorda's past behavior became comprehensible to me. She had
been formless for
years but without the self-discipline required. Thus she had been at
the mercy of drastic shifts of
mood, and incredible discrepancies between her actions and her purposes.
After our initial recollection of the Nagual woman, la Gorda and I
summoned all our forces
and tried for days to elicit more memories, but there seemed to be
none. I myself was back where
I had been before I had begun to remember. I intuited that there should
be a great deal more
somehow buried in me, but I could not get to it. My mind was void of
even the vaguest inkling of
any other memories.
La Gorda and I went through a period of tremendous confusion and doubt.
In our case, being
formless meant to be ravaged by the worst distrust imaginable. We felt
that we were guinea pigs
in the hands of don Juan, a being supposedly familiar to us, but about
whom in reality we knew
nothing. We fueled each other with doubts and fears. The most serious
issue was of course the
Nagual woman. When we would focus our attention on her, our memory of
her became so keen
that it was past comprehension that we could have forgotten her. This
would give rise over and
over to speculations of what don Juan had really done to us. These
conjectures led very easily to
the feeling that we had been used. We became enraged by the unavoidable
conclusion that he had
manipulated us, rendered us helpless and unknown to ourselves.
When our rage was exhausted, fear began to loom over us - for we were
faced with the
awesome possibility that don Juan might have done still more
deleterious things to us.
65
7. Dreaming Together
One day, in order to alleviate our distress momentarily, I suggested
that we immerse ourselves
in dreaming. As soon as I voiced my suggestion, I became aware that a
gloom which had been
haunting me for days could be drastically altered by willing the
change. I clearly understood then
that the problem with la Gorda and myself had been that we had
unwittingly focused on fear and
distrust, as if those were the only possible options available to us,
while all along we had had,
without consciously knowing it, the alternative of deliberately
centering our attention on the
opposite, the mystery, the wonder of what had happened to us.
I told la Gorda my realization. She agreed immediately. She became
instantly animated, the
pall of her gloom dispelled in a matter of seconds.
"What kind of dreaming do you propose we should do?" she asked.
"How many kinds are there?" I asked.
"We could do dreaming together," she replied. "My body tells me that we
have done this
already. We have gone into dreaming as a team. It'll be a cinch for us,
as it was for us to see
together."
"But we don't know what the procedure is to do dreaming together," I
said.
"We didn't know how to see together and yet we saw," she said. "I'm
sure that if we try we
can do it, because there are no steps to anything a warrior does. There
is only personal power.
And right now we have it.
"We should start out dreaming from two different places, as far away as
possible from each
other. The one who goes into dreaming first waits for the other. Once
we find each other we
interlock our arms and go deeper in together."
I told her that I had no idea how to wait for her if I went into
dreaming ahead of her. She
herself could not explain what was involved, but she said that to wait
for the other dreamer
was what Josefina had described as "snatching" them. La Gorda had been
snatched by Josefina
twice.
"The reason Josefina called it snatching was because one of us had to
grab the other by the
arm," she explained.
She demonstrated then a procedure of interlocking her left forearm with
my right forearm
by each of us grabbing hold of the area below each other's elbows.
"How can we do that in dreaming?" I asked.
I personally considered dreaming one of the most private states
imaginable.
"I don't know how, but I'll grab you," la Gorda said. "I think my body
knows how. The
more we talk about it, though, the more difficult it seems to be."
We started off our dreaming from two distant locations. We could agree
only on the time to
lie down, since the entrance into dreaming was something impossible to
prearrange. The
foreseeable possibility that I might have to wait for la Gorda gave me
a great deal of anxiety,
and I could not enter into dreaming with my customary ease. After some
ten to fifteen minutes
of restlessness I finally succeeded in going into a state I call
restful vigil.
Years before, when I had acquired a degree of experience in dreaming, I
had asked don
Juan if there were any known steps which were common to all of us. He
had told me that in the
final analysis every dreamer was different. But in talking with la
Gorda I discovered such
similarities in our experiences of dreaming that I ventured a possible
classificatory scheme of
the different stages.
Restful vigil is the preliminary state, a state in which the senses
become dormant and yet one
is aware. In my case, I had always perceived in this state a flood of
reddish light, a light exactly
66
like what one sees facing the sun with the eyelids tightly closed.
The second state of dreaming I called dynamic vigil. In this state the
reddish light dissipates,
as fog dissipates, and one is left looking at a scene, a tableau of
sorts, which is static. One sees a
three-dimensional picture, a frozen bit of something - a landscape, a
street, a house, a person, a
face, anything.
I called the third state passive witnessing. In it the dreamer is no
longer viewing a frozen bit
of the world but is observing, eyewitnessing, an event as it occurs. It
is as if the primacy of the
visual and auditory senses makes this state of dreaming mainly an
affair of the eyes and ears.
The fourth state was the one in which I was drawn to act. In it one is
compelled to enterprise,
to take steps, to make the most of one's time. I called this state
dynamic initiative.
La Gorda's proposition of waiting for me had to do with affecting the
second and third states
of our dreaming together. When I entered into the second state, dynamic
vigil, I saw a dreaming
scene of don Juan and various other persons, including a fat Gorda.
Before I even had time to
consider what I was viewing, I felt a tremendous pull on my arm and I
realized that the "real"
Gorda was by my side. She was to my left and had gripped my right
forearm with her left hand. I
clearly felt her lifting my hand to her forearm so that we were
gripping each other's forearms.
Next, I found myself in the third state of dreaming, passive
witnessing. Don Juan was telling me
that I had to look after la Gorda and take care of her in a most
selfish fashion - that is, as if she
were my own self.
His play on words delighted me. I felt an unearthly happiness in being
there with him and the
others, Don Juan went on explaining that my selfishness could be put to
a grand use, and that to
harness it was not impossible.
There was a general feeling of comradeship among all the people
gathered there. They were
laughing at what don Juan was saying to me, but without making fun. Don
Juan said that the
surest way to harness selfishness was through the daily activities of
our lives, that I was efficient
in whatever I did because I had no one to bug the devil out of me, and
that it was no challenge to
me to soar like an arrow by myself. If I were given the task of taking
care of la Gorda, however,
my independent effectiveness would go to pieces, and in order to
survive I would have to extend
my selfish concern for myself to include la Gorda. Only through helping
her, don Juan was
saying in the most emphatic tone, would I find the clues for the
fulfillment of my true task.
La Gorda put her fat arms around my neck. Don Juan had to stop talking.
He was laughing so
hard he could not go on. All of them were roaring.
I felt embarrassed and annoyed with la Gorda. I tried to get out of her
embrace but her arms
were tightly fastened around my neck. Don Juan made a sign with his
hands to make me stop. He
said that the minimal embarrassment I was experiencing then was nothing
in comparison with
what was in store for me.
The sound of laughter was deafening. I felt very happy, although I was
worried about having
to deal with la Gorda, for 1 did not know what it would entail.
At that moment in my dreaming I changed my point of view - or rather,
something pulled me
out of the scene and I began to look around as a spectator. We were in
a house in northern
Mexico; I could tell by the surroundings, which were partially visible
from where I stood. I could
see the mountains in the distance. I also remembered the paraphernalia
of the house.
We were at the back, under a roofed, open porch. Some of the people
were sitting on some
bulky chairs; most of them, however, were either standing or sitting on
the floor. I recognized
every one of them. There were sixteen people. La Gorda was standing by
my side facing don
Juan.
I became aware that I could have two different feelings at the same
time. I could either go into
67
the dreaming scene and feel that I was recovering a long-lost
sentiment, or I could witness the
scene with the mood that was current in my life. When I plunged into
the dreaming scene I felt
secure and protected; when I witnessed it with my current mood I felt
lost, insecure, anguished. I
did not like my current mood, so I plunged into my dreaming scene.
A fat Gorda asked don Juan, in a voice which could be heard above
everyone's laughter, if I
was going to be her husband. There was a moment's silence. Don Juan
seemed to be calculating
what to say. He patted her on the head and said that he could speak for
me and that I would be
delighted to be her husband. People were laughing riotously. I laughed
with them. My body
convulsed with a most genuine enjoyment, yet I did not feel I was
laughing at la Gorda. I did not
regard her as a clown, or as stupid. She was a child. Don Juan turned
to me and said that I had to
honor la Gorda regardless of what she did to me, and that I had to
train my body, through my
interaction with her, to feel at ease in the face of the most trying
situations. Don Juan addressed
the whole group and said that it was much easier to fare well under
conditions of maximum
stress than to be impeccable under normal circumstances, such as in the
interplay with someone
like la Gorda. Don Juan added that I could not under any circumstances
get angry with la Gorda,
because she was indeed my benefactress; only through her would I be
capable of harnessing my
selfishness.
I had become so thoroughly immersed in the dreaming scene that I had
forgotten I was a
dreamer. A sudden pressure on my arm reminded me that I was dreaming. I
felt la Gorda's
presence next to me, but without seeing her. She was there only as a
touch, a tactile sensation on
my forearm. I focused my attention on it; it felt like a solid grip on
me, and then la Gorda as a
whole person materialized, as if she were made of superimposed frames
of photographic film. It
was like trick photography in a movie. The dreaming scene dissolved.
Instead, la Gorda and I
were looking at each other with our forearms interlocked.
In unison, we again focused our attention on the dreaming scene we had
been witnessing. At
that moment I knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that both of us had
been viewing the same
thing. Now don Juan was saying something to la Gorda, but I could not
hear him. My attention
was being pulled back and forth between the third state of dreaming,
passive witnessing, and the
second, dynamic vigil. I was for a moment with don Juan, a fat Gorda,
and sixteen other people,
and the next moment I was with the current Gorda watching a frozen
scene.
Then a drastic jolt in my body brought me to still another level of
attention: I felt something
like the cracking of a dry piece of wood. It was a minor explosion, yet
it sounded more like an
extraordinarily loud cracking of knuckles. I found myself in the first
state of dreaming, restful
vigil. I was asleep and yet thoroughly aware. I wanted to stay for as
long as I could in that
peaceful stage, but another jolt made me wake up instantly. I had
suddenly realized that la
Gorda and I had dreamed together.
I was more than eager to speak with her. She felt the same. We rushed
to talk to each other.
When we had calmed down, I asked her to describe to me everything that
had happened to her
in our dreaming together.
"I waited for you for a long time," she said. "Some part of me thought
I had missed you, but
another part thought that you were nervous and were having problems, so
I waited."
"Where did you wait, Gorda?" I asked.
"I don't know," she replied. "I know that I was out of the reddish
light, but I couldn't see
anything. Come to think of it, I had no sight, I was feeling my way
around. Perhaps I was still in
the reddish light; it wasn't red, though. The place where I was, was
tinted with a light peach
color. Then I opened my eyes and there you were. You seemed to be ready
to leave, so I grabbed
you by the arm. Then I looked and saw the Nagual Juan Matus, you, me,
and other people in
68
Vicente's house. You were younger and I was fat."
The mention of Vicente's house brought a sudden realization to me. I
told la Gorda that once
while driving through Zacatecas, in northern Mexico, I had had a
strange urge and gone to visit
one of don Juan's friends, Vicente, not understanding that in doing so
I had unwittingly crossed
into an excluded domain, for don Juan had never introduced me to him.
Vicente, like the Nagual
woman, belonged to another area, another world. It was no wonder that
la Gorda was so shaken
when I told her about the visit. We knew him so very well; he was as
close to us as don Genaro,
perhaps even closer. Yet we had forgotten him, just as we had forgotten
the Nagual woman.
At that point la Gorda and I made a huge digression. We remembered
together that Vicente,
Genaro, and Silvio Manuel were don Juan's friends, his cohorts. They
were bound together by a
vow of sorts. La Gorda and I could not remember what it was that had
united them. Vicente was
not an Indian. He had been a pharmacist as a young man. He was the
scholar of the group, and
the real healer who kept all of them healthy. He had a passion for
botany. I was convinced
beyond any doubt that he knew more about plants than any human being
alive. La Gorda and I
remembered that it was Vicente who had taught everyone, including don
Juan, about medicinal
plants. He took special interest in Nestor, and all of us thought that
Nestor was going to be like
him.
"Remembering Vicente makes me think about myself," la Gorda said. "It
makes me think
what an unbearable woman I've been. The worst thing that can happen to
a woman is to have
children, to have holes in her body, and still act like a little girl.
That was my problem. I wanted
to be cute and I was empty. And they let me make a fool out of myself,
they encouraged me to
be a jackass."
"Who are they, Gorda?" I asked.
"The Nagual and Vicente and all those people who were in Vicente's
house when I acted
like such an ass with you."
La Gorda and I had a realization in unison. They had allowed her to be
unbearable only with
me. No one else put up with her nonsense, although she tried it on
everyone.
"Vicente did put up with me," la Gorda said. "He played along with me.
I even called him
uncle. When I tried to call Silvio Manuel uncle he nearly ripped the
skin off my armpits with
his clawlike hands."
We tried to focus our attention on Silvio Manuel but we could not
remember what he looked
like. We could feel his presence in our memories but he was not a
person, he was only a
feeling.
As far as the dreaming scene was concerned, we remembered that it had
been a faithful
replica of what really did occur in our lives at a certain place and
time; it still was not possible
for us to recall when. I knew, however, that I took care of la Gorda as
a means of training
myself for the hardship of interacting with people. It was imperative
that I internalize a mood of
ease in the face of difficult social situations, and no one could have
been a better coach than la
Gorda. The flashes of faint memories I had had of a fat Gorda stemmed
from those
circumstances, for I had followed don Juan's orders to the letter.
La Gorda said that she had not liked the mood of the dreaming scene.
She would have
preferred just to watch it, but I pulled her in to feel her old
feelings, which were abhorrent to
her. Her discomfort was so acute that she deliberately squeezed my arm
to force me to end our
participation in something so odious to her.
The next day we arranged a time for another session of dreaming
together. She started from
her bedroom and I from my study, but nothing happened. We became
exhausted merely trying
to enter into dreaming. For weeks after that we tried to achieve again
the effectiveness of our
69
first performance, but without any success. With every failure we
became more desperate and
greedy.
In the face of our impasse, I decided that we should postpone our
dreaming together for the
time being and take a closer look at the process of dreaming and
analyze its concepts and
procedures. La Gorda did not agree with me at first. For her, the idea
of reviewing what we knew
about dreaming was another way of succumbing to despair and greed. She
preferred to keep on
trying even if we did not succeed. I persisted and she finally accepted
my point of view out of the
sheer sense of being lost.
One night we sat down and, as casually as we could, we began to discuss
what we knew about
dreaming. It quickly became obvious that there were some core topics
which don Juan had given
special emphasis.
First was the act itself. It seemed to begin as a unique state of
awareness arrived at by
focusing the residue of consciousness, which one still has when asleep,
on the elements, or the
features, of one's dreams.
The residue of consciousness, which don Juan called the second
attention, was brought into
action, or was harnessed, through exercises of not-doing. We thought
that the essential aid to
dreaming was a state of mental quietness, which don Juan had called
"stopping the internal
dialogue," or the "not doing of talking to oneself." To teach me how to
master it, he used to make
me walk for miles with my eyes held fixed and out of focus at a level
just above the horizon so as
to emphasize the peripheral view. His method was effective on two
counts. It allowed me to stop
my internal dialogue after years of trying, and it trained my
attention. By forcing me to
concentrate on the peripheral view, don Juan reinforced my capacity to
concentrate for long
periods of time on one single activity.
Later on, when I had succeeded in controlling my attention and could
work for hours at a
chore without distraction - a thing I had never before been able to do
- he told me that the best
way to enter into dreaming was to concentrate on the area just at the
tip of the sternum, at the top
of the belly. He said that the attention needed for dreaming stems from
that area. The energy
needed in order to move and to seek in dreaming stems from the area an
inch or two below the
belly button. He called that energy the will, or the power to select,
to assemble. In a woman both
the attention and the energy for dreaming originate from the womb.
"A woman's dreaming has to come from her womb because that's her
center," la Gorda said.
"In order for me to start dreaming or to stop it all I have to do is
place my attention on my womb.
I've learned to feel the inside of it. I see a reddish glow for an
instant and then I'm off."
"How long does it take you to get to see that reddish glow?" I asked.
"A few seconds. The moment my attention is on my womb I'm already into
dreaming" she
continued. "I never toil, not ever. Women are like that. The most
difficult part for a woman is to
learn how to begin; it took me a couple of years to stop my internal
dialogue by concentrating my
attention on my womb. Perhaps that's why a woman always needs someone
else to prod her.
"The Nagual Juan Matus used to put cold, wet river pebbles on my belly
to get me to feel that
area. Or he would place a weight on it; I had a chunk of lead that he
got for me. He would make
me close my eyes and focus my attention on the spot where the weight
was. I used to fall asleep
every time. But that didn't bother him. It doesn't really matter what
one does as long as the
attention is on the womb. Finally I learned to concentrate on that spot
without anything being
placed on it. I went into dreaming one day all by myself. I was feeling
my belly, at the spot
where the Nagual had placed the weight so many times, when all of a
sudden I fell asleep as
usual, except that something pulled me right into my womb. I saw the
reddish glow and I then
had a most beautiful dream. But as soon as I tried to tell it to the
Nagual, I knew that it had not
70
been an ordinary dream. There was no way of telling him what the dream
was; I had just felt very
happy and strong. He said it had been dreaming.
"From then on he never put a weight on me. He let me do dreaming
without interfering. He
asked me from time to time to tell him about it, then he would give me
pointers. That's the way
the instruction in dreaming should be conducted."
La Gorda said that don Juan told her that anything may suffice as a
not-doing to help
dreaming, providing that it forces the attention to remain fixed. For
instance, he made her and all
the other apprentices gaze at leaves and rocks, and encouraged Pablito
to construct his own notdoing
device. Pablito started off with the not-doing of walking backwards. He
would move by
taking short glances to his sides in order to direct his path and to
avoid obstacles on the way. I
gave him the idea of using a rearview mirror, and he expanded it into
the construction of a
wooden helmet with an attachment that held two small mirrors, about six
inches away from his
face and two inches below his eye level. The two mirrors did not
interfere with his frontal view,
and due to the lateral angle at which they were set, they covered the
whole range behind him.
Pablito boasted that he had a 36o-degree peripheral view of the world.
Aided by this artifact,
Pablito could walk backwards for any distance, or any length of time.
The position one assumes to do dreaming was also a very important topic.
"I don't know why the Nagual didn't tell me from the very beginning,"
la Gorda said, "that the
best position for a woman to start from is to sit with her legs crossed
and then let the body fall, as
it may do once the attention is on dreaming. The Nagual told me about
this perhaps a year after I
had begun. Now I sit in that position for a moment, I feel my womb, and
right away I'm
dreaming."
In the beginning, just like la Gorda, I had done it while lying on my
back, until one day when
don Juan told me that for the best results I should sit up on a soft,
thin mat, with the soles of my
feet placed together and my thighs touching the mat. He pointed out
that, since I had elastic hip
joints, I should exercise them to the fullest, aiming at having my
thighs completely flat against
the mat. He added that if I were to enter into dreaming in that sitting
position, my body would not
slide or fall to either side, but my trunk would bend forward and my
forehead would rest on my
feet.Another topic of great significance was the time to do dreaming.
Don Juan had told us that the
late night or early morning hours were by far the best. His reason for
favoring those hours was
what he called a practical application of the sorcerers' knowledge. He
said that since one has to do
dreaming within a social milieu, one has to seek the best possible
conditions of solitude and lack
of interference. The interference he was referring to had to do with
the attention of people, and
not their physical presence. For don Juan it was meaningless to retreat
from the world and hide,
for even if one were alone in an isolated, deserted place, the
interference of our fellow men is
prevalent because the fixation of their first attention cannot be shut
off. Only locally, at the hours
when most people are asleep, can one avert part of that fixation for a
short period of time. It is at
those times that the first attention of those around us is dormant.
This led to his description of the second attention. Don Juan explained
to us that the attention
one needs in the beginning of dreaming has to be forcibly made to stay
on any given item in a
dream. Only through immobilizing our attention can one turn an ordinary
dream into dreaming.
He explained, furthermore, that in dreaming one has to use the same
mechanisms of attention
as in everyday life, that our first attention had been taught to focus
on the items of the world with
great force in order to turn the amorphous and chaotic realm of
perception into the orderly world
of awareness.
Don Juan also told us that the second attention served the function of
a beckoner, a caller of
71
chances. The more it is exercised, the greater the possibility of
getting the desired result. But that
was also the function of attention in general, a function so taken for
granted in our daily life that
it has become unnoticeable; if we encounter a fortuitous occurrence, we
talk about it in terms of
accident or coincidence, rather than in terms of our attention having
beckoned the event.
Our discussion of the second attention prepared the ground for another
key topic, the
dreaming body. As a means of guiding la Gorda to it, don Juan gave her
the task of immobilizing
her second attention as steadily as she could on the components of the
feeling of flying in
dreaming.
"How did you learn to fly in dreaming?" I asked her. "Did someone teach
you?"
"The Nagual Juan Matus taught me on this earth," she replied. "And in
dreaming, someone I
could never see taught me. It was only a voice telling me what to do.
The Nagual gave me the
task of learning to fly in dreaming, and the voice taught me how to do
it. Then it took me years to
teach myself to shift from my regular body, the one you can touch, to
my dreaming body."
"You have to explain this to me, Gorda" I said.
"You were learning to get to your dreaming body when you dreamed that
you got out of your
body," she continued. "But, the way I see it, the Nagual did not give
you any specific task, so you
went any old way you could. I, on the other hand, was given the task of
using my dreaming
body. The little sisters had the same task. In my case, I once had a
dream where I flew like a kite.
I told the Nagual about it because I had liked the feeling of gliding.
He took it very seriously and
turned it into a task. He said that as soon as one learns to do
dreaming, any dream that one can
remember is no longer a dream, it's dreaming.
"I began then to seek flying in dreaming. But I couldn't set it up; the
more I tried to influence
my dreaming, the more difficult it got. The Nagual finally told me to
stop trying and let it come
of its own accord. Little by little I started to fly in dreaming. That
was when some voice began
to tell me what to do. I've always felt it was a woman's voice.
"When I had learned to fly perfectly, the Nagual told me that every
movement of flying
which I did in dreaming I had to repeat while I was awake. You had the
same chance when the
saber-toothed tiger was showing you how to breathe. But you never
changed into a tiger in
dreaming, so you couldn't properly try to do it while you were awake.
But I did learn to fly in
dreaming. By shifting my attention to my dreaming body, I could fly
like a kite while I was
awake. I showed you my flying once, because I wanted you to see that I
had learned to use my
dreaming body, but you didn't know what was going on."
She was referring to a time she had scared me with the incomprehensible
act of actually
bobbing up and down in the air like a kite. The event was so farfetched
for me that I could not
begin to understand it in any logical way. As usual when things of that
nature confronted me, I
would lump them into an amorphous category of "perceptions under
conditions of severe stress."
I argued that in cases of severe stress, perception could be greatly
distorted by the senses. My
explanation did not explain anything but seemed to keep my reason
pacified.
I told la Gorda that there must have been more to what she had called
her shift into her
dreaming body than merely repeating the action of flying.
She thought for a while before answering.
"I think the Nagual must have told you, too," she said, "that the only
thing that really counts in
making that shift is anchoring the second attention. The Nagual said
that attention is what makes
the world; he was of course absolutely right. He had reasons to say
that. He was the master of
attention. I suppose he left it up to me to find out that all I needed
to shift into my dreaming body
was to focus my attention on flying. What was important was to store
attention in dreaming, to
observe everything I did in flying. That was the only way of grooming
my second attention. Once
72
it was solid, just to focus it lightly on the details and feeling of
flying brought more dreaming of
flying, until it was routine for me to dream I was soaring through the
air.
"In the matter of flying, then, my second attention was keen. When the
Nagual gave me the
task of shifting to my dreaming body he meant for me to turn on my
second attention while I was
awake. This is the way I understand it. The first attention, the
attention that makes the world, can
never be completely overcome; it can only be turned off for a moment
and replaced with the
second attention, providing that the body has stored enough of it.
Dreaming is naturally a way of
storing the second attention. So, I would say that in order to shift
into your dreaming body when
awake you have to practice dreaming until it comes out your ears."
"Can you get to your dreaming body any time you want?" I asked.
"No. It's not that easy," she replied. "I've learned to repeat the
movements and feelings of
flying while I'm awake, and yet I can't fly every time I want to. There
is always a barrier to my
dreaming body. Sometimes I feel that the barrier is down; my body is
free at those times and I
can fly as if I were dreaming."
I told la Gorda that in my case don Juan gave me three tasks to train
my second attention. The
first was to find my hands in dreaming. Next he recommended that I
should choose a locale,
focus my attention on it, and then do daytime dreaming and find out if
I could really go there. He
suggested that I should place someone I knew at the site, preferably a
woman, in order to do two
things: first to check subtle changes that might indicate that I was
there in dreaming, and second,
to isolate unobtrusive detail, which would be precisely what my second
attention would zero in
on.
The most serious problem the dreamer has in this respect is the
unbending fixation of the
second attention on detail that would be thoroughly undetected by the
attention of everyday life,
creating in this manner a nearly insurmountable obstacle to validation.
What one seeks in
dreaming is not what one would pay attention to in everyday life.
Don Juan said that one strives to immobilize the second attention only
in the learning period.
After that, one has to fight the almost invincible pull of the second
attention and give only
cursory glances at everything. In dreaming one has to be satisfied with
the briefest possible
views of everything. As soon as one focuses on anything, one loses
control.
The last generalized task he gave me was to get out of my body. I had
partially succeeded,
and all along I had considered it my only real accomplishment in
dreaming. Don Juan left before
I had perfected the feeling in dreaming that I could handle the world
of ordinary affairs while I
was dreaming. His departure interrupted what I thought was going to be
an unavoidable
overlapping of my dreaming time into my world of everyday life.
To elucidate the control of the second attention, don Juan presented
the idea of will. He said
that will can be described as the maximum control of the luminosity of
the body as a field of
energy; or it can be described as a level of proficiency, or a state of
being that comes abruptly
into the daily life of a warrior at any given time. It is experienced
as a force that radiates out of
the middle part of the body following a moment of the most absolute
silence, or a moment of
sheer terror, or profound sadness; but not after a moment of happiness,
because happiness is too
disruptive to afford the warrior the concentration needed to use the
luminosity of the body and
turn it into silence.
"The Nagual told me that for a human being sadness is as powerful as
terror," la Gorda said.
"Sadness makes a warrior shed tears of blood. Both can bring the moment
of silence. Or the
silence comes of itself, because the warrior tries for it throughout
his life."
"Have you ever felt that moment of silence yourself?" I asked.
"I have, by all means, but I can't remember what it is like," she said.
"You and I have both felt
73
it before and neither of us can remember anything about it. The Nagual
said that it is a moment of
blackness, a moment still more silent than the moment of shutting off
the internal dialogue. That
blackness, that silence, gives rise to the intent to direct the second
attention, to command it, to
make it do things. This is why it's called will. The intent and the
effect are will; the Nagual said
that they are tied together. He told me all this when I was trying to
learn flying in dreaming. The
intent of flying produces the effect of flying."
I told her that I had nearly written off the possibility of ever
experiencing will.
"You'll experience it," la Gorda said. "The trouble is that you and I
are not keen enough to
know what's happening to us. We don't feel our will because we think
that it should be something
we know for sure that we are doing or feeling, like getting angry, for
instance. Will is very quiet,
unnoticeable. Will belongs to the other self."
"What other self, Gorda?" I asked.
"You know what I'm talking about," she replied briskly. "We are in our
other selves when we
do dreaming. We have entered into our other selves countless times by
now, but we are not
complete yet."
There was a long silence. I conceded to myself that she was right in
saying that we were not
complete yet. I understood that as meaning that we were merely
apprentices of an inexhaustible
art. But then the thought crossed my mind that perhaps she was
referring to something else. It
was not a rational thought. I felt first something like a prickling
sensation in my solar plexus and
then I had the thought that perhaps she was talking about something
else. Next I felt the answer.
It came to me in a block, a clump of sorts. I knew that all of it was
there, first at the tip of my
sternum and then in my mind. My problem was that I could not
disentangle what I knew fast
enough to verbalize it.
La Gorda did not interrupt my thought processes with further comments
or gestures. She
was perfectly quiet, waiting. She seemed to be internally connected to
me to such a degree that
there was no need for us to say anything.
We sustained the feeling of communality with each other for a moment
longer and then it
overwhelmed us both. La Gorda and I calmed down by degrees. I finally
began to speak. Not
that I needed to reiterate what we had felt and known in common, but
just to reestablish our
grounds for discussion, I told her that I knew in what way we were
incomplete, but that I could
not put my knowledge into words.
"There are lots and lots of things we know," she said. "And yet we
can't get them to work for
us because we really don't know how to bring them out of us. You've
just begun to feel that
pressure. I've had it for years. I know and yet I don't know. Most of
the time I trip over myself
and sound like an imbecile when I try to say what I know."
I understood what she meant and I understood her at a physical level. I
knew something
thoroughly practical and self-evident about will and what la Gorda had
called the other self and
yet I could not utter a single word about what I knew, not because I
was reticent or bashful, but
because I did not know where to begin, or how to organize my knowledge.
"Will is such a complete control of the second attention that it is
called the other self," la
Gorda said after a long pause. "In spite of all we've done, we know
only a tiny bit of the other
self. The Nagual left it up to us to complete our knowledge. That's our
task of remembering."
She smacked her forehead with the palm of her hand, as if something had
just come to her
mind.
"Holy Jesus! We are remembering the other self!" she exclaimed, her
voice almost bordering
on hysteria. Then she calmed down and went on talking in a subdued
tone. "Evidently we've
already been there and the only way of remembering it is the way we're
doing it, by shooting off
74
our dreaming bodies while dreaming together."
"What do you mean, shooting off our dreaming bodies?" I asked.
"You yourself have witnessed when Genaro used to shoot off his dreaming
body," she said.
"It pops off like a slow bullet; it actually glues and unglues itself
from the physical body with a
loud crack. The Nagual told me that Genaro's dreaming body could do
most of the things we
normally do; he used to come to you that way in order to jolt you. I
know now what the Nagual
and Genaro were after. They wanted you to remember, and for that effect
Genaro used to
perform incredible feats in front of your very eyes by shooting off his
dreaming body. But to no
avail."
"I never knew that he was in his dreaming body," I said.
"You never knew because you weren't watching," she said. "Genaro tried
to let you know by
attempting to do things that the dreaming body cannot do, like eating,
drinking, and so forth. The
Nagual told me that Genaro used to joke with you that he was going to
shit and make the
mountains tremble."
"Why can't the dreaming body do those things?" I asked.
"Because the dreaming body cannot handle the intent of eating, or
drinking," she replied.
"What do you mean by that, Gorda" I asked.
"Genaro's great accomplishment was that in his dreaming he learned the
intent of the body,"
she explained. "He finished what you had started to do. He could dream
his whole body as
perfectly as it could be. But the dreaming body has a different intent
from the intent of the
physical body. For instance, the dreaming body can go through a wall,
because it knows the
intent of disappearing into thin air. The physical body knows the
intent of eating, but not the one
of disappearing. For Genaro's physical body to go through a wall would
be as impossible as for
his dreaming body to eat."
La Gorda was silent for a while as if measuring what she had just said.
I wanted to wait
before asking her any questions.
"Genaro had mastered only the intent of the dreaming body" she said in
a soft voice. "Silvio
Manuel, on the other hand, was the ultimate master of intent, I know
now that the reason we
can't remember his face is because he was not like everybody else."
"What makes you say that, Gorda?" I asked.
She started to explain what she meant, but she was incapable of
speaking coherently.
Suddenly she smiled. Her eyes lit up.
"I've got it!" she exclaimed. "The Nagual told me that Silvio Manuel
was the master of intent
because he was permanently in his other self. He was the real chief.
He, was behind everything
the Nagual did. In fact, he's the one who made the Nagual take care of
you."
I experienced a great physical discomfort upon hearing la Gorda say
that. I nearly became
sick to my stomach and made extraordinary efforts to hide it from her.
I turned my back to her
and began to gag. She stopped talking for an instant and then proceeded
as if she had made up
her mind not to acknowledge my state. Instead, she began to yell at me.
She said that it was time
that we air our grievances. She confronted me with my feelings of
resentment after what
happened in Mexico City. She added that my rancor was not because she
had sided with the
other apprentices against me, but because she had taken part in
unmasking me. I explained to her
that all of those feelings had vanished from me. She was adamant. She
maintained that unless I
faced them they would come back to me in some way. She insisted that my
affiliation with Silvio
Manuel was at the crux of the matter.
I could not believe the changes of mood I went through upon hearing
that statement. I became
two people - one raving, foaming at the mouth, the other calm,
observing. I had a final painful
75
spasm in my stomach and got ill. But it was not a feeling of nausea
that had caused the spasm. It
was rather an uncontainable wrath.
When I finally calmed down I was embarrassed at my behavior and worried
that an incident of
that nature might happen to me again at another time.
"As soon as you accept your true nature, you'll be free from rage," la
Gorda said in a
nonchalant tone.
I wanted to argue with her, but I saw the futility of it. Besides, my
attack of anger had drained
me of energy. I laughed at the fact that I did not know what I would do
if she were right. The
thought occurred to me then that if I could forget about the Nagual
woman, anything was
possible. I had a strange sensation of heat or irritation in my throat,
as if I had eaten hot spicy
food. I felt a jolt of bodily alarm, just as though I had seen someone
sneaking behind my back,
and I knew at that moment something I had had no idea I knew a moment
before. La Gorda was
right. Silvio Manuel had been in charge of me.
La Gorda laughed loudly when I told her that. She said that she had
also remembered
something about Silvio Manuel.
"I don't remember him as a person, as I remember the Nagual woman," she
went on, "but I
remember what the Nagual told me about him."
"What did he tell you?" I asked.
"He said that while Silvio Manuel was on this earth he was like Eligio.
He disappeared once
without leaving a trace and went into the other world. He was gone for
years; then one day he
returned. The Nagual said that Silvio Manuel did not remember where
he'd been or what he'd
done, but his body had been changed. He had come back to the world, but
he had come back in
his other self."
"What else did he say, Gorda?" I asked.
"I can't remember any more," she replied. "It is as if I were looking
through a fog."
I knew that if we pushed ourselves hard enough, we were going to find
out right then who
Silvio Manuel was. I told her
so.
"The Nagual said that intent is present everywhere," la Gorda said all
of a sudden.
"What does that mean?" I asked.
"I don't know," she said. "I'm just voicing things that come to my
mind. The Nagual also said
that intent is what makes the world."
I knew that I had heard those words before. I thought that don Juan
must have also told me the
same thing and I had forgotten it.
"When did don Juan tell you that?" I asked.
"I can't remember when," she said. "But he told me that people, and all
other living creatures
for that matter, are the slaves of intent. We are in its clutches. It
makes us do whatever it wants. It
makes us act in the world. It even makes us die.
"He said that when we become warriors, though, intent becomes our
friend. It lets us be free
for a moment; at times it even comes to us, as if it had been waiting
around for us. He told me
that he himself was only a friend of intent - not like Silvio Manuel,
who was the master of it."
There were barrages of hidden memories in me that fought to get out.
They seemed about to
surface. I experienced a tremendous frustration for a moment and then
something in me gave up.
I became calm. I was no longer interested in finding out about Silvio
Manuel.
La Gorda interpreted my change of mood as a sign that we were not ready
to face our
memories of Silvio Manuel.
"The Nagual showed all of us what he could do with his intent," she
said abruptly. "He could
76
make things appear by calling intent.
"He told me that if I wanted to fly, I had to summon the intent of
flying. He showed me then
how he himself could summon it, and jumped in the air and soared in a
circle, like a huge kite. Or
he would make things appear in his hand. He said that he knew the
intent of many things and
could call those things by intending them. The difference between him
and Silvio Manuel was
that Silvio Manuel, by being the master of intent, knew the intent of
everything."
I told her that her explanation needed more explaining. She seemed to
struggle arranging
words in her mind.
"I learned the intent of flying," she said, "by repeating all the
feelings I had while flying in
dreaming. This was only one thing. The Nagual had learned in his life
the intent of hundreds of
things. But Silvio Manuel went to the source itself. He tapped it. He
didn't have to learn the intent
of anything. He was one with intent. The problem was that he had no
more desires because intent
has no desire of its own, so he had to rely on the Nagual for volition.
In other words, Silvio
Manuel could do anything the Nagual wanted. The Nagual directed Silvio
Manuel's intent. But
since the Nagual had no desires either, most of the time they didn't do
anything."
77
8. The Right and The Left
Side Awareness
Our discussion of dreaming was most helpful to us, not only because it
solved our impasse in
dreaming together, but because it brought its concepts to an
intellectual level. Talking about it
kept us busy; it allowed us to have a moment's pause in order to ease
our agitation.
One night while I was out running an errand I called la Gorda from a
telephone booth. She
told me that she had been in a department store and had had the
sensation that I was hiding there
behind some mannequins on display. She was certain I was teasing her
and became furious with
me. She rushed through the store trying to catch me, to show me how
angry she was. Then she
realized that she was actually remembering something she had done quite
often around me,
having a tantrum.
In unison, we arrived then at the conclusion that it was time to try
again our dreaming
together. As we talked, we felt a renewed optimism. I went home
immediately.
I very easily entered into the first state, restful vigil. I had a
sensation of bodily pleasure, a
tingling radiating from my solar plexus, which was transformed into the
thought that we were
going to have great results. That thought turned into a nervous
anticipation. I became aware that
my thoughts were emanating from the tingling in the middle of my chest.
The instant I turned my
attention to it, however, the tingling stopped. It was like an electric
current that I could switch on
and off.
The tingling began again, even more pronounced than before, and
suddenly I found myself
face to face with la Gorda. It was as if I had turned a corner and
bumped into her. I became
immersed in watching her. She was so absolutely real, so herself, that
I had the urge to touch her.
The most pure, unearthly affection for her burst out of me at that
moment. I began to sob
uncontrollably.
La Gorda quickly tried to interlock our arms to stop my indulging, but
she could not move at
all. We looked around. There was no fixed tableau in front of our eyes,
no static picture of any
sort. I had a sudden insight and told la Gorda that it was because we
had been watching each
other that we had missed the appearance of the dreaming scene. Only
after I had spoken did I
realize that we were in a new situation. The sound of my voice scared
me. It was a strange voice,
harsh, unappealing. It gave me a feeling of physical revulsion.
La Gorda replied that we had not missed anything, that our second
attention had been caught
by something else. She smiled and made a puckering gesture with her
mouth, a mixture of
surprise and annoyance at the sound of her own voice.
I found the novelty of talking in dreaming spellbinding, for we were
not dreaming of a scene
in which we talked, we were actually conversing. And it required a
unique effort, quite similar to
my initial effort of walking down a stairway in dreaming.
I asked her whether she thought my voice sounded funny. She nodded and
laughed out loud.
The sound of her laughter was shocking. I remembered that don Genaro
used to make the
strangest and most frightening noises; la Gorda's laughter was in the
same category. The
realization struck me then that la Gorda and I had quite spontaneously
entered into our dreaming
bodies.
I wanted to hold her hand. I tried but I could not move my arm. Because
I had some
experience with moving in that state, I willed myself to go to la
Gorda's side. My desire was to
embrace her, but instead I moved in on her so close that we merged. I
was aware of myself as an
individual being, but at the same time I felt I was part of la Gorda. I
liked that feeling immensely.
We stayed merged until something broke our hold. I felt a command to
examine the
environment. As I looked, I clearly remembered having seen it before.
We were surrounded by
78
small round mounds that looked exactly like sand dunes. They were all
around us, in every
direction, as far as we could see. They seemed to be made of something
that looked like pale
yellow sandstone, or rough granules of sulphur. The sky was the same
color and was very low
and oppressive. There were banks of yellowish fog or some sort of
yellow vapor that hung from
certain spots in the sky.
I noticed then that la Gorda and I seemed to be breathing normally. I
could not feel my chest
with my hands, but I was able to feel it expanding as I inhaled. The
yellow vapors were obviously
not harmful to us.
We began to move in unison, slowly, cautiously, almost as if we were
walking. After a short
distance I got very fatigued and so did la Gorda. We were gliding just
over the ground, and
apparently moving that way was very tiring to our second attention; it
required an inordinate
degree of concentration. We were not deliberately mimicking our
ordinary walk, but the effect
was much the same as if we had been. To move required outbursts of
energy, something like tiny
explosions, with pauses in between. We had no objective in our movement
but moving itself, so
finally we had to stop.
La Gorda spoke to me, her voice so faint that it was barely audible.
She said that we were
mindlessly going toward the heavier regions, and that if we kept on
moving in that direction, the
pressure would get so great that we would die.
We automatically turned around and headed back in the direction we had
come from, but the
feeling of fatigue did not let up. Both of us were so exhausted that we
could no longer maintain
our upright posture. We collapsed and quite spontaneously adopted the
dreaming position.
I woke up instantly in my study. La Gorda woke up in her bedroom.
The first thing I told her upon awakening was that I had been in that
barren landscape several
times before. I had seen at least two aspects of it, one perfectly
flat, the other covered with small,
sand-dune-like mounds. As I was talking, I realized that I had not even
bothered to confirm that
we had had the same vision. I stopped and told her that I had gotten
carried away by my own
excitement; I had proceeded as if I were comparing notes with her about
a vacation trip.
"It's too late for that kind of talk between us," she said with a sigh,
"but if it makes you happy,
I'll tell you what we saw."
She patiently described everything we had seen, said, and done. She
added that she too had
been in that deserted place before, and that she knew for a fact that
it was a no-man's land, the
space between the world we know and the other world.
"It is the area between the parallel lines," she went on. "We can go to
it in dreaming. But in
order to leave this world and reach the other, the one beyond the
parallel lines, we have to go
through that area with our whole bodies."
I felt a chill at the thought of entering that barren place with our
whole bodies.
"You and I have been there together, with our bodies," la Gorda went
on. "Don't you
remember?"
I told her that all I could remember was seeing that landscape twice
under don Juan's
guidance. Both times I had written off the experience because it had
been brought about by the
ingestion of hallucinogenic plants. Following the dictums of my
intellect, I had regarded them as
private visions and not as consensual experiences. I did not remember
viewing that scene under
any other circumstances.
"When did you and I get there with our bodies?" I asked.
"I don't know," she said. "The vague memory of it just popped into my
mind when you
mentioned being there before. I think that now it is your turn to help
me finish what I have started
to remember. I can't focus on it yet, but I do recall that Silvio
Manuel took the Nagual woman,
79
you, and me into that desolate place. I don't know why he took us in
there, though. We were not
in dreaming."
I did not hear what else she was saying. My mind had begun to zero in
on something still
inarticulate. I struggled to set my thoughts in order. They rambled
aimlessly. For a moment I felt
as if I had reverted back years, to a time when I could not stop my
internal dialogue. Then the
fog began to clear. My thoughts arranged themselves without my
conscious direction, and the
result was the full memory of an event which I had already partially
recalled in one of those
unstructured flashes of recollection that I used to have. La Gorda was
right, we had been taken
once to a region that don Juan had called "limbo" apparently drawing
the term from religious
dogma. I knew that la Gorda was also right in saying that we had not
been in dreaming.
On that occasion, at the request of Silvio Manuel, don Juan had rounded
up the Nagual
woman, la Gorda, and myself. Don Juan told me that the reason for our
meeting was the fact
that, by my own means but without knowing how, I had entered into a
special recess of
awareness, which was the site of the keenest form of attention. I had
previously reached that
state, which don Juan had called the "left side," but all too briefly
and always aided by him. One
of its main features, the one that had the greatest value for all of us
involved with don Juan, was
that in that state we were able to perceive a colossal bank of
yellowish vapor, something which
don Juan called the "wall of fog." Whenever I was capable of perceiving
it, it was always to my
right, extending forward to the horizon and up to infinity, thus
dividing the world in two. The
wall of fog would turn either to the right or to the left as I turned
my head, so there was never a
way for me to face it.
On the day in question, both don Juan and Silvio Manuel had talked to
me about the wall of
fog. I remembered that after Silvio Manuel had finished talking, he
grabbed la Gorda by the nape
of her neck, as if she were a kitten, and disappeared with her into the
bank of fog. I had had a split
second to observe their disappearance, because don Juan had somehow
succeeded in making me
face the wall myself. He did not pick me up by the nape of the neck but
pushed me into the fog;
and the next thing I knew, I was looking at the desolate plain. Don
Juan, Silvio Manuel, the
Nagual woman, and la Gorda were also there. I did not care what they
were doing. I was
concerned with a most unpleasant and threatening feeling of oppression
- a fatigue, a maddening
difficulty in breathing. I perceived that I was standing inside a
suffocating, yellow, low-ceilinged
cave. The physical sensation of pressure became so overwhelming that I
could no longer breathe.
It seemed that all my physical functions had stopped; I could not feel
any part of my body. Yet I
still could move, walk, extend my arms, rotate my head. I put my hands
on my thighs; there was
no feeling in my thighs, nor in the palms of my hands. My legs and arms
were visibly there, but
not palpably there.
Moved by the boundless fear I was feeling, I grabbed the Nagual woman
by the arm and
yanked her off balance. But it was not my muscle strength that had
pulled her. It was a force that
was stored not in my muscles or skeletal frame but in the very center
of my body.
Wanting to play that force once more, I grabbed la Gorda. She was
rocked by the strength of
my pull. Then I realized that the energy to move them had come from a
sticklike protuberance
that acted upon them as a tentacle. It was balanced at the midpoint of
my body.
All that had taken only an instant. The next moment I was back again at
the same point of
physical anguish and fear. I looked at Silvio Manuel in a silent plea
for help. The way he returned
my look convinced me that I was lost. His eyes were cold and
indifferent. Don Juan turned his
back to me and I shook from the inside out with a physical terror
beyond comprehension. I
thought that the blood in my body was boiling, not because I felt heat,
but because an internal
pressure was mounting to the point of bursting.
80
Don Juan commanded me to relax and abandon myself to my death. He said
that I had to
remain in there until I died and that I had a chance either to die
peacefully, if I would make a
supreme effort and let my terror possess me, or I could die in agony,
if I chose to fight it.
Silvio Manuel spoke to me, a thing he rarely did. He said that the
energy I needed to accept
my terror was in my middle point, and that the only way to succeed was
to acquiesce, to
surrender without surrendering.
The Nagual woman and la Gorda were perfectly calm. I was the only one
who was dying
there. Silvio Manuel said that the way I was wasting energy, my end was
only moments away,
and that I should consider myself already dead. Don Juan signaled the
Nagual woman and la
Gorda to follow him. They turned their backs to me. I did not see what
else they did. I felt a
powerful vibration go through me. I figured that it was my death
rattle; my struggle was over. I
did not care any more. I gave in to the unsurpassable terror that was
killing me. My body, or the
configuration I regarded as my body, relaxed, abandoned itself to its
death. As I let the terror
come in, or perhaps go out of me, I felt and saw a tenuous vapor - a
whitish smear against the
sulphur-yellow surroundings - leaving my body.
Don Juan came back to my side and examined me with curiosity. Silvio
Manuel moved away
and grabbed la Gorda again by the nape of her neck. I clearly saw him
hurling her, like a giant
rag doll, into the fog bank. Then he stepped in himself and disappeared.
The Nagual woman made a gesture to invite me to come into the fog. I
moved toward her, but
before I reached her, don Juan gave me a forceful shove that propelled
me through the thick
yellow fog. I did not stagger but glided through and ended up falling
headlong onto the ground in
the everyday world.
La Gorda remembered the whole affair as I narrated it to her. Then she
added more details.
"The Nagual woman and I were not afraid for your life," she said. "The
Nagual had told us
that you had to be forced to give up your holdings, but that was
nothing new. Every male warrior
has to be forced by fear.
"Silvio Manuel had already taken me behind that wall three times so
that I would learn to
relax. He said that if you saw me at ease, you would be affected by it,
and you were. You gave up
and relaxed."
"Did you also have a hard time learning to relax?" I asked. "No. It's a
cinch for a woman," she
said. "That's our advantage. The only problem is that we have to be
transported through the fog.
We can't do it on our own."
"Why not, Gorda?" I asked.
"One needs to be very heavy to go through and a woman is light," she
said. "Too light, in
fact."
"What about the Nagual woman? I didn't see anyone transporting her," I
said.
"The Nagual woman was special," la Gorda said. "She could do everything
by herself. She
could take me in there, or take you. She could even pass through that
deserted plain, a thing
which the Nagual said was mandatory for all travelers who journey into
the unknown."
"Why did the Nagual woman go in there with me?" I asked.
"Silvio Manuel took us along to buttress you," she said. "He thought
that you needed the
protection of two females and two males flanking you. Silvio Manuel
thought that you needed to
be protected from the entities that roam and lurk in there. Allies come
from that deserted plain.
And other things even more fierce."
"Were you also protected?" I asked.
"I don't need protection," she said. "I'm a woman. I'm free from all
that. But we all thought
that you were in a terrible fix. You were the Nagual, and a very stupid
one. We thought that any
81
of those fierce allies - or if you wish, call them demons - could have
blasted you, or dismembered
you. That was what Silvio Manuel said. He took us to flank your four
corners. But the funny part
was that neither the Nagual nor Silvio Manuel knew that you didn't need
us. We were supposed to
walk for quite a while until you lost your energy. Then Silvio Manuel
was going to frighten you
by pointing out the allies to you and beckoning them to come after you.
He and the Nagual
planned to help you little by little. That is the rule. But something
went wrong. The minute you
got in there, you went crazy. You hadn't moved an inch and you were
already dying. You were
frightened to death and you hadn't even seen the allies yet.
"Silvio Manuel told me that he didn't know what to do, so he said in
your ear the last thing he
was supposed to say to you, to give in, to surrender without
surrendering. You became calm at
once all by yourself, and they didn't have to do any of the things that
they had planned. There
was nothing for the Nagual and Silvio Manuel to do except to take us
out of there."
I told la Gorda that when I found myself back in the world there was
someone standing by me
who helped me to stand up. That was all I could recollect.
"We were in Silvio Manuel's house," she said. "I can now remember a lot
about that house.
Someone told me, I don't know who, that Silvio Manuel found that house
and bought it because
it was built on a power spot. But someone else said that Silvio Manuel
found the house, liked it,
bought it, and then brought the power spot to it. I personally feel
that Silvio Manuel brought the
power. I feel that his impeccability held the power spot on that house
for as long as he and his
companions lived there.
"When it was time for them to move away, the power of that spot
vanished with them, and
the house became what it had been before Silvio Manuel found it, an
ordinary house."
As la Gorda talked, my mind seemed to clear up further, but not enough
to reveal what had
happened to us in that house that filled me with such sadness. Without
knowing why, I was sure
it had to do with the Nagual woman. Where was she?
La Gorda did not answer when I asked her that. There was a long
silence. She excused
herself, saying that she had to make breakfast; it was already morning.
She left me by myself,
with a most painful, heavy heart. I called her back. She got angry and
threw her pots on the floor.
I understood why.
In another session of dreaming together we went still deeper into the
intricacies of the second
attention. This took place a few days later. La Gorda and I, with no
such expectation or effort,
found ourselves standing together. She tried three or four times in
vain to interlock her arm with
mine. She spoke to me, but her speech was incomprehensible. I knew,
however, that she was
saying that we were again in our dreaming bodies. She was cautioning me
that all movement
should stem from our midsections.
As in our last attempt, no dreaming scene presented itself for our
examination, but I seemed
to recognize a physical locale which I had seen in dreaming nearly
every day for over a year: it
was the valley of the saber-toothed tiger.
We walked a few yards; this time our movements were not jerky or
explosive. We actually
walked from the belly, with no muscular action involved. The trying
part was my lack of
practice; it was like the first time I had ridden a bicycle. I easily
got tired and lost my rhythm,
became hesitant and unsure of myself. We stopped. La Gorda was out of
synchronization, too.
We began then to examine what was around us. Everything had an
indisputable reality, at
least to the eye. We were in a rugged area with a weird vegetation. I
could not identify the
strange shrubs I saw. They seemed like small trees, five to six feet
high. They had a few leaves,
which were flat and thick, chartreuse in color, and huge, gorgeous,
deep-brown flowers striped
82
with gold. The stems were not woody, but seemed to be light and
pliable, like reeds; they were
covered with long, formidable-looking needlelike thorns. Some old dead
plants that had dried
up and fallen to the ground gave me the impression that the stems were
hollow.
The ground was very dark and seemed moist. I tried to bend over to
touch it, but I failed to
move. La Gorda signaled me to use my midsection. When I did that I did
not have to bend over
to touch the ground; there was something in me like a tentacle which
could feel. But I could not
tell what I was feeling. There were no particular tactile qualities on
which to base distinctions.
The ground that I touched appeared to be soil, not to my sense of touch
but to what seemed to
be a visual core in me. I was plunged then into an intellectual
dilemma. Why would dreaming
seem to be the product of my visual faculty? Was it because of the
predominance of the visual
in daily life? The questions were meaningless. I was in no position to
answer them, and all my
queries did was to debilitate my second attention.
La Gorda jolted me out of my deliberations by ramming me. I experienced
a sensation like a
blow; a tremor ran through me. She pointed ahead of us. As usual, the
saber-toothed tiger was
lying on the ledge where I had always seen it. We approached until we
were a mere six feet
from the ledge and we had to lift our heads to see the tiger. We
stopped. It stood up. Its size
was stupendous, especially its breadth.
I knew that la Gorda wanted us to sneak around the tiger to the other
side of the hill. I
wanted to tell her that that might be dangerous, but I could not find a
way to convey the
message to her. The tiger seemed angry, aroused. It crouched back on
its hind legs, as if it were
preparing to jump on us. I was terrified.
La Gorda turned to me, smiling. I understood that she was telling me
not to succumb to my
panic, because the tiger was only a ghostlike image. With a movement of
her head, she coaxed
me to go on. Yet at an unfathomable level I knew that the tiger was an
entity, perhaps not in the
factual sense of our daily world, but real nonetheless. And because la
Gorda and I were
dreaming, we had lost our own factuality-in-the-world. At that moment
we were on a par with the
tiger: our existence also was ghostlike.
We took one more step at the nagging insistence of la Gorda. The tiger
jumped from the ledge.
I saw its enormous body hurtling through the air, coming directly at
me. I lost the sense that I
was dreaming - to me, the tiger was real and I was going to be ripped
apart. A barrage of lights,
images, and the most intense primary colors I had ever seen flashed all
around me. I woke up in
my study.
After we became extremely proficient in our dreaming together. I had
the certainty then that
we had managed to secure our detachment, and we were no longer in a
hurry. The outcome of our
efforts was not what moved us to act. It was rather an ulterior
compulsion that gave us the
impetus to act impeccably without thought of reward. Our subsequent
sessions were like the first
except for the speed and ease with which we entered into the second
state of dreaming, dynamic
vigil.
Our proficiency in dreaming together was such that we successfully
repeated it every night.
Without any such intention on our part, our dreaming together focused
itself randomly on three
areas: on the sand dunes, on the habitat of the saber-toothed tiger,
and most important, on
forgotten past events.
When the scenes that confronted us had to do with forgotten events in
which la Gorda and I
had played an important role, she had no difficulty in interlocking her
arm with mine. That act
gave me an irrational sense of security. La Gorda explained that it
fulfilled a need to dispel the
utter aloneness that the second attention produces. She said that to
interlock the arms promoted a
mood of objectivity, and as a result, we could watch the activity that
took place in every scene.
83
At times we were compelled to be part of the activity. At other times
we were thoroughly
objective and watched the scene as if we were in a movie theater.
When we visited the sand dunes or the habitat of the tiger, we were
unable to interlock arms.
In those instances our activity was never the same twice. Our actions
were never premeditated,
but seemed to be spontaneous reactions to novel situations.
According to la Gorda, most of our dreaming together grouped itself
into three categories.
The first and by far the largest was a reenactment of events we had
lived together. The second
was a review that both of us did of events I alone had "lived" - the
land of the saber-toothed
tiger was in this category. The third was an actual visit to a realm
that existed as we saw it at
the moment of our visit. She contended that those yellow mounds are
present here and now,
and that that is the way they look and stand always to the warrior who
journeys into them.
I wanted to argue a point with her. She and I had had mysterious
interactions with people
we had forgotten, for reasons inconceivable to us, but whom we had
nonetheless known in fact.
The saber-toothed tiger, on the other hand, was a creature of my
dreaming. I could not conceive
both of them to be in the same category.
Before I had time to voice my thoughts, I got her answer. It was as if
she were actually
inside my mind, reading it like a text.
"They are in the same class," she said, and laughed nervously. "We
can't explain why we have
forgotten, or how it is that we are remembering now. We can't explain
anything. The sabertoothed
tiger is there, somewhere. We'll never know where. But why should we
worry about a
made-up inconsistency? To say that one is a fact and the other a dream
has no meaning whatever
to the other self."
La Gorda and I used dreaming together as a means of reaching an
unimagined world of
hidden memories. Dreaming together enabled us to recollect events that
we were incapable of
retrieving with our everyday-life memory. When we rehashed those events
in our waking hours it
triggered yet more detailed recollections. In this fashion we
disinterred, so to speak, masses of
memories that had been buried in us. It took us almost two years of
prodigious effort and
concentration to arrive at a modicum of understanding of what had
happened to us.
Don Juan had told us that human beings are divided in two. The right
side, which he called the
tonal, encompasses everything the intellect can conceive of. The left
side, called the nagual, is a
realm of indescribable features: a realm impossible to contain in
words. The left side is perhaps
comprehended, if comprehension is what takes place, with the total
body; thus its resistance to
conceptualization.
Don Juan had also told us that all the faculties, possibilities, and
accomplishments of sorcery,
from the simplest to the most astounding, are in the human body itself.
Taking as a base the concepts that we are divided in two and that
everything is in the body
itself, la Gorda proposed an explanation of our memories. She believed
that during the years of
our association with the Nagual Juan Matus, our time was divided
between states of normal
awareness, on the right side, the tonal, where the first attention
prevails, and states of heightened
awareness, on the left side, the nagual, or the site of the second
attention.
La Gorda thought that the Nagual Juan Matus's efforts were to lead us
to the other self by
means of the self-control of the second attention through dreaming. He
put us in direct touch with
the second attention, however, through bodily manipulation, La Gorda
remembered that he used
to force her to go from one side to the other by pushing or massaging
her back. She said that
sometimes he would even give her a sound blow over or around her right
shoulder blade. The
result was her entrance into an extraordinary state of clarity. To la
Gorda, it seemed that
everything in that state went faster, yet nothing in the world had been
changed.
84
It was weeks after la Gorda told me this that I remembered the same had
been the case with
me. At any given time don Juan might give me a blow on my back. I
always felt the blow on
my spine, high between my shoulder blades. An extraordinary clarity
would follow. The world
was the same but sharper. Everything stood by itself. It may have been
that my reasoning
faculties were numbed by don Juan's blow, thus allowing me to perceive
without their
intervention.
I would stay clear indefinitely or until don Juan would give me another
blow on the same
spot to make me revert back to a normal state of awareness. He never
pushed or massaged me.
It was always a direct sound blow - not like the blow of a fist, but
rather a smack that took my
breath away for an instant. I would have to gasp and take long, fast
gulps of air until I could
breathe normally again.
La Gorda reported the same effect: all the air would be forced out of
her lungs by the
Nagual's blow and she would have to breathe extra hard to fill them up
again. La Gorda
believed that breath was the all-important factor. In her opinion, the
gulps of air that she had to
take after being struck were what made the difference, yet she could
not explain in what way
breathing would affect her perception and awareness. She also said that
she was never hit back
into normal awareness; she reverted back to it by her own means, though
without knowing how.
Her remarks seemed relevant to me. As a child, and even as an adult, I
had occasionally had
the wind knocked out of me when I took a fall on my back. But the
effect of don Juan's blow,
though it left me breathless, was not like that at all. There was no
pain involved; instead it
brought on a sensation impossible to describe. The closest I can come
is to say that it created a
feeling like dryness in me. The blows to my back seemed to dry out my
lungs and fog up
everything else. Then, as la Gorda had observed, everything that had
become hazy after the
Nagual's blow became crystal clear as I breathed, as if breath were the
catalyst, the allimportant
factor.
The same thing would happen to me on the way back to the awareness of
everyday life. The
air would be knocked out of me, the world I was watching would become
foggy, and then it
would clear as I filled up my lungs.
Another feature of those states of heightened awareness was the
incomparable richness of
personal interaction, a richness that our bodies understood as a
sensation of speeding. Our backand-
forth movement between the right and the left sides made it easier for
us to realize that on the
right side too much energy and time is consumed in the actions and
interactions of our daily life.
On the left side, on the other hand, there is an inherent need for
economy and speed.
La Gorda could not describe what this speed really was, and neither
could I. The best I could
do would be to say that on the left side I could grasp the meaning of
things with precision and
directness. Every facet of activity was free of preliminaries or
introductions. I acted and rested; I
went forth and retreated without any of the thought processes that are
usual to me. This was what
la Gorda and I understood as speeding.
La Gorda and I discerned at one moment that the richness of our
perception on the left side
was a post-facto realization. Our interaction appeared to be rich in
the light of our capacity to
remember it. We became cognizant then that in these states of
heightened awareness we had
perceived everything in one clump, one bulky mass of inextricable
detail. We called this ability to
perceive everything at once intensity. For years we had found it
impossible to examine the
separate constituent parts of those chunks of experience; we had been
unable to synthesize those
parts into a sequence that would make sense to the intellect. Since we
were incapable of those
syntheses, we could not remember. Our incapacity to remember was in
reality an incapacity to
put the memory of our perception on a linear basis. We could not lay
our experiences flat, so to
85
speak, and arrange them in a sequential order. The experiences were
available to us, but at the
same time they were impossible to retrieve, for they were blocked by a
wall of intensity.
The task of remembering, then, was properly the task of joining our
left and right sides, of
reconciling those two distinct forms of perception into a unified
whole. It was the task of
consolidating the totality of oneself by rearranging intensity into a
linear sequence.
It occurred to us that the activities we remembered taking part in
might not have taken long
to perform, in terms of time measured by the clock. By reason of our
capacity to perceive in
terms of intensity, we may have had only a subliminal sensation of
lengthy passages of time. La
Gorda felt that if we could rearrange intensity into a linear sequence,
we would honestly believe
that we had lived a thousand years.
The pragmatic step that don Juan took to aid our task of remembering
was to make us
interact with certain people while we were in a state of heightened
awareness. He was very
careful not to let us see those people when we were in a state of
normal awareness. In this way
he created the appropriate conditions for remembering.
Upon completing our remembering, la Gorda and I entered into a bizarre
state. We had
detailed knowledge of social interactions which we had shared with don
Juan and his
companions. These were not memories in the sense that I would remember
an episode from my
childhood; they were more than vivid moment-to-moment recollections of
events. We
reconstructed conversations that seemed to be reverberating in our
ears, as if we were listening
to them. Both of us felt that it was superfluous to try to speculate
about what was happening to
us. What we remembered, from the point of view of our experiential
selves, was taking place
now. Such was the character of our remembering.
At last la Gorda and I were able to answer the questions that had
driven us so hard. We
remembered who the Nagual woman was, where she fit among us, what her
role had been. We
deduced, more than remembered, that we had spent equal amounts of time
with don Juan and don
Genaro in normal states of awareness, and with don Juan and his other
companions in states of
heightened awareness. We recaptured every nuance of those interactions,
which had been veiled
by intensity.
Upon a thoughtful review of what we had found, we realized that we had
bridged the two
sides of ourselves in a minimal fashion. We turned then to other
topics, new questions that had
come to take precedence over the old ones. There were three subjects,
three questions, that
summarized all of our concerns. Who was don Juan and who were his
companions? What had
they really done to us? And where had all of them gone?
86
Part 3: The
Eagle's Gift
87
9. The Rule of The Nagual
Don Juan had been extremely sparing with information about his
background and personal
life. His reticence was, fundamentally, a didactic device; as far as he
was concerned, his time
began when he became a warrior; anything that had happened to him
before was of very little
consequence.
All la Gorda and I knew about his early life was that he was born in
Arizona of Yaqui and
Yuma Indian parentage. When he was still an infant his parents took him
to live with the Yaquis
in northern Mexico. At ten years of age he was caught in the tide of
the Yaqui wars. His mother
was killed then, and his father was apprehended by the Mexican army.
Both don Juan and his
father were sent to a relocation center in the farthest southern state
of Yucatan. He grew up there.
Whatever happened to him during that period was never disclosed to us.
Don Juan believed
there was no need to tell us about it. I felt otherwise. The importance
that I gave to that segment
of his life arose from my conviction that the distinctive features and
the emphasis of his
leadership grew out of that personal inventory of experience.
But that inventory, important as it might have been, was not what gave
him the paramount
significance he had in our eyes, and in the eyes of his other
companions. His total preeminence
rested on the fortuitous act of becoming involved with the "rule."
Being involved with the rule may be described as living a myth. Don
Juan lived a myth, a
myth that caught him and made him the Nagual.
Don Juan said that when the rule caught him he was an aggressive,
unruly man living in exile,
as thousands of other Yaqui Indians from northern Mexico lived at that
time. He worked in the
tobacco plantations of southern Mexico. One day after work, in a nearly
fatal encounter with a
fellow worker over matters of money, he was shot in the chest. When he
regained consciousness
an old Indian was leaning over him, poking the small wound in his chest
with his fingers. The
bullet had not penetrated the chest cavity but was lodged in the muscle
against a rib. Don Juan
fainted two or three times from shock, loss of blood, and in his own
words, from fear of dying.
The old Indian removed the bullet, and since don Juan had no place to
stay, he took him to his
own house and nursed him for over a month.
The old Indian was kind but severe. One day when don Juan was fairly
strong, almost
recovered, the old man gave him a sound blow on his back and forced him
into a state of
heightened awareness. Then, without any further preliminaries, he
revealed to don Juan the
portion of the rule which pertained to the Nagual and his role.
Don Juan did exactly the same thing with me, and with la Gorda; he made
us shift levels of
awareness and told us the rule of the Nagual in the following way:
The power that governs the destiny of all living beings is called the
Eagle, not because it is an
eagle or has anything to do with an eagle, but because it appears to
the seer as an immeasurable
jet-black eagle, standing erect as an eagle stands, its height reaching
to infinity. As the seer gazes
on the blackness that the Eagle is, four blazes of light reveal what
the Eagle is like. The first
blaze, which is like a bolt of lightning, helps the seer make out the
contours of the Eagle's body.
There are patches of whiteness that look like an eagle's feathers and
talons. A second blaze of
lightning reveals the flapping, wind-creating blackness that looks like
an eagle's wings. With the
third blaze of lightning the seer beholds a piercing, inhuman eye. And
the fourth and last blaze
discloses what the Eagle is doing.
The Eagle is devouring the awareness of all the creatures that, alive
on earth a moment before
and now dead, have floated to the Eagle's beak, like a ceaseless swarm
of fireflies, to meet their
owner, their reason for having had life. The Eagle disentangles these
tiny flames, lays them flat,
88
as a tanner stretches out a hide, and then consumes them; for awareness
is the Eagle's food.
The Eagle, that power that governs the destinies of all living things,
reflects equally and at
once all those living things. There is no way, therefore, for man to
pray to the Eagle, to ask
favors, to hope for grace, The human part of the Eagle is too
insignificant to move the whole.
It is only from the Eagle's actions that a seer can tell what it wants.
The Eagle, although it is
not moved by the circumstances of any living thing, has granted a gift
to each of those beings. In
its own way and right, any one of them, if it so desires, has the power
to keep the flame of
awareness, the power to disobey the summons to die and be consumed.
Every living thing has
been granted the power, if it so desires, to seek an opening to freedom
and to go through it. It is
evident to the seer who sees the opening, and to the creatures that go
through it, that the Eagle
has granted that gift in order to perpetuate awareness.
For the purpose of guiding living things to that opening, the Eagle
created the Nagual. The
Nagual is a double being to whom the rule has been revealed. Whether it
be in the form of a
human being, an animal, a plant, or anything else that lives, the
Nagual by virtue of its
doubleness is drawn to seek that hidden passageway.
The Nagual comes in pairs, male and female. A double man and a double
woman become the
Nagual only after the rule has been told to each of them, and each of
them has understood it and
accepted it in full.
To the eye of the seer, a Nagual man or Nagual woman appears as a
luminous egg with four
compartments. Unlike the average human being, who has two sides only, a
left and a right, the
Nagual has a left side divided into two long sections, and a right side
equally divided in two.
The Eagle created the first Nagual man and Nagual woman as seers and
immediately put
them in the world to see. It provided them with four female warriors
who were stalkers, three
male warriors, and one male courier, whom they were to nourish,
enhance, and lead to
freedom.
The female warriors are called the four directions, the four corners of
a square, the four
moods, the four winds, the four different female personalities that
exist in the human race.
The first is the east. She is called order. She is optimistic, light-
hearted, smooth, persistent
like a steady breeze.
The second is the north. She is called strength. She is resourceful,
blunt, direct, tenacious
like a hard wind.
The third is the west. She is called feeling. She is introspective,
remorseful, cunning, sly,
like a cold gust of wind.
The fourth is the south. She is called growth, She is nurturing, loud,
shy, warm, like a hot
wind.
The three male warriors and the courier are representative of the four
types of male activity
and temperament.
The first type is the knowledgeable man, the scholar; a noble,
dependable, serene man, fully
dedicated to accomplishing his task, whatever it may be.
The second type is the man of action, highly volatile, a great humorous
fickle companion.
The third type is the organizer behind the scenes, the mysterious,
unknowable man. Nothing
can be said about him because he allows nothing about himself to slip
out.
The courier is the fourth type, He is the assistant, a taciturn, somber
man who does very
well if properly directed but who cannot stand on his own.
In order to make things easier, the Eagle showed the Nagual man and
Nagual woman that
each of these types among men and women of the earth has specific
features in its luminous
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body.
The scholar has a sort of shallow dent, a bright depression at his
solar plexus. In some men
it appears as a pool of intense luminosity, sometimes smooth and shiny
like a mirror without a
reflection.
The man of action has some fibers emanating from the area of the will.
The number of
fibers varies from one to five, their size ranging from a mere string
to a thick, whiplike tentacle
up to eight feet long. Some have as many as three of these fibers
developed into tentacles.
The man behind the scenes is recognized not by a feature but by his
ability to create, quite
involuntarily, a burst of power that effectively blocks the attention
of seers. When in the
presence of this type of man, seers find themselves immersed in
extraneous detail rather than
seeing.
The assistant has no obvious configuration. To seers he appears as a
clear glow in a flawless
shell of luminosity.
In the female realm, the east is recognized by the almost imperceptible
blotches in her
luminosity, something like small areas of discoloration.
The north has an overall radiation; she exudes a reddish glow, almost
like heat.
The west has a tenuous film enveloping her, a film which makes her
appear darker than the
others.
The south has an intermittent glow; she shines for a moment and then
gets dull, only to
shine again.
The Nagual man and the Nagual woman have two different movements in
their luminous
bodies. Their right sides wave, while their left sides whirl.
In terms of personality, the Nagual man is supportive, steady,
unchangeable. The Nagual
woman is a being at war and yet relaxed, ever aware but without strain.
Both of them reflect
the four types of their sex, as four ways of behaving.
The first command that the Eagle gave the Nagual man and Nagual woman
was to find, on
their own, another set of four female warriors, four directions, who
were the exact replicas of
the stalkers but who were dreamers.
Dreamers appear to a seer as having an apron of hairlike fibers at
their midsections. Stalkers
have a similar apronlike feature, but instead of fibers the apron
consists of countless small,
round protuberances.
The eight female warriors are divided into two bands, which are called
the right and left
planets. The right planet is made up of four stalkers, the left of four
dreamers. The warriors of
each planet were taught by the Eagle the rule of their specific task:
stalkers were taught
stalking; dreamers were taught dreaming.
The two female warriors of each direction live together. They are so
alike that they mirror
each other, and only through impeccability can they find solace and
challenge in each other's
reflection.
The only time when the four dreamers or four stalkers get together is
when they have to
accomplish a strenuous task; but only under special circumstances
should the four of them join
hands, for their touch fuses them into one being and should be used
only in cases of dire need,
or at the moment of leaving this world.
The two female warriors of each direction are attached to one of the
males, in any
combination that is necessary. Thus they make a set of four households,
which are capable of
incorporating as many warriors as needed.
The male warriors and the courier can also form an independent unit of
four men, or each
can function as a solitary being, as dictated by necessity.
90
Next the Nagual and his party were commanded to find three more
couriers. These could be
all males or all females or a mixed set, but the male couriers had to
be of the fourth type of
man, the assistant, and the females had to be from the south.
In order to make sure that the first Nagual man would lead his party to
freedom and not
deviate from that path or become corrupted, the Eagle took the Nagual
woman to the other
world to serve as a beacon, guiding the party to the opening.
The Nagual and his warriors were then commanded to forget.
They were plunged into darkness and were given new tasks: the task of
remembering
themselves, and the task of remembering the Eagle.
The command to forget was so great that everyone was separated. They
did not remember
who they were. The Eagle intended that if they were capable of
remembering themselves again,
they would find the totality of themselves. Only then would they have
the strength and
forebearance necessary to seek and face their definitive journey.
Their last task, after they had regained the totality of themselves,
was to get a new pair of
double beings and transform them into a new Nagual man and a new Nagual
woman by virtue
of revealing the rule to them. And just as the first Nagual man and
Nagual woman had been
provided with a minimal party, they had to supply the new pair of
Naguals with four female
warriors who were stalkers, three male warriors, and one male courier.
When the first Nagual and his party were ready to go through the
passageway, the first
Nagual woman was waiting to guide them. They were ordered then to take
the new Nagual
woman with them to the other world to serve as a beacon for her people,
leaving the new
Nagual man in the world to repeat the cycle.
While in the world, the minimal number under a Nagual's leadership is
sixteen: eight female
warriors, four male warriors, counting the Nagual, and four couriers.
At the moment of leaving
the world, when the new Nagual woman is with them, the Nagual's number
is seventeen. If his
personal power permits him to have more warriors, then more must be
added in multiples of
four.
I had confronted don Juan with the question of how the rule became
known to man. He
explained that the rule was endless and covered every facet of a
warrior's behavior. The
interpretation and the accumulation of the rule is the work of seers
whose only task throughout
the ages has been to see the Eagle, to observe its ceaseless flux. From
their observations, the
seers have concluded that, providing the luminous shell that comprises
one's humanness has
been broken, it is possible to find in the Eagle the faint reflection
of man. The Eagle's
irrevocable dictums can then be apprehended by seers, properly
interpreted by them, and
accumulated in the form of a governing body.
Don Juan explained that the rule was not a tale, and that to cross over
to freedom did not
mean eternal life as eternity is commonly understood - that is, as
living forever. What the rule
stated was that one could keep the awareness which is ordinarily
relinquished at the moment of
dying. Don Juan could not explain what it meant to keep that awareness,
or perhaps he could
not even conceive of it. His benefactor had told him that at the moment
of crossing, one enters
into the third attention, and the body in its entirety is kindled with
knowledge. Every cell at
once becomes aware of itself, and also aware of the totality of the
body.
His benefactor had also told him that this kind of awareness is
meaningless to our
compartmentalized minds. Therefore the crux of the warrior's struggle
was not so much to
realize that the crossing over stated in the rule meant crossing to the
third attention, but rather to
conceive that there exists such an awareness at all.
Don Juan said that in the beginning the rule was to him something
strictly in the realm of
91
words. He could not imagine how it could lapse into the domain of the
actual world and its
ways. Under the effective guidance of his benefactor, however, and
after a great deal of work,
he finally succeeded in grasping the true nature of the rule, and
totally accepted it as a set of
pragmatic directives rather than a myth. From then on, he had no
problem in dealing with the
reality of the third attention. The only obstacle in his way arose from
his being so thoroughly
convinced that the rule was a map that he believed he had to look for a
literal opening in the
world, a passageway. Somehow he had become needlessly stuck at the
first level of a warrior's
development.
Don Juan's own work as a leader and teacher, as a result, was directed
at helping the
apprentices, and especially me, to avoid repeating his mistake. What he
succeeded in doing
with us was to lead us through the three stages of a warrior's
development without
overemphasizing any of them. First he guided us to take the rule as a
map; then he guided us to
the understanding that one can attain a paramount awareness, because
there is such a thing; and
finally he guided us to an actual passageway into that other concealed
world of awareness.
In order to lead us through the first stage, the acceptance of the rule
as a map, don Juan took
the section which pertains to the Nagual and his role and showed us
that it corresponds to
unequivocal facts. He accomplished this by allowing us to have, while
we were in stages of
heightened awareness, an unrestricted interaction with the members of
his group, who were the
living personifications of the eight types of people described by the
rule. As we interacted with
them, more complex and inclusive aspects of the rule were revealed to
us, until we were capable
of realizing that we were caught in the network of something which at
first we had conceptualized
as a myth, but which in essence was a map.
Don Juan told us that in this respect his case had been identical to
ours. His benefactor helped
him go through that first stage by allowing him the same type of
interaction. To that effect he
made him shift back and forth from the right side to the left side
awareness, just as don Juan had
done to us. On the left side, he introduced him to the members of his
own group, the eight female
and three male warriors, and the four couriers, who were, as is
mandatory, the strictest examples
of the types described by the rule. The impact of knowing them and
dealing with them was
staggering to don Juan. Not only did it force him to regard the rule as
a factual guide, but it made
him realize the magnitude of our unknown possibilities.
He said that by the time all the members of his own group had been
gathered, he was so
deeply committed to the warrior's way that he took for granted the fact
that, without any overt
effort on anybody's part, they had turned out to be perfect replicas of
the warriors of his
benefactor's party. The similarity of their personal likes, dislikes,
affiliations, and so forth, was
not a result of imitation; don Juan said that they belonged, as the
rule had stated, to specific
blocks of people who had the same input and output. The only
differences among members of the
same block were in the pitch of their voices, the sound of their
laughter.
In trying to explain to me the effects that the interaction with his
benefactor's warriors had
had on him, don Juan touched on the subject of the very meaningful
difference between his
benefactor and himself in how they interpreted the rule, and also in
how they led and taught
other warriors to accept it as a map. He said that there are two types
of interpretations -
universal and individual. Universal interpretations take the statements
that make up the body of
the rule at face value. An example would be to say that the Eagle does
not care about man's
actions and yet it has provided man with a passageway to freedom.
An individual interpretation, on the other hand, is a current
conclusion arrived at by seers
using universal interpretation's as premises. An example would be to
say that because of the
Eagle's lack of concern I would have to make sure that my chances to
reach freedom are
92
enhanced, perhaps by my own dedication.
According to don Juan, he and his benefactor were quite different in
the methods they used
to lead their wards. Don Juan said that his benefactor's mode was
severity; he led with an iron
hand, and following his conviction that with the Eagle free handouts
are out of the question, he
never did anything for anyone in a direct way. Instead, he actively
helped everyone to help
themselves. He considered that the Eagle's gift of freedom is not a
bestowal but a chance to
have a chance.
Don Juan, although he appreciated the merits of his benefactor's
method, disagreed with it.
Later on, when he was on his own, he himself saw that it wasted
precious time. For him it was
more expedient to present everyone with a given situation and force
them to accept it, rather
than wait until they were ready to face it on their own. That was his
method with me and the
other apprentices.
The instance in which that difference in leadership had the greatest
bearing for don Juan was
during the mandatory interaction that he had with his benefactor's
warriors. The command of the
rule was that his benefactor had to find for don Juan first a Nagual
woman and then a group of
four women and four men to make up his warrior's party. His benefactor
saw that don Juan did
not yet have enough personal power to assume the responsibility of a
Nagual woman, and so he
reversed the sequence and asked the females of his own group to find
don Juan the four women
first, and then the four men.
Don Juan confessed that he was enthralled with the idea of such a
reversal. He had understood
that those women were for his use, and in his mind that meant sexual
use. His downfall, however,
was to reveal his expectations to his benefactor, who immediately put
don Juan in contact with
the men and women of his own party and left him alone to interact with
them.
For don Juan, to meet those warriors was a true ordeal, not only
because they were
deliberately difficult with him, but because the nature of that
encounter is meant to be a
breakthrough.
Don Juan said that interaction in the left-side awareness cannot take
place unless all the
participants share that state. This was why he would not let us enter
into the left-side awareness
except to carry on our interaction with his warriors. That was the
procedure his benefactor had
followed with him.
Don Juan gave me a brief account of what had taken place during his
first meeting with the
members of his benefactor's group. His idea was that I could use his
experience perhaps as a
sample of what to expect. He said that his benefactor's world had a
magnificent regularity. The
members of his party were Indian warriors from all over Mexico. At the
time he met them they
lived in a remote mountainous area in southern Mexico.
Upon reaching their house, don Juan was confronted with two identical
women, the biggest
Indian women he had ever seen. They were sulky and mean, but had very
pleasing features.
When he tried to go between them, they caught him between their
enormous bellies, grabbed his
arms, and started beating him up. They threw him to the ground and sat
on him, nearly crushing
his rib cage. They kept him immobilized for over twelve hours while
they conducted on-the-spot
negotiations with his benefactor, who had to talk nonstop throughout
the night, until they finally
let don Juan get up around midmorning. He said that what scared him the
most was the
determination that showed in the eyes of those women. He thought he was
done for, that they
were going to sit on him until he died, as they had said they would.
Normally there should have been a waiting period of a few weeks before
meeting the next set
of warriors, but due to the fact that his benefactor was planning to
leave him in their midst, don
Juan was immediately taken to meet the others. He met everyone in one
day and all of them
93
treated him like dirt. They argued that he was not the man for the job,
that he was too coarse and
way too stupid, young but already senile in his ways. His benefactor
argued brilliantly in his
defense; he told them that they could change those conditions, and that
it should be an ultimate
delight for them and for don Juan to take up that challenge.
Don Juan said that his first impression was right. For him there was
only work and hardship
from then on. The women saw that don Juan was unruly and could not be
trusted to fulfill the
complex and delicate task of leading four women. Since they were seers
themselves, they made
their own individual interpretation of the rule and decided that it
would be more helpful for don
Juan to have the four male warriors first and then the four females.
Don Juan said that their
seeing had been correct, because in order to deal with women warriors a
Nagual has to be in a
state of consummate personal power, a state of serenity and control in
which human feelings play
a minimal part, a state which at the time was inconceivable for him.
His benefactor put him under the direct supervision of his two westerly
women, the most
fierce and uncompromising warriors of them all. Don Juan said that all
westerly women, in
accordance with the rule, are raving mad and have to be cared for.
Under the duress of dreaming
and stalking they lose their right sides, their minds. Their reason
burns up easily due to the fact
that their left-side awareness is extraordinarily keen. Once they lose
their rational side, they are
peerless dreamers and stalkers, since they no longer have any rational
ballast to hold them back.
Don Juan said that those women cured him of his lust. For six months he
spent most of his
time in a harness suspended from the ceiling of their rural kitchen,
like a ham that was being
smoked, until he was thoroughly purified from thoughts of gain and
personal gratification.
Don Juan explained that a leather harness is a superb device for curing
certain maladies that
are not physical. The idea is that the higher a person is suspended and
the longer that person is
kept from touching the ground, dangling in midair, the better the
possibilities of a true cleansing
effect.
While he was being cleansed by the westerly warriors, the other women
were involved in the
process of finding the men and the women for his party. It took years
to accomplish this. Don
Juan, meantime, was forced to interact with all his benefactor's
warriors by himself. The presence
of those warriors and his contact with them was so overwhelming to don
Juan that he believed he
would never get out from under them. The result was his total and
literal adherence to the body of
the rule. Don Juan said that he spent irreplaceable time pondering the
existence of an actual
passageway into the other world. He viewed such a concern as a pitfall
to be avoided at all costs.
To protect me from it, he allowed the required inter action with the
members of his group to be
carried on while I was protected by the presence of la Gorda or any of
the other apprentices.
In my case, meeting don Juan's warriors was the end result of a long
process. There was
never any mention of them in casual conversations with don Juan. I knew
of their existence
solely by inference from the rule, which he was revealing to me in
installments. Later on, he
admitted that they existed, and that eventually I would have to meet
them. He prepared me for
the encounter by giving me general instructions and pointers.
He warned me about a common error, that of overestimating the left-side
awareness, of
becoming dazzled by its clarity and power. He said that to be in the
left-side awareness does not
mean that one is immediately liberated from one's folly - it only means
an extended capacity for
perceiving, a greater facility to understand and learn, and above all,
a greater ability to forget.
As the time approached for me to meet don Juan's own warriors, he gave
me a scanty
description of his benefactor's party, again as a guideline for my own
use. He said that to an
onlooker, his benefactor's world may have appeared at certain times as
consisting of four
households. The first was formed by the southerly women and the
Nagual's courier; the second
94
by the easterly women, the scholar, and a male courier; the third by
the northerly women, the
man of action, and another male courier; and the fourth by the westerly
women, the man behind
the scenes, and a third male courier.
At other times that world may have seemed to be composed of groups.
There was a group of
four thoroughly dissimilar older men, who were don Juan's benefactor
and his three male
warriors. Then a group of four men who were very similar to one
another, who were the
couriers. A group composed of two sets of apparently identical female
twins who lived together
and were the southerly and easterly women.
And two other sets of apparently sisters, who were the northerly and
westerly women.
None of these women were relatives - they just looked alike because of
the enormous amount
of personal power that don Juan's benefactor had. Don Juan described
the southerly women as
being two mastodons, scary in appearance but very friendly and warm.
The easterly women were
very beautiful, fresh and funny, a true delight to the eyes and the
ears. The northerly women
were utterly womanly, vain, coquettish, concerned with their aging, but
also terribly direct and
impatient. The westerly women were mad at times, and at other times
they were the epitome of
severity and purpose. They were the ones who disturbed don Juan the
most, because he could not
reconcile the fact that they were so sober, kind, and helpful with the
fact that at any given
moment they could lose their composure and be raving mad.
The men, on the other hand, were in no way memorable to don Juan. He
thought that there
was nothing remarkable about them. They seemed to have been thoroughly
absorbed by the
shocking force of the women's determination and by his benefactor's
overpowering personality.
Insofar as his own awakening was concerned, don Juan said that upon
being thrust into his
benefactor's world, he realized how easy and convenient it had been for
him to go through life
with no self-restraint. He understood that his mistake had been to
believe that his goals were the
only worthwhile ones a man could have. All his life he had been a
pauper; his consuming
ambition, therefore, was to have material possessions, to be somebody.
He had been so
preoccupied with his desire to get ahead and his despair at not being
successful, that he had had
no time for examining anything. He had gladly sided with his benefactor
because he realized that
he was being offered an opportunity to make something of himself. If
nothing else, he thought he
might learn to be a sorcerer. He conceived that immersion in his
benefactor's world might have an
effect on him analogous to the effect of the Spanish Conquest on the
Indian culture. It destroyed
everything, but it also forced a shattering self-examination.
My response to the preparations to meet don Juan's party of warriors
was not, strangely
enough, awe or fear, but a petty intellectual concern about two topics.
The first was the
proposition that there are only four types of men and four types of
women in the world. I argued
with don Juan that the range of individual variation in people is too
great for such a simple
scheme. He disagreed with me. He said that the rule was final, and that
it did not allow for an
indefinite number of types of people.
The second topic was the cultural context of don Juan's knowledge. He
did not know that
himself. He viewed it as the product of a sort of Pan-Indianism. His
conjecture about its origin
was that at one time, in the Indian world prior to the Conquest, the
handling of the second
attention became vitiated. It was developed without any hindrance over
perhaps thousands of
years, to the point that it lost its strength. The practitioners of
that time may have had no need for
controls, and thus without restraint, the second attention, instead of
becoming stronger, became
weaker by virtue of its increased intricacy. Then the Spanish invaders
came and, with their
superior technology, destroyed the Indian world. Don Juan said that his
benefactor was convinced
that only a handful of those warriors survived and were capable of
reassembling their knowledge
95
and redirecting their path. Whatever don Juan and his benefactor knew
about the second attention
was the restructured version, a new version which had built-in
restraints because it had been
forged under the harshest conditions of suppression.
96
10. The Nagual's Party of
Warriors
When don Juan judged that the time was right for me to have my first
encounter with his
warriors, he made me shift levels of awareness. He then made it
perfectly clear that he would
have nothing to do with their way of meeting me. He warned me that if
they decided to beat me,
he could not stop them. They could do anything they wanted, except kill
me. He stressed over and
over again that the warriors of his party were a perfect replica of his
benefactor's, except that
some of the women were more fierce, and all the men were utterly unique
and powerful.
Therefore, my first encounter with them might resemble a head-on
collision.
I was nervous and apprehensive on the one hand, but curious on the
other. My mind was
running wild with endless speculations, most of them about what the
warriors would look like.
Don Juan said that he had the choice either of coaching me to memorize
an elaborate ritual, as
he had been made to do, or of making it the most casual encounter
possible. He waited for an
omen to point out which alternative to take. His benefactor had done
something similar, only he
had insisted don Juan learn the ritual before the omen presented
itself. When don Juan revealed
his sexual daydreams of sleeping with four women, his benefactor
interpreted it as the omen,
chucked the ritual, and ended up pleading like a hog dealer for don
Juan's life.
In my case, don Juan wanted an omen before he taught me the ritual.
That omen came when
don Juan and I were driving through a border town in Arizona and a
policeman stopped me. The
policeman thought I was an illegal alien. Only after I had shown him my
passport, which he
suspected of being a forgery, and other documents, did he let me go.
Don Juan had been in the
front seat next to me all the time, and the policeman had not given him
a second glance. He had
focused solely on me. Don Juan thought the incident was the omen he was
waiting for. His
interpretation of it was that it would be very dangerous for me to call
attention to myself, and he
concluded that my world had to be one of utter simplicity and candor -
elaborate ritual and pomp
were out of character for me. He conceded, however, that a minimal
observance of ritualistic
patterns was in order when I made my acquaintance with his warriors. I
had to begin by
approaching them from the south, because that is the direction that
power follows in its ceaseless
flux. Life force flows to us from the south, and leaves us flowing
toward the north. He said that
the only opening to a Nagual's world was through the south, and that
the gate was made by two
female warriors, who would have to greet me and would let me go through
if they so decided.
He took me to a town in central Mexico, to a house in the countryside.
As we approached it on
foot from a southerly direction, I saw two massive Indian women
standing four feet apart, facing
each other. They were about thirty or forty feet away from the main
door of the house, in an area
where the dirt was hard-packed. The two women were extraordinarily
muscular and stern. Both
had long, jet-black hair held together in a single thick braid. They
looked like sisters. They were
about the same height and weight - I figured that they must have been
around five feet four, and
weighed 150 pounds. One of them was extremely dark, almost black, the
other much lighter.
They were dressed like typical Indian women from central Mexico - long,
full dresses and shawls,
homemade sandals.
Don Juan made me stop three feet from them. He turned to the woman on
our left and made
me face her. He said that her name was Cecilia and that she was a
dreamer. He then turned
abruptly, without giving me time to say anything, and made me face the
darker woman, to our
right. He said that her name was Delia and that she was a stalker. The
women nodded at me.
They did not smile or move to shake hands with me, or make any gesture
of welcome.
Don Juan walked between them as if they were two columns marking a
gate. He took a couple
of steps and turned as if waiting for the women to invite me to go
through. The women stared at
me calmly for a moment. Then Cecilia asked me to come in, as if I were
at the threshold of an
97
actual door.
Don Juan led the way to the house. At the front door we found a man. He
was very slender. At
first sight he looked extremely young, but on closer examination he
appeared to be in his late
fifties. He gave me the impression of being an old child: small, wiry,
with penetrating dark eyes.
He was like an elfish apparition, a shadow. Don Juan introduced him to
me as Emilito, and said
that he was his courier and all-around helper, who would welcome me on
his behalf.
It seemed to me that Emilito was indeed the most appropriate being to
welcome anyone. His
smile was radiant; his small teeth were perfectly even. He shook hands
with me, or rather he
crossed his forearms and clasped both my hands. He seemed to be exuding
enjoyment; anyone
would have sworn that he was ecstatic in meeting me. His voice was very
soft and his eyes
sparkled.
We walked into a large room. There was another woman there. Don Juan
said that her name
was Teresa and that she was Cecilia's and Delia's courier. She was
perhaps in her early thirties,
and she definitely looked like Cecilia's daughter. She was very quiet
but very friendly. We
followed don Juan to the back of the house, where there was a roofed
porch. It was a warm day.
We sat there around a table, and after a frugal dinner we talked until
after midnight.
Emilito was the host. He charmed and delighted everyone with his exotic
stories. The
women opened up. They were a great audience for him. To hear the
women's laughter was an
exquisite pleasure. They were tremendously muscular, bold, and
physical. At one point, when
Emilito said that Cecilia and Delia were like two mothers to him, and
Teresa like a daughter,
they picked him up and tossed him in the air like a child.
Of the two women, Delia seemed the more rational, down- to-earth.
Cecilia was perhaps
more aloof, but appeared to have greater inner strength. She gave me
the impression of being
more intolerant, or more impatient; she seemed to get annoyed with some
of Emilito's stories.
Nonetheless, she was definitely on the edge of her chair when he would
tell what he called his
"tales of eternity." He would preface every story with the phrase, 'Do
you, dear friends, know
that. . . ?' The story that impressed me most was about some creatures
that he said existed in
the universe, who were the closest thing to human beings without being
human; creatures who
were obsessed with movement and capable of detecting the slightest
fluctuation inside
themselves or around them. These creatures were so sensitive to motion
that it was a curse to
them. It gave them such pain that their ultimate ambition was to find
quietude.
Emilito would intersperse his tales of eternity with the most
outrageous dirty jokes.
Because of his incredible gifts as a raconteur, I understood every one
of his stories as a
metaphor, a parable, with which he was teaching us something.
Don Juan said that Emilito was merely reporting about things he had
witnessed in his
journeys through eternity. The role of a courier was to travel ahead of
the Nagual, like a scout
in a military operation. Emilito went to the limits of the second
attention, and whatever he
witnessed he passed on to the others.
My second encounter with don Juan's warriors was just as contrived as
the first. One day
don Juan made me shift levels of awareness and told me that I had a
second appointment. He
made me drive to Zacatecas in northern Mexico. We arrived there very
early in the morning.
Don Juan said that that was only a stopover, and that we had until the
next day to relax before
we embarked on my second formal meeting to make the acquaintance of the
eastern women
and the scholar warrior of his party. He explained then an intricate
and delicate point of choice.
He said that we had met the south and the courier in the midafternoon,
because he had made an
individual interpretation of the rule and had picked that hour to
represent the night. The south
98
was really the night - a warm, friendly, cozy night - and properly we
should have gone to meet
the two southerly women after midnight. However, that would have been
inauspicious for me
because my general direction was toward the light, toward optimism, an
optimism that works
itself harmoniously into the mystery of darkness. He said that that was
precisely what we had
done that day; we had enjoyed each other's company and talked until it
was pitch-black. I had
wondered why they did not light their lanterns.
Don Juan said that the east, on the other hand, was the morning, the
light, and that we
would meet the easterly women the next day at midmorning.
Before breakfast we went to the plaza and sat down on a bench. Don Juan
told me that he
wanted me to remain there and wait for him while he ran some errands.
He left and shortly
after he had gone, a woman came and sat down on the other end of the
bench. I did not pay
any attention to her and started reading a newspaper. A moment later
another woman joined
her. I wanted to move to another bench, but I remembered that don Juan
had specifically said
that I should sit there. I turned my back to the women and had even
forgotten that they were
there, since they were so quiet, when a man greeted them and stood
facing me. I became aware
from their conversation that the women had been waiting for him. The
man apologized for
being late. He obviously wanted to sit down. I slid over to make room
for him. He thanked me
profusely and apologized for inconveniencing me. He said that they were
absolutely lost in the
city because they were rural people, and that once they had been to
Mexico City and had
nearly died in the traffic. He asked me if I lived in Zacatecas. I said
no and was going to end
our conversation right there but there was something very winning about
his smile. He was an
old man, remarkably fit for his age. He was not an Indian. He seemed to
be a gentleman farmer
from a small rural town. He was wearing a suit and had a straw hat on.
His features were very
delicate. His skin was almost transparent. He had a high-bridged nose,
a small mouth, and a
perfectly groomed white beard. He looked extraordinarily healthy and
yet he seemed frail. He
was of medium height and well built, but at the same time gave the
impression of being
slender, almost effete.
He stood up and introduced himself to me, He told me that his name was
Vicente Medrano,
and that he had come to the city on business only for the day. He then
pointed to the two women
and said that they were his sisters. The women stood up and faced us.
They were very slim and
darker than their brother. They were also much younger. One of them
could have been his
daughter. I noticed that their skin was not like his; theirs was dry.
The two women were very
good-looking. Like the man, they had fine features, and their eyes were
clear and peaceful. They
were about five feet four. They were wearing beautifully tailored
dresses, but with their shawls,
low heeled shoes, and dark cotton stockings they looked like well-to-do
farm women. The older
one appeared to be in her fifties, the younger in her forties.
The man introduced them to me. The older woman was named Carmela and
the younger one
Hermelinda. I stood up and briefly shook hands with them. I asked them
if they had any children.
That question was usually a sure conversation opener for me. The women
laughed and in unison
ran their hands down their stomachs to show me how lean they were. The
man calmly explained
that his sisters were spinsters, and that he himself was an old
bachelor. He confided to me, in a
half-joking tone, that unfortunately his sisters were too mannish, they
lacked the femininity that
makes a woman desirable, and so they had been unable to find husbands.
I said that they were better off, considering the subservient role of
women in our society. The
women disagreed with me; they said that they would not have minded at
all being servants if they
had only found men who wanted to be their masters. The younger one said
that the real problem
was that their father had failed to teach them to behave like women.
The man commented with a
99
sigh that their father was so domineering that he had also prevented
him from marrying by
deliberately neglecting to teach him how to be a macho. All three of
them sighed and looked
gloomy. I wanted to laugh.
After a long silence we sat down again and the man said that if I
stayed a while longer on that
bench I would have a chance to meet their father, who was still very
spirited for his advanced
age. He added in a shy tone that their father was going to take them to
eat breakfast, because they
themselves never carried any money. Their father handled the purse
strings.
I was aghast. Those old people who looked so strong were in reality
like weak, dependent
children. I said goodbye to them and got up to leave. The man and his
sisters insisted that I stay.
They assured me that their father would love it if I would join them
for breakfast. I did not want
to meet their father and yet I was curious. I told them that I myself
was waiting for someone. At
that, the women began to chuckle and then broke into a roaring
laughter. The man also
abandoned himself to uncontained laughter. I felt stupid, I wanted to
get out of there. At that
moment don Juan showed up and I became aware of their maneuver. I did
not think it was
amusing.
All of us stood up. They were still laughing as don Juan told me that
those women were the
east, that Carmela was the stalker and Hermelinda the dreamer, and that
Vicente was the
warrior scholar and his oldest companion.
As we were leaving the plaza, another man joined us, a tall, dark
Indian, perhaps in his
forties. He was wearing Levi's and a cowboy hat. He seemed terribly
strong and sullen. Don
Juan introduced him to me as Juan Tuma, Vicente's courier and research
assistant.
We walked to a restaurant a few blocks away. The women held me between
them. Carmela
said that she hoped I was not offended by their joke, that they had had
the choice of just
introducing themselves to me or kidding me. What made them decide to
kid me was my
thoroughly snobbish attitude in turning my back to them and wanting to
move to another bench.
Hermelinda added that one has to be utterly humble and carry nothing to
defend, not even one's
person; that one's person should be protected, but not defended. In
snubbing them, I was not
protecting but merely defending myself.
I felt quarrelsome. I was frankly put out by their masquerade. I began
to argue, but before I
had made my point don Juan came to my side. He told the two women that
they should
overlook my belligerence, that it takes a very long time to clean out
the garbage that a luminous
being picks up in the world.
The owner of the restaurant where we went knew Vicente and had prepared
a sumptuous
breakfast for us. All of them were in great spirits, but I was unable
to let go of my brooding.
Then, at don Juan's request, Juan Tuma began to talk about his
journeys. He was a factual man.
I became mesmerized by his dry accounts of things beyond my
comprehension. To me the most
fascinating was his description of some beams of light or energy that
allegedly crisscross the
earth. He said that these beams do not fluctuate as everything else in
the universe does, but are
fixed into a pattern. This pattern coincides with hundreds of points in
the luminous body.
Hermelinda had understood that all the points were in our physical
body, but Juan Tuma
explained that, since the luminous body is quite big, some of the
points are as much as three
feet away from the physical body. In a sense they are outside of us,
and yet they are not; they
are on the periphery of our luminosity and thus still belong to the
total body. The most
important of those points is located a foot away from the stomach, 40
degrees to the right of an
imaginary line shooting straight forward. Juan Tuma told us that that
was a center of
assembling for the second attention, and that it is possible to
manipulate it by gently stroking
the air with the palms of the hands. Listening to Juan Tuma, I forgot
my anger.
100
My next encounter with don Juan's world was with the west. He gave me
ample warning
that the first contact with the west was a most important event,
because it would decide, in one
way or another, what I should subsequently do. He also alerted me to
the fact that it was going
to be a trying event, especially for me, as I was so stiff and felt so
self-important. He said that
the west is naturally approached at dusk, a time of day which is
difficult just in itself, and that
his warriors of the west were very powerful, bold, and downright
maddening. At the same time,
I was also going to meet the male warrior who was the man behind the
scenes. Don Juan
admonished me to exercise the utmost caution and patience; not only
were the women raving
mad, but they and the man the most powerful warriors he had ever known.
They were, in his
opinion, the ultimate authorities of the second attention. Don Juan did
not elaborate any further.
One day, as though on the spur of the moment, he suddenly decided that
it was time to start
on our trip to meet the westerly women. We drove to a city in northern
Mexico. Just at dusk,
don Juan directed me to stop in front of a big unlit house on the
outskirts of town. We got out of
the car and walked to the main door. Don Juan knocked several times. No
one answered. I had
the feeling that we had come at the wrong time. The house seemed empty.
Don Juan kept on knocking until he apparently got tired. He signaled me
to knock. He told
me to keep on doing it without stopping because the people who lived in
there were hard of
hearing. I asked him if it would be better to return later or the next
day. He told me to keep on
banging on the door.
After a seemingly endless wait, the door began to open slowly. A
weird-looking woman
stuck her head out and asked me if my intention was to break down the
door or to anger the
neighbors and their dogs.
Don Juan stepped forward to say something. The woman stepped out and
forcefully brushed
him aside. She began to shake her finger at me, yelling that I was
behaving as if I owned the
world, as if there were no one else besides myself. I protested that I
was merely doing what don
Juan had told me to do. The woman asked if I had been told to break the
door down. Don Juan
tried to intervene but was again brushed away.
The woman looked as if she had just gotten out of bed. She was a mess.
Our knocking had
probably awakened her and she must have put on a dress from her basket
of dirty clothes. She
was barefoot; her hair was graying and terribly unkempt. She had red,
beady eyes. She was a
homely woman, but somehow very impressive: rather tall, about five feet
eight, dark and
enormously muscular; her bare arms were knotted with hard muscles. I
noticed that she had
beautifully shaped calves.
She looked me up and down, towering over me, and shouted that she had
not heard my
apologies. Don Juan whispered to me that I should apologize loud and
clear.
Once I had done that, the woman smiled and turned to don Juan and
hugged him as if he were
a child. She grumbled that he should not have made me knock because my
touch on the door was
too shifty and disturbing. She held don Juan's arm and led him inside,
helping him over the high
threshold. She called him "dearest little old man." Don Juan laughed. I
was appalled to see him
acting as if he were delighted at the absurdities of that scary woman.
Once she had helped the
"dearest little old man" into the house, she turned to me and made a
gesture with her hand to shoo
me away, as if I were a dog. She laughed at my surprise; her teeth were
big and uneven, and
filthy. Then she seemed to change her mind and told me to come in.
Don Juan was heading to a door that I could barely see at the end of a
dark hall. The woman
scolded him for not knowing where he was going. She took us through
another dark hall. The
house seemed to be enormous, and there was not a single light in it.
The woman opened a door to
101
a very large room, almost empty except for two old armchairs in the
center, under the weakest
light bulb I had ever seen. It was an old-fashioned long bulb.
Another woman was sitting in one of the armchairs. The first woman sat
down on a small
straw mat on the floor and rested her back against the other chair.
Then she put her thighs against
her breasts, exposing herself completely. She was not wearing
underpants. I stared at her
dumbfounded.
In an ugly gruff tone, the woman asked me why I was staring at her
vagina. I did not know
what to say except to deny it. She stood up and seemed about to hit me.
She demanded that I tell
her that I had gaped at her because I had never seen a vagina in my
life. I felt guilty. I was
thoroughly embarrassed and also annoyed at having been caught in such a
situation.
The woman asked don Juan what kind of Nagual I was if I had never seen
a vagina. She
began repeating this over and over, yelling it at the top of her voice.
She ran around the room
and stopped by the chair where the other woman was sitting. She shook
her by the shoulders
and, pointing at me, said that I was a man who had never seen a vagina
in his whole life. She
laughed and taunted me.
I was mortified. I felt that don Juan should have done something to
save me from that
humiliation. I remembered that he had told me these women were quite
mad. He had
understated it; this woman was ready for an institution. I looked at
don Juan for support and
advice. He looked away. He seemed to be equally at a loss, although I
thought I caught a
malicious smile, which he quickly hid by turning his head.
The woman lay down on her back and pulled up her skirt, and commanded
me to look to my
heart's content instead of sneaking glances. My face must have been
red, judging by the heat in
my head and neck. I was so annoyed that I almost lost control. I felt
like bashing her head in.
The woman who was sitting in the chair suddenly stood up and grabbed
the other one by the
hair and made her stand up in one single motion, seemingly with no
effort at all. She stared at
me through half-closed eyes, bringing her face no more than two or
three inches from mine. She
smelled surprisingly fresh.
In a high-pitched voice, she said that we should get down to business.
Both of the women
stood close to me under the light bulb. They did not look alike. The
second woman was older, or
looked older, and her face was covered by a thick coat of cosmetic
powder that gave her a
clownish appearance. Her hair was neatly arranged in a chignon. She
seemed calm except for a
continuous tremor in her lower lip and chin. Both women were equally
tall and strong-looking;
they towered menacingly over me and stared at me for a long time. Don
Juan did not do
anything to break their fixation. The older woman nodded her head, and
don Juan told me that
her name was Zuleica and that she was a dreamer. The woman who had
opened the door was
named Zoila, and she was a stalker.
Zuleica turned to me and, in a parrotlike voice, asked me if it was
true that I had never seen a
vagina. Don Juan could not hold his composure any longer and began to
laugh. With a gesture, I
signaled him that I did not know what to say. He whispered in my ear
that it would be better for
me to say that I had not; otherwise I should be prepared to describe a
vagina, because that was
what Zuleica would demand that I do next.
I answered accordingly, and Zuleica said that she felt sorry for me.
Then she ordered Zoila to
show me her vagina. Zoila lay down on her back under the light bulb and
opened her legs.
Don Juan was laughing and coughing. I begged him to get me out of that
madhouse. He
whispered in my ear again that I had better take a good look and appear
attentive and interested,
because if I did not we would have to stay there until kingdom come.
After my careful and attentive examination, Zuleica said that from then
on I could brag that I
102
was a connoisseur, and that if I ever stumbled upon a woman without
pants, I would not be so
coarse and obscene as to let my eyes pop out of their sockets, because
now I had seen a vagina.
Zuleica very quietly led us to the patio. She whispered that there was
someone out there
waiting to meet me. The patio was pitch black. I could hardly make out
the silhouettes of the
others. Then I saw the dark outline of a man standing a few-feet away
from me. My body
experienced an involuntary jolt.
Don Juan spoke to the man in a very low voice, saying that he had
brought me to meet him.
He told the man my name. After a moment's silence, don Juan said to me
that the man's name
was Silvio Manuel, and that he was the warrior of darkness and the
actual leader of the whole
warrior's party. Then Silvio Manuel spoke to me. I thought that he must
have had a speech
disorder - his voice was muffled and the words came out of him like
spurts of soft coughing.
He ordered me to come closer. As I tried to approach him, he receded,
just as if he were
floating. He led me into an even darker recess of a hall, walking, it
seemed, noiselessly
backwards. He muttered something I could not understand. I wanted to
speak; my throat itched
and was parched. He repeated something two or three times until it
dawned on me that he was
ordering me to undress. There was something overpowering about his
voice and the darkness
around him. I was incapable of disobeying. I took off my clothes and
stood stark naked,
shivering with fear and cold.
It was so dark that I could not see if don Juan and the two women were
around. I heard a soft
prolonged hissing from a source a few feet away from me; then I felt a
cool breeze. I realized that
Silvio Manuel was exhaling his breath all over my body.
He then asked me to sit on my clothes and look at a bright point which
I could easily
distinguish in the darkness, a point that seemed to give out a faint
amber light. I stared at it for
what seemed hours, until I suddenly realized that the point of
brightness was Silvio Manuel's left
eye. I could then make out the contour of his whole face and his body.
The hall was not as dark
as it had seemed. Silvio Manuel advanced to me and helped me up. To see
in the dark with such
clarity enthralled me. I did not even mind that I was naked or that, as
I then saw, the two women
were watching me. Apparently they could also see in the dark; they were
staring at me. I wanted
to put on my pants, but Zoila snatched them out of my hands.
The two women and Silvio Manuel stared at me for a long time. Then don
Juan came out of
nowhere, handed me my shoes, and Zoila led us through a corridor to an
open patio with trees. I
made out the dark silhouette of a woman standing in the middle of the
patio. Don Juan spoke to
her and she mumbled something in reply. He told me that she was a
southerly woman, that her
name was Marta, and that she was a courier to the two westerly women.
Marta said that she
could bet I had never been introduced to a woman while I was naked;
that the normal procedure
is to get acquainted and then undress. She laughed out loud. Her
laughter was so pleasing, so
clear and youthful, that it sent chills through me; it reverberated
through the whole house,
enhanced by the darkness and the silence there. I looked to don Juan
for support. He was gone
and so was Silvio Manuel. I was alone with the three women. I became
very nervous and asked
Marta if she knew where don Juan had gone. At that precise moment,
someone grabbed the skin
of my armpits. I yelled with pain. I knew that it was Silvio Manuel. He
lifted me up as if I
weighed nothing and shook my shoes off me. Then he stood me in a
shallow tub of ice-cold
water that came up to my knees.
I remained in the tub for a long time while all of them scrutinized me.
Then Silvio Manuel
lifted me up again and set me down next to my shoes, which someone had
neatly placed next to
the tub.
Don Juan again came out of nowhere and handed me my clothes. He
whispered that I should
103
put them on and stay only long enough to be polite. Marta gave me a
towel to dry myself. I
looked around for the other two women and Silvio Manuel, but they were
nowhere in sight.
Marta, don Juan, and I stood in the darkness talking for a long time.
She seemed to be
speaking mainly to don Juan, but I believed that I was her real
audience. I waited for a clue from
don Juan to leave, but he appeared to be enjoying Marta's agile
conversation. She told him that
Zoila and Zuleica had been at the peak of their madness that day. Then
she added for my benefit
that they were extremely rational most of the time.
As if she were revealing a secret, Marta told us that the reason
Zoila's hair looked so unkempt
was because at least one third of it was Zuleica's hair. What had
happened was that the two of
them had had a moment of intense camaraderie and were helping one
another to groom their hair.
Zuleica braided Zoila's hair as she had done hundreds of times, except
that, being out of control,
she had braided portions of her own hair in with Zoila's. Marta said
that when they got up from
their chairs they went into a commotion. She ran to their rescue, but
by the time she entered the
room, Zuleica had taken over, and since she was more lucid than Zoila
that day, she had decided
to cut the portion of Zoila's hair that was braided to hers. She got
confused in the melee that
ensued and cut her own hair instead.
Don Juan was laughing as if it were the funniest thing ever. I heard
soft coughlike bursts of
laughter coming from the darkness on the far side of the patio.
Marta added that she had to improvise a chignon until Zuleica's hair
grew out.
I laughed along with don Juan. I liked Marta. The two other women were
abhorrent to me;
they gave me a sensation of nausea. Marta, on the other hand, seemed a
paragon of calm and
silent purpose. I could not see her features, but I imagined her to be
very beautiful. The sound of
her voice was haunting.
She very politely asked don Juan if I would accept something to eat. He
replied that I did not
feel comfortable with Zuleica and Zoila, and that I would probably get
sick to my stomach.
Marta assured me that the two women were gone and took my arm and led
us through the darkest
hall yet into a well-lit kitchen. The contrast was too great for my
eyes. I stood in the doorway
trying to get used to the light.
The kitchen had a very high ceiling and was fairly modern and adequate.
We sat in a sort of
dinette area. Marta was young and very strong; she had a plump,
voluptuous figure, a round face,
and a small nose and mouth. Her jet-black hair was braided and coiled
around her head.
I thought that she must have been as curious to examine me as I had
been to see her. We sat
and ate and talked for hours. I was fascinated by her. She was an
uneducated woman but she held
me spellbound with her talk. She gave us detailed accounts of the
preposterous things that Zoila
and Zuleica did when they were mad.
As we drove away, don Juan expressed his admiration for Marta. He said
that she was perhaps
the finest example he knew of how determination can affect a human
being. With no background
or preparation at all, except for her unbending intent, Marta had
successfully tackled the most
arduous task imaginable, that of taking care of Zoila, Zuleica, and
Silvio Manuel.
I asked don Juan why Silvio Manuel had refused to let me look at him in
the light. He replied
that Silvio Manuel was in his element in darkness, and that I was going
to have countless
opportunities to see him. For our first meeting, nonetheless, it was
mandatory that he maintain
himself within the boundaries of his power, the darkness of the night.
Silvio Manuel and the two
women lived together because they were a team of formidable sorcerers.
Don Juan advised me that I should not make hasty judgments about the
westerly women. I had
met them at a moment when they were out of control, but their lack of
control pertained only to
surface behavior. They had an inner core which was unalterable; thus,
even at the time of their
104
worst madness they were capable of laughing at their own aberration, as
if it were a performance
staged by someone else.
Silvio Manuel's case was different. He was in no way deranged; in fact,
it was his profound
sobriety that enabled him to deal so effectively with those two women,
because he and they were
opposite extremes. Don Juan said that Silvio Manuel had been born that
way and everyone
around him acknowledged his difference. Even his benefactor, who was
stern and unsparing with
everybody, lavished a great deal of attention on Silvio Manuel. It took
don Juan years to
understand the reason for this preference. Due to something
inexplicable in his nature, once
Silvio Manuel had entered into the left-side awareness, he never came
out of it. His proclivity to
remain in a state of heightened awareness, coupled with the superb
leadership of his benefactor,
allowed him to arrive before anyone else not only at the conclusion
that the rule is a map and
there is in fact another kind of awareness but also to the actual
passageway into that other world
of awareness. Don Juan said that Silvio Manuel, in a most impeccable
manner, balanced his
excessive gains by putting them at the service of their common purpose.
He became the silent
force behind don Juan.
My last introductory encounter with don Juan's warriors was with the
north. Don Juan took me
to the city of Guadalajara to fulfill that meeting. He said that our
appointment was only a short
distance from the center of town and had to be at noon, because the
north was the midday. We
left the hotel around 11 A.M. and took an easy stroll through the
downtown area.
I was walking along without watching where I was going, worried about
the meeting, and I
collided head-on with a lady who was rushing out of a store. She was
carrying packages, which
scattered all over the ground. I apologized and began to help her pick
them up. Don Juan urged
me to hurry because we were going to be late. The lady seemed to be
stunned. I held her arm. She
was a very slender, tall woman, perhaps in her sixties, very elegantly
dressed. She seemed to be a
lady of social standing. She was exquisitely polite and assumed the
blame, saying that she had
been distracted looking for her manservant. She asked me if I would
help her locate him in the
crowd. I turned to don Juan; he said that the least I could do after
nearly killing her was to help
her.
I took her packages and we walked back into the store. A short distance
away I spotted a
forlorn-looking Indian who seemed thoroughly out of place there. The
lady called him and he
came to her side like a lost puppy. He looked as if he was about to
lick her hand.
Don Juan was waiting for us outside the store. He explained to the lady
that we were in a
hurry and then told her my name. The lady smiled graciously and
initiated a handshake. I thought
that in her youth she must have been ravishing, because she was still
beautiful and alluring.
Don Juan turned to me and abruptly said that her name was Nelida, that
she was of the north,
and that she was a dreamer. Then he made me face the manservant and
said that his name was
Genaro Flores, and that he was the man of action, the warrior of deeds
in the party. My surprise
was total. All three of them had a belly laugh; the greater my dismay,
the more they seemed to
enjoy it.
Don Genaro gave the packages away to a group of children, telling them
that his employer, the
kind lady who was talking, had bought those things as a present for
them; it was her good deed
for the day. Then we strolled in silence for half a block. I was
tongue-tied. Suddenly Nelida
pointed to a store and asked us to wait just an instant because she had
to pick up a box of nylons
that they were holding for her there. She peered at me, smiling, her
eyes shining, and told me
that, all kidding aside, sorcery or no sorcery, she had to wear nylons
and lace panties. Don Juan
and don Genaro laughed like two idiots. I stared at Nelida because I
could not do anything else.
There was something about her that was utterly earthly and yet she was
almost ethereal.
105
She kiddingly told don Juan to hold on to me because I was about to
pass out. Then she
politely asked don Genaro to run in and get her order from a specific
clerk. As he started in,
Nelida seemed to change her mind and called him back, but he apparently
did not hear her and
disappeared inside the store. She excused herself and ran after him.
Don Juan pressed my back to get me out of my turmoil. He said that I
would meet the other
northerly woman, whose name was Florinda, by herself at another time,
because she was to be
my link into another cycle, another mood. He described Florinda as a
carbon copy of Nelida, or
vice versa.
I remarked that Nelida was so sophisticated and stylish that I could
imagine seeing her in a
fashion magazine. The fact that she was beautiful and so fair, perhaps
of French or northern
Italian extraction, had surprised me. Although Vicente was not an
Indian either, his rural
appearance made him less of an anomaly. I asked don Juan why there were
non-Indians in his
world. He said that power is what selects the warriors of a Nagual's
party, and that it is
impossible to know its designs.
We waited in front of the store for perhaps half an hour. Don Juan
seemed to get impatient
and asked me to go inside and tell them to hurry. I walked into the
store. It was not a big place,
there was no back door, and yet they were nowhere in sight. I asked the
clerks, but they could not
help me.
I confronted don Juan and demanded to know what had happened. He said
that they had either
disappeared into thin air, or had sneaked out while he was cracking my
back.
I raged at him that most of his people were tricksters. He laughed
until tears were rolling
down his cheeks. He said that I was the ideal dupe. My self-importance
made me a most
enjoyable subject. He was laughing so hard at my annoyance that he had
to lean against a wall.
La Gorda gave me an account of her first meeting with the members of
don Juan's party. Her
version differed only in content; the form was the same. The warriors
were perhaps a bit more
violent with her, but she had understood this as their attempt to shake
her out of her slumber, and
also as a natural reaction to what she considered her ugly personality.
As we reviewed don Juan's world, we realized that it was a replica of
his benefactor's world. It
could be seen as consisting either of groups or households. There was a
group of four
independent pairs of apparent sisters who worked and lived together;
another group of three men
who were don Juan's age and were very close to him; a team of two
somewhat younger men, the
couriers Emilito and Juan Tuma; and finally a team of two younger,
southerly women who
seemed to be related to each other, Marta and Teresa. At other times it
could be seen as
consisting of four separate households, located quite far from one
another in different areas of
Mexico. One was made up of the two westerly women, Zuleica and Zoila,
Silvio Manuel, and the
courier Marta. The next was composed of the southerly women, Cecilia
and Delia, don Juan's
courier, Emilito, and the courier Teresa. Another household was formed
by the easterly women,
Carmela and Hermelinda, Vicente, and the courier Juan Tuma; and the
last, of the northerly
women, Nelida and Florinda, and don Genaro.
According to don Juan, his world did not have the harmony and balance
of his benefactor's.
The only two women who thoroughly balanced one another, and who looked
like identical twins
were the northerly warriors, Nelida and Florinda. Nelida once told me
in casual conversation,
they were so alike that they even had the same blood type.
For me one of the most pleasant surprises of our interaction was the
transformation of Zuleica
and Zoila, who had been so abhorrent. They turned out to be, as don
Juan had said, the most
sober and dutiful warriors imaginable. I could not believe my eyes when
I saw them again. Their
106
mad spell had passed and they now looked like two well-dressed Mexican
ladies, tall, dark, and
muscular, with brilliant dark eyes like pieces of shiny black obsidian.
They laughed and joked
with me about what had happened the night of our first meeting, as if
someone else and not they
had been involved in it. I could easily understand don Juan's turmoil
with the westerly warriors of
his benefactor's party. It was impossible for me to accept that Zuleica
and Zoila could ever turn
into such obnoxious, nauseating creatures as I had first encountered. I
was to witness their
metamorphoses many times, yet I was never again able to judge them as
harshly as I had on our
first encounter. More than anything else, their outrages made me feel
sad.
But the biggest surprise to me was Silvio Manuel. In the darkness of
our first meeting I had
imagined him to be an imposing man, an overpowering giant. In fact, he
was tiny, but not smallboned
tiny. His body was like the body of a jockey - small, yet perfectly
proportioned. He looked
to me as if he might be a gymnast. His physical control was so
remarkable that he could puff
himself up like a toad, to nearly twice his size, by contracting all
the muscles of his body. He
used to give astounding demonstrations of how he could dislodge his
joints and put them back
together again without any overt signs of pain. Looking at Silvio
Manuel, I always experienced a
deep unfamiliar feeling of fright. To me he seemed like a visitor from
another time. He was paledark,
like a bronze statue. His features were sharp; his aquiline nose, full
lips, and widely
separated, slanted eyes made him look like a stylized figure on a Mayan
fresco. He was friendly
and warm during the daytime, but as soon as the twilight set in, he
would become unfathomable.
His voice would change. He would sit in a dark corner and let the
darkness swallow him. All that
was visible of him was his left eye, which remained open and acquired a
strange shine,
reminiscent of the eyes of a feline.
A secondary issue that came up in the course of our interaction with
don Juan's warriors was
the subject of controlled folly. Don Juan gave me a succinct
explanation once when he was
discussing the two categories into which all the women warriors are
mandatorily divided, the
dreamers and the stalkers. He said that all the members of his party
did dreaming and stalking as
part of their daily lives, but that the women who made up the planet of
the dreamers and the
planet of the stalkers were the foremost authorities on their
respective activities.
The stalkers are the ones who take the brunt of the daily world. They
are the business
managers, the ones who deal with people. Everything that has to do with
the world of ordinary
affairs goes through them. The stalkers are the practitioners of
controlled folly, just as the
dreamers are the practitioners of dreaming. In other words, controlled
folly is the basis for
stalking, as dreams are the basis for dreaming. Don Juan said that,
generally speaking, a warrior's
greatest accomplishment in the second attention is dreaming, and in the
first attention his greatest
accomplishment is stalking.
I had misunderstood what don Juan's warriors were doing to me in our
first meetings. I took
their actions as instances of trickery - and that would still be my
impression today had it not been
for the idea of controlled folly. Don Juan said that their actions with
me had been masterful
lessons in stalking. He told me that the art of stalking was what his
benefactor had taught him
before anything else. In order to survive among his benefactor's
warriors he had had to learn that
art quickly. In my case, he said, since I did not have to contend by
myself with his warriors, I had
to learn dreaming first. When the time was right, Florinda would step
out to guide me into the
complexities of stalking. No one else could deliberately talk to me
about it; they could only give
me direct demonstrations, as they had already done in our first
meetings.
Don Juan explained to me at great length that Florinda was one of the
foremost practitioners
of stalking because she had been trained in every intricacy of it by
his benefactor and his four
female warriors who were stalkers. Florinda was the first female
warrior to come into don Juan's
107
world, and because of that, she was to be my personal guide - not only
in the art of stalking, but
also in the mystery of the third attention, if I ever got there. Don
Juan did not elaborate on this.
He said it would have to wait until I was ready, first to learn
stalking, and then to enter into the
third attention.
Don Juan said that his benefactor had taken extra time and care with
him and his warriors in
everything that pertained to their mastering the art of stalking. He
used complex ploys to create an
appropriate context for a counterpoint between the dictums of the rule
and the behavior of the
warriors in the daily world as they interacted with people. He believed
that that was the way to
convince them that, in the absence of self-importance, a warrior's only
way of dealing with the
social milieu is in terms of controlled folly.
In the course of working out his ploys, don Juan's benefactor would pit
the actions of people
and the actions of the warriors against the commands of the rule, and
would then sit back and let
the natural drama unfold itself. The folly of the people would take the
lead for a while and drag
the warriors into it, as seems to be the natural course, only to be
vanquished in the end by the
more encompassing designs of the rule.
Don Juan told us that at first he resented his benefactor's control
over the players. He even told
him that to his face. His benefactor was not fazed. He argued that his
control was merely an
illusion created by the Eagle. He was only an impeccable warrior, and
his actions were a humble
attempt to mirror the Eagle.
Don Juan said that the force with which his benefactor carried out his
designs originated from
his knowledge that the Eagle is real and final, and that what people do
is utter folly. The two
together gave rise to controlled folly, which don Juan's benefactor
described as the only bridge
between the folly of people and the finality of the Eagle's dictums.
108
11. The Nagual Woman
Don Juan said that when he was put in the care of the westerly women to
be cleansed, he was
also put under the guidance of the northerly woman who was comparable
to Florinda, the
number-one stalker, who taught him the principles of that art. She and
his benefactor gave him
the actual means to secure the three male warriors, the one courier,
and the four female stalkers
who were to make up his party.
The eight female seers of his benefactor's group had searched for the
distinctive
configurations of luminosity and had had no difficulty whatever in
finding the appropriate types
of male and female warriors for don Juan's party. His benefactor,
however, did not permit those
seers to do anything to gather the warriors they had found. It was left
to don Juan to apply the
principles of stalking and secure them.
The first warrior to appear was Vicente. Don Juan did not have enough
of a command of
stalking to be able to draft him. His benefactor and the northerly
stalker had to do most of the
work. Then came Silvio Manuel, later don Genaro, and finally Emilito,
the courier.
Florinda was the first female warrior. She was followed by Zoila, then
Delia, and then
Carmela. Don Juan said that his benefactor had insisted relentlessly
that they deal with the
world exclusively in terms of controlled folly. The end result was a
stupendous team of
practitioners, who thought up and executed the most intricate schemes.
When they had all acquired a degree of proficiency in the art of
stalking, their benefactor
thought it was time for him to find the Nagual woman for them. True to
his policy of helping
everyone to help themselves, he waited to bring her into their world,
not only until all of them
were expert stalkers, but until don Juan had learned to see. Although
don Juan regretted
immensely the time wasted in waiting, he conceded that their joint
effort in securing her created
a stronger tie among all of them. It revitalized their commitment to
seek their freedom.
His benefactor began to unfold his strategy for drawing in the Nagual
woman by all of a
sudden becoming a devout Catholic. He demanded that don Juan, being the
heir to his
knowledge, behave like a son and go to church with him. He dragged him
to mass nearly every
day. Don Juan said that his benefactor, who was very charming and glib,
would introduce him to
everyone in church as his son, a bone-setter.
Don Juan, by his own account an uncivilized pagan at that time, was
mortified to find himself
in social situations where he had to talk and give an account of
himself. He put his mind at ease
with the idea that his benefactor had an ulterior motive for everything
he was doing. He
attempted to deduce from observing him what his reasons might be. His
benefactor's actions
were consistent and seemed aboveboard. As an exemplary Catholic, he
gained the trust of scores
of people, especially the parish priest, who held him in high esteem,
considering him a friend and
confidant. Don Juan could not figure out what he was up to. The thought
crossed his mind that
his benefactor might have sincerely taken up Catholicism, or gone mad.
He had not yet
understood that a warrior never loses his mind under any circumstances.
Don Juan's qualms about going to church vanished when his benefactor
began introducing
him to the daughters of people he was acquainted with. He enjoyed that,
although he felt ill at
ease. Don Juan thought that his benefactor was helping him to exercise
his tongue. He was
neither glib nor charming, and his benefactor had said that a Nagual,
perforce, has to be both.
One Sunday during mass, after nearly a year of almost daily attendance,
don Juan found out
the real reason for their going to church. He was kneeling next to a
girl named Olinda, the
daughter of one of his benefactor's acquaintances. He turned to
exchange a glance with her, as
had become their custom after months of daily contact. Their eyes met,
and suddenly don Juan
saw her as a luminous being - and then he saw her doubleness. Olinda
was a double woman. His
109
benefactor had known it all along, and had taken the most difficult
path in order to put don Juan
in touch with her. Don Juan confessed to us that the moment was
overwhelming to him.
His benefactor knew that don Juan had seen. His mission to put the
double beings together had
been completed successfully and impeccably. He stood up and his eyes
swept every corner of that
church, then he walked out without a backward glance. There was nothing
more for him to do
there.
Don Juan said that when his benefactor walked out in the middle of
mass, all heads turned.
Don Juan wanted to follow him, but Olinda boldly clasped his hand and
held him back. He knew
then that the power of seeing had not been his alone. Something had
gone through both of them
and they were transfixed. Don Juan realized all of a sudden that not
only had the mass ended, but
that they were already outside the church. His benefactor was trying to
calm Olinda's mother,
who was incensed and shamed by their unexpected and inadmissible
display of affection.
Don Juan was at a loss as to what to do next. He knew that it was up to
him to figure out a
plan. He had the resources, but the importance of the event made him
lose confidence in his
ability. He forsook his training as a stalker and became lost in the
intellectual dilemma of
whether or not to treat Olinda as controlled folly.
His benefactor told him that he could not help him. His duty had been
only to put them
together, and that was where his responsibility ended. It was up to don
Juan to take the necessary
steps to secure her. He suggested that don Juan even consider marrying
her, if that was what was
needed. Only after she came to him of her own accord could he help don
Juan by directly
intervening with her as a Nagual.
Don Juan tried a formal courtship. He was not well received by her
parents, who could not
conceive of someone from a different social class as a suitor for their
daughter. Olinda was not an
Indian; her family were middle-class urban dwellers, owners of a small
business. The father had
other plans for his daughter. He threatened to send her away if don
Juan persisted in his intention
to marry her.
Don Juan said that double beings, especially women, are extraordinarily
conservative, even
timid. Olinda was no exception. After their initial exhilaration in
church, she was overtaken by
caution, and then by fear. Her own reactions scared her.
As a strategic maneuver, his benefactor made don Juan retreat, to make
it appear as if he were
acquiescing to his father, who had not approved of the girl - which was
the assumption of
everyone who had witnessed the incident in church. People gossiped that
their display had
displeased his father so intensely that his father, who was such a
devout Catholic, had never
returned to church.
His benefactor told don Juan that a warrior is never under siege. To be
under siege implies
that one has personal possessions that could be blockaded. A warrior
has nothing in the world
except his impeccability, and impeccability cannot be threatened.
Nonetheless, in a battle for
one's life, such as the one don Juan was waging to secure the Nagual
woman, a warrior should
strategically use every means available.
Accordingly, don Juan resolved to use any portion of his stalker's
knowledge that he had to, to
get the girl. To that end, he engaged Silvio Manuel to use his
sorcerer's arts, which even at that
early stage were formidable, to abduct the girl. Silvio Manuel and
Genaro, who was a true
daredevil, stole into the girl's house disguised as old washerwomen. It
was midday and everyone
in the house was busy preparing food for a large group of relatives and
friends who were coming
to dinner. They were having an informal going-away party for Olinda.
Silvio Manuel was
counting on the likelihood that people who saw two strange washerwomen
coming in with
bundles of clothes would assume that it had to do with Olinda's party
and would not get
110
suspicious. Don Juan had supplied Silvio Manuel and Genaro beforehand
with all the information
they needed concerning the routines of the members of the household. He
told them that the
washerwomen usually carried their bundles of washed clothes into the
house and left them in a
storage room to be ironed. Carrying a large bundle of clothes, Silvio
Manuel and Genaro went
directly into that room, knowing that Olinda would be there.
Don Juan said that Silvio Manuel went up to Olinda and used his
mesmeric powers to make
her faint. They put her inside a sack, wrapped the sack with her bed
sheets, and walked out,
leaving behind the bundle they had carried in. They bumped into her
father at the door. He did
not even glance at them.
Don Juan's benefactor was utterly put out with their maneuver. He
ordered don Juan to take
the girl back immediately to her house. It was imperative, he said,
that the double woman come
to the benefactor's house of her own free will, perhaps not with the
idea of joining them but at
least because they interested her.
Don Juan felt that everything was lost - the odds against getting her
back into her house
unnoticed were too great - but Silvio Manuel figured out a solution. He
proposed that they should
let the four women of don Juan's party take the girl to a deserted
road, where don Juan would
rescue her.
Silvio Manuel wanted the women to pretend that they were kidnapping
her. At some point
along the road someone would see them and come in pursuit. Their
pursuer would overtake them
and they would drop the sack, with a degree of force so as to be
convincing. The pursuer would
be, of course, don Juan, who would happen miraculously to be at just
the right place at the right
time.
Silvio Manuel demanded true-to-life action. He ordered the women to gag
the girl, who by
then would surely be awake and screaming inside the sack, and then to
run for miles carrying the
sack. He told them to hide from their pursuer. Finally, after a truly
exhausting ordeal, they were
to drop the sack in such a way that the girl could witness a most
vicious fight between don Juan
and the four women. Silvio Manuel told the women that this had to be
utterly realistic. He armed
them with sticks and instructed them to hit don Juan convincingly
before they were driven away.
Of the women, Zoila was the one most easily carried away by hysteria;
as soon as they began
whacking don Juan she became possessed by her role and gave a chilling
performance, striking
don Juan so hard that flesh was torn from his back and shoulders. For a
moment it seemed that
the kidnappers were going to win. Silvio Manuel had to come out of his
hiding place and,
pretending to be a passerby, remind them that it was only a ploy and
that it was time to run away.
Don Juan thus became Olinda's savior and protector. He told her that he
could not take her
back to her house himself because he had been injured, but he would
send her back instead with
his pious father.
She helped him walk to his benefactor's house. Don Juan said that he
did not have to pretend
injury; he was bleeding profusely and barely made it to the door. When
Olinda told his
benefactor what had happened his benefactor's desire to laugh was so
excruciating he had to
disguise it as weeping.
Don Juan had his wounds bandaged and then went to bed. Olinda began to
explain to him
why her father was opposed to him, but she did not finish. Don Juan's
benefactor came into the
room and told her that it was evident to him, from observing her walk,
that the kidnappers had
injured her back. He offered to align it for her before it became
critical.
Olinda hesitated. Don Juan's benefactor reminded her that the
kidnappers had not been playing
- they had nearly killed his son, after all. That comment sufficed; she
came to the benefactor's
side and let him give her a sound blow on her shoulder blade. It made a
cracking sound and
111
Olinda entered into a state of heightened awareness. He disclosed the
rule to her, and just like don
Juan, she accepted it in full. There was no doubt, no hesitation.
The Nagual woman and don Juan found completeness and silence in each
other's company.
Don Juan said that the feeling they had for each other had nothing to
do with affection or need; it
was rather a shared physical sense that an ominous barrier had been
broken within them, and they
were one and the same being.
Don Juan and his Nagual woman, as the rule prescribed, worked together
for years to find the
set of four female dreamers, who turned out to be Nelida, Zuleica,
Cecilia, and Hermelinda and
the three couriers, Juan Tuma, Teresa, and Marta. Finding them was
another occasion when the
pragmatic nature of the rule was made clear to don Juan: All of them
were exactly what the rule
said they were going to be. Their advent introduced a new cycle for
everyone, don Juan's
benefactor and his party included. For don Juan and his warriors it
meant the cycle of dreaming,
and for his benefactor and his party it meant a period of unequalled
impeccability in their acts.
His benefactor explained to don Juan that when he was young and was
first introduced to the
idea of the rule as the means to freedom, he had been elated,
transfixed with joy. Freedom to him
was a reality around the corner. When he came to understand the nature
of the rule as a map, his
hopes and optimism were redoubled. Later on, sobriety took hold of his
life; the older he got, the
less chance he saw for his success and the success of his party.
Finally he became convinced that
no matter what they did, the odds were too great against their tenuous
human awareness ever
flying free. He made peace with himself and his fate, and surrendered
to failure. He told the Eagle
from his inner self that he was glad and proud to have nourished his
awareness. The Eagle was
welcome to it.
Don Juan told us that the same mood was shared by all the members of
his benefactor's party.
The freedom proposed in the rule was something they considered
unattainable. They had caught
glimpses of the annihilating force that the Eagle is, and felt that
they did not stand a chance
against it. All of them had agreed, nevertheless, that they would live
their lives impeccably for no
other reason than to be impeccable.
Don Juan said that his benefactor and his party, in spite of their
feelings of inadequacy, or
perhaps because of those feelings, did find their freedom. They did
enter into the third attention -
not as a group, however, but one by one. The fact that they found the
passageway was the final
corroboration of the truth contained in the rule. The last one to leave
the world of everyday-life
awareness was his benefactor. He complied with the rule and took don
Juan's Nagual woman
with him. As the two of them dissolved into total awareness, don Juan
and all his warriors were
made to explode from within - he could find no other way of describing
the feeling entailed in
being forced to forget all they had witnessed of their benefactor's
world.
The one who never forgot was Silvio Manuel. It was he who engaged don
Juan in the
backbreaking effort of bringing back together the members of their
group, all of whom had been
scattered. He then plunged them into the task of finding the totality
of themselves. It took them
years to accomplish both tasks.
Don Juan had extensively discussed the topic of forgetting, but only in
connection with their
great difficulty in getting together again and starting over without
their benefactor. He never told
us exactly what it entailed to forget or to gain the totality of
oneself. In that respect he was true to
his benefactor's teachings, only helping us to help ourselves.
To this effect, he trained la Gorda and me to see together and was able
to show us that,
although human beings appear to a seer as luminous eggs, the egglike
shape is an external
cocoon, a shell of luminosity that houses a most intriguing, haunting,
mesmeric core made up of
concentric circles of yellowish luminosity, the color of a candle's
flame. During our final session,
112
he had us see people milling around a church. It was late afternoon,
almost dark, yet the creatures
inside their rigid, luminous cocoons radiated enough light to render
everything around them
crystal clear. The sight was wondrous.
Don Juan explained that the egg-shaped shells which seemed so bright to
us were indeed dull.
The luminosity emanated from the brilliant core; the shell in fact
dulled its radiance. Don Juan
revealed to us that the shell must be broken in order to liberate that
being. It must be broken from
the inside at the right time, just as creatures that hatch out of eggs
break their shells. If they fail to
do so, they suffocate and die. As with creatures that hatch out of
eggs, there is no way for a
warrior to break the shell of his luminosity until the time is right.
Don Juan told us that losing the human form was the only means of
breaking that shell, the
only means of liberating that haunting luminous core, the core of
awareness which is the Eagle's
food. To break the shell means remembering the other self, and arriving
at the totality of oneself.
Don Juan and his warriors did arrive at the totality of themselves, and
turned then to their last
task, which was to find a new pair of double beings. Don Juan said that
they thought it was going
to be a simple matter - everything else had been relatively easy for
them. They had no idea that
the apparent effortlessness of their accomplishments as warriors was a
consequence of their
benefactor's mastery and personal power.
Their quest for a new pair of double beings was fruitless. In all their
searching, they never
came across a double woman. They found several double men, but they
were all well-situated,
busy, prolific, and so satisfied with their lives that it would have
been useless to approach them.
They did not need to find purpose in life. They thought they had
already found it.
Don Juan said that one day he realized that he and his group were
getting old, and there
seemed to be no hope of ever accomplishing their task. That was the
first time they felt the sting
of despair and impotence.
Silvio Manuel insisted that they should resign themselves and live
impeccably without hope
of finding their freedom. It seemed plausible to don Juan that this
might indeed be the key to
everything. In this respect he found himself following in his
benefactor's footsteps. He came to
accept that an unconquerable pessimism overtakes a warrior at a certain
point on his path. A
sense of defeat, or perhaps more accurately, a sense of unworthiness,
comes upon him almost
unawares. Don Juan said that, before, he used to laugh at his
benefactor's doubts and could not
bring himself to believe that he worried in earnest. In spite of the
protests and warnings of Silvio
Manuel, don Juan had thought it was all a giant ploy designed to teach
them something.
Since he could not believe that his benefactor's doubts were real,
neither could he believe that
his benefactor's resolution to live impeccably without hope of freedom
was genuine. When he
finally grasped that his benefactor, in all seriousness, had resigned
himself to fail, it also dawned
on him that a warrior's resolution to live impeccably in spite of
everything cannot be approached
as a strategy to ensure success. Don Juan and his party proved this
truth for themselves when
they realized for a fact that the odds against them were astonishing.
Don Juan said that at such
moments a lifelong training takes over, and the warrior enters into a
state of unsurpassed
humility; when the true poverty of his human resources becomes
undeniable, the warrior has no
recourse but to step back and lower his head.
Don Juan marveled that this realization seems to have no effect on the
female warriors of a
party; the disarray seems to leave them unfazed. He told us that he had
noted this in his
benefactor's party: the females were never as worried and morose about
their fate as were the
males. They seemed simply to acquiesce in the judgment of don Juan's
benefactor and follow
him without showing signs of emotional wear and tear. If the women were
ruffled at some level,
they were indifferent to it. To be busy was all that counted for them.
It was as if only the males
113
had bid for freedom and felt the impact of a counter-bidding.
In his own group, don Juan observed the same contrast. The women
readily agreed with him
when he said that his resources were inadequate. He could only conclude
that the women,
although they never mentioned it, had never believed they had any
resources to begin with. There
was consequently no way they could feel disappointed or despondent at
finding out they were
impotent: They had known it all along.
Don Juan told us that the reason the Eagle demanded twice as many
female warriors as males
was precisely because females have an inherent balance which is lacking
in males. At the crucial
moment, it is the men who get hysterical and commit suicide if they
judge that everything is lost.
A woman may kill herself due to lack of direction and purpose, but not
because of the failure of a
system to which she happens to belong.
After don Juan and his party of warriors had given up hope - or rather,
as don Juan put it, after
he and the male warriors had reached rock bottom and the women had
found suitable ways to
humor them - don Juan finally stumbled upon a double man he could
approach. I was that double
man. He said that since no one in his right mind is going to volunteer
for such a preposterous
project as a struggle for freedom, he had to follow his benefactor's
teachings and, in true stalker's
style, reel me in as he had reeled in the members of his own party. He
needed to have me alone at
a place where he could apply physical pressure to my body, and it was
necessary that I go there
of my own accord. He lured me into his house with great ease - as he
said, securing the double
man is never a great problem. The difficulty is to find one who is
available.
That first visit to his house was, from the point of view of my daily
awareness, an uneventful
session. Don Juan was charming and joked with me. He guided the
conversation to the fatigue
the body experiences after long drives, a subject that seemed
thoroughly inconsequential to me,
as a student of anthropology. Then he made the casual comment that my
back appeared to be out
of alignment, and without another word put a hand on my chest and
straightened me up and gave
me a sound rap on the back. He caught me so unprepared that I blacked
out. When I opened my
eyes again I felt as if he had broken my spine, but I knew that I was
different. I was someone else
and not the me I knew. From then on, whenever I saw him he would make
me shift from my
right-side awareness to my left, and then he would reveal the rule to
me.
Almost immediately after finding me, don Juan encountered a double
woman. He did not put
me in touch with her through a scheme, as his benefactor had done with
him, but devised a ploy,
as effective and elaborate as any of his benefactor's, by which he
himself enticed and secured the
double woman. He assumed this burden because he believed that it was
the benefactor's duty to
secure both double beings immediately upon finding them, and then to
put them together as
partners in an inconceivable enterprise.
He told me that one day, when he was living in Arizona, he had gone to
a government office
to fill out an application. The lady at the desk told him to take it to
an employee in the adjacent
section, and without looking, she pointed to her left. Don Juan
followed the direction of her
outstretched arm and saw a double woman sitting at a desk. When he took
his application to her
he realized that she was just a young girl. She told him that she had
nothing to do with
applications. Nevertheless, out of sympathy for a poor old Indian, she
took the time to help him
process it.
Some legal documents were needed, documents which don Juan had in his
pocket, but he
pretended total ignorance and helplessness. He made it seem that the
bureaucratic organization
was an enigma to him. It was not difficult at all to portray total
mindlessness, don Juan said; all
he had to do was revert to what had once been his normal state of
awareness. It was to his
purpose to prolong his interaction with the girl for as long as he
could. His mentor had told him,
114
and he himself had verified it in his search, that double women are
quite rare. His mentor had
also warned him that they have inner resources that make them highly
volatile. Don Juan was
afraid that if he did not play his cards expertly she would leave. He
played on her sympathy to
gain time. He created further delay by pretending that the legal
documents were lost. Nearly
every day he would bring in a different one to her. She would read it
and regretfully tell him that
it was not the right one. The girl was so moved by his sorry condition
that she even volunteered
to pay for a lawyer to draw him up an affidavit in lieu of the papers.
After three months of this, don Juan thought it was time to produce the
documents. By then
she had gotten used to him and almost expected to see him every day.
Don Juan came one last
time to express his thanks and say goodbye. He told her that he would
have liked to bring her a
gift to show his appreciation, but he did not have money even to eat.
She was moved by his
candor and took him to lunch. As they were eating he mused that a gift
does not necessarily have
to be an object that one buys. It could be something that is only for
the eyes of the beholder.
Something to remember rather than to possess.
She was intrigued by his words. Don Juan reminded her that she had
expressed compassion
for the Indians and their condition as paupers. He asked her if she
would like to see the Indians in
a different light - not as paupers but as artists. He told her that he
knew an old man who was the
last of his line of power dancers. He assured her that the man would
dance for her at his request;
and furthermore, he promised her that never in her life had she seen
anything like it nor would
she ever again. It was something that only Indians witnessed.
She was delighted at the idea. She picked him up after her work, and
they headed for the hills
where he told her the Indian lived. Don Juan took her to his own house.
He made her stop the car
quite a distance away, and they began to walk the rest of the way.
Before they reached the house
he stopped and drew a line with his foot in the sandy, dried dirt. He
told her that the line was a
boundary and coaxed her to step across.
The Nagual woman herself told me that up to that point she had been
very intrigued with the
possibility of witnessing a genuine Indian dancer, but when the old
Indian drew a line on the dirt
and called it a boundary, she began to hesitate. Then she became
outright alarmed when he told
her that the boundary was for her alone, and that once she stepped over
it there was no way of
returning.
The Indian apparently saw her consternation and tried to put her at
ease. He politely patted her
on the arm and gave her his guarantee that no harm would come to her
while he was around. The
boundary could be explained, he told her, as a form of symbolic payment
to the dancer, for he did
not want money. Ritual was in lieu of money, and ritual required that
she step over the boundary
of her own accord.
The old Indian gleefully stepped over the line and told her that to him
all of it was sheer
Indian nonsense, but that the dancer, who was watching them from inside
the house, had to be
humored if she wanted to see him dance.
The Nagual woman said that she suddenly became so afraid that she could
not move to cross
the line. The old Indian made an effort to persuade her, saying that
stepping over that boundary
was beneficial to the entire body. Crossing it had not only made him
feel younger, it had actually
made him younger, such power did that boundary have. To demonstrate his
point, he crossed
back again and immediately his shoulders slouched, the corners of his
mouth drooped, his eyes
lost their shine. The Nagual woman could not deny the differences the
crossings had made.
Don Juan recrossed the line a third time. He breathed deeply, expanding
his chest, his
movements brisk and bold. The Nagual woman said that the thought
crossed her mind that he
might even make sexual advances. Her car was too far away to make a run
for it. The only thing
115
she could do was to tell herself that it was stupid to fear that old
Indian.
Then the old man made another appeal to her reason and to her sense of
humor. In a
conspiratorial tone, as if he were revealing a secret with some
reluctance, he told her that he was
just pretending to be young to please the dancer, and that if she did
not help him by crossing the
line, he was going to faint at any moment from the stress of walking
without slouching. He
walked back and forth across the line to show her the immense strain
involved in his pantomime.
The Nagual woman said that his pleading eyes revealed the pain his old
body was going
through to mimic youth. She crossed the line to help him and be done
with it; she wanted to go
home.
The moment she crossed the line, don Juan took a prodigious jump and
glided over the roof of
the house. The Nagual woman said that he flew like a huge boomerang.
When he landed next to
her she fell on her back. Her fright was beyond anything she had ever
experienced, but so was
her excitement at having witnessed such a marvel. She did not even ask
how he had
accomplished such a magnificent feat. She wanted to run back to her car
and head for home.
The old man helped her up and apologized for having tricked her. In
fact, he said, he himself
was the dancer and his flight over the house had been his dance. He
asked her if she had paid
attention to the direction of his flight. The Nagual woman circled her
hand counterclockwise. He
patted her head paternally and told her that it was very auspicious
that she had been attentive.
Then he said that she may have injured her back in her fall, and that
he could not just let her go
without making sure she was all right. Boldly, he straightened her
shoulders and lifted her chin
and the back of her head, as if he were directing her to extend her
spine. He then gave her a
sound smack between her shoulder blades, literally knocking all the air
out of her lungs. For a
moment she was unable to breathe and she fainted.
When she regained consciousness, she was inside his house. Her nose was
bleeding, her ears
were buzzing, her breathing was accelerated, she could not focus her
eyes. He instructed her to
take deep breaths to a count of eight. The more she breathed, the
clearer everything became. At
one point, she told me, the whole room became incandescent; everything
glowed with an amber
light. She became stupefied and could not breathe deeply any more. The
amber light by then was
so thick it resembled fog. Then the fog turned into amber cobwebs. It
finally dissipated, but the
world remained uniformly amber for a while longer.
Don Juan began to talk to her then. He took her outside the house and
showed her that the
world was divided into two halves. The left side was clear but the
right side was veiled in amber
fog. He told her that it is monstrous to think that the world is
understandable or that we ourselves
are understandable. He said that what she was perceiving was an enigma,
a mystery that one
could only accept in humbleness and awe.
He then revealed the rule to her. Her clarity of mind was so intense
that she understood
everything he said. The rule seemed to her appropriate and self-evident.
He explained to her that the two sides of a human being are totally
separate and that it takes
great discipline and determination to break that seal and go from one
side to the other. A double
being has a great advantage: the condition of being double permits
relatively easy movement
between the compartments on the right side. The great disadvantage of
double beings is that by
virtue of having two compartments they are sedentary, conservative,
afraid of change.
Don Juan said to her that his intention had been to make her shift from
her extreme right
compartment to her more lucid, sharper left-right side, but instead,
through some inexplicable
quirk, his blow had sent her all across her doubleness, from her
everyday extreme-right side to
her extreme-left side. He tried four times to make her revert back to a
normal state of awareness,
but to no avail. His blows helped her, however, to turn her perception
of the wall of fog on and
116
off at will. Although he had not intended it, don Juan had been right
in saying that the line was a
one-way boundary for her. Once she crossed it, just like Silvio Manuel,
she never returned.
When don Juan put the Nagual woman and me face to face, neither of us
had known of the
other's existence, yet we instantly felt that we were familiar with one
another. Don Juan knew
from his own experience that the solace double beings feel in each
other's company is
indescribable, and far too brief. He told us that we had been put
together by forces
incomprehensible to our reason, and that the only thing we did not have
was time. Every minute
might be the last; therefore, it had to be lived with the spirit.
Once don Juan had put us together, all that was left for him and his
warriors to do was find
four female stalkers, three male warriors, and one male courier to make
up our party. To that end,
don Juan found Lydia, Josefina, la Gorda, Rosa, Benigno, Nestor,
Pablito, and the courier Eligio.
Each one of them was a replica in an undeveloped form of the members of
don Juan's own party.
117
12. The Not-Doings of Silvio
Manuel
Don Juan and his warriors sat back to allow the Nagual woman and myself
room to enact the
rule - that is, to nourish, enhance, and lead the eight warriors to
freedom. Everything seemed
perfect, yet something was wrong. The first set of female warriors don
Juan had found were
dreamers when they should have been stalkers. He did not know how to
explain this anomaly. He
could only conclude that power had put those women in his path in a
manner that made it
impossible to refuse them.
There was another striking anomaly that was even more baffling to don
Juan and his party;
three of the women and the three male warriors were incapable of
entering into a state of
heightened awareness, despite don Juan's titanic efforts. They were
groggy, out of focus, and
could not break the seal, the membrane that separates their two sides.
They were nicknamed the
drunkards, because they staggered around without muscular coordination.
The courier Eligio and
la Gorda were the only ones with an extraordinary degree of awareness,
especially Eligio, who
was par with any of don Juan's own people.
The three girls clustered together and made an unshakable unit. So did
the three men. Groups
of three when the rule prescribes four were something ominous. The
number three is a symbol of
dynamics, change, movement, and above all, a symbol of revitalization.
The rule was no longer serving as a map. And yet it was not conceivable
that an error was
involved. Don Juan and his warriors argued that power does not make
mistakes. They pondered
the question in their dreaming and seeing. They wondered whether they
had perhaps been too
hasty, and simply had not seen that the three women and the three men
were inept.
Don Juan confided to me that he saw two relevant questions. One was the
pragmatic problem
of our presence among them. The other was the question of the rule's
validity. Their benefactor
had guided them to the certainty that the rule encompassed everything a
warrior might be
concerned with. He had not prepared them for the eventuality that the
rule might prove to be
inapplicable.
La Gorda said that the women of don Juan's party never had any problems
with me; it was
only the males who were at a loss. To the men, it was incomprehensible
and unacceptable that the
rule was incongruous in my case. The women, however, were confident
that sooner or later the
reason for my being there was going to be made clear. I had observed
how the women kept
themselves detached from the emotional turmoil, seeming to be
completely unconcerned with the
outcome. They seemed to know without any reasonable doubt that my case
had to be somehow
included in the rule. After all, I had definitely helped them by
accepting my role. Thanks to the
Nagual woman and myself, don Juan and his party had completed their
cycle and were almost
free. The answer came to them at last through Silvio Manuel. His seeing
revealed that the three
little sisters and the Genaros were not inept; it was rather that I was
not the right Nagual for them.
I was incapable of leading them because I had an unsuspected
configuration that did not match
the pattern laid down by the rule, a configuration which don Juan as a
seer had overlooked. My
luminous body gave the appearance of having four compartments when in
reality it had only
three. There was another rule for what they called a "three-pronged
Nagual." I belonged to that
other rule. Silvio Manuel said that I was like a bird hatched by the
warmth and care of birds of a
different species. All of them were still bound to help me, as I myself
was bound to do anything
for them, but I did not belong with them.
Don Juan assumed responsibility for me because he had brought me into
their midst, but my
presence among them forced them all to exert themselves to the maximum,
searching for two
things: an explanation of what I was doing among them, and a solution
to the problem of what to
118
do about it.
Silvio Manuel very quickly hit upon a way to dislodge me from their
midst. He took over the
task of directing the project, but since he did not have the patience
or energy to deal with me
personally, he commissioned don Juan to do so as his surrogate. Silvio
Manuel's goal was to
prepare me for a moment when a courier bearing the rule pertinent to a
three-pronged Nagual
would make himself or herself available to me. He said that it was not
his role to reveal that
portion of the rule. I had to wait, just as all the others had to wait,
for the right time.
There was still another serious problem that added more confusion. It
had to do with la Gorda,
and in the long run with me. La Gorda had been accepted into my party
as a southerly woman.
Don Juan and the rest of his seers had attested to it. She seemed to be
in the same category with
Cecilia, Delia, and the two female couriers. The similarities were
undeniable. Then la Gorda lost
all her superfluous weight and slimmed down to half her size. The
change was so radical and
profound that she became something else.
She had gone unnoticed for a long time simply because all the other
warriors were too
preoccupied with my difficulties to pay any attention to her. Her
change was so drastic, however,
that they were forced to focus on her, and what they saw that she was
not a southerly woman at
all. The bulkiness of her body had misled their previous seeing. They
remembered then that from
the first moment she came into their midst, la Gorda could not really
get along with Cecilia,
Delia, and the other southerly women. She was, on the other hand,
utterly charmed and at ease
with Nelida and Florinda, because in fact she had always been like
them. That meant that there
were two northerly dreamers in my party, la Gorda and Rosa - a blatant
discrepancy with the
rule.Don Juan and his warriors were more than baffled. They understood
everything that was
happening as an omen, an indication that things had taken an
unforeseeable turn. Since they
could not accept the idea of human error overriding the rule, they
assumed that they had been
made to err by a superior command, for a reason which was difficult to
discern but real.
They pondered the question of what to do next, but before any of them
came up with an
answer, a true southerly woman, dona Soledad, came into the picture
with such a force that it was
impossible for them to refuse her. She was congruous with the rule. She
was a stalker.
Her presence distracted us for a time. For a while it seemed as if she
were going to pull us off
to another plateau. She created vigorous movement. Florinda took her
under her wing to instruct
her in the art of stalking. But whatever good it did, it was not enough
to remedy a strange loss of
energy that I felt, a listlessness that seemed to be increasing.
Then one day Silvio Manuel said that in his dreaming he had received a
master plan. He was
exhilarated and went off to discuss its details with don Juan and the
other warriors. The Nagual
woman was included in their discussions, but I was not. This made me
suspect that they did not
want me to find out what Silvio Manuel had discovered about me.
I confronted every one of them with my suspicions. They all laughed at
me, except for the
Nagual woman, who told me that I was right. Silvio Manuel's dreaming
had revealed the reason
for my presence among them, but I would have to surrender to my fate,
which was not to know
the nature of my task until I was ready for it.
There was such finality in her tone that I could only accept without
question everything she
said. I think that if don Juan or Silvio Manuel had told me the same
thing, I would not have
acquiesced so easily. She also said that she disagreed with don Juan
and the others - she thought I
should be informed of the general purpose of their actions, if only to
avoid unnecessary friction
and rebelliousness.
Silvio Manuel intended to prepare me for my task by taking me directly
into the second
119
attention. He planned a series of bold actions that would galvanize my
awareness.
In the presence of all the others he told me that he was taking over my
guidance, and that he
was shifting me to his area of power, the night. The explanation he
gave was that a number of
not-doings had presented themselves to him in dreaming. They were
designed for a team
composed of la Gorda and myself as the doers, and the Nagual woman as
the overseer.
Silvio Manuel was awed by the Nagual woman and had only words of
admiration for her. He
said that she was in a class by herself. She could perform on a par
with him or any of the other
warriors of his party. She did not have experience, but she could
manipulate her attention in any
way she needed. He confessed that her prowess was as great a mystery to
him as was my
presence among them, and that her sense of purpose and her conviction
were so keen that I was
no match for her. In fact, he asked la Gorda to give me special
support, so I could withstand the
Nagual woman's contact.
For our first not-doing, Silvio Manuel constructed a wooden crate big
enough to house la
Gorda and me, if we sat back-to-back with our knees up. The crate had a
lid made of latticework
to let in a flow of air. La Gorda and I were to climb inside it and sit
in total darkness and total
silence, without falling asleep. He began by letting us enter the box
for short periods; then he
increased the time as we got used to the procedure, until we could
spend the entire night inside it
without moving or dozing off.
The Nagual woman stayed with us to make sure that we would not change
levels of
awareness due to fatigue. Silvio Manuel said that our natural tendency
under unusual conditions
of stress is to shift from the heightened state of awareness to our
normal one, and vice versa.
The general effect of the not-doing every time we performed it was to
give us an unequalled
sense of rest, which was a complete puzzle to me, since we never fell
asleep during our
nightlong vigils. I attributed the sense of rest to the fact that we
were in a state of heightened
awareness, but Silvio Manuel said that the one had nothing to do with
the other, that the sense of
rest was the result of sitting with our knees up.
The second not-doing consisted of making us lie on the ground like
curled-up dogs, almost in
the fetal position, resting on our left sides, our foreheads on our
folded arms. Silvio Manuel
insisted that we keep our eyes closed as long as possible, opening them
only when he told us to
shift positions and lie on our right sides. He told us that the purpose
of this not-doing was to
allow our sense of hearing to separate from our sight. As before, he
gradually increased the
length of time until we could spend the entire night in auditory vigil.
Silvio Manuel was then ready to move us to another area of activity. He
explained that in the
first two not-doings we had broken a certain perceptual barrier while
we were stuck to the
ground. By way of analogy, he compared human beings to trees. We are
like mobile trees. We
are somehow rooted to the ground; our roots are transportable, but that
does not free us from the
ground. He said that in order to establish balance we had to perform
the third not-doing while
dangling in the air. If we succeeded in channeling our intent while we
were suspended from a
tree inside a leather harness, we would make a triangle with our
intent, a triangle whose base was
on the ground and its vertex in the air. Silvio Manuel thought that we
had gathered our attention
with the first two not-doings to the point that we could perform the
third perfectly from the
beginning.
One night he suspended la Gorda and me in two separate harnesses like
strap chairs. We sat in
them and he lifted us with a pulley to the highest large branches of a
tall tree. He wanted us to
pay attention to the awareness of the tree, which he said would give us
signals, since we were its
guests. He made the Nagual woman stay on the ground and call our names
from time to time
during the entire night.
120
While we were suspended from the tree, in the innumerable times we
performed this notdoing,
we experienced a glorious flood of physical sensations, like mild
charges of electrical
impulses. During the first three or four attempts, it was as if the
tree were protesting our
intrusion; then after that the impulses became signals of peace and
balance. Silvio Manuel told us
that the awareness of a tree draws its nourishment from the depths of
the earth, while the
awareness of mobile creatures draws it from the surface. There is no
sense of strife in a tree,
whereas moving beings are filled to the brim with it.
His contention was that perception suffers a profound jolt when we are
placed in states of
quietude in darkness. Our hearing takes the lead then, and the signals
from all the living and
existing entities around us can be detected - not with our hearing
only, but with a combination of
the auditory and visual senses, in that order. He said that in
darkness, especially while one is
suspended, the eyes become subsidiary to the ears.
He was absolutely right, as la Gorda and I discovered. Through the
exercise of the third notdoing,
Silvio Manuel gave a new dimension to our perception of the world
around us.
He then told la Gorda and me that the next set of three not- doings
would be intrinsically
different and more complex. These had to do with learning to handle the
other world. It was
mandatory to maximize their effect by moving our time of action to the
evening or predawn
twilight. He told us that the first not-doing of the second set had two
stages. In stage one we had
to bring ourselves to our keenest state of heightened awareness so as
to detect the wall of fog.
Once that was done, stage two consisted of making that wall stop
rotating in order to venture into
the world between the parallel lines.
He warned us that what he was aiming at was to place us directly into
the second attention,
without any intellectual preparation. He wanted us to learn its
intricacies without rationally
understanding what we were doing. His contention was that a magical
deer or a magical coyote
handles the second attention without having any intellect. Through the
forced practice of
journeying behind the wall of fog, we were going to undergo, sooner or
later, a permanent
alteration in our total being, an alteration that would make us accept
that the world between the
parallel lines is real, because it is part of the total world, as our
luminous body is part of our total
being.
Silvio Manuel also said that he was using la Gorda and me to probe into
the possibility that
we could someday help the other apprentices by ushering them into the
other world, in which
case they could accompany the Nagual Juan Matus and his party in their
definitive journey. He
reasoned that since the Nagual woman had to leave this world with the
Nagual Juan Matus and
his warriors, the apprentices had to follow her because she was their
only leader in the absence of
a Nagual man. He assured us that she was counting on us, that this was
the reason she was
supervising our work.
Silvio Manuel had la Gorda and me sit down on the ground in the area in
back of his house,
where we had performed all the not-doings. We did not need don Juan's
aid to enter into our
keenest state of awareness. Almost immediately I saw the wall of fog.
La Gorda did too; yet no
matter how we tried, we could not stop its rotation. Every time I moved
my head, the wall moved
with it.
The Nagual woman was able to stop it and go through it by herself, but
for all her efforts she
could not take the two of us with her. Finally don Juan and Silvio
Manuel had to stop the wall for
us and physically push us through it. The sensation I had upon entering
into that wall of fog was
that my body was being twisted like the braids of a rope.
On the other side there was the horrible desolate plain with small
round sand dunes. There
were very low yellow clouds around us, but no sky or horizon; banks of
pale yellow vapor
121
impaired visibility. It was very difficult to walk. The pressure seemed
much greater than what my
body was used to. La Gorda and I walked aimlessly, but the Nagual woman
seemed to know
where she was going. The further we went away from the wall, the darker
it got and the more
difficult it was to move. La Gorda and I could no longer walk erect. We
had to crawl. I lost my
strength and so did la Gorda; the Nagual woman had to drag us back to
the wall and out of there.
We repeated our journey innumerable times. At first we were aided by
don Juan and Silvio
Manuel in stopping the wall of fog, but then la Gorda and I became
almost as proficient as the
Nagual woman. We learned to stop the rotation of that wall. It happened
quite naturally to us. In
my case, on one occasion I realized that my intent was the key, a
special aspect of my intent
because it was not my volition as I know it. It was an intense desire
that was focused on the
midpoint of my body. It was a peculiar nervousness that made me shudder
and then it turned into
a force that did not really stop the wall, but made some part of my
body turn involuntarily ninety
degrees to the right. The result was that for an instant I had two
points of view. I was looking at
the world divided in two by the wall of fog and at the same time I was
staring directly at a bank
of yellowish vapor. The latter view gained predominance and something
pulled me into the fog
and beyond it.
Another thing that we learned was to regard that place as real; our
journeys acquired for us the
factuality of an excursion into the mountains, or a sea voyage in a
sailboat. The deserted plain
with sand-dune-like mounds was as real to us as any part of the world.
La Gorda and I had the rational feeling that the three of us spent an
eternity in the world
between-the parallel lines, yet we were unable to remember what exactly
transpired there. We
could only remember the terrifying moments when we would have to leave
it to return to the
world of everyday life. It was always a moment of tremendous anguish
and insecurity.
Don Juan and all his warriors followed our endeavors with great
curiosity, but the one who
was strangely absent from all our activities was Eligio. Although he
was himself a peerless
warrior, comparable to the warriors of don Juan's own party, he never
took part in our struggle,
nor did he help us in any way.
La Gorda said that Eligio had succeeded in attaching himself to Emilito
and thus directly to
the Nagual Juan Matus. He was never part of our problem, because he
could go into the second
attention at the drop of a hat. To him, journeying into the confines of
the second attention was as
easy as snapping his fingers.
La Gorda reminded me of the day when Eligio's unusual talents allowed
him to find out that I
was not their man, long before anyone else had even an inkling of the
truth.
I was sitting on the back porch of Vicente's house in northern Mexico
when Emilito and
Eligio suddenly showed up. Everyone took for granted that Emilito had
to disappear for long
periods of time; when he would show up again, everyone also took for
granted that he had
returned from a voyage. No one asked him any questions. He would report
his findings first to
don Juan and then to whoever wanted to hear them.
On that day it was as if Emilito and Eligio had just come into the
house through the back
door. Emilito was ebullient as ever. Eligio was his usual quiet somber
self. I had always thought,
when both of them were together, that Emilito's exquisite personality
overwhelmed Eligio and
made him even more sullen.
Emilito went inside looking for don Juan and Eligio opened up to me. He
smiled and came to
my side. He put his arm around my shoulders and placing his mouth to my
ear whispered that he
had broken the seal of the parallel lines and he could go into
something he said Emilito had called
glory.
Eligio went on to explain certain things about glory which I was unable
to comprehend. It was
122
as if my mind could only focus on the periphery of that event. After
explaining it to me, Eligio
took me by the hand and made me stand in the middle of the patio,
looking at the sky with my
chin slightly turned up. He was to my right, standing with me in the
same position. He told me to
let go and fall backwards pulled by the heaviness of the very top of my
head. Something grabbed
me from behind and pulled me down. There was an abyss behind me. I fell
into it. And then
suddenly I was on the desolate plain with dune-like mounds.
Eligio urged me to follow him. He told me that the edge of glory was
over the hills. I walked
with him until I could not move any longer. He ran ahead of me with no
effort at all, as if he were
made of air. He stood on top of a large mound and pointed beyond. He
ran back to me and
begged me to crawl up that hill, which he told me was the edge of
glory. It was perhaps only a
hundred feet away from me, but I could not move another inch.
He tried to drag me up the hill; he could not budge me. My weight
seemed to have increased a
hundred-fold. Eligio finally had to summon don Juan and his party.
Cecilia lifted me up on her
shoulders and carried me out.
La Gorda added that Emilito had put Eligio up to it. Emilito was
proceeding according to the
rule. My courier had journeyed into glory. It was mandatory that he
show it to me.
I could recollect the eagerness in Eligio's face and the fervor with
which he urged me to make
one last effort to witness glory. I could also recollect his sadness
and disappointment when I
failed. He never spoke to me again.
La Gorda and I had been so involved in our journeys behind the wall of
fog that we had
forgotten that we were due for the next not-doing of the series with
Silvio Manuel. He told us
that it could be devastating, and that it consisted of crossing the
parallel lines with the three little
sisters and the three Genaros, directly into the entrance to the world
of total awareness. He did
not include dona Soledad because his not-doings were only for dreamers
and she was a stalker.
Silvio Manuel added that he expected us to become familiar with the
third attention by
placing ourselves at the foot of the Eagle over and over. He prepared
us for the jolt; he explained
that a warrior's journeys into the desolate sand dunes is a preparatory
step for the real crossing of
boundaries. To venture behind the wall of fog while one is in a state
of heightened awareness or
while one is doing dreaming entails only a very small portion of our
total awareness, while to
cross bodily into the other world entails engaging our total being.
Silvio Manuel had conceived the idea of using the bridge as the symbol
of a true crossing. He
reasoned that the bridge was adjacent to a power spot; and power spots
are cracks, passageways
into the other world. He thought that it was possible that la Gorda and
I had acquired enough
strength to withstand a glimpse of the Eagle.
He announced that it was my personal duty to round up the three women
and the three men
and help them get into their keenest states of awareness. It was the
least I could do for them,
since I had perhaps been instrumental in destroying their chances for
freedom.
He moved our time of action to the hour just before dawn, or the
morning twilight. I dutifully
attempted to make them shift awareness, as don Juan did to me. Since I
had no idea how to
manipulate their bodies or what I really had to do with them I ended up
beating them on the back.
After several grueling attempts on my part, don Juan finally
intervened. He got them as ready as
they could possibly be and handed them over to me to herd like cattle
onto the bridge. My task
was to take them one by one across that bridge. The power spot was on
the south side, a very
auspicious omen. Silvio Manuel planned to cross first, wait for me to
deliver them to him and
then usher us as a group into the unknown.
Silvio Manuel walked across, followed by Eligio, who did not even
glance at me. I held the
six apprentices in a tight group on the north side of the bridge. They
were terrified; they got loose
123
from my grip and began to run in different directions. I caught the
three women one by one and
succeeded in delivering them to Silvio Manuel. He held them at the
entrance of the crack between
the worlds. The three men were too fast for me. I was too tired to run
after them.
I looked at don Juan across the bridge for guidance. He and the rest of
his party and the
Nagual woman were clustered together looking at me; they had coaxed me
with gestures to run
after the women or the men, laughing at my fumbling attempts. Don Juan
made a gesture with his
head to disregard the three men and to cross over to Silvio Manuel with
la Gorda.
We crossed. Silvio Manuel and Eligio seemed to be holding the sides of
a vertical slit the size
of a man. The women ran and hid behind la Gorda. Silvio Manuel urged
all of us to step inside
the opening. I obeyed him. The women did not. Beyond that entrance
there was nothing. Yet it
was filled to the brim with something that was nothing. My eyes were
open; all my senses were
alert. I strained myself trying to see in front of me. But there was
nothing in front of me. Or if
there was something there, I could not grasp it. My senses did not have
the compartmentalization
I have learned to regard as meaningful. Everything came to me at once,
or rather nothingness
came to me to a degree I had never experienced before or after. I felt
that my body was being torn
apart. A force from within myself was pushing outward. I was bursting,
and not in a figurative
way. Suddenly I felt a human hand snatching me out of there before I
disintegrated.
The Nagual woman had crossed over and saved me. Eligio had not been
able to move because
he was holding the opening, and Silvio Manuel had the four women by
their hair, two in each
hand, ready to hurl them in.
I assume that the whole event must have taken at least a quarter of an
hour to unfold, but at
the time it never occurred to me to worry about people around the
bridge. Time seemed to have
been somehow suspended. Just as it had been suspended when we returned
to the bridge on our
way to Mexico City.
Silvio Manuel said that although the attempt had seemed to be a
failure, it was a total success.
The four women did see the aperture and through it into the other
world; and what I experienced
in there was a true sense of death.
"There is nothing gorgeous or peaceful about death," he said. "Because
the real terror begins
upon dying. With that incalculable force you felt in there, the Eagle
will squeeze out of you
every flicker of awareness you have ever had."
Silvio Manuel prepared la Gorda and me for another attempt. He
explained that power spots
were actual holes in a sort of canopy that prevents the world from
losing its shape. A power spot
could be utilized as long as one has gathered enough strength in the
second attention. He told us
that the key to withstanding the Eagle's presence was the potency of
one's intent. Without intent
there was nothing. He said to me that, since I was the only one who had
stepped into the other
world, what had nearly killed me was my incapacity to change my intent.
He was confident,
however, that with forced practice all of us would get to elongate our
intent. He could not
explain, however, what intent was. He joked that only the Nagual Juan
Matus could explain it -
but that he was not around.
Unfortunately our next attempt did not take place, for I became
deplenished of energy. It was
a swift and devastating loss of vitality. I was suddenly so weak that I
passed out in Silvio
Manuel's house.
I asked la Gorda whether she knew what happened next; I myself had no
idea. La Gorda said
that Silvio Manuel told everyone that the Eagle had dislodged me from
their group, and that
finally I was ready for them to prepare me to carry out the designs of
my fate. His plan was to
take me to the world between the parallel lines while I was
unconscious, and let that world draw
out all the remaining and useless energy from my body. His idea was
sound in the judgment of all
124
his companions because the rule says that one could only enter in there
with awareness. To enter
without it brings death, since without consciousness the life force is
exhausted by the physical
pressure of that world.
La Gorda added that they did not take her with me. But the Nagual Juan
Matus had told her
that once I was empty of vital energy, practically dead, all of them
took turns in blowing new
energy into my body. In that world, anybody who has life force can give
it to others by blowing
on them. They put their breath in all the spots where there is a
storage point. Silvio Manuel blew
first, then the Nagual woman. The remaining part of me was made up of
all the members of the
Nagual Juan Matus' party.
After they had blown their energy into me, the Nagual woman brought me
out of the fog to
Silvio Manuel's house. She laid me on the ground with my head toward
the southeast. La Gorda
said that I looked as if I were dead. She and the Genaros and the three
little sisters were there. The
Nagual woman explained to them that I was ill, but that I was going to
come back someday to
help them find their freedom, because I would not be free myself until
I did that. Silvio Manuel
then gave me his breath and brought me back to life. That was why she
and the little sisters
remembered that he was my master. He carried me to my bed and let me
sleep, as if nothing had
happened. After I woke up I left and did not return. And then she
forgot because no one ever
pushed her into the left side again. She went to live in the town where
I later found her with the
others. The Nagual Juan and Genaro had set up two different households.
Genaro took care of the
men; the Nagual Juan Matus looked after the women.
I had gone to sleep feeling depressed, feeble. When I woke up I was in
perfect control of
myself, ebullient, filled with extraordinary and unfamiliar energy. My
well-being was marred
only by don Juan's telling me that I had to leave la Gorda and strive
alone to perfect my attention,
until one day when I would be able to return to help her. He also told
me not to fret or get
discouraged, for the carrier of the rule would eventually make himself
or herself known to me in
order to reveal my true task.
Afterward I did not see don Juan for a very long time. When I came back
he kept on making
me shift from the right to the left side awareness for two purposes;
first, so I could continue my
relationship with his warriors and the Nagual woman, and second, so he
could put me under the
direct supervision of Zuleica, with whom I had a steady interaction
throughout the remaining
years of my association with don Juan.
He told me that the reason he had to entrust me to Zuleica was because
according to Silvio
Manuel's master plan there were to be two kinds of instruction for me,
one for the right side and
one for the left. The right side instruction pertained to the state of
normal consciousness and had
to do with leading me to the rational conviction that there is another
type of awareness concealed
in human beings. Don Juan was in charge of this instruction. The left
side instruction had been
assigned to Zuleica; it was related to the state of heightened
awareness and had to do exclusively
with the handling of the second attention. Thus every time I went to
Mexico I would spend half
of my time with Zuleica, and the other half with don Juan.
125
13. The Intricacies of
Dreaming
Don Juan began the task of ushering me into the second attention by
telling me that I had
already had a great deal of experience in entering into it. Silvio
Manuel had taken me to the very
entrance. The flaw had been that I had not been given the appropriate
rationales. Male warriors
must be given serious reasons before they safely venture into the
unknown. Female warriors are
not subject to this and can go without any hesitation, providing that
they have total confidence in
whoever is leading them.
He told me that I had to start by learning first the intricacies of
dreaming. He then put me
under Zuleica's supervision. He admonished me to be impeccable and
practice meticulously
whatever I learned, and above all, to be careful and deliberate in my
actions so as not to exhaust
my life force in vain. He said that the prerequisite for entrance into
any of the three stages of
attention is the possession of life force, because without it warriors
cannot have direction and
purpose. He explained that upon dying our awareness also enters into
the third attention; but only
for an instant, as a purging action, just before the Eagle devours it.
La Gorda said that the Nagual Juan Matus made every one of the
apprentices learn dreaming.
She thought that all of them were given this task at the same time I
was. Their instruction was
also divided into right and left. She said that the Nagual and Genaro
provided the instruction for
the state of normal awareness. When they judged that the apprentices
were ready, the Nagual
made them shift into a state of heightened awareness and left them with
their respective
counterparts. Vicente taught Nestor, Silvio Manuel taught Benigno,
Genaro taught Pablito. Lydia
was taught by Hermelinda, and Rosa by Nelida. La Gorda added that
Josefina and she were put
under the care of Zuleica in order to learn together the finer points
of dreaming, so they would be
able to come to my aid someday.
Moreover, la Gorda deduced on her own that the men were also taken to
Florinda to be taught
stalking. The proof of this was their drastic change of behavior. She
claimed that she knew,
before she remembered anything, that she had been taught the principles
of stalking but in a very
superficial manner; she had not been made to practice, while the men
were given practical
knowledge and tasks. Their behavioral change was the proof. They became
lighthearted and
jovial. They enjoyed their lives, while she and the other women,
because of their dreaming
became progressively more somber and morose.
La Gorda believed that the men were unable to remember their
instruction when I asked them
to reveal their stalking knowledge to me, because they practiced it
without knowing what they
were doing. Their training was revealed, however, in their dealings
with people. They were
consummate artists in bending people to their wishes. Through their
stalking practice the men had
even learned controlled folly. For example, they carried on as if
Soledad were Pablito's mother.
To any onlooker, it would seem that they were mother and son pitted
against each other, when in
reality they were acting out a part. They convinced everybody.
Sometimes Pablito would give
such a performance that he would even convince himself.
La Gorda confessed that all of them were more than baffled by my
behavior. They did not
know whether I was insane or myself a master of controlled folly, I
gave all the outward
indications that I believed their masquerade. Soledad told them not to
be fooled, because I was
indeed insane. I appeared to be in control but I was so completely
aberrated that I could not
behave like a Nagual. She engaged every one of the women in delivering
a deadly blow to me.
She told them that I had requested it myself at one time when I had
been in control of my
faculties.
La Gorda said that it took her several years, under Zuleica's guidance,
to learn dreaming.
126
When the Nagual Juan Matus had judged that she was proficient, he
finally took her to her true
counterpart, Nelida. It was Nelida who showed her how to behave in the
world. She groomed her
not only to be at ease in Western clothes, but to have good taste. Thus
when she put on her city
clothes in Oaxaca and amazed me with her charm and poise, she was
already experienced in that
transformation.
Zuleica was very effective as my guide into the second attention. She
insisted that our
interaction take place only at night, and in total darkness. For me,
Zuleica was only a voice in the
dark, a voice that started every contact we had by telling me to focus
my attention on her words
and nothing else. Her voice was the woman's voice that la Gorda thought
she had heard in
dreaming.
Zuleica told me that if dreaming is going to be done indoors, it is
best to do it in total
darkness, while lying down or sitting up on a narrow bed, or better
yet, while sitting inside a
coffin-like crib. She thought that outdoors, dreaming should be done in
the protection of a cave,
in the sandy areas of water holes, or sitting against a rock in the
mountains; never on the flat floor
of a valley, or next to rivers, or lakes, or the sea, because flat
areas as well as water were
antithetical to the second attention.
Every one of my sessions with her was imbued with mysterious overtones.
She explained that
the surest way to make a direct hit on the second attention is through
ritual acts, monotonous
chanting, intricate repetitious movements.
Her teachings were not about the preliminaries of dreaming, which had
already been taught to
me by don Juan. Her assumption was that whoever came to her already
knew how to do
dreaming, so she dealt exclusively with esoteric points of the left
side awareness.
Zuleica's instructions began one day when don Juan took me to her
house. We got there late in
the afternoon. The place seemed to be deserted, although the front door
opened as we
approached. I expected Zoila or Marta to show up but no one was at the
entrance. I felt that
whoever had opened the door for us had also moved out of our way very
quickly. Don Juan took
me inside to the patio and made me sit on a crate that had a cushion
and had been turned into a
bench. The seat on the crate was bumpy and hard and very uncomfortable.
I ran my hand
underneath the thin cushion and found sharp-edged rocks. Don Juan said
that my situation was
unconventional because I had to learn the fine points of dreaming in a
hurry. Sitting on a hard
surface was a prop to keep my body from feeling it was in a normal
sitting situation. Just a few
minutes before arriving at the house, don Juan had made me change
levels of awareness. He said
that Zuleica's instruction had to be conducted in that state in order
for me to have the speed that I
needed. He admonished me to abandon myself and trust Zuleica
implicitly. He then commanded
me to focus my gaze with all the concentration I was capable of and
memorize every detail of the
patio that was within my field of vision. He insisted that I had to
memorize the detail as much as
the feeling of sitting there. He repeated his instructions to make sure
that I had understood. Then
he left.
It quickly got very dark and I started to fret, sitting there. I had
not had enough time to
concentrate on the detail of the patio. I heard a rustling sound just
behind me and then Zuleica's
voice jolted me. In a forceful whisper she told me to get up and follow
her. I automatically
obeyed her. I could not see her face, she was only a dark shape walking
two steps ahead of me.
She led me to an alcove in the darkest hall in her house. Although my
eyes were used to the
darkness I was still unable to see a thing. I stumbled on something and
she commanded me to sit
down inside a narrow crib and support my lower back with something I
thought was a hard
cushion.
I next felt that she had backed up a few steps behind me, a thing which
baffled me completely,
127
for I thought that my back was only a few inches from the wall.
Speaking from behind me, she
ordered me in a soft voice to focus my attention on her words and let
them guide me. She told me
to keep my eyes open and fixed on a point right in front of me, at my
eye level; and that this point
was going to turn from darkness to a bright and pleasing orange-red.
Zuleica spoke very softly with an even intonation. I heard every word
she said. The darkness
around me seemed to have effectively cut off any distracting external
stimuli. I heard Zuleica's
words in a vacuum, and then I realized that the silence in that hall
was matched by the silence
inside me.
Zuleica explained that a dreamer must start from a point of color;
intense light or unmitigated
darkness are useless to a dreamer in the initial onslaught. Colors such
as purple or light green or
rich yellow are, on the other hand, stupendous starting points. She
preferred, however, orangered,
because through experience it had proven to be the one that gave her
the greatest sensation of
rest. She assured me that once I had succeeded in entering into the
orange-red color I would have
rallied my second attention permanently, providing that I could be
aware of the sequence of
physical events.
It took me several sessions with Zuleica's voice to realize with my
body what she wanted me
to do. The advantage of being in a state of heightened awareness was
that I could follow my
transition from a state of vigil to a state of dreaming. Under normal
conditions that transition is
blurred, but under those special circumstances I actually felt in the
course of one session how my
second attention took over the controls. The first step was an unusual
difficulty in breathing. It
was not a difficulty in inhaling or exhaling; I was not short of breath
- rather, my breathing
changed rhythm all of a sudden. My diaphragm began to contract and it
forced my midsection to
move in and out with great speed. The result was the fastest short
breaths I had ever taken. I
breathed in the lower part of my lungs and felt a great pressure in my
intestines. I tried
unsuccessfully to break the spasms of my diaphragm. The harder I tried,
the more painful it got.
Zuleica ordered me to let my body do whatever was necessary and to
forget about directing or
controlling it. I wanted to obey her, but I did not know how. The
spasms, which must have lasted
ten to fifteen minutes, subsided as suddenly as they had appeared and
were followed by another
strange, shocking sensation. I felt it first as a most peculiar itch, a
physical feeling which was not
pleasing or displeasing; it was something like a nervous tremor. It
became very intense, to the
point of forcing me to focus my attention on it in order to determine
where in my body it was
happening. I was stunned by the realization that it was not taking
place anywhere in my physical
body, but outside of it, and yet I still felt it.
I disregarded Zuleica's order to enter into a patch of coloration that
was forming right at my
eye level, and gave myself fully to the exploration of that strange
sensation outside me. Zuleica
must have seen what I was going through; she suddenly began to explain
that the second attention
belongs to the luminous body, as the first attention belongs to the
physical body. The point
where, she said, the second attention assembles itself was situated
right where Juan Tuma had
described it the first time we met - approximately one and one-half
feet in front of the midpoint
between the stomach and the belly button and four inches to the right.
Zuleica ordered me to massage that place, to manipulate it by moving
the fingers of both my
hands right on that point as if I were playing a harp. She assured me
that sooner or later I would
end up feeling my fingers going through something as thick as water,
and that finally I would feel
my luminous shell.
As I kept on moving my fingers the air got progressively thicker until
I felt a mass of sorts.
An undefined physical pleasure spread all over me. I thought that I was
touching a nerve in my
body and felt silly at the absurdity of it. I stopped.
128
Zuleica warned me that if I did not move my fingers she was going to
bop me on the head.
The longer I kept up the wavering motion, the closer I felt the
itching. It finally got as near as
five or six inches from my body. It was as if something in me had
shrunk. I actually thought I
could feel a dent. I then had another eerie sensation. I was falling
asleep and yet I was conscious.
There was a buzzing in my ears, which reminded me of the sound of a
bullroarer; next I felt a
force rolling me over on my left side without waking me up. I was
rolled very tightly, like a
cigar, and was tucked into the itching depression. My awareness
remained suspended there,
incapable of waking up, but so tightly rolled on itself that I could
not fall asleep either.
I heard Zuleica's voice telling me to look around. I could not open my
eyes, but my tactile
sense told me that I was in a ditch, lying on my back. I felt
comfortable, secure. There was such a
tightness to my body, such a compactness, that I did not ever want to
get up. Zuleica's voice
ordered me to stand up and open my eyes. I could not do it. She said
that I had to will my
movements, that it was no longer a matter of contracting my muscles to
get up.
I thought that she was annoyed at my slowness. I realized then that I
was fully conscious,
perhaps more conscious than I had ever been in my entire life. I could
think rationally and yet I
seemed to be sound asleep. The thought occurred to me that Zuleica had
put me in a state of deep
hypnosis. It bothered me for an instant, then it did not matter. I
abandoned myself to the feeling
of being suspended, floating free.
I could not hear anything else she said. It was either that she had
stopped talking to me or that
I had shut off the sound of her voice. I did not want to leave that
haven. I had never been so
peaceful and complete. I lay there unwilling to get up or to change
anything. I could feel the
rhythm of my breathing. Suddenly I woke up.
In my next session with Zuleica she told me that I had succeeded in
making a dent in my
luminosity all by myself, and that making a dent meant bringing a
distant point in my luminous
shell closer to my physical body, therefore closer to control. She
asserted repeatedly that from the
moment the body learns to make that dent, it is easier to enter into
dreaming. I agreed with her. I
had acquired a strange impulse, a sensation that my body had instantly
learned to reproduce. It
was a mixture of feeling at ease, secure, dormant, suspended without
tactile sense and at the same
time fully awake, aware of everything.
La Gorda said that the Nagual Juan Matus had struggled for years to
create that dent in her, in
all three little sisters, and in the Genaros as well, so as to give
them the permanent ability to focus
their second attention. He had told her that ordinarily the dent is
created on the spur of the
moment by the dreamer when it is needed, then the luminous shell
changes back to its original
shape. But in the apprentices' case, because they did not have a Nagual
leader, the depression was
created from the outside and was a permanent feature of their luminous
bodies, a great help but
also a hindrance. It made all of them vulnerable and moody.
I remembered then that once I had seen and kicked a depression in the
luminous shells of
Lydia and Rosa. I thought that the dent was at the height of the upper
portion of the outside of
their right thigh, or perhaps just at the crest of their hipbone. La
Gorda explained that I had
kicked them in the dent of their second attention and that I had nearly
killed them.
La Gorda said that she and Josefina lived in Zuleica's house for
several months. The Nagual
Juan Matus had delivered them to her one day after making them shift
levels of awareness. He
did not tell them what they were going to do there nor what to expect,
he simply left them by
themselves in the hall of her house and walked away. They sat there
until it got dark. Zuleica
then came to them. They never saw her, they only heard her voice as if
she were talking to them
from a point on the wall.
Zuleica was very demanding from the moment she took over. She made them
undress on the
129
spot and ordered both of them to crawl inside thick fluffy cotton bags,
some poncho-like
garments that were lying on the floor. They covered them from neck to
toes. She ordered them
next to sit back to back on a mat in the same alcove where I myself
used to sit. She told them that
their task was to gaze at the darkness until it began to acquire a hue.
After many sessions they
indeed began to see colors in the darkness, at which time Zuleica made
them sit side by side and
gaze at the same spot.
La Gorda said that Josefina learned very fast, and that one night she
dramatically entered into
the patch of orange-red by swishing physically out of the poncho. La
Gorda thought that either
Josefina had reached out for the blotch of color or it had reached out
for her. The result was that
in one instant Josefina was gone from inside the poncho. Zuleica
separated them from then on,
and la Gorda started her slow, solitary learning.
La Gorda's account made me remember that Zuleica had also made me crawl
inside a fluffy
garment. In fact, the commands she used to order me to crawl inside
revealed to me the rationale
for its use. She directed me to feel its fluffiness with my naked skin,
especially with the skin of
my calves. She repeated over and over that human beings have a superb
center of perception on
the outside of the calves, and that if the skin in that area could be
made to relax or be soothed, the
scope of our perception would be enhanced in ways that would be
impossible to fathom
rationally. The garment was very soft and warm, and it induced an
extraordinary sensation of
pleasurable relaxation in my legs. The nerves in my calves became
highly stimulated.
La Gorda reported the same sensation of physical pleasure. She went as
far as to say that it
was the power of that poncho that guided her to find the patch of
orange-red color. She was so
impressed with the garment that she made herself one, copying the
original, but its effect was not
the same, although it still provided her solace and well-being. She
said that she and Josefina
ended up spending all of their available time inside the ponchos that
she had sewn for both of
them.
Lydia and Rosa had also been placed inside the garment, but they were
never particularly
fond of it. Neither was I.
La Gorda explained Josefina's and her own attachment as a direct
consequence of having been
led to finding their dreaming color while they were inside the garment.
She said that the reason
for my indifference to it was the fact that I did not enter into the
area of coloration at all - rather
the hue had come to me. She was right. Something else besides Zuleica's
voice dictated the
outcome of that preparatory phase. By all indications Zuleica was
leading me through the same
steps she had led la Gorda and Josefina. I had stared at the darkness
throughout many sessions
and was ready to visualize the spot of coloration. In fact, I witnessed
its entire metamorphosis
from plain darkness to a precisely outlined blotch of intense
brightness, and then I was swayed
by the external itch, on which I focused my attention, until I ended up
entering into a state of
restful vigil. It was then that I first became immersed in an
orange-red coloration.
After I had learned to remain suspended between sleep and vigil,
Zuleica seemed to relax her
pace. I even believed that she was not in any hurry to get me out of
that state. She let me stay in
it without interfering, and never asked me about it, perhaps because
her voice was only for
commands and not for asking questions. We never really talked, at least
not the way I talked with
don Juan.
While I was in the state of restful vigil, I realized one time that it
was useless for me to remain
there, that no matter how pleasant it was, its limitations were
blatant. I sensed then a tremor in
my body and I opened my eyes, or rather my eyes became open by
themselves. Zuleica was
staring at me. I experienced a moment of bafflement. I thought I had
woken up, and to be faced
with Zuleica in the flesh was something I had not expected. I had
gotten used to hearing only her
130
voice. It also surprised me that it was no longer night. I looked
around. We were not in Zuleica's
house. Then the realization struck me that I was dreaming and I woke up.
Zuleica started then on another facet of her teachings. She taught me
how to move. She began
her instruction by commanding me to place my awareness on the midpoint
of my body. In my
case the midpoint is below the lower edge of my belly button. She told
me to sweep the floor with
it, that is, make a rocking motion with my belly as if a broom were
attached to it. Throughout
countless sessions I attempted to accomplish what her voice was urging
me to do. She did not
allow me to go into a state of restful vigil. It was her intention to
guide me to elicit the perception
of sweeping the floor with my midsection while I remained in a waking
state. She said that to be
on the left side awareness was enough of an advantage to do well in the
exercise.
One day, for no reason I could think of, I succeeded in having a vague
feeling in the area of
my stomach. It was not something defined, and when I focused my
attention on it I realized that it
was a prickling sensation inside the cavity of my body, not quite in my
stomach area but above it.
The closer I examined it, the more details I noticed. The vagueness of
the sensation soon turned
into a certainty. There was a strange connection of nervousness or a
prickling sensation between
my solar plexus and my right calf.
As the sensation became more acute I involuntarily brought my right
thigh up to my chest.
Thus the two points were as close to each other as my anatomy
permitted. I shivered for a
moment with an unusual nervousness and then I clearly felt that I was
sweeping the floor with my
midsection; it was a tactile sensation that happened over and over
every time I rocked my body in
my sitting position.
In my next session Zuleica allowed me to enter into a state of restful
vigil. But this time that
state was not quite as it had been before. There seemed to be a sort of
control in me that curtailed
my enjoying it freely, as I had done in the past - a control that also
made me focus on the steps I
had taken to get into it. First I noticed the itch on the point of the
second attention in my luminous
shell. I massaged that point by moving my fingers on it as if I were
playing a harp and the point
sunk towards my stomach. I felt it almost on my skin. I experienced a
prickling sensation on the
outside of my right calf. It was a mixture of pleasure and pain. The
sensation radiated to my
whole leg and then to my lower back. I felt that my buttocks were
shaking. My entire body was
transfixed by a nervous ripple. I thought that my body had been caught
upside down in a net. My
forehead and my toes seemed to be touching. I was like a closed
U-shape. Then I felt as if I were
being folded in two and rolled inside a sheet. My nervous spasms were
what made the sheet roll
into itself, with me in the center. When the rolling ended I could not
sense my body any more. I
was only an amorphous awareness, a nervous spasm wrapped in itself.
That awareness came to
rest inside a ditch, inside a depression of itself.
I understood then the impossibility of describing what takes place in
dreaming. Zuleica said
that the right and left side awareness are wrapped up together. Both of
them come to rest in one
single bundle in the dent, the depressed center of the second
attention. To do dreaming one needs
to manipulate both the luminous body and the physical body. First, the
center of assembling for
the second attention has to be made accessible by being pushed in from
the outside by someone
else, or sucked in from within by the dreamer. Second, in order to
dislodge the first attention, the
centers of the physical body located in the midsection and the calves,
especially the right one,
have to be stimulated and placed as close to one another as possible
until they seem to join. Then
the sensation of being bundled takes place and automatically the second
attention takes over.
Zuleica's explanation, given in commands, was the most cogent way of
describing what takes
place, for none of the sensory experiences involved in dreaming are
part of our normal inventory
of sensory data. All of them were baffling to me. The sensation of an
itch, a tingling outside
131
myself, was localized and because of that the turmoil of my body upon
feeling it was minimal.
The sensation of being rolled on myself, on the other hand, was by far
the most disquieting. It
included a range of sensations that left my body in a state of shock. I
was convinced that at one
point my toes were touching my forehead, which is a position I am not
able to attain. And yet I
knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that I was inside a net, hanging
upside down in a pear shape
with my toes right against my forehead. On a physical plane I was
sitting down and my thighs
were against my chest.
Zuleica also said that the feeling of being rolled up like a cigar and
placed inside the dent of
the second attention was the result of merging my right and left
awareness into one in which the
order of predominance has been switched and the left has gained
supremacy. She challenged me
to be attentive enough to catch the reversal motion, the two attentions
again becoming what they
normally are with the right holding the reins.
I never caught the feelings involved, but her challenge obsessed me to
the point that I became
trapped in deadly vacillations in my effort to watch everything. She
had to withdraw her
challenge by ordering me to stop my scrutinies, for I had other things
to do.
Zuleica said that first of all I had to perfect my command of moving at
will. She began her
instruction by directing me time and time again to open my eyes while I
was in a state of restful
vigil. It took a great deal of effort for me to do it. One time my eyes
opened suddenly and I saw
Zuleica looming over me. I was lying down but I could not determine
where. The light was
extremely bright, as if I were just underneath a powerful electric
bulb, but the light was not
shining directly on my eyes. I could see Zuleica without any effort.
She ordered me to stand up by willing my movement. She said that I had
to push myself up
with my midsection, that I had three thick tentacles there which I
could use as crutches to lift up
my whole body.
I tried every conceivable way to get up. I failed. I had a sensation of
despair and physical
anguish reminiscent of nightmares I used to have as a child in which I
was unable to wake up and
yet I was fully awake desperately trying to scream.
Zuleica finally spoke to me. She said that I had to follow a certain
sequence, and that it was
wasteful and downright dumb of me to fret and get agitated as if I were
dealing with the world of
everyday life. Fretting was proper only in the first attention; the
second attention was calmness
itself. She wanted me to repeat the sensation I had had of sweeping the
floor with my midsection.
I thought that in order to repeat it I would have to be sitting.
Without any deliberation on my part
I sat up and adopted the position I had used when my body first
elicited that sensation. Something
in me rocked, and suddenly I was standing. I could not figure out what
I had done to move. I
thought that if I started all over again I could catch the sequence. As
soon as I had that thought I
found myself lying down again. Upon standing up once more I realized
that there was no
procedure involved, that in order to move I had to intend my moving at
a very deep level. In
other words, I had to be utterly convinced that I wanted to move, or
perhaps it would be more
accurate to say that I had to be convinced that I needed to move.
Once I had understood that principle, Zuleica made me practice every
conceivable aspect of
volitional movement. The more I practiced, the clearer it became for me
that dreaming was in
fact a rational state. Zuleica explained it. She said that in dreaming,
the right side, the rational
awareness, is wrapped up inside the left side awareness in order to
give the dreamer a sense of
sobriety and rationality; but that the influence of rationality has to
be minimal and used only as
an inhibiting mechanism to protect the dreamer from excesses and
bizarre undertakings.
The next step was learning to direct my dreaming body. Don Juan had
proposed, from the first
time I met Zuleica, the task of gazing at the patio as I sat on the
crate. I religiously engaged
132
myself, sometimes for hours, in gazing at it. I was always alone in
Zuleica's house. It seemed that
on the days when I went there everyone was gone or was hiding. The
silence and the solitude
worked in my favor and I succeeded in memorizing the details of that
patio.
Zuleica presented to me, accordingly, the task of opening my eyes from
a state of restful vigil
to see the patio. It took many sessions to accomplish it. At first I
would open my eyes and I
would see her, and she, with a jerk of her body, would make me bounce
back like a ball into the
state of restful vigil. On one of those bounces I felt an intense
tremor; something that was located
in my feet rattled its way up to my chest and I coughed it up; the
scene of the patio at night came
out of me just as if it had emerged out of my bronchial tubes. It was
something like the roar of an
animal.
I heard Zuleica's voice coming to me as a faint murmur. I could not
understand what she was
saying. I vaguely noticed that I was sitting on the crate. I wanted to
get up but I felt that I was not
solid. It was as if a wind were blowing me away. Then I heard Zuleica's
voice very clearly telling
me not to move. I tried to remain motionless but some force pulled me
and I woke up in the
alcove in the hall. Silvio Manuel was facing me.
After every session of dreaming in Zuleica's house, don Juan would be
waiting for me in the
pitch-black hall. He would take me out of the house and make me shift
levels of awareness. This
time Silvio Manuel was there. Without saying a word to me, he put me
inside a harness and
hoisted me up against the beams of the roof. He kept me there until
midday, at which time don
Juan came and let me down. He explained that to be kept without
touching the ground for a
period of time tunes the body, and that it is essential to do this
before embarking on a dangerous
journey such as the one I was about to undertake.
It took many more sessions of dreaming for me to learn at last to open
my eyes to see either
Zuleica or to see the dark patio. I realized then that she herself had
been dreaming all along. She
had never been in person behind me in the alcove in the hall. I had
been right the first night when
I thought that my back was against the wall. Zuleica was merely a voice
from dreaming.
During one of the dreaming sessions, when I opened my eyes deliberately
to see Zuleica, I
was shocked to find la Gorda as well as Josefina looming over me
together with Zuleica. The
final facet of her teaching began then. Zuleica taught the three of us
to journey with her. She said
that our first attention was hooked to the emanations of the earth,
while our second attention was
hooked to the emanations of the universe. What she meant by that was
that a dreamer by
definition is outside the boundaries of the concerns of everyday life.
As a traveler in dreaming
then, Zuleica's last task with la Gorda, Josefina, and me was to tune
our second attention to
follow her around in her voyages into the unknown.
In successive sessions Zuleica's voice told me that her "obsession" was
going to lead me to a
rendezvous, that in matters of the second attention the dreamer's
obsession serves as a guide, and
that hers was focused on an actual place beyond this earth. From there
she was going to call me
and I had to use her voice as a line to pull myself.
Nothing happened for two sessions; Zuleica's voice would become more
and more faint as she
spoke, and I worried that I was incapable of following her. She had not
told me what to do. I also
experienced an unusual heaviness. I could not break a binding force
around me that prevented me
from getting out of the state of restful vigil.
During the third session I suddenly opened my eyes without even trying
to. Zuleica, la Gorda
and Josefina were staring at me. I was standing with them. I
immediately realized that we were in
some place completely unknown to me. The most obvious feature was a
brilliant indirect light.
The whole scene was inundated by a white, powerful, neonlike light.
Zuleica was smiling as if
inviting us to look around. La Gorda and Josefina seemed to be as
cautious as I was. They gave
133
me and Zuleica furtive glances. Zuleica signaled us to move around. We
were outdoors, standing
in the middle of a glaring circle. The ground seemed to be hard, dark
rock, yet it reflected a great
deal of the blinding white light, which came from above. The strange
thing was that although I
knew that the light was too intense for my eyes, I was not at all hurt
when I looked up and
spotted its source. It was the sun. I was staring directly at the sun,
which, perhaps due to the fact
that I was dreaming, was intensely white.
La Gorda and Josefina were also staring at the sun, apparently without
any injurious effect.
Suddenly I felt frightened. The light was alien to me. It was a
merciless light; it seemed to attack
us, creating a wind that I could feel. I could not sense any heat,
however. I believed it to be
malignant. In unison, la Gorda, Josefina and I huddled together like
frightened children around
Zuleica. She held us, and then the white, glaring light began to
diminish by degrees until it had
completely vanished. In its place there was a mild, very soothing,
yellowish light.
I became aware then that we were not in this world. The ground was the
color of wet terracotta.
There were no mountains, but where we were standing was not flat land
either. The ground
was cracked and parched. It looked like a rough dry sea of terra-cotta.
I could see it all around
me, just as if I were in the middle of the ocean. I looked up; the sky
had lost its maddening glare.
It was dark, but not blue. A bright, incandescent star was near the
horizon. It dawned on me at
that instant that we were in a world with two suns, two stars. One was
enormous and had gone
over the horizon, the other was smaller or perhaps more distant.
I wanted to ask questions, to walk around and look for things. Zuleica
signaled us to relax, to
wait patiently. But something seemed to be pulling us. Suddenly la
Gorda and Josefina were
gone. And I woke up.
From that time on I never went back to Zuleica's house. Don Juan would
make me shift levels
of awareness in his own house or wherever we were, and I would enter
into dreaming. Zuleica, la
Gorda and Josefina were always waiting for me. We went back to the same
unearthly scene over
and over, until we were thoroughly familiar with it. Whenever we could
do it we would skip the
time of glare, the daytime, and go there at night, just in time to
witness the rise over the horizon
of a colossal celestial body: something of such magnitude that when it
erupted over the jagged
line of the horizon it covered at least half of the one hundred and
eighty degree range in front of
us. The celestial body was beautiful, and its ascent over the horizon
was so breathtaking that I
could have stayed there for an eternity, just to witness that sight.
The celestial body took up nearly the entire firmament when it reached
the zenith. Invariably
we would lie on our backs in order to gaze at it. It had consistent
configurations, which Zuleica
taught us to recognize. I realized that it was not a star. Its light
was reflected; it must have been an
opaque body because the reflected light was mellow in relation to its
monumental size. There
were enormous, unchanging brown spots on its saffron-yellow surface.
Zuleica took us systematically on voyages that were beyond words. La
Gorda said that Zuleica
took Josefina even farther and deeper into the unknown, because
Josefina was, just like Zuleica
herself, quite a bit crazy; neither of them had that core of
rationality that supplies a dreamer with
sobriety - thus they had no barriers and no interest in finding out
rational causes or reasons for
anything.
The only thing that Zuleica told me about our journeys that sounded
like an explanation was
that the dreamers' power to focus on their second attention made them
into living slingshots. The
stronger and the more impeccable the dreamers were, the farther they
could project their second
attention into the un