Don Juan was convinced then that the nagual Julian was utterly mad. Hearing him talk about not-doings or about monsters with three thousand heads or about places of no pity, don Juan felt almost sorry for him.
The nagual Julian very calmly asked don Juan to go to the storage shed in the back of the house and ask Tulio to come out.
Don Juan sighed and did his best not to burst out laughing. The nagual’s methods were too obvious. Don Juan knew that the nagual wanted to continue the test, using Tulio.
Don Juan stopped his narration and asked me what I thought about Tulio’s behavior. I said that, guided by what I knew about the sorcerers’ world, I would say that Tulio was a sorcerer and somehow he was moving his own assemblage point in a very sophisticated manner to give don Juan the impression that he was in four places at the same time.
“So what do you think I found in the shed?” don Juan asked with a big grin.
“I would say either you found Tulio or you didn’t find anybody,” I replied.
“But if either of these had happened, there would have been no shock to my continuity,” don Juan said.
I tried to imagine bizarre things and I proposed that perhaps he found Tulio’s dreaming body. I reminded don Juan that he himself had done something similar to me with one of the members of his party of sorcerers.
“No,” don Juan retorted. “What I found was a joke that has no equivalent in reality. And yet it was not bizarre; it was not out of this world. What do you think it was?”
I told don Juan I hated riddles. I said that with all the bizarre things he had made me experience, the only things I could conceive would be more bizarre-ness, and since that was ruled out, I gave up guessing.
“When I went into that shed I was prepared to find that Tulio was hiding,” don Juan said. “I was sure that the next part of the test was going to be an infuriating game of hide-and-seek. Tulio was going to drive me crazy hiding inside that shed.
“But nothing I had prepared myself for happened. I walked into that shed and found four Tulios.”
“What do you mean, four Tulios?” I asked.
“There were four men in that shed,” don Juan replied. “And all of them were Tulio. Can you imagine my surprise? All of them were sitting in the same position, their legs crossed and pressed tightly together. They were waiting for me. I looked at them and ran away screaming.
“My benefactor held me down on the ground outside the door. And then, truly horrified, I saw how the four Tulios came out of the shed and advanced toward me. I screamed and screamed while the Tulios pecked me with their hard fingers, like huge birds attacking. I screamed until I felt something give in me and I entered a state of superb indifference. Never in all my life had I felt something so extraordinary. I brushed off the Tulios and got up. They had just been tickling me. I went directly to the nagual and asked him to explain the four men to me.”
What the nagual Julian explained to don Juan was that those four men were the paragons of stalking. Their names had been invented by their teacher, the nagual Elías, who, as an exercise in controlled folly, had taken the Spanish numerals uno, dos, tres, cuatro, added them to the name of Tulio, and obtained in that manner the names Tuliuno, Tuliddo, Tulitre, and Tulicuatro.
The nagual Julian introduced each in turn to don Juan. The four men were standing in a row. Don Juan faced each of them and nodded, and each nodded to him. The nagual said the four men were stalkers of such extraordinary talent, as don Juan had just corroborated, that praise was meaningless. The Tulios were the nagual Elías’s triumph; they were the essence of unobtrusiveness. They were such magnificent stalkers that, for all practical purposes, only one of them existed. Although people saw and dealt with them daily, nobody outside the members of the household knew that there were four Tulios.
Don Juan understood with perfect clarity everything the nagual Julian was saying about the men. Because of his unusual clarity, he knew he had reached the place of no pity. And he understood, all by himself, that the place of no pity was a position of the assemblage point, a position which rendered self-pity inoperative. But don Juan also knew that his insight and wisdom were extremely transitory. Unavoidably, his assemblage point would return to its point of departure.
When the nagual asked don Juan if he had any questions, he realized that he would be better off paying close attention to the nagual’s explanation than speculating about his own foresightedness.
Don Juan wanted to know how the Tulios created the impression that there was only one person. He was extremely curious, because observing them together he realized they were not really that alike. They wore the same clothes. They were about the same size, age, and configuration. But that was the extent of their similarity. And yet, even as he watched them he could have sworn that there was only one Tulio.
The nagual Julian explained that the human eye was trained to focus only on the most salient features of anything, and that those salient features were known beforehand. Thus, the stalkers’ art was to create an impression by presenting the features they chose, features they knew the eyes of the onlooker were bound to notice. By artfully reinforcing certain impressions, stalkers were able to create on the part of the onlooker an unchallengeable conviction as to what their eyes had perceived.
The nagual Julian said that when don Juan first arrived dressed in his woman’s clothes, the women of his party were delighted and laughed openly. But the man with them, who happened to be Tulitre, immediately provided don Juan with the first Tulio impression. He half turned away to hide his face, shrugged his shoulders disdainfully, as if all of it was boring to him, and walked away—to laugh his head off in private—while the women helped to consolidate that first impression by acting apprehensive, almost annoyed, at the unsociability of the man.
From that moment on, any Tulio who was around don Juan reinforced that impression and further perfected it until don Juan’s eye could not catch anything except what was being fed to him.
Tuliuno spoke then and said that it had taken them about three months of very careful and consistent actions to have don Juan blind to anything except what he was guided to expect. After three months, his blindness was so pronounced that the Tulios were no longer even careful. They acted normal in the house. They even ceased wearing identical clothes, and don Juan did not notice the difference.
When other apprentices were brought into the house, however, the Tulios had to start all over again. This time the challenge was hard, because there were many apprentices and they were sharp.
Don Juan asked Tuliuno about Tulio’s appearance. Tuliuno answered that the nagual Elías maintained appearance was the essence of controlled folly, and stalkers created appearance by intending them, rather than by producing them with the aid of props. Props created artificial appearances that looked false to the eye. In this respect, intending appearances was exclusively an exercise for stalkers.
Tulitre spoke next. He said appearances were solicited from the spirit. Appearances were asked, were forcefully called on; they were never invented rationally. Tulio’s appearance had to be called from the spirit. And to facilitate that the nagual Elías put all four of them together into a very small, out-of-the-way storage room, and there the spirit spoke to them. The spirit told them that first they had to intend their homogeneity. After four weeks of total isolation, homogeneity came to them.
The nagual Elías said that intent had fused them together and that they had acquired the certainty that their individuality would go undetected. Now they had to call up the appearance that would be perceived by the onlooker. And they got busy, calling intent for the Tulios’ appearance don Juan had seen. They had to work very hard to perfect it. They focused, under the direction of their teacher, on all the details that would make it perfect.
The four Tulios gave don Juan a demonstration of Tulio’s most salient features. These were: very forceful gestures of disdain and arrogance; abrupt turns of the face to the right as if in anger; twists of their upper bodies as if to hide part of the face with the left shoulder; angry sweeps of a hand over the eyes as if to brush hair off the forehead; and the gait of an agile but impatient person who is too nervous to decide which way to go.