I became so despondent I was nearly in tears. Don Juan came to my side. He reassuringly put his hand on my shoulder. He said that the Sonoran desert, for reasons incomprehensible to him, fostered definite belligerence in man or any other organism.
“People may say that it’s because the air is too dry here,” he continued, “or because it’s too hot. Seers would say that there is a particular confluence of the Eagle’s emanations here, which, as I’ve already said, helps the assemblage point to shift below.
“Be that as it may, warriors are in the world to train themselves to be unbiased witnesses, so as to understand the mystery of ourselves and relish the exulta-tion of finding what we really are. This is the highest of the new seers’ goals. And not every warrior attains it. We believe that the nagual Julian didn’t attain it. He was waylaid, and so was la Catalina.”
He further said that to be a peerless nagual, one has to love freedom, and one has to have supreme detachment. He explained that what makes the warrior’s path so very dangerous is that it is the opposite of the life situation of modern man. He said that modern man has left the realm of the unknown and the mysterious, and has settled down in the realm of the functional. He has turned his back to the world of the foreboding and the exulting and has welcomed the world of bore-dom.
“To be given a chance to go back again to the mystery of the world,” don Juan continued, “is sometimes too much for warriors, and they succumb; they are waylaid by what I’ve called the high adventure of the unknown. They forget the quest for freedom; they for-get to be unbiased witnesses. They sink into the unknown and love it.”
“And you think i’m like that, don’t you?” I asked don Juan.
“We don’t think, we know,” Genaro replied. “And la Catalina knows better than anyone else.”
“Why would she know it?” I demanded.
“Because she’s like you,” Genaro replied, pronouncing his words with a comical intonation.
I was about to get into a heated argument again when don Juan interrupted me.
“There’s no need to get so worked up,” he said to me. “You are what you are. The fight for freedom is harder for some. You are one of them.
“In order to be unbiased witnesses,” he went on, “we begin by understanding that the fixation or the movement of the assemblage point is all there is to us and the world we witness, whatever that world might be.
“The new seers say that when we were taught to talk to ourselves, we were taught the means to dull ourselves in order to keep the assemblage point fixed on one spot.”
Genaro clapped his hands noisily and let out a piercing whistle that imitated the whistle of a football coach.
“Let’s get that assemblage point moving!” he yelled. “Up, up, up! Move, move, move!”
We were all still laughing when the bushes by my right side were suddenly stirred. Don Juan and Genaro immediately sat down with the left leg tucked under the seat. The right leg, with the knee up, was like a shield in front of them. Don Juan signaled me to do the same. He raised his brows and made a gesture of resignation at the corner of his mouth.
“Sorcerers have their own quirks,” he said in a whisper. “When the assemblage point moves to the regions below its normal position, the vision of sorcerers becomes limited. If they see you standing, they’ll attack you.”
“The nagual Julian kept me once for two days in this warrior’s position,” Genaro whispered to me. “I even had to urinate while I sat in this position.”
“And defecate,” don Juan added.
“Right,” Genaro said. And then he whispered to me, as if on second thought, “I hope you did your kaka earlier. If your bowels aren’t empty when la Catalina shows up, you’ll shit in your pants, unless I show you how to take them off. If you have to shit in this position, you’ve got to get your pants off.”
He began to show me how to maneuver out of my trousers. He did it in a most serious and concerned manner. All my concentration was focused on his movements. It was only when I had gotten out of my pants that I became aware that don Juan was roaring with laughter. I realized that Genaro was again poking fun at me. I was about to stand up to put on my pants, when don Juan stopped me. He was laughing so hard that he could hardly articulate his words. He told me to stay put, that Genaro did things only half in fun, and that la Catalina was really there behind the bushes.
His tone of urgency, in the midst of laughter, got to me. I froze on the spot. A moment later a rustle in the bushes sent me into such a panic that I forgot about my pants. I looked at Genaro. He was again wearing his pants. He shrugged his shoulders.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I didn’t have time to show you how to put them back on without getting up.”
I did not have time to get angry or to join them in their mirth. Suddenly, right in front of me, the bushes separated and a most horrendous creature came out. It was so outlandish I was no longer afraid. I was spellbound. Whatever was in front of me was not a human being; it was something not even remotely resembling one. It was more like a reptile. Or a bulky grotesque insect. Or even a hairy, ultimately repulsive bird. Its body was dark and had coarse reddish hair. I could not see any legs, just the ugly enormous head. The nose was flat and the nostrils were two enormous lateral holes. It had something like a beak with teeth. Horrifying as that thing was, its eyes were magnificent. They were like two mesmeric pools of inconceivable clarity. They had knowledge. They were not human eyes, or bird eyes, or any kind of eyes I had ever seen.
The creature moved toward my left, rustling the bushes. As I moved my head to follow it, I noticed that don Juan and Genaro seemed to be as spellbound by its presence as I was. It occurred to me that they had never seen anything like that either.
In an instant, the creature had moved completely out of sight. But a moment later there was a growl and its gigantic shape again loomed in front of us.
I was fascinated and at the same time worried by the fact that I was not in the least afraid of that grotesque creature. It was as if my early panic had been experienced by someone else.
I felt, at one moment, that I was beginning to stand up. Against my volition, my legs straightened up and I found myself standing up, facing the creature. I vaguely felt that I was taking off my jacket, my shirt, and my shoes. Then I was naked. The muscles of my legs tensed with a tremendously powerful contraction. I jumped up and down with colossal agility, and then the creature and I raced toward some ineffable green-ness in the distance.
The creature raced ahead of me, coiling on itself, like a serpent. But then I caught up with it. As we speeded together, I became aware of something I already knew?the creature was really la Catalina. All of a sudden, la Catalina, in the flesh, was next to me. We moved effortlessly. It was as if we were stationary, only posed in a bodily gesture of movement and speed, while the scenery around us was being moved, giving the impression of enormous acceleration.
Our racing stopped as suddenly as it had started, and then I was alone with la Catalina in a different world. There was not a single recognizable feature in it. There was an intense glare and heat coming from what seemed to be the ground, a ground covered with huge rocks. Or at least they seemed to be rocks. They had the color of sandstone, but they had no weight; they were like chunks of sponge tissue. I could send them hurling around by only leaning on them.
I became so fascinated with my strength that I was oblivious to anything else. I had assessed, in whatever way, that the chunks of seemingly weightless material opposed resistance to me. It was my superior strength that sent them hurling around.
I tried to grab them with my hands, and I realized that my entire body had changed. La Catalina was looking at me. She was again the grotesque creature she had been before, and so was I. I could not see myself, but I knew that both of us were exactly alike.