“Don’t look at Genaro!” a voice ordered me in my ear. “Look around!”
I obeyed. I thought I was in hell! The shock of seeing the surroundings was so great that I screamed in terror, but there was no sound to my voice. Around me was the most vivid picture of all the descriptions of hell in my Catholic upbringing. I was seeing a reddish world, hot and oppressive, dark and cavernous, with no sky, no light but the malignant reflections of reddish lights that kept on moving around us, at great speed.
Genaro started to walk again, and something pulled me with him. The force that was making me follow Genaro also kept me from looking around. My awareness was glued to Genaro’s movements.
I saw Genaro plop down as if he were utterly exhausted. The instant he touched the ground and stretched himself to rest, something was released in me and I was able again to look around. Don Juan was watching me inquisitively. I was standing up facing him. We were at the same place where we had sat down, a wide rocky ledge on top of a small mountain. Genaro was panting and wheezing, and so was I. I was covered with perspiration. My hair was dripping wet. My clothes were soaked, as if I had been dunked in a river.
“My God, what’s going on!” I exclaimed in utter seriousness and concern.
The exclamation sounded so silly that don Juan and Genaro started to laugh.
“We’re trying to make you understand alignment,” Genaro said.
Don Juan gently helped me to sit down. He sat by me.
“Do you remember what happened?” he asked me.
I told him that I did and he insisted that I tell him exactly what I had seen. His request was incongruous with what he had told me, that the only value of my experiences was the movement of my assemblage point and not the content of my visions.
He explained that Genaro had tried to help me be-fore in very much the same fashion as he had just done, but that I could never remember anything. He said that Genaro had guided my assemblage point this time, as he had done before, to assemble a world with another of the great bands of emanations.
There was a long silence. I was numb, shocked, yet my awareness was as keen as it had ever been. I thought I had finally understood what alignment was. Something inside me, which I had been activating without knowing how, gave me the certainty that I had comprehended a great truth.
“I think you’re beginning to gather your own momentum,” don Juan said to me. “Let’s go home. You’ve had enough for one day.”
“Oh, come on,” Genaro said. “He’s stronger than a bull. He’s got to be pushed a little further.”
“No!” don Juan said emphatically. “We’ve got to save his strength. He’s only got so much of it.”
Genaro insisted that we stay. He looked at me and winked.
“Look,” he said to me, pointing to the eastern range of mountains. “The sun has hardly moved an inch over those mountains and yet you plodded in hell for hours and hours. Don’t you find that overwhelming?”
“Don’t scare him unnecessarily!” don Juan protested almost vehemently.
It was then that I saw their maneuvers. At that mo-ment the voice of seeing told me that don Juan and Genaro were a team of superb stalkers playing with me. It was don Juan who always pushed me beyond my limits, but he always let Genaro be the heavy. That day at Genaro’s house, when I reached a dangerous state of hysterical fright as Genaro questioned don Juan whether I should be pushed, and don Juan assured me that Genaro was enjoying himself at my expense, Genaro was actually worrying about me.
My seeing was so shocking to me that I began to laugh. Both don Juan and Genaro looked at me with surprise. Then don Juan seemed to realize at once what was going through my mind. He told Genaro, and both of them laughed like children.
“You’re coming of age,” don Juan said to me. “Right on time; you’re neither too stupid nor too bright. Just like me. You’re not like me in your aberrations. There you are more like the nagual Julian, except that he was brilliant.”
He stood up and stretched his back. He looked at me with the most piercing, ferocious eyes I had ever seen. I stood up.
“A nagual never lets anyone know that he is in charge,” he said to me. “A nagual comes and goes without leaving a trace. That freedom is what makes him a nagual.”
His eyes glared for an instant, and then they were covered by a cloud of mellowness, kindness, humanness, and they were again don Juan’s eyes.
I could hardly keep my balance. I was swooning helplessly. Genaro jumped to my side and helped me to sit down. Both of them sat down flanking me.
“You are going to catch a boost from the earth,” don Juan said to me in one ear.
“Think about the nagual’s eyes,” Genaro said to me in the other.
“The boost will come at the moment you see the glitter on the top of that mountain,” don Juan said and pointed to the highest peak on the eastern range.
“You’ll never see the nagual’s eyes again,” Genaro whispered.
“Go with the boost wherever it takes you,” don Juan said.
“If you think of the nagual’s eyes, you’ll realize that there are two sides to a coin,” Genaro whispered.
I wanted to think about what both of them were saying, but my thoughts did not obey me. Something was pressing down on me. I felt I was shrinking. I had a sensation of nausea. I saw the evening shadows advancing rapidly up the sides of those eastern mountains. I had the feeling that I was running after them.
“Here we go,” Genaro said in my ear.
“Watch the big peak, watch the glitter,” don Juan said in my other ear.
There was indeed a point of intense brilliance where don Juan had pointed, on the highest peak of the range. I watched the last ray of sunlight being reflected on it. I felt a hole in the pit of my stomach, just as if I were on a roller coaster.
I felt, rather than heard, a faraway earthquake rum-ble which abruptly overtook me. The seismic waves were so loud and so enormous that they lost all meaning for me. I was an insignificant microbe being twisted and twirled.
The motion slowed down by degrees. There was one more jolt before everything came to a halt. I tried to look around. I had no point of reference. I seemed to be planted, like a tree. Above me there was a white, shiny, inconceivably big dome. Its presence made me feel elated. I flew toward it, or rather I was ejected like a projectile. I had the sensation of being comfortable, nurtured, secure; the closer I got to the dome, the more intense those feelings became. They finally overwhelmed me and I lost all sense of myself.
The next thing I knew, I was rocking slowly in the air like a leaf that falls. I felt exhausted. A suction force started to pull me. I went through a dark hole and then I was with don Juan and Genaro.
The next day don Juan, Genaro, and I went to Oax-aca. While don Juan and I strolled around the main square, in the later afternoon, he suddenly started to talk about what we had done the day before. He asked me if I had understood what he was referring to when he said that the old seers had stumbled onto something monumental.
I told him that I did, but that I couldn’t explain it in words.
“And what do you think was the main thing we wanted you to find out on top of that mountain?” he asked.
“Alignment,” a voice said in my ear, at the same time I said it myself.
I turned around in a reflex action and bumped into Genaro, who was just behind me, walking in my tracks. The speed of my movement startled him. He broke into a giggle and then embraced me.
We sat down. Don Juan said that there were very few things that he could say about the boost I had gotten from the earth, that warriors are always alone in such cases, and true realizations come much later, after years of struggle.
I told don Juan that my problem in understanding was magnified by the fact that he and Genaro were doing all the work. I was simply a passive subject who could only react to their maneuvers. I could not for the life of me initiate any action, because I did not know what a proper action should be, nor did I know how to initiate it.