La Gorda said that smoke had helped Josefina to be ethereal and very elusive, and that no doubt it had helped me to cure my madness, whatever it was.
“The Nagual said that smoke takes everything out of you,” la Gorda went on. “It makes you clear and direct.”
I asked her if she knew how to bring out with the smoke whatever a person was hiding. She said that she could easily do it because of having lost her form, but that the little sisters and the Genaros, although they had seen the Nagual and Genaro do it scores of times, could not yet do it themselves.
I was curious to know why don Juan had never mentioned the subject to me, in spite of the fact that he had smoked me like dry fish hundreds of times.
“He did,” la Gorda said with her usual conviction. “The Nagual even taught you fog gazing. He told us that once you smoked a whole place in the mountains and saw what was hiding behind the scenery. He said that he was spellbound himself.”
I remembered an exquisite perceptual distortion, a hallucination of sorts, which I had had and thought was the product of a play between a most dense fog and an electrical storm that was occurring at the same time. I narrated to them the episode and added that don Juan had never really directly taught me anything about the fog or the smoke. His procedure had been to build fires or to take me into fog banks.
La Gorda did not say a word. She stood up and went back to the stove. Lidia shook her head and clicked her tongue.
“You sure are dumb,” she said. “The Nagual taught you everything. How do you think you saw what you have just told us about?”
There was an abyss between our understanding of how to teach something. I told them that if I were to teach them something I knew, such as how to drive a car, I would go step by step, making sure that they understood every facet of the whole procedure.
La Gorda returned to the table.
“That’s only if the sorcerer is teaching something about the tonal,” she said. “When the sorcerer is dealing with the nagual, he must give the instruction, which is to show the mystery to the warrior. And that’s all he has to do. The warrior who receives the mysteries must claim knowledge as power, by doing what he has been shown.
“The Nagual showed you more mysteries than all of us together. But you’re lazy, like Pablito, and prefer to be confused. The tonal and the nagual are two different worlds. In one you talk, in the other you act.”
At the moment she spoke, her words made absolute sense to me. I knew what she was talking about. She went back to the stove, stirred something in a pot and came back again.
“Why are you so dumb?” Lidia bluntly asked me.
“He’s empty,” Rosa replied.
They made me stand up and forced themselves to squint as they scanned my body with their eyes. All of them touched my umbilical region.
“But why are you still empty?” Lidia asked.
“You know what to do, don’t you?” Rosa added.
“He was crazy,” Josefina said to them. “He must still be crazy now.”
La Gorda came to my aid and told them that I was still empty for the same reason they still had their form. All of us secretly did not want the world of the nagual. We were afraid and had second thoughts. In short, none of us was better than Pablito.
They did not say a word. All three of them seemed thoroughly embarrassed.
“Poor little Nagual,” Lidia said to me with a tone of genuine concern. “You’re as scared as we are. I pretend to be tough, Josefina pretends to be crazy, Rosa pretends to be ill-tempered and you pretend to be dumb.”
They laughed, and for the first time since I had arrived they made a gesture of comradeship toward me. They embraced me and put their heads against mine.
La Gorda sat facing me and the little sisters sat around her. I was facing all four of them.
“Now we can talk about what happened tonight,” la Gorda said. “The Nagual told me that if we survived the last contact with the allies we wouldn’t be the same. The allies did something to us tonight. They have hurled us away.”
She gently touched my writing hand.
“Tonight was a special night for you,” she went on. “Tonight all of us pitched in to help you, including the allies. The Nagual would have liked it. Tonight you saw all the way through.”
“I did?” I asked.
“There you go again,” Lidia said, and everybody laughed.
“Tell me about my seeing, Gorda,” I insisted. “You know that I’m dumb. There should be no misunderstandings between us.”
“All right,” she said. “I see what you mean. Tonight you saw the little sisters.”
I said to them that I had also witnessed incredible acts performed by don Juan and don Genaro. I had seen them as plainly as I had seen the little sisters and yet don Juan and don Genaro had always concluded that I had not seen. I failed, therefore, to determine in what way could the acts of the little sisters be different.
“You mean you didn’t see how they were holding onto the lines of the world?” She asked.
“No, I didn’t.”
“You didn’t see them slipping through the crack between the worlds?”
I narrated to them what I had witnessed. They listened in silence. At the end of my account la Gorda seemed to be on the verge of tears.
“What a pity! ” she exclaimed.
She stood up and walked around the table and embraced me. Her eyes were clear and restful. I knew she bore no malice toward me.
“It’s our fate that you are plugged up like this,” she said. “But you’re still the Nagual to us. I won’t hinder you with ugly thoughts. You can at least be assured of that.”
I knew that she meant it. She was speaking to me from a level that I had witnessed only in don Juan. She had repeatedly explained her mood as the product of having lost her human form; she was indeed a formless warrior. A wave of profound affection for her enveloped me. I was about to weep. It was at the instant that I felt she was a most marvelous warrior that quite an intriguing thing happened to me. The closest way of describing it would be to say that I felt that my ears had suddenly popped. Except that I felt the popping in the middle of my body, right below my navel, more acutely than in my ears. Right after the popping everything became clearer; sounds, sights, odors. Then I felt an intense buzzing, which oddly enough did not interfere with my hearing capacity; the buzzing was loud but did not drown out any other sounds. It was as if I were hearing the buzzing with some part of me other than my ears. A hot flash went through my body. And then I suddenly recalled something I had never seen. It was as though an alien memory had taken possession of me.
I remembered Lidia pulling herself from two horizontal, reddish ropes as she walked on the wall. She was not really walking; she was actually gliding on a thick bundle of lines that she held with her feet. I remembered seeing her panting with her mouth open, from the exertion of pulling the reddish ropes. The reason I could not hold my balance at the end of her display was because I was seeing her as a light that went around the room so fast that it made me dizzy; it pulled me from the area around my navel.
I remembered Rosa’s actions and Josefina’s as well. Rosa had actually brachiated, with her left arm holding onto long, vertical, reddish fibers that looked like vines dropping from the dark roof. With her right arm she was also holding some vertical fibers that seemed to give her stability. She also held onto the same fibers with her toes. Toward the end of her display she was like a phosphorescence on the roof. The lines of her body had been erased.
Josefina was hiding herself behind some lines that seemed to come out of the floor. What she was doing with her raised forearm was moving the lines together to give them the necessary width to conceal her bulk. Her puffed-up clothes were a great prop; they had somehow contracted her luminosity. The clothes were bulky only for the eye that looked. At the end of her display Josefina, like Lidia and Rosa, was just a patch of light. I could switch from one recollection to the other in my mind.