I returned to the kitchen area and washed my face. The coldness of the water seemed to restore my awareness. Pablito, Nestor and Benigno were sitting around the table. Pablito had brought his chair. He stood up and shook hands with me. Then Nestor and Benigno did the same. La Gorda and the little sisters joined us.
There seemed to be something wrong with me. My ears were buzzing. I felt dizzy. Josefina stood up and grabbed onto Rosa for support. I turned to ask la Gorda what to do. Lidia was falling backward over the bench. I caught her, but her weight pulled me down and I fell over with her.
I must have fainted. I woke up suddenly. I was lying on a straw mat in the front room. Lidia, Rosa and Josefina were sound asleep next to me. I had to crawl over them to stand up. I nudged them but they did not wake up. I walked out to the kitchen. La Gorda was sitting with the Genaros around the table.
“Welcome back,” Pablito said.
He added that la Gorda had woken up a short while before. I felt that I was my old self again. I was hungry. La Gorda gave me a bowl of food. She said that they had already eaten. After eating I felt perfect in every respect except I could not think as I usually do. My thoughts had quieted down tremendously. I did not like that state. I noticed then that it was late afternoon. I had a sudden urge to jog in place facing the sun, the way don Juan used to make me do. I stood up and la Gorda joined me. Apparently she had had the same idea. Moving like that made me perspire. I got winded very quickly and returned to the table. La Gorda followed me. We sat down again. The Genaros were staring at us. La Gorda handed me my writing pad.
“The Nagual here got us lost,” la Gorda said.
The moment she spoke I experienced a most peculiar bursting. My thoughts came back to me in an avalanche. There must have been a change in my expression, for Pablito embraced me and so did Nestor and Benigno.
“The Nagual is going to live! ” Pablito said loudly.
La Gorda also seemed delighted. She wiped her forehead in a gesture of relief. She said that I had nearly killed all of them and myself with my terrible tendency to indulge.
“To focus the second attention is no joke,” Nestor said.
“What happened to us, Gorda?” I asked.
“We got lost,” she said. “You began to indulge in your fear and we got lost in that immensity. We couldn’t focus our attention of the tonal anymore. But we succeeded in bundling up our second attention with yours and now you have two faces.”
Lidia, Rosa and Josefina stepped out into the kitchen at that moment. They were smiling and seemed as fresh and vigorous as ever. They helped themselves to some food. They sat down and nobody uttered a word while they ate. The moment the last one had finished eating, la Gorda picked up where she had left off.
“Now you’re a warrior with two faces,” she went on. “The Nagual said that all of us have to have two faces to fare well in both attentions. He and Genaro helped us to round up our second attention and turned us around so we could face in two directions, but they didn’t help you, because to be a true nagual you have to claim your power all by yourself. You’re still a long way from that, but let’s say that now you’re walking upright instead of crawling, and when you’ve regained your completeness and have lost your form, you’ll be gliding.”
Benigno made a gesture with his hand of a plane in flight and imitated the roar of the engine with his booming voice. The sound was truly deafening.
Everybody laughed. The little sisters seemed to be delighted.
I had not been fully aware until then that it was late afternoon. I said to la Gorda that we must have slept for hours, for we had gone into their room before noon. She said that we had not slept long at all, that most of that time we had been lost in the other world, and that the Genaros had been truly frightened and despondent, because there was nothing they could do to bring us back.
I turned to Nestor and asked him what they had actually done or seen while we were gone. He stared at me for a mo-ment before answering.
“We brought a lot of water to the yard,” he said, pointing to some empty oil barrels. “Then all of you staggered into the yard and we poured water on you, that’s all.”
“Did we come out of the room?” I asked him.
Benigno laughed loudly. Nestor looked at la Gorda as if asking for permission or advice.
“Did we come out of the room?” la Gorda asked.
“No,” Nestor replied.
La Gorda seemed to be as anxious to know as I was, and that was alarming to me. She even coaxed Nestor to speak.
“You came from nowhere,” Nestor said. “I should also say that it was frightening. All of you were like fog. Pablito saw you first. You may have been in the yard for a long time, but we didn’t know where to look for you. Then Pablito yelled and all of us saw you. We have never seen anything like that.”
“What did we look like?” I asked.
The Genaros looked at one another. There was an unbearably long silence. The little sisters were staring at Nestor with their mouths open.
“You were like pieces of fog caught in a web,” Nestor said. “When we poured water on you, you became solid again.”
I wanted him to keep on talking but la Gorda said that there was very little time left, for I had to leave at the end of the day and she still had things to tell me. The Genaros stood up and shook hands with the little sisters and la Gorda. They embraced me and told me that they only needed a few days in order to get ready to move away. Pablito put his chair upside down on his back. Josefina ran to the area around the stove, picked up a bundle they had brought from dona Soledad’s house and placed it between the legs of Pablito’s chair, which made an ideal carrying device.
“Since you’re going home you might as well take this,” she said. “It belongs to you anyway.”
Pablito shrugged his shoulders and shifted his chair in order to balance the load.
Nestor signaled Benigno to take the bundle but Pablito would not let him.
“It’s all right,” he said. “I might as well be a jackass as long as I’m carrying this damn chair.”
“Why do you carry it, Pablito?” I asked.
“I have to store my power,” he replied. “I can’t go around sitting on just anything. Who knows what kind of a creep sat there before me?”
He cackled and made the bundle wiggle by shaking his shoulders.
After the Genaros left, la Gorda explained to me that Pablito began his crazy involvement with his chair to tease Lidia. He did not want to sit where she had sat, but he had gotten carried away, and since he loved to indulge he would not sit anywhere else except on his chair.
“He’s capable of carrying it through life,” la Gorda said to me with great certainty. “He’s almost as bad as you. He’s your partner; you’ll carry your writing pad through life and he’ll carry his chair. What’s the difference? Both of you indulge more than the rest of us.”
The little sisters surrounded me and laughed, patting me on the back.
“It’s very hard to get into our second attention,” la Gorda went on, “and to manage it when you indulge as you do is even harder. The Nagual said that you should know how difficult that managing is better than any of us. With his power plants, you learned to go very far into that other world. That’s why you pulled us so hard today that we nearly died. We wanted to gather our second attention on the Nagual’s spot, and you plunged us into something we didn’t know. We are not ready for it, but neither are you. You can’t help yourself, though; the power plants made you that way. The Nagual was right: all of us have to help you contain your second attention, and you have to help all of us to push ours. Your second attention can go very far, but it has no control; ours can go only a little bit, but we have absolute control over it.”
La Gorda and the little sisters, one by one, told me how frightening the experience of being lost in the other world had been.