“The Nagual told me,” la Gorda went on, “that when he was gathering your second attention with his smoke, you focused it on a gnat, and then the little gnat became the guardian of the other world for you.”
I told her that that was true. At her request I narrated to them the experience don Juan had made me undergo. With the aid of his smoking mixture I had perceived a gnat as a hundred-foot-high, horrifying monster that moved with incredible speed and agility. The ugliness of that creature was nauseat-ing, and yet there was an awesome magnificence to it.
I also had had no way to accommodate that experience in my rational scheme of things. The only support for my intellect was my deep-seated certainty that one of the effects of the psychotropic smoking mixture was to induce me to hallucinate the size of the gnat.
I presented to them, especially to la Gorda, my rational, causal explanation of what had taken place. They laughed.
“There are no hallucinations,” la Gorda said in a firm tone. “If anybody suddenly sees something different, something that was not there before, it is because that person’s second attention has been gathered and that person is focusing it on something. Now, whatever is gathering that person’s attention might be anything, maybe it’s liquor, or maybe it’s madness, or maybe it’s the Nagual’s smoking mixture.
“You saw a gnat and it became the guardian of the other world for you. And do you know what that other world is? That other world is the world of our second attention. The Nagual thought that perhaps your second attention was strong enough to pass the guardian and go into that world. But it wasn’t. If it had been, you might have gone into that world and never returned. The Nagual told me that he was prepared to follow you. But the guardian didn’t let you pass and nearly killed you. The Nagual had to stop making you focus your second attention with his power plants because you could only focus on the awesomeness of things. He had you do dreaming instead, so you could gather it in another way. But he was sure your dreaming would also be awesome. There was nothing he could do about it. You were following him in his own foot-steps and he had an awesome, fearsome side.”
They remained silent. It was as if all of them had been engulfed by their memories.
La Gorda said that the Nagual had once pointed out to me a very special red insect, in the mountains of his homeland. She asked me if I remembered it.
I did remember it. Years before don Juan had taken me to an area unknown to me, in the mountains of northern Mexico. With extreme care he showed me some round insects, the size of a ladybug. Their backs were brilliantly red. I wanted to get down on the ground and examine them, but he would not let me. He told me that I should watch them, without staring, until I had memorized their shape, because I was supposed to remember them always. He then explained some intricate details of their behavior, making it sound like a metaphor. He was telling me about the arbitrary importance of our most cherished mores. He pointed out some alleged mores of those insects and pitted them against ours. The comparison made the importance of our beliefs look ridiculous.
“Just before he and Genaro left,” la Gorda went on, “the Nagual took me to that place in the mountains where those little bugs lived. I had already been there once, and so had everyone else. The Nagual made sure that all of us knew those little creatures, although he never let us gaze at them.
“While I was there with him he told me what to do with you and what I should tell you. I’ve already told you most of what he asked me to, except for this last thing. It has to do with what you’ve been asking everybody about: Where are the Nagual and Genaro? Now I’ll tell you exactly where they are. The Nagual said that you will understand this better than any of us. None of us has ever seen the guardian. None of us has ever been in that yellow sulfur world where he lives. You are the only one among us who has. The Nagual said that he followed you into that world when you focused your second attention on the guardian. He intended to go there with you, perhaps forever, if you would’ve been strong enough to pass. It was then that he first found out about the world of those little red bugs. He said that their world was the most beautiful and perfect thing one could imagine. So, when it was time for him and Genaro to leave this world, they gathered all their sec-ond attention and focused it on that world. Then the Nagual opened the crack, as you yourself witnessed, and they slipped through it into that world, where they are waiting for us to join them someday. The Nagual and Genaro liked beauty. They went there for their sheer enjoyment.”
She looked at me. I had nothing to say. She had been right in saying that power had to time her revelation perfectly if it were going to be effective. I felt an anguish I could not express. It was as if I wanted to weep and yet I was not sad or melancholy. I longed for something inexpressible, but that longing was not mine. Like so many of the feelings and sensations I had had since my arrival, it was alien to me.
Nestor’s assertions about Eligio came to my mind. I told la Gorda what he had said, and she asked me to narrate to them the visions of my journey between the tonal and the nagual which I had had upon jumping into the abyss. When I finished they all seemed frightened. La Gorda immediately isolated my vision of the dome.
“The Nagual told us that our second attention would someday focus on that dome,” she said. “That day we will be all second attention, just like the Nagual and Genaro are, and that day we will join them.”
“Do you mean, Gorda, that we will go as we are?” I asked.
“Yes, we will go as we are. The body is the first attention, the attention of the tonal. When it becomes the second attention, it simply goes into the other world. Jumping into the abyss gathered all your second attention for a while. But Eligio was stronger and his second attention was fixed by that jump. That’s what happened to him and he was just like all of us. But there is no way of telling where he is. Even the Nagual himself didn’t know. But if he is someplace he is in that dome. Or he is bouncing from vision to vision, perhaps for a whole eternity.”
La Gorda said that in my journey between the tonal and the nagual I had corroborated on a grand scale the possibility that our whole being becomes all second attention, and on a much smaller scale when I got all of them lost in the world of that attention, earlier that day, and also when she transported us half a mile in order to flee from the allies. She added that the problem the Nagual had left for us as a challenge was whether or not we would be capable of developing our will, or the power of our second attention to focus indefinitely on anything we wanted.
We were quiet for a while. It seemed that it was time for me to leave, but I could not move. The thought of Eligio’s fate had paralyzed me. Whether he had made it to the dome of our rendezvous, or whether he had gotten caught in the tremen-dum, the image of his journey was maddening. It took no effort at all for me to envision it, for I had the experience of my own journey.
The other world, which don Juan had referred to practically since the moment we met, had always been a metaphor, an obscure way of labeling some perceptual distortion, or at best a way of talking about some undefinable state of being. Even though don Juan had made me perceive indescribable features of the world, I could not consider my experiences to be anything beyond a play on my perception, a directed mirage of sorts that he had managed to make me undergo, either by means of psychotropic plants, or by means I could not deduce rationally. Every time that had happened. I had shielded myself with the thought that the unity of the “me” I knew and was familiar with had been only temporarily dis-placed. Inevitably, as soon as that unity was restored, the world became again the sanctuary for my inviolable, rational self. The scope that la Gorda had opened with her revelations was terrifying.