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 re-
ceives 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 con-
fused. 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 thor-
oughly 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 some-
thing to us tonight. They have hurled us away.
She gently touched my writing hand.
Tonight was a special night for you, she went on. To-
night 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 be-
tween 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 per-
formed 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 sud-
denly 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 buzz-
ing 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, ver-
tical, reddish fibers that looked like vines dropping from the
dark roof. With her right arm she was also holding some ver-
tical 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 neces-
sary 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.
When I told them about my concurrent memories the little
sisters looked at me bewildered. La Gorda was the only one
who seemed to be following what was happening to me. She
laughed with true delight and said that the Nagual was right
in saying that I was too lazy to remember what I had seen ;
therefore, I only bothered with what I had looked at.
Is it possible, I thought to myself, that I am unconsciously
selecting what I recall? Or is it la Gorda who is creating all
this? If it was true that I had selected my recall at first and
then released what I had censored, then it also had to be true
that I must have perceived much more of don Juan’s and don
Genaro’s actions, and yet I could only recall a selective part of
my total perception of those events.
It’s hard to believe, I said to la Gorda, that I can remem-
ber now something I didn’t remember at all a while ago.
The Nagual said that everyone can see, and yet we choose
not to remember what we see, she said. Now I understand
how right he was. All of us can see; some, more than others.
I told la Gorda that some part of me knew that I had found
then a transcendental key. A missing piece had been handed
down to me by all of them. But it was difficult to discern what
it was.
She announced that she had just seen that I had practiced
a good deal of dreaming, and that I had developed my at-
tention, and yet I was fooled by my own appearance of not