even harder. The Nagual said that you should know how diffi-
cult 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 at-
tention 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.
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 intel-
lect 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 atten-
tion has been gathered and that person is focusing it on some-
thing. 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 en-
gulfed 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 de-
tails 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 ex-
press. 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 sensa-
tions 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 some-
day 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 atten-
tion, 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 any-
thing 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