The Second Ring of Power (47 page)

"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.

"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 nauseating, 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 footsteps
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 second 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 tremendum, 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 displaced. 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.

She stood up and pulled me up off the bench. She said that I had to
leave before the twilight
set in. All of them walked with me to
my car and we said good-bye.

La Gorda gave me a last command. She told me that on my return I should
go directly to the
Genaros' house.

"We don't want to see you until you know what to do," she
said with a radiant smile. "But
don't delay too long."

The little sisters nodded.

"Those mountains are not going to let us stay here much
longer," she said, and with a subtle
movement of her
chin she pointed to the ominous, eroded hills across the valley.

I asked her one more question. I wanted to know if she had any idea
where the Nagual and
Genaro would go after we had completed
our rendezvous. She looked up at the sky, raised her arms and made an
indescribable gesture with them to point out that there was no limit to that
vastness.