. I'm not asserting the opposite," he remarked when I confronted
him. "I've said to you that the inorganic beings don't pursue females; they
only go after males. But I've also said to you that the inorganic beings are
female, and that the entire universe is female to a large degree. So draw
your own conclusions."
Since I had no way to draw any conclusions, Don Juan explained to me
that sorceresses, in theory, come and go as they please in that world
because of their enhanced awareness and their femaleness.
"Do you know this for a fact?" I asked.
"The women of my party have never done that," he confessed, "not
because they can't but because I dissuaded them. The women of your party, on
the other hand, do it like changing skirts."
I felt a vacuum in my stomach. I really did not know anything about the
women of my party. Don Juan consoled me, saying that my circumstances were
different from his, as was my role as a nagual. He assured me that I did not
have it in me to dissuade any of the women of my party, even if I stood on
my head.
As the taxi drove us to her hotel, Carol delighted don Juan and me with
her impersonations of people we knew. I tried to be serious and questioned
her about our task. She mumbled some apologies for not being able to answer
me with the seriousness I deserved. Don Juan laughed uproariously when she
mimicked my solemn tone of voice.
After registering Carol at the hotel, the three of us meandered around
downtown, looking for secondhand bookstores. We ate a light dinner at the
Sanborn's restaurant in the House of Tiles. About ten o'clock, we walked to
the Regis Hotel. We went directly to the elevator. My fear had sharpened my
capacity to perceive details. The hotel building was old and massive. The
furniture in the lobby had obviously seen better days. Yet there was still,
all around us, something left of an old glory that had a definite appeal. I
could easily understand why Carol liked that hotel so much.
Before we got into the elevator, my anxiety mounted to such heights
that I had to ask don Juan for last- minute instructions. "Tell me again how
we are going to proceed," I begged.
Don Juan pulled us to the huge, ancient stuffed chairs in the lobby and
patiently explained to us that, once we were in the world of the inorganic
beings, we had to voice our intent to transfer our normal awareness to our
energy bodies. He suggested that Carol and I voice our intent together,
although that part was not really important. What was important, he said,
was that each of us intend the transfer of the total awareness of our daily
world to our energy body.
"How do we do this transference of awareness?" I asked.
"Transferring awareness is purely a matter of voicing our intent and
having the necessary amount of energy," he said. "Carol knows all this.
She's done it before. She entered physically into the inorganic beings'
world when she pulled you out of it, remember? Her energy will do the trick.
It'll tip the scales."
"What does it mean to tip the scales? I am in limbo, don Juan."
Don Juan explained that to tip the scales meant to add one's total
physical mass to the energy body. He said that using awareness as a medium
to make the journey into another world is not the result of applying any
techniques but the corollary of intending and having enough energy. The bulk
of energy from Carol Tiggs added to mine, or the bulk of my energy added to
Carol's, was going to make us into one single entity, energetically capable
of pulling our physicality and placing it on the energy body in order to
make that journey.
"What exactly do we have to do in order to enter into that other
world?" Carol asked. Her question scared me half to death; I thought she
knew what was going on.
"Your total physical mass has to be added to your energy body," don
Juan replied, looking into her eyes. "The great difficulty of this maneuver
is to discipline the energy body, a thing the two of you have already done.
Lack of discipline is the only reason the two of you may fail in performing
this feat of ultimate stalking. Sometimes, as a fluke, an average person
ends up performing it and entering into another world. But this is
immediately explained away as insanity or hallucination."
I would have given anything in the world for don Juan to continue
talking. But he put us in the elevator, and we went up to the second floor,
to Carol's room, despite my protests and my rational need to know. Deep
down, however, my turmoil was not so much that I needed to know; the bottom
line was my fear. Somehow, this sorcerers' maneuver was more frightening to
me than anything I had done so far.
Don Juan's parting words to us were "Forget the self and you will fear
nothing." His grin and the nodding of his head were invitations to ponder
the statement.
Carol laughed and began to clown, imitating don Juan's voice as he gave
us his cryptic instructions. Her lisping added quite a bit of color to what
don Juan had said. Sometimes I found her lisping adorable. Most of the time,
I detested it. Fortunately, that night her lisping was hardly noticeable.
We went to her room and sat down on the edge of the bed. My last
conscious thought was that the bed was a relic from the beginning of the
century. Before I had time to utter a single word, I found myself in a
strange-looking bed. Carol was with me. She half sat up at the same time I
did. We were naked, each covered with a thin blanket.
"What's going on?" she asked in a feeble voice.
"Are you awake?" I asked inanely.
"Of course I am awake," she said in an impatient tone.
"Do you remember where we were?" I asked. There was a long silence, as
she obviously tried to put her thoughts in order. "I think I am real, but
you are not," she finally said. "I know where I was before this. And you
want to trick me."
I thought she was doing the same thing herself. She knew what was going
on and was testing me or pulling my leg. Don Juan had told me that her
demons and mine were caginess and distrust. I was having a grand sample of
that.
"I refuse to be part of any shit where you are in control," she said.
She looked at me with venom in her eyes. "I am talking to you, whoever you
are."
She took one of the blankets we had been covered with and wrapped
herself with it. "I am going to lie here and go back to where I came from,"
she said, with an air of finality. "You and the nagual go and play with each
other."
"You have to stop this nonsense," I said forcefully. "We are in another
world."
She didn't pay any attention and turned her back to me like an annoyed,
pampered child. I did not want to waste my dreaming attention in futile
discussions of realness. I began to examine my surroundings. The only light
in the room was moonlight shining through the window directly in front of
us. We were in a small room, on a high bed. I noticed that the bed was
primitively constructed. Four thick posts had been planted in the ground,
and the bed frame was a lattice, made of long poles attached to the posts.
The bed had a thick mattress, or rather a compact mattress. There were no
sheets or pillows. Filled burlap sacks were stacked up against the walls.
Two sacks by the foot of the bed, staggered one on top of the other, served
as a stepladder to climb onto it.
Looking for a light switch, I became aware that the high bed was in a
corner, against the wall. Our heads were to the wall; I was on the outside
of the bed and Carol on the inside. When I sat on the edge of the bed, I
realized that it was perhaps over three feet above the ground.
Carol sat up suddenly and said with a heavy lisp, "This is disgusting!
The nagual certainly didn't tell me I was going to end up like this."
"I didn't know it either," I said. I wanted to say more and start a
conversation, but my anxiety had grown to extravagant proportions.
"You shut up," she snapped at me, her voice cracking with anger. "You
don't exist. You're a ghost. Disappear! Disappear!"
Her lisping was actually cute and distracted me from my obsessive fear.
I shook her by the shoulders. She yelled, not so much in pain as in surprise
or annoyance.
"I'm not a ghost," I said. "We made the journey because we joined our
energy."
Carol Tiggs was famous among us for her speed in adapting to any
situation. In no time at all she was convinced of the realness of our
predicament and began to look for her clothes in the semidarkness. I
marveled at the fact that she was not afraid. She became busy, reasoning out
loud where she might have put her clothes had she gone to bed in that room.
"Do you see any chair?" she asked.
I faintly saw a stack of three sacks that might have served as a table
or high bench. She got out of the bed, went to it, and found her clothes and
mine, neatly folded, the way she always handled garments. She handed my
clothes to me; they were my clothes, but not the ones I had been wearing a
few minutes before, in Carol's room at the Regis Hotel.
"These are not my clothes," she lisped. "And yet they are mine. How
strange!"
We dressed in silence. I wanted to tell her that I was about to burst
with anxiety. I also wanted to comment on the speed of our journey, but, in
the time I had taken to dress, the thought of our journey had become very
vague. I could hardly remember where we had been before waking up in that
room. It was as if I had dreamt the hotel room. I made a supreme effort to
recollect, to push away the vagueness that had begun to envelop me. I
succeeded in dispelling the fog, but that act exhausted all my energy. I
ended up panting and sweating.
"Something nearly, nearly got me," Carol said. I looked at her. She,
like me, was covered with perspiration. "It nearly got you too. What do you
think it is?"
"The position of the assemblage point," I said with absolute certainty.
She did not agree with me. "It's the inorganic beings collecting their
dues," she said shivering. "The nagual told me it was going to be horrible,
but I never imagined anything this horrible."
I was in total agreement with her; we were in a horrifying mess, yet I
could not conceive what the horror of that situation was. Carol and I were
not novices; we had seen and done endless things, some of them outright
terrifying. But there was something in that dream room that chilled me
beyond belief.
"We are dreaming, aren't we?" Carol asked.
Without hesitation, I reassured her that we were, although I would have
given anything to have don Juan there to reassure me of the same thing.
"Why am I so frightened?" she asked me, as if I were capable of
rationally explaining it.
Before I could formulate a thought about it, she answered her question
herself. She said that what frightened her was to realize, at a body level,
that perceiving is an all-inclusive act when the assemblage point has been
immobilized on one position. She reminded me that don Juan had told us that
the power our daily world has over us is a result of the fact that our
assemblage point is immobile on its habitual position. This immobility is
what makes our perception of the world so inclusive and overpowering that we
cannot escape from it. Carol also reminded me about another thing the nagual
had said: that if we want to break this totally inclusive force, all we have
to do is dispel the fog, that is to say, displace the assemblage point by
intending its displacement.
I had never really understood what don Juan meant until the moment I
had to bring my assemblage point to another position, in order to dispel
that world's fog, which had begun to swallow me.
Carol and I, without saying another word, went to the window and looked
out. We were in the country. The moonlight revealed some low, dark shapes of
dwelling structures. By all indications, we were in the utility or supply
room of a farm or a big country house.
"Do you remember going to bed here?" Carol asked.
"I almost do," I said and meant it. I told her I had to fight to keep
the image of her hotel room in my mind, as a point of reference.
"I have to do the same," she said in a frightened whisper. "I know that
if we let go of that memory, we are goners."
Then she asked me if I wanted us to leave that shack and venture
outside. I did not. My apprehension was so acute that I was unable to voice
my words. I could only give her a signal with my head.
"You are so very right not to want to go out," she said. "I have the
feeling that if we leave this shack, we'll never make it back."
I was going to open the door and just look outside, but she stopped me.
"Don't do that," she said. "You might let the outside in."
The thought that crossed my mind at that instant was that we had been
placed inside a frail cage. Anything, such as opening the door, might upset
the precarious balance of that cage. At the moment I had that thought, both
of us had the same urge. We took off our clothes as if our lives depended on
that; we then jumped into the high bed without using the two sack steps,
only to jump down from it in the next instant.
It was evident that Carol and I had the same realization at the same
time. She confirmed my assumption when she said, "Anything that we use
belonging to this world can only weaken us. If I stand here naked and away
from the bed and away from the window, I don't have any problem remembering
where I came from. But if I lie in that bed or wear those clothes or look
out the window, I am done for."
We stood in the center of the room for a long time, huddled together. A
weird suspicion began to fester in my mind. "How are we going to return to
our world?" I asked, expecting her to know.
"The reentry into our world is automatic if we don't let the fog set
in," she said with the air of a foremost authority, which was her trademark.
And she was right. Carol and I woke up, at the same time, in the bed of
her room in the Regis Hotel. It was so obvious we were back in the world of
daily life that we didn't ask questions or make comments about it. The
sunlight was nearly blinding.
"How did we get back?" Carol asked. "Or rather, when did we get back?"
I had no idea what to say or what to think. I was too numb to
speculate, which was all I could have done.
"Do you think that we just returned?" Carol insisted. "Or maybe we've
been asleep here all night. Look! We're naked. When did we take our clothes
off?"
"We took them off in that other world," I said and surprised myself
with the sound of my voice.
My answer seemed to stump Carol. She looked uncomprehendingly at me and
then at her own naked body.
We sat there without moving for an endless time. Both of us seemed to
be deprived of volition. But then, quite abruptly, we had the same thought
at exactly the same time. We got dressed in record time, ran out of the
room, went down two flights of stairs, crossed the street, and rushed into
don Juan's hotel.
Inexplicably and excessively out of breath, since we had not really
exerted ourselves physically, we took turns explaining to him what we had
done. He confirmed our conjectures. "What you two did was about the most
dangerous thing one can imagine," he said.
He addressed Carol and told her that our attempt had been both a total
success and a fiasco. We had succeeded in transferring our awareness of the
daily world to our energy bodies, thus making the journey with all our
physicality, but we had failed in avoiding the influence of the inorganic
beings. He said that ordinarily dreamers experience the whole maneuver as a
series of slow transitions, and that they have to voice their intent to use
awareness as an element. In our case, all those steps were dispensed with.
Because of the intervention of the inorganic beings, the two of us had
actually been hurled into a deadly world with a most terrifying speed.
"It wasn't your combined energy that made your journey possible," he
continued. "Something else did that. It even selected adequate clothes for
you."
"Do you mean, nagual, that the clothes and the bed and the room
happened only because we were being run by the inorganic beings?" Carol
asked.
"You bet your life," he replied. "Ordinarily, dreamers are merely
voyeurs. The way your journey turned out, you two got a ringside seat and
lived the old sorcerers' damnation. What happened to them was precisely what
happened to you. The inorganic beings took them to worlds from which they
could not return. I should have known, but it didn't even enter my mind,
that the inorganic beings would take over and try to set up the same trap
for you two."
"Do you mean they wanted to keep us there?" Carol asked.
"If you had gotten outside that shack, you'd now be meandering
hopelessly in that world," don Juan said.
He explained that since we entered into that world with all our
physicality, the fixation of our assemblage points on the position
preselected by the inorganic beings was so overpowering that it created a
sort of fog that obliterated any memory of the world we came from. He added
that the natural consequence of such an immobility, as in the case of the
sorcerers of antiquity, is that the dreamer's assemblage point cannot return
to its habitual position.
"Think about this," he urged us. "Perhaps this is exactly what is
happening to all of us in the world of daily life. We are here, and the
fixation of our assemblage point is so overpowering that it has made us
forget where we came from, and what our purpose was for coming here."
Don Juan did not want to say any more about our journey. I felt that he
was sparing us further discomfort and fear. He took us to eat a late lunch.
By the time we reached the restaurant, a couple of blocks down Francisco
Madero Avenue, it was six o'clock in the afternoon. Carol and I had slept,
if that is what we did, about eighteen hours.
Only don Juan was hungry. Carol remarked with a touch of anger that he
was eating like a pig. Quite a few heads turned in our direction on hearing
don Juan's laughter.
It was a warm night. The sky was clear. There was a soft, caressing
breeze as we sat down on a bench in the Paseo Alameda.
"There is a question that's burning me," Carol said to don Juan. "We
didn't use awareness as a medium for traveling, right?"
"That's true," don Juan said and sighed deeply. "The task was to sneak
by the inorganic beings, not be run by them."
"What's going to happen now?" she asked.
"You are going to postpone stalking the stalkers until you two are
stronger," he said. "Or perhaps you'll never accomplish it. It doesn't
really matter; if one thing doesn't work, another will. Sorcery is an
endless challenge."
He explained to us again, as if he were trying to fix his explanation
in our minds, that in order to use awareness as an element of the
environment, dreamers first have to make a journey to the inorganic beings'
realm. Then they have to use that journey as a springboard, and, while they
are in possession of the necessary dark energy, they have to intend to be
hurled through the medium of awareness into another world.
"The failure of your trip was that you didn't have time to use
awareness as an element for traveling," he went on. "Before you even got to
the inorganic beings' world, you two were already in another world."
"What do you recommend we do?" Carol asked. "I recommend that you see
as little of each other as possible," he said. "I'm sure the inorganic
beings will not pass up the opportunity to get you two, especially if you
join forces."
So Carol Tiggs and I deliberately stayed away from each other from then
on. The prospect that we might inadvertently elicit a similar journey was
too great a risk for us. Don Juan encouraged our decision by repeating over
and over that we had enough combined energy to tempt the inorganic beings to
lure us again.
Don Juan brought my dreaming practices back to seeing energy in
energy-generating dreamlike states. In the course of time, I saw everything
that presented itself to me. I entered in this manner into a most peculiar
state: I became incapable of rendering intelligently what I saw. My
sensation was always that I had reached states of perception for which I had
no lexicon.
Don Juan explained my incomprehensible and indescribable visions as my
energy body using awareness as an element not for journeying, because I
never had enough energy, but for entering into the energy fields of
inanimate matter or of living beings.
11. THE TENANT
There were no more dreaming practices for me, as I was accustomed to
having them. The next time I saw don Juan, he put me under the guidance of
two women of his party: Florinda and Zuleica, his two closest cohorts. Their
instruction was not at all about the gates of dreaming but about different
ways to use the energy body, and it did not last long enough to be
influential. They gave me the impression that they were more interested in
checking me out than in teaching me anything.
"There is nothing else I can teach you about dreaming," don Juan said
when I questioned him about this state of affairs. "My time on this earth is
up. But Florinda will stay. She's the one who will direct, not only you but
all my other apprentices."
"Will she continue my dreaming practices?"
"I don't know that, and neither does she. It's all up to the spirit.
The real player. We are not players ourselves. We are mere pawns in its
hands. Following the commands of the spirit, I have to tell you what the
fourth gate of dreaming is, although I can't guide you anymore."
"What's the point of whetting my appetite? I'd rather not know."
"The spirit is not leaving that up to me or to you. I have to outline
the fourth gate of dreaming for you, whether I like it or not."
Don Juan explained that, at the fourth gate of dreaming, the energy
body travels to specific, concrete places and that there are three ways of
using the fourth gate: one, to travel to concrete places in this world; two,
to travel to concrete places out of this world; and, three, to travel to
places that exist only in the intent of others. He stated that the last one
is the most difficult and dangerous of the three and was, by far, the old
sorcerers' predilection.
"What do you want me to do with this knowledge?" I asked.
"Nothing for the moment. File it away until you need it."
"Do you mean that I can cross the fourth gate by myself, without help?"
"Whether or not you can do that is up to the spirit."
He abruptly dropped the subject, but he did not leave me with the
sensation that I should try to reach and cross the fourth gate by myself.
Don Juan then made one last appointment with me to give me, he said, a
sorcerers' send-off: the concluding touch of my dreaming practices. He told
me to meet him in the small town in southern Mexico where he and his
sorcerer companions lived.
I arrived there in the late afternoon. Don Juan and I sat in the patio
of his house on some uncomfortable wicker chairs fitted with thick, oversize
pillows. Don Juan laughed and winked at me. The chairs were a gift from one
of the women members of his party, and we simply had to sit as if nothing
was bothering us, especially him. The chairs had been bought for him in
Phoenix, Arizona, and with great difficulty brought into Mexico.
Don Juan asked me to read to him a poem by Dylan Thomas, which he said
had the most pertinent meaning for me at that point in time.
I have longed to move away
From the hissing of the spent lie
And the old terrors' continual cry
Growing more terrible as the day
Goes over the hill into the deep sea. . . .
I have longed to move away but am afraid;
Some life, yet unspent, might explode
Out of the old lie burning on the ground,
And, crackling into the air, leave me half-blind.
Don Juan stood up and said that he was going for a walk in the plaza,
in the center of town. He asked me to come along. I immediately assumed that
the poem had evoked a negative response in him and he needed to dispel it.
We reached the square plaza without having said a word. We walked
around it a couple of times, still not talking. There were quite a number of
people, milling around the stores on the streets facing the east and north
sides of the park. All the streets around the plaza were unevenly paved. The
houses were massive, one-story adobe buildings, with tiled roofs,
whitewashed walls, and blue or brown painted doors. On a side street, a
block away from the plaza, the high walls of the enormous colonial church,
which looked like a Moorish mosque, loomed ominously over the roof of the
only hotel in town. On the south side, there were two restaurants, which
inexplicably coexisted side by side, doing good business, serving
practically the same menu at the same prices.
I broke the silence and asked don Juan whether he also found it odd
that both restaurants were just about the same.
"Everything is possible in this town," he replied.
The way he said it made me feel uneasy.
"Why are you so nervous?" he asked, with a serious expression. "Do you
know something you're not telling me?"
"Why am I nervous? That's a laugh. I am always nervous around you, don
Juan. Sometimes more so than others."
He seemed to be making a serious effort not to laugh. "Naguals are not
really the most friendly beings on earth," he said in a tone of apology. "I
learned this the hard way, being pitted against my teacher, the terrible
nagual Julian. His mere presence used to scare the daylights out of me. And
when he used to zero in on me, I always thought my life wasn't worth a plug
nickel."
"Unquestionably, don Juan, you have the same effect on me."
He laughed openly. "No, no. You are definitely exaggerating. I'm an
angel in comparison."
"You may be an angel in comparison, except that I don't have the nagual
Julian to compare you with."
He laughed for a moment, then became serious again.
"I don't know why, but I definitely feel scared," I explained.
"Do you feel you have reason to be scared?" he asked and stopped
walking to peer at me.
His tone of voice and his raised eyebrows gave me the impression he
suspected that I knew something I was not revealing to him. He was clearly
expecting a disclosure on my part.
"Your insistence makes me wonder," I said. "Are you sure you are not
the one who has something up his sleeve?"
"I do have something up my sleeve," he admitted and grinned. "But
that's not the issue. The issue is that there is something in this town
awaiting you. And you don't quite know what it is or you do know what it is
but don't dare to tell me, or you don't know anything about it at all."
"What's waiting for me here?"
Instead of answering me, don Juan briskly resumed his walking, and we
kept going around the plaza in complete silence. We circled it quite a few
times, looking for a place to sit. Then, a group of young women got up from
a bench and left.
"For years now, I have been describing to you the aberrant practices of
the sorcerers of ancient Mexico," don Juan said as he sat down on the bench
and gestured for me to sit by him.
With the fervor of someone who has never said it before, he began to
tell me again what he had told me many times, that those sorcerers, guided
by extremely selfish interests, put all their efforts into perfecting
practices that pushed them further and further away from sobriety or mental
balance, and that they were finally exterminated when their complex edifices
of beliefs and practices became so cumbersome that they could no longer
support them.
"The sorcerers of antiquity, of course, lived and proliferated in this
area," he said, watching my reaction. "Here in this town. This town was
built on the actual foundations of one of their towns. Here in this area,
the sorcerers of antiquity carried on all their dealings."
"Do you know this for a fact, don Juan?"
"I do, and so will you, very soon."
My mounting anxiety was forcing me to do something I detested: to focus
on myself. Don Juan, sensing my frustration, egged me on.
"Very soon, we'll know whether or not you're really like the old
sorcerers or like the new ones," he said.
"You are driving me nuts with all this strange and ominous talk," I
protested.
Being with don Juan for thirteen years had conditioned me, above
everything else, to conceive of panic as something that was just around the
corner at all times, ready to be released.
Don Juan seemed to vacillate. I noticed his furtive glances in the
direction of the church. He was even distracted. When I talked to him, he
was not listening. I had to repeat my question. "Are you waiting for
someone?"
"Yes, I am," he said. "Most certainly I am. I was just sensing the
surroundings. You caught me in the act of scanning the area with my energy
body."
"What did you sense, don Juan?"
"My energy body senses that everything is in place. The play is on
tonight. You are the main protagonist. I am a character actor with a small
but meaningful role. I exit in the first act."
"What in the world are you talking about?"
He did not answer me. He smiled knowingly. "I'm preparing the ground,"
he said. "Warming you up, so to speak, harping on the idea that modern-day
sorcerers have learned a hard lesson. They have realized that only if they
remain totally detached can they have the energy to be free. Theirs is a
peculiar type of detachment, which is born not out of fear or indolence but
out of conviction."
Don Juan paused and stood up, stretched his arms in front of him, to
his sides, and then behind him. "Do the same," he advised me. "It relaxes
the body, and you have to be very relaxed to face what's coming to you
tonight." He smiled broadly. "Either total detachment or utter indulging is
coming to you tonight. It is a choice that every nagual in my line has to
make." He sat down again and took a deep breath. What he had said seemed to
have taken all his energy.
"I think I can understand detachment and indulging," he went on,
"because I had the privilege of knowing two naguals: my benefactor, the
nagual Julian, and his benefactor, the nagual Elias. I witnessed the
difference between the two. The nagual Elias was detached to the point that
he could put aside a gift of power. The nagual Julian was also detached, but
not enough to put aside such a gift."
"Judging by the way you're talking," I said, "I would say that you are
going to spring some sort of test on me tonight. Is that true?"
"I don't have the power to spring tests of any sort on you, but the
spirit does." He said this with a grin, then added, "I am merely its agent."
"What is the spirit going to do to me, don Juan?"
"All I can say is that tonight you're going to get a lesson in
dreaming, the way lessons in dreaming used to be, but you are not going to
get that lesson from me. Someone else is going to be your teacher and guide
you tonight."
"Who is going to be my teacher and guide?"
"A visitor, who might be a horrendous surprise to you or no surprise at
all."
"And what's the lesson in dreaming I am going to get?"
"It's a lesson about the fourth gate of dreaming. And it is in two
parts. The first part I'll explain to you presently. The second part nobody
can explain to you, because it is something that pertains only to you. All
the naguals of my line got this two-part lesson, but no two of those lessons
were alike; they were tailored to fit those naguals' personal bents of
character."
"Your explanation doesn't help me at all, don Juan. I am getting more
and more nervous."
We remained quiet for a long moment. I was shaken up and fidgety and
did not know what else to say without actually nagging.
"As you already know, for modern-day sorcerers to perceive energy
directly is a matter of personal attainment," don Juan said. "We maneuver
the assemblage point through self-discipline. For the old sorcerers, the
displacement of the assemblage point was a consequence of their subjugation
to others, their teachers, who accomplished those displacements through dark
operations and gave them to their disciples as gifts of power.
"It's possible for someone with greater energy than ours to do anything
to us," he went on. For example, the nagual Julian could have turned me into
anything he wanted, a fiend or a saint. But he was an impeccable nagual and
let me be myself. The old sorcerers were not that impeccable, and, by means
of their ceaseless efforts to gain control over others, they created a
situation of darkness and terror that was passed on from teacher to
disciple."
He stood up and swept his gaze all around us. "As you can see, this
town isn't much," he continued, "but it has a unique fascination for the
warriors of my line. Here lies the source of what we are and the source of
what we don't want to be.
"Since I am at the end of my time, I must pass on to you certain ideas,
recount to you certain stories, put you in touch with certain beings, right
here in this town, exactly as my benefactor did with me."
Don Juan said that he was reiterating something I already was familiar
with, that whatever he was and everything he knew were a legacy from his
teacher, the nagual Julian. He in turn inherited everything from his
teacher, the nagual Elias. The nagual Elias from the nagual Rosendo; he from
the nagual Lujan; the nagual Lujan from the nagual Santisteban; and the
nagual Santisteban from the nagual Sebastian.
He told me again, in a very formal tone, something he had explained to
me many times before, that there were eight naguals before the nagual
Sebastian, but that they were quite different. They had a different attitude
toward sorcery, a different concept of it, although they were still directly
related to his sorcery lineage.
"You must recollect now, and repeat to me, everything I've told you
about the nagual Sebastian," he demanded.
His request seemed odd to me, but I repeated everything I had been told
by him or by any of his companions about the nagual Sebastian and the
mythical old sorcerer, the death defier, known to them as the tenant.
"You know that the death defier makes us gifts of power every
generation," don Juan said. "And the specific nature of those gifts of power
is what changed the course of our lineage."
He explained that the tenant, being a sorcerer from the old school, had
learned from his teachers all the intricacies of shifting his assemblage
point. Since he had perhaps thousands of years of strange life and
awareness-ample time to perfect anything - he knew now how to reach and hold
hundreds, if not thousands, of positions of the assemblage point. His gifts
were like both maps for shifting the assemblage point to specific spots and
manuals on how to immobilize it on any of those positions and thus acquire
cohesion.
Don Juan was at the peak of his raconteur's form. I had never seen him
more dramatic. If I had not known him better, I would have sworn that his
voice had the deep and worried inflection of someone gripped by fear or
preoccupation. His gestures gave me the impression of a good actor
portraying nervousness and concern to perfection.
Don Juan peered at me, and, in the tone and manner of someone making a
painful revelation, he said that, for instance, the nagual Lujan received
from the tenant a gift of fifty positions. He shook his head rhythmically,
as if he were silently asking me to consider what he had just said. I kept
quiet.
"Fifty positions!" he exclaimed in wonder. "For a gift, one or, at the
most, two positions of the assemblage point should be more than adequate."
He shrugged his shoulders, gesturing bewilderment. "I was told that the
tenant liked the nagual Lujan immensely," he continued. "They struck up such
a close friendship that they were practically inseparable. I was told that
the nagual Lujan and the tenant used to stroll into the church over there
every morning for early mass."
"Right here, in this town?" I asked, in total surprise.
"Right here," he replied. "Possibly they sat down on this very spot, on
another bench, over a hundred years ago."
"The nagual Lujan and the tenant really walked in this plaza?" I asked
again, unable to overcome my surprise.
"You bet!" he exclaimed. "I brought you here tonight because the poem
you were reading to me cued me that it was time for you to meet the tenant."
Panic overtook me with the speed of wildfire. I had to breathe through
my mouth for a moment.
"We have been discussing the strange accomplishments of the sorcerers
of ancient times," don Juan continued. "But it's always hard when one has to
talk exclusively in idealities, without any firsthand knowledge. I can
repeat to you from now until doomsday something that is crystal clear to me
but impossible for you to understand or believe, because you don't have any
practical knowledge of it."
He stood up and gazed at me from head to toe. "Let's go to church," he
said. "The tenant likes the church and its surroundings. I'm positive this
is the moment to go there."
Very few times in the course of my association with don Juan had I felt
such apprehension. I was numb. My entire body trembled when I stood up. My
stomach was tied in knots, yet I followed him without a word when he headed
for the church, my knees wobbling and sagging involuntarily every time I
took a step. By the time we had walked the short block from the plaza to the
limestone steps of the church portico, I was about to faint. Don Juan put
his arm around my shoulders to prop me up.
"There's the tenant," he said as casually as if he had just spotted an
old friend.
I looked in the direction he was pointing and saw a group of five women
and three men at the far end of the portico. My fast and panicked glance did
not register anything unusual about those people. I couldn't even tell
whether they were going into the church or coming out of it. I noticed,
though, that they seemed to be congregated there accidentally. They were not
together. By the time don Juan and I reached the small door, cut out in the
church's massive wooden portals, three women had entered the church. The
three men and the other two women were walking away. I experienced a moment
of confusion and looked at don Juan for directions. He pointed with a
movement of his chin to the holy water font.
"We must observe the rules and cross ourselves," he whispered.
"Where's the tenant?" I asked, also in a whisper. Don Juan dipped the
tips of his fingers in the basin and made the sign of the cross. With an
imperative gesture of the chin, he urged me to do the same.
"Was the tenant one of the three men who left?" I whispered nearly in
his ear.
"No," he whispered back. "The tenant is one of the three women who
stayed. The one in the back row."
At that moment, a woman in the back row turned her head toward me,
smiled, and nodded at me.
I reached the door in one jump and ran out.
Don Juan ran after me. With incredible agility, he overtook me and held
me by the arm.
"Where are you going?" he asked, his face and body contorting with
laughter.
He held me firmly by the arm