The
Universal Shift of Consciousness
Fifth
Lot of Books by
Carlos
Castaneda
You are not
Your Physical Body; You are Not the Physical Matter: You are Energy !
Link
to Site Map listing other articles, books and useful
websites:
SITE
MAP
Any
material inc. pictures can be
taken from this website!
"The Active Side
of Infinity"
by Carlos Castaneda
FROM:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/2074784/Carlos-Castaneda-The-Active-Side-of-Infinity
"The sorcerers' revolution," he continued, "is that they refuse to
honor agreements in which they did not participate. Nobody ever asked
me if I would consent to be eaten by beings of a different kind of
awareness. My parents just brought me into this world to be food, like
themselves, and that's the end of the story."
CARLOS CASTANEDA was the author of ten bestselling books, including the
acknowledged classic The Teachings of Don Juan and most recently The
Art of Dreaming and Magical Passes. He departed on his definitive
journey in 1998.
§ THE ACTIVE SIDE OF
INFINITY §
THIS BOOK IS a collection of the memorable events in my life. Don Juan
revealed to me as time went by that the shamans of ancient Mexico had
conceived of this collection of memorable events as a bona-fide device
to stir caches of energy that exist within the self. They explained
these caches as being composed of energy that originates in the body
itself and becomes displaced, pushed out of reach by the circumstances
of our daily lives. In this sense, the collection of memorable events
was, for don Juan and the shamans of his lineage, the means for
redeploying their unused energy.
gathered them following the recommendation of don Juan Matus, a Yaqui
Indian shaman from Mexico who, as a teacher, endeavored for thirteen
years to make available to me the cognitive world of the shamans who
lived in Mexico in ancient times. Don Juan Matus's suggestion that I
gather this collection of memorable events was made as if it were
something casual, something that occurred to him on the spur of the
moment. That was don Juan's style of teaching. He veiled the importance
of certain maneuvers behind the mundane. He hid, in this fashion, the
sting of finality, presenting it as something no different from any of
the concerns of everyday life. Don Juan revealed to me as time went by
that the shamans of ancient Mexico had conceived of this collection of
memorable events as a bona-fide device to stir caches of energy that
exist within the self. They explained these caches as being composed of
energy that originates in the body itself and becomes displaced, pushed
out of reach by the circumstances of our daily lives. In this sense,
the collection of
memorable events was, for don Juan and the shamans of his lineage, the
means for redeploying their unused energy.
The prerequisite for this collection was the genuine and all-consuming
act of putting together the sum total of one's emotions and
realizations, without sparing anything. According to don Juan, the
shamans of his lineage were convinced that the collection of memorable
events was the vehicle for the emotional and energetic adjustment
necessary for venturing, in terms of perception, into the unknown. Don
Juan described the total goal of the shamanistic knowledge that he
handled as the preparation for facing the definitive journey: the
journey that every human being has to take at the end of his life. He
said that through their discipline and resolve, shamans were capable of
retaining their individual awareness and purpose after death. For them,
the vague, idealistic state that modern man calls "life after death"
was a concrete region filled to capacity with practical affairs of a
different order than the practical affairs of daily life, yet bearing a
similar functional practicality. Don Juan considered that to collect
the memorable events in their lives was, for shamans, the preparation
for their entrance into that concrete region which they called the
active side of infinity. Don Juan and I were talking one afternoon
under his ramada, a loose structure made of thin poles of bamboo. It
looked like a roofed porch that was partially shaded from the sun but
that would not provide protection at all from the rain. There were some
small, sturdy freight boxes there that served as benches. Their freight
brands were faded, and appeared to be more ornament than
identification. I was sitting on one of them. My back was against the
front wall of the house. Don Juan was sitting on another box, leaning
against a pole that supported the ramada. I had just driven in a few
minutes earlier. It had been a daylong
ride in hot, humid weather. I was nervous, fidgety, and sweaty.
Don Juan began talking to me as soon as I had comfortably settled down
on the box. With a broad
smile, he commented that overweight people hardly ever knew how to
fight fatness. The smile that
played on his lips gave me an inkling that he wasn't being facetious.
He was just pointing out to me, in
a most direct and at the same time indirect way, that I was overweight.
I became so nervous that I tipped over the freight box on which I was
sitting and my back banged very
hard against the thin wall of the house. The impact shook the house to
its foundations. Don Juan
looked at me inquiringly, but instead of asking me if I was all right,
he assured me that I had not
cracked the house. Then he expansively explained to me that his house
was a temporary dwelling
for him, that he really lived somewhere else. When I asked him where he
really lived, he stared at me.
His look was not belligerent; it was, rather, a firm deterrent to
improper questions. I didn't comprehend
what he wanted. I was about to ask the same question again, but he
stopped me.
"Questions of that sort are not asked around here," he said firmly.
"Ask anything you wish about
procedures or ideas. Whenever I'm ready to tell you where I live, if
ever, I will tell you, without your
having to ask me."
1 instantly felt rejected. My face turned red involuntarily. I was
definitely offended. Don Juan's
explosion of laughter added immensely to my chagrin. Not only had he
rejected me, he had insulted
me and then laughed at me.
"I live here temporarily," he went on, unconcerned with my foul mood,
"because this is a magical
center. In fact, I live here because of you."
That statement unraveled me. I couldn't believe it. I thought that he
was probably saying that to ease my
irritation at being insulted. "Do you really live here because of me?"
I finally asked him, unable to
contain my curiosity.
"Yes," he said evenly. "I have to groom you. You are like me. I will
repeat to you now what I have
already told you: The quest of every nagual, or leader, in every
generation of shamans, or sorcerers, is
to find a new man or woman who, like himself, shows a double energetic
structure; I saw this feature in
you when we were in the bus depot in Nogales. When I see your energy, I
see two balls of luminosity
superimposed, one on top of the other, and that feature binds us
together. I can't refuse you any more
than you can refuse me." His words caused a most strange agitation in
me. An instant before I had been
angry, now I wanted to weep.
He went on, saying that he wanted to start me off on something shamans
called the warriors' way,
backed by the strength of the area where he lived, which was the center
of very strong emotions and
reactions. Warlike people had lived there for thousands of years,
soaking the land with their concern
with war.
He lived at that time in the state of Sonora in northern Mexico, about
a hundred miles south of the
city of Guaymas. I always went there to visit him under the auspices of
conducting my fieldwork.
"Do I need to enter into war, don Juan?" I asked, genuinely worried
after he declared that the
concern with war was something that I would need someday. I had already
learned to take everything
he said with the utmost seriousness.
"You bet your boots," he replied, smiling. "When you have absorbed all
there is to be absorbed in
this area, I'll move away."
I had no grounds to doubt what he was saying, but I couldn't conceive
of him as living anywhere
else. He was absolutely part of everything that surrounded him. His
house, however, seemed indeed
to be a temporary dwelling. It was a shack typical of the Yaqui
farmers; it was made out of wattle and
daub with a flat, thatched roof; it had one big room for eating and
sleeping and a roofless kitchen.
"It's very difficult to deal with overweight people," he said.
It seemed to be a non sequitur, but it wasn't. Don Juan was simply
going back to the subject he had
introduced before I had interrupted him by hitting my back on the wall
of his house.
"A minute ago, you hit my house like a demolition ball," he said,
shaking his head slowly from side
to side. "What an impact! An impact worthy of a portly man."
I had the uncomfortable feeling that he was talking to me from the
point of view of someone who
had given up on me. I immediately took on a defensive attitude. He
listened, smirking, to my frantic
explanations that my weight was normal for my bone structure.
"That's right," he conceded facetiously. "You have big bones. You could
probably carry thirty more
pounds with great ease and no one, I assure you, no one, would notice.
I would not notice."
His mocking smile told me that I was definitely pudgy. He asked me then
about my health in
general, and I went on talking, desperately trying to get out of any
further comment about my weight.
He changed the subject himself.
"What's new about your eccentricities and aberrations?" he asked with a
deadpan expression.
I idiotically answered that they were okay. "Eccentricities and
aberrations" was how he labeled my
interest in being a collector. At that time, I had taken up, with
renewed zeal, something that I had
enjoyed doing all my life: collecting anything collectible. I collected
magazines, stamps, records, World
War II paraphernalia such as daggers, military helmets, flags, etc.
"All I can tell you, don Juan, about my aberrations, is that I'm trying
to sell my collections," I said
with the air of a martyr who is being forced to do something odious.
"To be a collector is not such a bad idea," he said as if he really
believed it. "The crux of the matter is
not that you collect, but what you collect. You collect junk, worthless
objects that imprison you as
surely as your pet dog does. You can't just up and leave if you have
your pet to look after, or if you
have to worry about what would happen to your collections if you were
not around."
"I'm seriously looking for buyers, don Juan, believe me," I protested.
"No, no, no, don't feel that I'm accusing you of anything," he
retorted. "In fact, I like your
collector's spirit. I just don't like your collections, that's all. I
would like, though, to engage your
collector's eye. I would like to propose to you a worthwhile
collection."
Don Juan paused for a long moment. He seemed to be in search of words;
or perhaps it was only a
dramatic, well-placed hesitation. He looked at me with a deep,
penetrating stare. "Every warrior, as a
matter of duty, collects a special album," don Juan went on, "an album
that reveals the warrior's
personality, an album that attests to the circumstances of his life."
"Why do you call this a collection, don Juan?" I asked in an
argumentative tone. "Or an album, for
that matter?"
"Because it is both," he retorted. "But above all, it is like an album
of pictures made out of
memories, pictures made out of the recollection of memorable events."
"Are those memorable events memorable in some specific way?" I asked.
"They are memorable because they have a special significance in one's
life," he said. "My proposal
is that you assemble this album by putting in it the complete account
of various events that have had
profound significance for you."
"Every event in my life has had profound significance for me, don
Juan!" I said forcefully, and felt
instantly the impact of my own pomposity.
"Not really," he replied, smiling, apparently enjoying my reactions
immensely. "Not every event in
your life has had profound significance for you. There are a few,
however, that I would consider likely
to have changed things for you, to have illuminated your path.
Ordinarily, events that change our path
are impersonal affairs, and yet are extremely personal."
"I'm not trying to be difficult, don Juan, but believe me, everything
that has happened to me meets
those qualifications," I said, knowing that I was lying.
Immediately after voicing this statement, I wanted to apologize, but
don Juan didn't pay attention to
me. It was as if I hadn't said a thing.
"Don't think about this album in terms of banalities, or in terms of a
trivial rehashing of your life
experiences," he said.
I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and tried to quiet my mind. I was
talking to myself frantically
about my insoluble problem: I most certainly didn't like to visit don
Juan at all. In his presence, I felt
threatened. He verbally accosted me and didn't leave me any room
whatsoever to show my worth. I
detested losing face every time I opened my mouth; I detested being the
fool.
But there was another voice inside me, a voice that came from a greater
depth, more distant, almost
faint. In the midst of my barrages of known dialogue, I heard myself
saying that it was too late for me
to turn back. But it wasn't really my voice or my thoughts that I was
experiencing; it was, rather, like
an unknown voice that said I was too far gone into don Juan's world,
and that I needed him more than I
needed air.
"Say whatever you wish," the voice seemed to say to me, "but if you
were not the egomaniac that
you are, you wouldn't be so chagrined."
"That's the voice of your other mind," don Juan said, just as if he had
been listening to or reading
my thoughts.
My body jumped involuntarily. My fright was so intense that tears came
to my eyes. I confessed to
don Juan the whole nature of my turmoil.
"Your conflict is a very natural one," he said. "And believe you me, I
don't exacerbate it that much.
I'm not the type. I have some stories to tell you about what my
teacher, the nagual Julian, used to do to
me. I detested him with my entire being. I was very young, and I saw
how women adored him, gave
themselves to . him like anything, and when I tried to say hello to
them, they would turn against me
like lionesses, ready to bite my head off. They hated my guts and loved
him. How do you think I felt?"
"How did you resolve this conflict, don Juan?" I asked with more than
genuine interest.
"I didn't resolve anything," he declared. "It, the conflict or
whatever, was the result of the battle
between my two minds. Every one of us human beings has two minds. One
is totally ours, and it is like
a faint voice that always brings us order, directness, purpose. The
other mind is a foreign installation. It
brings us conflict, self-assertion, doubts, hopelessness."
My fixation on my own mental concatenations was so intense that I
completely missed what don
Juan had said. I could clearly
remember every one of his words, but they had no meaning for me. Don
Juan very calmly, and
looking directly into my eyes, repeated what he had just said. 1 was
still incapable of grasping what he
meant. 1 couldn't focus my attention on his words.
"For some strange reason, don Juan, I can't concentrate on what you're
telling me," I said.
"1 understand perfectly why you can't," he said, smiling expansively,
"and so will you, someday, at the
same time that you resolve the conflict of whether you like me or not,
the day you cease to be the meme
center of the world.
"In the meantime," he continued, "let's put the topic of our two minds
aside and go back to the idea of
preparing your album of memorable events. I should add that such an
album is an exercise in
discipline and impartiality. Consider this album to be an act of war."
Don Juan's assertion-that my conflict of both liking and not liking to
see him was going to end
whenever I abandoned my egocentrism-was no solution for me. In fact,
that assertion made me
angrier; it frustrated me all the more. And when 1 heard don Juan speak
of the album as an act of war,
I lashed out at him with all my poison.
"The idea that this is a collection of events is already hard to
understand," I said in a tone of protest.
"But that on top of all this, you call it an album and say that such an
album is an act of war is too
much for me. It's too obscure. Being obscure makes the metaphor lose
its meaning."
"How strange! It's the opposite for me," don Juan replied calmly. "Such
an album being an act of war
has all the meaning in the world for me. I wouldn't like my album of
memorable events to be anything
but an act of war."
I wanted to argue my point further and explain to him that I did
understand the idea of an album of
memorable events. I objected to the perplexing way he was describing
it. I thought of myself in those
days as an advocate of clarity and functionalism in the use of language.
Don Juan didn't comment on my belligerent mood. He only shook his head
as if he were fully agreeing
with me. After a
while, I either completely ran out of energy, or I got a gigantic surge
of it. All of a sudden, without any
effort on my part, I realized the futility of my outbursts. I felt
embarrassed no end.
"What possesses me to act the way I do?" I asked don Juan in earnest. I
was, at that instant, utterly
baffled. I was so shaken by my realization that without any volition on
my part, I began to weep.
"Don't worry about stupid details," don Juan said reassuringly. "Every
one of us, male and female, is
like this."
"Do you mean, don Juan, that we are naturally petty and contradictory?"
"No, we are not naturally petty and contradictory," he replied. "Our
pettiness and contradictions are,
rather, the result of a transcendental conflict that afflicts every one
of us, but of which only sorcerers
are painfully and hopelessly aware: the conflict of our two minds."
Don Juan peered at me; his eyes were like two black charcoals.
"You've been telling me on and on about our two minds," I said, "but my
brain can't register what you
are saying. Why?"
"You'll get to know why in due time," he said. "For the present, it
will be sufficient that I repeat to you
what I have said before about our two minds. One is our true mind, the
product of all our life
experiences, the one that rarely speaks because it has been defeated
and relegated to obscurity. The
other, the mind we use daily for everything we do, is a foreign
installation."
"I think that the crux of the matter is that the concept of the mind
being a foreign installation is so
outlandish that my mind refuses to take it seriously," I said, feeling
that I had made a real discovery.
Don Juan did not comment on what 1 had said. He continued explaining
the issue of the two minds as
if I hadn't said a word.
"To resolve the conflict of the two minds is a matter of intending it,"
he said. "Sorcerers beckon intent
by voicing the word intent loud and clear. Intent is a force that
exists in the universe. When sorcerers
beckon intent, it comes to them and sets up the path for attainment,
which means that sorcerers always
accomplish what they set out to do."
"Do you mean, don Juan, that sorcerers get anything they want, even if
it is something petty and
arbitrary?" I asked.
"No, I didn't mean that. Intent can be called, of course, for
anything," he replied, "but sorcerers have
found out, the hard way, that intent comes to them only for something
that is abstract. That's the safety
valve for sorcerers; otherwise they would be unbearable. In your case,
beckoning intent to resolve the
conflict of your two minds, or to hear the voice of your true mind, is
not a petty or arbitrary matter.
Quite the contrary; it is ethereal and abstract, and yet as vital to
you as anything can be."
Don Juan paused for a moment; then he began to talk again about the
album.
"My own album, being an act of war, demanded a super-careful
selection," he said. "It is now a
precise collection of the unforgetable moments of my life, and
everything that led me to them. I have
concentrated in it what has been and will be meaningful to me. In my
opinion, a warrior's album is
something most concrete, something so to the point that it is
shattering."
I had no clue as to what don Juan wanted, and yet I did understand him
to perfection. He advised me
to sit down, alone, and let my thoughts, memories, and ideas come to me
freely. He recommended that
I make an effort to let the voice from the depths of me speak out and
tell me what to select. Don Juan
told me then to go inside the house and lie down on a bed that I had
there. It was made of wooden
boxes and dozens of empty burlap sacks that served as a mattress. My
whole body ached, and when I
lay on the bed it was actually extremely comfortable.
I took his suggestions to heart and began to think about my past,
looking for events that had left a
mark on me. I soon realized that my assertion that every event in my
life had been meaningful was
nonsense. As I pressed myself to recollect, I
found that I didn't even know where to start. Through my mind ran
endless disassociated thoughts and
memories of events that had happened to me, but I couldn't decide
whether or not they had had any
meaning for me. The impression I got was that nothing had had any
significance whatsoever. It looked
as if I had gone through life like a corpse empowered to walk and talk,
but not to feel anything.
Having no concentration whatsoever to pursue the subject beyond a
shallow attempt, I gave up and
fell asleep.
"Did you have any success?" don Juan asked me when I woke up hours
later.
Instead of being at ease after sleeping and resting, I was again moody
and belligerent.
"No, I didn't have any success!" I barked.
"Did you hear that voice from the depths of you?" he asked.
"I think I did," I lied.
"What did it say to you?" he inquired in an urgent tone.
"I can't think of it, don Juan," I muttered.
"Ah, you are back in your daily mind," he said and patted me forcefully
on the back. "Your daily mind
has taken over again. Let's relax it by talking about your collection
of memorable events. I should tell
you that the selection of what to put in your album is not an easy
matter. This is the reason I say that
making this album is an act of war. You have to remake yourself ten
times over in order to know what
to select."
I clearly understood then, if only for a second, that I had two minds;
however, the thought was so
vague that I lost it instantly. What remained was just the sensation of
an incapacity to fulfill don
Juan's requirement. Instead of graciously accepting my incapacity,
though, I allowed it to become a
threatening affair. The driving force of my life, in those days, was to
appear always in a good light.
To be incompetent was the equivalent of being a loser, something that
was thoroughly intolerable to
me. Since I didn't know how to respond to the challenge don Juan was
posing, I did the only thing I
knew how to do: I got angry.
"I've got to think a great deal more about this, don Juan," I said.
"I've got to give my mind some time
to settle on the idea."
"Of course, of course," don Juan assured me. "Take all the time in the
world, but hurry."
Nothing else was said about the subject at that time. At home, I forgot
about it completely until one
day when, quite abruptly, in the middle of a lecture I was attending,
the imperious command to search
for the memorable events of my life hit me like a bodily jolt, a
nervous spasm that shook my entire
body from head to toe
.
I began to work in earnest. It took me months to rehash experiences in
my life that I believed were
meaningful to me. However, upon examining my collection, I realized
that I was dealing only with
ideas that had no substance whatsoever. The events I remembered were
just vague points of reference
that I remembered abstractly. Once again, I had the most unsettling
suspicion that I had been reared
just to act without ever stopping
to feel anything.
One of the vaguest events I recalled, which I wanted to make memorable
at any cost, was the day I
found out I had been admitted to graduate school at UCLA. No matter how
hard I tried, I couldn't
remember what I had been doing that day. There was nothing interesting
or unique about that day,
except for the idea that it had to be memorable. Entering graduate
school should have made me happy
or proud of myself, but it didn't.
Another sample in my collection was the day I almost got married to Kay
Condor. Her last name
wasn't really Condor, but she had changed it because she wanted to be
an actress. Her ticket to fame
was that she actually looked like Carole Lombard. That day was
memorable in my mind, not so much
because of the events that took place but because she was beautiful and
wanted to marry me. She was
a head taller than I was, which made her all the more interesting to me.
I was thrilled with the idea of marrying a tall woman, in a church
ceremony. I rented a gray tuxedo.
The pants were quite
wide for my height. They were not bell-bottoms; they were just wide,
and that bothered me no end.
Another thing that annoyed me immensely was that the sleeves of the
pink shirt I had bought for the
occasion were about three inches too long; I had to use rubber bands to
hold them up. Outside of that,
everything was perfect until the moment when the guests and I found out
that Kay Condor had gotten
cold feet and wasn't going to show up.
Being a very proper young lady, she had sent me a note of apology by
motorcycle messenger. She
wrote that she didn't believe in divorce, and couldn't commit herself
for the rest of her days to
someone who didn't quite share her views on life. She reminded me that
I snickered every time I said
the name "Condor," something that showed a total lack of respect for
her person. She said that she had
discussed the matter with her mother. Both of them loved me dearly, but
not enough to make me part
of their family. She added that, bravely and wisely, we all had to cut
our losses.
My state of mind was one of total numbness. When I tried to recollect
that day, I couldn't remember
whether I felt horribly humiliated at being left standing in front of a
lot of people in my gray, rented
tuxedo with the wide-legged pants, or whether I was crushed because Kay
Condor didn't marry me.
These were the only two events I was capable of isolating with clarity.
They were meager examples,
but after rehashing them, I had succeeded in re-dressing them as tales
of philosophical acceptance. I
thought of myself as a being who goes through life with no real
feelings, who has only intellectual
views of everything. Taking don Juan's metaphors as models, I even
constructed one of my own: a
being who lives his life vicariously in terms of what it should be.
I believed, for instance, that the day I was admitted to graduate
school at UCLA should have been a
memorable day. Since it wasn't, I tried my best to imbue it with an
importance I was far from feeling.
A similar thing happened with the day I nearly married Kay Condor. It
should have been a devastating
day for me, but it wasn't. At the moment of recollecting it, I knew
that there was nothing there and
began to work as hard as I could to construct what I should have felt.
The next time I went to don Juan's house I presented to him my two
samples of memorable events as
soon as I arrived.
"This is a pile of nonsense," he declared. "None of it will do. The
stories are related exclusively to you
as a person who thinks, feels, cries, or doesn't feel anything at all.
The memorable events of a
shaman's album are affairs that will stand the test of time because
they have nothing to do with him,
and yet he is in the thick of them. He'll always be in the thick of
them, for the duration of his life, and
perhaps beyond, but not quite personally."
His words left me feeling dejected, totally defeated. I sincerely
believed in those days that don Juan
was an intransigent old man who found special delight in making me feel
stupid. He reminded me of a
master craftsman I had met at a sculptor's foundry where I worked while
going to art school. The
master artisan used to criticize and find flaws with everything his
advanced apprentices did, and
would demand that they correct their work according to his
recommendations. His apprentices would
turn around and pretend to correct their work. I remembered the glee of
the master when he would say,
upon being presented with the same work, "Now you have a real thing!"
"Don't feel bad," don Juan said, shaking me out of my recollection. "In
my time, I was in the same
spot. For years, not only did I not know what to choose, I thought I
had no experiences to choose
from. It seemed that nothing had ever happened to me. Of course,
everything had happened to me, but
in my effort to defend the idea of myself, I had no time or inclination
to notice anything."
"Can you tell me, don Juan, specifically, what is wrong with my
stories? I know that they are nothing,
but the rest of my life is just like that."
"I will repeat this to you," he said. "The stories of a warrior's album
are not personal. Your story of the
day you were admitted
to school is nothing but your assertion about you as the center of
everything. You feel, you don't feel;
you realize, you don't realize. Do you see what I mean? All of the
story is just you."
"But how can it be otherwise, don Juan?" I asked.
"In your other story, you almost touch on what I want, but you turn it
again into something extremely
personal. I know that you could add more details, but all those details
would be an extension of your
person and nothing else."
"I sincerely cannot see your point, don Juan," I protested. "Every
story seen through the eyes of the
witness has to be, perforce, personal."
"Yes, yes, of course," he said, smiling, delighted as usual by my
confusion. "But then they are not
stories for a warrior's album. They are stories for other purposes. The
memorable events we are after
have the dark touch of the impersonal. That touch permeates them. I
don't know how else to explain
this."
I believed then that I had a moment of inspiration and that I
understood what he meant by the dark
touch of the impersonal. I thought that he meant something a bit
morbid. Darkness meant that for me.
And I related to him a story from my childhood.
One of my older cousins was in medical school. He was an intern, and
one day he took me to the
morgue. He assured me that a young man owed it to himself to see dead
people because that sight was
very educational; it demonstrated the transitoriness of life. He
harangued me, on and on, in order to
convince me to go. The more he talked about how unimportant we were in
death, the more curious I
became. I had never seen a corpse. My curiosity, in the end, to see one
overwhelmed me and I went
with him.
He showed me various corpses and succeeded in scaring me stiff. I found
nothing educational or
illuminating about them. They were, outright, the most frightening
things I had ever seen. As he talked
to me, he kept looking at his watch as if he were waiting for someone
who was going to show up at
any moment. He obviously wanted to keep me in the morgue longer than my
strength permitted. Being
the competitive creature that I was, I believed that he was testing my
endurance, my manhood. 1
clenched my teeth and made up my mind to stay until the bitter end.
The bitter end came in ways that I had not dreamed of. A corpse that
was covered with a sheet actually
moved up with a rattle on the marble table where all the corpses were
lying, as if it were getting ready
to sit up. It made a burping sound that was so awful it burned through
me and will remain in my
memory for the rest of my life. My cousin, the doctor, the scientist,
explained that it was the corpse of
a man who had died of tuberculosis, and that his lungs had been eaten
away by bacilli that had left
enormous holes filled with air, and that in cases like this, when the
air changed temperature, it
sometimes forced the body to sit up or at least convulse.
"No, you haven't gotten it yet," don Juan said, shaking his head from
side to side. "It is merely a story
about your fear. 1 would have been scared to death myself; however,
being scared like that doesn't
illuminate anyone's path. But I'm curious to know what happened to you."
"I yelled like a banshee," I said. "My cousin called me a coward, a
yellow-belly, for hiding my face
against his chest and for getting sick to my stomach all over him."
I had definitely hooked on to a morbid strand in my life. I came up
with another story about a sixteenyear-
old boy I knew in high school who had a glandular disease and grew to a
gigantic height. His
heart did not grow at the same rate as the rest of his body and one day
he died of heart failure. I went
with another boy to the mortuary out of morbid curiosity. The
mortician, who was perhaps more
morbid than the two of us, opened the back door and let us in. He
showed us his masterpiece. He had
put the gigantic boy, who had been over seven feet, seven inches tall,
into a coffin for a normal person
by sawing off his legs. He showed us how he had arranged his legs as if
the dead boy were holding
them with his arms like two trophies.
The fright I experienced was comparable to the fright I had experienced
in the morgue as a child, but
this new fright was not a physical reaction; it was a reaction of
psychological revulsion.
"You're almost there," don Juan said. "However, your story is still too
personal. It's revolting. It makes
me sick, but I see great potential."
Don Juan and I laughed at the horror found in situations of everyday
life. By then I was hopelessly
lost in the morbid strands I had caught and released. I told him then
the story of my best friend, Roy
Goldpiss. He actually had a Polish surname, but his friends called him
Goldpiss because whatever he
touched, he turned to gold; he was a great businessman.
His talent for business made him a super-ambitious being. He wanted to
be the richest man in the
world. However, he found that the competition was too tough. According
to him, doing business alone
he couldn't possibly compete, for instance, with the head of an Islamic
sect who, at that time, got paid
his weight in gold every year. The head of the sect would fatten
himself as much as his body allowed
him before he was weighed.
Then my friend Roy lowered his sights to being the richest man in the
United States. The competition
in this sector was ferocious. He went down a notch: Perhaps he could be
the richest man in California.
He was too late for that, too. He gave up hope that, with his chains of
pizza and ice cream parlors, he
could ever rise in the business world to compete with the established
families who owned California.
He settled for being the richest man in Woodland Hills, the suburb of
Los Angeles where he lived.
Unfortunately for him, down the street from his house lived Mr. Marsh,
who owned factories that
produced A-one quality mattresses all over the United States, and he
was rich beyond belief. Roy's
frustration knew no limits. His drive to accomplish was so intense that
it finally impaired his health.
One day he died from an aneurysm in his brain.
His death brought, as a consequence, my third visit to a morgue or a
mortuary. Roy's wife begged me,
as his best friend, to make sure that the corpse was properly dressed.
I went to the funeral parlor,
where I was led by a male secretary to the inner chambers. At the
precise moment I arrived, the
mortician, working on a high marble-topped table, was forcefully
pushing up the corners of the upper
lip of the corpse, which had already entered rigor mortis, with the
index and little finger of his right
hand while he held his middle finger against his palm. As a grotesque
smile appeared on Roy's dead
face, the mortician half-turned to me and said in a servile tone, "I
hope all this is to your satisfaction,
sir."
Roy's wife-it will never be known whether she liked him or not-decided
to bury him with all the
garishness that, in her opinion, his life deserved. She had bought a
very expensive coffin, a custommade
affair that looked like a telephone booth; she had gotten the idea from
a movie. Roy was going
to be buried sitting, as if he were making a business call on the
telephone.
I didn't stay for the ceremony. I left in the midst of a most violent
reaction, a mixture of impotence and
anger, the kind of anger that couldn't be vented on anyone.
"You certainly are morbid today," don Juan commented, laughing. "But in
spite of that, or perhaps
because of that, you're almost there. You're touching it."
I never ceased to marvel at the way in which my mood changed every time
I went to see don Juan. I
always arrived moody, grouchy, filled with self-assertions and doubts.
After a while, my mood would
mysteriously change and I would become more expansive, by degrees,
until I was as calm as I had
ever been. However, my new mood was couched in my old vocabulary. My
usual way of talking was
that of a totally dissatisfied person who is containing himself from
complaining out loud, but whose
endless complaints are implied at every turn of the conversation.
"Can you give me an example of a memorable event from your album, don
Juan?" I asked in my
habitual tone of veiled complaint. "If I knew the pattern you were
after, I might be able to come up
with something. As it is, I am whistling hopelessly in the dark."
"Don't explain yourself so much," don Juan said with a stern look in
his eyes. "Sorcerers say that in
every explanation there is a hidden apology. So, when you are
explaining why you cannot do this or
that, you're really apologizing for your shortcomings, hoping that
whoever is listening to you will have
the kindness to understand them."
My most useful maneuver, when 1 was attacked, had always been to turn
my attackers off by not
listening to them. Don Juan, however, had the disgusting ability to
trap every bit of my attention. No
matter how he attacked me, no matter what he said, he always managed to
have me riveted to his
every word. On this occasion, what he was saying about me didn't please
me at all because it was the
naked truth.
I avoided his eyes. I felt, as usual, defeated, but it was a peculiar
defeat this time. It didn't bother me as
it would have if it had happened in the world of everyday life, or
right after I had arrived at his house.
After a very long silence, don Juan spoke to me again. "I'll do better
than give you an example of a
memorable event from my album," he said. "I'll give you a memorable
event from your own life, one
that should go for sure in your collection. Or, I should say, if I were
you, I would certainly put it in my
collection of memorable events."
1 thought don Juan was joking and I laughed stupidly. "This is not a
laughing matter," he said
cuttingly. "I am serious. You once told me a story that fits the bill."
"What story is that, don Juan?"
"The story of 'figures in front of a mirror,'" he said. "Tell me that
story again. But tell it to me in all the
detail you can remember."
I began to retell the story in a cursory fashion. He stopped me and
demanded a careful, detailed
narration, starting at the beginning. I tried again, but my rendition
didn't satisfy him.
"Let's go for a walk," he proposed. "When you walk, you are much more
accurate than when you're
sitting down. It is not an idle idea that you should pace back and
forth when you try to relate
something."
We had been sitting, as we usually did during the day, under the house
ramada. I had developed a
pattern: Whenever I sat there, I always did it on the same spot, with
my back against the wall. Don
Juan sat in various places under the ramada, but never on the same spot.
We went for a hike at the worst time of the day, noon. He outfitted me
with an old straw hat, as he
always did whenever we went out in the heat of the sun. We walked for a
long time in complete
silence. I tried to the best of my ability to force myself to remember
all the details of the story. It was
mid afternoon when we sat down under the shade of some tall bushes, and
I retold the full story.
Years before, while I was studying sculpture in a fine arts school in
Italy, I had a close friend, a
Scotsman who was studying art in order to become an art critic. What
stood out most vividly in my
mind about him, and had to do with the story I was telling don Juan,
was the bombastic idea he had of
himself; he thought he was the most licentious, lusty, all-around
scholar and craftsman, a man of the
Renaissance. Licentious he was, but lustiness was something in complete
contradiction to his bony,
dry, serious person. He was a vicarious follower of the English
philosopher Bertrand Russell and
dreamed of applying the principles of logical positivism to art
criticism. To be an all-around scholar
and craftsman was perhaps his wildest fantasy because he was a
procrastinator; work was his nemesis.
His dubious specialty wasn't art criticism, but his personal knowledge
of all the prostitutes of the local
bordellos, of which there were plenty. The colorful and lengthy
accounts he used to give me-in order
to keep me, according to him, up to date about all the marvelous things
he did in the world of his specialty-
were delightful. It was not surprising to me, therefore, that one day
he came to my apartment,
all excited, nearly out of breath, and told me that something
extraordinary had happened to him and
that he wanted to share it with me.
"I say, old man, you must see this for yourself!" he said excitedly in
the Oxford accent he affected
every time he talked to me. He paced the room nervously. "It's hard to
describe, but I know it's
something you will appreciate. Something, the impression of which will
last you for a lifetime. I am
going to give you a marvelous gift for life. Do you understand?"
I understood that he was a hysterical Scotsman. It was always my
pleasure to humor him and tag
along. I had never regretted
it. "Calm down, calm down, Eddie," I said. "What are you trying to tell
me?”
He related to me that he had been in a bordello, where he had found an
unbelievable woman who did
an incredible thing she called "figures in front of a mirror." He
assured me repeatedly, almost
stuttering, that I owed it to myself to experience this unbelievable
event personally.
"I say, don't worry about money!" he said, since he knew I didn't have
any. "I've already paid the price.
All you have to do is go with me. Madame Ludmilla will show you her
'figures in front of a mirror.'
It's a blast!"
In a fit of uncontrollable glee, Eddie laughed uproariously, oblivious
to his bad teeth, which he
normally hid behind a tight-lipped smile or laugh. "I say, it's
absolutely great!"
My curiosity mounted by the minute. I was more than willing to
participate in his new delight. Eddie
drove me to the outskirts of the city. We stopped in front of a dusty,
badly kept building; the paint was
peeling off the walls. It had the air of having been a hotel at one
time, a hotel that had been turned into
an apartment building. I could see the remnants of a hotel sign that
seemed to have been ripped to
pieces. On the front of the building there were rows of dirty single
balconies filled with flowerpots or
draped with carpets put out to dry.
At the entrance to the building were two dark, shady-looking men
wearing pointed black shoes that
seemed too tight on their feet; they greeted Eddie effusively. They had
black, shifty, menacing eyes.
Both of them were wearing shiny light-blue suits, also too tight for
their bulky bodies. One of them
opened the door for Eddie. They didn't even look at me.
We went up two flights of stairs on a dilapidated staircase that at one
time must have been luxurious.
Eddie led the way and walked the length of an empty, hotellike corridor
with doors on both sides. All
the doors were painted in the same drab, dark, olive green. Every door
had a brass number, tarnished
with age, barely visible against the painted wood.
Eddie stopped in front of a door. I noticed the number 112 on it. He
rapped repeatedly. The door
opened, and a round, short woman with bleached-blonde hair beckoned us
in without saying a word.
She was wearing a red silk robe with feathery, flouncy sleeves and red
slippers with furry balls on top.
Once we were inside a small hall and she had closed the door behind us,
she greeted Eddie in terribly
accented English. "Hallo, Eddie. You brought friend, eh?"
Eddie shook her hand, and then kissed it, gallantly. He acted as if he
were most calm, yet I noticed his
unconscious gestures of being ill at ease.
"How are you today, Madame Ludmilla?" he said, trying to sound like an
American and flubbing it.
I never discovered why Eddie always wanted to sound like an American
whenever he was transacting
business in those houses of ill repute. I had the suspicion that he did
it because Americans were known
to be wealthy, and he wanted to establish his rich man's bona fides
with them.
Eddie turned to me and said in his phony American accent, "I leave you
in good hands, kiddo."
He sounded so awful, so foreign to my ears, that I laughed out loud.
Madame Ludmilla didn't seem
perturbed at all by my explosion of mirth. Eddie kissed Madame
Ludmilla's hand again and left.
"You speak English, my boy?" she shouted as if I were deaf. "You look
Eyipcian, or perhaps Torkish."
I assured Madame Ludmilla that I was neither, and that I did speak
English. She asked me then if I
fancied her "figures in front of a mirror." I didn't know what to say.
I just shook my head affirmatively.
"I give you good show," she assured me. "Figures in front of a mirror
is only foreplay. When you are
hot and ready, tell me to
stop."
From the small hall where we were standing we walked into a dark and
eerie room. The windows
were heavily curtained. There were some low-voltage light bulbs on
fixtures attached to the wall. The
bulbs were shaped like tubes and protruded straight out at right angles
from the wall. There was a
profusion of objects around the room: pieces of furniture like small
chests of drawers, antique tables
and chairs; a roll-top desk set against the wall and crammed with
papers, pencils, rulers, and at least a
dozen pairs of scissors. Madame Ludmilla made me sit down on an old
stuffed chair.
"The bed is in the other room, darling," she said, pointing to the
other side of the room. "This is my
antisala. Here I give show to get you hot and ready."
She dropped her red robe, kicked off her slippers, and opened the
double doors of two armoires
standing side by side against the wall. Attached to the inside of each
door was a full-length mirror.
"And now the music, my boy," Madame Ludmilla said, then cranked a
Victrola that appeared to be in
mint condition, shiny, like new. She put on a record. The music was a
haunting melody that reminded
me of a circus march.
"And now my show," she said, and began to twirl around to the
accompaniment of the haunting
melody. The skin of Madame Ludmilla's body was tight, for the most
part, and extraordinarily white,
though she was not young. She must have been in her well-lived late
forties. Her belly sagged, not a
great deal, but a bit, and so did her voluminous breasts. The skin of
her face also sagged into
noticeable jowls. She had a small nose and heavily painted red lips.
She wore thick black mascara.
She brought to mind the prototype of an aging prostitute. Yet there was
something childlike about her,
a girlish abandon and trust, a sweetness that jolted me.
"And now, figures in front of a mirror," Madame Ludmilla announced
while the music continued.
"Leg, leg, leg!" she said, kicking one leg up in the air, and then the
other, in time with the music. She
had her right hand on top of her head, like a little girl who is not
sure that she can perform the
movements.
"Turn, turn, turn!" she said, turning like a top.
"Butt, butt, butt!" she said then, showing me her bare behind like a
cancan dancer.
She repeated the sequence over and over until the music began to fade
when the Victrola's spring
wound down. I had the feeling that Madame Ludmilla was twirling away
into the distance, becoming
smaller and smaller as the music faded. Some despair and loneliness
that I didn't know existed in me
came to the surface, from the depths of my very being, and made me get
up and run out of the room,
down the stairs like a madman, out of the building, into the street.
Eddie was standing outside the door talking to the two men in
light-blue shiny suits. Seeing me
running like that, he began to laugh uproariously.
"Wasn't it a blast?" he said, still trying to sound like an American. "
'Figures in front of a mirror is only
the foreplay.' What a thing! What a thing!"
The first time I had mentioned the story to don Juan, I had told him
that I had been deeply affected by
the haunting melody and the old prostitute clumsily twirling to the
music. And I had been deeply
affected also by the realization of how callous my friend was.
When I had finished retelling my story to don Juan, as we sat in the
hills of a range of mountains in
Sonora I was shaking, mysteriously affected by something quite
undefined.
"That story," don Juan said, "should go in your album of memorable
events. Your friend, without
having .any idea of what he was doing, gave you, as he himself said,
something that will indeed last
you for a lifetime."
"1 see this as a sad story, don Juan, but that's all," 1 declared.
"It's indeed a sad story, just like your
other stories," don Juan replied, "but what makes it different and
memorable to me is that it touches
every one of us human beings, not just you, like your other tales. You
see, like Madame Ludmilla,
every one of us, young and old alike, is making figures in front of a
mirror in one way or another.
Tally what you know about people. Think of any human being on this
earth, and you will know,
without the shadow of a doubt, that no matter who they are, or what
they think of themselves, or what
they do, the result of their actions is always the same: senseless
figures in front of a mirror."
A Tremor in the Air
A Journey
of Power
AT THE TIME I met don Juan I was a fairly studious anthropology
student, and I wanted to begin my
career as a professional anthropologist by publishing as much as
possible. I was bent on climbing the
academic ladder, and in my calculations, I had determined that the
first step was to collect data on the
uses of medicinal plants by the Indians of the southwestern United
States.
I first asked a professor of anthropology who had worked in that area
for advice about my project. He
was a prominent ethnologist who had published extensively in the late
thirties and early forties on the
California Indians and the Indians of the Southwest and Sonora, Mexico.
He patiently listened to my
exposition. My idea was to write a paper, call it "Ethnobotanical
Data," and publish it in a journal that
dealt exclusively with anthropological issues of the southwestern
United States.
I proposed to collect medicinal plants, take the samples to the
Botanical Garden at UCLA to be
properly identified, and then describe why and how the Indians of the
Southwest used them. I
envisioned collecting thousands of entries. I even envisioned
publishing a small encyclopedia on the
subject.
The professor smiled forgivingly at me. "I don't want to dampen your
enthusiasm," he said in a tired
voice, "but I can't help commenting negatively on your eagerness.
Eagerness is welcome in
anthropology, but it must be properly channeled. We are still in the
golden age of anthropology. It was
my luck to study with Alfred Krober and Robert Lowie, two pillars of
social science. I haven't
betrayed their trust. Anthropology is still the master discipline.
Every other discipline should stem
from anthropology. The entire field of history, for example, should be
called 'historical anthropology,'
and the field of philosophy should be called 'philosophical
anthropology.' Man should be the measure
of everything. Therefore, anthropology, the study of man, should be the
core of every other discipline.
Someday, it will."
I looked at him, bewildered. He was, in my estimation, a totally
passive, benevolent old professor who
had recently had a heart attack. I seemed to have struck a chord of
passion in him.
"Don't you think that you should pay more attention to your formal
studies?" he continued. "Rather
than doing fieldwork, wouldn't it be better for you to study
linguistics? We have in the department
here one of the most prominent linguists in the world. If I were you,
I'd be sitting at his feet, catching
any drift emanating from him.
"We also have a superb authority in comparative religions. And there
are some exceptionally
competent anthropologists here who have done work on kinship systems in
cultures all over the world,
from the point of view of linguistics and from the point of view of
cognition. You need a lot of
preparation. To think that you could do fieldwork now is a travesty.
Plunge into your books, young
man. That's my advice."
Stubbornly, I took my proposition to another professor, a younger one.
He wasn't in any way more
helpful. He laughed at me openly. He told me that the paper I wanted to
write was a Mickey Mouse
paper, and that it wasn't anthropology by any stretch of the
imagination.
"Anthropologists nowadays," he said professorially, "are concerned with
issues that have relevance.
Medical and pharmaceutical scientists have done endless research on
every possible medicinal plant in
the world. There's no longer any bone to chew on there. Your kind of
data collecting belongs to the
turn of the nineteenth century. Now it's nearly two hundred years
later. There is such a thing as
progress, you know."
He proceeded to give me, then, a definition and a justification of
progress and perfectibility as two
issues of philosophical discourse, which he said were most relevant to
anthropology.
"Anthropology is the only discipline in existence," he continued,
"which can clearly substantiate the
concept of perfectibility and progress. Thank God that there's still a
ray of hope in the midst of the
cynicism of our times. Only anthropology can show the actual
development of culture and social
organization. Only anthropologists can prove to mankind beyond the
shadow of a doubt the progress
of human knowledge. Culture evolves, and only anthropologists can
present samples of societies that
fit definite cubbyholes in a line of progress and perfectibility.
That's anthropology for you! Not some
puny fieldwork, which is not fieldwork at all, but mere masturbation."
It was a blow on the head to me. As a last resort, I went to Arizona to
talk to anthropologists who were
actually doing field-work there. By then, I was ready to give up on the
whole idea. I understood what
the two professors were trying to tell me. I couldn't have agreed with
them more. My attempts at doing
fieldwork were definitely simpleminded. Yet I wanted to get my feet wet
in the field; I didn't want to
do only library research.
In Arizona, I met with an extremely seasoned anthropologist who had
written copiously on the Yaqui
Indians of Arizona as well as those of Sonora, Mexico. He was extremely
kind. He didn't run me
down, nor did he give me any advice. He only commented that the Indian
societies of the Southwest
were extremely isolationist, and that foreigners, especially those of
Hispanic origin, were distrusted,
even abhorred, by those Indians. THE ACTIVE
A younger colleague of his, however, was more outspoken. He said that 1
was better off reading
herbalists' books. He was an authority in the field and his opinion was
that anything to be known about
medicinal plants from the Southwest had already been classified and
talked about in various
publications. He went as far as to say that the sources of any Indian
curer of the day were precisely
those publications rather than any traditional knowledge. He finished
me off with the assertion that if
there still were any traditional curing practices, the Indians would
not divulge them to a stranger.
"Do something worthwhile," he advised me. "Look into urban
anthropology. There's a lot of money
for studies on alcoholism among Indians in the big city, for example.
Now that's something that any
anthropologist can do easily. Go and get drunk with local Indians in a
bar. Then arrange whatever you
find out about them in terms of statistics. Turn everything into
numbers. Urban anthropology is a real
field."
There was nothing else for me to do except to take the advice of those
experienced social scientists. I
decided to fly back to Los Angeles, but another anthropologist friend
of mine let me know then that he
was going to drive throughout Arizona and New Mexico, visiting all the
places where he had done
work in the past, renewing in this fashion his relationships with the
people who had been his
anthropological informants.
"You're welcome to come with me," he said. "I'm not going to do any
work. I'm just going to visit with
them, have a few drinks with them, bullshit with them. I bought gifts
for them-blankets, booze,
jackets, ammunition for twenty-two-caliber rifles. My car is loaded
with goodies. I usually drive alone
whenever I go to see them, but by myself I always run the risk of
falling asleep. You could keep me
company, keep me from dozing off, or drive a little bit if I'm too
drunk."
I felt so despondent that I turned him down.
"I'm very sorry, Bill," I said. "The trip won't do for me, I see no
point in pursuing this idea of
fieldwork any longer."
"Don't give up without a fight," Bill said in a tone of paternal
concern. "Give all you have to the fight,
and if it licks you, then it's okay to give up, but not before. Come
with me and see how you like the
Southwest."
He put his arm around my shoulders. I couldn't help noticing how
immensely heavy his arm was. He
was tall and husky, but in recent years his body had acquired a strange
rigidity. He had lost his boyish
quality. His round face was no longer filled, youthful, the way it had
been. Now it was a worried face.
I believed that he worried because he was losing his hair, but at times
it seemed to me that it was
something more than that. And it wasn't that he was fatter; his body
was heavy in ways that were
impossible to explain. I noticed it in the way that he walked, and got
up, and sat down. Bill seemed to
me to be fighting gravity with every fiber of his being, in everything
he did.
Disregarding my feelings of defeat, I started on a journey with him. We
visited every place in Arizona
and New Mexico where there were Indians. One of the end results of this
trip was that I found out that
my anthropologist friend had two definite facets to his person. He
explained to me that his opinions as
a professional anthropologist were very measured, and congruous with
the anthropological thought of
the day, but that as a private person, his anthropological fieldwork
had given him a wealth of experiences
that he never talked about. These experiences were not congruous with
the anthropological
thought of the day because they were events that were impossible to
catalog.
During the course of our trip, he would invariably have some drinks
with his ex-informants, and feel
very relaxed afterward. I would take the wheel then and drive as he sat
in the passenger seat taking
sips from his bottle of thirty-year-old Ballantine's. It was then that
Bill would talk about his
uncataloged experiences.
"I have never believed in ghosts," he said abruptly one day. "I never
went in for apparitions and
floating essences, voices in the dark, you know. I had a very
pragmatic, serious upbringing. Science
had always been my compass. But then, working in the field, all kinds
of weird crap began to filter
through to me. For instance, I went with some Indians one night on a
vision quest. They were going to
actually initiate me by some painful business of piercing the muscles
of my chest. They were
preparing a sweat lodge in the woods. I had resigned myself to
withstand the pain. I took a couple of
drinks to give me strength. And then the man who was going to intercede
for me with the people who
actually , performed the ceremony yelled in horror and pointed at a
dark, shadowy figure walking
toward us.
"When the shadowy figure came closer to me," Bill went on, "I noticed
that what I had in front of me
was an old Indian dressed in the weirdest getup you could imagine. He
had the parapherna of
shamans. The man 1 was with that night fainted shamelessly at the sight
of the old man. The old man
came to me and pointed a finger at my chest. His finger was just skin
and bone. He babbled
incomprehensible things to me. By then, the rest of the people had seen
the old man, and started to
rush silently toward me. The old man turned to look at them, and every
one of them froze. He
harangued them for a moment. His voice was something unforgettable. It
was as if he were talking
from a tube, or as if he had something attached to his mouth that
carried the words out of him. I swear
to you that I saw the man talking inside his body, and his mouth
broadcasting the words as a
mechanical apparatus. After haranguing the men, the old man continued
walking, past me, past them,
and disappeared, swallowed by the darkness."
Bill said that the plan to have an initiation ceremony went to pot; it
was never performed; and the
men, including the shamans in charge, were shaking in their boots. He
stated that they were so
frightened that they disbanded and left.
"People who had been friends for years," he went on, "never spoke to
each other again. They claimed
that what they had seen was the apparition of an incredibly old shaman,
and that it would bring bad
luck to talk about it among themselves. In fact, they said that the
mere act of setting eyes on one
another would bring them bad luck. Most of them moved away from the
area."
"Why did they feel that talking to each other or seeing each other
would bring them bad luck?" I asked
him.
"Those are their beliefs," he replied. "A vision of that nature means
to them that the apparition spoke
to each of them individually. To have a vision of that nature is, for
them, the luck of a lifetime."
"And what was the individual thing that the vision told each of them?"
1 asked.
"Beats me," he replied. "They never explained anything to me. Every
time 1 asked them, they entered
into a profound state of numbness. They hadn't seen anything, they
hadn't heard anything. Years after
the event, the man who had fainted next to me swore to me that he had
just faked the faint because he
was so frightened that he didn't want to face the old man, and that
what he had to say was understood
by everybody at a level other than language comprehension."
Bill said that in his case, what the apparition voiced to him he
understood as having to do with his
health and his expectations in life.
"What do you mean by that?" 1 asked him. "Things are not that good for
me," he confessed. "My body
doesn't feel well."
"But do you know what is really the matter with you?" I asked. "Oh,
yes," he said nonchalantly.
"Doctors have told me. But I'm not gonna worry about it, or even think
about it."
Bill's revelations left me feeling thoroughly uneasy. This was a facet
of his person that I didn't know. I
had always thought that he was a tough old cookie. I could never
conceive of him as vulnerable. I
didn't like our exchange. It was, however, too late for me to retreat.
Our trip continued.
On another occasion, he confided that the shamans of the Southwest were
capable of transforming
themselves into different entities, and that the categorization schemes
of "bear shaman" or "mountain
lion shaman," etc., should not be taken as euphemisms or metaphors
because they were not. THE
"Would you believe it," he said in a tone of great admiration, "that
there are some shamans who
actually become bears, or mountain lions, or eagles? I'm not
exaggerating, nor am I fabricating
anything when I say that once I witnessed the transformation of a
shaman who called himself 'River
Man," or 'River Shaman,' or 'Proceeding from River, Returning to
River.' I was out in the mountains of
New Mexico with this shaman. I was driving for him; he trusted me, and
he was going in search of his
origin, or so he said. We were walking along a river when he suddenly
got very excited. He told me to
move away from the shore to some high rocks, and hide there, put a
blanket over my head and
shoulders, and peek through it so I would not miss what he was about to
do."
"What was he going to do?" I asked him, incapable of containing myself.
"I didn't know," he said. "Your guess would have been as good as mine.
I had no way of conceiving of
what he was going to do. He just walked into the water, fully dressed.
When the water reached him at
mid-calf, because it was a wide but shallow river, the shaman simply
vanished, disappeared. Prior to
entering the water, he had whispered in my ear that 1 should go
downstream and wait for him. He told
me the exact spot to wait. I, of course, didn't believe a word of what
he was saying, so at first I
couldn't remember where he had said I had to wait for him, but then I
found the spot and I saw the
shaman coming out of the water. It sounds stupid to say 'coming out of
the water.' I saw the shaman
turning into water and then being remade out of the water. Can you
believe that?"
I had no comments on his stories. It was impossible for me to believe
him, but I could not disbelieve
him either. He was a very serious man. The only possible explanation
that I could think of was that as
we continued our trip he drank more and more every day. He had in the
trunk of the car a box of
twenty-four bottles of Scotch for only himself. He actually drank like
a fish.
"I have always been partial to the esoteric mutations of shamans," he
said to me another day. "It's not
that I can explain the mutations, or even believe that they take place,
but as an intellectual exercise I
am very interested in considering that mutations into snakes and
mountain lions are not as difficult as
what the water shaman did. It is at moments like this, when I engage my
intellect in such a fashion,
that I cease to be an anthropologist and I begin to react, following a
gut feeling. My gut feeling is that
those shamans certainly do something that can't be measured
scientifically or even talked about
intelligently.
"For instance, there are cloud shamans who turn into clouds, into mist.
I have never seen this happen,
but I knew a cloud shaman. I never saw him disappearing or turning into
mist in front of my eyes as I
saw that other shaman turning into water right in front of me. But I
chased that cloud shaman once,
and he simply vanished in an area where there was no place for him to
hide. Although I didn't see him
turning into a cloud, he disappeared. I couldn't explain where he went.
There were no rocks or
vegetation around the place where he ended up. I was there half a
minute after he was, but the shaman
was gone.
"I chased that man all over the place for information," Bill went on.
"He wouldn't give me the time of
day. He was very friendly to me, but that was all."
Bill told me endless other stories about strife and political factions
among Indians in different Indian
reservations, or stories about personal vendettas, animosities,
friendships, etc., etc., which did not
interest me in the least. On the other hand, his stories about shamans'
mutations and apparitions had
caused a true emotional upheaval in me. 1 was at once both fascinated
and appalled by them.
However, when I tried to think about why I was fascinated or appalled,
1 couldn't tell. All 1 could
have said was that his stories about shamans hit me at an unknown,
visceral level.
Another realization brought by this trip was that I verified for myself
that the Indian societies of the
Southwest were indeed closed to outsiders. I finally came to accept
that I did need a great
deal of preparation in the science of anthropology, and that it was
more functional to do
anthropological fieldwork in an area with which I was familiar or one
in which I had an entree.
When the journey ended, Bill drove me to the Greyhound bus depot in
Nogales, Arizona, for my
return trip to Los Angeles. As we were sitting in the waiting area
before the bus came, he consoled me
in a paternal manner, reminding me that failures were a matter of
course in anthropological fieldwork,
and that they meant only the hardening of one's purpose or the coming
to maturity of an
anthropologist.
Abruptly, he leaned over and pointed with a slight movement of his chin
to the other side of the room.
"I think that old man sitting on the bench by the corner over there is
the man I told you about," he
whispered in my ear. "I am not quite sure because I've had him in front
of me, face-to-face, only
once."
"What man is that? What did you tell me about him?" 1 asked.
"When we were talking about shamans and shamans' transformations, I
told you that I had once met a
cloud shaman."
"Yes, yes, I remember that," I said. "Is that man the cloud shaman?"
"No," he said emphatically. "But I think he is a companion or a teacher
of the cloud shaman. I saw
both of them together in the distance various times, many years ago."
I did remember Bill mentioning, in a very casual manner, but not in
relation to the cloud shaman, that
he knew about the existence of a mysterious old man who was a retired
shaman, an old Indian
misanthrope from Yuma who had once been a terrifying sorcerer. The
relationship of the old man to
the cloud shaman was never voiced by my friend, but obviously it was
foremost in Bill's mind, to the
point where he believed that he had told me about him.
A strange anxiety suddenly possessed me and made me jump out of my
seat. As if I had no volition of
my own, I approached the old man and immediately began a long tirade on
how much I knew about
medicinal plants and shamanism among the
American Indians of the plains and their Siberian ancestors. As a
secondary theme, I mentioned to the
old man that I knew that he was a shaman. I concluded by assuring him
that it would be thoroughly
beneficial for him to talk to me at length.
"If nothing else," I said petulantly, "we could swap stories. You tell
me yours and I'll tell you mine."
The old man kept his eyes lowered until the last moment. Then he peered
at me. "I am Juan Matus," he
said, looking me squarely in the eyes.
My tirade shouldn't have ended by any means, but for no reason that I
could discern I felt that there
was nothing more I could have said. I wanted to tell him my name. He
raised his hand to the height of
my lips as if to prevent me from saying it.
At that instant, a bus pulled up to the bus stop. The old man muttered
that it was the bus he had to
take, then he earnestly asked me to look him up so we could talk with
more ease and swap stories.
There was an ironic smirk on the comer of his mouth when he said that.
With an incredible agility for
a man his age-I figured he must have been in his eighties-he covered,
in a few leaps, the fifty yards
between the bench where he was sitting and the door of the bus. As if
the bus had stopped just to pick
him up, it moved away as soon as he had jumped in and the door had
closed.
After the old man left, I went back to the bench where Bill was sitting.
"What did he say, what did he say?" he asked excitedly.
"He told me to look him up and come to his house to visit," I said. "He
even said that we could talk
there."
"But what did you say to him to get him to invite you to his house?" he
demanded.
I told Bill that I had used my best sales pitch, and that I had
promised the old man to reveal to him
everything I knew, from the point of view of my reading, about
medicinal plants.
Bill obviously didn't believe me. He accused me of holding out on him.
"I know the people around this
area," he said belligerently, "and that old man is a very strange fart.
He doesn't talk to anybody,
Indians included. Why would he talk to you, a perfect stranger? You're
not even cute!" '
It was obvious that Bill was annoyed with me. I couldn't figure out why
though. I didn't dare ask him
for an explanation. He gave me the impression of being a bit jealous.
Perhaps he felt that I had
succeeded where he had failed. However, my success had been so
inadvertent that it didn't mean
anything to me. Except for Bill's casual remarks, I didn't have any
conception of how difficult it was
to approach that old man, and I couldn't have cared less. At the time,
I found nothing remarkable in the
exchange. It baffled me that Bill was so upset about it.
"Do you know where his house is?" I asked him.
"I haven't the foggiest idea," he answered curtly. "I have heard people
from this area say that he
doesn't live anywhere, that he just appears here and there
unexpectedly, but that's a lot of horse-shit.
He probably lives in some shack in Nogales, Mexico."
"Why is he so important?" I asked him. My question made me gather
enough courage to add, "You
seem to be upset because he talked to me. Why?"
Without any ado, he admitted that he was chagrined because he knew how
useless it was to try to talk
to that man. "That old man is as rude as anyone can be," he added. "At
best, he stares at you without
saying a word when you talk to him. At other times, he doesn't even
look at you; he treats you as if
you didn't exist. The one time 1 tried to talk to him he brutally
turned me down. Do you know what he
said to me? He said, 'If I were you, I wouldn't waste my energy opening
my mouth. Save it. You need
it.' If he weren't such an old fart, I would have punched him in the
nose."
1 pointed out to Bill that to call him an "old" man was more a figure
of speech than an actual
description. He didn't really appear to be that old, although he was
definitely old. He possessed a
tremendous vigor and agility. 1 felt that Bill would have failed
miserably if he had tried to punch him
in the nose. That old Indian was powerful. In fact, he was downright
scary.
I didn't voice my thoughts. I let Bill go on telling me how disgusted
he was at the nastiness of that old
man, and how he would have dealt with him had it not been for the fact
that the old man was so
feeble.
"Who do you think could give me some information about where he might
live?" I asked him.
"Perhaps some people in Yuma," he replied, a bit more relaxed. "Maybe
the people I introduced you to
at the beginning of our trip. You wouldn't lose anything by asking
them. Tell them that I sent you to
them."
I changed my plans right then and instead of going back to Los Angeles
went directly to Yuma,
Arizona. I saw the people to whom Bill had introduced me. They didn't
know where the old Indian
lived, but their comments about him inflamed my curiosity even more.
They said that he was not from
Yuma, but from Sonora, Mexico, and that in his youth he had been a
fearsome sorcerer who did
incantations and put spells on people, but that he had mellowed with
age, turning into an ascetic
hermit. They remarked that although he was a Yaqui Indian, he had once
run around with a group of
Mexican men who seemed to be extremely knowledgeable about bewitching
practices. They all agreed
that they hadn't seen those men in the area for ages.
One of the men added that the old man was contemporaneous with his
grandfather, but that while his
grandfather was senile and bedridden, the sorcerer seemed to be more
vigorous than ever. The same
man referred me to some people in Hermosillo, the capital of Sonora,
who might know the old man
and be able to tell me more about him. The prospect of going to Mexico
was not at all appealing to
me. Sonora was too far away from my area of interest. Besides, I
reasoned that I was better off doing
urban anthropology after all and I went back to Los Angeles. But before
leaving for Los Angeles, I
canvassed the area of Yuma, searching tor information about the old
man. No one knew anything
about him.
As the bus drove to Los Angeles, I experienced a unique sensation. On
the one hand, I felt totally
cured of my obsession with fieldwork or my interest in the old man. On
the other hand, I felt a strange
nostalgia. It was, truthfully, something I had never felt before. Its
newness struck me profoundly. It
was a mixture of anxiety and longing, as if I were missing something of
tremendous importance. I had
the clear sensation as I approached Los Angeles that whatever had been
acting on me around Yuma
had begun to fade with distance; but its fading only increased my
unwarranted longing.
The Intent of
Infinity
"I WANT YOU to think deliberately about every detail of what transpired
between you and those two
men, Jorge Campos and Lucas Coronado," don Juan said to me, "who are
the ones who really
delivered you to me, and then tell me all about it."
I found his request very difficult to fulfill, and yet I actually
enjoyed remembering everything those
two had said to me. He wanted every detail possible, something that
forced me to push my memory to
its limits.
The story don Juan wanted me to recollect began in the city of Guaymas,
in Sonora, Mexico. In Yuma,
Arizona, I had been given the names and addresses of some people who, I
was told, might be able to
shed light on the mystery of the old man I had met in the bus depot.
The people I went to see not only
didn't know any retired old shaman, they even doubted that such a man
had ever existed. They were
all filled to the brim, however, with scary stories about Yaqui
shamans, and about the belligerent general
mood of the Yaqui Indians. They insinuated that perhaps in THE ACTIVE
Vicam, a railroad-station town between the cities of Guaymas and Ciudad
Obregon, I might find
someone who could perhaps steer me in the proper direction.
"Is there anyone in particular 1 could look up?" I asked. "Your best
bet would be to talk to a field
inspector of the official government bank," one of the men suggested.
"The bank has a lot of field
inspectors. They know all the Indians of the area because the bank is
the government institution that
buys their crops, and every Yaqui is a farmer, the proprietor of a
parcel of land that he can call his own
as long as he cultivates it." "Do you know any field inspectors?" I
asked. They looked at each other
and smiled apologetically at me. They didn't know any, but strongly
recommended that I should
approach one of those men on my own and put my case to him.
In Vicam Station, my attempts at making contact with the field
inspectors of the government bank
were a total disaster. I met three of them, and when I told them what I
wanted, every one of them
looked at me with utter distrust. They immediately suspected that I was
a spy sent there by the
Yankees to cause problems that they could not clearly define, but about
which they made wild
speculations ranging from political agitation to industrial espionage.
It was the unsubstantiated belief
of everyone around that there were copper deposits in the lands of the
Yaqui Indians and that the
Yankees coveted them.
After this resounding failure, I retreated to the city of Guaymas and
stayed at a hotel that was very
close to a fabulous restaurant. I went there three times a day. The
food was superb. I liked it so much
that I stayed in Guaymas for over a week. I practically lived in the
restaurant, and became, in this
manner, acquainted with
the owner, Mr. Reyes.
One afternoon while 1 was eating, Mr. Reyes came to my table with
another man, whom he
introduced to me as Jorge Campos, a full-blooded Yaqui Indian
entrepreneur who had lived in Arizona
in his youth, who spoke English perfectly, and who was more American
than any American. Mr. Reyes
praised him as a true example of how hard work and dedication could
develop a person into an
exceptional man.
Mr. Reyes left and Jorge Campos sat down next to me and immediately
took over. He pretended to be
modest and denied all praise but it was obvious that he was as pleased
as punch with what Mr. Reyes
had said about him. At first sight, I had the clear impression that
Jorge Campos was an entrepreneur of
the particular kind that one finds in bars or on crowded corners of
main streets trying to sell an idea or
simply trying to find a way to con people out of their savings.
Mr. Campos was very pleasant looking, around six feet tall and lean,
but with a high pot belly like a
habitual drinker of hard liquor. He had a very dark complexion, with a
touch of green to it, and wore
expensive blue jeans and shiny cowboy boots with pointed toes and
angular heels, as if he needed to
dig them into the ground to stop being dragged by a lassoed steer.
He was wearing an impeccably ironed gray plaid shirt; in its right
pocket was a plastic pocket guard
into which he had inserted a row of pens. I had seen the same pocket
guard among office workers who
didn't want to stain their shirt pockets with ink. His attire also
included an expensive-looking fringed
reddish-brown suede jacket and a tall Texas-style cowboy hat. His round
face was expressionless. He
had no wrinkles even though he seemed to be in his early fifties. For
some unknown reason, I believed
that he was dangerous. "Very pleased to meet you, Mr. Campos," I said
in Spanish, extending my hand
to him.
"Let's dispense with the formalities," he responded, also in Spanish,
shaking my hand vigorously. "I
like to treat young people as equals, regardless of age differences.
Call me Jorge."
He was quiet for a moment, no doubt assessing my reaction. I didn't
know what to say. I certainly
didn't want to humor him, nor did I want to take him seriously.
"I'm curious to know what you're doing in Guaymas," he went on
casually. "You don't seem to be a
tourist, nor do you seem to be interested in deep-sea fishing." "I am
an anthropology student," I said,
"and I am trying to establish my credentials with the local Indians in
order to do some field research."
"And I am a businessman," he said. "My business is to supply
information, to be the go-between. You
have the need, I have the commodity. 1 charge for my services. However,
my services are guaranteed.
If you don't get satisfaction, you don't have to pay
me."
"If your business is to supply information," I said, "I will gladly
pay you whatever you charge."
"Ah!" he exclaimed. "You certainly need a guide, someone with more
education than the average
Indian here, to show you around. Do you have a grant from the United
States government or from
another big institution?"
"Yes," I lied. "I have a grant from the Esoterical Foundation of Los
Angeles."
When I said that, I actually saw a glint of greed in his eyes. "Ah!" he
exclaimed again. "How big is
that institution?" "Fairly big," I said.
"My goodness! Is that so?" he said, as if my words were an explanation
that he had wanted to hear.
"And now, may I ask you, if you don't mind, how big is your grant? How
much money did they give
you?"
"A few thousand dollars to do preliminary fieldwork," I lied again, to
see what he would say.
"Ah! I like people who are direct," he said, relishing his words. "I am
sure that you and I are going to
reach an agreement. I offer you my services as a guide and as a key
that can open many secret doors
among the Yaquis. As you can see by my general appearance, I am a man
of taste and means."
"Oh, yes, definitely you are a man of good taste," I asserted. "What I
am saying to you," he said, "is
that for a small fee, which you will find most reasonable, I will steer
you to the right people, people to
whom you could ask any question you want. And for some very little
more, I will translate their words
to you, verbatim, into Spanish or English. I can also speak French and
German, but I have the feeling
that those languages do not interest you."
"You are right, you are so very right," I said. "Those languages don't
interest me at all. But how much
would your fees be?"
"Ah! My fees!" he said, and took a leather-covered notebook out of his
back pocket and flipped it
open in front of my face; he scribbled quick notes on it, flipped it
closed again, and put it in his pocket
with precision and speed. I was sure that he wanted to give me the
impression of being efficient and
fast at calculating figures.
"I will charge you fifty dollars a day," he said, "with transportation,
plus my meals. I mean, when you
eat, I eat. What do you say?"
At that moment, he leaned over to me and, almost in a whisper, said
that we should shift into English
because he didn't want people to know the nature of our transactions.
He began to speak to me then in
something that wasn't English at all. I was at a loss. I didn't know
how to respond. I began to fret
nervously as the man kept on talking gibberish with the most natural
air. He didn't bat an eyelash. He
moved his hands in a very animated fashion and pointed around him as if
he were instructing me. I
didn't have the impression that he was speaking in tongues; I thought
perhaps he was speaking the
Yaqui language.
When people came around our table and looked at us, I nodded and said
to Jorge Campos, "Yes, yes,
indeed." At one point I said, "You could say that again," and this
sounded so funny to me that I broke
into a belly laugh. He also laughed heartily, as if I had said the
funniest thing possible.
He must have noticed that I was finally at my wits' end, and before I
could get up and tell him to get
lost, he started to speak Spanish again.
"I don't want to tire you with my silly observations," he said. "But if
I'm going to be your guide, as I
think I am going to be, we will be spending long hours chatting. I was
testing you just now, to see if
you are a good conversationalist. If I'm going to spend time with you
driving, I need someone by me
who could be a good receptor and initiator. I'm glad to tell you that
you are both."
Then he stood up, shook my hand, and left. As if on cue, the owner came
to my table, smiling and
shaking his head from side to side like a little bear.
"Isn't he a fabulous guy?" he asked me.
I didn't want to commit myself to a statement, and Mr. Reyes
volunteered that Jorge Campos was at
that moment a go-between in an extremely delicate and profitable
transaction. He said that some
mining companies in the United States were interested in the iron and
copper deposits that belonged to
the Yaqui Indians, . and that Jorge Campos was there, in line to
collect perhaps a five-million-dollar
fee. I knew then that Jorge Campos was a con man. There were no iron or
copper deposits on the lands
owned by the Yaqui Indians. If there had been any, private enterprises
would have already moved the
Yaquis out of those lands and relocated them somewhere else. •
"He's fabulous," I said. "Most wonderful guy I ever met. How can I get
in touch with him again?"
"Don't worry about that," Mr. Reyes said. "Jorge asked me all about
you. He has been watching you
since you came. He'll probably come and knock on your door later today
or tomorrow."
Mr. Reyes was right. A couple of hours later, somebody woke me from my
afternoon nap. It was Jorge
Campos. I had intended to leave Guaymas in the early evening and drive,
all night, to California. I
explained to him that I was leaving, but that I would come back in a
month or so.
"Ah! But you must stay now that I have decided to be your
guide," he said.
"I'm sorry, but we will have to wait for this because my time is very
limited now," I replied.
I knew that Jorge Campos was a crook, yet I decided to reveal to him
that I already had an informant
who was waiting to work
with me, and that I had met him in Arizona. I described the old man and
said that his name was Juan
Matus, and that other people had characterized him as a shaman. Jorge
Campos smiled at me broadly.
I asked him if he knew the old man.
"Ah, yes, I know him," he said jovially. "You may say that we are good
friends." Without being
invited, Jorge Campos came into the room and sat down at the table just
inside the balcony.
"Does he live around here?" I asked.
"He certainly does," he assured me.
"Would you take me to him?"
"I don't see why not," he said. "I would need a couple of days to make
my own inquiries, just to make
sure that he is there, and then we will go and see him."
I knew that he was lying, yet I didn't want to believe it. I even
thought that my initial distrust had
perhaps been ill-founded. He seemed so convincing at that moment.
"However," he continued, "in order to take you to see the man, I will
charge you a flat fee. My
honorarium will be two hundred dollars."
That amount was more than I had at my disposal. I politely declined and
said that I didn't have enough
money with me.
"I don't want to appear mercenary," he said with his most winning
smile, "but how much money can
you afford? You must take into consideration that I have to do a little
bribing. The Yaqui Indians are
very private, but there are always ways; there are always doors that
open with a magical key-money."
In spite of all my misgivings, I was convinced that Jorge Campos was my
entry not only into the
Yaqui world but to finding the old man who had intrigued me so much. I
didn't want to haggle over
money. I was almost embarrassed to offer him the fifty dollars I had in
my pocket.
"I am at the end of my stay here," I said as a sort of apology, "so I
have nearly run out of money. I
have only fifty dollars left."
Jorge Campos stretched his long legs under the table and crossed his
arms behind his head, tipping his
hat over his face.
"I'll take your fifty dollars and your watch," he said shamelessly.
"But for that money, I will take you
to meet a minor shaman. Don't get impatient," he warned me, as if 1
were going to protest. "We must
step carefully up the ladder, from the lower ranks to the man himself,
who I assure you is at the very
top."
"And when could I meet this minor shaman?" I asked, handing him the
money and my watch.
"Right now!" he replied as he sat up straight and eagerly grabbed the
money and the watch. "Let's go!
There's not a minute to waste!"
We got into my car and he directed me to head off for the town of
Potam, one of the traditional Yaqui
towns along the Yaqui River. As we drove, he revealed to me that we
were going to meet Lucas
Coronado, a man who was known for his sorcery feats, his shamanistic
trances, and for the
magnificent masks that he made for the Yaqui festivities of Lent.
Then he shifted the conversation to the old man, and what he said was
in total contradiction to what
others had said to me about the man. While they had described him as a
hermit and retired shaman,
Jorge Campos portrayed him as the most prominent curer and sorcerer of
the area, a man whose fame
had turned him into a nearly inaccessible figure. He paused, like an
actor, and then he delivered his
blow: He said that to talk to the old man on a steady basis, the way
anthropologists like to do, was
going to cost me at least two thousand dollars.
I was going to protest such a drastic hike in price, but he anticipated
me.
"For two hundred dollars, I could take you to him," he said. "Out of
those two hundred dollars, I
would clear about thirty. The rest would go for bribes. But to talk to
him at length will cost more. You
yourself could figure that out. He has actual bodyguards, people who
protect him. I have to sweet-talk
them and come up with dough for them.
"In the end," he continued, "I will give you a total account with
receipts and everything for your taxes.
Then you will know
that my commission for setting it all up is minimal."
I felt a wave of admiration for him. He was aware of everything, even
receipts for income tax. He was
quiet for a while, as if calculating his minimal profit. I had nothing
to say. I was busy calculating
myself, trying to figure out a way to get two thousand dollars. I even
thought of really applying for a
grant.
"But are you sure the old man would talk to me?" I asked.
"Of course," he assured me. "Not only would he talk to you, he's going
to perform sorcery for you, for
what you pay him. Then you could work out an agreement with him as to
how much you could pay
him for further lessons."
Jorge Campos kept silent again for a while, peering into my eyes.
"Do you think that you could pay me the two thousand dollars?" he asked
in a tone so purposefully
indifferent that I instantly knew it was a sham.
"Oh, yes, I can easily afford that," I lied reassuringly.
He could not disguise his glee.
"Good boy! Good boy!" he cheered. "We're going to have a ball!"
I tried to ask him some general questions about the old man; he
forcefully cut me off. "Save all this for
the man himself. He'll be all yours," he said, smiling.
He began to tell me then about his life in the United States and about
his business aspirations, and to
my utter bewilderment, since I had already classified him as a phony
who didn't speak a word of
English, he shifted into English.
"You do speak English!" 1 exclaimed without any attempt at hiding my
surprise.
"Of course 1 do, my boy," he said, affecting a Texan accent, which he
carried on for the duration of
our conversation. "I told you, I wanted to test you, to see if you are
resourceful. You are. In fact, you
are quite clever, I may say."
His command of English was superb, and he delighted me with jokes and
stories. In no time at all, we
were in Potam. He directed me to a house on the outskirts of town. We
got out of the car. He led the
way, calling loudly in Spanish for Lucas Coronado.
We heard a voice from the back of the house that said, also in Spanish,
"Come over here."
There was a man behind a small shack, sitting on the ground, on a
goatskin. He was holding a piece of
wood with his bare feet while he worked on it with a chisel and a
mallet. By holding the piece of
wood in place with the pressure of his feet, he had fashioned a
stupendous potter's turning wheel, so to
speak. His feet turned the piece as his hands worked the chisel. I had
never seen anything like this in
my life. He was making a mask, hollowing it with a curved chisel. His
control of his feet in holding
the wood and turning it around was remarkable.
The man was very thin; he had a thin face with angular features, high
cheekbones, and a dark,
copperish complexion. The skin of his face and neck seemed to be
stretched to the maximum. He
sported a thin, droopy mustache that gave his angular face a malevolent
slant. He had an aquiline nose
with a very thin bridge, and fierce black eyes. His extremely black
eyebrows appeared as if they had
been drawn on with a pencil, and so did his jet black hair, combed
backward on his head. I had never
seen a more hostile face. The image that came to mind looking at him
was that of an Italian poisoner
of the era of the Medicis. The words "truculent" and "saturnine" seemed
to be the most apt
descriptions when I focused my attention on Lucas Coronado's face.
I noticed that while he was sitting on the ground, holding the piece of
wood with his feet, the bones of
his legs were so long that his knees came to his shoulders. When we
approached him, he stopped
working and stood up. He was taller than Jorge Campos, and as thin as a
rail. As a gesture of
deference to us, I suppose, he put on his gwraches.
"Come in, come in," he said without smiling.
I had a strange feeling then that Lucas Coronado didn't know how to
smile.
"To what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?" he asked Jorge Campos.
"I've brought this young man here because he wants to ask you some
questions about your art," Jorge
Campos said in a most patronizing tone. "I vouched that you would
answer his questions truthfully."
"Oh, that's no problem, that's no problem," Lucas Coronado assured me,
sizing me up with his cold
stare.
He shifted into a different language then, which I presumed to be
Yaqui. He and Jorge Campos got
into an animated conversation that lasted for some time. Both of them
acted as if I did not exist. Then
Jorge Campos turned to me.
"We have a little problem here," he said. "Lucas has just informed me
that this is a very busy season
for him, since the festivities are approaching, so he won't be able to
answer all the questions that you
ask him, but he will at another time."
"Yes, yes, most certainly," Lucas Coronado said to me in Spanish. "At
another time, indeed; at another
time."
"We have to cut our visit short," Jorge Campos said, "but I'll bring
you back again."
As we were leaving, I felt moved to express to Lucas Coronado my
admiration for his stupendous
technique of working with his hands and feet. He looked at me as if I
were mad, his eyes widening
with surprise.
"You've never seen anyone working on a mask?" he hissed through
clenched teeth. "Where are you
from? Mars?"
I felt stupid. I tried to explain that his technique was quite new to
me. He seemed ready to hit me on
the head. Jorge Campos said to me in English that I had offended Lucas
Coronado with my comments.
He had understood my praise as a veiled way of making fun of his
poverty; my words had been to him
an ironic statement of how poor and helpless he was.
"But it's the opposite," I said. "I think he's magnificent!"
"Don't try to tell him anything like that," Jorge Campos retorted.
"These people are trained to receive
and dispense insults in a most covert form. He thinks it's odd that you
run him down when you don't
even know him, and make fun of the fact that he cannot afford a vise to
hold his sculpture."
I felt totally at a loss. The last thing I wanted was to foul up my
only possible contact. Jorge Campos
seemed to be utterly aware of my chagrin.
"Buy one of his masks," he advised me.
I told him that I intended to drive to Los Angeles in one lap, without
stopping, and that I had just
sufficient money to buy gasoline and food.
"Well, give him your leather jacket," he said matter-of-factly but in a
confidential, helpful tone.
"Otherwise, you're going to anger him, and all he'll remember about you
will be your insults. But don't
tell him that his masks are beautiful. Just buy one."
When I told Lucas Coronado that I wanted to trade my leather jacket for
one of his masks, he grinned
with satisfaction. He took the jacket and put it on. He walked to his
house, but before he entered, he
did some strange gyrations. He knelt in front of some sort of religious
altar and moved his arms, as if
to stretch them, and rubbed his hands on the sides of the jacket.
He went inside the house and brought out a bundle wrapped in
newspapers, which he handed to me. I
wanted to ask him some questions. He excused himself, saying that he
had to work, but added that if I
wanted I could come back at another time.
On the way back to the city of Guaymas, Jorge Campos asked me to open
the bundle. He wanted to
make sure that Lucas Coronado had not cheated me. I didn't care to open
the bundle; my only concern
was the possibility that I could come back by myself to talk to Lucas
Coronado. I was elated.
"I must see what you have," Jorge Campos insisted. "Stop the car,
please. Not under any conditions or
for any reasons whatsoever would I endanger my clients. You paid me to
render some services to you.
That man is a genuine shaman, therefore very dangerous. Because you
have offended him, he may
have given you a witchcraft bundle. If that's the case, we have to bury
it quickly in this area."
I felt a wave of nausea and stopped the car. With extreme care, I took
out the bundle. Jorge Campos
snatched it out of my hands and opened it. It contained three
beautifully made traditional Yaqui masks.
Jorge Campos mentioned, in a casual, disinterested tone, that it would
be only proper that I give him
one of them. I reasoned that since he had not yet taken me to see the
old man, I had to preserve my
connection with him. I gladly gave him one of the masks.
"If you allow me to choose, I would rather take that one," he said,
pointing.
I told him to go ahead. The masks didn't mean anything to me; I had
gotten what I was after. I would
have given him the other two masks as well, but I wanted to show them
to my anthropologist friends.
"These masks are nothing extraordinary," Jorge Campos declared. "You
can buy them in any store in
town. They sell them to tourists there."
I had seen the Yaqui masks that were sold in the stores in town. They
were very rude masks in
comparison to the ones I had, and Jorge Campos had indeed picked out
the best.
I left him in the city and headed for Los Angeles. Before I said
good-bye, he reminded me that I
practically owed him two thousand dollars because he was going to start
his bribing and working
toward taking me to meet the big man.
"Do you think that you could give me my two thousand dollars the next
time you come?" he asked
daringly.
His question put me in a terrible position. I believed that to tell him
the truth, that I doubted it, would
have made him drop me. I was convinced then that in spite of his patent
greed, he was my usher.
"I will do my best to have the money," I said in a noncommittal tone.
"You gotta do better than that, boy," he retorted forcefully, almost
angrily. "I'm going to spend money
on my own, setting up this meeting, and I must have some reassurance on
your part. I know that you
are a very serious young man. How much is your car worth? Do you have
the pink slip?"
I told him what my car was worth, and that I did have the pink slip,
but he seemed satisfied only when
1 gave him my word that 1 would bring him the money in cash on my next
visit.
Five months later, I went back to Guaymas to see Jorge Campos. Two
thousand dollars at that time
was a considerable amount of money, especially for a student. 1 thought
that if perhaps he were
willing to take partial payments, I would be more than happy to commit
myself to pay that amount in
installments.
I couldn't find Jorge Campos anywhere in Guaymas. 1 asked the owner of
the restaurant. He was as
baffled as I was about his disappearance.
"He has just vanished," he said. "I'm sure he went back to Arizona, or
to Texas, where he has
business."
I took a chance and went to see Lucas Coronado by myself. I arrived at
his house at midday. I couldn't
find him either. I asked his neighbors if they knew where he might be.
They looked at me belligerently
and didn't dignify me with an answer. I left, but went by his house
again in the late afternoon. 1 didn't
expect anything at all. In fact, I was prepared to leave for Los
Angeles immediately. To my surprise,
Lucas Coronado was not only there but was extremely friendly to me. He
frankly expressed his
approval on seeing that I had come without Jorge Campos, who he said
was an outright pain in the ass.
He complained that Jorge Campos, to whom he referred as a renegade
Yaqui Indian, took delight in
exploiting his fellow Yaquis.
I gave Lucas Coronado some gifts that I had brought him and bought from
him three masks, an
exquisitely carved staff, and a pair of rattling leggings made out of
the cocoons of some insects from
the desert, leggings which the Yaquis used in their traditional dances.
Then I took him to Guaymas for
dinner.
I saw him every day for the five days that I remained in the area, and
he gave me endless amounts of
information about the
Yaquis-their history and social organization, and the meaning and
nature of their festivities. I was
having such fun as a field-worker that I even felt reluctant to ask him
if he knew anything about the
old shaman. Overcoming second thoughts, I finally asked Lucas Coronado
if he knew the old man
whom Jorge Campos had assured me was such a prominent shaman. Lucas
Coronado seemed
perplexed. He assured me that to his knowledge, no such man had ever
existed in that part of the
country and that Jorge Campos was a crook who only wanted to cheat me
out of my money.
Hearing Lucas Coronado deny the existence of that old man had a
terrible, unexpected impact on me.
In one instant, it became evident to me that I really didn't give a
damn about field-work. I only cared
about finding that old man. I knew then that meeting the old shaman had
indeed been the culmination
of something that had nothing to do with my desires, aspirations, or
even thoughts as an
anthropologist.
I wondered more than ever who in the hell that old man was. Without any
inhibitory checks, I began to
rant and yell in frustration. I stomped on the floor. Lucas Coronado
was quite taken aback by my
display. He looked at me, bewildered, and then started to laugh. I had
no idea that he could laugh. I
apologized to him for my outburst of anger and frustration. I couldn't
explain why I was so out of
sorts. Lucas Coronado seemed to understand my quandary.
"Things like that happen in this area," he said.
I had no idea to what he was referring, nor did I want to ask him. I
was deadly afraid of the easiness
with which he took offense. A peculiarity of the Yaquis was the
facility they had to feel offended. They
seemed to be perennially on their toes, looking out for insults that
were too subtle to be noticed by
anyone else.
"There are magical beings living in the mountains around here," he
continued, "and they can act on
people. They make people go veritably mad. People rant and rave under
their influence, and when
they finally calm down, exhausted, they don't have any clue as to why
they exploded."
"Do you think that's what happened to me?" I asked.
"Definitely," he replied with total conviction. "You already have a
predisposition to going bonkers at
the drop of a hat, but you are also very contained. Today, you weren't
contained. You went bananas
over nothing."
"It isn't over nothing," I assured him. "I didn't know it until now,
but to me that old man is the driving
force of all my efforts."
Lucas Coronado kept quiet, as if in deep thought. Then he began to pace
up and down.
"Do you know any old man who lives around here but is not quite from
this area?" I asked him.
He didn't understand my question. I had to explain to him that the old
Indian I had met was perhaps
like Jorge Campos, a Yaqui who had lived somewhere else. Lucas Coronado
explained that the
surname "Matus" was quite common in that area, but that he didn't know
any Matus whose first name
was Juan. He seemed despondent. Then he had a moment of insight and
stated that because the man
was old, he might have another name, and that perhaps he had given me a
working name, not his real
one.
"The only old man I know," he went on, "is Ignacio Flores's father. He
comes to see his son from time
to time, but he .comes from Mexico City. Come to think of it, he's
Ignacio's father, but he doesn't seem
that old. But he's old. Ignacio's old, too. His father seems younger,
though."
He laughed heartily at his realization. Apparently, he had never
thought about the youth of the old man
until that moment. He kept on shaking his head, as if in disbelief. I,
on the other hand, was elated
beyond measure.
"That's the man!" I yelled without knowing why.
Lucas Coronado didn't know where Ignacio Flores actually lived, but he
was very accommodating and
directed me to drive to a nearby Yaqui town, where he found the man for
me.
Ignacio Flores was a big, corpulent man, perhaps in his mid-sixties.
Lucas Coronado had warned me
that the big man had been a career soldier in his youth, and that he
still had the bearing of a military
man. Ignacio Flores had an enormous mustache; that and the fierceness
of his eyes made him for me
the personification of a ferocious soldier. He had a dark complexion.
His hair was still jet black in
spite of his years. His forceful, gravelly voice seemed to be trained
solely to give commands. I had the
impression that he had been a cavalry man. He walked as if he were
still wearing spurs, and for some
strange reason, impossible to fathom, I heard the sound of spurs when
he walked.
Lucas Coronado introduced me to him and said that I had come from
Arizona to see his father, whom I
had met in Nogales. Ignacio Flores didn't seem surprised at all.
"Oh yes," he said. "My father travels a great deal." Without any other
preliminaries, he directed us to
where we could find his father. He didn't come with us, I thought out
of politeness. He excused
himself and marched away, as if he were keeping step in a parade.
I prepared myself to go to the old man's house with Lucas Coronado.
Instead, he politely declined; he
wanted me to drive him back to his house.
"I think you found the man you were looking for, and I feel that you
should be alone," he said.
I marveled at how extraordinarily polite these Yaqui Indians were, and
yet, at the same time, so fierce.
I had been told that the Yaquis were savages who had no qualms about
killing anyone; as far as I was
concerned, though, their most remarkable feature was their politeness
and consideration.
I drove to the house of Ignacio Flores's father, and there I found the
man I was looking for.
"I wonder why Jorge Campos lied and told me that he knew you," I said
at the end of my account.
"He didn't lie to you," don Juan said with the conviction of someone
who was condoning Jorge
Campos's behavior. "He didn't even misrepresent himself. He thought you
were an easy mark and was
going to cheat you. He couldn't carry out his plan, though, because
infinity overpowered him. Do you
know that he disappeared soon after he met you, never to be found?
"Jorge Campos was a most meaningful personage for you," he continued.
"You will find, in whatever
transpired between the two of you, a sort of guiding blueprint, because
he is the representation of your
life."
"Why? I'm not a crook!" I protested.
He laughed, as if he knew something that I didn't. The next thing I
knew, I found myself in the midst
of an extensive explanation of my actions, my ideals, my expectations.
However, a strange thought
urged me to consider with the same fervor with which I was explaining
myself that under certain
circumstances, I might be like Jorge Campos. I found the thought
inadmissible, and I used all my
available energy to try to disprove it. However, down in the depths of
myself, I didn't care to apologize
if I were like Jorge Campos.
When I voiced my dilemma, don Juan laughed so hard that he choked, many
times.
"If I were you," he commented, "I'd listen to my inner voice. What
difference would it make if you
were like Jorge Campos: a crook! He was a cheap crook. You are more
elaborate. This is the power of
the recounting. This is why sorcerers use it. It puts you into contact
with something that you didn't
even suspect existed in you."
I wanted to leave right then. Don Juan knew exactly how I felt.
"Don't listen to the superficial voice that makes you angry," he said
commandingly. "Listen to that
deeper voice that is going to guide you from now on, the voice that is
laughing. Listen to it! And laugh
with it. Laugh! Laugh!"
His words were like a hypnotic command to me. Against my will, I began
to laugh. Never had I been
so happy. I felt free, unmasked.
"Recount to yourself the story of Jorge Campos, over and over,"
don Juan said. "You will find endless wealth in it. Every detail is
part of a map. It is the nature of
infinity, once we cross a certain threshold, to put a blueprint in
front of us."
He peered at me for a long time. He didn't merely glance as before, but
he gazed intently at me. "One
deed which Jorge Campos couldn't avoid performing," he finally said,
"was to put you in contact with
the other man: Lucas Coronado, who is as meaningful to you as Jorge
Campos himself, maybe even
more
.
In the course of recounting the story of those two men, I had realized
that I had spent more time with
Lucas Coronado than with Jorge Campos; however, our exchanges had not
been as intense, and were
marked by enormous lagoons of silence. Lucas Coronado was not by nature
a talkative man, and by
some strange twist, whenever he was silent he managed to drag me with
him into that state.
"Lucas Coronado is. the other part of your map," don Juan said. "Don't
you find it strange that he is a
sculptor, like yourself, a super-sensitive artist who was, like
yourself at one time, in search of a
sponsor for his art? He looked for a sponsor just like you looked for a
woman, a lover of the arts, who
would sponsor your creativity."
I entered into another terrifying struggle. This time my struggle was
between my absolute certainty
that I had not mentioned this aspect of my life to him, the fact that
all of it was true, and the fact that I
was unable to find an explanation for how he could have obtained this
information. Again, I wanted to
leave right away. But once more, the impulse was overpowered by a voice
that came from a deep
place. Without any coaxing, I began to laugh heartily. Some part of me,
at a profound level, didn't give
a hoot about finding out how don Juan had gotten that information. The
fact that he had it, and had
displayed it in such a delicate but conniving manner, was a delightful
maneuver to witness. It was of
no consequence that the superficial part of me got angry and wanted to
leave.
"Very good," don Juan said to me, patting me forcefully on the back,
"very good."
He was pensive for a moment, as if he were perhaps seeing things
invisible to the average eye.
"Jorge Campos and Lucas Coronado are the two ends of an axis," he said.
"That axis is you, at one end
a ruthless, shameless, crass mercenary who takes care of himself;
hideous, but indestructible. At the
other end a super-sensitive, tormented artist, weak and vulnerable.
That should have been the map of
your life, were it not for the appearance of another possibility, the
one that opened up when you
crossed the threshold of infinity. You searched for me, and you found
me; and so, you did cross the
threshold. The intent of infinity told me to look for someone like you.
1 found you, thus crossing the
threshold myself."
The conversation ended at that point. Don Juan went into one of his
habitual long periods of total
silence. It was only at the end of the day, when we had returned to his
house and while we were sitting
under his ramada, cooling off from the long hike we had taken, that he
broke his silence.
"In your recounting of what happened between you and Jorge Campos, and
you and Lucas Coronado,"
don Juan went on, "I found, and I hope you did, too, a very disturbing
factor. For me, it's an omen. It
points to the end of an era, meaning that whatever was standing there
cannot remain. Very flimsy
elements brought you to me. None of them could stand on their own. This
is what I drew from your
recounting."
I remembered that don Juan had revealed to me one day that Lucas
Coronado was terminally ill. He
had some health condition that was slowly consuming him.
"I have sent word to him through my son Ignacio about what he should do
to cure himself," don Juan
went on, "but he thinks it's nonsense and doesn't want to hear it. It
isn't Lucas's fault. The entire human
race doesn't want to hear anything. They hear only what they want to
hear."
I remembered that I had prevailed upon don Juan to tell me
what I could say to Lucas Coronado to help him alleviate his physical
pain and mental anguish. Don
Juan not only told me what to tell him, but asserted that if Lucas
Coronado wanted to, he could easily
cure himself. Nevertheless, when I delivered don Juan's message, Lucas
Coronado looked at me as if I
had lost my mind. Then he shifted into a brilliant, and, had I been a
Yaqui, deeply insulting, portrayal
of a man who is bored to death by someone's unwarranted insistence. I
thought that only a Yaqui
Indian could be so subtle.
"Those things don't help me," he finally said defiantly, angered by my
lack of sensibility. "It doesn't
really matter. We all have to die. But don't you dare believe that I
have lost hope. I'm going to get
some money from the government bank. I'll get an advance on my crops,
and then I'll get enough
money to buy something that will cure me, ipso facto. It's name is
Vi-ta-mi-nol."
"What is Vitaminol?" I had asked.
"It's something that's advertised on the radio," he said with the
innocence of a child. "It cures
everything. It's recommended for people who don't eat meat or fish or
fowl every day. It's recommended
for people like myself who can barely keep body and soul together."
In my eagerness to help Lucas Coronado, I committed right then the
biggest blunder imaginable in a
society of such hypersensitive beings as the Yaquis: I offered to give
him the money to buy Vitaminol.
His cold stare was the measure of how deeply I had hurt him. My
stupidity was unforgivable. Very
softly, Lucas Coronado said that he was capable of affording Vitaminol
himself.
I went back to don Juan's house. I felt like weeping. My eagerness had
betrayed me.
"Don't waste your energy worrying about things like that," don Juan
said coldly. "Lucas Coronado is
locked in a vicious cycle, but so are you. So is everyone. He has
Vitaminol, which he trusts will cure
everything, and resolve every one of his problems. At the ttiornent, he
can't afford it, but he has great
hopes that he eventually will be able to." Don Juan peered at me with
his piercing eyes. "I told you
that Lucas Coronado's acts are the map of your life," he said. "Believe
you me, they are. Lucas
Coronado pointed out Vitaminol to you, and he did it so powerfully and
painfully that he hurt you and
made you weep."
Don Juan stopped talking then. It was a long and most effective pause.
"And don't tell me that you
don't understand what I mean," he said. "One way or another, we all
have our own version of
Vitaminol."
Who Was Juan
Matus, Really?
THE PART OF my account of meeting don Juan that he didn't want to hear
about was my feelings and
impressions on that fateful day when I walked into his house: the
contradictory clash between my
expectations and the reality of the situation, and the effect that was
caused in me by a cluster of the
most extravagant ideas I had ever heard.
"That is more in the line of confession than in the line of events," he
had said to me once when I tried
to tell him about all this.
"You couldn't be more wrong, don Juan," I began, but I stopped.
Something in the way he looked at
me made me realize that he was right. Whatever I was going to say could
have sounded only like lip
service, flattery. What had taken place on our first real meeting,
however, was of transcendental
importance to me, an event of ultimate consequence.
During my first encounter with don Juan, in the bus depot in Nogales,
Arizona, something of an
unusual nature had happened to me, but it had come to me cushioned in
my concerns with the
presentation of the self. I had wanted to impress don Juan, and in
attempting to do so I had focused all
my attention on the act of selling my wares, so to speak. It was only
months later that a strange residue
of forgotten events began to appear.
One day, out of nowhere, and with no coaxing or coaching on my part, I
recollected with extraordinary
clarity something that had completely bypassed me during my actual
encounter with don Juan. When
he had stopped me from telling him my name, he had peered into my eyes
and had numbed me with
his look. There was infinitely more that 1 could have said to him about
myself. I could have
expounded on my knowledge and worth for hours if his look hadn't
completely cut me off.
In light of this new realization, I reconsidered everything that had
happened to me on that occasion.
My unavoidable conclusion was that I had experienced the interruption
of some mysterious flow that
kept me going, a flow that had never been interrupted before, at least
not in the manner in which don
Juan had done it. When I tried to describe to any of my friends what I
had physically experienced, a
strange perspiration began to cover my entire body, the same
perspiration that I had experienced when
don Juan had given me that look; 1 had been, at that moment, not only
incapable of voicing a single
word, but incapable of having a single thought.
For some time after, I dwelled on the physical sensation of this
interruption, for which I found no
rational explanation. I argued for a while that don Juan must have
hypnotized me, but then my
memory told me that he hadn't given any hypnotic commands, nor had he
made any movements that
could have trapped my attention. In fact, he had merely glanced at me.
It was the intensity of that
glance that had made it appear as if he had stared at me for a long
time. It had obsessed me, and had
rendered me discombobulated at a deep physical level.
When 1 finally had don Juan in front of me again, the first thing I
noticed about him was that he didn't
look at all as I had imagined him during all the time I had tried to
find him. I had fabricated an image
of the man I had met at the bus depot, which 1 perfected every day by
allegedly remembering more
details. In my mind, he was an old man, still very strong and nimble,
yet almost frail. The man facing
me was muscular and decisive. He moved with agility, but not
nimbleness. His steps were firm and, at
the same time, light. He exuded vitality and purpose. My composite
memory was not at all in harmony
with the real thing. 1 thought he had short, white hair and an
extremely dark complexion. His hair was
longer, and not as white as I had imagined. His complexion was not that
dark either. I could have
sworn that his features were birdlike, because of his age. But that was
not so either. His face was full,
almost round. In one glance, the most outstanding feature of the man
looking at me was his dark eyes,
which shone with a peculiar, dancing glow.
Something that had bypassed me completely in my prior assessment of him
was the fact that his total
countenance was that of an athlete. His shoulders were broad, his
stomach flat; he seemed to be
planted firmly on the ground. There was no feebleness to his knees, no
tremor in his upper limbs. I had
imagined detecting a slight tremor in his head and arms, as if he were
nervous and unsteady. I had also
imagined him to be about five feet six inches tall, three inches
shorter than his actual height.
Don Juan didn't seem surprised to see me. I wanted to tell him how
difficult it had been for me to find
him. I would have liked to be congratulated by him on my titanic
efforts, but he just laughed at me,
teasingly.
"Your efforts are not important," he said. "What's important is that
you found my place. Sit down, sit
down," he said, enticing me, pointing to one of the freight boxes under
his ramada and Patting me on
my back; but it wasn't a friendly pat.
It felt like he had slapped me on the back although he never actually
touched me. His quasi-slap
created a strange, unstable sensation, which appeared abruptly and
disappeared before I had time to
grasp what it was. What was left in me instead was a strange peace. I
felt at ease. My mind was crystal
clear. I had no expectations, no desires. My usual nervousness and
sweaty hands, the marks of my
existence, were suddenly gone.
"Now you will understand everything I am going to say to you," don Juan
said to me, looking into my
eyes as he had done in the bus depot.
Ordinarily, I would have found his statement perfunctory, perhaps
rhetorical, but when he said it, 1
could only assure him repeatedly and sincerely that I would understand
anything he said to me. He
looked me in the eyes again with a ferocious intensity.
"I am Juan Matus," he said, sitting down on another freight box, a few
feet away, facing me. "This is
my name, and I voice it because with it, 1 am making a bridge for you
to cross over to where I am."
He stared at me for an instant before he started talking again.
"I am a sorcerer," he went on. "1 belong to a lineage of sorcerers that
has lasted for twenty-seven
generations. 1 am the nagual of my generation."
He explained to me that the leader of a party of sorcerers like himself
was called the "nagual," and that
this was a generic term applied to a sorcerer in each generation who
had some specific energetic
configuration that set him apart from the others. Not in terms of
superiority or inferiority, or anything
of the like, but in terms of the capacity to be responsible.
"Only the nagual," he said, "has the energetic capacity to be
responsible for the fate of his cohorts.
Every one of his cohorts knows this, and they accede. The nagual can be
a man or a woman. In the
time of the sorcerers who were the founders of my lineage, women were,
by rule, the naguals. Their
natural pragmatism-the product of their femaleness-led my lineage into
pits of practicalities from
which they could barely emerge. Then, the males took over, and led my
lineage into pits of imbecility
from which we are barely emerging now.
"Since the time of the nagual Lujan, who lived about two hundred years
ago," he went on, "there has
been a joint nexus of effort, shared by a man and a woman. The nagual
man brings sobriety; the
nagual woman brings innovation."
I wanted to ask him at this point if there was a woman in his life who
was the nagual, but the depth of
my concentration didn't allow me to formulate the question. Instead, he
himself formulated it for me.
"Is there a nagual woman in my life?" he asked. "No, there isn't any. 1
am a solitary sorcerer. I have
my cohorts, though. At the moment, they are not around."
A thought came with uncontainable vigor into my mind. At that instant,
I remembered what some
people in Yuma had told me about don Juan running with a party of
Mexican men who seemed to be
very versed in sorcery maneuvers.
"To be a sorcerer," don Juan continued, "doesn't mean to practice
witchcraft, or to work to affect
people, or to be possessed by demons. To be a sorcerer means to reach a
level of awareness that makes
inconceivable things available. The term 'sorcery' is inadequate to
express what sorcerers do, and so is
the term 'shamanism.' The actions of sorcerers are exclusively in the
realm of the abstract, the
impersonal. Sorcerers struggle to reach a goal that has nothing to do
with the quests of an average
man. Sorcerers' aspirations are to reach infinity, and to be conscious
of it."
Don Juan continued, saying that the task of sorcerers was to face
infinity, and that they plunged into it
daily, as a fisherman plunges into the sea. It was such an overwhelming
task that sorcerers had to state
their names before venturing into it. He reminded me that, in Nogales,
he had stated his name before
any interaction had taken place between us. He had, in this manner,
asserted his individuality in front
of the infinite.
I understood with unequaled clarity what he was explaining. I didn't
have to ask him for clarifications.
My keenness of thought should have surprised me, but it didn't at all.
1 knew at that moment that I had
always been crystal clear, merely playing dumb for someone else's
benefit.
"Without you knowing anything about it," he continued, "I started you
on a traditional quest. You are
the man I was looking for. My quest ended when I found you, and yours
when you found me now."
Don Juan explained to me that, as the nagual of his generation, he was
in search of an individual who
had a specific energetic configuration, adequate to ensure the
continuity of his lineage. He said that at
a given moment, the nagual of each generation for twenty-seven
successive generations had entered
into the most nerve-racking experience of their lives: the search for
succession.
Looking me straight in the eyes, he stated that what made human beings
into sorcerers was their
capacity to perceive energy directly as it flows in the universe, and
that when sorcerers perceive a
human being in this fashion, they see a luminous ball, or a luminous
egg-shaped figure. His contention
was that human beings are not only capable of seeing energy directly as
it flows in the universe, but
that they actually do see it, although they are not deliberately
conscious of seeing it.
He made right then the most crucial distinction for sorcerers, the one
between the general state of
being aware and the particular state of being deliberately conscious of
something. He categorized all
human beings as possessing awareness, in a general sense, which permits
them to see energy directly,
and he categorized sorcerers as the only human beings who were
deliberately conscious of seeing
energy directly. He then defined "awareness" as energy and "energy" as
constant flux, a luminous
vibration that was never stationary, but always moving of its own
accord. He asserted that when a
human being was seen, he was perceived as a conglomerate of energy
fields held together by the most
mysterious force in the universe: a binding, agglutinating, vibratory
force that holds energy fields
together in a cohesive unit. He further explained that the nagual was a
specific sorcerer in each
generation whom the other sorcerers were able to see, not as a single
luminous ball but as a set of two
spheres of luminosity fused, one over the other.
"This feature of doubleness," he continued, "permits the nagual to
perform maneuvers that are rather
difficult for an average sorcerer. For example, the nagual is a
connoisseur of the force that holds us
together as a cohesive unit. The nagual could place his full attention,
for a fraction of a second, on that
force, and numb the other person. I did that to you at the bus depot
because I wanted to stop your
barrage of me, me, me, me, me, me, me. I wanted you to find me and cut
the crap.
"The sorcerers of my lineage maintained," don Juan went on, "that the
presence of a double being-a
nagual-is sufficient to clarify things for us. What's odd about it is
that the presence of the nagual
clarifies things in a veiled fashion. It happened to me when I met the
nagual Julian, my teacher. His
presence baffled me for years, because every time I was around him, I
could think clearly, but when he
moved away, I became the same idiot that I had always been.
"I had the privilege," don Juan went on, "of actually meeting and
dealing with two naguals. For six
years, at the request of the nagual Elias, the teacher of the nagual
Julian, I went to live with him. He is
the one who reared me, so to speak. It was a rare privilege. I had a
ringside seat for watching what a
nagual really is. The nagual Elias and the nagual Julian were two men
of tremendously different
temperaments. The nagual Elias was quieter, and lost in the darkness of
his silence. The nagual Julian
was bombastic, a compulsive talker. It seemed that he lived to dazzle
women. There were more
women in his life than one would care to think about. Yet both of them
were astoundingly alike in that
there was nothing inside them. They were empty. The nagual Elias was a
collection of astounding,
haunting stories of regions unknown. The nagual Julian was a collection
of stories that would have
anybody in stitches, sprawled on the ground laughing. Whenever I tried
to pin down the man in them,
the real man, the way I could pinpoint the man in my father, the man in
everybody I knew, I round
nothing. Instead of a real person inside them, there was a bunch of
stories about persons unknown.
Each of the two men had his own flair, but the end result was just the
same: emptiness, an emptiness
that reflected not the world, but infinity."
Don Juan went on explaining that the moment one crosses a peculiar
threshold in infinity, either
deliberately or, as in my case, unwittingly, everything that happens to
one from then on is no longer
exclusively in one's own domain, but enters into the realm of infinity.
"When we met in Arizona, both of us crossed a peculiar threshold," he
continued. "And this threshold
was not decided by either one of us, but by infinity itself. Infinity
is everything that surrounds us." He
said this and made a broad gesture with his arms. "The sorcerers of my
lineage call it infinity, the
spirit, the dark sea of awareness, and say that it is something that
exists out there and rules our lives."
I was truly capable of comprehending everything he was saying, and yet
1 didn't know what the hell
he was talking about. I asked if crossing the threshold had been an
accidental event, born of
unpredictable circumstances ruled by chance. He answered that his steps
and mine were guided by
infinity, and that circumstances that seemed to be ruled by chance were
in essence ruled by the active
side, of infinity. He called it intent.
"What put you and me together," he went on, "was the intent of
infinity. It is impossible to determine
what this intent of infinity is, yet it is there, as palpable as you
and 1 are. Sorcerers say that it is a
tremor in the air. The advantage of sorcerers is to know that the
tremor in the air exists, and to
acquiesce to it without any further ado. For sorcerers, there's no
pondering, wondering, or speculating.
They know that all they have is the possibility of merging with the
intent of infinity, and they just do
it."
Nothing could have been clearer to me than those statements. As far as
I was concerned, the truth of
what he was telling me was so self-evident that it didn't permit me to
ponder how such absurd
assertions could have sounded so rational. 1 knew that everything that
don Juan was saying was not
only a truism, but 1 could corroborate it by referring to my own being.
I knew about everything that he
was saying. I had the sensation that I had lived every twist of his
description.
Our interchange ended then. Something seemed to deflate inside me. It
was at that instant that the
thought crossed my mind that I was losing my marbles. I had been
blinded by weird statements and
had lost every conceivable sense of objectivity. Accordingly, I left
don Juan's house in a real hurry,
feeling threatened to the core by an unseen enemy. Don Juan walked me
to my car, fully cognizant of
what was going on inside me.
"Don't worry," he said, putting his hand on my shoulder. You're not
going crazy. What you felt was a
gentle tap of infinity."
As time went by, I was able to corroborate what don Juan had said about
his two teachers. Don Juan
Matus was exactly as he had described those two men to be. I would go
as far as saying that he was an
extraordinary blend of both of them: on the one hand, extremely quiet
and introspective; on the other,
extremely open and funny. The most accurate statement about what a
nagual is, which he voiced the
day I found him, was that a nagual is empty, and that that emptiness
doesn't reflect the world, but
reflects infinity.
Nothing could have been more true than this in reference to don Juan
Matus. His emptiness reflected
infinity. There was no boisterousness on his part, or assertions about
the self. There was not a speck of
a need to have either grievances or remorse. His was the emptiness of a
warrior-traveler, seasoned to
the point where he doesn't take anything for granted. A
warrior-traveler who doesn't underestimate or
overestimate anything. A quiet, disciplined fighter whose elegance is
so extreme that no one, no matter
how hard they try to look, will ever find the seam where all that
complexity has come together.
The End of an Era
The Deep Concerns 0f Everyday Life
I WENT TO Sonora to see don Juan. I had to discuss with him the most
serious event of that moment
in my life. I needed his advice. When I arrived at his house, I barely
went through the formality of
greeting him. I sat down and blurted out my turmoil.
"Calm down, calm down," don Juan said. "Nothing can be that bad!"
"What's happening to me, don Juan?" I asked. It was a rhetorical
question on my part.
"It is the workings of infinity," he replied. "Something happened to
your way of perceiving the day
you met me. Your sensation of nervousness is due to the subliminal
realization that your time is up.
You are aware of it, but not deliberately conscious of it. You feel the
absence of time, and that makes
you impatient. I know this, for it happened to me and to all the
sorcerers of my lineage. At a given
time, a whole era in my life, or their lives, ended. Now it's your
turn. You have simply run out of
time." He demanded then a total account of whatever had happened to me.
He said that it had to be a
full account, sparing no details. He wasn't after sketchy descriptions.
He wanted me to air the full
impact of what was troubling me.
"Let's have this talk, as they say in your world, by the book," he
said. "Let us enter into the realm of
formal talks."
Don Juan explained that the shamans of ancient Mexico had developed the
idea of formal versus
informal talks, and used both of them as devices for teaching and
guiding their disciples. Formal talks
were, for them, summations that they made from time to time of
everything that they had taught or
said to their disciples. Informal talks were daily elucidations in
which things were explained without
reference to anything but the phenomenon itself under scrutiny.
"Sorcerers keep nothing to themselves," he continued. "To empty
themselves in this fashion is a
sorcerers' maneuver. It leads them to abandon the fortress of the self."
I began my story, telling don Juan that the circumstances of my life
have never permitted me to be
introspective. As far back in my past as I can remember, my daily life
has been filled to the brim with
pragmatic problems that have clamored for immediate resolution. I
remember my favorite uncle
telling me that he was appalled at having found out that I had never
received a gift for Christmas or
for my birthday. I had come to live in my father's family's home not
too long before he made that
statement. He commiserated with me about the unfairness of my
situation. He even apologized,
although it had nothing to do with him.
"It is disgusting, my boy," he said, shaking with feeling. "I want you
to know that I am behind you one
hundred percent when-ever the moment comes to redress wrongdoings."
He insisted over and over that I had to forgive the people who had
wronged me. From what he said, I
formed the impression that he wanted me to confront my father with his
finding and accuse him of
indolence and neglect, and then, of course, forgive him. He failed to
see that I didn't feel wronged at
all. What he was asking me to do required an introspective nature that
would make me respond to the
barbs of psychological mistreatment once they were pointed out to me. I
assured my uncle that I was
going to think about it, but not at the moment, because at that very
instant, my girlfriend, from the
living room where she was waiting for me, was signaling me desperately
to hurry up.
1 never had the opportunity to think about it, but my uncle must have
talked to my father, because I
got a gift from him, a package neatly wrapped up, with ribbon and all,
and a little card that said
"Sorry." I curiously and eagerly ripped the wrappings. There was a
cardboard box, and inside it there
was a beautiful toy, a tiny boat with a winding key attached to the
steam pipe. It could be used by
children to play with while they took baths in the bathtub. My father
had thoroughly forgotten that I
was already fifteen years old and, for all practical purposes, a man.
Since I had reached my adult years still incapable of serious
introspection, it was quite a novelty when
one day years later I found myself in the throes of a strange emotional
agitation, which seemed to
increase as time went by. I discarded it, attributing it to natural
processes of the mind or the body that
enter into action periodically, for no reason at all, or are perhaps
triggered by biochemical processes
within the body itself. I thought nothing of it. However, the agitation
increased and its pressure forced
me to believe that I had arrived at a moment in life when what I needed
was a drastic change. There
was something in me that demanded a rearrangement of my life. This urge
to rearrange everything was
familiar. I had felt it in the past, but it had been dormant for a long
time.
I was committed to studying anthropology, and this commitment was so
strong that not to study
anthropology was never part of my proposed drastic change. It didn't
occur to me to drop out of school
and do something else. The first thing that came to mind was that I
needed to change schools and go
somewhere else, far away from Los Angeles.
Before I undertook a change of that magnitude, I wanted to test the
waters, so to speak. I enrolled in a
full summer load of classes at a school in another city. The most
important course,for me, was a class
in anthropology taught by a foremost authority on the Indians of the
Andean region. It was my belief
that if I focused my studies on an area that was emotionally accessible
to me I would have a better
opportunity to do anthropological field-work in a serious manner when
the time came. I conceived of
rny knowledge of South America as giving me a better entree into any
given Indian society there.
At the same time that I registered for school, I got a job as a
research assistant to a psychiatrist who
was the older brother of one of my friends. He wanted to do a content
analysis of excerpts from some
innocuous tapes of question-and-answer sessions with young men and
women about their problems
arising from overwork in school, unfulfilled expectations, not being
understood at home, frustrating
love affairs, etc. The tapes were over five years old and were going to
be destroyed, but before they
were, random numbers were allotted to each reel, and following a table
of random numbers, reels were
picked by the psychiatrist and his research assistants and scanned for
excerpts that could be analyzed.
On the first day of class in the new school, the anthropology professor
talked about his academic bona
fides and dazzled his students with the scope of his knowledge and his
publications. He was a tall,
slender man in his mid-forties, with shifty blue eyes. What struck me
the most about his physical
appearance was that his eyes were rendered enormous behind glasses for
correcting far-sightedness,
and each of his eyes gave the impression that it was rotating in an
opposite direction from the other
when he moved his head as he spoke. I knew that that couldn't be true;
it was, however, a very
disconcerting image. He was extremely well dressed for an
anthropologist, who in my day were
famous for their super-casual attire. Archaeologists, for example, were
described by their students as
creatures lost in carbon-14 dating who never took a bath.
However, for reasons unbeknownst to me, what really set him apart
wasn't his physical appearance, or
his erudition, but his speech pattern. He pronounced every word as
clearly as anyone I had ever heard,
and emphasized certain words by elongating them- He had a markedly
foreign intonation, but I knew
that it was an affectation. He pronounced certain phrases like an
Englishman and others like a
revivalist preacher.
He fascinated me from the start despite his enormous pomposity. His
self-importance was so blatant
that it ceased to be an issue after the first five minutes of his
class, which were always bombastic
displays of knowledge cushioned in wild assertions about himself. His
command of the audience was
sensational. None of the students I talked to felt anything but supreme
admiration for this
extraordinary man. I earnestly thought that everything was moving along
nicely, and that this move to
another school in another city was going to be easy and uneventful, but
thoroughly positive. I liked my
new surroundings.
At my job, I became completely engrossed in listening to the tapes, to
the point where I would sneak
into the office and listen not to excerpts, but to entire tapes. What
fascinated me beyond measure, at
first, was the fact that I heard myself speaking in every one of those
tapes. As the weeks went by and I
heard more tapes, my fascination turned to sheer horror. Every line
that was spoken, including the
psychiatrist's questions, was mine. Those people were speaking from the
depths of my own being. The
revulsion that I experienced was something unique for me. Never had I
dreamed that I could be
repeated endlessly in every man or woman I heard speaking on the tapes.
My sense of individuality,
which had been ingrained in me from birth, tumbled down hopelessly
under the impact of this colossal
discovery.
I began then an odious process of trying to restore myself. I
unconsciously made a ludicrous attempt at
introspection; I tried to wriggle out of my predicament by endlessly
talking to myself. I rehashed in
my mind all the possible rationales that would sup-Port my sense of
uniqueness, and then talked out
loud to myself about them. I even experienced something quite
revolutionary to me: waking myself up
many times by my loud talking in my sleep, discoursing about my value
and distinctiveness.
Then, one horrifying day, I suffered another deadly blow. In the wee
hours of the night, I was woken
up by an insistent knocking on my door. It wasn't a mild, timid knock,
but what my friends called a
"Gestapo knock." The door was about to come off its hinges. I jumped
out of bed and opened the
peephole. The person who was knocking on the door was my boss, the
psychiatrist. My being his
younger brother's friend seemed to have created an avenue of
communication with him. He had
befriended me without any hesitation, and there he was on my doorstep.
I turned on the light and
opened the door.
"Please come in," I said. "What happened?"
It was three o'clock in the morning, and by his livid expression, and
his sunken eyes, I knew that he
was deeply upset. He came in and sat down. His pride and joy, his black
mane of longish hair, was
falling all over his face. He didn't make any effort to comb his hair
back, the way he usually wore it. I
liked him very much because he was an older version of my friend in Los
Angeles, with black, heavy
eyebrows, penetrating brown eyes, a square jaw, and thick lips. His
upper lip seemed to have an extra
fold inside, which at times, when he smiled in a certain way, gave the
impression that he had a double
upper lip. He always talked about the shape of his nose, which he
described as an impertinent, pushy
nose. I thought he was extremely sure of himself, and opinionated
beyond belief. He claimed that in
his profession those qualities were winning cards.
"What happened!" he repeated with a tone of mockery, his double upper
lip trembling uncontrollably.
"Anyone can tell that everything has happened to me tonight."
He sat down in a chair. He seemed dizzy, disoriented, looking for
words. He got up and went to the
couch, slumping down on it.
"It's not only that I have the responsibility of my patients," he went
on, "but my research grant, my
wife and kids, and now another fucking pressure has been added to it,
and what burns me
up is that it was my own fault, my own stupidity for putting my trust
in a stupid cunt!
"I'll tell you, Carlos," he continued, "there's nothing more appalling,
disgusting, fucking nauseating
than the insensitivity of women. I'm not a woman hater, you know that!
But at this moment it seems to
me that every single cunt is just a cunt! Duplicitous and vile!"
I didn't know what to say. Whatever he was telling me didn't need
affirmation or contradiction. I
wouldn't have dared to contradict him anyway. I didn't have the
ammunition for it. I was very tired. I
wanted to go back to sleep, but he kept on talking as if his life
depended on it.
"You know Theresa Manning, don't you?" he asked me in a forceful,
accusatory manner.
For an instant, I believed that he was accusing me of having something
to do with his young, beautiful
student-secretary. Without giving me time to respond, he continued
talking.
"Theresa Manning is an asshole. She's a schnook! A stupid,
inconsiderate woman who has no
incentive in life other than balling anyone with a bit of fame and
notoriety. I thought she was
intelligent and sensitive. I thought she had something, some
understanding, some empathy, something
that one would like to share, or hold as precious all to oneself. I
don't know, but that's the picture that
she painted for me, when in reality she's lewd and degenerate, and, I
may add, incurably gross."
As he kept on talking, a strange picture began to emerge. Apparently,
the psychiatrist had just had a
bad experience involving his secretary.
"Since the day she came to work for me," he went on, "I knew that she
was attracted to me sexually,
but she never came around to saying it. It was all in the innuendos and
the looks. Well, fuck it! This
afternoon I got sick and tired of pussyfooting around and I came right
to the point. I went up to her
desk and said, 'I know what you want, and you know what I want.'"
He went into a great, elaborate rendition of how forcefully he had told
her that he expected her in his
apartment across the street from school at 11:30 P.M., and that he did
not alter his routines for
anybody, that he read and worked and drank wine until one o'clock, at
which time he retired to the
bedroom. He kept an apartment in town as well as the house he and his
wife and children lived in in
the suburbs.
"1 was so confident that the affair was going to pan out, turn into
something memorable," he said and
sighed. His voice acquired the mellow tone of someone confiding
something intimate. "I even gave
her the key to my apartment," he said, and his voice cracked.
"Very dutifully, she came at eleven-thirty," he went on. "She let
herself in with her own key, and
sneaked into the bedroom like a shadow. That excited me terribly. I
knew that she wasn't going to be
any trouble for me. She knew her role. She probably fell asleep on the
bed. Or maybe she watched TV.
I became engrossed in my work, and 1 didn't care what the fuck she did.
I knew that I had her in the
bag.
"But the moment 1 came into the bedroom," he continued, his voice tense
and constricted, as if he
were morally offended, "Theresa jumped on me like an animal and went
for my dick. She didn't even
give me time to put down the bottle and the two glasses I was carrying.
I had enough presence of mind
to put my two Baccarat glasses on the floor without breaking them. The
bottle flew across the room
when she grabbed my balls as if they were made out of rocks. I wanted
to hit her. I actually yelled in
pain, but that didn't faze her. She giggled insanely, because she
thought I was being cute and sexy. She
said so, as if to placate me."
Shaking his head with contained rage, he said that the woman was so
friggin' eager and utterly selfish
that she didn't take into account that a man needs a moment's peace, he
needs to feel at ease, at home,
in friendly surroundings. Instead of showing consideration and
understanding, as her role demanded,
Theresa Manning pulled his sexual organs out of his pants with the
expertise of someone who had
done it hundreds of times.
"The result of all this shit," he said, "was that my sensuality
retreated in horror. I was emotionally
emasculated. My body abhorred that fucking woman, instantly. Yet my
lust prevented me from
throwing her out in the street."
He said that he decided then that instead of losing face by his
impotence, miserably, the way he was
bound to, he would have oral sex with her, and make her have an
orgasm-put her at his mercy-but his
body had rejected the woman so thoroughly that he couldn't do it.
"The woman was not even beautiful anymore," he said, "but plain.
Whenever she's dressed up, the
clothes that she wears hide the bulges of her hips. She actually looks
okay. But when she's naked, she's
a sack of bulging white flesh! The slenderness that she presents when
she's clothed is fake. It doesn't
exist."
Venom poured out of the psychiatrist in ways that I would never have
imagined. He was shaking with
rage. He wanted desperately to appear cool, and kept on smoking
cigarette after cigarette.
He said that the oral sex was even more maddening and disgusting, and
that he was just about to vomit
when the friggin' woman actually kicked him in the belly, rolled him
out of his own bed onto the floor,
and called him an impotent faggot.
At this point in his narration, the psychiatrist's eyes were burning
with hatred. His mouth was
quivering. He was pale.
"I have to use your bathroom," he said. "I want to take a bath. I am
reeking. Believe it or not, I have
pussy breath."
He was actually weeping, and I would have given anything in the world
not to be there. Perhaps it was
my fatigue, or the mesmeric quality of his voice, or the inanity of the
situation that created the illusion
that I was listening not to the psychiatrist but to the voice of a male
supplicant on one of his tapes
complaining about minor problems turned into gigantic affairs by
talking obsessively about them. My
ordeal ended around nine o'clock in one morning. It was time for me to
go to class and time for the
psychiatrist to go and see his own shrink.
I went to class then, highly charged with a burning anxiety and a
tremendous sensation of discomfort
and uselessness. There, I received the final blow, the blow that caused
my attempt at a drastic change
to collapse. No volition of my own was involved in its collapse, which
just happened not only as if it
had been scheduled but as if its progression had been accelerated by
some unknown hand.
The anthropology professor began his lecture about a group of Indians
from the high plateaus of
Bolivia and Peru, the aymara'. He called them the
"ey-MEH-ra," elongating the name as if his pronunciation of it was the
only accurate one in existence.
He said that the making of chicha, which is pronounced "CHEE-cha," but
which he pronounced
"CHAHI-cha," an alcoholic beverage made from fermented corn, was in the
realm of a sect of priestesses
who were considered semidivine by the aymara’. He said, in a
tone of revelation, that those
women were in charge of making the cooked corn into a mush ready for
fermentation by chewing and
spitting it, adding in this manner an enzyme found in human saliva. The
whole class shrieked with
contained horror at the mention of human saliva.
The professor seemed to be tickled pink. He laughed in little spurts.
It was the chuckle of a nasty
child. He went on to say that the women were expert chewers, and he
called them the "chahi-cha
chewers." He looked at the front row of the classroom, where most of
the young women were sitting,
and he delivered his punch line.
"I was p-r-r-rivileged," he said with a strange quasi-foreign
intonation, "to be asked to sleep with one
of the chahi-cha chewers. The art of chewing the chahi-cha mush makes
them develop the muscles
around their throat and cheeks to the point that they can do wonders
with them."
He looked at his bewildered audience and paused for a long time,
punctuating the pause with his
giggles. "I'm sure you get my drift," he said, and went into fits of
hysterical laughter.
The class went wild with the professor's innuendo. The lecture was
interrupted by at least five minutes
of laughter and a barrage
of questions that the professor declined to answer, emitting more silly
giggles.
I felt so compressed by the pressure of the tapes, the psychiatrist's
story, and the professor's "chahi-cha
chewers" that in one instantaneous sweep I quit the job, quit school,
and drove back to L.A.
"Whatever happened to me with the psychiatrist and the professor of
anthropology," I said to don
Juan, "has plunged me into an unknown emotional state. I can only call
it introspection. I've been
talking to myself without stop."
"Your malady is a very simple one," don Juan said, shaking with
laughter.
Apparently my situation delighted him. It was a delight I could not
share, because I failed to see the
humor in it.
"Your world is coming to an end," he said. "It is the end of an era for
you. Do you think that the
world you have known all your life is going to leave you peacefully,
without any fuss or muss? No!
It will wriggle underneath you, and hit you with its tail."
The View I Could
Not Stand
LOS ANGELES HAD always been home for me. My choice of Los Angeles had
not been
volitional. To me, staying in Los Angeles has always been the
equivalent of having been born
there, perhaps even more than that. My emotional attachment to it has
always been total. My love
for the city of Los Angeles has always been so intense, so much a part
of me, that I have never
had to voice it. I have never had to review it or renew it, ever.
1 had, in Los Angeles, my family of friends. They were to me part of my
immediate milieu,
meaning that I had accepted them totally, the way 1 had accepted the
city. One of my friends
made the statement once, half in fun, that all of us hated each other
cordially. Doubtless, they
could afford feelings like that themselves, for they had other
emotional arrangements at their disposal,
like parents and wives and husbands. 1 had only my friends in Los
Angeles.
For whatever reason, 1 was each one's confidant. Every one of them
poured out to me their
problems and vicissitudes. My friends were so close to me that I had
never acknowledged their
problems or tribulations as anything but normal. I could talk for hours
to them about the very
same things that had horrified me in the psychiatrist and his tapes.
Furthermore, 1 had never realized that every one of my friends was
astoundingly similar to the
psychiatrist and the professor of anthropology. 1 had never noticed how
tense my friends were.
All of them smoked compulsively, like the psychiatrist, but it had
never been obvious to me
because 1 smoked just as much myself and was just as tense. Their
affectation in speech was
another thing that had never been apparent to me, although it was
there. They always affected a
twang of the western United States, but they were very aware of what
they were doing. Nor had I
ever noticed their blatant innuendos about a sensuality that they were
incapable of feeling, except
intellectually.
The real confrontation with myself began when 1 was faced with the
dilemma of my friend Pete.
He came to see me, all battered. He had a swollen mouth and a red and
swollen left eye that had
obviously been hit and was turning blue already. Before 1 had time to
ask him what had happened
to him, he blurted out that his wife, Patricia, had gone to a real
estate brokers' convention over the
weekend, in relation to her job, and that something terrible had
happened to her. The way Pete
looked, I thought that perhaps Patricia had been injured, or even
killed, in an accident.
"Is she all right?" 1 asked, genuinely concerned.
"Of course she's all right," he barked. "She's a bitch and a whore, and
nothing happens to bitchwhores
except that they get fucked, and they like it!"
Pete was rabid. He was shaking, nearly convulsing. His bushy, curly
hair was sticking out every
which way. Usually, he combed it carefully and slicked his natural
curls into place. Now, he
looked as wild as a Tasmanian devil.
"Everything was normal until today," my friend continued. 'Then, this
morning, after 1 came out
of the shower, she snapped a towel at my naked butt, and that's what
made me aware of her shit! I
knew instantly that she'd been fucking someone else."
I was puzzled by his line of reasoning. I questioned him further, 1
asked him how snapping a towel
could reveal anything of this sort to anybody.
"It wouldn't reveal anything to assholes!" he said with pure venom in
his voice. "But I know Patricia,
and on Thursday, before she went to the brokers' convention, she could
not snap a towel! In fact, she
has never been able to snap a towel in all the time we've been married.
Somebody must have taught
her to do it, while they were naked! So I grabbed her by the throat and
choked the truth out of her!
Yes! She's fucking her boss!"
Pete said that he went to Patricia's office to have it out with her
boss, but the man was heavily
protected by bodyguards. They threw him out into the parking lot. He
wanted to smash the windows
of the office, throw rocks at them, but the bodyguards said that if he
did that, he'd land in jail, or even
worse, he'd get a bullet in his head.
"Are they the ones who beat you up, Pete?" I asked him.
"No," he said, dejected. "I walked down the street and went into the
sales office of a used car lot. I
punched the first salesman who came to talk to me. The man was shocked,
but he didn't get angry. He
said, 'Calm down, sir, calm down! There's room for negotiation.' When I
punched him again in the
mouth, he got pissed off. He was a big guy, and he hit me in the mouth
and the eye and knocked me
out. When I came to my senses," Pete continued, "I was lying on the
couch in their office. I heard an
ambulance approaching. 1 knew they were coming for me, so I got up and
ran out. Then I came to see
you."
He began to weep uncontrollably. He got sick to his stomach. He was a
mess. 1 called his wife, and in
less than ten minutes she was in the apartment. She kneeled in front of
Pete and swore that she loved
only him, that everything else she did was pure imbecility, and that
theirs was a love that was a matter
of life or death-The others were nothing. She didn't even remember
them. Both of them wept to their
hearts' content, and of course they forgave each other. Patricia was
wearing sunglasses to hide the
hematoma by her right eye where Pete had hit her-Pete was left-handed.
Both of them were oblivious
to my presence, and when they left, they didn't even know I was there.
They just walked out, leaving
the door open, hugging each other.
Life seemed to continue for me as it always had. My friends acted with
me as they always did. We
were, as usual, involved in going to parties, or the movies, or just
simply "chewing the fat," or looking
for restaurants where they offered "all you can eat" for the price of
one meal. However, despite this
pseudo-normality, a strange new factor seemed to have entered my life.
As the subject who was
experiencing it, it appeared to me that, all of a sudden, I had become
extremely narrow-minded. I had
begun to judge my friends in the same way I had judged the psychiatrist
and the professor of
anthropology. Who was I, anyway, to set myself up in judgment of anyone
else?
I felt an immense sense of guilt. To judge my friends created a mood
previously unknown to me. But
what I considered to be even worse was that not only was I judging
them, I was finding their problems
and tribulations astoundingly banal. I was the same man; they were my
same friends. I had heard their
complaints and renditions of their situations hundreds of times, and I
hadn't ever felt anything except a
deep identification with whatever I was listening to. My horror at
discovering this new mood in
myself was staggering.
The aphorism that when it rains it pours couldn't have been more true
for me at that moment in my
life. The total disintegration of my way of life came when my friend
Rodrigo Cummings asked me
to take him to the Burbank airport; from there he was going to fly to
New York. It was a very
dramatic and desperate Maneuver on his part. He considered it his
damnation to be caught in Los
Angeles. For the rest of his friends, it was a big joke, the fact that
he had tried to drive across
country to New York various times, and every time he had tried to do
it, his car had broken
down. Once, he had gone as far as Salt Lake City before his car
collapsed; it needed a new motor.
He had to junk it there. Most of the time, his cars petered out in the
suburbs of Los Angeles.
"What happens to your cars, Rodrigo?" I asked him once, driven by
truthful curiosity.
"I don't know," he replied with a veiled sense of guilt. And then, in a
voice worthy of the
professor of anthropology in his role of revivalist preacher, he said,
"Perhaps it is because when I
hit the road, I accelerate because I feel free. I usually open all my
windows. I want the wind to
blow on my face. I feel that I'm a kid in search of something new."
It was obvious to me that his cars, which were always jalopies, were no
longer capable of
speeding, and he just simply burned their motors out.
From Salt Lake City, Rodrigo had returned to Los Angeles, hitchhiking.
Of course, he could have
hitchhiked to New York, but it had never occurred to him. Rodrigo
seemed to be afflicted by the
same condition that afflicted me: an unconscious passion for Los
Angeles, which he wanted to
refuse at any cost.
Another time, his car was in excellent mechanical condition. It could
have made the whole trip
with ease, but Rodrigo was apparently not in any condition to leave Los
Angeles. He drove as far
as San Bernardino, where he went to see a movie-The Ten Commandments.
This movie, for
reasons known only to Rodrigo, created in him an unbeatable nostalgia
for L.A. He came back,
and wept, telling me how the fucking city of Los Angeles had built a
fence around him that didn't
let him go through. His wife was delighted that he hadn't gone, and his
girlfriend, Melissa, was
even more delighted, although also chagrined because she had to give
back the dictionaries that
he had given her.
His last desperate attempt to reach New York by plane was rendered even
more dramatic because
he borrowed money from his friends to pay for the ticket. He said that
in this fashion, since he
didn't intend to repay them, he was making sure that he wouldn't come
back.
I put his suitcases in the trunk of my car and headed with him for the
Burbank airport. He
remarked that the plane didn't leave until seven o'clock. It was early
afternoon, and we had plenty
of time to 20 and see a movie. Besides, he wanted to take one last look
at
Hollywood Boulevard, the center of our lives and activities.
We went to see an epic in Technicolor and Cinerama. It was a long,
excruciating movie that
seemed to rivet Rodrigo's attention. When we got out of the movie, it
was already getting dark. I
rushed to Burbank in the midst of heavy traffic. He demanded that we go
on surface streets rather
than the freeway, which was jammed at that hour. The plane was just
leaving when we reached
the airport. That was the final straw. Meek and defeated, Rodrigo went
to a cashier and presented
his ticket to get his money back. The cashier wrote down his name and
gave him a receipt and
said that his money would be sent within six to twelve weeks from
Tennessee, where the
accounting offices of the airline were located.
We drove back to the apartment building where we both lived. Since he
hadn't said good-bye to
anybody this time, for fear of losing face, nobody had ever noticed
that he had tried to leave one
more time. The only drawback was that he had sold his car. He asked me
to drive him to his
parents' house, because his dad was going to give him the money he had
spent on the ticket. His
father had always been, as far back as I could remember, the man who
had bailed Rodrigo out of
every problematic situation that he had ever gotten into. The father's
slogan was "Have no fear,
Rodrigo Senior is here!" After he heard Rodrigo's request for a loan to
pay his other loan, the
father looked at my friend with the saddest expression that I had ever
seen. He was having
terrible financial difficulties himself.
Putting his arm around his son's shoulders, he said, "I can't help you
this time, my boy. Now you
should have fear, because Rodrigo Senior is no longer here."
I wanted desperately to identify with my friend, to feel his drama the
way I always had, but I
couldn't. I only focused on the father's statement. It sounded to me so
final that it galvanized me.
I sought don Juan's company avidly. 1 left everything pending in Los
Angeles and made a trip to
Sonora. I told him about the strange mood that I had entered into with
my friends. Sobbing with
remorse, I said to him that I had begun to judge them.
"Don't get so worked up over nothing," don Juan said calmly. "You
already know that a whole era
in your life is coming to an end, but an era doesn't really come to an
end until the king dies."
"What do you mean by that, don Juan?"
"You are the king, and you are just like your friends. That is the
truth that makes you shake in
your boots. One thing you can do is to accept it at face value, which,
of course, you can't do. The
other thing you can do is to say, 'I am not like that, I am not like
that,' and repeat to yourself that
you are not like that. I promise you, however, that a moment will come
when you will realize that
you are like that."
The Unavoidable
Appointment
THERE WAS SOMETHING that kept nagging at me in the back of my mind: I
had to answer a
most important letter I'd received, and I had to do it at any cost.
What had prevented me from
doing it was a mixture of indolence and a deep desire to please. My
anthropologist friend who
was responsible for my meeting don Juan Matus had written me a letter a
couple of months
earlier. He wanted to know how I was doing in my studies of
anthropology, and urged me to pay
him a visit. I composed three long letters. On rereading each of them,
I found them so trite and
obsequious that I tore them up. I couldn't express in them the depth of
my gratitude, the depth of
my feelings for him. rationalized my delay in answering with a genuine
resolve to go to see him
and tell him personally what I was doing with don Juan Matus, but I
kept postponing my
imminent trip because I wasn't sure what it was that I was doing with
don Juan. I wanted someday
to show my friend real results. As it was, I had only vague sketches of
possibilities, which, in his
demanding eyes, wouldn't have been anthropological fieldwork anyway.
One day I found out that he had died. His death brought to me one of
those dangerous silent
depressions. I had no way to express what 1 felt because what 1 was
feeling was not fully formulated
in my mind. It was a mixture of dejection, despondency, and abhorrence
at myself for not having
answered his letter, for not having gone to see him.
I paid a visit to don Juan Matus soon after that. On arriving at his
house, I sat down on one of the
crates under his ramada and tried to search for words that would not
sound banal to express my sense
of dejection over the death of my friend. For reasons incomprehensible
to me, don Juan knew the
origin of my turmoil and the overt reason for my visit to him.
"Yes," don Juan said dryly. "I know that your friend, the
anthropologist who guided you to meet me,
has died. For whatever reasons, I knew exactly the moment he died. I
saw it."
His statements jolted me to my foundations.
"I saw it coming a long time ago. I even told you about it, but you
disregarded what 1 said. I'm sure
that you don't even remember it."
I remembered every word he had said, but it had no meaning for me at
the time he had said it. Don
Juan had stated that an event deeply related to our meeting, but not
part of it, was the fact that he had
seen my anthropologist friend as a dying man.
"I saw death as an outside force already opening your friend," he had
said to me. "Every one of us has
an energetic fissure, an energetic crack below the navel. That crack,
which sorcerers call the gap, is
closed when a man is in his prime."
He had said that, normally, all that is discernible to the sorcerer's
eye is a tenuous discoloration in the
otherwise whitish glow of the luminous sphere. But when a man is close
to dying, that gap becomes
quite apparent. He had assured me that my friend's gap was wide open.
"What is the significance of all this, don Juan?" I had asked
perfunctorily.
"The significance is a deadly one," he had replied. "The spirit was
signaling to me that something was
coming to an end. I thought it was my life that was coming to an end,
and I accepted it as gracefully as
I could. It dawned on me much, much later that
it wasn't my life that was coming to an end, but my entire lineage."
I didn't know what he was talking about. But how could I have taken all
that seriously? As far as I was
concerned, it was, at the time he said it, like everything else in my
life: just talk.
"Your friend himself told you, though not in so many words, that he was
dying," don Juan said. "You
acknowledged what he was saying the way you acknowledged what I said,
but in both cases, you
chose to bypass it."
I had no comments to make. I was overwhelmed by what he was saying. I
wanted to sink into the crate
I was sitting on, to disappear, swallowed up by the earth.
"It's not your fault that you bypass things like this," he went on.
"It's youth. You have so many things
to do, so many people around you. You are not alert. You never learned
to be alert, anyway."
In the vein of defending the last bastion of myself, my idea that I was
watchful, I pointed out to don
Juan that I had been in life-and-death situations that required my
quick wit and vigilance. It wasn't that
I lacked the capacity to be alert, but that I lacked the orientation
for setting an appropriate list of
priorities; therefore, everything was either important or unimportant
to me.
"To be alert doesn't mean to be watchful," don Juan said. "For
sorcerers, to be alert means to be aware
of the fabric of the everyday world that seems extraneous to the
interaction of the moment. On the trip
that you took with your friend before you met me, you noticed only the
details that were obvious. You
didn't notice how his death was absorbing him, and yet something in you
knew it."
I began to protest, to tell him that what he was saying wasn't true.
"Don't hide yourself behind banalities," he said in an accusing tone.
"Stand up. If only for the moment
you are with me, assume responsibility for what you know. Don't get
lost in the extraneous fabric of
the world around you, extraneous to what's going on. If you hadn't been
so concerned with yourself
and your problems, you would have known that that was his last trip.
You would have noticed that he
was closing his accounts, seeing the people who helped him, saying
good-bye to them.
"Your anthropologist friend talked to me once," don Juan went on. "I
remembered him so clearly that I
wasn't surprised at all when he brought you to me at that bus depot. I
couldn't help him when he talked
to me. He wasn't the man I was looking for, but I wished him well from
my sorcerer's emptiness, from
my sorcerer's silence. For this reason, I know that on his last trip,
he was saying thank you to the
people who counted in his life."
I admitted to don Juan that he was so very right, that there had been
so many details that I had been
aware of, but that they hadn't meant a thing to me at the time, such
as, for instance, my friend's ecstasy
in watching the scenery around us. He would stop the car just to watch,
for hours on end, the
mountains in the distance, or the riverbed, or the desert. I discarded
this as the idiotic sentimentality of
a middle-aged man. I even made vague hints to him that perhaps he was
drinking too much. He told
me that in dire cases a drink would allow a man a moment of peace and
detachment, a moment long
enough to savor something unrepeatable.
"That was, for a fact, the trip for his eyes only," don Juan said.
"Sorcerers take such a trip and, in it,
nothing counts except what their eyes can absorb. Your friend was
unburdening himself of everything
superfluous."
I confessed to don Juan that I had disregarded what he had said to me
about my dying friend because,
at an unknown level, I had known that it was true.
"Sorcerers never say things idly," he said. "I am most careful about
what I say to you or to anybody
else. The difference between you and me is that I don't have any time
at all, and I act accordingly. You,
on the other hand, believe that you have all the time in the world, and
you act accordingly. The end
result of our individual behaviors is that I measure everything I do
and say, and you don't."
I conceded that he was right, but I assured him that whatever he was
saying did not alleviate my
turmoil, or my sadness. I blurted out then, uncontrollably, every
nuance of my confused feelings. I told
him that I wasn't in search of advice. I wanted him to prescribe a
sorcerer's way to end my anguish. I
believed I was really interested in getting from him some natural
relaxant, an organic Valium, and I
said so to him. Don Juan shook his head in bewilderment.
"You are too much," he said. "Next you're going to ask for a sorcerer's
medication to remove
everything annoying from you, with no effort at all on your part-just
the effort of swallowing whatever
is given. The more awful the taste, the better the results. That's your
Western man's motto. You want
results-one potion and you're cured.
"Sorcerers face things in a different way," don Juan continued. "Since
they don't have any time to
spare, they give themselves fully to what's in front of them. Your
turmoil is the result of your lack of
sobriety. You didn't have the sobriety to thank your friend properly.
That happens to every one of us.
We never express what we feel, and when we want to, it's too late,
because we have run out of time.
It's not only your friend who ran out of time. You, too, ran out of it.
You should have thanked him
profusely in Arizona. He took the trouble to take you around, and
whether you understand it or not, in
the bus depot he gave you his best shot. But the moment when you should
have thanked him, you
were angry with him-you were judging him, he was nasty to you,
whatever. And then you postponed
seeing him. In reality, what you did was to postpone thanking him. Now
you're stuck with a ghost on
your tail. You'll never be able to pay what you owe him."
I understood the immensity of what he was saying. Never had I faced my
actions in such a light. In
fact, I had never thanked anyone, ever. Don Juan pushed his barb even
deeper. "Your friend knew that
he was dying," he said. "He wrote you one final letter to find out
about your doings. Perhaps unbeknownst
to him, or to you, you were his last thought."
The weight of don Juan's words was too much for my shoulders. I
collapsed. I felt that I had to lie
down. My head was spinning. Maybe it was the setting. I had made the
terrible mistake of arriving at
don Juan's house in the late afternoon. The setting sun seemed
astoundingly golden, and the reflections
on the bare mountains to the east of don Juan's house were gold and
purple. The sky didn't have a
speck of a cloud. Nothing seemed to move. It was as if the whole world
were hiding, but its presence
was overpowering. The quietness of the Sonoran desert was like a
dagger. It went to the marrow of my
bones. I wanted to leave, to get in my car and drive away. I wanted to
be in the city, get lost in its
noise.
"You are having a taste of infinity," don Juan said with grave
finality. "I know it, because I have been
in your shoes. You want to run away, to plunge into something human,
warm, contradictory, stupid,
who cares? You want to forget the death of your friend. But infinity
won't let you." His voice
mellowed. "It has gripped you in its merciless clutches."
"What can I do now, don Juan?" I asked.
"The only thing you can do," don Juan said, "is to keep the memory of
your friend fresh, to keep it
alive for the rest of your life and perhaps even beyond. Sorcerers
express, in this fashion, the thanks
that they can no longer voice. You may think it is a silly way, but
that's the best sorcerers can do."
It was my own sadness, doubtless, which made me believe that the
ebullient don Juan was as sad as I
was. I discarded the thought immediately. That couldn't be possible.
"Sadness, for sorcerers, is not personal," don Juan said, again
erupting into my thoughts. "It is not
quite sadness. It's a wave of energy that comes from the depths of the
cosmos, and hits sorcerers when
they are receptive, when they are like radios, capable of catching
radio waves.
"The sorcerers of olden times, who gave us the entire format of
sorcery, believed that there is sadness in the universe, as a force, a
condition, like light, like intent, and
that this perennial force acts especially on sorcerers because they no
longer have any defensive
shields. They cannot hide behind their friends or their studies. They
cannot hide behind love, or
hatred, or happiness, or misery. They can't hide behind anything.
"The condition of sorcerers," don Juan went on, "is that sadness, for
them, is abstract. It doesn't come
from coveting or lacking something, or from self-importance. It doesn't
come from me. It comes from
infinity. The sadness you feel for not thanking your friend is already
leaning in that direction.
"My teacher, the nagual Julian," he went on, "was a fabulous actor. He
actually worked professionally
in the theater. He had a favorite story that he used to tell in his
theater sessions. He used to push me
into terrible outbursts of anguish with it. He said that it was a story
for warriors who had everything
and yet felt the sting of the universal sadness. I always thought he
was telling it for me, personally."
Don Juan then paraphrased his teacher, telling me that the story
referred to a man suffering from
profound melancholy. He went to see the best doctors of his day and
every one of those doctors failed
to help him. He finally came to the office of a leading doctor, a
healer of the soul. The doctor
suggested to his patient that perhaps he could find solace, and the end
of his melancholy, in love. The
man responded that love was no problem for him, that he was loved
perhaps like no one else in the
world. The doctor's next suggestion was that maybe the patient should
undertake a voyage and see
other parts of the world. The man responded that, without exaggeration,
he had been in every corner of
the world. The doctor recommended hobbies like the arts, sports, etc.
The man responded to every one
of his recommendations in the same terms: He had done that and had had
no relief. The doctor
suspected that the man was possibly an incurable liar. He couldn't have
done all those things, as he
claimed. But being a good healer, the doctor had a final insight. "Ah!"
he exclaimed. "I have the
perfect solution for you, sir. You must attend a performance of the
greatest comedian of our day. He
will delight you to the point where you will forget every twist of your
melancholy. You must attend a
performance of the Great Garrick!"
Don Juan said that the man looked at the doctor with the saddest look
you can imagine, and said,
"Doctor, if that's your recommendation, I am a lost man. I have no
cure. I am the Great Garrick."
The Breaking Point
DON JUAN DEFINED inner silence as a peculiar state of being in which
thoughts were canceled out
and one could function from a level other than that of daily awareness.
He stressed that inner silence
meant the suspension of the internal dialogue- the perennial companion
of thoughts-and was therefore
a state of profound quietude.
"The old sorcerers," don Juan said, "called it inner silence because it
is a state in which perception
doesn't depend on the senses. What is at work during inner silence is
another faculty that man has, the
faculty that makes him a magical being, the very faculty that has been
curtailed, not by man himself
but by some extraneous influence."
"What is this extraneous influence that curtails the magical faculty of
man?" I asked.
"That is the topic for a future explanation," don Juan replied, "not
the subject of our present
discussion, even though it is indeed the most serious aspect of the
sorcery of the shamans of ancient
Mexico.
"Inner silence," he continued, "is the stand from which everything
stems in sorcery. In other words,
everything we do leads to that stand, which, like everything else in
the world of sorcerers, doesn't
reveal itself unless something gigantic shakes us."
Don Juan said that the sorcerers of ancient Mexico devised endless ways
to shake themselves or other
sorcery practitioners at their foundations in order to reach that
coveted state of inner I silence. They
considered the most far-fetched acts, which may seem totally unrelated
to the pursuit of inner silence,
such as, for instance, jumping into waterfalls or spending nights
hanging upside down from the top
branch of a tree, to be the key points that brought it into being.
Following the rationales of the sorcerers of ancient Mexico, don Juan
stated categorically that inner
silence was accrued, accumulated. In my case, he struggled to guide me
to construct a core of inner
silence in myself, and then add to it, second by second, on every
occasion I practiced it. He explained
that the sorcerers of ancient Mexico discovered that each individual
had a different threshold of inner
silence in terms of time, meaning that inner silence must be kept by
each one of us for the length of
time of our specific threshold before it can work.
"What did those sorcerers consider the sign that inner silence is
working, don Juan?" I asked.
"Inner silence works from the moment you begin to accrue it," he
replied. "What the old sorcerers
were after was the final, dramatic, end result of reaching that
individual threshold of silence. Some
very talented practitioners need only a few minutes of silence to reach
that coveted goal. Others, less
talented, need long periods of silence, perhaps more than one hour of
complete quietude, before they
reach the desired result. The desired result is what the old sorcerers
called stopping the world, the
moment when everything around us ceases to be what it's always been.
"This is the moment when sorcerers return to the true nature of man,"
don Juan went on. "The old
sorcerers also called it total freedom. It is the moment when man the
slave becomes man the
free being, capable of feats of perception that defy our linear
imagination."
Don Juan assured me that inner silence is the avenue that leads to a
true suspension of judgment-to a
moment when sensory data emanating from the universe at large ceases to
be interpreted by the
senses; a moment when cognition ceases to be the force which, through
usage and repetition, decides
the nature of the world.
"Sorcerers need a breaking point for the workings of inner silence to
set in," don Juan said. "The
breaking point is like the mortar that a mason puts between bricks.
It's only when the mortar hardens
that the loose bricks become a structure."
From the beginning of our association, don Juan had drilled into me the
value, the necessity, of inner
silence. I did my best to follow his suggestions by accumulating inner
silence second by second. I had
no means to measure the effect of this accumulation, nor did I have any
means to judge whether or not
I had reached any threshold. I simply aimed doggedly at accruing it,
not just to please don Juan but
because the act of accumulating it had become a challenge in itself.
One day, don Juan and I were taking a leisurely stroll in the main
plaza of Hermosillo. It was the early
afternoon of a cloudy day. The heat was dry, and actually very
pleasant. There were lots of people
walking around. There were stores around the plaza. I had been to
Hermosillo many times, and yet 1
had never noticed the stores. I knew that they were there, but their
presence was not something 1 had
been consciously aware of. I couldn't have made a map of that plaza if
my life depended on it. That
day, as I walked with don Juan, I was trying to locate and identify the
stores. I searched for something
to use as a mnemonic device that would stir my recollection for later
use.
"As I have told you before, many times," don Juan said, jolting me out
of my concentration, "every
sorcerer I know, male or female, sooner or later arrives at a breaking
point in their lives."
"Do you mean that they have a mental breakdown or something like that?"
I asked
"No, no," he said, laughing. "Mental breakdowns are for persons who
indulge in themselves. Sorcerers
are not persons. What 1 mean is that at a given moment the continuity
of their lives has to break in
order for inner silence to set in and become an active part of their
structures.
"It's very, very important," don Juan went on, "that you yourself
deliberately arrive at that breaking
point, or that you create it artificially, and intelligently."
"What do you mean by that, don Juan?" I asked, caught in his intriguing
reasoning.
"Your breaking point" he said, "is to discontinue your life as you know
it. You have done everything I
told you, dutifully and accurately. If you are talented, you never show
it. That seems to be your style.
You're not slow, but you act as if you were. You're very sure of
yourself, but you act as if you were
insecure. You're not timid, and yet you act as if you were afraid of
people. Everything you do points at
one single spot: your need to break all that, ruthlessly."
"But in what way, don Juan? What do you have in mind?" I asked,
genuinely frantic.
"I think everything boils down to one act," he said. "You must leave
your friends. You must say goodbye
to them, for good. It's not possible for you to continue on the
warriors' path carrying your personal
history with you, and unless you discontinue your way of life, I won't
be able to go ahead with my
instruction."
"Now, now, now, don Juan," I said, "I have to put my foot down. You're
asking too much of me. To be
frank with you, I don't think I can do it. My friends are my family, my
points of reference."
"Precisely, precisely," he remarked. "They are your points of
reference. Therefore, they have to go.
Sorcerers have only one point of reference: infinity."
"But how do you want me to proceed, don Juan?" I asked in a plaintive
voice. His request was driving
me up the wall.
"You must simply leave," he said matter-of-factly. "Leave any way you
can."
"But where would I go?" I asked.
"My recommendation is that you rent a room in one of those chintzy
hotels you know," he said. "The
uglier the place, the better. If the room has drab green carpet, and
drab green drapes, and drab green
walls, so much the better-a place comparable to that hotel I showed you
once in Los Angeles."
I laughed nervously at my recollection of a time when I was driving
with don Juan through the
industrial side of Los Angeles, where there were only warehouses and
dilapidated hotels for transients.
One hotel in particular attracted don Juan's attention because of its
bombastic name: Edward the
Seventh. We stopped across the street from it for a moment to look at
it.
"That hotel over there," don Juan said, pointing at it, "is to me the
true representation of life on Earth
for the average person. If you are lucky, or ruthless, you will get a
room with a view of the street,
where you will see this endless parade of human misery. If you're not
that lucky, or that ruthless, you
will get a room on the inside, with windows to the wall of the next
building. Think of spending a
lifetime torn between those two views, envying the view of the street
if you're inside, and envying the
view of the wall if you're on the outside, tired of looking out."
Don Juan's metaphor bothered me no end, for I had taken it all in.
Now, faced with the possibility of having to rent a room in a hotel
comparable to the Edward the
Seventh, 1 didn't know what to say or which way to go.
"What do you want me to do there, don Juan?" I asked.
"A sorcerer uses a place like that to die," he said, looking at me with
an unblinking stare. "You have
never been alone in your life. This is the time to do it. You will stay
in that room until you die."
His request scared me, but at the same time, it made me laugh.
"Not that I'm going to do it, don Juan," I said, "but what would be the
criteria to know that I'm
dead?-unless you want me to actually die physically."
"No," he said, "I don't want your body to die physically. I want your
person to die. The two are very
different affairs. In essence, your person has very little to do with
your body. Your person is your
mind, and believe you me, your mind is not yours."
"What is this nonsense, don Juan, that my mind is not mine?" I heard
myself asking with a nervous
twang in my voice.
"I'll tell you about that subject someday," he said, "but not while
you're cushioned by your friends.
"The criteria that indicates that a sorcerer is dead," he went on, "is
when it makes no difference to him
whether he has company or whether he is alone. The day you don't covet
the company of your friends,
whom you use as shields, that's the day that your person has died. What
do you say? Are you game?"
"I can't do it, don Juan," I said. "It's useless that I try to lie to
you. I can't leave my friends."
"It's perfectly all right," he said, unperturbed. My statement didn't
seem to affect him in the least. "I
won't be able to talk to you anymore, but let's say that during our
time together you have learned a
great deal. You have learned things that will make you very strong,
regardless of whether you come
back or you stray away."
He patted me on the back and said good-bye to me. He turned around and
simply disappeared among
the people in the plaza, as if he had merged with them. For an instant,
I had the strange sensation that
the people in the plaza were like a curtain that he had opened and then
disappeared behind. The end
had come, as did everything else in don Juan's world: swiftly and
unpredictably. Suddenly, it was on
me, I was in the throes of it, and I didn't even know how I had gotten
into it.
I should have been crushed. Yet I wasn't. I don't know why I was
elated. I marveled at the facility with
which everything had ended. Don Juan was indeed an elegant being. There
were no recriminations or
anger or anything of that sort, at all. I got in my car and drove, as
happy as a lark. I was ebullient.
How extraordinary that everything had ended so swiftly, I thought, so
painlessly.
My trip home was uneventful. In Los Angeles, being in my familiar
surroundings, I noticed that I had
derived an enormous amount of energy from my last exchange with don
Juan. I was actually very
happy, very relaxed, and I resumed what I considered to be my normal
life with renewed zest. All my
tribulations with my friends, and my realizations about them,
everything that I had said to don Juan in
reference to this, were thoroughly forgotten. It was as if something
had erased all that from my mind. I
marveled a couple of times at the facility I had in forgetting
something that had been so meaningful,
and in forgetting it so thoroughly.
Everything was as expected. There was one single inconsistency in the
otherwise neat paradigm of my
new old life: I distinctly remembered don Juan saying to me that my
departing from the sorcerers'
world was purely academic, and that I would be back. I had remembered
and written down every word
of our exchange. According to my normal linear reasoning and memory,
don Juan had never made
those statements. How could I remember things that had never taken
place? I pondered uselessly. My
pseudorecollection was strange enough to make a case for it, but then I
decided that there was no point
to it. As far as I was concerned, I was out of don Juan's milieu.
Following don Juan's suggestions in reference to my behavior with those
who had favored me in any
way, I had come to an earthshaking decision for me: that of honoring
and saying thank you to my
friends before it was too late. One case in point was my friend Rodrigo
Cummings. One incident
involving my friend Rodrigo, however, toppled my new paradigm and sent
it tumbling down to its
total destruction.
My attitude toward him changed radically when I vanquished rny
competitiveness with him. I found
out that it was the easiest thing in the world for me to project 100
percent into whatever Rodrigo did.
In fact, I was exactly like him, but I didn't know it until I stopped
competing with him. Then the truth
emerged for me with maddening vividness. One of Rodrigo's foremost
wishes was to finish college.
Every semester, he registered for school and took as many courses as
was permitted. Then, as the
semester progressed, he dropped them one by one. Sometimes he would
withdraw from school
altogether. At other times he would keep one three-unit course all the
way through to the bitter end.
During his last semester, he kept a course in sociology because he
liked it. The final exam was
approaching. He told me that he had three weeks to study, to read the
textbook for the course. He
thought that that was an exorbitant amount of time to read merely six
hundred pages. He considered
himself something of a speed reader, with a high level of retention; in
his opinion, he had a nearly 100
percent photographic memory.
He thought he had a great deal of time before the exam, so he asked me
if I would help him
recondition his car for his paper route. He wanted to take the right
door off in order to throw the paper
through that opening with his right hand instead of over the roof with
his left. I pointed out to him that
he was left-handed, to which he retorted that among his many abilities,
which none of his friends
noticed, was that of being ambidextrous. He was right about that; I had
never noticed it myself. After 1
helped him to take the door off, he decided to rip out the roof lining,
which was badly torn. He said
that his car was in optimum mechanical condition, and he would take it
to Tijuana, Mexico, which, as
a good Angeleno of the day, he called "TJ," to have it relined for a
few bucks.
"We could use a trip," he said with glee. He even selected the friends
he would like to take. "In TJ, I'm
sure that you'll go to look for used books, because you're an asshole.
The rest of us will go to a
bordello. I know quite a few."
It took us a week to rip out all the lining and sand the metal surface
to prepare it for its new lining.
Rodrigo had two weeks left to study then, and he still considered that
to be too much time-He engaged
me then in helping him paint his apartment and redo the floors. It took
us over a week to paint it and
sand the hardwood floors. He didn't want to paint over the wallpaper in
one room. We had to rent a
machine that removed wallpaper by applying steam to it. Naturally,
neither Rodrigo nor I knew how to
use the machine properly, and we botched the job horrendously. We ended
up having to use Topping, a
very fine mixture of plaster of paris and other substances that gives a
wall a smooth surface.
After all these endeavors, Rodrigo ended up having only two days left
to cram six hundred pages into
his head. He went frantically into an all-day and all-night reading
marathon, with the help of
amphetamines. Rodrigo did go to school the day of the exam, and did sit
down at his desk, and did get
the multiple-choice exam sheet.
What he didn't do was stay awake to take the exam. His body slumped
forward, and his head hit the
desk with a terrifying thud. The exam had to be suspended for a while.
The sociology teacher became
hysterical, and so did the students sitting around Rodrigo. His body
was stiff and icy cold. The whole
class suspected the worst; they thought he had died of a heart attack.
Paramedics were summoned to
remove him. After a cursory examination, they pronounced Rodrigo
profoundly asleep and took him
to a hospital to sleep the effect of the amphetamines off.
My projection into Rodrigo Cummings was so total that it frightened me.
I was exactly like him. The
similarity became untenable to me. In an act of what I considered to be
total, suicidal nihilism, I rented
a room in a dilapidated hotel in Hollywood.
The carpets were green and had terrible cigarette burns that had
obviously been snuffed out before
they turned into full-fledged fires. It had green drapes and drab green
walls. The blinking sign of the
hotel shone all night through the window.
I ended up doing exactly what don Juan had requested, but in a
roundabout way. I didn't do it to fulfill
any of don Juan's requirements or with the intention of patching up our
differences. I did stay in that
hotel room for months on end, until my person, like don Juan had
proposed, died, until it truthfully
made no difference to me whether I had company or I was alone.
After leaving the hotel, I went to live alone, closer to school. I
continued my studies of anthropology,
which had never been interrupted, and I started a very profitable
business with a lady partner.
Everything seemed perfectly in order until one day when the realization
hit me like a kick in the head
that I was going to spend the rest of my life worrying about my
business, or worrying about the
phantom choice between being an academic or a businessman, or worrying
about my partner's foibles
and shenanigans. True desperation pierced the depths of my being. For
the first time in my life, despite
all the things that I had done and seen, I had no way out. I was
completely lost. I seriously began to
toy with the idea of the most pragmatic and painless way to end my days.
One morning, a loud and insistent knocking woke me up. I thought it was
the landlady, and I was sure
that if I didn't answer, she would enter with her passkey. I opened the
door, and there was don Juan! I
was so surprised that I was numb. I stammered and stuttered, incapable
of saying a word. I wanted to
kiss his hand, to kneel in front of him. Don Juan came in and sat down
with great ease on the edge of
my bed.
"I made the trip to Los Angeles," he said, "just to see you."
I wanted to take him to breakfast, but he said that he had other things
to attend to, and that he had only
a moment to talk to me. 1 hurriedly told him about my experience in the
hotel. His presence had
created such havoc that not for a second did it occur to me to ask him
how he had found out where I
lived. I told don Juan how intensely I regretted having said what I had
in Hermosillo.
"You don't have to apologize," he assured me. "Every one of us does the
same thing. Once, I ran away
from the sorcerers' world myself, and I had to nearly die to realize my
stupidity. The important issue is
to arrive at a breaking point, in whatever way, and that's exactly what
you have done. Inner silence is
becoming real
for you. This is the reason I am here in front of you, talking to you.
Do you see what I mean?"
I thought I understood what he meant. I thought that he had intuited or
read, the way he read things in
the air, that I was at my wits' end and that he had come to bail me out.
"You have no time to lose," he said. "You must dissolve your business
enterprise within an hour,
because one hour is all I can afford to wait-not because I don't want
to wait, but because infinity is
pressing me mercilessly. Let's say that infinity is giving you one hour
to cancel yourself out. For
infinity, the only worthwhile enterprise of a warrior is freedom. Any
other enterprise is fraudulent. Can
you dissolve everything in one hour?"
I didn't have to assure him that I could. I knew that I had to do it.
Don Juan told me then that once I
had succeeded in dissolving everything, he was going to wait for me at
the marketplace in a town in
Mexico. In my effort to think about the dissolution of my business, I
overlooked what he was saying.
He repeated it and, of course, I thought he was joking.
"How can I reach that town, don Juan? Do you want me to drive, to take
a plane?" I asked.
"Dissolve your business first," he commanded. "Then the solution will
come. But remember, I'll be
waiting for you only for an hour."
He left the apartment, and I feverishly endeavored to dissolve
everything I had. Naturally, it took me
more than an hour, but I didn't stop to consider this because once I
had set the dissolution of the
business in motion, its momentum carried me. It was only when I was
through that the real dilemma
faced me. I knew then that I had failed hopelessly. I was left with no
business, and no possibilities of
ever reaching don Juan.
I went to my bed and sought the only solace I could think of: quietude,
silence. In order to facilitate
the advent of inner silence, don Juan had taught me a way to sit down
on my bed, with the knees bent
and the soles of the feet touching, the hands pushing the feet together
by holding the ankles. He had
given me a thick dowel that I always kept at hand wherever I went. It
was cut to a fourteen-inch length
to support the weight of my head if I leaned over and put the dowel on
the floor between my feet, and
then placed the other end, which was cushioned, on the spot in the
middle of my forehead. Every time
I adopted this position, I fell sound asleep in a matter of seconds.
I must have fallen asleep with my usual facility, for I dreamed that I
was in the Mexican town where
don Juan had said he was going to meet me. I had always been intrigued
by this town. The
marketplace was open one day a week, and the farmers who lived in the
area brought their products
there to be sold. What fascinated me the most about that town was the
paved road that led to it. At the
very entrance to the town, it went over a steep hill. I had sat many
times on a bench by a stand that
sold cheese, and had looked at that hill. I would see people who were
coming into town with their
donkeys and their loads, but I would see their heads first; as they
kept approaching I would see more
of their bodies, until the moment they were on the very top of the
hill, when I would see their entire
bodies. It seemed to me always that they were emerging from the earth,
either slowly or very fast,
depending on their speed. In my dream, don Juan was waiting for me by
the cheese stand. I
approached him.
"You made it from your inner silence," he said, patting me on the back.
"You did reach your breaking
point. For a moment, I had begun to lose hope. But I stuck around,
knowing that you would make it."
In that dream, we went for a stroll. I was happier than I had ever
been. The dream was so vivid, so
terrifyingly real, that it left me no doubts that I had resolved the
problem, even if my resolving it was
only a dream-fantasy.
Don Juan laughed, shaking his head. He had definitely read my thoughts.
"You're not in a mere
dream," he said, "but who am I to tell you that? You'll know it
yourself someday-that there are no
dreams from inner silence-because you'll choose to know it."
The Measurements
of Cognition
"THE END OF an era" was, for don Juan, an accurate description of a
process that shamans go
through in dismantling the structure of the world they know in order to
replace it with another way of
understanding the world around them. Don Juan Matus as a teacher
endeavored, from the very instant
we met, to introduce me to the cognitive world of the shamans of
ancient Mexico. The term
"cognition" was, for me at that time, a bone of tremendous contention.
I understood it as the process
by which we recognize the world around us. Certain things fall within
the realm of that process and
are easily recognized by us. Other things don't, and remain, therefore,
as oddities, things for which we
nave no adequate comprehension.
Don Juan maintained, from the start of our association, that the world
of the sorcerers of ancient
Mexico was different from ours, not in a shallow way, but different in
the way in which the Process of
cognition was arranged. He maintained that in our world our cognition
requires the interpretation of
sensory data. He said that the universe is composed of an infinite
number of energy fields that exist in
the universe at large as luminous filaments. Those luminous filaments
act on man as an organism. The
response of the organism is to turn those energy fields into sensory
data. Sensory data is then
interpreted, and that interpretation becomes our cognitive system. My
understanding of cognition
forced me to believe that it is a universal process, as language is a
universal process. There is a
different syntax for every language, as there must be a slightly
different arrangement for every system
of interpretation in the world.
Don Juan's assertion, however, that the shamans of ancient Mexico had a
different cognitive system,
was, for me, equivalent to saying that they had a different way of
communicating that had nothing to
do with language. What 1 desperately wanted him to say was that their
different cognitive system was
the equivalent of having a different language but that it was a
language nonetheless. "The end of an
era" meant, to don Juan, that the units of a foreign cognition were
beginning to take hold. The units of
my normal cognition, no matter how pleasant and rewarding they were for
me, were beginning to
fade. A grave moment in the life of a man!
Perhaps my most cherished unit was my academic life. Anything that
threatened it was a threat to the
very core of my being, especially if the attack was veiled, unnoticed.
It happened with a professor in
whom I had put all my trust, Professor Lorca.
I had enrolled in Professor Lorca's course on cognition because he was
recommended to me as one of
the most brilliant academics in existence. Professor Lorca was rather
handsome, with blond hair neatly
combed to the side. His forehead was smooth, wrinkle-free, giving the
appearance of someone who
had never worried in his life. His clothes were extremely well
tailored. He didn't wear a tie, a feature
that gave him a boyish look. He would put on a tie only to face
important people.
On my memorable first class with Professor Lorca, I was bewildered and
nervous at seeing how he
paced back and forth for minutes that stretched themselves into an
eternity for me. Professor Lorca
kept on moving his thin, clenched lips up and down, adding immensities
to the tension he was
generating in that closed-window, stuffy room. Suddenly, he stopped
walking. He stood in the center
of the room, a few feet from where I was sitting, and, banging a
carefully rolled newspaper on the
podium, he began to talk.
"It'll never be known .. ." he began.
Everyone in the room at once started anxiously taking notes.
"It'll never be known," he repeated, "what a toad is feeling while he
sits at the bottom of a pond and
interprets the toad world around him." His voice carried a tremendous
force and finality. "So, what do
you think this thing is?" He waved the newspaper over his head.
He went on to read to the class an article in the newspaper in which
the work of a biologist was
reported. The scientist was quoted as describing what frogs felt when
insects swam above their heads.
"This article shows the carelessness of the reporter, who has obviously
misquoted the scientist,"
Professor Lorca asserted with the authority of a full professor. "A
scientist, no matter how shoddy his
work might be, would never allow himself to anthropomorphize the
results of his research, unless, of
course, he's a nincompoop."
With this as an introduction, he delivered a most brilliant lecture on
the insular quality of our cognitive
system, or the cognitive system of any organism, for that matter. He
brought to me, in his initial
lecture, a barrage of new ideas and made them extremely simple, ready
for use. The most novel idea to
me was that every individual of every species on this earth interprets
the world around it, using data
reported by its specialized senses. He asserted that human beings
cannot even imagine what it must be
like, for example, to be in a world ruled by echolocation, as in the
world of bats, where any inferred
point of reference could not even be conceived of by the human mind. He
made it quite clear that,
from that point of view, no two cognitive systems could be alike among
species.
As I left the auditorium at the end of the hour-and-a-half lecture, I
felt that I had been bowled over by
the brilliance of Professor Lorca's mind. From then on, I was his
confirmed admirer. I found his
lectures more than stimulating and thought provoking. His were the only
lectures I had ever looked
forward to attending. All his eccentricities meant nothing to me in
comparison with his excellence as a
teacher and as an innovative thinker in the realm of psychology.
When I first attended the class of Professor Lorca, I had been working
with don Juan Matus for almost
two years. It was a well-established pattern of behavior with me,
accustomed as I was to routines, to
tell don Juan everything that happened to me in my everyday world. On
the first opportunity I had, I
related to him what was taking place with Professor Lorca. I praised
Professor Lorca to the skies and
told don Juan unabashedly that Professor Lorca was my role model. Don
Juan seemed very impressed
with my display of genuine admiration, yet he gave me a strange warning.
"Don't admire people from afar," he said. "That is the surest way to
create mythological beings. Get
close to your professor, talk to him, see what he's like as a man. Test
him. If your professor's behavior
is the result of his conviction that he is a being who is going to die,
then everything he does, no matter
how strange, must be premeditated and final. If what he says turns out
to be just words, he's not worth
a hoot."
I was insulted no end by what I considered to be don Juan's
callousness. I thought he was a little bit
jealous of my feelings for Professor Lorca. Once that thought was
formulated in my mind I felt
relieved; I understood everything.
"Tell me, don Juan," I said to end the conversation on a different
note, "what is a being that is going to
die, really? I have heard you talk about it so many times, but you
haven't actually defined it for me."
"Human beings are beings that are going to die," he said.
"Sorcerers firmly maintain that the only way to have a grip on our
world, and on what we do in it, is
by fully accepting that we are beings on the way to dying. Without this
basic acceptance, our lives, our
doings, and the world in which we live are unmanageable affairs."
"But is the mere acceptance of this so far-reaching?" 1 asked in a tone
of quasi-protest.
"You bet your life!" don Juan said, smiling. "However, it's not the
mere acceptance that does the trick.
We have to embody that acceptance and live it all the way through.
Sorcerers throughout the ages have
said that the view of our death is the most sobering view that exists.
What is wrong with us human
beings, and has been wrong since time immemorial, is that without ever
stating it in so many words,
we believe that we have entered the realm of immortality. We behave as
if we were never going to diean
infantile arrogance. But even more injurious than this sense of
immortality is what comes with it:
the sense that we can engulf this inconceivable universe with our
minds."
A most deadly juxtaposition of ideas had me mercilessly in its grip:
don Juan's wisdom and Professor
Lorca's knowledge. Both were difficult, obscure, all-encompassing, and
most appealing. There was
nothing for me to do except follow the course of events and go with
them wherever they might take
me.
I followed to the letter don Juan's suggestion about approaching
Professor Lorca. I tried, for the whole
semester, to get close to him, to talk to him. 1 went religiously to
his office during his office hours, but
he never seemed to have any time for me. But even though I couldn't
speak to him, I admired him
unbiasedly. I even accepted that he would never talk to me. It didn't
matter to me; what mattered were
the ideas that I gathered from his magnificent classes.
I reported to don Juan all my intellectual findings. I had done
extensive reading on cognition. Don
Juan Matus urged me, more than ever, to establish direct contact with
the source of my intellectual
revolution. "It is imperative that you speak to him," he said with a
note of urgency in his voice.
"Sorcerers don't admire people in a vacuum. They talk to them; they get
to know them. They establish
points of reference. They compare. What you are doing is a little bit
infantile. You are admiring from a
distance. It is very much like what happens to a man who is afraid of
women. Finally, his gonads
overrule his fear and compel him to worship the first woman who says
'hello' to him."
I tried doubly hard to approach Professor Lorca, but he was like an
impenetrable fortress. When I
talked to don Juan about my difficulties, he explained that sorcerers
viewed any kind of activity with
people, no matter how minute or unimportant, as a battlefield. In that
battlefield, sorcerers performed
their best magic, their best effort. He assured me that the trick to
being at ease in such situations, a
thing that had never been my forte, was to face our opponents openly.
He expressed his abhorrence of
timid souls who shy away from interaction to the point where even
though they interact, they merely
infer or deduce, in terms of their own psychological states, what is
going on without actually
perceiving what is really going on. They interact without ever being
part of the interaction.
"Always look at the man who is involved in a tug of war with you," he
continued. "Don't just pull the
rope; look up and see his eyes. You'll know then that he is a man, just
like you. No matter what he's
saying, no matter what he's doing, he's shaking in his boots, just like
you. A look like that renders the
opponent helpless, if only for an instant; deliver your blow then."
One day, luck was with me: I cornered Professor Lorca in the hall
outside his office.
"Professor Lorca," I said, "do you have a free moment so I could talk
to you?"
"Who in the hell are you?" he said with the most natural air, as if I
were his best friend and he were
merely asking me how I felt that day.
Professor Lorca was as rude as anyone could be, but his words
didn't have the effect of rudeness on me. He grinned at me with tight
lips, as if encouraging me to
leave or to say something meaningful.
"I am an anthropology student, Professor Lorca," I said. "I am involved
in a field situation where I
have the opportunity to learn about the cognitive system of sorcerers."
Professor Lorca looked at me with suspicion and annoyance. His eyes
seemed to be two blue points
filled with spite. He combed his hair backward with his hand, as if it
had fallen on his face.
"I work with a real sorcerer in Mexico," I continued, trying to
encourage a response. "He's a real
sorcerer, mind you. It has taken
me over a year just to warm him up so he would consent to talk to me."
Professor Lorca's face relaxed; he opened his mouth and, waving a most
delicate hand in front of my
eyes, as if he were twirling pizza dough with it, he spoke to me. I
couldn't help noticing his enameled
gold cuff links, which matched his greenish blazer to perfection.
"And what do you want from me?" he said.
"I want you to hear me out for a moment," I said, "and see if whatever
I'm doing may interest you."
He made a gesture of reluctance and resignation with his shoulders,
opened the door of his office, and
invited me to come in. I knew that I had no time at all to waste and I
gave him a very direct
description of my field situation. I told him that I was being taught
procedures that had nothing to do
with what I had found in the anthropological literature about shamanism.
He moved his lips for a moment without saying a word. When he spoke, he
pointed out that the flaw
of anthropologists in general is that they never allow themselves
sufficient time to become fully
cognizant of all the nuances of the particular cognitive system used by
the people they are studying.
He defined "cognition" as a system of interpretation, which through
usage makes it possible for
individuals to utilize, with the utmost expertise, all the nuances of
meaning that make up the particular
social milieu under consideration.
Professor Lorca's words illuminated the total scope of my field-work.
Without gaining command of all
the nuances of the cognitive system of the shamans of ancient Mexico,
it would have been thoroughly
superfluous for me to formulate any idea about that world. If Professor
Lorca had not said another
word to me, what he had just voiced would have been more than
sufficient. What followed was a
marvelous discourse on cognition.
"Your problem," Professor Lorca said, "is that the cognitive system of
our everyday world with which
we are all familiar, virtually from the day we are born, is not the
same as the cognitive system of the
sorcerers' world."
This statement created a state of euphoria in me. I thanked Professor
Lorca profusely and assured him
that there was only one course of action in my case: to follow his
ideas through hell or high water.
"What I have told you, of course, is general knowledge," he said as he
ushered me out of his office.
"Anyone who reads is aware of what I have been telling you."
We parted almost friends. My account to don Juan of my success in
approaching Professor Lorca was
met with a strange reaction. Don Juan seemed, on the one hand, to be
elated, and on the other,
concerned.
"I have the feeling that your professor is not quite what he claims to
be," he said. "That's, of course,
from a sorcerer's point of view. Perhaps it would be wise to quit now,
before all this becomes too
involved and consuming. One of the high arts of sorcerers is to know
when to stop. It appears to me
that you've gotten from your professor all you can get from him."
I immediately reacted with a barrage of defenses on behalf of Professor
Lorca. Don Juan calmed me
down. He said that it wasn't his intention to criticize or judge
anybody, but that to his knowledge, very
few people knew when to quit and even fewer knew how to actually
utilize their knowledge.
In spite of don Juan's warnings, I didn't quit; instead, I became
Professor Lorca's faithful student,
follower, admirer. He seemed to take a genuine interest in my work,
although he felt frustrated no end
with my reluctance and inability to formulate clear-cut concepts about
the cognitive system of the
sorcerers' world.
One day, Professor Lorca formulated for me the concept of the
scientist-visitor to another cognitive
world. He conceded that he was willing to be open-minded, and toy, as a
social scientist, with the
possibility of a different cognitive system. He envisioned an actual
research in which protocols would
be gathered and analyzed. Problems of cognition would be devised and
given to the shamans I knew,
to measure, for instance, their capacity to focus their cognition on
two diverse aspects of behavior.
He thought that the test would begin with a simple paradigm in which
they would try to comprehend
and retain written text that they read while they played poker. The
test would escalate, to measure, for
instance, their capacity to focus their cognition on complex things
that were being said to them while
they slept, and so on. Professor Lorca wanted a linguistic analysis to
be performed on the shamans'
utterances. He wanted an actual measurement of their responses in terms
of their speed and accuracy,
and other variables that would become prevalent as the project
progressed.
Don Juan veritably laughed his head off when I told him about Professor
Lorca's proposed
measurements of the cognition of shamans.
"Now, I truly like your professor," he said. "But you can't be serious
about this idea of measuring our
cognition. What could your professor get out of measuring our
responses? He'll get the conviction that
we are a bunch of morons, because that's what we are. We cannot
possibly be more intelligent, faster
than the average man. It's not his fault, though, to believe he can
make measurements of cognition
across worlds. The fault is yours. You have failed to express to your
professor that when sorcerers talk
about the cognitive world of the shamans of ancient Mexico they are
talking about things for which
we have no equivalent in the world of everyday life.
"For instance, perceiving energy directly as it flows in the universe
is a unit of cognition that shamans
live by. They see how energy flows, and they follow its flow. If its
flow is obstructed, they move away
to do something entirely different. Shamans see lines in the universe.
Their art, or their job, is to
choose the line that will take them, perception-wise, to regions that
have no name. You can say that
shamans react immediately to the lines of the universe. They see human
beings as luminous balls, and
they search in them for their flow of energy. Naturally, they react
instantly to this sight. It's part of
their cognition."
I told don Juan that I couldn't possibly talk about all this to
Professor Lorca because I hadn't done any
of the things that he was describing. My cognition remained the same.
"Ah!" he exclaimed. "It's simply that you haven't had the time yet to
embody the units of cognition of
the shamans' world."
I left don Juan's house more confused than ever. There was a voice
inside me that virtually demanded
that I end all endeavors with Professor Lorca. I understood how right
don Juan was when he said to
me once that the practicalities that scientists were interested in were
conducive to building more and
more complex machines. They were not the practicalities that changed an
individual's life course from
within. They were not geared to reaching the vastness of the universe
as a personal, experiential affair.
The stupendous machines in existence, or those in the making, were
cultural affairs, the attainment of
which had to be enjoyed vicariously, even by the creators of those
machines themselves. The only
reward for them was monetary.
In pointing out all of that to me, don Juan had succeeded in placing me
in a more inquisitive frame of
mind. I really began to question the ideas of Professor Lorca,
something I had never done before.
Meanwhile, Professor Lorca kept spouting astounding truths about
cognition. Each declaration was
more severe than the preceding one and, therefore, more incisive.
i
At the end of my second semester with Professor Lorca, I had reached an
impasse. There was no way
on earth for me to bridge the two lines of thought: don Juan's and
Professor Lorca's. They were on
parallel tracks. I understood Professor Lorca's drive to qualify and
quantify the study of cognition.
Cybernetics was just around the comer at that time, and the practical
aspect of the studies of cognition
was a reality. But so was don Juan's world, which could not be measured
with the standard tools of
cognition. I had been privileged to witness it, in don Juan's actions,
but I hadn't experienced it myself.
I felt that that was the drawback that made bridging those two worlds
impossible.
I told all this to don Juan on one of my visits to him. He said that
what I considered to be my
drawback, and therefore the factor that made bridging these two worlds
impossible, wasn't accurate. In
his opinion, the flaw was something more encompassing than one man's
individual circumstances.
"Perhaps you can recall what I said to you about one of our biggest
flaws as average human beings,"
he said.
I couldn't recall anything in particular. He had pointed out so many
flaws that plagued us as average
human beings that my mind reeled.
"You want something specific," I said, "and I can't think of it."
"The big flaw I am talking about," he said, "is something you ought to
bear in mind every second of
your existence. For me, it's the issue of issues, which I will repeat
to you over and over until it comes
out of your ears."
After a long moment, I gave up any further attempt to remember.
"We are beings on our way to dying," he said. "We are not immortal, but
we behave as if we were.
This is the flaw that brings us down as individuals and will bring us
down as a species someday."
Don Juan stated that the sorcerers' advantage over their average fellow
men is that sorcerers know that
they are beings on their way to dying and they don't let themselves
deviate from that knowledge. He
emphasized that an enormous effort must be employed in order to elicit
and maintain this knowledge
as a total certainty.
"Why is it so hard for us to admit something that is so truthful?" I
asked, bewildered by the magnitude
of our internal contradiction.
"It's really not man's fault," he said in a conciliatory tone.
"Someday, I'll tell you more about the forces
that drive a man to act like an ass."
There wasn't anything else to say. The silence that followed was
ominous. I didn't even want to know
what the forces were that don Juan was referring to.
"It is no great feat for me to assess your professor at a distance,"
don Juan went on. "He is an immortal
scientist. He is never going to die. And when it comes to any concerns
about dying, I am sure that he
has taken care of them already. He has a plot to be buried in, and a
hefty life insurance policy that will
take care of his family. Having fulfilled those two mandates, he
doesn't think about death anymore. He
thinks only about his work.
"Professor Lorca makes sense when he talks," don Juan continued,
"because he is prepared to use
words accurately. But he's not prepared to take himself seriously as a
man who is going to die. Being
immortal, he wouldn't know how to do that. It makes no difference what
complex machines scientists
can build. The machines can in no way help anyone face the unavoidable
appointment: the
appointment with infinity.
"The nagual Julian used to tell me," he went on, "about the conquering
generals of ancient Rome.
When they would return home victorious, gigantic parades were staged to
honor them. Displaying the
treasures that they had won, and the defeated people that they had
turned into slaves, the conquerors
paraded, riding in their war chariots. Riding with them was always a
slave whose job was to whisper
in their ear that all fame and glory is but transitory.
"If we are victorious in any way," don Juan went on, "we don't have
anyone to whisper in our ear that
our victories are fleeting. Sorcerers, however, do have the upper hand;
as beings on their way to dying,
they have someone whispering in their ear that everything is ephemeral.
The whisperer is death, the
infallible advisor, the only one who won't ever tell you a lie."
Saying Thank You
"WARRIOR-TRAVELERS don't leave any debts unpaid," don Juan said.
"What are you talking about, don Juan?" I asked.
"It is time that you square certain indebtedness you have incurred in
the course of your life," he said.
"Not that you will ever pay in full, mind you, but you must make a
gesture. You must make a token
payment in order to atone, in order to appease infinity. You told me
about your two friends who meant
so much to you, Patricia Turner and Sandra Flanagan. It's time for you
to go and find them and to
make to each of them one gift in which you spend everything you have.
You have to make two gifts
that will leave you penniless. That's the gesture."
"I don't know where they are, don Juan," I said, almost in a mood of
protest.
"To find them is your challenge. In your search for them, you will not
leave any stone unturned. What
you intend to do is something very simple, and yet nearly impossible.
You want to cross over the
threshold of personal indebtedness and in one sweep be free, in order
to proceed. If you cannot cross
that
threshold, there won't be any point in trying to continue with me-
"But where did you get the idea of this task for me?" I asked. "Did you
invent it yourself, because you
think it is appropriate?"
"I don't invent anything," he said matter-of-factly. "I got this task
from infinity itself. It's not easy for
me to say all this to you. If you think that I'm enjoying myself pink
with your tribulations, you're
wrong. The success of your mission means more to me than it does to
you. If you fail, you have very
little to lose. What? Your visits to me. Big deal. But I would lose
you, and that means to me losing
either the continuity of my lineage or the possibility of your closing
it with a golden key."
Don Juan stopped talking. He always knew when my mind became feverish
with thoughts.
"I have told you over and over that warrior-travelers are pragmatists,"
he went on. "They are not
involved in sentimentalism, or nostalgia, or melancholy. For
warrior-travelers, there is only struggle,
and it is a struggle with no end. If you think that you have come here
to find peace, or that this is a lull
in your life, you're wrong. This task of paying your debts is not
guided by any feelings that you know
about. It is guided by the purest sentiment, the sentiment of a
warrior-traveler who is about to dive
into infinity, and just before he does, he turns around to say thank
you to those who favored him.
"You must face this task with all the gravity it deserves," he
continued. "It is your last stop before
infinity swallows you. In fact, unless a warrior-traveler is in a
sublime state of being, infinity will not
touch him with a ten-foot pole. So, don't spare yourself; don't spare
any effort. Push it mercilessly, but
elegantly, all the way through."
I had met the two people don Juan had referred to as my two friends who
meant so much to me while
going to junior college. I used to live in the garage apartment of the
house belonging to Patricia
Turner's parents. In exchange for room and board, I took care of
vacuuming the pool, raking the
leaves, putting the trash out, and making breakfast for Patricia and
myself. I was also the handyman in
the house as well as the family chauffeur; I drove Mrs. Turner to do
her shopping and I bought liquor
for Mr. Turner, which I had to sneak into the house and then into his
studio.
He was an insurance executive who was a solitary drinker. He had
promised his family that he was not
going to touch the bottle ever again after some serious family
altercations due to his excessive
drinking. He confessed to me that he had tapered off enormously, but
that he needed a swig from time
to time. His studio was, of course, off limits to everybody except me.
I was supposed to go in to clean
it, but what I really did was hide his bottles inside a beam that
appeared to support an arch in the
ceiling in the studio but that was actually hollow. I had to sneak the
bottles in and sneak the empties
out and dump them at the market.
Patricia was a drama and music major in college and a fabulous singer.
Her goal was to sing in
musicals on Broadway. It goes without saying that I fell head over
heels in love with Patricia Turner.
She was very slim and athletic, a brunette with angular features and
about a head taller than I am, my
ultimate requisite for going bananas over any woman.
I seemed to fulfill a deep need in her, the need to nurture someone,
especially after she realized that
her daddy trusted me implicitly. She became my little mommy. I couldn't
even open my mouth
without her consent. She watched me like a hawk. She even wrote term
papers for me, read textbooks
and gave me synopses of them. And 1 liked it, but not because I wanted
to be nurtured; I don't think
that that need was ever part of my cognition. I relished the fact that
she did it. I relished her company.
She used to take me to the movies daily. She had passes to all the big
movie theaters in Los Angeles,
given to her father courtesy of some movie moguls. Mr. Turner never
used them himself; he felt that it
was beneath his dignity to flash movie passes. The movie clerks always
made the recipients of such
passes sign a receipt. Patricia had no qualms about signing anything,
but sometimes the nasty clerks
wanted Mr. Turner to sign, and when I went to do that, they were not
satisfied with only the signature
of Mr. Turner. They demanded a driver's license. One of them, a sassy
young guy, made a remark that
cracked him up, and me, too, but which sent Patricia into a fit of fury.
"I think you're Mr. Turd," he said with the nastiest smile you could
imagine, "not Mr. Turner."
I could have sloughed off the remark, but then he subjected us to the
profound humiliation of refusing
us entrance to see Hercules starring Steve Reeves.
Usually, we went everywhere with Patricia's best friend, Sandra
Flanagan, who lived next door with
her parents. Sandra was quite the opposite of Patricia. She was just as
tall, but her face was round,
with rosy cheeks and a sensuous mouth; she was healthier than a
raccoon. She had no interest in
singing. She was only interested in the sensual pleasures of the body.
She could eat and drink anything
and digest it, and-the feature that finished me off about her-after she
had polished off her own plate,
she managed to do the same with mine, a thing that, being a picky
eater, I had never been able to do in
all my life. She was also extremely athletic, but in a rough, wholesome
way. She could punch like a
man and kick like a mule.
As a courtesy to Patricia, I used to do the same chores for Sandra's
parents that I did for hers:
vacuuming their pool, raking the leaves from their lawn, taking the
trash out on trash day, and
incinerating papers and flammable trash. That was the time in Los
Angeles when the air pollution was
increased by the use of backyard incinerators.
Perhaps it was because of the proximity, or the ease of those young
women, that I ended up madly in
love with both of them.
I went to seek advice from a very strange young man who was my friend,
Nicholas van Hooten. He
had two girlfriends, and he lived with both of them, apparently in a
state of bliss. He began by giving
me, he said, the simplest advice: how to behave in a movie theater if
you had two girlfriends. He said
that whenever he went to a movie with his two girlfriends, all his
attention was always centered on
whoever sat to his left. After a while, the two girls would go to the
bathroom and, on their return, he
would have them change the seating arrangement. Anna would sit where
Betty had been sitting, and
nobody around them was the wiser. He assured me that this was the first
step in a long process of
breaking the girls into a matter-of-fact acceptance of the trio
situation; Nicholas was rather corny, and
he used that trite French expression: menage a trois.
I followed his advice and went to a theater that showed silent movies
on Fairfax Avenue in Los
Angeles with Patricia and Sandy. I sat Patricia to my left and poured
all my attention on her. They
went to the bathroom, and when they returned I told them to switch
places. I started then to do what
Nicholas van Hooten had advised, but Patricia would not put up with any
nonsense like that. She stood
up and left the theater, offended, humiliated, and raving mad. I wanted
to run after her and apologize,
but Sandra stopped me.
"Let her go," she said with a poisonous smile. "She's a big girl. She
has enough money to get a taxi
and go home."
I fell for it and remained in the theater kissing Sandra, rather
nervously, and filled with guilt. I was in
the middle of a passionate kiss when I felt someone pulling me backward
by the hair. It was Patricia.
The row of seats was loose and tilted backward. Athletic Patricia
jumped out of the way before the
seats where we were sitting crashed on the row of seats behind. I heard
the frightened screams of two
movie watchers who were sitting at the end of the row, by the aisle.
Nicholas van Hooten's tip was miserable advice. Patricia, Sandra, and I
returned home in absolute
silence. We patched up our differences, in the midst of very weird
promises, tears, the works. The
outcome of our three-sided relationship was that, in the end, we nearly
destroyed ourselves. We were
not prepared for such an endeavor. We didn't know how to resolve the
problems of affection, morality,
duty, and social mores. I couldn't leave one
of them for the other, and they couldn't leave me. One day, at the
climax of a tremendous upheaval,
and out of sheer desperation, all three of us fled in different
directions, never to see one another again.
I felt devastated. Nothing of what I did could erase their impact on my
life. I left Los Angeles and got
busy with endless things in an effort to placate my longing. Without
exaggerating in the least, I can
sincerely say that I fell into the depths of hell, I believed, never to
emerge again. If it hadn't been for
the influence that don Juan had on my life and my person, I would never
have survived my private
demons. I told don Juan that I knew that whatever I had done was wrong,
that I had no business
engaging such wonderful people in such sordid, stupid shenanigans that
I had no preparation to face.
"What was wrong," don Juan said, "was that the three of you were lost
egomaniacs. Your selfimportance
nearly destroyed you. If you don't have self-importance, you have only
feelings.
"Humor me," he went on, "and do the following simple and direct
exercise that could mean the world
to you: Remove from your memory of those two girls any statements that
you make to yourself such
as 'She said this or that to me, and she yelled, and the other one
yelled, at ME!' and remain at the level
of your feelings. If you hadn't been so self-important, what would you
have had as the irreducible
residue?"
"My unbiased love for them," I said, nearly choking.
"And is it less today than it was then?" don Juan asked.
"No, it isn't, don Juan," I said in truthfulness, and I felt the same
pang of anguish that had chased me
for years.
"This time, embrace them from your silence," he said. "Don't be a
meager asshole. Embrace them
totally for the last time. But intend that this is the last time on
Earth. Intend it from your darkness. If
you are worth your salt," he went on, "when you make your gift to them,
you'll sum up your entire life
twice. Acts of this nature make warriors airborne, almost vaporous."
Following don Juan's commands, I took the task to heart. I realized
that if I didn't emerge victorious,
don Juan was not the only one who was going to lose out. I would also
lose something, and whatever I
was going to lose was as important to me as what don Juan had described
as being important to him. I
was going to lose my chance to face infinity and be conscious of it.
The memory of Patricia Turner and Sandra Flanagan put me in a terrible
frame of mind. The
devastating sense of irreparable loss that had chased me all these
years was as vivid as ever. When don
Juan exacerbated that feeling, I knew for a fact that there are certain
things that can remain with us, in
don Juan's terms, for life and perhaps beyond. I had to find Patricia
Turner and Sandra Flanagan. Don
Juan's final recommendation was that if I did find them, I could not
stay with them. I could have time
only to atone, to envelop each of them with all the affection I felt,
without the angry voices of
recrimination, self-pity, or egomania.
I embarked on the colossal task of finding out what had become of them,
where they were. I began by
asking questions of the people who knew their parents. Their parents
had moved out of Los Angeles,
and nobody could give me a lead as to where to find them. There was no
one to talk to. I thought of
putting a personal ad in the paper. But then I thought that perhaps
they had moved out of California. I
finally had to hire a private investigator. Through his connections
with official offices of records and
whatnot, he located them within a couple of weeks.
They lived in New York, a short distance from one other, and their
friendship was as close as it had
ever been. I went to New York and tackled Patricia Turner first. She
hadn't made it to stardom on
Broadway the way she had wanted to, but she was part of a production. I
didn't want to know whether
it was in the capacity of a performer or as management. I visited her
in her office. She didn't tell me
what she did. She was shocked to see me. What we did was just sit
together and hold hands and weep.
I didn't tell her what I did either. I said that I had come to see her
because I wanted to give her a gift
that would express my gratitude, and that I was embarking on a journey
from which I did not intend to
come back.
"Why such ominous words?" she asked, apparently genuinely alarmed.
"What are you planning to do?
Are you ill? You don't look ill."
"It was a metaphorical statement," I assured her. "I'm going back to
South America, and I intend to
seek my fortune there. The competition is ferocious, and the
circumstances are very harsh, that's all. If
I want to succeed, I will have to give all I have to it."
She seemed relieved, and hugged me. She looked the same, except much
bigger, much more powerful,
more mature, very elegant. I kissed her hands and the most overwhelming
affection enveloped me.
Don Juan was right. Deprived of recriminations, all I had were feelings.
"I want to make you a gift, Patricia Turner," I said. "Ask me anything
you want, and if it is within my
means, I'll get it for you."
"Did you strike it rich?" she said and laughed. "What's great about you
is that you never had anything,
and you never will. Sandra and I talk about you nearly every day. We
imagine you parking cars, living
off women, et cetera, et cetera. I'm sorry, we can't help ourselves,
but we still love you."
I insisted that she tell me what she wanted. She began to weep and
laugh at the same time.
"Are you going to buy me a mink coat?" she asked me between sobs.
I ruffled her hair and said that I would.
"If you don't like it, you take it back to the store and get the money
back," I said.
She laughed and punched me the way she used to. She had to go back to
work, and we parted after I
promised her that I would come back again to see her, but that if I
didn't, I wanted her to understand
that the force of my life was pulling me every which way, yet I would
keep the memory of her in me
for the rest of my life and perhaps beyond. I did return, but only to
see from a distance how they
delivered the mink coat to her. I heard her screams of delight.
That part of my task was finished. I left, but I wasn't vaporous, the
way don Juan had said I was going
to be. I had opened up an old wound and it had started to bleed. It
wasn't quite raining outside; it was a
fine mist that seemed to penetrate all the way to the marrow of my
bones.
Next, I went to see Sandra Flanagan. She lived in one of the suburbs of
New York that is reached by
train. I knocked on her door. Sandra opened it and looked at me as if I
were a ghost. All the color
drained out of her face. She was more beautiful than ever, perhaps
because she had filled out and
looked as big as a house.
"Why, you, you, you!" she stammered, not quite capable of articulating
my name.
She sobbed, and she seemed indignant and reproachful for a moment. I
didn't give her the chance to
continue. My silence was total. In the end, it affected her. She let me
in and we sat down in her living
room.
"What are you doing here?" she said, quite a bit calmer. "You can't
stay! I'm a married woman! I have
three children! And I'm very happy in my marriage."
Shooting her words out rapidly, like a machine gun, she told me that
her husband was very
dependable, not too imaginative but a good man, that he was not
sensual, that she had to be very
careful because he tired very easily when they made love, that he got
sick easily and sometimes
couldn't go to work but that he had managed to produce three beautiful
children, and that after her
third child, her husband, whose name seemed to be Herbert, had just
simply quit. He didn't have it
anymore, but it didn't matter to her.
I tried to calm her down by assuring her over and over that 1 had come
to visit her only for a moment,
that it was not my intention to alter her life or to bother her in any
way. I described to her how hard it
had been to find her.
"I have come here to say good-bye to you," I said, "and to tell you
that you are the love of my life. I
want to make you a token gift, a symbol of my gratitude and my undying
affection."
She seemed to be deeply affected. She smiled openly the way she used
to. The separation between her
teeth made her look childlike. I commented to her that she was more
beautiful than ever, which was
the truth to me.
She laughed and said that she was going on a strict diet, and if she
had known that I was coming to see
her, she would have started her diet a long time ago. But she would
start now, and I would find her the
next time as lean as she had always been. She reiterated the horror of
our life together and how
profoundly affected she had been. She had even thought, in spite of
being a devout Catholic, of
committing suicide, but she had found in her children the solace that
she needed; whatever we had
done were quirks of youth that would never be vacuumed away, but had to
be swept under the rug.
When I asked if there was some gift that I could make to her as a token
of my gratitude and affection
for her, she laughed and said exactly what Patricia Turner had said:
that I didn't have a pot to piss in,
nor would I ever have one, because that's the way I was made. I
insisted that she name something.
"Can you buy me a station wagon where all my children could fit?" she
said, laughing. "I want a
Pontiac, or an Oldsmobile, with all the trimmings."
She said that knowing in her heart of hearts that I could not possibly
make her such a gift. But I did.
I drove the dealer's car, following him as he delivered the station
wagon to her the next day, and from
the parked car where I was hiding, I heard her surprise; but congruous
with her sensual being, her
surprise was not an expression of delight. It was a bodily reaction, a
sob of anguish, of bewilderment.
She cried, but I knew that she was not crying because she had received
the gift. She was expressing a
longing that had echoes in me. I crumpled in the seat of the car. On my
train ride to New York, and my
flight to Los Angeles, the feeling that persisted was that my life was
running out; it was running out of
me like clutched sand. I didn't feel in any way liberated or changed by
saying thank you and good-bye.
Quite the contrary, I felt the burden of that weird affection more
deeply than ever. I felt like weeping.
What ran through my mind over and over were the titles that my friend
Rodrigo Cummings had
invented for books that were never to be written. He specialized in
writing titles. His favorite was
"We'll All Die in Hollywood"; another was "We'll Never Change"; and my
favorite, the one that I
bought for ten dollars, was "From the Life and Sins of Rodrigo
Cummings." All those titles played in
my mind. I was Rodrigo Cummings, and I was stuck in time and space, and
I did love two women
more than my life, and that would never change. And like the rest of my
friends, I would die in
Hollywood.
I told don Juan all of this in my report of what I considered to be my
pseudo-success. He discarded it
shamelessly. He said that what I felt was merely the result of
indulging and self-pity, and that in order
to say good-bye and thank you, and really mean it and sustain it,
sorcerers had to remake themselves.
"Vanquish your self-pity right now," he demanded. "Vanquish the idea
that you are hurt and what do
you have as the irreducible residue?"
What I had as the irreducible residue was the feeling that I had made
my ultimate gift to both of them.
Not in the spirit of renewing anything, or harming anyone, including
myself, but in the true spirit that
don Juan had tried to point out to me-in the spirit of a
warrior-traveler whose only virtue, he had said,
is to keep alive the memory of whatever has affected him, whose only
way to say thank you and goodbye
was by this act of magic: of storing in his silence whatever he has
loved.
Beyond Syntax
The Usher
I WAS IN don Juan's house in Sonora, sound asleep in my bed, when he
woke me up. I had
stayed up practically all night, mulling over concepts that he had
explained to me.
"You have rested enough," he said firmly, almost gruffly, as he shook
me by the shoulders. "Don't
indulge in being fatigued. Your fatigue is, more than fatigue, a desire
not to be bothered.
Something in you resents being bothered. But it's most important that
you exacerbate that part of
you until it breaks down. Let's go for a hike."
Don Juan was right. There was some part of me that resented immensely
being bothered. I wanted
to sleep for days and not think about don Juan's sorcery concepts
anymore. Thoroughly against
my will, I got up and followed him. Don Juan had pre-pared a meal,
which I devoured as if I
hadn't eaten for days, and then we walked out of the house and headed
east, toward the
mountains. I had been so dazed that I hadn't noticed that it was early
morning until I saw the sun,
which was right above the eastern range of mountains. I wanted to
comment to don Juan that I
had slept all night without moving, but he hushed me. He said that we
were going to go on an
expedition to the mountains to search for specific plants.
"What are you going to do with the plants you are going to collect, don
Juan?" I asked him as soon as
we had started off.
"They are not for me," he said with a grin. "They are for a friend of
mine, a botanist and pharmacist.
He makes potions with them."
"Is he a Yaqui, don Juan? Does he live here in Sonora?" I asked.
"No, he isn't a Yaqui, and he doesn't live here in Sonora. You'll meet
him someday."
"Is he a sorcerer, don Juan?"
"Yes, he is," he replied dryly.
I asked him then if I could take some of the plants to be identified at
the Botanical Garden at UCLA.
"Surely, surely!" he said.
I had found out in the past that whenever he said "surely," he didn't
mean it. It was obvious that he had
no intention whatsoever of giving me any specimens for identification.
I became very curious about
his sorcerer friend, and asked him to tell me more about him, perhaps
describe him, telling me where
he lived and how he got to meet him.
"Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa!" don Juan said, as if I were a horse. "Hold
it, hold it! Who are you?
Professor Lorca? Do you want to study his cognitive system?"
We went deep into the arid foothills. Don Juan walked steadily for
hours. I thought that the task of the
day was going to be just to walk. He finally stopped and sat down on
the shaded side of the foothills.
"It is time that you start on one of the biggest projects of sorcery,"
don Juan said.
"What is this project of sorcery that you're talking about, don Juan?"
I inquired.
"It's called the recapitulation," he said. "The old sorcerers used to
call it recounting the events of your
life, and for them, it started as a simple technique, a device to aid
them in remembering what they
were doing and saying to their disciples. For their disciples, the
technique had the same value: It
allowed them to remember what their teachers had said and done to them.
It took terrible social
upheavals, like being conquered and vanquished several times, before
the old sorcerers realized that
their technique had far-reaching effects."
"Are you referring, don Juan, to the Spanish conquest?" I asked.
"No," he said. "That was just the icing on the cake. There were other
upheavals before that, more
devastating. When the Spaniards got here, the old sorcerers didn't
exist any longer. The disciples of
those who had survived other upheavals were very cagey by then. They
knew how to take care of
themselves. It is that new crop of sorcerers who renamed the old
sorcerers' technique recapitulation.
"There's an enormous premium on time," he continued. "For sorcerers in
general, time is of the
essence. The challenge I am faced with is that in a very compact unit
of time I must cram into you
everything there is to know about sorcery as an abstract proposition,
but in order to do that I have to
build the necessary space in you."
"What space? What are you talking about, don Juan?"
"The premise of sorcerers is that in order to bring something in, there
must be a space to put it in," he
said. "If you are filled to the brim with the items of everyday life,
there's no space for anything new.
That space must be built. Do you see what I mean? The sorcerers of
olden times believed that the
recapitulation of your life made that space. It does, and much more, of
course.
"The way sorcerers perform the recapitulation is very formal," he went
on. "It consists of writing a list
of all the people they have met, from the present to the very beginning
of their lives. Once they have
that list, they take the first person on it and recollect everything
they can about that person. And I
mean everything, every detail. It's better to recapitulate from the
present to the past, because the
memories of the present are fresh, and in this manner, the recollection
ability is honed. What
practitioners do is to recollect and breathe. They inhale slowly and
deliberately, fanning the head from
right to left, in a barely noticeable swing, and exhale in the same
fashion."
He said that the inhalations and exhalations should be natural; if they
were too rapid, one would enter
into something that he called tiring breaths: breaths that required
slower breathing afterward in order
to calm down the muscles.
"And what do you want me to do, don Juan, with all this?" I asked.
"You begin making your list today," he said. "Divide it by years, by
occupations, arrange it in any
order you want to, but make it sequential, with the most recent person
first, and end with Mommy and
Daddy. And then, remember everything about them. No more ado than that.
As you practice, you will
realize what you're doing."
On my next visit to his house, I told don Juan that I had been
meticulously going through the events of
my life, and that it was very difficult for me to adhere to his strict
format and follow my list of persons
one by one. Ordinarily, my recapitulation took me every which way. I
let the events decide the
direction of my recollection. What I did, which was volitional, was to
adhere to a general unit of time.
For instance, I had begun with the people in the anthropology
department, but I let my recollection
pull me to anywhere in time, from the present to the day I started
attending school at UCLA.
I told don Juan that an odd thing I'd found out, which I had completely
forgotten, was that I had no
idea that UCLA existed until one night when my girlfriend's roommate
from college came to Los
Angeles and we picked her up at the airport. She was going to study
musicology at UCLA. Her plane
arrived in the early evening, and she asked me if I could take her to
the campus so she could take a
look at the place where she was going to spend the next four years of
her life. I knew where the
campus was, for I had driven past its entrance on Sunset Boulevard
endless times on my way to the
beach. I had never been on the campus, though.
It was during the semester break. The few people that we found directed
us to the music department.
The campus was deserted, but what I witnessed subjectively was the most
exquisite thing I have ever
seen. It was a delight to my eyes. The buildings seemed to be alive
with some energy of their own.
What was going to be a very cursory visit to the music department
turned out to be a gigantic tour of
the entire campus. I fell in love with UCLA. I mentioned to don Juan
that the only thing that marred
my ecstasy was my girlfriend's annoyance at my insistence on walking
through the huge campus.
"What the hell could there be in here?" she yelled at me in protest.
"It's as if you have never seen a
university campus in your life! You've seen one, you've seen them all.
I think you're just trying to
impress my friend with your sensitivity!"
I wasn't, and I vehemently told them that I was genuinely impressed by
the beauty of my
surroundings. I sensed so much hope in those buildings, so much
promise, and yet I couldn't express
my subjective state.
"I have been in school nearly all my life," my girlfriend said through
clenched teeth, "and I'm sick and
tired of it! Nobody's going to find shit in here! All you find is guff,
and they don't even prepare you to
meet your responsibilities in life."
When I mentioned that I would like to attend school here, she became
even more furious.
"Get a job!" she screamed. "Go and meet life from eight to five, and
cut the crap! That's what life is: a
job from eight to five, forty hours a week! See what it does to you!
Look at me-I'm super-educated
now, and I'm not fit for a job."
All I knew was that I had never seen a place so beautiful. I made a
promise then that I would go to
school at UCLA, no matter what, come hell or high water. My desire had
everything to do with me,
and yet it was not driven by the need for immediate gratification. It
was more in the realm of awe.
I told don Juan that my girlfriend's annoyance had been so jarring to
me that it forced me to look at her
in a different light, and that to my recollection, that was the first
time ever that a commentary had
aroused such a deep reaction in me. I saw facets of character in my
girlfriend that I hadn't seen before,
facets that scared me stiff.
"I think I judged her terribly," I said to don Juan. "After our visit
to the campus, we drifted apart. It
was as if UCLA had come between us like a wedge. I know that it's
stupid to think this way."
"It isn't stupid," don Juan said. "It was a perfectly valid reaction.
While you were walking on the
campus, I am sure that you had a bout with intent. You intended being
there, and anything that was
opposed to it you had to let go.
"But don't overdo it," he went on. "The touch of warrior-travelers is
very light, although it is
cultivated. The hand of a warrior-traveler begins as a heavy, gripping,
iron hand but becomes like the
hand of a ghost, a hand made of gossamer. Warrior-travelers leave no
marks, no tracks. That's the
challenge for warrior-travelers.'"
Don Juan's comments made me sink into a deep, morose state of
recriminations against myself, for I
knew, from the little bit of my recounting, that I was extremely
heavy-handed, obsessive, and
domineering. I told don Juan about my ruminations.
"The power of the recapitulation," don Juan said, "is that it stirs up
all the garbage of our lives and
brings it to the surface."
Then don Juan delineated the intricacies of awareness and perception,
which were the basis of the
recapitulation. He began by saying that he was going to present an
arrangement of concepts that I
should not take as sorcerers' theories under any conditions, because it
was an arrangement formulated
by the shamans of ancient Mexico as a result of seeing energy directly
as it flows in the universe. He
warned me that he would present the units of this arrangement to me
without any attempt at
classifying them or ranking them by any predetermined standard.
"I'm not interested in classifications," he went on. "You have been
classifying everything all your life.
Now you are going to be
forced to stay away from classifications. The other day, when I asked
you if you knew anything about
clouds, you gave me the names of all the clouds and the percentage of
moisture that one should expect
from each one of them. You were a veritable weatherman. But when I
asked you if you knew what you
could do with the clouds personally, you had no idea what I was talking
about.
"Classifications have a world of their own," he continued. "After you
begin to classify anything, the
classification becomes alive, and it rules you. But since
classifications never started as energy-giving
affairs, they always remain like dead logs. They are not trees; they
are merely logs."
He explained that the sorcerers of ancient Mexico saw; that the
universe at large is composed of
energy fields in the form of luminous filaments. They saw zillions of
them, wherever they turned to
see. They also saw that those energy fields arrange themselves into
currents of luminous fibers,
streams that are constant, perennial forces in the universe, and that
the current or stream of filaments
that is related to the recapitulation was named by those sorcerers the
dark sea of awareness, and also
the Eagle.
He stated that those sorcerers also found out that every creature in
the universe is attached to the dark
sea of awareness at a round point of luminosity that was apparent when
those creatures were
perceived as energy. On that point of luminosity, which the sorcerers
of ancient Mexico called the
assemblage point, don Juan said that perception was assembled by a
mysterious aspect of the dark sea
of awareness.
Don Juan asserted that on the assemblage point of human beings,
zillions of energy fields from the
universe at large, in the form of luminous filaments, converge and go
through it. These energy fields
are converted into sensory data, and the sensory data is then
interpreted and perceived as the world we
know. Don Juan further explained that what turns the luminous fibers
into sensory data is the dark sea
of awareness. Sorcerers see this transformation and call it the glow of
awareness, a sheen that extends
like a halo around the assemblage point. He warned me then that he was
going to make a statement
which, in the understanding of sorcerers, was central to comprehending
the scope of the recapitulation.
Putting an enormous emphasis on his words, he said that what we call
the senses in organisms is
nothing but degrees of awareness. He maintained that if we accept that
the senses are the dark sea of
awareness, we have to admit that the interpretation that the senses
make of sensory data is also the
dark sea of awareness. He explained at length that to face the world
around us in the terms that we do
is the result of the interpretation system of mankind with which every
human being is equipped. He
also said that every organism in existence has to have an
interpretation system that permits it to
function in its surroundings.
"The sorcerers who came after the apocalyptic upheavals I told you
about," he continued, "saw that at
the moment of death, the dark sea of awareness sucked in, so to speak,
through the assemblage point,
the awareness of living creatures. They also saw that the dark sea of
awareness had a moment's, let's
say, hesitation when it was faced with sorcerers who had done a
recounting of their lives.
Unbeknownst to them, some had done it so thoroughly that the dark sea
of awareness took their
awareness in the form of their life experiences, but didn't touch their
life force. Sorcerers had found
out a gigantic truth about the forces of the universe: The dark sea of
awareness wants only our life
experiences, not our life force."
The premises of don Juan's elucidation were incomprehensible to me. Or
perhaps it would be more
accurate to say that I was vaguely and yet deeply cognizant of how
functional the premises of his
explanation were.
"Sorcerers believe," don Juan went on, "that as we recapitulate our
lives, all the debris, as I told you,
comes to the surface. We realize our inconsistencies, our repetitions,
but something in us puts up a
tremendous resistance to recapitulating. Sorcerers say that the road is
free only after a gigantic
upheaval, after the appearance on our screen of the memory of an event
that shakes our foundations
with its terrifying clarity of detail. It's the event that drags us to
the actual moment that we lived it.
Sorcerers call that event the usher, because from then on every event
we touch on is relived, not
merely remembered.
"Walking is always something that precipitates memories," don Juan went
on. "The sorcerers of
ancient Mexico believed that everything we live we store as a sensation
on the backs of the legs. They
considered the backs of the legs to be the warehouse of man's personal
history. So, let's go for a walk
in the hills now." We walked until it was almost dark.
"I think I have made you walk long enough," don Juan said when we were
back at his house, "to have
you ready to begin this sorcerers' maneuver of finding an usher: an
event in your life that you will
remember with such clarity that it will serve as a spotlight to
illuminate everything else in your
recapitulation with the same, or comparable, clarity. Do what sorcerers
call recapitulating pieces of a
puzzle. Something will lead you to remember the event that will serve
as your usher." He left me
alone, giving me one last warning. "Give it your best shot," he said.
"Do your best." 1 was extremely
silent for a moment, perhaps due to the silence around me. I
experienced, then, a vibration, a sort of
jolt in my chest. 1 had difficulty breathing, but suddenly something
opened up in my chest that
allowed me to take a deep breath, and a total view of a forgotten event
of my childhood burst into my
memory, as if it had been held captive and was suddenly released.
I was at my grandfather's studio, where he had a billiard table, and I
was playing billiards with him. 1
was almost nine years old then. My grandfather was quite a skillful
player, and compulsively he had
taught me every play he knew until I was good enough to have a serious
match with him. We spent
endless hours playing billiards. I became so proficient at it that one
day I defeated him. From that day
on, he was incapable of winning. Many a time I
deliberately threw the game, just to be nice to him, but he knew it and
would become furious with me.
Once, he got so upset that he hit me on the top of the head with the
cue.
To my grandfather's chagrin and delight, by the time I was nine years
old, I could make carom after
carom without stopping. He became so frustrated and impatient in a game
with me once that he threw
down his cue and told me to play by myself. My compulsive nature made
it possible for me to
compete with myself and work the same play on and on until I got it
perfectly.
One day, a man notorious in town for his gambling connections, the
owner of a billiards house, came
to visit my grandfather. They were talking and playing billiards as I
happened to enter the room. I
instantly tried to retreat, but my grandfather grabbed me and pulled me
in.
"This is my grandson," he said to the man.
"Very pleased to meet you," the man said. He looked at me sternly, and
then extended his hand, which
was the size of the head of a normal person.
I was horrified. His enormous burst of laughter told me that he was
cognizant of my discomfort. He
told me that his name was Falelo Quiroga, and I mumbled my name.
He was very tall, and extremely well dressed. He was wearing a
double-breasted blue pinstriped suit
with beautifully tapered trousers. He must have been in his early
fifties then, but he was trim and fit
except for a slight bulge in his midsection. He wasn't fat; he seemed
to cultivate the look of a man who
is well fed and is not in need of anything. Most of the people in my
hometown were gaunt. They were
people who labored hard to earn a living and had no time for niceties.
Falelo Quiroga appeared to be
the opposite. His whole demeanor was that of a man who had time only
for niceties.
He was pleasant-looking. He had a bland, well-shaven face with kind
blue eyes. He had the air and the
confidence of a doctor. People in my town used to say that he was
capable of putting anyone at ease,
and that he should have been a priest, a lawyer, or a doctor instead of
a gambler. They also used to say
that he made more money gambling than all the doctors and lawyers in
town put together made by
working.
His hair was black, and carefully combed. It was obviously thinning
considerably. He tried to hide his
receding hairline by combing his hair over his forehead. He had a
square jaw and an absolutely
winning smile. He had big, white teeth, which were well cared for, the
ultimate novelty in an area
where tooth decay was monumental. Two other remarkable features of
Falelo Quiroga, for me, were
his enormous feet and his handmade, black patent-leather shoes. I was
fascinated by the fact that his
shoes didn't squeak at all as he walked back and forth in the room. I
was accustomed to hearing my
grandfather's approach by the squeak of the soles of his shoes.
"My grandson plays billiards very well," my grandfather said
nonchalantly to Falelo Quiroga. "Why
don't I give him my cue and let him play with you while I watch?""
"This child plays billiards?" the big man asked my grandfather with a
laugh.
"Oh, he does," my grandfather assured him. "Of course, not as well as
you do, Falelo. Why don't you
try him? And to make it interesting for you, so you won't be
patronizing my grandson, let's bet a little
money. What do you say if we bet this much?"
He put a thick wad of crumpled-up bills on the table and smiled at
Falelo Quiroga, shaking his head
from side to side as if daring the big man to take his bet.
"My oh my, that much, eh?" Falelo Quiroga said, looking at me
questioningly. He opened his wallet
then and pulled out some neatly folded bills. This, for me, was another
surprising detail. My
grandfather's habit was to carry his money in every one of his pockets,
all crumpled up. When he
needed to pay for something, he had to straighten out the bills in
order to count them.
Falelo Quiroga didn't say it, but I knew that he felt like a highway
robber. He smiled at my grandfather
and, obviously out of respect for him, he put his money on the table.
My grandfather, acting as the
arbiter, set the game at a certain number of caroms and flipped a coin
to see who would start first.
Falelo Quiroga won.
"You better give it all you have, without holding back," my grandfather
urged him. "Don't have any
qualms about demolishing this twerp and winning my money!"
Falelo Quiroga, following my grandfather's advice, played as hard as he
was able, but at one point he
missed one carom by a hair. I took the cue. I thought I was going to
faint, but seeing my grandfather's
glee-he was jumping up and down-calmed me, and besides, it irked me to
see Falelo Quiroga about to
split his sides laughing when he saw the way I held the cue. I couldn't
lean over the table, as billiards
is normally played, because of my height. But my grandfather, with
painstaking patience and determination,
had taught me an alternative way of playing. By extending my arm all
the way back, I held
the cue nearly above my shoulders, to the side.
"What does he do when he has to reach the middle of the table?" Falelo
Quiroga asked, laughing.
"He hangs on the edge of the table," my grandfather said
mat-ter-of-factly. "It's permissible, you
know."
My grandfather came to me and whispered through clenched teeth that if
I tried to be polite and lose
he was going to break all the cues on my head. I knew he didn't mean
it; this was just his way of
expressing his confidence in me.
I won easily. My grandfather was delighted beyond description, but
strangely enough, so was Falelo
Quiroga. He laughed as he went around the pool table, slapping its
edges. My grandfather praised me
to the skies. He revealed to Quiroga my best score, and joked that I
had excelled because he had found
the way to lure me to practice: coffee with Danish pastries.
"You don't say, you don't say!" Quiroga kept repeating. He said
good-bye; my grandfather picked up
the bet money, and the incident was forgotten. My grandfather promised
to take me to a restaurant and
buy me
the best meal in town, but he never did. He was very stingy; he was
known to be a lavish spender only
with women.
Two days later, two enormous men affiliated with Falelo Quiroga came to
me at the time that I got out
from school and was leaving.
"Falelo Quiroga wants to see you," one of them said in a guttural tone.
"He wants you to go to his
place and have some coffee and Danish pastries with him."
If he hadn't said coffee and Danish pastries, I probably would have run
away from them. I
remembered then that my grandfather had told Falelo Quiroga that I
would sell my soul for coffee and
Danish pastries. I gladly went with them. However, I couldn't walk as
fast as they did, so one of them,
the one whose name was Guillermo Falcon, picked me up and cradled me in
his huge arms. He
laughed through crooked teeth.
"You better enjoy the ride, kid," he said. His breath was terrible.
"Have you ever been carried by
anyone? Judging by the way you wriggle, never!" He giggled grotesquely.
Fortunately, Falelo Quiroga's place was not too far from the school.
Mr. Falcon deposited me on a
couch in an office. Falelo Quiroga was there, sitting behind a huge
desk. He stood up and shook hands
with me. He immediately had some coffee and delicious pastries brought
to me, and the two of us sat
there chatting amiably about my grandfather's chicken farm. He asked me
if I would like to have more
pastries, and I said that I wouldn't mind if I did. He laughed, and he
himself brought me a whole tray
of unbelievably delicious pastries from the next room.
After I had veritably gorged myself, he politely asked me if I would
consider coming to his billiards
place in the wee hours of the night to play a couple of friendly games
with some people of his choice.
He casually mentioned that a considerable amount of money was going to
be involved. He openly
expressed his trust in my skill, and added that he was going to pay me,
for my time and my effort, a
percentage of the winning money. He further stated that he knew the
mentality of my family; they
would have found it improper that he give me money, even though it was
pay. So he promised to put
the money in the bank in a special account for me, or more practical
yet, he would cover any purchase
that I made in any of the stores in town, or the food I consumed in any
restaurant in town.
I didn't believe a word of what he was saying. I knew that Falelo
Quiroga was a crook, a racketeer. I
liked, however, the idea of playing billiards with people I didn't
know, and I struck a bargain with him.
"Will you give me some coffee and Danish pastries like the ones you
gave me today?" I said.
"Of course, my boy," he replied. "If you come to play for me, I will
buy you the bakery! I will have
the baker bake them just for you. Take my word."
I warned Falelo Quiroga that the only drawback was my incapacity to get
out of my house; I had too
many aunts who watched me like hawks, and besides, my bedroom was on
the second floor.
"That's no problem," Falelo Quiroga assured me. "You're quite small.
Mr. Falcon will catch you if you
jump from your window into his arms. He's as big as a house! I
recommend that you go to bed early
tonight. Mr. Falcon will wake you up by whistling and throwing rocks at
your window. You have to
watch out, though! He's an impatient man."
I went home in the midst of the most astounding excitation. I couldn't
go to sleep. I was quite awake
when I heard Mr. Falcon whistling and throwing small pebbles against
the glass panes of the window.
I opened the window. Mr. Falcon was right below me, on the street.
"Jump into my arms, kid," he said to me in a constricted voice, which
he tried to modulate into a loud
whisper. "If you don't aim at my arms, I'll drop you and you'll die.
Remember that. Don't make me run
around. Just aim at my arms. Jump! Jump!"
I did, and he caught me with the ease of someone catching a bag of
cotton. He put me down and told
me to run. He said that I was a child awakened from a deep sleep, and
that he had to make me run so I
would be fully awake by the time I got to the billiards house.
I played that night with two men, and I won both games. I had the most
delicious coffee and pastries
that one could imagine. Personally, I was in heaven. It was around
seven in the morning when I
returned home. Nobody had noticed my absence. It was time to go to
school. For all practical
purposes, everything was normal except for the fact that I was so tired
that I couldn't keep my eyes
open all day.
From that day on, Falelo Quiroga sent Mr. Falcon to pick me up two or
three times a week, and I won
every game that he made me play. And faithful to his promise, he paid
for anything that I bought,
including meals at my favorite Chinese restaurant, where I used to go
daily. Sometimes, I even invited
my friends, whom I mortified no end by running out of the restaurant
screaming when the waiter
brought the bill. They were amazed at the fact that they were never
taken to the police for consuming
food and not paying for it.
What was an ordeal for me was that I had never conceived of the fact
that I would have to contend
with the hopes and expectations of all the people who bet on me. The
ordeal of ordeals, however, took
place when a crack player from a nearby city challenged Falelo Quiroga
and backed his challenge
with a giant bet. The night of the game was an inauspicious night. My
grandfather became ill and
couldn't fall asleep. The entire family was in an uproar. It appeared
that nobody went to bed. I doubted
that I had any possibility of sneaking out of my bedroom, but Mr.
Falcon's whistling and the pebbles
hitting the glass of my window were so insistent that I took a chance
and jumped from my window
into Mr. Falcon's arms.
It seemed that every male in town had congregated at the billiards
place. Anguished faces silently
begged me not to lose. Some of the men boldly assured me that they had
bet their houses and all their
belongings. One man, in a half-joking tone, said that he had bet his
wife; if I didn't win, he would be a
cuckold that night, or a murderer. He didn't specify whether he meant
he would kill his wife in order
not to be a cuckold, or me, for losing the game.
Falelo Quiroga paced back and forth. He had hired a masseur to massage
me. He wanted me relaxed.
The masseur put hot towels on my arms and wrists and cold towels on my
forehead. He put on my feet
the most comfortable, soft shoes that I had ever worn. They had hard,
military heels and arch supports.
Falelo Quiroga even outfitted me with a beret to keep my hair from
falling in my face, as well as a
pair of loose overalls with a belt.
Half of the people around the billiard table were strangers from
another town. They glared at me. They
gave me the feeling that they wanted me dead.
Falelo Quiroga flipped a coin to decide who would go first. My opponent
was a Brazilian of Chinese
descent, young, round-faced, very spiffy and confident. He started
first, and he made a staggering
amount of caroms. I knew by the color of his face that Falelo Quiroga
was about to have a heart
attack, and so were the other people who had bet everything they had on
me.
I played very well that night, and as 1 approached the number of caroms
that the other man had made,
the nervousness of the ones who had bet on me reached its peak. Falelo
Quiroga was the most
hysterical of them all. He yelled at everybody and demanded that
someone open the windows because
the cigarette smoke made the air unbreathable for me. He wanted the
masseur to relax my arms and
shoulders. Finally, I had to stop everyone, and in a real hurry, I made
the eight caroms that I needed to
win. The euphoria of those who had bet on me was indescribable. I was
oblivious to all that, for it was
already morning and they had to take me home in a hurry.
My exhaustion that day knew no limits. Very obligingly, Falelo Quiroga
didn't send for me for a whole
week. However, one afternoon, Mr. Falcon picked me up from school and
took me to the billiards
house. Falelo Quiroga was extremely serious. He didn't even offer me
coffee or Danish pastries. He
sent everybody out of
his office and got directly to the point. He pulled his chair close
tome.
"I have put a lot of money in the bank for you," he said very solemnly.
"I am true to what I promised
you. I give you my word that I will always look after you. You know
that! Now, if you do what I am
going to tell you to do, you will make so much money that you won't
have to work a day in your life. I
want you to lose your next game by one carom. I know that you can do
it. But I want you to miss by
only a hair. The more dramatic, the better."
I was dumbfounded. All of this was incomprehensible to me. Falelo
Quiroga repeated his request and
further explained that he was going to bet anonymously all he had
against me, and that that was the
nature of our new deal.
"Mr. Falcon has been guarding you for months," he said. "All I need to
tell you is that Mr. Falcon uses
all his force to protect you, but he could do the opposite with the
same strength."
Falelo Quiroga's threat couldn't have been more obvious. He must have
seen in my face the horror that
I felt, for he relaxed and laughed.
"Oh, but don't you worry about things like that," he said reassuringly,
"because we are brothers."
This was the first time in my life that I had been placed in an
untenable position. I wanted with all my
might to run away from Falelo Quiroga, from the fear that he had evoked
in me. But at the same time,
and with equal force, I wanted to stay; I wanted the ease of being able
to buy anything I wanted from
any store, and above all, the ease of being able to eat at any
restaurant of my choice, without paying. I
was never confronted, however, with having to choose one or the other.
Unexpectedly, at least for me, my grandfather moved to another area,
quite distant. It was as if he
knew what was going on, and he sent me ahead of everyone else. I
doubted that he actually knew what
was taking place. It seemed that sending me away was one of his usual
intuitive actions. Don Juan's
return brought me out of my recollection. I had lost track of time. I
should have been famished but I
wasn't hungry at all. I was filled with nervous energy. Don Juan lit a
kerosene lantern and hung it from
a nail on the wall. Its dim light cast strange, dancing shadows in the
room. It took a moment for my
eyes to adjust to the semidarkness. I entered then into a state of
profound sadness. It was a strangely
detached feeling, a far-reaching longing that came from that
semidarkness, or perhaps from the
sensation of being trapped. I was so tired that I wanted to leave, but
at the same time, and with the
same force, I wanted to stay.
Don Juan's voice brought me a measure of control. He appeared to know
the reason for and the depth
of my turmoil, and modulated his voice to fit the occasion. The
severity of his tone helped me to gain
control over something that could easily have turned into a hysterical
reaction to fatigue and mental
stimulation.
"To recount events is magical for sorcerers," he said. "It isn't just
telling stories. It is seeing the
underlying fabric of events. This is the reason recounting is so
important and vast."
At his request, I told don Juan the event I had recollected.
"How appropriate," he said, and chuckled with delight. "The only
commentary I can make is that
warrior-travelers roll with the punches. They go wherever the impulse
may take them. The power of
warrior-travelers is to be alert, to get maximum effect from minimal
impulse. And above all, their
power lies in not interfering. Events have a force, a gravity of their
own, and travelers are just
travelers. Everything around them is for their eyes alone. In this
fashion, travelers construct the
meaning of every situation, without ever asking how it happened this
way or that way.
"Today, you remembered an event that sums up your total life," he
continued. "You are always faced
with a situation that is the same as the one that you never resolved.
You never really had to choose
whether to accept or reject Falelo Quiroga's crooked deal.
"Infinity always puts us in this terrible position of having to
choose," he went on. "We want infinity,
but at the same time, we want to run away from it. You want to tell me
to go and jump in a lake, but at
the same time you are compelled to stay. It would be infinitely easier
for you to just be compelled to
stay."
The Interplay of
Energy on the Horizon
THE CLARITY OF the usher brought a new impetus to my recapitulation. A
new mood replaced the
old one. From then on, I began to recollect events in my life with
maddening clarity. It was exactly as
if a barrier had been built inside me that had kept me holding rigidly
on to meager and unclear
memories, and the usher had smashed it. My memory faculty had been for
me, prior to that event, a
vague way of referring to things that had happened, but which I wanted
most of the time to forget.
Basically, I had no interest whatsoever in remembering anything of my
life. Therefore, I honestly saw
absolutely no point in this futile exercise of recapitulating, which
don Juan had practically imposed on
me. For me, it was a chore that tired me instantly and did nothing but
point out my incapacity for
concentrating.
I had dutifully made, nevertheless, lists of people, and I had engaged
in a haphazard effort of quasiremembering
my interactions with them. My lack of clarity in bringing those people
into
focus didn't dissuade me. I fulfilled what I considered to be my duty,
regardless of the way I really
felt. With practice, the clarity of my recollection improved, I thought
remarkably. I was able to
descend, so to speak, on certain choice events with a fair amount of
keenness that was at once scary
and rewarding. After don Juan presented me with the idea of the usher,
however, the power of my
recollection became something for which I had no name.
Following my list of people made the recapitulation extremely formal
and exigent, the way don Juan
wanted it. But from time to time, something in me got loose, something
that forced me to focus on
events unrelated to my list, events whose clarity was so maddening that
I was caught and submerged
in them, perhaps even more intensely than I had been when I had lived
the experiences themselves.
Every time I recapitulated in such a fashion, I had a degree of
detachment which allowed me to see
things I had disregarded when I had really been in the throes of them.
The first time in which the recollection of an event shook me to my
foundations happened after I had
given a lecture at a college in Oregon. The students in charge of
organizing the lecture took me and
another anthropology friend of mine to a house to spend the night. I
was going to go to a motel, but
they insisted, for our comfort, on taking us to this house. They said
that it was in the country, and there
were no noises, the quietest place in the world, with no telephones, no
interference from the outside
world. I, like the fool that I was, agreed to go with them. Don Juan
had not only warned me to always
be a solitary bird, he had demanded that I observe his recommendation,
something that I did most of
the time, but there were occasions when the gregarious creature in me
took the upper hand.
The committee took us to the house, quite a distance from Portland, of
a professor who was on
sabbatical. Very swiftly, they turned on the lights inside and outside
of the house, which was located
on a hill with spotlights all around it. With the spotlights on, the
house must have been visible from
five miles away. After that, the committee took off as fast as they
could, some-thing that surprised me
because I thought they were going to stay and talk. The house was a
wooden A-frame, small, but very
well constructed. It had an enormous living room and a mezzanine above
it where the bedroom was.
Right above, at the apex of the A-frame, there was a life-size crucifix
hanging from a strange rotating
hinge, which was drilled into the head of the figure. The spotlights on
the wall were focused on the
crucifix. It was quite an impressive sight, especially when it rotated,
squeaking as if the hinge needed
oil.
The bathroom of the house was another sight. It had mirrored tiles on
the ceiling, the walls, and the
floor, and it was illuminated with a reddish light. There was no way to
go to the bathroom without
seeing yourself from every conceivable angle. I enjoyed all those
features of the house, which seemed
to me stupendous.
When the time came for me to go to sleep, however, I encountered a
serious problem because there
was only one narrow, hard, quite monastic bed and my anthropologist
friend was close to having
pneumonia, wheezing and retching phlegm every time he coughed. He went
straight for the bed and
passed out. I looked for a place to sleep. I couldn't find one. That
house was barren of comforts.
Besides, it was cold. The committee had turned on the lights, but not
the heater. I looked for the heater.
My search was fruitless, as was my search for the switch to the
spotlights or to any of the lights in the
house, for that matter. The switches were there on the walls, but they
seemed to be overruled by the
effect of some main switch. The lights were on, and I had no way to
turn them off.
The only place I could find to sleep was on a thin throw rug, and the
only thing I found with which I
could cover myself was the tanned hide of a giant French poodle.
Obviously, it had been the pet of the
house and had been preserved; it had shiny black-marble eyes and an
open mouth with the tongue
hanging out. I put the head of the poodle skin toward my knees. I still
had to cover myself with the
tanned rear end, which was on my neck. Its
preserved head was like a hard object between my knees, quite
unsettling! If it had been dark, it
wouldn't have been as bad. I gathered a bundle of washcloths and used
them as a pillow. I used as
many as possible to cover the hide of the French poodle the best way I
could. I couldn't sleep all night.
It was then, as I lay there cursing myself silently for being so stupid
and not following don Juan's
recommendation, that I had the first maddeningly clear recollection of
my entire life. I had recollected
the event that don Juan had called the usher with equal clarity, but my
tendency had always been to
half-disregard what happened to me when I was with don Juan, on the
basis that in his presence
anything was possible. This time, however, I was alone.
Years before I met don Juan, I had worked painting signs on buildings.
My boss's name was Luigi
Palma. One day Luigi got a contract to paint a sign, advertising the
sale and rental of bridal gowns and
tuxedos, on the back wall of an old building. The owner of the store in
the building wanted to catch
the eye of possible customers with a large display. Luigi was going to
paint a bride and groom, and I
was going to do the lettering. We went to the flat roof of the building
and set up a scaffold.
I was quite apprehensive although I had no overt reason to be so. I had
painted dozens of signs on high
buildings. Luigi thought that I was beginning to be afraid of heights,
but that my fear was going to
pass. When the time came to start working, he lowered the scaffold a
few feet from the roof and
jumped onto its flat boards. He went to one side, while I stood on the
other in order to be totally out of
his way. He was the artist.
Luigi began to show off. His painting movements were so erratic and
agitated that the scaffold moved
back and forth. I became dizzy. I wanted to go back to the flat roof,
using the pretext that I needed
more paint and other painters' paraphernalia. I grabbed the edge of the
wall that fringed the flat roof
and tried to hoist myself up, but the tips of my feet got stuck in the
boards of the scaffold. I tried to
pull my feet and the scaffold toward the
wall; the harder I pulled, the farther away I pushed the scaffold from
the wall. Instead of helping me
untangle my feet, Luigi sat down and braced himself with the cords that
attached the scaffold to the
flat roof. He crossed himself and looked at me in horror. From his
sitting position, he knelt, weeping
quietly as he recited the Lord's Prayer.
I held on to the edge of the wall for dear life; what gave me the
desperate strength to endure was the
certainty that if I was in control, I could keep the scaffold from
moving farther and farther away. I
wasn't going to lose my grip and fall thirteen floors to my death.
Luigi, being a compulsive taskmaster
to the bitter end, yelled to me, in the midst of tears, that I should
pray. He swore that both of us were
going to fall to our deaths, and that the least we could do was to pray
for the salvation of our souls.
For a moment, I deliberated about whether it was functional to pray. I
opted to yell for help. People in
the building must have heard my yelling and sent for the firemen. I
sincerely thought that it had taken
only two or three seconds after I began to yell for the firemen to come
onto the roof and grab Luigi
and me and secure the scaffold.
In reality, I had hung on to the side of the building for at least
twenty minutes. When the firemen
finally pulled me onto the roof, I had lost any vestige of control. I
vomited on the hard floor of the
roof, sick to my stomach from fear and the odious smell of melted tar.
It was a very hot day; the tar
on the cracks of the scratchy roofing sheets was melting in the heat.
The ordeal had been so
frightening and embarrassing that I didn't want to remember it, and I
ended up hallucinating that the
firemen had pulled me into a warm, yellow room; they had then put me in
a supremely comfortable
bed, and I had fallen peacefully asleep, safe, wearing my pajamas,
delivered from danger.
My second recollection was another blast of incommensurable force. I
was talking amiably to a group
of friends when, for no apparent reason I could account for, I suddenly
lost my breath under the
impact of a thought, a memory, which was vague for an
instant and then became an engrossing experience. Its force was so
intense that I had to excuse myself
and retreat for a moment to a corner. My friends seemed to understand
my reaction; they disbanded
without any comments. What I was remembering was an incident that had
taken place in my last year
of high school.
My best friend and I used to walk to school, passing a big mansion with
a black wrought-iron fence at
least seven feet high and ending in pointed spikes. Behind the fence
was an extensive, well-kept green
lawn, and a huge, ferocious German shepherd dog. Every day, we used to
tease the dog and let him
charge at us. He stopped physically at the wrought-iron fence, but his
rage seemed to cross over to us.
My friend delighted in engaging the dog every day in a contest of mind
over matter. He used to stand a
few inches from the dog's snout, which protruded between the iron bars
at least six inches into the
street, and bare his teeth, just like the dog did.
"Yield, yield!" my friend shouted every time. "Obey! Obey! I am more
powerful than you!"
His daily displays of mental power, which lasted at least five minutes,
never affected the dog, outside
of leaving him more furious than ever. My friend assured me daily, as
part of his ritual, that the dog
was either going to obey him or die in front of us of heart failure
brought about by rage. His
conviction was so intense that I believed that the dog was going to
drop dead any day.
One morning, when we came around, the dog wasn't there. We waited for a
moment, but he didn't
show up; then we saw him, at the end of the extensive lawn. He seemed
to be busy there, so we slowly
began to walk away. From the comer of my eye, I noticed that the dog
was running at full speed,
toward us. When he was perhaps six or seven feet from the fence, he
took a gigantic leap over it. I was
sure that he was going to rip his belly on the spikes. He barely
cleared them and fell onto the street
like a sack of potatoes.
I thought for a moment that he was dead, but he was only stunned.
Suddenly, he got up, and instead of
chasing after the one who had brought about his rage, he ran after me.
I jumped onto the roof of a car,
but the car was nothing for the dog. He took a leap and was nearly on
top of me. I scrambled down
and climbed the first tree that was within reach, a flimsy little tree
that could barely support my
weight. I was sure that it would snap in the middle, sending me right
into the dog's jaws to be mauled
to death.
In the tree, I was nearly out of his reach. But the dog jumped again,
and snapped his teeth, catching
me by the seat of my pants and ripping them. His teeth actually nicked
my buttocks. The moment I
was safe at the top of the tree, the dog left. He just ran up the
street, perhaps looking for my friend.
At the infirmary in school, the nurse told me that I had to ask the
owner of the dog for a certificate of
rabies vaccination.
"You must look into this," she said severely. "You may have rabies
already. If the owner refuses to
show you the vaccination certificate, you are within your rights to
call the police."
I talked to the caretaker of the mansion where the dog lived. He
accused me of luring the owner's most
valuable dog, a pedigreed animal, out into the street.
"You better watch out, boy!" he said in an angry tone. "The dog got
lost. The owner will send you to
jail if you keep on bothering us."
"But I may have rabies," I said in a sincerely terrified tone.
"I don't give a shit if you have the bubonic plague," the man snapped.
"Scram!"
"I'll call the police," I said.
"Call whoever you like," he retorted. "You call the police, we'll turn
them against you. In this house,
we have enough clout to do that!"
I believed him, so I lied to the nurse and said that the dog could not
be found, and that it had no owner.
"Oh my god!" the woman exclaimed. "Then brace yourself for the worst. I
may have to send you to
the doctor." She gave me a long list of symptoms that I should look for
or wait for until they
manifested themselves. She said that the injections for rabies were
extremely painful, and that they
had to be administered subcutaneously on the area of the abdomen.
"I wouldn't wish that treatment on my worst enemy," she said, plunging
me into a horrid nightmare.
What followed was my first real depression. I just lay in my bed
feeling every one of the symptoms
enumerated by the nurse. I ended up going to the school infirmary and
begging the woman to give me
the treatment for rabies, no matter how painful. I made a huge scene. I
became hysterical. I didn't have
rabies, but I had totally lost my control.
I related to don Juan my two recollections in all their detail, sparing
nothing. He didn't make any
comments. He nodded a few times.
"In both recollections, don Juan," I said, feeling myself the urgency
of my voice, "I was as hysterical
as anyone could be. My body was trembling. I was sick to my stomach. I
don't want to say it was as if
I were in the experiences, because that's not the truth. I was in the
experiences themselves both times.
And when I couldn't take them anymore, I jumped into my life now. For
me, that was a jump into the
future. I had the power of going over time. My jump into the past was
not abrupt; the event developed
slowly, as memories do. It was at the end that I did jump abruptly into
the future: my life now."
"Something in you has begun to collapse for sure," he finally said. "It
has been collapsing all along,
but it repaired itself very quickly every time its supports failed. My
feeling is that it is now collapsing
totally."
After another long silence, don Juan explained that the sorcerers of
ancient Mexico believed that, as
he had told me already, we had two minds, and only one of them was
truly ours. I had always
understood don Juan as saying that there were two parts to our minds,
and one of them was always
silent because expression was denied to it by the force of the other
part. Whatever don Juan had said, I
had taken as a metaphorical way to explain, perhaps, the apparent
dominance of the left hemisphere of
the brain over the right, or something of the like.
"There is a secret option to the recapitulation" , don Juan said.
"Just like I told you that there is a secret option to dying, an option
that only sorcerers take. In the case
of dying, the secret option is that human beings could retain their
life force and relinquish only their
awareness, the product of their lives. In the case of the
recapitulation, the secret option that only
sorcerers take is to choose to enhance their true minds.
"The haunting memory of your recollections," he went on, "could come
only from your true mind. The
other mind that we all have and share is, I would say, a cheap model:
economy strength, one size fits
all. But this is a subject that we will discuss later. What is at stake
now is the advent of a disintegrating
force. But not a force that is disintegrating you-I don't mean it that
way. It is disintegrating what the
sorcerers call the foreign installation, which exists in you and in
every other human being. The effect
of the force that is descending on you, which is disintegrating the
foreign installation, is that it pulls
sorcerers out of their syntax."
I had listened carefully to don Juan, but I couldn't say that I had
understood what he had said. For
some strange reason, which was to me as unknown as the cause of my
vivid recollections, I couldn't
ask him any questions.
"I know how difficult it is for you," don Juan said all of a sudden,
"to deal with this facet of your life.
Every sorcerer that I know has gone through it. The males going through
it suffer infinitely more
damage than the females. I suppose it's the condition of women to be
more durable. The sorcerers of
ancient Mexico, acting as a group, tried their best to buttress the
impact of this disintegrating force. In
our day, we have no means of acting as a group, so we must brace
ourselves to face in solitude a force
that will sweep us away from language, for there is no way to describe
adequately what is going on."
Don Juan was right in that I was at a loss for explanations or ways of
describing the effect that those
recollections had had on me. Don Juan had told me that sorcerers face
the unknown in the most
common incidents one can imagine. When they are confronted with it, and
cannot interpret what they
are perceiving, they have to rely on an outside source for direction.
Don Juan had called that source
infinity, or the voice of the spirit, and had said that if sorcerers
don't try to be rational about what can't
be rationalized, the spirit unerringly tells them what's what.
Don Juan had guided me to accept the idea that infinity was a force
that had a voice and was conscious
of itself. Consequently, he had prepared me to be ready to listen to
that voice and act efficiently
always, but without antecedents, using as little as possible the
railings of the a priori. I waited
impatiently for the voice of the spirit to tell me the meaning of my
recollections, but nothing
happened.
I was in a bookstore one day when a girl recognized me and came over to
talk to me. She was tall and
slim, and had an insecure, little girl's voice. I was trying to make
her feel at ease when I was suddenly
accosted by an instantaneous energetic change. It was as if an alarm
had been triggered in me, and as
it had happened in the past, without any volition on my part
whatsoever, I recollected another
completely forgotten event in my life. The memory of my grandparents'
house flooded me. It was a
veritable avalanche so intense that it was devastating, and once more,
I had to retreat to a corner. My
body shook, as if I had taken a chill.
I must have been eight years old. My grandfather was talking to me. He
had begun by telling me that
it was his utmost duty to set me straight. I had two cousins who were
my age: Alfredo and Luis. My
grandfather demanded mercilessly that I admit that my cousin Alfredo
was really beautiful. In my
vision, I heard my grandfather's raspy, constricted voice.
"Alfredo doesn't need any introductions," he had said to me on that
occasion. "He needs only to be
present and the doors will fly open for him because everybody practices
the cult of beauty. Everybody
likes beautiful people. They envy them, but they certainly seek their
company. Take it from me. I am
handsome, wouldn't you say?" I sincerely agreed with my grandfather. He
was certainly a very
handsome man, small-boned, with laughing blue eyes and an exquisitely
chiseled face with beautiful
cheekbones. Everything seemed to be perfectly balanced in his face-his
nose, his mouth, his eyes, his
pointed jaw. He had blond hair growing on his ears, a feature that gave
him an elflike appearance. He
knew everything about himself, and he exploited his attributes to the
maximum. Women adored him;
first, according to him, for his beauty, and second, because he posed
no threat to them. He, of course,
took full advantage of all this.
"Your cousin Alfredo is a winner," my grandfather went on. "He will
never have to crash a party
because he'll be the first one on the list of guests. Have you ever
noticed how people stop in the street
to look at him, and how they want to touch him? He's so beautiful that
I'm afraid he's going to turn out
to be an asshole, but that's a different story. Let us say that he'll
be the most welcome asshole you have
ever met."
My grandfather compared my cousin Luis with Alfredo. He said that Luis
was homely, and a little bit
stupid, but that he had a heart of gold. And then he brought me into
the picture.
"If we are going to proceed with our explanation," he continued, "you
have to admit in sincerity that
Alfredo is beautiful and Luis is good. Now, let's take you; you are
neither handsome nor good. You are
a veritable son of a bitch. Nobody's going to invite you to a party.
You'll have to get used to the idea
that if you want to be at a party, you will have to crash it. Doors
will never be open for you the way
they will be open for Alfredo for being beautiful, and for Luis for
being good, so you will have to get
in through the window."
His analysis of his three grandsons was so accurate that he made me
weep with the finality of what he
had said. The more I wept, the happier he became. He finished his case
with a most deleterious
admonition.
"There's no need to feel bad," he said, "because there's nothing more
exciting than getting in through
the window. To do that,
you have to be clever and on your toes. You have to watch everything,
and be prepared for endless
humiliations.
"If you have to go in through the window," he went on, "it's because
you're definitely not on the list of
guests; therefore, your presence is not welcome at all, so you have to
work your butt off to stay. The
only way I know is by possessing everybody. Scream! Demand! Advise!
Make them feel that you are
in charge! How could they throw you out if you're in charge?"
Remembering this scene caused a profound upheaval in me. I had buried
this incident so deeply that I
had forgotten all about it. What I had remembered all along, however,
was his admonition to be in
charge, which he must have repeated to me over and over throughout the
years.
I didn't have a chance to examine this event, or ponder it, because
another forgotten memory surfaced
with the same force. In it, I was with the girl I had been engaged to.
At that time, both of us were
saving money to be married and have a house of our own. I heard myself
demanding that we have a
joint checking account; I wouldn't have it any other way. I felt an
imperative need to lecture her on
frugality. I heard myself telling her where to buy her clothes, and
what the top affordable price should
be.
Then I saw myself giving driving lessons to her younger sister and
going veritably berserk when she
said that she was planning to move out of her parents' house.
Forcefully, I threatened her with
canceling my lessons. She wept, confessing that she was having an
affair with her boss. I jumped out
of the car and began kicking the door.
However, that was not all. I heard myself telling my fiancee's father
not to move to Oregon, where he
planned to go. I shouted at the top of my voice that it was a stupid
move. I really believed that my
reasonings against it were unbeatable. I presented him with budget
figures in which I had meticulously
calculated his losses. When he didn't pay any attention to me, I
slammed the door and left, shaking
with rage. I found my fiancee in the living room, playing her guitar. I
pulled it out of her hands and
yelled at her that she embraced the guitar instead of playing it, as if
it were more than an object.
My desire to impose my will extended all across the board. I made no
distinctions; whoever was close
to me was there for me to possess and mold, following my whims.
I didn't have to ponder anymore the significance of my vivid visions.
For an unquestionable certainty
invaded me, as if coming from outside me. It told me that my weak point
was the idea that 1 had to be
the man in the director's chair at all times. It had been a deeply
ingrained concept with me that 1 not
only had to be in charge, but 1 had to be in control of any situation.
The way in which 1 had been
brought up had reinforced this drive, which must have been arbitrary at
its onset, but had turned, in my
adulthood, into a deep necessity.
I was aware, beyond any doubt, that what was at stake was infinity. Don
Juan had portrayed it as a
conscious force that deliberately intervenes in the lives of sorcerers.
And now it was intervening in
mine. 1 knew that infinity was pointing out to me, through the vivid
recollection of those forgotten
experiences, the intensity and the depth of my drive for control, and
thus preparing me for something
transcendental to myself. 1 knew with frightening certainty that
something was going to bar any possibility
of my being in control, and that 1 needed, more than anything else,
sobriety, fluidity, and
abandon in order to face the things that 1 felt were coming to me.
Naturally, I told all this to don Juan, elaborating to my heart's
content on my speculations and
inspirational insights about the possible significance of my
recollections.
Don Juan laughed good-humoredly. "All this is psychological
exaggeration on your part, wishful
thinking," he said. "You are, as usual, seeking explanations with
linear cause and effect. Each of your
recollections becomes more and more vivid, more and more maddening to
you, because as 1 told you
already, you have entered an irreversible process. Your true mind is
emerging, waking up from a state
of lifelong lethargy. "Infinity is claiming you," he continued.
"Whatever means it uses to point that out to you cannot have
any other reason, any other cause, any other value than that. What you
should do, however, is to be
prepared for the onslaughts of infinity. You must be in a state of
continuously bracing yourself for a
blow of tremendous magnitude. That is the sane, sober way in which
sorcerers face infinity."
Don Juan's words left me with a bad taste in my mouth. 1 actually
sensed the assault coming on me,
and feared it. Since 1 had spent my entire life hiding behind some
superfluous activity, 1 immersed
myself in work. 1 gave lectures in classes taught by my friends in
different schools in southern
California. I wrote copiously. I could say without exaggeration that 1
threw dozens of manuscripts into
the garbage can because they didn't fulfill an indispensable
requirement that don Juan had described to
me as the mark of something that is acceptable by infinity.
He had said that everything I did had to be an act of sorcery. An act
free from encroaching
expectations, fears of failure, hopes of success. Free from the cult of
me; everything I did had to be
impromptu, a work of magic where I freely opened myself to the impulses
of the infinite.
One night, I was sitting at my desk preparing myself for my daily
activity of writing. 1 felt a moment
of grogginess. 1 thought that 1 was feeling dizzy because 1 had gotten
up too quickly from my mat
where 1 had been doing my exercises. My vision blurred. 1 saw yellow
spots in front of my eyes. I
thought I was going to faint. The fainting spell got worse. There was
an enormous red spot in front of
me. I began to breathe deeply, trying to quiet whatever agitation was
causing this visual distortion. 1
became extraordinarily silent, to the point where 1 noticed that 1 was
surrounded by impenetrable
darkness. The thought crossed my mind that 1 had fainted. However, I
could feel the chair, my desk; I
could feel everything around me from inside the darkness that
surrounded me.
Don Juan had said that the sorcerers of his lineage considered that one
of the most coveted results of
inner silence was a specific interplay of energy, which is always
heralded by a strong emotion. He felt
that my recollections were the means to agitate me to the extreme,
where I would experience this
interplay. Such an interplay manifested itself in terms of hues that
were projected on any horizon in
the world of everyday life, be it a mountain, the sky, a wall, or
simply the palms of the hands. He had
explained that this interplay of hues begins with the appearance of a
tenuous brushstroke of lavender
on the horizon. In time, this lavender brushstroke starts to expand
until it covers the visible horizon,
like advancing storm clouds.
He assured me that a dot of a peculiar, rich, pomegranate red shows up,
as if bursting from the
lavender clouds. He stated that as sorcerers become more disciplined
and experienced, the dot of
pomegranate expands and finally explodes into thoughts or visions, or
in the case of a literate man,
into written words; sorcerers either see visions engendered by energy,
hear thoughts being voiced as
words, or read written words.
That night at my desk, I didn't see any lavender brushstrokes, nor did
I see any advancing clouds. I
was sure that I didn't have the discipline that sorcerers require for
such an interplay of energy, but I
had an enormous dot of pomegranate red in front of me. This enormous
dot, without any
preliminaries, exploded into disassociated words that I read as if they
were on a sheet of paper coming
out of a typewriter. The words moved at such tremendous speed in front
of me that it was impossible
to read anything. Then I heard a voice describing something to me.
Again, the speed of the voice was
wrong for my ears. The words were garbled, making it impossible to hear
anything that would make
sense.
As if that weren't enough, I began to see liverish scenes like one sees
in dreams after a heavy meal.
They were baroque, dark, ominous. I began to twirl, and I did so until
I got sick to my stomach. The
whole event ended there. I felt the effect of whatever had happened to
me in every muscle of my body.
1 was exhausted. This violent intervention had made me angry and
frustrated.
I rushed to don Juan's house to tell him about this happening. I sensed
that I needed his help more than
ever.
"There's nothing gentle about sorcerers or sorcery," don Juan commented
after he heard my story.
"This was the first time that infinity descended on you in such a
fashion. It was like a blitz. It was a
total takeover of your faculties. Insofar as the speed of your visions
is concerned, you yourself will
have to learn to adjust it. For some sorcerers, that's the job of a
lifetime. But from now on, energy will
appear to you as if it were being projected onto a movie screen.
"Whether or not you understand the projection," he went on, "is another
matter. In order to make an
accurate interpretation, you need experience. My recommendation is that
you shouldn't be bashful,
and you should begin now. Read energy on the wall! Your true mind is
emerging, and it has nothing to
do with the mind that is a foreign installation. Let your true mind
adjust the speed. Be silent, and don't
fret, no matter what happens."
"But, don Juan, is all this possible? Can one actually read energy as
if it were a text?" I asked,
overwhelmed by the idea.
"Of course it's possible!" he retorted. "In your case, it's not only
possible, it's happening to you."
"But why reading it, as if it were a text?" I insisted, but it was a
rhetorical insistence.
"It's an affectation on your part," he said. "If you read the text, you
could repeat it verbatim. However,
if you tried to be a viewer of infinity instead of a reader of
infinity, you would find that you could not
describe whatever you were viewing, and you would end up babbling
inanities, incapable of
verbalizing what you witness. The same thing if you tried to hear it.
This is, of course, specific to you.
Anyway, infinity chooses. The warrior-traveler simply acquiesces to the
choice.
"But above all," he added after a calculated pause, "don't be
overwhelmed by the event because you
cannot describe it. It is an event beyond the syntax of our language."
Journeys Through
the Dark Sea of Awareness
"WE CAN SPEAK a little more clearly now about inner silence " don Juan
said.
His statement was such a non sequitur that it startled me. He had been
talking to me all afternoon
about the vicissitudes that the Yaqui Indians had suffered after the
big Yaqui wars of the twenties,
when they were deported by the Mexican government from their native
homeland in the state of
Sonora, in northern Mexico, to work in sugarcane plantations in central
and southern Mexico. The
Mexican government had had problems with endemic wars with the Yaqui
Indians for years. Don Juan
told me some astounding, poignant Yaqui stories of political intrigue
and betrayal, deprivation and
human misery.
I had the feeling that don Juan was setting me up for something,
because he knew that those stories
were my cup of tea, so to speak. I had at that time an exaggerated
sense of social justice and fair play.
"Circumstances around you have made it possible for you to have more
energy," he went on. "You
have started the recapitulation of your life; you have looked at your
friends for the first time as if they
were in a display window; you arrived at your breaking point, all by
yourself, driven by your own
needs; you canceled your business; and above all, you have accrued
enough inner silence. All of these
made it possible for you to make a journey through the dark sea of
awareness.
"Meeting me in that town of our choice was that journey," he continued.
"I know that a crucial
question almost reached the surface in you, and that for an instant,
you wondered if I really came to
your house. My coming to see you wasn't a dream for you. I was real,
wasn't I?"
"You were as real as anything could be," I said.
I had nearly forgotten about those events, but I remembered that it did
seem strange to me that he had
found my apartment. I had discarded my astonishment by the simple
process of assuming that he had
asked someone for my new address, although, if I had been pressed, I
wouldn't have been able to come
up with the identity of anyone who would have known where I lived.
"Let us clarify this point," he continued. "In my terms, which are the
terms of the sorcerers of ancient
Mexico, I was as real as 1 could have been, and as such, I actually
went to your place from my inner
silence to tell you about the requisite of infinity, and to warn you
that you were about to run out of
time. And you, in turn, from your inner silence, veritably went to that
town of our choice to tell me
that you had succeeded in fulfilling the requisite of infinity.
"In your terms, which are the terms of the average man, it was a
dream-fantasy in both instances. You
had a dream-fantasy that I came to your place without knowing the
address, and then you had a
dream-fantasy that you went to see me. As far as I'm concerned, as a
sorcerer, what you consider your
dream-fantasy of meeting me in that town was as real as the two of us
talking here today."
I confessed to don Juan that there was no possibility of my framing
those events in a pattern of
thought proper to Western man. I said that to think of them in terms of
dream-fantasy was to create a
false category that couldn't stand up under scrutiny, and that the only
quasi-explanation that was
vaguely possible was another aspect of his knowledge: dreaming.
"No, it is not dreaming," he said emphatically. "This is something more
direct, and more mysterious.
By the way, I have a new definition of dreaming for you today, more in
accordance with your state of
being. Dreaming is the act of changing the point of attachment with the
dark sea of awareness. If you
view it in this fashion, it's a very simple concept, and a very simple
maneuver. It takes all you have to
realize it, but it's not an impossibility, nor is it something
surrounded with mystical clouds.
"Dreaming is a term that has always bugged the hell out of me," he
continued, "because it weakens a
very powerful act. It makes it sound arbitrary; it gives it a sense of
being a fantasy, and this is the only
thing it is not. I tried to change the term myself, but it's too
ingrained. Maybe someday you could
change it yourself, although, as with everything else in sorcery, I am
afraid that by the time you could
actually do it, you won't give a damn about it because it won't make
any difference what it is called
anymore."
Don Juan had explained at great length, during the entire time that I
had known him, that dreaming
was an art, discovered by the sorcerers of ancient Mexico, by means of
which ordinary dreams were
transformed into bona-fide entrances to other worlds of perception. He
advocated, in any way he
could, the advent of something he called dreaming attention, which was
the capacity to pay a special
kind of attention, or to place a special kind of awareness on the
elements of an ordinary dream.
I had followed meticulously all his recommendations and had succeeded
in commanding my
awareness to remain fixed on the elements of a dream. The idea that don
Juan proposed was not to set
out deliberately to have a desired dream, but to fix one's attention on
the component elements of
whatever dream presented itself.
Then don Juan had showed me energetically what the sorcerers of ancient
Mexico considered to be the
origin of dreaming: the displacement of the assemblage point. He said
that the assemblage point was
displaced very naturally during sleep, but that to see the displacement
was a bit difficult because it
required an aggressive mood, and that such an aggressive mood had been
the predilection of the
sorcerers of ancient Mexico. Those sorcerers, according to don Juan,
had found all the premises of
their sorcery by means of this mood.
"It is a very predatory mood," don Juan went on. "It's not difficult at
all to enter into it, because man is
a predator by nature. You could see, aggressively, anybody in this
little village, or perhaps someone far
away, while they are asleep; anyone would do for the purpose at hand.
What's important is that you
arrive at a complete sense of indifference. You are in search of
something, and you are out to get it.
You're going to go out looking for a person, searching like a feline,
like an animal of prey, for
someone to descend on."
Don Juan had told me, laughing at my apparent chagrin, that the
difficulty with this technique was the
mood, and that I couldn't be passive in the act of seeing, for the
sight was not something to watch but
to act upon. It might have been the power of his suggestion, but that
day, when he had told me all this,
I felt astoundingly aggressive. Every muscle of my body was filled to
the brim with energy, and in my
dreaming practice I did go after someone. I was not interested in who
that someone might have been. I
needed someone who was asleep, and some force I was aware of, without
being fully conscious of it,
had guided me to find that someone.
I never knew who the person was, but while I was seeing that person, I
felt don Juan's presence. It was
a strange sensation of knowing that someone was with me by an
undetermined sensation of proximity
that was happening at a level of awareness that
wasn't part of anything that 1 had ever experienced. 1 could only focus
my attention on the individual
at rest. 1 knew that he was a male, but I don't know how 1 knew that. I
knew that he was asleep
because the ball of energy that human beings ordinarily are was a
little bit flat; it was expanded
laterally.
And then I saw the assemblage point at a position different from the
habitual one, which is right
behind the shoulder blades. In this instance, it had been displaced to
the right of where it should have
been, and a bit lower. I calculated that in this case it had moved to
the side of the ribs. Another thing
that I noticed was that there was no stability to it. It fluctuated
erratically and then abruptly went back
to its normal position. I had the clear sensation that, obviously, my
presence, and don Juan's, had
awakened the individual. I had experienced a profusion of blurred
images right after that, and then I
woke up back in the place where I had started.
Don Juan had also told me all along that sorcerers were divided into
two groups: one group was
dreamers; the other was stalkers. The dreamers were those who had a
great facility for displacing the
assemblage point. The stalkers were those who had a great facility for
maintaining the assemblage
point fixed on that new position. Dreamers and stalkers complemented
each other, and worked in
pairs, affecting one another with their given proclivities.
Don Juan had assured me that the displacement and the fixation of the
assemblage point could be
realized at will by means of the sorcerers' iron-handed discipline. He
said that the sorcerers of his
lineage believed that there were at least six hundred points within the
luminous sphere that we are,
that when reached at will by the assemblage point, can each give us a
totally inclusive world; meaning
that, if our assemblage point is displaced to any of those points and
remains fixed on it, we will
perceive a world as inclusive and total as the world of everyday life,
but a different world
nevertheless.
Don Juan had further explained that the art of sorcery is to manipulate
the assemblage point and make
it change positions at
will on the luminous spheres that human beings are. The result of this
manipulation is a shift in the
point of contact with the dark sea of awareness, which brings as its
concomitant a different bundle of
zillions of energy fields in the form of luminous filaments that
converge on the assemblage point. The
consequence of new energy fields converging on the assemblage point is
that awareness of a different
sort than that which is necessary for perceiving the world of everyday
life enters into action, turning
the new energy fields into sensory data, sensory data that is
interpreted and perceived as a different
world because the energy fields that engender it are different from the
habitual ones.
He had asserted that an accurate definition of sorcery as a practice
would be to say that sorcery is the
manipulation of the assemblage point for purposes of changing its focal
point of contact with the dark
sea of awareness, thus making it possible to perceive other worlds.
Don Juan had said that the art of the stalkers enters into play after
the assemblage point has been
displaced. Maintaining the assemblage point fixed in its new position
assures sorcerers that they will
perceive whatever new world they enter in its absolute completeness,
exactly as we do in the world of
ordinary affairs. For the sorcerers of don Juan's lineage, the world of
everyday life was but one fold of
a total world consisting of at least six hundred folds.
Don Juan went back again to the topic under discussion: my journeys
through the dark sea of
awareness, and said that what 1 had done from my inner silence was very
similar to what is done in
dreaming when one is asleep. However, when journeying through the dark
sea of awareness, there was
no interruption of any sort caused by going to sleep, nor was there any
attempt whatsoever at
controlling one's attention while having a dream. The journey through
the dark sea of awareness
entailed an immediate response. There was an overpowering sensation of
the here and now. Don Juan
lamented the fact that some idiotic sorcerers had given the name
dreaming-awake to this act of
reaching the dark sea of aware-ness directly, making the term dreaming
even more ridiculous.
"When you thought that you had the dream-fantasy of going to that town
of our choice," he continued,
"you had actually placed your assemblage point directly on a specific
position on the dark sea of
awareness that allows the journey. Then the dark sea of awareness
supplied you with whatever was
necessary to carry on that journey. There's no way whatsoever to choose
that place at will. Sorcerers
say that inner silence selects it unerringly. Simple, isn't it?"
He explained to me then the intricacies of choice. He said that choice,
for warrior-travelers, was not
really the act of choosing, but rather the act of acquiescing elegantly
to the solicitations of infinity.
"Infinity chooses," he said. "The art of the warrior-traveler is to
have the ability to move with the
slightest insinuation, the art of acquiescing to every command of
infinity. For this, a warrior-traveler
needs prowess, strength, and above everything else, sobriety. All those
three put together give, as a
result, elegance!"
After a moment's pause, I went back to the subject that intrigued me
the most.
"But it's unbelievable that I actually went to that town, don Juan, in
body and soul," I said.
"It is unbelievable, but it's not unlivable," he said. "The universe
has no limits, and the possibilities at
play in the universe at large are indeed incommensurable. So don't fall
prey to the axiom, 'I believe
only what I see,' because it is the dumbest stand one can possibly
take."
Don Juan's elucidation had been crystal clear. It made sense, but I
didn't know where it made sense;
certainly not in my daily world of usual affairs. Don Juan assured me
then, unleashing a great
trepidation in me, that there was only one way in which sorcerers could
handle all this information: to
taste it through experience, because the mind was incapable of taking
in all that stimulation.
"What do you want me to do, don Juan?" I asked.
"You must deliberately journey through the dark sea of awareness," he
replied, "but you'll never know
how this is done. Let's say that inner silence does it, following
inexplicable ways, ways that cannot be
understood, but only practiced."
Don Juan had me sit down on my bed and adopt the position that fostered
inner silence. I usually fell
asleep instantly whenever I adopted this position. However, when I was
with don Juan, his presence
always made it impossible for me to fall asleep; instead, I entered
into a veritable state of complete
quietude. This time, after an instant of silence, I found myself
walking. Don Juan was guiding me by
holding my arm as we walked.
We were no longer in his house; we were walking in a Yaqui town 1 had
never been in before. I knew
of the town's existence; I had been close to it many times, but I had
been made to turn around by the
sheer hostility of the people who lived around it. It was a town where
it was nearly impossible for a
stranger to enter. The only non-Yaquis who had free access to that town
were the supervisors from the
federal bank because of the fact that the bank bought the crops from
the Yaqui farmers. The endless
negotiations of the Yaqui farmers revolved around getting cash advances
from the bank on the basis of
a near-speculation process about future crops.
I instantly recognized the town from the descriptions of people who had
been there. As if to increase
my astonishment, don Juan whispered in my ear that we were in the Yaqui
town in question. I wanted
to ask him how we had gotten there, but I couldn't articulate my words.
There were a large number of
Indians talking in argumentative tones; tempers seemed to flare. I
didn't understand a word of what
they were saying, but the moment I conceived of the thought that I
couldn't understand, something
cleared up. It was very much as if more light went into the scene.
Things became very defined and
neat, and I understood what the people were saying although I didn't
know how; I didn't speak their
language. The words were definitely understandable to me, not
singularly, but in clusters, as if my
mind could pick up whole patterns of thought.
I could say in earnest that I got the shock of a lifetime, not so much
because I understood what they
were saying but because of the content of what they were saying. Those
people were indeed warlike.
They were not Western men at all. Their propositions were propositions
of strife, warfare, strategy.
They were measuring their strength, their striking resources, and
lamenting the fact that they had no
power to deliver their blows. I registered in my body the anguish of
their impotence. All they had were
sticks and stones to fight high-technology weapons. They mourned the
fact that they had no leaders.
They coveted, more than anything else one could imagine, the rise of
some charismatic fighter who
could galvanize them.
I heard then the voice of cynicism; one of them expressed a thought
that seemed to devastate everyone
equally, including me, for 1 seemed to be an indivisible part of them.
He said that they were defeated
beyond salvation, because if at a given moment one of them had the
charisma to rise up and rally
them, he would be betrayed because of envy and jealousy and hurt
feelings.
1 wanted to comment to don Juan on what was happening to me, but 1
couldn't voice a single word.
Only don Juan could talk.
"The Yaquis are not unique in their pettiness," he said in my ear. "It
is a condition in which human
beings are trapped, a condition that is not even human, but imposed
from the outside."
1 felt my mouth opening and closing involuntarily as 1 tried
desperately to ask a question that I could
not even conceive of. My mind was blank, void of thoughts. Don Juan and
1 were in the middle of a
circle of people, but none of them seemed to have noticed us. I did not
record any movement, reaction,
or furtive glance that may have indicated that they were aware of us.
The next instant, I found myself in a Mexican town built around a
railroad station, a town located
about a mile and a half east of where don Juan lived. Don Juan and 1
were in the middle of the street
by the government bank. Immediately afterward, I saw one of the
strangest sights I had ever been
witness to in don Juan's world. I was seeing energy as it flows in the
universe, but I wasn't seeing
human beings as spherical or oblong blobs of energy. The people around
me were, in one instant, the
normal beings of everyday life, and in the next instant, they were
strange creatures. It was as if the ball
of energy that we are were transparent; it was like a halo around an
insectlike core. That core did not
have a primate's shape. There were no skeletal pieces, so I wasn't
seeing people as if I had X-ray
vision that went to the bone core. At the core of people there were,
rather, geometric shapes made of
what seemed to be hard vibrations of matter. That core was like letters
of the alphabet-a capital T
seemed to be the main structural support. An inverted thick L was
suspended in front of the T; the
Greek letter for delta, which went almost to the floor, was at the
bottom of the vertical bar of the T,
and seemed to be a support for the whole structure. On top of the
letter T, I saw a ropelike strand,
perhaps an inch in diameter; it went through the top of the luminous
sphere, as if what I was seeing
were indeed a gigantic bead hanging from the top like a drooping gem.
Once, don Juan had presented to me a metaphor to describe the energetic
union of strands of human
beings. He had said that the sorcerers of ancient Mexico described
those strands as a curtain made
from beads strung on a string. I had taken this description literally,
and thought that the string went
through the conglomerate of energy fields that we are from head to toe.
The attaching string I was
seeing made the round shape of the energy fields of human beings look
more like a pendant. I didn't
see, however, any other creature being strung by the same string. Every
single creature that I saw was
a geometrically patterned being that had a sort of string on the upper
part of its spherical halo. The
string reminded me immensely of the segmented wormlike shapes that some
of us see with the eyelids
half closed when we are in sunlight.
Don Juan and I walked in the town from one end to the other, and I saw
literally scores of
geometrically patterned creatures. My ability to see them was unstable
in the extreme. I would see
them for an instant, and then I would lose sight of them and I would be
faced with average people.
Soon, I became exhausted, and I could see only normal people. Don Juan
said that it was time to go
back home, and again, something in me lost my usual sense of
continuity. 1 found myself in don
Juan's house without having the slightest notion as to how I had
covered the distance from the town to
the house. I lay down in my bed and tried desperately to recollect, to
call back my memory, to probe
the depths of my very being for a clue as to how I had gone to the
Yaqui town, and to the railroadstation
town. 1 didn't believe that they had been dream-fantasies, because the
scenes were too detailed
to be anything but real, and yet they couldn't possibly have been real.
"You're wasting your time," don Juan said, laughing. "1 guarantee you
that you will never know how
we got from the house to the Yaqui town, and from the Yaqui town to the
railroad station, and from the
railroad station to the house. There was a break in the continuity of
time. That is what inner silence
does."
He patiently explained to me that the interruption of that flow of
continuity that makes the world
understandable to us is sorcery. He remarked that I had journeyed that
day through the dark sea of
awareness, and that I had seen people as they are, engaged in people's
business. And then I had seen
the strand of energy that joins specific lines of human beings.
Don Juan reiterated to me over and over that I had witnessed something
specific and inexplicable. I
had understood what people were saying, without knowing their language,
and I had seen the strand of
energy that connected human beings to certain other beings, and I had
selected those aspects through
an act of intending it. He stressed the fact that this intending I had
done was not something conscious
or volitional; the intending had been done at a deep level, and had
been ruled by necessity. I needed to
become cognizant of some of the possibilities of journeying through the
dark sea of awareness, and
my inner silence had guided intent-a perennial force in the universe-to
fulfill that need.
Inorganic Awareness
AT A GIVEN moment in my apprenticeship, don Juan revealed to me the
complexity of his life
situation. He had maintained, to my chagrin and despondency, that he
lived in the shack in the state of
Sonora, Mexico, because that shack depicted my state of awareness. I
didn't quite believe that he
really meant that I was so meager, nor did I believe that he had other
places to live, as he was
claiming.
It turned out that he was right on both counts. My state of awareness
was very meager, and he did
have other places where he could live, infinitely more comfortable than
the shack where I had first
found him. Nor was he the solitary sorcerer that I had thought him to
be, but the leader of a group of
fifteen other warrior-travelers: ten women and five men. My surprise
was gigantic when he took me
to his house in central Mexico, where he and his companion sorcerers
lived.
"Did you live in Sonora just because of me, don Juan?" I asked him,
unable to stand the responsibility,
which filled me with guilt and remorse and a sensation of
worthlessness. ' "Well, 1 didn't actually
live there," he said, laughing. "1 just
met you there."
"But-but-but you never knew when I was coming to see you, don ]uan," I
said. "I had no means to let
you know!"
"Well, if you remember correctly," he said, "there were many, many
times when you didn't find me.
You had to sit patiently and wait for me, for days sometimes."
"Did you fly from here to Guaymas, don Juan?" 1 asked him in earnest. I
thought that the shortest way
would have been to take
a plane.
"No, 1 didn't fly to Guaymas," he said with a big smile. "I flew
directly, to the shack where you were
waiting."
I knew that he was purposefully telling me something that my linear
mind could not understand or
accept, something that was confusing me no end. I was at the level of
awareness, in those days, when
1 asked myself incessantly a fatal question: What if all that don Juan
says is true?
I didn't want to ask him any more questions, because 1 was hopelessly
lost, trying to bridge our two
tracks of thought and
action.
In his new surroundings, don Juan began painstakingly to instruct me in
a more complex facet of his
knowledge, a facet that required all my attention, a facet in which
merely suspending judgment was
not enough. This was the time when 1 had to plummet down into the
depths of his knowledge. I had to
cease to be objective, and at the same time 1 had to desist from being
subjective.
One day, 1 was helping don Juan clean some bamboo poles in the back of
his house. He asked me to
put on some working gloves, because, he said, the splinters of bamboo
were very sharp and easily
caused infections. He directed me on how to use a knife to clean the
bamboo. 1 became immersed in
the work. When don Juan began to talk to me, 1 had to stop working in
order to pay attention. He told
me that 1 had worked long enough, and that we should go into the house.
He asked me to sit down in a very comfortable armchair in his spacious,
almost empty living room. He
gave me some nuts, dried apricots, and slices of cheese, neatly
arranged on a plate. I protested that I
wanted to finish cleaning the bamboo. I didn't want to eat. But he
didn't pay attention to me. He
recommended that 1 nibble slowly and carefully, for 1 would need a
steady supply of food in order to
be alert and attentive to what he was going to
tell me.
"You already know," he began, "that there exists in the universe a
perennial force, which the sorcerers
of ancient Mexico called the dark sea of awareness. While they were at
the maximum of their
perceiving power, they saw something that made them shake in their
pantaloonies, if they were
wearing any. They saw that the dark sea of awareness is responsible not
only for the awareness of
organisms, but also for the awareness of entities that don't have an
organism."
"What is this, don Juan, beings without an organism that have
awareness?" I asked, astonished, for he
had never mentioned such
an idea before.
"The old shamans discovered that the entire universe is com' posed of
twin forces," he began, "forces
that are at the same time opposed and complementary to each other. It
is inescapable that our world is
a twin world. Its opposite and complementary world is one populated by
beings that have awareness,
but not an organism. For this reason, the old shamans called them
inorganic
beings."
"And where is this world, don Juan?" I asked, munching unconsciously on
a piece of dried apricot.
"Here, where you and I are sitting," he replied matter-of-factly, but
laughing outright at my
nervousness. "I told you that it's our twin world, so it's intimately
related to us. The sorcerers of
ancient Mexico didn't think like you do in terms of space and time.
They thought exclusively in terms
of awareness. Two types of awareness coexist without ever impinging on
each other, because each
type is entirely different from the other. The old shamans faced this
problem of coexistence without
concerning
themselves with time and space. They reasoned that the degree of
awareness of organic beings and the
degree of awareness of inorganic beings were so different that both
could coexist with the most
minimal interference."
"Can we perceive those inorganic beings, don Juan?" I asked. "We
certainly can," he replied.
"Sorcerers do it at will. Average people do it, but they don't realize
that they're doing it because they
are not conscious of the existence of a twin world. When they think of
a twin world, they enter into all
kinds of mental masturbation, but it has never occurred to them that
their fantasies have their origin in
a subliminal knowledge that all of us have: that we are not alone."
1 was riveted by don Juan's words. Suddenly, I had become voraciously
hungry. There was an
emptiness in the pit of my stomach. All I could do was to listen as
carefully as I could, and eat.
"The difficulty with your facing things in terms of time and space," he
continued, "is that you only
notice if something has landed in the space and time at your disposal,
which is very limited. Sorcerers,
on the other hand, have a vast field on which they can notice if
something extraneous has landed. Lots
of entities from the universe at large, entities that possess awareness
but not an organism, land in the
field of awareness of our world, or the field of awareness of its twin
world, without an average human
being ever noticing them. The entities that land on our field of
awareness, or the field of awareness of
our twin world, belong to other worlds that exist besides our world and
its twin. The universe at large
is crammed to the brim with worlds of awareness, organic and inorganic."
Don Juan continued talking and said that those sorcerers knew when
inorganic awareness from other
worlds besides our twin world had landed in their field of awareness.
He said that as every human
being on this earth would do, those shamans made endless
classifications of different types of this
energy that has awareness. They knew them by the general term inorganic
beings.
"Do those inorganic beings have life like we have life?" I asked. "If
you think that life is to be aware,
then they do have life," he said. "I suppose it would be accurate to
say that if life can be measured by
the intensity, the sharpness, the duration of that awareness, I can
sincerely say that they are more alive
than you and I." "Do those inorganic beings die, don Juan?" I asked.
Don Juan chuckled for a moment
before he answered. "If you call death the termination of awareness,
yes, they die. Their awareness
ends. Their death is rather like the death of a human being, and at the
same time, it isn't, because the
death of human beings has a hidden option. It is something like a
clause in a legal document, a clause
that is written in tiny letters that you can barely see. You have to
use a magnifying glass to read it, and
yet it's the most important clause of the document." "What's the hidden
option, don Juan?"
"Death's hidden option is exclusively for sorcerers. They are the only
ones who have, to my
knowledge, read the fine print. For them, the option is pertinent and
functional. For average human
beings, death means the termination of their awareness, the end of
their organisms. For the inorganic
beings, death means the same: the end of their awareness. In both
cases, the impact of death is the act
of being sucked into the dark sea of awareness, Their individual
awareness, loaded with their life
experiences, breaks its boundaries, and awareness as energy spills out
into the dark sea of awareness."
"But what is death's hidden option that is picked up only by sorcerers,
don Juan?" I asked.
"For a sorcerer, death is a unifying factor. Instead of disintegrating
the organism, as is ordinarily the
case, death unifies it." "How can death unify anything?" I protested.
"Death for a sorcerer," he said,
"terminates the reign of individual moods in the body. The old
sorcerers believed it was the dominion
of the different parts of the body that ruled the moods and the actions
of the total body; parts that
become dysfunctional drag the rest of the body to chaos, such as, for
instance, when youyourself get
sick from eating junk. In that case, the mood of your stomach affects
everything else. Death eradicates
the dominion of those individual parts. It unifies their awareness into
one single unit."
"Do you mean that after they die, sorcerers are still aware?" I asked.
"For sorcerers, death is an act of unification that employs every bit
of their energy. You are thinking of
death as a corpse in front of you, a body on which decay has settled.
For sorcerers, when the act of
unification takes place, there is no corpse. There is no decay. Their
bodies in their entirety have been
turned into energy, energy possessing awareness that is not fragmented.
The boundaries that are set up
by the organism, boundaries which are broken down by death, are still
functioning in the case of
sorcerers, although they are no longer visible to the naked eye.
"I know that you are dying to ask me," he continued with a broad smile,
"if whatever I'm describing is
the soul that goes to hell or heaven. No, it is not the soul. What
happens to sorcerers, when they pick
up that hidden option of death, is that they turn into inorganic
beings, very specialized, high-speed
inorganic beings, beings capable of stupendous maneuvers of perception.
Sorcerers enter then into
what the shamans of ancient Mexico called their definitive journey.
Infinity becomes their realm of
action."
"Do you mean by this, don Juan, that they become eternal?"
"My sobriety as a sorcerer tells me," he said, "that their awareness
will terminate, the way inorganic
beings' awareness terminates, but I haven't seen this happen. I have no
firsthand knowledge of it. The
old sorcerers believed that the awareness of this type of inorganic
being would last as long as the earth
is alive. The earth is their matrix. As long as it prevails, their
awareness continues. To me, this is a
most reasonable statement."
The continuity and order of don Juan's explanation had been, for me,
superb. I had no way whatsoever
in which to contribute. He left me with a sensation of mystery and
unvoiced expectations to be
fulfilled.
On my next visit to don Juan, I began my conversation by asking him
eagerly a question that was
foremost in my mind.
"Is there a possibility, don Juan, that ghosts and apparitions really
exist?"
"Whatever you may call a ghost or an apparition," he said, "when it is
scrutinized by a sorcerer, boils
down to one issue-it is possible that any of those ghostlike
apparitions may be a conglomeratation of
energy fields that have awareness, and which we turn into things we
know. If that's the case, then the
apparitions have energy. Sorcerers call them energy-generating
configurations. Or, no energy
emanates from them, in which case they are phantasmagorical creations,
usually of a very strong
person-strong in terms of awareness.
"One story that intrigued me immensely," don Juan continued, "was the
story you told me once about
your aunt. Do you remember it?"
I had told don Juan that when I was fourteen years old I had gone to
live in my father's sister's house.
She lived in a gigantic house that had three patios with living
accommodations in between each of
them-bedrooms, living rooms, etc. The first patio was very austere,
cobblestoned. They told me that it
was a colonial house and this first patio was where horse-drawn
carriages had gone in. The second
patio was a beautiful orchard zigzagged by brick lanes of Moorish
design and filled with fruit trees.
The third patio was covered with flowerpots hanging from the eaves of
the roof, birds in cages, and a
colonial-style fountain in the middle of it with running water, as well
as a large area fenced with
chicken wire, set aside for my aunt's prized fighting cocks, her
predilection in life.
My aunt made available to me a whole apartment right in front of the
fruit orchard. I thought I was
going to have the time of my life there. I could eat all the fruit that
I wanted. No one else in the
household touched the fruit of any of those trees, for reasons that
were never revealed to me. The
household was composed of my aunt, a tall, round-faced chubby lady in
her fifties, very jovial, a great
raconteur, and full of eccentricities that she hid behind a formal
facade and the appearance of devout
Catholicism. There was a butler, a tall, imposing man in his early
forties who had been a sergeantmajor
in the army and had been lured out of the service to occupy the
better-paid position of butler,
bodyguard, and all-around man in my aunt's house. His wife, a beautiful
young woman, was my aunt's
companion, cook, and confidante. The couple also had a daughter, a
chubby little girl who looked
exactly like my aunt. The likeness was so strong that my aunt had
adopted her legally.
Those four were the quietest people I had ever met. They lived a very
sedate life, punctuated only by
the eccentricities of my aunt, who, on the spur of the moment, would
decide to take trips, or buy
promising new fighting cocks, train them, and actually have serious
contests in which enormous sums
of money were involved. She tended her fighting cocks with loving care,
sometimes all day long. She
wore thick leather gloves and stiff leather leggings to keep the
fighting cocks from spurring her.
I spent two stupendous months living in my aunt's house. She taught me
music in the afternoons, and
told me endless stories about my family's ancestors. My living
situation was ideal for me because I
used to go out with my friends and didn't have to report the time I
came back to anybody. Sometimes I
used to spend hours without falling asleep, lying on my bed. 1 used to
keep my window open to let the
smell of orange blossoms fill my room. Whenever I was lying there
awake, I would hear someone
walking down a long corridor that ran the length of the whole property
on the north side, joining all
the patios of the house. This corridor had beautiful arches and a tiled
floor. There were four light bulbs
of minimal voltage that dimly illuminated the corridor, lights that
were turned on at six o'clock every
evening and turned off at six in the morning.
I asked my aunt if anyone walked at night and stopped at my
window, because whoever was walking always stopped by my window, turned
around, and walked
back again toward the main entrance of the house.
"Don't trouble yourself with nonsense, dear," my aunt said, smiling.
"It's probably my butler, making
his rounds. Big deal! Were you frightened?"
"No, I was not frightened," I said, "I just got curious, because your
butler walks up to my room every
night. Sometimes his steps wake me up."
She discarded my inquiry in a matter-of-fact fashion, saying that the
butler had been a military man
and was habituated to making his rounds, as a sentry would. I accepted
her explanation.
One day, I mentioned to the butler that his steps were just too loud,
and asked if he would make his
rounds by my window with a little more care so as to let me sleep.
"I don't know what you're talking about!" he said in a gruff voice.
"My aunt told me that you make your rounds at night," I said.
"I never do such a thing!" he said, his eyes flaring with disgust.
"But who walks by my window then?"
"Nobody walks by your window. You're imagining things. Just go back to
sleep. Don't go around
stirring things up. I'm telling you this for your own good."
Nothing could have been worse for me in those years than someone
telling me that they were doing
something for my own good. That night, as soon as I began to hear the
footsteps, I got out of my bed
and stood behind the wall that led to the entrance of my apartment.
When I calculated that whoever
was walking was by the second bulb, I just stuck my head out to look
down the corridor. The steps
stopped abruptly, but there was no one in sight. The dimly illuminated
corridor was deserted. If
somebody had been walking there, they wouldn't have had time to hide
because there was no place to
hide. There were only bare walls.
My fright was so immense that I woke up the whole household screaming
my head off. My aunt and
her butler tried to calm me down by telling me that 1 was imagining all
that, but my agitation was
so intense that both of them sheepishly confessed, in the end that
something which was unknown
to them walked in that house every night.
Don Juan had said that it was almost surely my aunt who walked at
night; that is to say, some
aspect of her awareness over which she had no volitional control. He
believed that this
phenomenon obeyed a sense of playfulness or mystery that she
cultivated. Don Juan was sure that
it was not a far-fetched idea that my aunt, at a subliminal level, was
not only making all those
noises happen, but that she was capable of much more complex
manipulations of awareness. Don
Juan had also said that to be completely fair, he had to admit the
possibility that the steps were the
product of inorganic awareness.
Don Juan said that the inorganic beings who populated our twin world
were considered, by the
sorcerers of his lineage, to be our relatives. Those shamans believed
that it was futile to make
friends with our family members because the demands levied on us for
such friendships were
always exorbitant. He said that that type of inorganic being, who are
our first cousins,
communicate with us incessantly, but that their communication with us
is not at the level of
conscious awareness. In other words, we know all about them in a
subliminal way, while they
know all about us in a deliberate, conscious manner.
"The energy from our first cousins is a drag!" don Juan went on. "They
are as fucked up as we
are. Let's say that the organic and inorganic beings of our twin worlds
are the children of two
sisters who live next door to each other. They are exactly alike
although they look different. They
cannot help us, and we cannot help them. Perhaps we could join
together, and make a fabulous
family business corporation, but that hasn't happened. Both branches of
the family are extremely
touchy and take offense over nothing, a typical relationship between
touchy first cousins. The
crux of the matter, the sorcerers of ancient Mexico believed, is that
both human beings and
inorganic beings from the twin worlds are profound egomaniacs."
According to don Juan, another classification that the sorcerers of
ancient Mexico made of the
inorganic beings was that of scouts, or explorers, and by this they
meant inorganic beings that
came from the depths of the universe, and which were possessors of
awareness infinitely sharper
and faster than that of human beings. Don Juan asserted that the old
sorcerers had spent generations
polishing their classification schemes, and their conclusions were that
certain types of
inorganic beings from the category of scouts or explorers, because of
their vivaciousness, were
akin to man. They could make liaisons and establish a symbiotic
relation with men. The old
sorcerers called these kinds of inorganic beings the allies.
Don Juan explained that the crucial mistake of those shamans with
reference to this type of
inorganic being was to attribute human characteristics to that
impersonal energy and to believe
that they could harness it. They thought of those blocks of energy as
their helpers, and they relied
on them without comprehending that, being pure energy, they didn't have
the power to sustain any
effort.
"I've told you all there is to know about inorganic beings," don Juan
said abruptly. "The only way
you can put this to the test is by means of direct experience."
I didn't ask him what he wanted me to do. A deep fear made my body
rattle with nervous spasms
that burst like a volcanic eruption from my solar plexus and extended
down to the tips of my toes
and up to my upper trunk.
"Today, we will go to look for some inorganic beings," he announced.
Don Juan ordered me to sit on my bed and adopt again the Position that
fostered inner silence, I
followed his command with unusual ease. Normally, I would have been
reluctant, perhaps not
overtly, but I would have felt a twinge of reluctance nonetheless. 1
had a vague thought that by
the time I sat down, I was already in a state of inner silence. My
thoughts were no longer clear. I felt
an impenetrable darkness surrounding me, making me feel as if I were
falling asleep. My body was
utterly motionless, either because I had no intention of setting up any
commands to move or because I
just couldn't formulate them.
A moment later, I found myself with don Juan, walking in the Sonoran
desert. I recognized the
surroundings; I had been there with him so many times that I had
memorized every feature of it. It was
the end of the day, and the light of the setting sun created in me a
mood of desperation. I walked
automatically, aware that I was feeling in my body sensations that were
not accompanied by thoughts.
I was not describing to myself my state of being. I wanted to tell this
to don Juan, but the desire to
communicate my bodily sensations to him vanished in an instant.
Don Juan said, very slowly, and in a low, grave voice, that the dry
riverbed on which we were walking
was a most appropriate place for our business at hand, and that I
should sit on a small boulder, alone,
while he went and sat on another boulder about fifty feet away. I
didn't ask don Juan, as I ordinarily
would have, what I was supposed to do. I knew what I had to do. I heard
then the rustling steps of
people walking through the bushes that were sparsely scattered around.
There wasn't enough moisture
in the area to allow the heavy growth of underbrush. Some sturdy bushes
grew there, with a space of
perhaps ten or fifteen feet between them.
I saw then two men approaching. They seemed to be local men, perhaps
Yaqui Indians from one of the
Yaqui towns in the vicinity. They came and stood by me. One of them
nonchalantly asked me how I
had been. I wanted to smile at him, laugh, but I couldn't. My face was
extremely rigid. Yet I was
ebullient. I wanted to jump up and down, but I couldn't. I told him
that I had been fine. Then I asked
them who they were. I said to them that I didn't know them, and yet I
sensed an extraordinary
familiarity with them-One of the men said, matter-of-factly, that they
were my allies.
I stared at them, trying to memorize their features, but their features
changed. They seemed to mold
themselves to the mood of my stare. No thoughts were involved.
Everything was a matter guided by
visceral sensations. I stared at them long enough to erase their
features completely, and finally, I was
facing two shiny blobs of luminosity that vibrated. The blobs of
luminosity did not have boundaries.
They seemed to sustain themselves cohesively from within. At times,
they became flat, wide. Then
they would take on a verticality again, at the height of a man.
Suddenly, I felt don Juan's arm hooking my right arm and pulling me
from the boulder. He said that it
was time to go. The next moment, I was in his house again, in central
Mexico, more bewildered than
ever.
"Today, you found inorganic awareness, and then you saw it as it really
is," he said. "Energy is the
irreducible residue of everything. As far as we are concerned, to see
energy directly is the bottom line
for a human being. Perhaps there are other things beyond that, but they
are not available to us."
Don Juan asserted all this over and over, and every time he said it,
his words seemed to solidify me
more and more, to help me return to my normal state.
I told don Juan everything I had witnessed, everything I had heard.
Don.Juan explained to me that I
had succeeded that day in transforming the anthropomorphic shape of the
inorganic beings into their
essence: impersonal energy aware of itself.
"You must realize," he said, "that it is our cognition, which is in
essence an interpretation system, that
curtails our resources. Our interpretation system is what tells us what
the parameters of our
possibilities are, and since we have been using that system of
interpretation all our lives, we cannot
possibly dare to go against its dictums.
"The energy of those inorganic beings pushes us," don Juan went on,
"and we interpret that push as
we may, depending on our mood. The most sober thing to do, for a
sorcerer, is to relegate those
entities to an abstract level. The fewer interpretations sorcerers
make, the better off they are. "From
now on," he continued, "whenever you are confronted with the strange
sight of an apparition, hold
your ground and gaze at it with an inflexible attitude. If it is an
inorganic being, your interpretation of
it will fall off like dead leaves. If nothing happens, it is just a
chicken-shit aberration of your mind,
which is not your mind anyway."
The Clear View
FOR THE FIRST time in my life, I found myself in a total quandary as to
how to behave in the world.
The world around me had not changed. It definitely stemmed from a flaw
in me. Don Juan's influence
and all the activities stemming from his practices, into which he had
engaged me so deeply, were
taking their toll on me and were causing in me a serious incapacity to
deal with my fellow men. I
examined my problem and concluded that my flaw was my compulsion to
measure everyone using
don Juan as a yardstick.
Don Juan was, in my estimate, a being who lived his life
professionally, in every aspect of the term,
meaning that every one of his acts, no matter how insignificant,
counted. I was surrounded by people
who believed that they were immortal beings, who contradicted
themselves every step of the way;
they were beings whose acts could never be accounted for. It was an
unfair game; the cards were
stacked against the people I encountered. I was accustomed to don
Juan's unalterable behavior, to his
total lack of self-importance, and to the unfathomable scope of his
intellect; very few of the people I
knew were even aware that there existed another pattern of behavior
that fostered those qualities. Most
of them knew only the behavioral pattern of self-reflection, which
renders men weak and contorted.
Consequently, I was having a very difficult time in my academic
studies. I was losing sight of them. I
tried desperately to find a rationale that would justify my academic
endeavors. The only thing that
came to my aid and gave me a connection, however flimsy, to academia
was the recommendation that
don Juan had made to me once that warrior-travelers should have a
romance with knowledge, in
whatever form knowledge was presented.
He had defined the concept of warrior-travelers, saying that it
referred to sorcerers who, by being
warriors, traveled in the dark sea of awareness. He had added that
human beings were travelers of the
dark sea of awareness, and that this Earth was but a station on their
journey; for extraneous reasons,
which he didn't care to divulge at the time, the travelers had
interrupted their voyage. He said that
human beings were caught in a sort of eddy, a current that went in
circles, giving them the impression
of moving while they were, in essence, stationary. He maintained that
sorcerers were the only
opponents of whatever force kept human beings prisoners, and that by
means of their discipline
sorcerers broke loose from its grip and continued their journey of
awareness.
What precipitated the final chaotic upheaval in my academic life was my
incapacity to focus my
interest on topics of anthropological concern that didn't mean a hoot
to me, not because of their lack of
appeal but because they were mostly matters where words and concepts
had to be manipulated, as in a
legal document, to obtain a given result that would establish
precedents. It was argued that human
knowledge is built in such a fashion, and that the effort of every
individual was a building block in
constructing a system of knowledge. The example that was put to me was
that of the legal system by
which we live, and which is or invaluable importance to us. However, my
romantic notions at the time
impeded me from conceiving of myself as a barrister-at-anthropology. I
had bought, lock, stock, and
barrel, the concept that anthropology should be the matrix of all human
endeavor, or the measure of
man.
Don Juan, a consummate pragmatist, a true warrior-traveler of the
unknown, said that I was full of
prunes. He said that it didn't matter that the anthropological topics
proposed to me were maneuvers of
words and concepts, that what was important was the exercise of
discipline.
"It doesn't make any difference," he said to me one time, "how good a
reader you are, and how many
wonderful books you can read. What's important is that you have the
discipline to read what you don't
want to read. The crux of the sorcerers' exercise of going to school is
in what you refuse, not in what
you accept."
I decided to take some time off from my studies and went to work in the
art department of a company
that made decals. My job engaged my efforts and thoughts to their
fullest extent. My challenge was to
carry out the tasks assigned to me as perfectly and as rapidly as I
could. To set up the vinyl sheets with
the images to be processed by silk-screening into decals was a standard
procedure that wouldn't admit
of any innovation, and the efficiency of the worker was measured by
exactness and speed. I became a
workaholic and enjoyed myself tremendously.
The director of the art department and I became fast friends. He
practically took me under his wing.
His name was Ernest Lipton. I admired and respected him immensely. He
was a fine artist and a
magnificent craftsman. His flaw was his softness, his incredible
consideration for others, which
bordered on passivity.
For example, one day we were driving out of the parking lot of a
restaurant where we had eaten lunch.
Very politely, he waited for another car to pull out of the parking
space in front of him. The driver
obviously didn't see us and began to back out at a considerable speed.
Ernest Lipton could easily have
blown his horn to attract the man's attention to watch where he was
going. Instead, he sat, grinning
like an idiot as the guy crashed into his car. Then he turned and
apologized to me. "Gee, I could have
blown my horn," he said, "but it's so fucking loud, it embarrasses me."
The guy who had backed up into Ernest's car was furious and had to be
placated.
"Don't worry," Ernest said. "There is no damage to your car. Besides,
you only smashed my
headlights; I was going to replace them anyway."
Another day, in the same restaurant, some Japanese people, clients of
the decal company and his
guests for lunch, were talking animatedly to us, asking questions. The
waiter came with the food and
cleared the table of some of the salad plates, making room, the best
way he could on the narrow table,
for the huge hot plates of the entree. One of the Japanese clients
needed more space. He pushed his
plate forward; the push set Ernest's plate in motion and it began to
slide off the table. Again, Ernest
could have warned the man, but he didn't. He sat there grinning until
the plate fell in his lap.
On another occasion, I went to his house to help him put up some
rafters over his patio, where he was
going to let a grape vine grow for partial shade and fruit. We
prearranged the rafters into a huge frame
and then lifted one side and bolted it to some beams. Ernest was a
tall, very strong man, and using a
length of two-by-four as a hoisting device, he lifted the other end for
me to fit the bolts into holes that
were already drilled into the supporting beams. But before I had a
chance to put in the bolts there was
an insistent knock on the door and Ernest asked me to see who it was
while he held the frame of
rafters.
His wife was at the door with her grocery packages. She engaged me in a
lengthy conversation and I
forgot about Ernest. I even helped her to put her groceries away. In
the middle of arranging her celery
bundles, I remembered that my friend was still holding the frame of
rafters, and knowing him, I knew
that he would still be at the job, expecting everybody else to have the
consideration that he himself
had. I rushed desperately to the backyard, and there he was on the
ground. He had collapsed from
the exhaustion of holding the heavy wooden frame. He looked like a rag
doll. We had to call his
friends to lend a hand and hoist up the frame of rafters-he couldn't do
it anymore. He had to go to bed.
He thought for sure that he had a hernia.
The classic story about Ernest Lipton was that one day he went hiking
for the weekend in the San
Bernardino Mountains with some friends. They camped in the mountains
for the night. While
everybody was sleeping, Ernest Lipton went to the bushes, and being
such a considerate man, he
walked some distance from the camp so as not to bother anybody. He
slipped in the darkness and
rolled down the side of the mountain. He told his friends afterward
that he knew for a fact that he was
falling to his death at the bottom of the valley. He was lucky in that
he grabbed on to a ledge with the
tips of his fingers; he held on to it for hours, searching in the dark
with his feet for any support,
because his arms were about to give in-he was going to hold on until
his death. By extending his legs
as wide as he could, he found tiny protuberances in the rock that
helped him to hold on. He stayed
stuck to the rock, like the decals that he made, until there was enough
light for him to realize that he
was only a foot from the ground.
"Ernest, you could have yelled for help!" his friends complained.
"Gee, I didn't think there was any use," he replied. "Who could have
heard me? I thought I had rolled
down at least a mile into the valley. Besides, everyone was asleep."
The final blow came for me when Ernest Lipton, who spent two hours
daily commuting back and
forth from his house to the shop, decided to buy an economy car, a
Volkswagen Beetle, and began
measuring how many miles he got per gallon of gasoline. I was extremely
surprised when he
announced one morning that he had reached 125 miles per gallon. Being a
very exact man, he
qualified his statement, saying that most of his driving was not done
in the city, but on the freeway,
although at the peak hour of traffic, he had to slow down and
accelerate quite often. A week later, he
said that he had reached the 250-mile-per-gallon mark.
This marvelous event escalated until he reached an unbelievable figure:
645 miles to a gallon. His
friends told him that he should enter this figure into the logs of the
Volkswagen company. Ernest
Lipton was as pleased as punch, and gloated, saying that he wouldn't
know what to do if he reached
the thousand-mile mark. His friends told him that he should claim a
miracle.
This extraordinary situation went on until one morning when he caught
one of his friends, who for
months had been playing the oldest gag in the book on him, adding
gasoline to his tank. Every
morning he had been adding three or four cups so that Ernest's gas
gauge was never on empty.
Ernest Lipton was nearly angry. His harshest comment was, "Gee! Is this
supposed to be funny?"
I had known for weeks that his friends were playing that gag on him,
but I was unable to intervene. I
felt that it was none of my business. The people who were playing the
gag on Ernest Lipton were his
lifelong friends. I was a newcomer. When I saw his look of
disappointment and hurt, and his
incapacity to get angry, I felt a wave of guilt and anxiety. I was
facing again an old enemy of mine. I
despised Ernest Lipton, and at the same time, I liked him immensely. He
was helpless.
The real truth of the matter was that Ernest Lipton looked like my
father. His thick glasses and his
receding hairline, as well as the stubble of graying beard that he
could never quite shave completely,
brought my father's features to mind. He had the same straight, pointed
nose and pointed chin. But
seeing Ernest Lipton's inability to get angry and punch the jokers in
the nose was what really clinched
his likeness to my father for me and pushed it beyond the threshold of
safety.
I remembered how my father had been madly in love with the sister of
his best friend. I spotted her
one day in a resort town, holding hands with a young man. Her mother
was with her as a chaperone.
The girl seemed so happy. The two young people looked at each other,
enraptured. As far as I could
see, it was young love at its best. When I saw my father, I told him,
relishing every instant of my
recounting with all the malice of my ten years, that his girlfriend had
a real boyfriend. He was taken
aback. He didn't believe me.
"But have you said anything at all to the girl?" I asked him daringly-
"Does she know that you are in
love with her?"
"Don't be stupid, you little creep!" he snapped at me. "I don't have to
tell any woman any shit of that
sort!" Like a spoiled child, he looked at me petulantly, his lips
trembling with rage.
"She's mine! She should know that she's my woman without my having to
tell her anything!"
He declared all this with the certainty of a child who has had
everything in life given to him without
having to fight for it.
At the apex of my form, I delivered my punch line. "Well," I said, "I
think she expected someone to
tell her that, and someone has just beaten you to it."
I was prepared to jump out of his reach and run because I thought he
would slash at me with all the
fury in the world, but instead, he crumpled down and began to weep. He
asked me, sobbing
uncontrollably, that since I was capable of anything, would I please
spy on the girl for him and tell
him what was going on?
I despised my father beyond anything I could say, and at the same time
I loved him, with a sadness
that was unmatched. I cursed myself for precipitating that shame on him.
Ernest Lipton reminded me of my father so much that I quit my job,
alleging that I had to go back to
school. I didn't want to increase the burden that I already carried on
my shoulders. I had never
forgiven myself for causing my father that anguish, and I had never
forgiven him for being so
cowardly.
I went back to school and began the gigantic task of reintegrating
myself into my studies of
anthropology. What made this re integration very difficult was the fact
that if there was someone I
could have worked with with ease and delight because of his admirable
touch, his daring curiosity, and
his willingness to expand his knowledge without getting flustered or
defending. indefensible points, it
was someone outside my department, an archaeologist. It was because of
his influence that I had
become interested in fieldwork in the first place. Perhaps because of
the fact that he actually went into
the field, literally to dig out information, his practicality was an
oasis of sobriety for me. He was the
only one who had encouraged me to go ahead and do field-work because I
had nothing to lose.
"Lose it all, and you'll gain it all," he told me once, the soundest
advice that I ever got in academia. If I
followed don Juan's advice, and worked toward correcting my obsession
with self-reflection, I
veritably had nothing to lose and everything to gain. But this
possibility hadn't been in the cards for
me at that time.
When I told don Juan about the difficulty I encountered in finding a
professor to work with, I thought
that his reaction to what I'd said was vicious. He called me a petty
fart, and worse. He told me what I
already knew: that if I were not so tense, I could have worked
successfully with anybody in academia,
or in business.
"Warrior-travelers don't complain," don Juan went on. "They take
everything that infinity hands them
as a challenge. A challenge is a challenge. It isn't personal. It
cannot be taken as a curse or a blessing.
A warrior-traveler either wins the challenge or the challenge
demolishes him. It's more exciting to win,
so win!"
I told him that it was easy for him or anyone else to say that, but to
carry it out was another matter, and
that my tribulations were insoluble because they originated in the
incapacity of my fellow men to be
consistent.
"It's not the people around you who are at fault," he said. "They
cannot help themselves. The fault is
with you, because you can help yourself, but you are bent on judging
them, at a deep level of silence.
Any idiot can judge. If you judge them, you will only get the worst out
of them. All of us human
beings are prisoners, and it is that prison that makes us act in such a
miserable way. Your challenge is
to take people as they are! Leave people alone."
"You are absolutely wrong this time, don Juan," I said. "Believe me, I
have no interest whatsoever in
judging them, or entangling myself with them in any way."
"You do understand what I'm talking about," he insisted doggedly. "If
you're not conscious of your
desire to judge them," he continued, "you are in even worse shape than
I thought. This is the flaw of
warrior-travelers when they begin to resume their journeys. They get
cocky, out of hand."
I admitted to don Juan that my complaints were petty in the extreme. I
knew that much. I said to him
that I was confronted with daily events, events that had the nefarious
quality of wearing down all my
resolve, and that I was embarrassed to relate to don Juan the incidents
that weighed heavily on my
mind.
"Come on," he urged me. "Out with it! Don't have any secrets from me.
I'm an empty tube. Whatever
you say to me will be projected out into infinity."
"All I have are miserable complaints," I said. "I am exactly like all
the people I know. There's no way
to talk to a single one of them without hearing an overt or a covert
complaint."
I related to don Juan how in even the simplest dialogues my friends
managed to sneak in an endless
number of complaints, such as in a dialogue like this one:
"How is everything, Jim?"
"Oh, fine, fine, Cal." A huge silence would follow.
I would be obliged to say, "Is there something wrong, Jim?"
"No! Everything's great. I have a bit of a problem with Mel, but you
know how Mel is-selfish and
shitty. But you have to take your friends as they come, true? He could,
of course, have a little more
consideration. But what the fuck. He's himself. He always puts the
burden on you-take me or leave
me. He's been doing that since we were twelve, so it's really my fault.
Why in the fuck do I have to
take him?"
"Well, you're right, Jim, you know Mel is very hard, yes. Yeah!"
"Well, speaking of shitty people, you're no better than Mel, Cal. I can
never count on you," etc.
Another classic dialogue was:
"How are you doing, Alex? How's your married life?"
"Oh, just great. For the first time, I'm eating on time, home-cooked
meals, but I'm getting fat. There's
nothing for me to do except watch TV. I used to go out with you guys,
but now I can't. Theresa doesn't
let me. Of course, I could tell her to go and fuck herself, but I don't
want to hurt her. I feel content, but
miserable."
And Alex had been the most miserable guy before he got married. He was
the one whose classic joke
was to tell his friends, every time we ran into him, "Hey, come to my
car, I want to introduce you to
my bitch."
He enjoyed himself pink with our crushed expectations when we would see
that what he had in his car
was a female dog. He introduced his "bitch" to all his friends. We were
shocked when he actually
married Theresa, a long-distance runner. They met at a marathon when
Alex fainted. They were in the
mountains, and Theresa had to revive him by any means, so she pissed on
his face. After that, Alex
was her prisoner. She had marked her territory. His friends used to
say, "Her pissy prisoner." His
friends thought she was the true bitch who had turned weird Alex into a
fat dog.
Don Juan and I laughed for a while. Then he looked at me with a serious
expression.
"These are the ups and downs of daily living," don Juan said. "You win,
and you lose, and you don't
know when you win or when you lose. This is the price one pays for
living under the rule of selfreflection.
There is nothing that I can say to you, and there's nothing that you
can say to yourself. I
could only recommend that you not feel guilty because you're an
asshole, but that you strive to end the
dominion of self-reflection. Go back to school. Don't give up yet."
My interest in remaining in academia was waning considerably. I began
to live on automatic pilot. I
felt heavy, despondent. However, I noticed that my mind was not
involved. I didn't calculate any
thing, or set up any goals or expectations of any sort. My thoughts
were not obsessive, but my feelings
were. I tried to conceptualize this dichotomy between a quiet mind and
turbulent feelings. It was in
this frame of mindlessness and overwhelmed feelings that I walked one
day from Haines Hall, where
the anthropology department was, to the cafeteria to eat my lunch.
I was suddenly accosted by a strange tremor. I thought I was going to
faint, and I sat down on some
brick steps. I saw yellow spots in front of my eyes. I had the
sensation that I was spinning. I was sure
that I was going to get sick to my stomach. My vision became blurry,
and finally I couldn't see a thing.
My physical discomfort was so total and intense that it didn't leave
room for a single thought. I had
only bodily sensations of fear and anxiety mixed with elation, and a
strange anticipation that I was at
the threshold of a gigantic event. They were sensations without the
counterpart of thought. At a given
moment, I no longer knew whether I was sitting or standing. I was
surrounded by the most
impenetrable darkness one can imagine, and then, I saw energy as it
flowed in the universe.
I saw a succession of luminous spheres walking toward me or away from
me. I saw them one at a
time, as don Juan had always told me one sees them. I knew they were
different individuals because of
their differences in size. I examined the details of their structures.
Their luminosity and their
roundness were made of fibers that seemed to be stuck together. They
were thin or thick fibers. Every
one of those luminous figures had a thick, shaggy covering. They looked
like some strange, luminous,
furry animals, or gigantic round insects covered with luminous hair.
What was the most shocking thing to me was the realization that I had
seen those furry insects all my
life. Every occasion on which don Juan had made me deliberately see
them seemed to me at that
moment to be like a detour that I had taken with him. I remembered
every instance of his help in
making me see people as luminous spheres, and all of those instances
were set apart from the bulk of
seeing to which I was having access now. I knew then, as
beyond the shadow of a doubt, that I had perceived energy as it flows
in the universe all my life, on
my own, without anybody's help. Such a realization was overwhelming to
me. I felt infinitely,
vulnerable, frail. I needed to seek cover, to hide somewhere It was
exactly like the dream that most of
us seem to have at one time or another in which we find ourselves naked
and don't know what to do. I
felt more than naked; I felt unprotected, weak, and I dreaded returning
to my normal state. In a vague
way, I sensed that I was lying down. I braced myself for my return to
normality. I conceived of the
idea that I was going to find myself lying on the brick walk, twitching
convulsively, surrounded by a
whole circle of spectators.
The sensation that I was lying down became more and more accentuated. I
felt that I could move my
eyes. I could see light through my closed eyelids, but 1 dreaded
opening them. The odd part was that I
didn't hear any of those people that I imagined were around me. I heard
no noise at all. At last, I
ventured opening my eyes. I was on my bed, in my office apartment by
the corner of Wilshire and
Westwood boulevards.
I became quite hysterical upon finding myself in my bed. But for some
reason that was beyond my
grasp, I calmed down almost immediately. My hysteria was replaced by a
bodily indifference, or by a
state of bodily satisfaction, something like what one feels after a
good meal. However, I could not
quiet my mind. It had been the most shocking thing imaginable for me to
realize that I had perceived
energy directly all my life. How in the world could it have been
possible that I hadn't known? What
had been preventing me from gaining access to that facet of my being?
Don Juan had said that every
human being has the potential to see energy directly. What he hadn't
said was that every human being
already sees energy directly but doesn't know it.
I put that question to a psychiatrist friend. He couldn't shed any
light on my quandary. He thought that
my reaction was the result
fatigue and overstimulation. He gave me a prescription for Valium and
told me to rest.
hadn't dared mention to anyone that I had woken up in my bed without
being able to account for how
1 had gotten there. Therefore, my haste to see don Juan was more than
justified. I flew to Mexico City
as soon as I could, rented a car, and drove to where he lived.
"You've done all this before!" don Juan said, laughing, when I narrated
my mind-boggling experience
to him. "There are only two things that are new. One is that now you
have perceived energy all by
yourself. What you did was to stop the world, and then you realized
that you have always seen energy
as it flows in the universe, as every human being does, but without
knowing it deliberately. The other
new thing is that you have traveled from your inner silence all by
yourself.
"You know, without my having to tell you, that anything is possible if
one departs from inner silence.
This time your fear and vulnerability made it possible for you to end
up in your bed, which is not
really that far from the UCLA campus. If you would not indulge in your
surprise, you would realize
that what you did is nothing, nothing extraordinary for a
warrior-traveler.
"But the issue which is of the utmost importance isn't knowing that you
have always perceived energy
directly, or your journeying from inner silence, but, rather, a twofold
affair. First, you experienced
something which the sorcerers of ancient Mexico called the clear view,
or losing the human form: the
time when human pettiness vanishes, as if it had been a patch of fog
looming over us, a fog that
slowly clears up and dissipates. But under no circumstances must you
believe that this is an
accomplished fact. The sorcerers' world is not an immutable world like
the world of everyday life,
where they tell you that once you reach a goal, you remain a winner
forever. In the sorcerers' world, to
arrive at a certain goal means that you have simply acquired the most
efficient tools to continue your
fight, which, by the way, will never end. "The second part of this
twofold matter is that you
experienced
the most maddening question for the hearts of human beings. You
expressed it yourself when you
asked yourself the questions: 'How in the world could it have been
possible that I didn't know that I
had perceived energy directly all my life? What had been preventing me
from gaining access to that
facet of my being?'"
Mud Shadows
TO SIT IN silence with don Juan was one of the most enjoyable
experiences I knew. We were
comfortably sitting on some stuffed chairs in the back of his house in
the mountains of central Mexico.
It was late afternoon. There was a pleasant breeze. The sun was behind
the house, at our backs. Its
fading light created exquisite shades of green in the big trees in the
backyard. There were big trees
growing around his house, and beyond it, which obliterated the sight of
the city where he lived. This
always gave me the impression that I was in the wilderness, a different
wilderness than the barren
Sonoran desert, but wilderness nonetheless.
"Today, we're going to discuss a most serious topic in sorcery," don
Juan said abruptly, "and we're
going to begin by talking about the energy body."
He had described the energy body to me countless times, saying that it
was a conglomerate of energy
fields, the mirror image of the conglomerate of energy fields that
makes up the physical body when it
is seen as energy that flows in the universe. He had said that it was
smaller, more compact, and of
heavier appearance than the luminous sphere of the physical body.
Don Juan had explained that the body and the energy body were two
conglomerates of energy fields
compressed together by some strange agglutinizing force. He had
emphasized no end that the force
that binds that group of energy fields together was, according to the
sorcerers of ancient Mexico, the
most mysterious force in the universe. His personal estimation was that
it was the pure essence of the
entire cosmos, the sum total of everything there is.
He had asserted that the physical body and the energy body were the
only counterbalanced energy
configurations in our realm as human beings. He accepted, therefore, no
other dualism than the one
between these two. The dualism between body and mind, spirit and flesh,
he considered to be a mere
concatenation of the mind, emanating from it without any energetic
foundation. Don Juan had said
that by means of discipline it is possible for anyone to bring the
energy body closer to the physical
body. Normally, the distance between the two is enormous. Once the
energy body is within a certain
range, which varies for each of us individually, anyone, through
discipline, can forge it into the exact
replica of their physical body-that is to say, a three-dimensional,
solid being. Hence the sorcerers' idea
of the other or the double. By the same token, through the same
processes of discipline, anyone can
forge their three-dimensional, solid physical body to be a perfect
replica of their energy body-that is to
say, an ethereal charge of energy invisible to the human eye, as all
energy is.
When don Juan had told me all about this, my reaction had been to ask
him if he was describing a
mythical proposition. He had replied that there was nothing mythical
about sorcerers. Sorcerers were
practical beings, and what they described was always something quite
sober and down-to-earth.
According to don Juan, the difficulty in understanding what sorcerers
did was that they proceeded
from a different cognitive system.
Sitting at the back of his house in central Mexico that day, don Juan
said that the energy body was of
key importance in whatever was taking place in my life. He saw that it
was an energetic fact that my
energy body, instead of moving away from me, as it normally happens,
was approaching me with great
speed.
"What does it mean, that it's approaching me, don Juan?" I asked.
"It means that something is going to knock the daylights out of you,"
he said, smiling. "A tremendous
degree of control is going to come into your life, but not your
control, the energy body's control."
"Do you mean, don Juan, that some outside force will control me?" I
asked.
"There are scores of outside forces controlling you at this moment,"
don Juan replied. "The control
that I am referring to is something outside the domain of language. It
is your control and at the same
time it is not. It cannot be classified, but it can certainly be
experienced. And above all, it can certainly
be manipulated. Remember this: It can be manipulated, to your total
advantage, of course, which
again, is not your advantage, but the energy body's advantage. However,
the energy body is you, so we
could go on forever like dogs biting their own tails, trying to
describe this. Language is inadequate.
All these experiences are beyond syntax."
Darkness had descended very quickly, and the foliage of the trees that
had been glowing green a little
while before was now very dark and heavy. Don Juan said that if I paid
close attention to the darkness
of the foliage without focusing my eyes, but sort of looked at it from
the corner of my eye, I would see
a fleeting shadow crossing my field of vision.
"This is the appropriate time of day for doing what I am asking you to
do," he said. "It takes a moment
to engage the necessary attention in you to do it. Don't stop until you
catch that fleeting black
shadow."
I did see some strange fleeting black shadow projected on the foliage
of the trees. It was either one
shadow going back and forth or various fleeting shadows moving from
left to right or right to left or
straight up in the air. They looked like fat black fish to me, enormous
fish. It was as if gigantic
swordfish were flying in the air. I was engrossed in the sight. Then,
finally, it scared me. It became too
dark to see the foliage, yet I could still see the fleeting black
shadows.
"What is it, don Juan?" I asked. "I see fleeting black shadows all over
the place."
"Ah, that's the universe at large," he said, "incommensurable,
nonlinear, outside the realm of syntax.
The sorcerers of ancient Mexico were the first ones to see those
fleeting shadows, so they followed
them around. They saw them as you're seeing them, and they saw them as
energy that flows in the
universe. And they did discover something transcendental."
He stopped talking and looked at me. His pauses were perfectly placed.
He always stopped talking
when I was hanging by a thread.
"What did they discover, don Juan?" I asked.
"They discovered that we have a companion for life," he said, as
clearly as he could. "We have a
predator that came from the depths of the cosmos and took over the rule
of our lives. Human beings
are its prisoners. The predator is our lord and master. It has rendered
us docile, helpless. If we want to
protest, it suppresses our protest. If we want to act independently, it
demands that we don't do so."
It was very dark around us, and that seemed to curtail any expression
on my part. If it had been
daylight, I would have laughed my head off. In the dark, I felt quite
inhibited.
"It's pitch black around us," don Juan said, "but if you look out of
the corner of your eye, you will still
see fleeting shadows jumping all around you."
He was right. I could still see them. Their movement made me dizzy. Don
Juan turned on the light,
and that seemed to dissipate everything.
"You have arrived, by your effort alone, to what the shamans of ancient
Mexico called the topic of
topics," don Juan said. "I have been beating around the bush all this
time, insinuating to you that
something is holding us prisoner. Indeed we are held prisoner! This was
an energetic fact for the
sorcerers of ancient Mexico."
"Why has this predator taken over in the fashion that you're
describing, don Juan?" I asked. "There
must be a logical explanation."
"There is an explanation," don Juan replied, "which is the simplest
explanation in the world. They
took over because we are food for them, and they squeeze us mercilessly
because we are their
sustenance. Just as we rear chickens in chicken coops, gallineros, the
predators rear us in human
coops, humaneros. Therefore, their food is always available to them."
I felt that my head was shaking violently from side to side. I could
not express my profound sense of
unease and discontentment, but my body moved to bring it to the
surface. I shook from head to toe
without any volition on my part.
"No, no, no, no," I heard myself saying. "This is absurd, don Juan.
What you're saying is something
monstrous. It simply can't be true, for sorcerers or for average men,
or for anyone."
"Why not?" don Juan asked calmly. "Why not? Because it infuriates you?"
"Yes, it infuriates me," I retorted. "Those claims are monstrous!"
"Well," he said, "you haven't heard all the claims yet. Wait a bit
longer and see how you feel. I'm
going to subject you to a blitz. That is, I'm going to subject your
mind to tremendous onslaughts, and
you cannot get up and leave because you're caught. Not because I'm
holding you prisoner, but because
something in you will prevent you from leaving, while another part of
you is going to go truthfully
berserk. So brace yourself!"
There was something in me which was, I felt, a glutton for punishment.
He was right. I wouldn't have
left the house for the world. And yet I didn't like one bit the
inanities he was spouting.
"I want to appeal to your analytical mind," don Juan said. Think for a
moment, and tell me how you
would explain the contradiction between the intelligence of man the
engineer and the stupidity of his
systems of beliefs, or the stupidity of his contradictory behavior.
Sorcerers believe that the predators
have given us our systems of beliefs, our ideas of good and evil, our
social mores. They are the ones
who set up our hopes and expectations and dreams of success or failure.
They have given us
covetousness, greed, and cowardice. It is the predators who make us
complacent, routinary, and
egomaniacal."
"But how can they do this, don Juan?" I asked, somehow angered further
by what he was saying. "Do
they whisper all that in our ears while we are asleep?"
"No, they don't do it that way. That's idiotic!" don Juan said,
smiling. "They are infinitely more
efficient and organized than that. In order to keep us obedient and
meek and weak, the predators
engaged themselves in a stupendous maneuver-stupendous, of course, from
the point of view of a
fighting strategist. A horrendous maneuver from the point of view of
those who suffer it. They gave us
their mind! Do you hear me? The predators give us their mind, which
becomes our mind. The
predators' mind is baroque, contradictory, morose, filled with the fear
of being discovered any minute
now.
"I know that even though you have never suffered hunger," he went on,
"you have food anxiety, which
is none other than the anxiety of the predator who fears that any
moment now its maneuver is going to
be uncovered and food is going to be denied. Through the mind, which,
after all, is their mind, the
predators inject into the lives of human beings whatever is convenient
for them. And they ensure, in
this manner, a degree of security to act as a buffer against their
fear."
"It's not that I can't accept all this at face value, don Juan," I
said. "I could, but there's something so
odious about it that it actually repels me. It forces me to take a
contradictory stand. If it's true that they
eat us, how do they do it?"
Don Juan had a broad smile on his face. He was as pleased as punch. He
explained that sorcerers see
infant human beings as strange, luminous balls of energy, covered from
the top to the bottom with a
glowing coat, something like a plastic cover that is adjusted tightly
over their cocoon of energy. He
said that that glowing coat of awareness was what the predators
consumed, and that when a human
being reached adulthood, all that was left of that glowing coat of
awareness was a narrow fringe that
went from the ground to the top of the toes. That fringe permitted
mankind to continue living, but only
barely.
As if I had been in a dream, I heard don Juan Matus explaining that to
his knowledge, man was the
only species that had the glowing coat of awareness outside that
luminous cocoon. Therefore, he
became easy prey for an awareness of a different order, such as the
heavy awareness of the predator.
He then made the most damaging statement he had made so far. He said
that this narrow fringe of
awareness was the epicenter of self-reflection, where man was
irremediably caught. By playing on our
self-reflection, which is the only point of awareness left to us, the
predators create flares of awareness
that they proceed to consume in a ruthless, predatory fashion. They
give us inane problems that force
those flares of awareness to rise, and in this manner they keep us
alive in order for them to be fed with
the energetic flare of our pseudoconcerns.
There must have been something to what don Juan was saying, which was
so devastating to me that at
that point I actually got sick to my stomach.
After a moment's pause, long enough for me to recover, I asked don
Juan: "But why is it that the
sorcerers of ancient Mexico and all sorcerers today, although they see
the predators, don't do anything
about it?"
"There's nothing that you and I can do about it," don Juan said in a
grave, sad voice. "All we can do is
discipline ourselves to the point where they will not touch us. How can
you ask your fellow men to go
through those rigors of discipline? They'll laugh and make fun of you,
and the more aggressive ones
will beat the shit out of you. And not so much because they don't
believe it. Down in the depths of
every human being, there's an ancestral, visceral knowledge about the
predators' existence."
My analytical mind swung back and forth like a yo-yo. It left me and
came back and left me and came
back again. Whatever don Juan was proposing was preposterous,
incredible. At the same time, it was a
most reasonable thing, so simple. It explained every kind of human
contradiction I could think of. But
how could one have taken all this seriously? Don Juan was pushing me
into the path of an avalanche
that would take me down forever.
I felt another wave of a threatening sensation. The wave didn't stem
from me, yet it was attached to
me. Don Juan was doing something to me, mysteriously positive and
terribly negative at the same
time. I sensed it as an attempt to cut a thin film that seemed to be
glued to me. His eyes were fixed on
mine in an unblinking stare. He moved his eyes away and began to talk
without looking at me
anymore.
"Whenever doubts plague you to a dangerous point," he said, "do
something pragmatic about it. Turn
off the light. Pierce the darkness; find out what you can see."
He got up to turn off the lights. I stopped him.
"No, no, don Juan," I said, "don't turn off the lights. I'm doing okay."
What I felt then was a most unusual, for me, fear of the darkness. The
mere thought of it made me
pant. I definitely knew something viscerally, but I wouldn't dare touch
it, or bring it to the surface, not
in a million years!
"You saw the fleeting shadows against the trees," don Juan said,
sitting back against his chair. "That's
pretty good. I'd like you to see them inside this room. You're not
seeing anything. You're just merely
catching fleeting images. You have enough energy for that.
I feared that don Juan would get up anyway and turn off the lights,
which he did. Two seconds later, I
was screaming my head off. Not only did I catch a glimpse of those
fleeting images, I heard them
buzzing by my ears. Don Juan doubled up with laughter as he turned on
the lights.
"What a temperamental fellow!" he said. "A total disbeliever, on the
one hand, and a total pragmatist
on the other. You must arrange this internal fight. Otherwise, you're
going to swell up like a big toad
and burst."
Don Juan kept on pushing his barb deeper and deeper into me. "The
sorcerers of ancient Mexico," he
said, "saw; the predator. They called it the flyer because it leaps
through the air. It is not a pretty sight.
It is a big shadow, impenetrably dark, a black shadow that jumps
through the air. Then, it lands flat on
the ground. The sorcerers of ancient Mexico were quite ill at ease with
the idea of when it made its
appearance on Earth. They reasoned that man must have been a complete
being at one point, with
stupendous insights, feats of awareness that are mythological legends
nowadays. And then everything
seems to disappear, and we have now a sedated man."
I wanted to get angry, call him a paranoiac, but somehow the
righteousness that was usually just
underneath the surface of my being wasn't there. Something in me was
beyond the point of asking
myself my favorite question: What if all that he said is true? At the
moment he was talking to me that
night, in my heart of hearts, I felt that all of what he was saying was
true, but at the same time, and
with equal force, all that he was saying was absurdity itself.
"What are you saying, don Juan?" I asked feebly. My throat was
constricted. I could hardly breathe.
"What I'm saying is that what we have against us is not a simple
predator. It is very smart, and
organized. It follows a methodical system to render us useless. Man,
the magical being that he is
destined to be, is no longer magical. He's an average piece of meat.
There are no more dreams for man
but the dreams of an animal who is being raised to become a piece of
meat: trite, conventional,
imbecilic."
Don Juan's words were eliciting a strange, bodily reaction in me
comparable to the sensation of
nausea. It was as if I were going to get sick to my stomach again. But
the nausea was coming from
the bottom of my being, from the marrow of my bones. I convulsed
involuntarily. Don Juan shook me
by the shoulders forcefully. I felt my neck wobbling back and forth
under the impact of his grip. The
maneuver calmed me down at once. I felt more in control.
"This predator," don Juan said, "which, of course, is an inorganic
being, is not altogether invisible to
us, as other inorganic beings are. 1 think as children we do see it and
decide it's so horrific that we
don't want to think about it. Children, of course, could insist on
focusing on the sight, but everybody
else around them dissuades them from doing so.
"The only alternative left for mankind," he continued, "is discipline.
Discipline is the only deterrent.
But by discipline I don't mean harsh routines. I don't mean waking up
every morning at five-thirty and
throwing cold water on yourself until you're blue. Sorcerers understand
discipline as the capacity to
face with serenity odds that are not included in our expectations. For
them, discipline is an art: the art
of facing infinity without flinching, not because they are strong and
tough but because they are filled
with awe."
"In what way would the sorcerers' discipline be a deterrent?" I asked.
"Sorcerers say that discipline makes the glowing coat of awareness
unpalatable to the flyer," don Juan
said, scrutinizing my face as if to discover any signs of disbelief.
"The result is that the predators
become bewildered. An inedible glowing coat of awareness is not part of
their cognition, I suppose.
After being bewildered, they don't have any recourse other than
refraining from continuing their
nefarious task.
"If the predators don't eat our glowing coat of awareness for a while,"
he went on, "it'll keep on
growing. Simplifying this matter to the extreme, I can say that
sorcerers, by means of their discipline,
push the predators away long enough to allow their glowing coat of
awareness to grow beyond the
level of the toes. Once it goes beyond the level of the toes, it grows
back to its natural size.
The sorcerers of ancient Mexico used to say that the glowing coat of
awareness is like a tree. If it is
not pruned, it grows to its natural size and volume. As awareness
reaches levels higher than the toes,
tremendous maneuvers of perception become a matter of course.
"The grand trick of those sorcerers of ancient times," don Juan
continued, "was to burden the flyers'
mind with discipline. They found out that if they taxed the flyers'
mind with inner silence, the foreign
installation would flee, giving to any one of the practitioners
involved in this maneuver the total
certainty of the mind's foreign origin. The foreign installation comes
back, I assure you, but not as
strong, and a process begins in which the fleeing of the 'flyers' mind
becomes routine, until one day it
flees permanently. A sad day indeed! That's the day when you have to
rely on your own devices, which
are nearly zero. There's no one to tell you what to do. There's no mind
of foreign origin to dictate the
imbecilities you're accustomed to.
"My teacher, the nagual Julian, used to warn all his disciples," don
Juan continued, "that this was the
toughest day in a sorcerer's life, for the real mind that belongs to
us, the sum total of our experience,
after a lifetime of domination has been rendered shy, insecure, and
shifty. Personally, 1 would say that
the real battle of sorcerers begins at that moment. The rest is merely
preparation."
I became genuinely agitated. 1 wanted to know more, and yet a strange
feeling in me clamored for me
to stop. It alluded to dark results and punishment, something like the
wrath of God descending on me
for tampering with something veiled by God himself. 1 made a supreme
effort to allow my curiosity to
win.
"What-what-what do you mean," I heard myself say, "by taxing the
flyers' mind?"
"Discipline taxes the foreign mind no end," he replied. "So, through
their discipline, sorcerers
vanquish the foreign installation."
I was overwhelmed by his statements. I believed that don Juan was
either certifiably insane or that he
was telling me something so awesome that it froze everything in me. I
noticed, however how quickly I
rallied my energy to deny everything he had said. After an instant of
panic, I began to laugh, as if don
Juan had told me a joke. I even heard myself saying, "Don Juan, don
Juan, you're incorrigible!"
Don Juan seemed to understand everything I was experiencing. He shook
his head from side to side
and raised his eyes to the heavens in a gesture of mock despair.
"I am so incorrigible," he said, "that I am going to give the flyers'
mind, which you carry inside you,
one more jolt. I am going to reveal to you one of the most
extraordinary secrets of sorcery. I am going
to describe to you a finding that took sorcerers thousands of years to
verify and consolidate."
He looked at me and smiled maliciously. "The flyers' mind flees
forever," he said, "when a sorcerer
succeeds in grabbing on to the vibrating force that holds us together
as a conglomerate of energy
fields. If a sorcerer maintains that pressure long enough, the flyers'
mind flees in defeat. And that's
exactly what you are going to do: hold on to the energy that binds you
together."
I had the most inexplicable reaction I could have imagined. Something
in me actually shook, as if it
had received a jolt. I entered into a state of unwarranted fear, which
I immediately associated with my
religious background.
Don Juan looked at me from head to toe.
"You are fearing the wrath of God, aren't you?" he said. "Rest assured,
that's not your fear. It's the
flyers' fear, because it knows that you will do exactly as I'm telling
you."
His words did not calm me at all. I felt worse. I was actually
convulsing involuntarily, and I had no
means to stop it.
"Don't worry," don Juan said calmly. "I know for a fact that those
attacks wear off very quickly. The
flyer's mind has no concentration whatsoever."
After a moment, everything stopped, as don Juan had predicted. To say
again that I was bewildered is
a euphemism. This was the first time ever, with don Juan or alone, in
my life that I didn't know
whether I was coming or going. I wanted to get out of the chair and
walk around, but I was deathly
afraid. I was filled with rational assertions, and at the same time I
was filled with an infantile fear. I
began to breathe deeply as a cold perspiration covered my entire body.
I had somehow unleashed on
myself a most godawful sight: black, fleeting shadows jumping all
around me, wherever I turned.
I closed my eyes and rested my head on the arm of the stuffed chair. "I
don't know which way to turn,
don Juan," I said. "Tonight, you have really succeeded in getting me
lost."
"You're being torn by an internal struggle," don Juan said. "Down in
the depths of you, you know that
you are incapable of refusing the agreement that an indispensable part
of you, your glowing coat of
awareness, is going to serve as an incomprehensible source of
nourishment to, naturally,
incomprehensible entities. And another part of you will stand against
this situation with all its might.
"The sorcerers' revolution," he continued, "is that they refuse to
honor agreements in which they did
not participate. Nobody ever asked me if I would consent to be eaten by
beings of a different kind of
awareness. My parents just brought me into this world to be food, like
themselves, and that's the end
of the story."
Don Juan stood up from his chair and stretched his arms and legs. "We
have been sitting here for
hours. It's time to go into the house. I'm gonna eat. Do you want to
eat with me?"
I declined. My stomach was in an uproar.
"I think you'd better go to sleep," he said. "The blitz has devastated
you."
I didn't need any further coaxing. I collapsed onto my bed and fell
asleep like the dead.
At home, as time went by, the idea of the flyers became one of the main
fixations of my life. I got to
the point where I felt that don Juan was absolutely right about them.
No matter how hard I tried, I
couldn't discard his logic. The more I thought about it, and the more I
talked to and observed myself
and my fellow men, the more intense the conviction that something was
rendering us incapable of any
activity or any interaction or any thought that didn't have the self as
its focal point. My concern, as
well as the concern of everyone I knew or talked to, was the self.
Since I couldn't find any explanation
for such universal homogeneity, I believed that don Juan's line of
thought was the most appropriate
way of elucidating the phenomenon.
I went as deeply as I could into readings about myths and legends. In
reading, I experienced
something I had never felt before: Each of the books I read was an
interpretation of myths and
legends. In each one of those books, a homogeneous mind was palpable.
The styles differed, but the
drive behind the words was homogeneously the same: Even though the
theme was something as
abstract as myths and legends, the authors always managed to insert
statements about themselves. The
homogeneous drive behind every one of those books was not the stated
theme of the book; instead, it
was self-service. I had never felt this before.
I attributed my reaction to don Juan's influence. The unavoidable
question that I posed to myself was:
Is he influencing me to see this, or is there really a foreign mind
dictating everything we do? I lapsed,
perforce, into denial again, and I went insanely from denial to
acceptance to denial. Something in me
knew that whatever don Juan was driving at was an energetic fact, but
something equally important in
me knew that all of that was guff. The end result of my internal
struggle was a sense of foreboding, the
sense of something imminently dangerous coming at me.
I made extensive anthropological inquiries into the subject of the
flyers in other cultures, but I couldn't
find any references to them anywhere. Don Juan seemed to be the only
source of information about
this matter. The next time I saw him, I instantly jumped to talk about
the flyers.
"I have tried my best to be rational about this subject matter," I
said, "but I can't. There are moments
when I fully agree with you about the predators."
"Focus your attention on the fleeting shadows that you actually see,"
don Juan said with a smile.
I told don Juan that those fleeting shadows were going to be the end of
my rational life. I saw them
everywhere. Since I had left his house, I was incapable of going to
sleep in the dark. To sleep with the
lights on did not bother me at all. The moment I turned the lights off,
however, everything around me
began to jump. I never saw complete figures or shapes. All I saw were
fleeting black shadows.
"The flyers' mind has not left you," don Juan said. "It has been
seriously injured. It's trying its best to
rearrange its relationship with you. But something in you is severed
forever. The flyer knows that. The
real danger is that the flyers' mind may win by getting you tired and
forcing you to quit by playing the
contradiction between what it says and what I say.
"You see, the flyers' mind has no competitors," don Juan continued.
"When it proposes something, it
agrees with its own proposition, and it makes you believe that you've
done something of worth. The
flyers' mind will say to you that whatever Juan Matus is telling you is
pure nonsense, and then the
same mind will agree with its own proposition, 'Yes, of course, it is
nonsense,' you will say. That's the
way they overcome us.
"The flyers are an essential part of the universe," he went on, "and
they must be taken as what they
really are-awesome, monstrous. They are the means by which the universe
tests us.
"We are energetic probes created by the universe," he continued as if
he were oblivious to my
presence, "and it's because we are possessors of energy that has
awareness that we are the means by
which the universe becomes aware of itself. The flyers are the
implacable challengers. They cannot be
taken as anything else. If we succeed in doing that, the universe
allows us to continue."
I wanted don Juan to say more. But he said only, "The blitz ended the
last time you were here; there's
only so much you could say about the flyers. It's time for another kind
of maneuver."
I couldn't sleep that night. I fell into a light sleep in the early
hours of the morning, until don Juan
dragged me out of my bed and took me for a hike in the mountains. Where
he lived, the configuration
of the land was very different from that of the Sonoran desert, but he
told me not to indulge in
comparison that after walking for a quarter of a mile, every place in
the world was just the same.
"Sightseeing is for people in cars," he said. "They go at great speed
without any effort on their part.
Sightseeing is not for walkers. For instance, when you are riding in a
car, you may see a gigantic
mountain whose sight overwhelms you with its beauty. The sight of the
same mountain will not
overwhelm you in the same manner if you look at it while you're going
on foot; it will overwhelm you
in a different way, especially if you have to climb it or go around it."
It was very hot that morning. We walked on a dry riverbed. One thing
that this valley and the Sonoran
desert had in common was their millions of insects. The gnats and flies
all around me were like divebombers
that aimed at my nostrils, eyes, and ears. Don Juan told me not to pay
attention to their
buzzing.
"Don't try to disperse them with your hand," he uttered in a firm tone.
"Intend them away. Set up an
energy barrier around you. Be silent, and from your silence the barrier
will be constructed. Nobody
knows how this is done. It is one of those things that the old
sorcerers called energetic facts. Shut off
your internal dialogue. That's all it takes.
"I want to propose a weird idea to you," don Juan went on as he kept
walking ahead of me.
I had to accelerate my steps to be closer to him so as not to miss
anything he said.
"I have to stress that it's a weird idea that will find endless
resistance in you," he said. "I will tell you
beforehand that you won't accept it easily. But the fact that it's
weird should not be a deterrent. You are
a social scientist. Therefore, your mind is always open to inquiry,
isn't that so?"
Don Juan was shamelessly making fun of me. I knew it, but it
didn't bother me. Perhaps due to the fact that he was walking so fast,
and I had to make a tremendous
effort to keep up with him, his sarcasm just sloughed off me, and
instead of making me feisty, it made
me laugh. My undivided attention was focused on what he was saying, and
the insects either stopped
bothering me because I had intended a barrier of energy around me or
because I was so busy listening
to don Juan that I didn't care about their buzzing around me anymore.
"The weird idea," he said slowly, measuring the effect of his words,
"is that every human being on this
earth seems to have exactly the same reactions, the same thoughts, the
same feelings. They seem to
respond in more or less the same way to the same stimuli. Those
reactions seem to be sort of fogged
up by the language they speak, but if we scrape that off, they are
exactly the same reactions that
besiege every human being on Earth. I would like you to become curious
about this, as a social
scientist, of course, and see if you could formally account for such
homogeneity."
Don Juan collected a series of plants. Some of them could hardly be
seen. They seemed to be more in
the realm of algae, moss. I held his bag open, and we didn't speak
anymore. When he had enough
plants, he headed back for his house, walking as fast as he could. He
said that he wanted to clean and
separate those plants and put them in a proper order before they dried
up too much.
I was deeply involved in thinking about the task he had delineated for
me. I began by trying to review
in my mind if I knew of any articles or papers written on this subject.
I thought that I would have to
research it, and I decided to begin my research by reading all the
works available on "national
character." 1 got enthusiastic about the topic, in a haphazard way, and
I really wanted to start for home
right away, for I wanted to take his task to heart, but before we
reached his house, don Juan sat down
on a high ledge overlooking the valley. He didn't say anything for a
while. He was not out of breath. I
couldn't conceive of why he had stopped to sit down.
"The task of the day, for you," he said abruptly, in a foreboding tone,
"is one of the most mysterious
things of sorcery, something that goes beyond language, beyond
explanations. We went for a hike
today, we talked, because the mystery of sorcery must be cushioned in
the mundane. It must stem from
nothing, and go back again to nothing. That's the art of
warrior-travelers: to go through the eye of a
needle unnoticed. So, brace yourself by propping your back against this
rock wall, as far as possible
from the edge. I will be by you, in case you faint or fall down."
"What are you planning to do, don Juan?" I asked, and my alarm was so
patent that I noticed it and
lowered my voice.
"I want you to cross your legs and enter into inner silence , " he
said. "Let's say that you want to find
out what articles you could look for to discredit or substantiate what
I have asked you to do in your
academic milieu. Enter into inner silence, but don't fall asleep. This
is not a journey through the dark
sea of awareness. This is seeing from inner silence."
It was rather difficult for me to enter into inner silence without
falling asleep. I fought a nearly
invincible desire to fall asleep. I succeeded, and found myself looking
at the bottom of the valley from
an impenetrable darkness around me. And then, I saw something that
chilled me to the marrow of my
bones. I saw a gigantic shadow, perhaps fifteen feet across, leaping in
the air and then landing with a
silent thud. I felt the thud in my bones, but I didn't hear it.
"They are really heavy," don Juan said in my ear. He was holding me by
the left arm, as hard as he
could.
I saw; something that looked like a mud shadow wiggle on the ground,
and then take another gigantic
leap, perhaps fifty feet long, and land again, with the same ominous
silent thud. I fought not to lose
my concentration. I was frightened beyond anything I could rationally
use as a description. I kept my
eyes fixed on the jumping shadow on the bottom of the valley. Then I
heard a most peculiar buzzing, a
mixture of the sound of flapping wings and the buzzing of a radio whose
dial has not quite picked up
the frequency of a radio station, and the thud that followed was
something unforgettable. It shook don
Juan and me to the core-a gigantic black mud shadow had just landed by
our feet.
"Don't be frightened," don Juan said imperiously. "Keep your inner
silence and it will move away."
I was shivering from head to toe. I had the clear knowledge that if I
didn't keep my inner silence alive,
the mud shadow would cover me up like a blanket and suffocate me.
Without losing the darkness
around me, I screamed at the top of my voice. Never had I been so
angry, so utterly frustrated. The
mud shadow took another leap, clearly to the bottom of the valley. I
kept on screaming, shaking my
legs. I wanted to shake off whatever might come to eat me. My state of
nervousness was so intense
that I lost track of time. Perhaps I fainted.
When I came to my senses, I was lying in my bed in don Juan's house.
There was a towel, soaked in
icy-cold water, wrapped around my forehead. I was burning with fever.
One of don Juan's female
cohorts rubbed my back, chest, and forehead with rubbing alcohol, but
this did not relieve me. The
heat I was experiencing came from within myself. It was wrath and
impotence that generated it.
Don Juan laughed as if what was happening to me was the funniest thing
in the world. Peals of
laughter came out of him in an
endless barrage.
"1 would never have thought that you would take seeing a flyer so much
to heart," he said.
He took me by the hand and led me to the back of his house, where he
dunked me in a huge tub of
water, fully clothed-shoes, watch, everything.
"My watch, my watch!" I screamed.
Don Juan twisted with laughter. "You shouldn't wear a watch when you
come to see me," he said.
"Now you've fouled up your
watch!"
I took off my watch and put it by the side of the tub. I remembered
that it was waterproof and that
nothing would happen to it.
Being dunked in the tub helped me enormously. When don Juan pulled me
out of the freezing water, I
had gained a degree of control.
"That sight is preposterous!" I kept on repeating, unable to say
anything else.
The predator don Juan had described was not something benevolent. It
was enormously heavy, gross,
indifferent. I felt its disregard for us. Doubtless, it had crushed us
ages ago, making us, as don Juan
had said, weak, vulnerable, and docile. I took off my wet clothes,
covered myself with a poncho, sat in
my bed, and veritably wept my head off, but not for myself. I had my
wrath, my unbending intent, not
to let them eat me. I wept for my fellow men, especially for my father.
I never knew until that instant
that I loved him so much.
"He never had a chance," I heard myself repeating, over and over, as if
the words were not really
mine. My poor father, the most considerate being I knew, so tender, so
gentle, so helpless.
Starting on the
Definitive Journey
The Jump into the Abyss
THERE WAS ONLY one trail leading to the flat mesa. Once we were on the
mesa itself, I realized that
it was not as extensive as it had appeared when 1 had looked at it from
a distance. The vegetation on
the mesa was not different from the vegetation below: faded green woody
shrubs that had the
ambiguous appearance of trees.
At first, I didn't see the chasm. It was only when don Juan led me to
it that 1 became aware that the
mesa ended in a precipice; it wasn't really a mesa but merely the flat
top of a good-sized mountain.
The mountain was round and eroded on its east and south faces; however,
on part of its west and north
sides, it seemed to have been cut with a knife. From the edge of the
precipice, 1 was able to see the
bottom of the ravine, perhaps six hundred feet below. It was covered
with the same woody shrubs that
grew everywhere.
A whole row of small mountains to the south and to the north of that
mountaintop gave the clear
impression that they had been part of a gigantic canyon, millions of
years old, dug out by a no longer
existing river. The edges of that canyon had been erased by erosion. At
certain points they had been
leveled with the ground. The only portion still intact was the area
where I was standing.
"It's solid rock," don Juan said as if he were reading my thoughts. He
pointed with his chin toward the
bottom of the ravine. "If anything were to fall down from this edge to
the bottom, it would get
smashed to flakes on the rock, down there."
This was the initial dialogue between don Juan and myself, that day, on
that mountaintop. Prior to
going there, he had told me that his time on Earth had come to an end.
He was leaving on his
definitive journey. His statements were devastating to me. I truly lost
my grip, and entered into a
blissful state of fragmentation, perhaps similar to what people
experience when they have a mental
breakdown. But there was a core fragment of myself that remained
cohesive: the me of my childhood.
The rest was vagueness, incertitude. I had been fragmented for so long
that to become fragmented
once again was the only way out of my devastation.
A most peculiar interplay between different levels of my awareness took
place afterward. Don Juan,
his cohort don Genaro, two of his apprentices, Pablito and Nestor, and
I had climbed to that
mountaintop. Pablito, Nestor, and I were there to take care of our last
task as apprentices: to jump into
an abyss, a most mysterious affair, which don Juan had explained to me
at various levels of awareness
but which has remained an enigma to me to this day.
Don Juan jokingly said that I should get my writing pad and start
taking notes about our last moments
together. He gently poked me in the ribs and assured me, as he hid his
laughter, that it would have
been only proper, since I had started on the warrior' travelers' path
by taking notes.
Don Genaro cut in and said that other warrior-travelers before us had
stood on that same flat
mountaintop before embarking on their journey to the unknown. Don Juan
turned to me and in a soft
voice said that soon I would be entering into infinity by the force of
my personal power, and that he
and don Genaro were there only to bid me farewell. Don Genaro cut in
again and said that I was there
also to do the same for them.
"Once you have entered into infinity," don Juan said, "you can't depend
on us to bring you back. Your
decision is needed then. Only you can decide whether or not to return.
I must also warn you that few
warrior-travelers survive this type of encounter with infinity.
Infinity is enticing beyond belief. A
warrior'traveler finds that to return to the world of disorder,
compulsion, noise, and pain is a most
unappealing affair. You must know that your decision to stay or to
return is not a matter of a
reasonable choice, but a matter of intending it.
"If you choose not to return," he continued, "you will disappear as if
the earth had swallowed you. But
if you choose to come back, you must tighten your belt and wait like a
true warrior-traveler until your
task, whatever it might be, is finished, either in success or in
defeat."
A very subtle change began to take place in my awareness then. I
started to remember faces of people,
but I wasn't sure I had met them; strange feelings of anguish and
affection started to mount. Don
Juan's voice was no longer audible. I longed for people I sincerely
doubted I had ever met. I was
suddenly possessed by the most unbearable love for those persons,
whoever they may have been. My
feelings for them were beyond words, and yet I couldn't tell who they
were. I only sensed their
presence, as if I had lived another life before, or as if I were
feeling for people in a dream. I sensed
that their outside forms shifted; they began by being tall and ended up
petite. What was left intact was
their essence, the very thing that produced my unbearable longing for
them.
Don Juan came to my side and said to me, "The agreement was that you
remain in the awareness of
the daily world." His voice was harsh and authoritative. "Today you are
going to fulfill a concrete
task," he went on, "the last link of a long chain; and you must do it
in your utmost mood of reason."
I had never heard don Juan talk to me in that tone of voice. He was a
different man at that instant, yet
he was thoroughly familiar to me. I meekly obeyed him and went back to
the awareness of the world
of everyday life. I didn't know that I was doing this, however. To me,
it appeared, on that day, as if I
had acquiesced to don Juan out of fear and respect.
Don Juan spoke to me next in the tone I was accustomed to. What he said
was also very familiar. He
said that the backbone of a warrior-traveler is humbleness and
efficiency, acting without expecting
anything and withstanding anything that lies ahead of him.
I went at that point through another shift in my level of awareness. My
mind focused on a thought, or
a feeling of anguish. I knew then that I had made a pact with some
people to die with them, and I
couldn't remember who they were. I felt, without the shadow of a doubt,
that it was wrong that I
should die alone. My anguish became unbearable.
Don Juan spoke to me. "We are alone," he said. "That's our condition,
but to die alone is not to die in
loneliness."
I took big gulps of air to erase my tension. As I breathed deeply, my
mind became clear.
"The great issue with us males is our frailty," he went on. "When our
awareness begins to grow, it
grows like a column, right on the midpoint of our luminous being, from
the ground up. That column
has to reach a considerable height before we can rely on it. At this
time in your life, as a sorcerer, you
easily lose your grip on your new awareness. When you do that, you
forget everything you have done
and seen on the warrior-travelers' path because your consciousness
shifts back to the awareness of
your everyday life. I have explained to you that the task of every male
sorcerer is to reclaim
everything he has done and seen on the warrior-travelers' path while he
was on new levels of
awareness. The problem of every male sorcerer is that he easily forgets
because his awareness loses its
new level and falls to the ground at the drop of a hat."
"I understand exactly what you're saying, don Juan," I said.
"Perhaps this is the first time I have come to the full realization of
why I forget everything, and why I
remember everything later. I have always believed that my shifts were
due to a personal pathological
condition; I know now why these changes take place, yet I can't
verbalize what I know."
"Don't worry about verbalizations," don Juan said. "You'll verbalize
all you want in due time. Today,
you must act on your inner silence, on what you know without knowing.
You know to perfection what
you have to do, but this knowledge is not quite formulated in your
thoughts yet."
On the level of concrete thoughts or sensations, all I had were vague
feelings of knowing something
that was not part of my mind. I had, then, the clearest sense of having
taken a huge step down;
something seemed to have dropped inside me. It was almost a jolt. I
knew that I had entered into
another level of awareness at that instant.
Don Juan told me then that it is obligatory that a warrior-traveler say
good-bye to all the people he
leaves behind. He must say his good-bye in a loud and clear voice so
that his shout and his feelings
will remain forever recorded in those mountains.
I hesitated for a long time, not out of bashfulness but because I
didn't know whom to include in my
thanks. I had completely internalized the sorcerers' concept that
warrior-travelers can't owe anything
to anyone.
Don Juan had drilled a sorcerers' axiom into me: "Warrior-travelers pay
elegantly, generously, and
with unequaled ease every favor, every service rendered to them. In
this manner, they get rid of the
burden of being indebted."
I had paid, or I was in the process of paying, everyone who had honored
me with their care or concern.
I had recapitulated my life to such an extent that I had not left a
single stone unturned. I truthfully
believed in those days that I didn't owe anything to anyone. I
expressed my beliefs and hesitation to
don Juan.
Don Juan said that I had indeed recapitulated my life thoroughly, but
he added that I was far from
being free of indebtedness.
"How about your ghosts?" he went on. "Those you can no longer touch?"
He knew what he was talking about. During my recapitulation, I had
recounted to him every incident
of my life. Out of the hundreds of incidents that I related to him, he
had isolated three as samples of
indebtedness that I incurred very early in life, and added to that, my
indebtedness to the person who
was instrumental in my meeting him. I had thanked my friend profusely,
and I had sensations that
something out there acknowledged my thanks. The other three had
remained stories from my life,
stories of people who had given me an inconceivable gift, and whom I
had never thanked.
One of these stories had to do with a man I'd known when I was a child.
His name was Mr. Leandro
Acosta. He was my grandfather's archenemy, his true nemesis. My
grandfather had accused this man
repeatedly of stealing chickens from his chicken farm. The man wasn't a
vagrant, but someone who
did not have a steady, definite job. He was a maverick of sorts, a
gambler, a master of many trades:
handyman, self-styled curer, hunter and provider of plant and insect
specimens for local herbalists and
curers and any kind of bird or mammal life for taxidermists or pet
shops.
People believed that he made tons of money, but that he couldn't keep
it or invest it. His detractors and
friends alike believed that he could have established the most
prosperous business in the area, doing
what he knew best-searching for plants and hunting animals-but that he
was cursed with a strange
disease of the spirit that made him restless, incapable of tending to
anything for any length of time.
One day, while I was taking a stroll on the edge of my grandfather's
farm, I noticed that someone was
watching me from between the thick bushes at the forest's edge. It was
Mr. Acosta. He was squatting
inside the bushes of the jungle itself and would have been totally out
of sight had it not been for my
sharp eight-year-old eyes.
"No wonder my grandfather thinks that he comes to steal chickens," I
thought. I believed that no one
else but me could have noticed him; he was utterly concealed by his
motionlessness. I had caught the
difference between the bushes and his silhouette by feeling rather than
sight. I approached him. The
fact that people rejected him so viciously, or liked him so
passionately, intrigued me no end.
"What are you doing there, Mr. Acosta?" I asked daringly.
"I'm taking a shit while I look at your grandfather's farm," he said,
"so you better scram before 1 get
up unless you like the smell of shit."
I moved away a short distance. I wanted to know if he was really doing
what he was claiming. He
was. He got up. I thought he was going to leave the bush and come onto
my grandfather's land and
perhaps walk across to the road, but he didn't. He began to walk
inward, into the jungle.
"Hey, hey, Mr. Acosta!" I yelled. "Can I come with you?"
I noticed that he had stopped walking; it was again more a feeling than
an actual sight because the
bush was so thick.
"You can certainly come with me if you can find an entry into the
bush," he said.
That wasn't difficult for me. In my hours of idleness, I had marked an
entry into the bush with a goodsized
rock. 1 had found out through an endless process of trial and error
that there was a crawling
space there, which if I followed for three or four yards turned into an
actual trail on which I could
stand up and walk.
Mr. Acosta came to me and said, "Bravo, kid! You've done it. Yes, come
with me if you want to."
That was the beginning of my association with Mr. Leandro Acosta. We
went on daily hunting
expeditions. Our association became so obvious, since I was gone from
the house from dawn to
sunset, without anybody ever knowing where I went, that finally my
grandfather admonished me
severely.
"You must select your acquaintances," he said, "or you will end up
being like them. I will not tolerate
this man affecting you in any way imaginable. He could certainly
transmit to you his elan, yes. And he
could influence your mind to be just like his: useless. I'm telling
you, if you don't put an end to this, I
will. I'll send the authorities after him on charges of stealing my
chickens, because you know damn
well that he comes every day and steals them."
I tried to show my grandfather the absurdity of his charges. Mr. Acosta
didn't have to steal chickens.
He had the vastness of that jungle at his command. He could have drawn
from that jungle anything he
wanted. But my arguments infuriated my grandfather even more. I
realized then that my grandfather
secretly envied Mr. Acosta's freedom, and Mr. Acosta was transformed
for me by this realization from
a nice hunter into the ultimate expression of what is at the same time
both forbidden and desired.
I attempted to curtail my encounters with Mr. Acosta, but the lure was
just too overwhelming for me.
Then, one day, Mr. Acosta and three of his friends proposed that I do
something that Mr. Acosta had
never done before: catch a vulture alive, uninjured. He explained to me
that the vultures of the area,
which were enormous, with a five- to six-foot wingspan, had seven
different types of flesh in their
bodies, and each one of those seven types served a specific curative
purpose. He said that the desired
state was that the vulture's body not be injured. The vulture had to be
killed by tranquilizer, not by
violence. It was easy to shoot them, but in that case, the meat lost
its curative value. So the art was to
catch them alive, a thing that he had never done. He had figured out,
though, that with my help and the
help of his three friends he had the problem licked. He assured me that
his was a natural conclusion
arrived at after hundreds of occasions on which he had observed the
behavior of vultures.
"We need a dead donkey in order to perform this feat, something which
we have," he declared
ebulliently.
He looked at me, waiting for me to ask the question of what would be
done with the dead donkey.
Since the question was not asked, he proceeded.
"We remove the intestines, and we put some sticks in there to keep the
roundness of the belly.
"The leader of the turkey vultures is the king; he is the biggest, the
most intelligent," he went on. "No
sharper eyes exist. That's what makes him a king. He'll be the one who
will spot the dead donkey, and
the first who will land on it. He'll land downwind from the donkey to
really smell that it is dead. The
intestines and soft organs that we are going to draw out of the
donkey's belly we'll pile by his rear end,
outside. This way, it looks like a wild cat has already eaten some of
it. Then, lazily, the vulture will
come closer to the donkey. He'll take his time. He'll come
hopping-flying, and then he will land on the
dead donkey's hip and begin to rock the donkey's body. He would turn it
over if it were not for the four
sticks that we will stake into the ground as part of the armature.
He'll stand on the hip for a while; that
will be the clue for other vultures to come and land there in the
vicinity. Only when he has three or
four of his companions down with him will the king vulture begin his
work."
"And what is my role in all this, Mr. Acosta?" I asked.
"You hide inside the donkey," he said with a deadpan expression.
"Nothing to it. I give you a pair of
specially designed leather - gloves, and you sit there and wait until
the king turkey vulture rips the
anus of the dead donkey open with his enormous powerful beak and sticks
his head in to begin eating.
Then you grab him by the neck with both hands and don't let go.
"My three friends and I will be hiding on horseback in a deep ravine.
I'll be watching the operation
with binoculars. When I see that you have grabbed the king vulture by
the neck, we'll come at full
gallop and throw ourselves on top of the vulture and subdue him."
"Can you subdue that vulture, Mr. Acosta?" I asked him. Not that I
doubted his skill, I just wanted to
be assured.
"Of course I can!" he said with all the confidence in the world. "We're
all going to be wearing gloves
and leather leggings. The vulture's talons are quite powerful. They
could break a shinbone like a
twig."
There was no way out for me. I was caught, nailed by an exorbitant
excitation. My admiration for Mr.
Leandro Acosta knew no limits at that moment. I saw him as a true
hunter-resourceful cunning,
knowledgeable. "Okay, let's do it then!" I said.
"That's my boy!" said Mr. Acosta. "I expected as much from you." He had
put a thick blanket behind
his saddle, and one of his friends just lifted me up and put me on Mr.
Acosta's horse, right behind the
saddle, sitting on the blanket.
"Hold on to the saddle," Mr. Acosta said, "and as you hold on to the
saddle, hold the blanket, too."
We took off at a leisurely trot. We rode for perhaps an hour until we
came to some flat, dry, desolate
lands. We stopped by a tent that resembled a vendor's stand in a
market. It had a flat roof for shade.
Underneath that roof was a dead brown donkey. It didn't seem that old;
it looked like an adolescent
donkey.
Neither Mr. Acosta nor his friends explained to me whether they had
found or killed the dead donkey.
I waited for them to tell me, but I wasn't going to ask. While they
made the preparations, Mr. Acosta
explained that the tent was in place because vultures were on the
lookout from huge distances out
there, circling very high, out of sight, but certainly capable of
seeing everything that was going on.
"Those creatures are creatures of sight alone," Mr. Acosta said. "They
have miserable ears, and their
noses are not as good as their eyes. We have to plug every hole of the
carcass. I don't want you to be
peeking out of any hole, because they will see your eye and never come
down. They must see
nothing."
They put some sticks inside the donkey's belly and crossed them,
leaving enough room for me to
crawl in. At one moment I finally ventured the question that I was
dying to ask.
"Tell me, Mr. Acosta, this donkey surely died of illness, didn't he? Do
you think its disease could
affect me?"
Mr. Acosta raised his eyes to the sky. "Come on! You cannot be that
dumb. Donkey's diseases cannot
be transmitted to man. Let's live this adventure and not worry about
stupid details. If I were shorter, I'd
be inside that donkey's belly myself. Do you know what it is to catch
the king of turkey buzzards?"
I believed him. His words were sufficient to set up a cloak of
unequaled confidence over me. I wasn't
going to get sick and miss the event of events.
The dreaded moment came when Mr. Acosta put me inside the donkey. Then
they stretched the skin
over the armature and began to sew it closed. They left, nevertheless,
a large area open at the bottom,
against the ground, for air to circulate in. The horrendous moment for
me came when the skin was
finally closed over my head like the lid of a coffin. I breathed hard,
thinking only about the excitement
of grabbing the king of vultures by the
neck.
Mr. Acosta gave me last-minute instructions. He said that he would let
me know by a whistle that
resembled a birdcall when the king vulture was flying around and when
it had landed, so as to keep
me informed and prevent me from fretting or getting impatient. Then I
heard them pulling down the
tent, followed by their horses galloping away. It was a good thing that
they hadn't left a single space
open to look out from because that's what I would have done. The
temptation to look up and see what
was going on was nearly irresistible.
A long time went by in which I didn't think of anything. Then I heard
Mr. Acosta's whistling and I
presumed the king vulture was circling around. My presumption turned to
certainty when I heard the
flapping of powerful wings, and then suddenly, the dead donkey's body
began to rock as if it were in a
windstorm. Then I felt a weight on the donkey's body, and I knew that
the king vulture had landed on
the donkey and was not moving anymore. I heard the flapping of other
wings and the whistling of Mr.
Acosta in the distance. Then I braced myself for the inevitable. The
body of the donkey began to shake
as something started to rip the skin.
Then, suddenly, a huge, ugly head with a red crest, an enormous beak,
and a piercing, open eye burst
in. I yelled with fright and grabbed the neck with both hands. I think
I stunned the king vulture for an
instant because he didn't do anything, which gave me the opportunity to
grab his neck even harder,
and then all hell broke loose. He ceased to be stunned and began to
pull with such force that I was
smashed against the structure, and in the next instant I was partially
out of the donkey's body, armature
and all, holding on to the neck of the invading beast for dear life.
I heard Mr. Acosta's galloping horse in the distance. I heard him
yelling, "Let go, boy, let go, he's
going to fly away with you!"
The king vulture indeed was going to either fly away with me holding on
to his neck or rip me apart
with the force of his talons. The reason he couldn't reach me was
because his head was sunk halfway
into the viscera and the armature. His talons kept slipping on the
loose intestines and they never
actually touched me. Another thing that saved me was that the force of
the vulture was involved in
pulling his neck out from my clasp and he could not move his talons far
forward enough to really
injure me. The next thing I knew, Mr. Acosta had landed on top of the
vulture at the precise moment
that my leather gloves came off my hands.
Mr. Acosta was beside himself with joy. "We've done it, boy, we've done
it!" he said. "The next time,
we will have longer stakes on the ground that the vulture cannot yank
out, and you will be strapped to
the structure."
My relationship with Mr. Acosta had lasted long enough for us to catch
a vulture. Then my interest in
following him disappeared as mysteriously as it had appeared and I
never really had the opportunity to
thank him for all the things that he had taught me.
Don Juan said that he had taught me the patience of a hunter at the
best time to learn it; and above all,
he had taught me to draw from solitariness all the comfort that a
hunter needs.
"You cannot confuse solitude with solitariness," don Juan explained to
me once. "Solitude for me is
psychological, of the mind. Solitariness is physical. One is
debilitating, the other comforting."
For all this, don Juan had said, I was indebted to Mr. Acosta forever
whether or not 1 understood
indebtedness the way warrior-travelers understand it.
The second person don Juan thought I was indebted to was a ten-year-old
child I'd known growing up.
His name was Armando Velez. Just like his name, he was extremely
dignified, starchy, a little old man.
I liked him very much because he was firm and yet very friendly. He was
someone who could not
easily be intimidated. He would fight anyone if he needed to and yet he
was not a bully at all.
The two of us used to go on fishing expeditions. We used to catch very
small fish that lived under
rocks and had to be gathered by hand. We would put the tiny fish we
caught to dry in the sun and eat
them raw, all day sometimes.
I also liked the fact that he was very resourceful and clever as well
as being ambidextrous. He could
throw a rock with his left hand farther than with his right. We had
endless competitive games in
which, to my ultimate chagrin, he always won. He used to sort of
apologize to me for winning by
saying, "If I slow down and let you win, you'll hate me. It'll be an
affront to your manhood. So try
harder."
Because of his excessively starchy behavior, we used to call him "Senor
Velez," but the "Senor" was
shortened to "Sho," a custom typical of the region in South America
where I come from.
One day, Sho Velez asked me something quite unusual. He began his
request, naturally, as a challenge
to me. "I bet anything," he said, "that I know something that you
wouldn't dare do."
"What are you talking about, Sho Velez?"
"You wouldn't dare go down a river in a raft."
"Oh yes I would. I've done it in a flooded river. I got stranded on an
island for eight days once. They
had to drift food to me."
This was the truth. My other best friend was a child nicknamed Crazy
Shepherd. We got stranded in a
flood on an island once, with no way for anyone to rescue us.
Townspeople expected the flood to
overrun the island and kill us both. They drifted baskets of food down
the river in the hope that they
would land on the island, which they did. They kept us alive in this
fashion until the water had
subsided enough for them to reach us with a raft and pull us to the
banks of the river.
"No, this is a different affair," Sho Velez continued with his erudite
attitude. "This one implies going
on a raft on a subterranean river."
He pointed out that a huge section of a local river went through a
mountain. That subterranean section
of the river had always been a most intriguing place for me. Its
entrance into the mountain was a
foreboding cave of considerable size, always filled with bats and
smelling of ammonia. Children of
the area were told that it was the entrance to hell: sulfur fumes,
heat, stench.
"You bet your friggin' boots, Sho Velez, that I will never go near that
river in my lifetime!" I said,
yelling. "Not in ten lifetimes! You have to be really crazy to do
something like that."
Sho Velez's serious face got even more solemn. "Oh," he said, "then I
will have to do it all by myself. I
thought for a minute that I could goad you into going with me. I was
wrong. My loss."
"Hey, Sho Velez, what's with you? Why in the world would you go into
that hellish place?"
"I have to," he said in his gruff little voice. "You see, my father is
as crazy as you are, except that he is
a father and a husband. He has six people who depend on him. Otherwise,
he would be as crazy as a
goat. My two sisters, my two brothers, my mother and I depend on him.
He is everything to us."
I didn't know who Sho Velez's father was. I had never seen him. I
didn't know what he did for a living.
Sho Velez revealed that his father was a businessman, and that
everything that he owned was on the
line, so to speak.
"My father has constructed a raft and wants to go. He wants to make
that expedition. My mother says
that he's just letting off
steam, but I don't trust him," Sho Velez continued. "I have seen your
crazy look in his eyes. One of
these days, he'll do it, and I am sure that he'll die. So, I am going
to take his raft and go into that river
myself. I know that I will die, but my father won't."
I felt something like an electric shock go through my neck, and I heard
myself saying in the most
agitated tone one can imagine, "I'll do it, Sho Velez, I'll do it. Yes,
yes, it'll be great! I'll go with you!"
Sho Velez had a smirk on his face. I understood it as a smirk of
happiness at the fact that I was going
with him, not at the fact that he had succeeded in luring me. He
expressed that feeling in his next
sentence. "I know that if you are with me, I will survive," he said.
I didn't care whether Sho Velez survived or not. What had galvanized me
was his courage. I knew that
Sho Velez had the guts to do what he was saying. He and Crazy Shepherd
were the only gutsy kids in
town. They both had something that I considered unique and unheard of:
courage. No one else in that
whole town had any. I had tested them all. As far as I was concerned,
every one of them was dead,
including the love of my life, my grandfather. I knew this without the
shadow of a doubt when I was
ten. Sho Velez's daring was a staggering realization for me. I wanted
to be with him to the bitter end.
We made plans to meet at the crack of dawn, which we did, and the two
of us carried his father's
lightweight raft for three or four miles out of town, into some low,
green mountains to the entrance of
the cave where the river became subterranean. The smell of bat manure
was overwhelming. We
crawled on the raft and pushed ourselves into the stream. The raft was
equipped with flashlights,
which we had to turn on immediately. It was pitch black inside the
mountain and humid and hot. The
water was deep enough for the raft and fast enough that we didn't need
to paddle.
The flashlights would create grotesque shadows. Sho Velez whispered in
my ear that perhaps it was
better not to look at all, because it was truly something more than
frightening. He was right; it was
nauseating, oppressive. The lights stirred bats so that they began to
fly around us, flapping their wings
aimlessly. As we traveled deeper into the cave, there were not even
bats anymore, just stagnant air that
was heavy and hard to breathe. After what seemed like hours to me, we
came to a sort of pool where
the water was very deep; it hardly moved. It looked as if the main
stream had been dammed.
"We are stuck," Sho Velez whispered in my ear again. "There's no way
for the raft to go through, and
there's no way for us to go back."
The current was just too great for us to even attempt a return trip. We
decided that we had to find a
way out. I realized then that if we stood on top of the raft, we could
touch the ceiling of the cave,
which meant that the water had been dammed almost all the way to the
top of the cave. At the entrance
it was cathedral-like, maybe fifty feet high. My only conclusion was
that we were on top of a pool that
was about fifty feet deep.
We tied the raft to a rock and began to swim downward into the depths,
trying to feel for a movement
of water, a current. Everything was humid and hot on the surface but
very cold a few feet below. My
body felt the change in temperature and I became frightened, a strange
animal fear that 1 had never
felt before. I surfaced. Sho Velez must have felt the same. We bumped
into each other on the surface.
"I think we're close to dying," he said solemnly.
1 didn't share his solemnity or his desire to die. I searched
frantically for an opening. Floodwaters
must have carried rocks that had created a dam. 1 found a hole big
enough for my ten-year-old body to
go through. 1 pulled Sho Velez down and showed the hole to him. It was
impossible for the raft to go
through it. We pulled our clothes from the raft and tied them into a
very tight bundle and swam
downward with them until we found the hole again and went through it.
We ended up on a water slide, like the ones in an amusement
park. Rocks covered with lichen and moss allowed us to slide for a
great distance without being
injured at all. Then we came into an enormous cathedral-like cave,
where the water continued flowing,
waist deep. We saw the light of the sky at the end of the cave and
waded out. Without saying a word,
we spread out our clothes and let them dry in the sun, then headed back
for town. Sho Velez was
nearly inconsolable because he had lost his father's raft.
"My father would have died there," he finally conceded. "His body would
never have gone through
the hole we went through. He's too big for it. My father is a big, fat
man," he said. "But he would have
been strong enough to walk his way back to the entrance."
I doubted it. As I remembered, at times, due to the inclination, the
current was astoundingly fast. I
conceded that perhaps a desperate, big man could have finally walked
his way out with the aid of
ropes and a lot of effort.
The issue of whether Sho Velez's father would have died there or not
was not resolved then, but that
didn't matter to me. What mattered was that for the first time in my
life I had felt the sting of envy.
Sho Velez was the only being I have ever envied in my life. He had
someone to die for, and he had
proved to me that he would do it; I had no one to die for, and I had
proved nothing at all.
In a symbolic fashion, I gave Sho Velez the total cake. His triumph was
complete. I bowed out. That
was his town, those were his people, and he was the best among them as
far as I was concerned. When
we parted that day, I spoke a banality that turned out to be a deep
truth when I said, "Be the king of
them, Sho Velez. You are the best."
I never spoke to him again. I purposely ended my friendship with him. I
felt that this was the only
gesture I could make to denote how profoundly I had been affected by
him.
Don Juan believed that my indebtedness to Sho Velez was imperishable,
that he was the only one who
had ever taught me that we must have something we could die for before
we could think that we have
something to live for.
"If you have nothing to die for," don Juan said to me once, "how can
you claim that you have
something to live for? The two go hand in hand, with death at the helm."
The third person don Juan thought I was indebted to beyond my life and
my death was my
grandmother on my mother's side. In my blind affection for my
grandfather-the male:-I had for-gotten
the real source of strength in that household: my very eccentric
grandmother.
Many years before I came to their household, she had saved a local
Indian from being lynched. He
was accused of being a sorcerer. Some irate young men were actually
hanging him from a tree on my
grandmother's property. She came upon the lynching and stopped it. All
the lynchers seemed to have
been her godsons and they wouldn't dare go against her. She pulled the
man down and took him home
to cure him. The rope had already cut a deep wound on his neck.
His wounds healed, but he never left my grandmother's side. He claimed
that his life had ended the
day of the lynching, and that whatever new life he had no longer
belonged to him; it belonged to her.
Being a man of his word, he dedicated his life to serving my
grandmother. He was her valet,
majordomo, and counselor. My aunts said that it was he who had advised
my grandmother to adopt a
newborn orphan child as her son, something that they resented more than
bitterly.
When I came into my grandparents' house, my grandmother's adopted son
was already in his late
thirties. She had sent him to study in France. One afternoon, out of
the blue, a most elegantly dressed
husky man got out of a taxi in front of the house. The driver carried
his leather suitcases to the patio.
The husky man tipped the driver generously. I noticed in one glance
that the husky man's features
were very striking. He had long, curly hair, long, curly eyelashes. He
was extremely handsome
without being physically beautiful. His best feature was, however, his
beaming, open smile, which he
immediately turned on me.
"May I ask your name, young man?" he said with the most beautiful stage
voice I had ever heard.
The fact that he had addressed me as young man had won me over
instantly. "My name is Carlos
Aranha, sir," I said, "and may I ask in turn what is yours?"
He made a gesture of mock surprise. He opened his eyes wide and jumped
backward as if he had been
attacked. Then he began to laugh uproariously. At the sound of his
laughter, my grandmother came out
to the patio. When she saw the husky man, she screamed like a small
girl and threw her arms around
him in a most affectionate embrace. He lifted her up as if she weighed
nothing and twirled her around.
I noticed then that he was very tall. His huskiness hid his height. He
actually had the body of a
professional fighter. He seemed to notice that I was eyeing him. He
flexed his biceps.
"I've done some boxing in my day, sir," he said, thoroughly aware of
what I was thinking.
My grandmother introduced him to me. She said that he was her son
Antoine, her baby, the apple of
her eye; she said that he was a dramatist, a theater director, a
writer, a poet.
The fact that he was so athletic was his winning ticket with me. I
didn't understand at first that he was
adopted. I noticed, however, that he didn't look at all like the rest
of the family. While every one of the
members of my family were corpses that walked, he was alive, vital from
the inside out. We hit it off
marvelously. I liked the fact that he worked out every day, punching a
bag. I liked immensely that not
only did he punch the bag, he kicked it, too, in the most astounding
style, a mixture of boxing and
kicking. His body was as hard as a rock.
One day Antoine confessed to me that his only fervent desire in life
was to be a writer of note.
"I have everything," he said. "Life has been very generous to me. The
only thing I don't have is the
only thing I want: talent. The muses do not like me. I appreciate what
I read, but I cannot create
anything that I like to read. That's my torment; I lack the discipline
or the charm to entice the muses,
so my life is as empty as anything can be."
Antoine went on to tell me that the one reality that he had was his
mother. He called my grandmother
his bastion, his support, his twin soul. He ended up by voicing a very
disturbing thought to me. "If I
didn't have my mother," he said, "I wouldn't live."
I realized then how profoundly tied he was to my grandmother. All the
horror stories that my aunts had
told me about the spoiled child Antoine became suddenly very vivid for
me. My grandmother had
really spoiled him beyond salvation. Yet they seemed so very happy
together. I saw them sitting for
hours on end, his head on her lap as if he were still a child. I had
never heard my grandmother
converse with anybody for such lengths of time.
Abruptly, one day Antoine started to produce a lot of writing. He began
to direct a play at the local
theater, a play that he had written himself. When it was staged, it
became an instant success. His
poems were published in the local paper. He seemed to have hit a
creative streak. But only a few
months later it all came to an end. The editor of the town's paper
publicly denounced Antoine; he
accused him of plagiarism and published in the paper the proof of
Antoine's guilt.
My grandmother, of course, would not hear of her son's misbehavior. She
explained it all as a case of
profound envy. Every one of those people in that town was envious of
the elegance, the style of her
son. They were envious of his personality, of his wit. Indeed, he was
the personification of elegance
and savoir faire. But he was a plagiarist for sure; there was no doubt
about it.
Antoine never explained his behavior to anyone. I liked him too much to
ask him anything about it.
Besides, I didn't care. His reasons were his reasons, as far as I was
concerned. But something was
broken; from then on, our lives moved in leaps and bounds, so to speak.
Things changed so drastically
in the house from one day to the next that I grew accustomed to expect
anything, the best or the worst.
One night my grandmother walked into Antoine's room in a most dramatic
fashion. There was a look
of hardness in her eyes that I had never seen before. Her lips trembled
as she spoke.
"Something terrible has happened, Antoine," she began.
Antoine interrupted her. He begged her to let him explain.
She cut him off abruptly. "No, Antoine, no," she said firmly. "This has
nothing to do with you. It has to
do with me. At this very difficult time for you, something of greater
importance yet has happened.
Antoine, my dear son, I have run out of time.
"I want you to understand that this is inevitable," she went on. "I
have to leave, but you must remain.
You are the sum total of everything that I have done in this life. Good
or bad, Antoine, you are all I
am. Give life a try. In the end, we will be together again anyway.
Meanwhile, however, do, Antoine,
do. Whatever, it doesn't matter what, as long as you do."
I saw Antoine's body as it shivered with anguish. I saw how he
contracted his total being, all the
muscles of his body, all his strength. It was as if he had shifted
gears from his problem, which was like
a river, to the ocean.
"Promise me that you won't die until you die!" she shouted at him.
Antoine nodded his head.
My grandmother, the next day, on the advice of her sorcerer-counselor,
sold all her holdings, which
were quite sizable, and turned the money over to her son Antoine. And
the following day, very early
in the morning, the strangest scene that I had ever witnessed took
place in front of my ten-year-old
eyes: the moment in which Antoine said good-bye to his mother. It was a
scene as unreal as the set of
a moving picture; unreal in the sense that it seemed to have been
concocted, written down somewhere,
created by a series of adjustments that a writer makes and a director
carries out.
The patio of my grandparents' house was the setting. Antoine was the
main protagonist, his mother the
leading actress. Antoine was traveling that day. He was going to the
port. He was going to catch an
Italian liner and go over the Atlantic to Europe on a leisurely cruise.
He was as elegantly dressed as
ever. A taxi driver was waiting for him outside the house, blowing the
horn of his taxi impatiently.
I had witnessed Antoine's last feverish night when he tried as
desperately as anyone can try to write a
poem for his mother.
"It is crap," he said to me. "Everything that I write is crap. I'm a
nobody."
I assured him, even though I was nobody to assure him, that whatever he
was writing was great. At
one moment, I got carried away and stepped over certain boundaries I
should never have crossed.
"Take it from me, Antoine," I yelled. "I am a worse nobody than you!
You have a mother. I have
nothing. Whatever you are writing is fine."
Very politely, he asked me to leave his room. I had succeeded in making
him feel stupid, having to
listen to advice from a nobody kid. I bitterly regretted my outburst. I
would have liked him to keep on
being my friend.
Antoine had his elegant overcoat neatly folded, draped over his right
shoulder. He was wearing a most
beautiful green suit, English cashmere.
My grandmother spoke. "You have to hurry up, dear," she said. "Time is
of the essence. You have to
leave. If you don't, these people will kill you for the money."
She was referring to her daughters, and their husbands, who were beyond
fury when they found out
that their mother had quietly disinherited them, and that the hideous
Antoine, their archenemy, was
going to get away with everything that was rightfully theirs.
"I'm sorry I have to put you through all this," my grandmother
apologized. "But, as you know, time is
independent of our wishes."
Antoine spoke with his grave, beautifully modulated voice. He sounded
more than ever like a stage
actor. "It'll take but a
minute, Mother," he said. "I'd like to read something that I have
written for you."
It was a poem of thanks. When he had finished reading, he paused. There
was such a wealth of feeling
in the air, such a tremor.
"It was sheer beauty, Antoine," my grandmother said, sighing. "It
expressed everything that you
wanted to say. Everything that I wanted to hear." She paused for an
instant. Then her lips broke into an
exquisite smile.
"Plagiarized, Antoine?" she asked.
Antoine's smile in response to his mother was equally beaming. "Of
course, Mother," he said. "Of
course."
They embraced, weeping. The horn of the taxi sounded more impatient
yet. Antoine looked at me
where I was hiding under the stairway. He nodded his head slightly, as
if to say, "Good-bye. Take
care." Then he turned around, and without looking at his mother again,
he ran toward the door. He was
thirty-seven years old, but he looked like he was sixty, he seemed to
carry such a gigantic weight on
his shoulders. He stopped before he reached the door, when he heard his
mother's voice admonishing
him for the last time.
"Don't turn around to look, Antoine," she said. "Don't turn around to
look, ever. Be happy, and do. Do!
There is the trick. Do!"
The scene filled me with a strange sadness that lasts to this day-a
most inexplicable melancholy that
don Juan explained as my first-time knowledge that we do run out of
time