The active side of infin.., p.7
The Active Side of Infinity, page 7
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. He directed me to drive to a nearby Yaqui town where he found Ignacio Flores for me.
Lucas Coronado had warned me that Ignacio Flores had been a career soldier in his youth, and that he still had the bearing of a military man.
Ignacio Flores was a big, corpulent man, perhaps in his mid-sixties. He 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.
At the end of my account, I said to don Juan, "I wonder why Jorge Campos lied and told me that he knew you."
"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, and 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.
Don Juan said, "Recount to yourself the story of Jorge Campos, over and over. 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, but he didn't merely glance as before. He gazed intently at me.
He finally said, "One deed which Jorge Campos couldn't avoid performing 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. I found you, thus I crossed 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 we were sitting under his ramada cooling off from the long hike we had taken, that he broke his silence.
Don Juan went on, saying, "In your recounting of what happened between you and Jorge Campos, and you and Lucas Coronado, 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, a 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. [* ipso facto- by the fact itself] 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 moment, 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."
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Who Was Don 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 I 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. I 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 I 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 I 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. I 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 had not seemed 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 as a result 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, I 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, I 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. "I belong to a lineage of sorcerers that has lasted for twenty-seven generations. I 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. [* accede- agree; submit; yield] 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.
