The Active Side of Infinity (15 page)

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."

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.