The Active Side of Infinity (37 page)

"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.

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.