The Active Side of Infinity (5 page)

"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."

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

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.