The Power of Silence (8 page)

"Everything
connected with my benefactor was very difficult," he said and began to
laugh. "When he was twenty-four years old, the spirit didn't just knock on
his door, it nearly banged it down."

He said
that the story had really begun years earlier, when his benefactor had been a
handsome adolescent from a good family in Mexico City. He was wealthy,
educated, charming, and had a charismatic personality. Women fell in love with
him at first sight. But he was already self-indulgent and undisciplined, lazy
about anything that did not give him immediate gratification.

Don Juan
said that with that personality and his type of upbringing - he was the only
son of a wealthy widow who, together with his four adoring sisters, doted on
him - he could only behave one way. He indulged in every impropriety he could
think of. Even among his equally self-indulgent friends, he was seen as a moral
delinquent who lived to do anything that the world considered morally wrong.

In the long
run, his excesses weakened him physically and he fell mortally ill with
tuberculosis - the dreaded disease of the time. But his illness, instead of
restraining him, created a physical condition in which he felt more sensual
than ever. Since he did not have one iota of self-control, he gave himself over
fully to debauchery, and his health deteriorated until there was no hope.

The saying
that it never rains but it pours was certainly true for don Juan's benefactor
then. As his health declined, his mother, who was his only source of support and
the only restraint on him, died. She left him a sizable inheritance, which
should have supported him adequately for life, but undisciplined as he was, in
a few months he had spent every cent. With no profession or trade to fall back
on, he was left to scrounge for a living.

Without
money he no longer had friends; and even the women who once loved him turned
their backs. For the first time in his life, he found himself confronting a
harsh reality. Considering the state of his health, it should have been the
end. But he was resilient. He decided to work for a living.

His sensual
habits, however, could not be changed, and they forced him to seek work in the
only place he felt comfortable: the theater. His qualifications were that he
was a born ham and had spent most of his adult life in the company of
actresses. He joined a theatrical troupe in the provinces, away from his
familiar circle of friends and acquaintances, and became a very intense actor,
the consumptive hero in religious and morality plays.

Don Juan
commented on the strange irony that had always marked his benefactor's life.
There he was, a perfect reprobate, dying as a result of his dissolute ways and
playing the roles of saints and mystics. He even played Jesus in the Passion
Play during Holy Week.

His health
lasted through one theatrical tour of the northern states. Then two things
happened in the city of Durango: his life came to an end and the spirit knocked
on his door.

Both his
death and the spirit's knock came at the same time - in broad daylight in the
bushes. His death caught him in the act of seducing a young woman. He was
already extremely weak, and that day he overexerted himself. The young woman,
who was vivacious and strong and madly infatuated, had by promising to make
love induced him to walk to a secluded spot miles from nowhere. And there she
had fought him off for hours. When she finally submitted, he was completely
worn out, and coughing so badly that he could hardly breathe.

During his
last passionate outburst he felt a searing pain in his shoulder. His chest felt
as if it were being ripped apart and a coughing spell made him retch
uncontrollably. But his compulsion to seek pleasure kept him going until his
death came in the form of a hemorrhage. It was then that the spirit made its
entry, borne by an Indian who came to his aid. Earlier he had noticed the
Indian following them around, but had not given him a second thought, absorbed
as he was in the seduction.

He saw, as
in a dream, the girl. She was not scared nor did she lose her composure.
Quietly and efficiently she put her clothes back on and took off as fast as a
rabbit chased by hounds.

He also saw
the Indian rushing to him trying to make him sit up. He heard him saying
idiotic things. He heard him pledging himself to the spirit and mumbling
incomprehensible words in a foreign language. Then the Indian acted very
quickly. Standing behind him, he gave him a smacking blow on the back.

Very
rationally, the dying man deduced that the Indian was trying either to dislodge
the blood clot or to kill him.

As the
Indian struck him repeatedly on the back, the dying man became convinced that
the Indian was the woman's lover or husband and was murdering him. But seeing
the intensely brilliant eyes of that Indian, he changed his mind. He knew that
the Indian was simply crazy and was not connected with the woman. With his last
bit of consciousness, he focused his attention on the man's mumblings. What he
was saying was that the power of man was incalculable, that death existed only
because we had intended it since the moment of our birth, that the intent of
death could be suspended by making the assemblage point change positions.

He then
knew that the Indian was totally insane. His situation was so theatrical -
dying at the hands of a crazy Indian mumbling gibberish - that he vowed he
would be a ham actor to the bitter end, and he promised himself not to die of
either the hemorrhaging or the blows, but to die of laughter. And he laughed
until he was dead.

Don Juan
remarked that naturally his benefactor could not possibly have taken the Indian
seriously. No one could take such a person seriously, especially not a
prospective apprentice who was not supposed to be volunteering for the sorcery
task.

Don Juan
then said that he had given me different versions of what that sorcery task
consisted. He said it would not be presumptuous of him to disclose that, from
the spirit's point of view, the task consisted of clearing our connecting link
with it. The edifice that intent flaunts before us is, then, a clearinghouse,
within which we find not so much the procedures to clear our connecting link as
the silent knowledge that allows the clearing process to take place. Without
that silent knowledge no process could work, and all we would have would be an
indefinite sense of needing something.

He
explained that the events unleashed by sorcerers as a result of silent
knowledge were so simple and yet so abstract that sorcerers had decided long
ago to speak of those events only in symbolic terms. The manifestations and the
knock of the spirit were examples.

Don Juan
said that, for instance, a description of what took place during the initial
meeting between a nagual and a prospective apprentice from the sorcerers' point
of view, would be absolutely incomprehensible. It would be nonsense to explain
that the nagual, by virtue of his lifelong experience, was focusing something
we couldn't imagine, his second attention - the increased awareness gained
through sorcery training - on his invisible connection with some indefinable
abstract. He was doing this to emphasize and clarify someone else's invisible
connection with that indefinable abstract.

He remarked
that each of us was barred from silent knowledge by natural barriers, specific
to each individual; and that the most impregnable of my barriers was the drive
to disguise my complacency as independence.

I
challenged him to give me a concrete example. I reminded him that he had once
warned me that a favorite debating ploy was to raise general criticisms that
could not be supported by concrete examples. Don Juan looked at me and beamed.

"In
the past, I used to give you power plants," he said. "At first, you
went to extremes to convince yourself that what you were experiencing were
hallucinations. Then you wanted them to be special hallucinations. I remember I
made fun of your insistence on calling them didactic hallucinatory
experiences."

He said
that my need to prove my illusory independence forced me into a position where
I could not accept what he had told me was happening, although it was what I
silently knew for myself. I knew he was employing power plants, as the very
limited tools they were, to make me enter partial or temporary states of
heightened awareness by moving my assemblage point away from its habitual
location.

"You
used your barrier of independence to get you over that obstruction," he
went on. "The same barrier has continued to work to this day, so you still
retain that sense of indefinite anguish, perhaps not so pronounced. Now the
question is, how are you arranging your conclusions so that your current
experiences fit into your scheme of complacency?"

I confessed
that the only way I could maintain my independence was not to think about my
experiences at all.

Don Juan's
hearty laugh nearly made him fall out of his cane chair. He stood and walked
around to catch his breath. He sat down again and composed himself. He pushed
his chair back and crossed his legs.

He said
that we, as average men, did not know, nor would we ever know, that it was
something utterly real and functional - our connecting link with intent - which
gave us our hereditary preoccupation with fate. He asserted that during our
active lives we never have the chance to go beyond the level of mere
preoccupation, because since time immemorial the lull of daily affairs has made
us drowsy. It is only when our lives are nearly over that our hereditary
preoccupation with fate begins to take on a different character. It begins to
make us see through the fog of daily affairs. Unfortunately, this awakening always
comes hand in hand with loss of energy caused by aging, when we have no more
strength left to turn our preoccupation into a pragmatic and positive
discovery. At this point, all there is left is an amorphous, piercing anguish,
a longing for something indescribable, and simple anger at having missed out.

"I
like poems for many reasons," he said. "One reason is that they catch
the mood of warriors and explain what can hardly be explained."

He conceded
that poets were keenly aware of our connecting link with the spirit, but that
they were aware of it intuitively, not in the deliberate, pragmatic way of
sorcerers.

"Poets
have no firsthand knowledge of the spirit," he went on. "That is why
their poems cannot really hit the center of true gestures for the spirit. They
hit pretty close to it, though."

He picked
up one of my poetry books from a chair next to him, a collection by Juan Ramon
Jimenez. He opened it to where he had placed a marker, handed it to me and
signaled me to read.

Is
it I who walks tonight in
my room

or is it
the beggar who was prowling in my garden at nightfall?

I look
around and find that everything is the same and it is not the same

Was the
window open?

Had I not
already fallen asleep?

Was not the
garden pale green? . . .

The sly was
clear and blue . . .

And there
are clouds and it is windy

and the
garden is dark and gloomy.

I think
that my hair was black . . .

I was
dressed in grey . . .

And my hair
is grey

and I am
wearing black . . .

Is this my
gait?

Does this
voice, which now resounds in me,

have the
rhythms of the voice I used to have?

Am I myself
or am I the beggar

who was
prowling in my garden at nightfall? I look around . . .

There are
clouds and it is windy . . .

The garden
is dark and gloomy . . .

I come and
go . . .

Is it not
true that I had already fallen asleep? My hair is grey . . .

And
everything is the same and it is not the same . . .

I reread
the poem to myself and I caught the poet's mood of impotence and bewilderment.
I asked don Juan if he felt the same.

"I
think the poet senses the pressure of aging and the anxiety that that
realization produces," don Juan said. "But that is only one part of
it. The other part, which interests me, is that the poet, although he never
moves his assemblage point, intuits that something extraordinary is at stake.
He intuits with great certainty that there is some unnamed factor, awesome
because of its simplicity, that is determining our fate."

The sun had
not yet risen from behind the eastern peaks, but the day was already hot. As we
reached the first steep slope, a couple of miles along the road from the
outskirts of town, don Juan stopped walking and moved to the side of the paved
highway. He sat down by some huge boulders that had been dynamited from the
face of the mountain when they cut the road and signaled me to join him. We
usually stopped there to talk or rest on our way to the nearby mountains. Don
Juan announced that this trip was going to be long and that we might be in the
mountains for days.