The Active Side of Infinity (11 page)

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 1 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; 1 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 1 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 1 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. 1 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 didn't seem 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 instead 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, 1 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, 1 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. "1 belong to a lineage of
sorcerers that has lasted for twenty-
seven generations. 1 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. 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.

"Is there a nagual woman in my life?" he asked. "No,
there isn't any. 1 am a solitary sorcerer. I
have my
cohorts, though. At the moment, they are not around."

A thought came with uncontainable vigor into my mind. At that instant,
I remembered what
some people in Yuma had told me about don Juan
running with a party of Mexican men who
seemed to be
very versed in sorcery maneuvers.

"To be a sorcerer," don Juan continued, "doesn't mean to
practice witchcraft, or to work to
affect people, or to be
possessed by demons. To be a sorcerer means to reach a level of awareness
that
makes inconceivable things available. The term 'sorcery' is inadequate to
express what
sorcerers do, and so is the term 'shamanism.' The actions
of sorcerers are exclusively in the realm of the abstract, the impersonal.
Sorcerers struggle to reach a goal that has nothing to do with the
quests
of an average man. Sorcerers' aspirations are to reach
infinity,
and to be conscious of it."

Don Juan continued, saying that the task of sorcerers was to face
infinity,
and that they
plunged into it daily, as a
fisherman plunges into the sea. It was such an overwhelming task that
sorcerers
had to state their names before venturing into it. He reminded me that, in Nogales, he
had stated his name before any interaction had taken place between us.
He had, in this manner,
asserted his individuality in front of
the infinite.

I understood with unequaled clarity what he was explaining. I didn't
have to ask him for
clarifications. My keenness of thought should have
surprised me, but it didn't at all. 1 knew at that
moment that I
had always been crystal clear, merely playing dumb for someone else's benefit.

"Without you knowing anything about it," he continued,
"I started you on a traditional quest. You are the man I was looking for.
My quest ended when I found you, and yours when you found
me now."

Don Juan explained to me that, as the nagual of his generation, he was
in search of an
individual who had a specific energetic
configuration, adequate to ensure the continuity of his
lineage.
He said that at a given moment, the nagual of each generation for twenty-seven
successive
generations had entered into the most nerve-racking experience of their lives:
the
search for succession.

Looking me straight in the eyes, he stated that what made human beings
into sorcerers was
their capacity to perceive energy directly as it
flows in the universe, and that when sorcerers
perceive a
human being in this fashion, they
see a
luminous
ball, or a luminous egg-shaped
figure. His contention was that human
beings are not only capable of
seeing
energy
directly as it flows in the universe, but that they actually do
see
it,
although they are not deliberately conscious of
seeing
it.

He made right then the most crucial distinction for sorcerers, the one
between the general state
of being aware and the particular state of being
deliberately conscious of something. He
categorized
all human beings as possessing awareness, in a general sense, which permits
them to
see
energy directly, and he
categorized sorcerers as the only human beings who were deliberately
conscious
of
seeing
energy directly. He then
defined "awareness" as energy and "energy" as
constant flux, a luminous
vibration that was never stationary, but always moving of its own
accord. He asserted that when a human being was
seen,
he was perceived as a conglomerate of
energy
fields held together by the most mysterious force in the universe: a binding,
agglutinating,
vibratory force that holds energy fields together
in a cohesive unit. He further explained that the
nagual was a
specific sorcerer in each generation whom the other sorcerers were able to
see,
not
as a single luminous ball but as a set
of two spheres of luminosity fused, one over the other.

"This feature of doubleness," he continued, "permits the
nagual to perform maneuvers that are
rather difficult for an average
sorcerer. For example, the nagual is a connoisseur of the force that holds us
together as a cohesive unit. The nagual could place his full attention, for a
fraction of a
second, on that force, and numb the other person. I did
that to you at the bus depot because I
wanted to stop
your barrage of me,
me, me, me, me, me, me.
I
wanted you to find me and cut the
crap.

"The sorcerers of my lineage maintained," don Juan went on,
"that the presence of a double
being-a nagual-is sufficient to
clarify things for us. What's odd about it is that the presence of the
nagual
clarifies things in a veiled fashion. It happened to me when I met the nagual
Julian, my teacher. His presence baffled me for years, because every time I was
around him, I could think clearly, but when he moved away, I became the same
idiot that I had always been.

"I had the privilege," don Juan went on, "of actually
meeting and dealing with two naguals.
For six years, at the request
of the nagual Elias, the teacher of the nagual Julian, I went to live
with
him. He is the one who reared me, so to speak. It was a rare privilege. I had a
ringside seat
for watching what a nagual really is. The nagual Elias
and the nagual Julian were two men of
tremendously different
temperaments. The nagual Elias was quieter, and lost in the darkness of his
silence. The nagual Julian was bombastic, a compulsive talker. It seemed that
he lived to
dazzle women. There were more women in his life than one
would care to think about. Yet both of them were astoundingly alike in that
there was nothing inside them. They were empty. The nagual Elias was a
collection of astounding, haunting stories of regions unknown. The nagual
Julian
was a collection of stories that would have anybody in stitches, sprawled on
the ground
laughing. Whenever I tried to pin down the man in them,
the real man, the way I could pinpoint
the man in my
father, the man in everybody I knew, I round nothing. Instead of a real person
inside
them, there was a bunch of stories about persons unknown. Each of the two men
had his
own flair, but the end result was just the same:
emptiness, an emptiness that reflected not the
world, but
infinity."