The Active Side of Infinity (13 page)

At my job, I became completely engrossed in listening to the tapes, to
the point where I would
sneak into the office and listen not to
excerpts, but to entire tapes. What fascinated me beyond
measure,
at first, was the fact that I heard myself speaking in every one of those
tapes. As the
weeks went by and I heard more tapes, my fascination
turned to sheer horror. Every line that was
spoken, including
the psychiatrist's questions, was mine. Those people were speaking from the
depths of my own being. The revulsion that I experienced was something unique
for me. Never
had I dreamed that I could be repeated endlessly in
every man or woman I heard speaking on the
tapes. My
sense of individuality, which had been ingrained in me from birth, tumbled down
hopelessly under the impact of this colossal discovery.

I began then an odious process of trying to restore myself. I
unconsciously made a ludicrous
attempt at introspection; I tried to
wriggle out of my predicament by endlessly talking to myself. I
rehashed
in my mind all the possible rationales that would sup-Port my sense of
uniqueness, and
then talked out loud to myself about them. I even
experienced something quite revolutionary to me: waking myself up many times by
my loud talking in my sleep, discoursing about my value
and
distinctiveness.

Then, one horrifying day, I suffered another deadly blow. In the wee
hours of the night, I was
woken up by an insistent knocking on my
door. It wasn't a mild, timid knock, but what my friends
called
a "Gestapo knock." The door was about to come off its hinges. I
jumped out of bed and
opened the peephole. The person who was
knocking on the door was my boss, the psychiatrist.
My being his
younger brother's friend seemed to have created an avenue of communication with
him. He had befriended me without any hesitation, and there he was on my
doorstep. I turned on
the light and opened the door.

"Please come in," I said. "What happened?"

It was three o'clock in the morning, and by his livid expression, and
his sunken eyes, I knew
that he was deeply upset. He came in
and sat down. His pride and joy, his black mane of longish
hair,
was falling all over his face. He didn't make any effort to comb his hair back,
the way he usually wore it. I liked him very much because he was an older
version of my friend in Los
Angeles
, with black, heavy eyebrows, penetrating brown
eyes, a square jaw, and thick lips. His
upper lip seemed to have an
extra fold inside, which at times, when he smiled in a certain way,
gave
the impression that he had a double upper lip. He always talked about the shape
of his nose,
which he described as an impertinent, pushy nose. I
thought he was extremely sure of himself,
and
opinionated beyond belief. He claimed that in his profession those qualities
were winning
cards.

"What happened!" he repeated with a tone of mockery, his
double upper lip trembling
uncontrollably. "Anyone can tell
that everything has happened to me tonight."

He sat down in a chair. He seemed dizzy, disoriented, looking for
words. He got up and went to the couch, slumping down on it.

"It's not only that I have the responsibility of my patients,"
he went on, "but my research
grant, my wife and kids, and now
another fucking pressure has been added to it, and what burns
me
up is that it was my own fault, my own stupidity
for putting my trust in a stupid cunt!

"I'll tell you, Carlos," he continued, "there's nothing
more appalling, disgusting, fucking
nauseating than the
insensitivity of women. I'm not a woman hater, you know that! But at this
moment
it seems to me that every single cunt is just a cunt! Duplicitous and
vile!"

I didn't know what to say. Whatever he was telling me didn't need
affirmation or
contradiction. I wouldn't have dared to contradict
him anyway. I didn't have the ammunition for
it. I was very
tired. I wanted to go back to sleep, but he kept on talking as if his life
depended on
it.

"You know Theresa Manning, don't you?" he asked me in a
forceful, accusatory manner.

For an instant, I believed that he was accusing me of having something
to do with his young,
beautiful student-secretary. Without
giving me time to respond, he continued talking.

"Theresa Manning is an asshole. She's a schnook! A stupid,
inconsiderate woman who has no
incentive in life other than balling
anyone with a bit of fame and notoriety. I thought she was
intelligent
and sensitive. I thought she had something, some understanding, some empathy,
something
that one would like to share, or hold as precious all to oneself. I don't know,
but that's the picture that she painted for me, when in reality she's lewd and
degenerate, and, I may add, incurably gross."

As he kept on talking, a strange picture began to emerge. Apparently,
the psychiatrist had just
had a bad experience involving his
secretary.

"Since the day she came to work for me," he went on, "I
knew that she was attracted to me sexually, but she never came around to saying
it. It was all in the innuendos and the looks. Well, fuck it! This afternoon I
got sick and tired of pussyfooting around and I came right to the point. I
went
up to her desk and said, 'I know what you want, and you know what I
want.'"

He went into a great, elaborate rendition of how forcefully he had told
her that he expected her in his apartment across the street from school at
11:30 P.M., and that he did not alter his
routines for
anybody, that he read and worked and drank wine until one o'clock, at which
time he
retired to the bedroom. He kept an apartment in town as
well as the house he and his wife and children lived in in the suburbs.

"1 was so confident that the affair was going to pan out, turn into
something memorable," he
said and sighed. His voice acquired
the mellow tone of someone confiding something intimate. "I
even
gave her the key to my apartment," he said, and his voice cracked.

"Very dutifully, she came at eleven-thirty," he went on.
"She let herself in with her own key,
and sneaked
into the bedroom like a shadow. That excited me terribly. I knew that she
wasn't
going to be any trouble for me. She knew her role. She
probably fell asleep on the bed. Or maybe
she watched
TV. I became engrossed in my work, and 1 didn't care what the fuck she did. I
knew
that I had her in the bag.

"But the moment 1 came into the bedroom," he continued, his
voice tense and constricted, as if he were morally offended, "Theresa
jumped on me like an animal and went for my dick. She
didn't even
give me time to put down the bottle and the two glasses I was carrying. I had
enough
presence of mind to put my two Baccarat glasses on the
floor without breaking them. The bottle
flew across
the room when she grabbed my balls as if they were made out of rocks. I wanted
to
hit her. I actually yelled in pain, but that didn't faze
her. She giggled insanely, because she
thought I was
being cute and sexy. She said so, as if to placate me."

Shaking his head with contained rage, he said that the woman was so
friggin' eager and utterly
selfish that she didn't take into
account that a man needs a moment's peace, he needs to feel at
ease,
at home, in friendly surroundings. Instead of showing consideration and
understanding, as her role demanded, Theresa Manning pulled his sexual organs
out of his pants with the expertise
of someone who had done it
hundreds of times.

"The result of all this shit," he said, "was that my
sensuality retreated in horror. I was emotionally emasculated. My body abhorred
that fucking woman, instantly. Yet my lust
prevented me
from throwing her out in the street."

He said that he decided then that instead of losing face by his
impotence, miserably, the way he was bound to, he would have oral sex with her,
and make her have an orgasm-put her at his
mercy-but his
body had rejected the woman so thoroughly that he couldn't do it.

"The woman was not even beautiful anymore," he said, "but
plain. Whenever she's dressed
up, the clothes that she wears hide the
bulges of her hips. She actually looks okay. But when she's
naked,
she's a sack of bulging white flesh! The slenderness that she presents when
she's clothed is
fake. It doesn't exist."

Venom poured out of the psychiatrist in ways that I would never have
imagined. He was
shaking with rage. He wanted desperately to appear
cool, and kept on smoking cigarette after
cigarette.

He said that the oral sex was even more maddening and disgusting, and
that he was just about
to vomit when the friggin' woman
actually kicked him in the belly, rolled him out of his own bed
onto
the floor, and called him an impotent faggot.

At this point in his narration, the psychiatrist's eyes were burning
with hatred. His mouth was
quivering. He was pale.

"I have to use your bathroom," he said. "I want to take a
bath. I am reeking. Believe it or not, I
have pussy
breath."

He was actually weeping, and I would have given anything in the world
not to be there.
Perhaps it was my fatigue, or the mesmeric quality
of his voice, or the inanity of the situation that
created the
illusion that I was listening not to the psychiatrist but to the voice of a male
supplicant on one of his tapes complaining about minor problems turned into
gigantic affairs by talking obsessively about them. My ordeal ended around nine
o'clock in one morning. It was time for me to go to class and time for the
psychiatrist to go and see his own shrink.

I went to class then, highly charged with a burning anxiety and a
tremendous sensation of
discomfort and uselessness. There, I
received the final blow, the blow that caused my attempt at a
drastic change to
collapse. No volition of my own was involved in its collapse, which just
happened not only as if it had been scheduled but
as if its progression had been accelerated by
some unknown hand.

The anthropology professor began his lecture about a group of Indians
from the high plateaus
of Bolivia and Peru, the
aymara'.
He called them the
"ey-meh-ra,"
elongating the name as if his pronunciation of it was the only accurate one in
existence.
He said that the making of
chicha,
which is
pronounced "chee-cha," but which he pronounced "chai-cha," an
alcoholic beverage made from fermented corn, was in the realm of a
sect
of priestesses who were considered semidivine by the
aymara’.
He said, in a tone of
revelation,
that those women were in charge of making the cooked corn into a mush ready for
fermentation by chewing and spitting it, adding in this manner an enzyme
found in human saliva.
The whole class shrieked with contained
horror at the mention of human saliva.

The professor seemed to be tickled pink. He laughed in little spurts. It
was the chuckle of a
nasty child. He went on to say that the
women were expert chewers, and he called them the "chahi-cha
chewers." He looked at the front row of the classroom, where most of the
young women were sitting, and he delivered his punch line.

"I was p-r-r-rivileged," he said with a strange quasi-foreign
intonation, "to be asked to sleep
with one of the
chahi-cha chewers. The art of chewing the chahi-cha mush makes them develop the
muscles around their throat and cheeks to the point that they can do wonders with
them."

He looked at his bewildered audience and paused for a long time,
punctuating the pause with his giggles. "I'm sure you get my drift,"
he said, and went into fits of hysterical laughter.

The class went wild with the professor's innuendo. The lecture was
interrupted by at least five
minutes of laughter and a barrage of
questions that the professor declined to answer, emitting more silly giggles.

I felt so compressed by the pressure of the tapes, the psychiatrist's
story, and the professor's
"chahi-cha chewers" that in
one instantaneous sweep I quit the job, quit school, and drove back to
L.A.

"Whatever happened to me with the psychiatrist and the professor
of anthropology," I said to don Juan, "has plunged me into an unknown
emotional state. I can only call it introspection. I've
been
talking to myself without stop."