The Active Side of Infinity (21 page)

"What was wrong," don Juan said, "was that the three of
you were lost egomaniacs. Your self-
importance nearly destroyed you.
If you don't have self-importance, you have only feelings.

"Humor me," he went on, "and do the following simple and
direct exercise that could mean
the world to you: Remove from your
memory of those two girls any statements that you make to
yourself
such as 'She said this or that to me, and she yelled, and the other one yelled,
at ME!' and
remain at the level of your feelings. If you hadn't been
so self-important, what would you have
had as the
irreducible residue?"

"My unbiased love for them," I said, nearly choking.

"And is it less today than it was then?" don Juan asked.

"No, it isn't, don Juan," I said in truthfulness, and I felt
the same pang of anguish that had
chased me for years.

"This time, embrace them from your silence," he said.
"Don't be a meager asshole. Embrace them totally for the last time. But
intend
that this is the last time on Earth.
Intend
it from your
darkness. If you are worth your
salt," he went on, "when you make your gift to them, you'll sum up
your entire life twice. Acts of this nature make warriors airborne, almost
vaporous."

Following don Juan's commands, I took the task to heart. I realized
that if I didn't emerge
victorious, don Juan was not the only
one who was going to lose out. I would also lose
something, and
whatever I was going to lose was as important to me as what don Juan had
described
as being important to him. I was going to lose my chance to face
infinity
and be
conscious of it.

The memory of Patricia Turner and Sandra Flanagan put me in a terrible
frame of mind. The
devastating sense of irreparable loss that had
chased me all these years was as vivid as ever.
When don Juan
exacerbated that feeling, I knew for a fact that there are certain things that
can
remain with us, in don Juan's terms, for life and perhaps
beyond. I had to find Patricia Turner and
Sandra
Flanagan. Don Juan's final recommendation was that if I did find them, I could
not stay
with them. I could have time only to atone, to envelop
each of them with all the affection I felt,

without the angry voices of recrimination, self-pity, or egomania.

I embarked on the colossal task of finding out what had become of them,
where they were. I
began by asking questions of the people who knew
their parents. Their parents had moved out of Los Angeles, and nobody could
give me a lead as to where to find them. There was no one to talk to. I thought
of putting a personal ad in the paper. But then I thought that perhaps they had
moved
out of California. I finally had to hire a private
investigator. Through his connections with official
offices of
records and whatnot, he located them within a couple of weeks.

They lived in New York, a short distance from one other, and their
friendship was as close as
it had ever been. I went to New York and tackled Patricia Turner first. She hadn't made it to
stardom on
Broadway the way she had wanted to, but she was part of a production. I didn't
want
to know whether it was in the capacity of a performer or
as management. I visited her in her
office. She didn't tell me what
she did. She was shocked to see me. What we did was just sit
together
and hold hands and weep. I didn't tell her what I did either. I said that I had
come to see
her because I wanted to give her a gift that would
express my gratitude, and that I was embarking on a journey from which I did
not intend to come back.

"Why such ominous words?" she asked, apparently genuinely
alarmed. "What are you
planning to do? Are you ill? You don't
look ill."

"It was a metaphorical statement," I assured her. "I'm
going back to South America, and I intend to seek my fortune there. The
competition is ferocious, and the circumstances are very
harsh,
that's all. If I want to succeed, I will have to give all I have to it."

She seemed relieved, and hugged me. She looked the same, except much
bigger, much more
powerful, more mature, very elegant. I kissed her
hands and the most overwhelming affection
enveloped me.
Don Juan was right. Deprived of recriminations, all I had were feelings.

"I want to make you a gift, Patricia Turner," I said.
"Ask me anything you want, and if it is
within my
means, I'll get it for you."

"Did you strike it rich?" she said and laughed. "What's
great about you is that you never had
anything, and you never will.
Sandra and I talk about you nearly every day. We imagine you
parking
cars, living off women, et cetera, et cetera. I'm sorry, we can't help
ourselves, but we still
love you."

I insisted that she tell me what she wanted. She began to weep and laugh
at the same time.
"Are you going to buy me a mink coat?"
she asked me between sobs.

I ruffled her hair and said that I would.

"If you don't like it, you take it back to the store and get the
money back," I said.

She laughed and punched me the way she used to. She had to go back to
work, and we parted
after I promised her that I would come back again
to see her, but that if I didn't, I wanted her to
understand
that the force of my life was pulling me every which way, yet I would keep the
memory
of her in me for the rest of my life and perhaps beyond. I did return, but only
to see from
a distance how they delivered the mink coat to her. I
heard her screams of delight.

That part of my task was finished. I left, but I wasn't vaporous, the
way don Juan had said I
was going to be. I had opened up an
old wound and it had started to bleed. It wasn't quite raining
outside;
it was a fine mist that seemed to penetrate all the way to the marrow of my
bones.

Next, I went to see Sandra Flanagan. She lived in one of the suburbs of New York that is reached by train. I knocked on her door. Sandra opened it and looked at me
as if I were a ghost.
All the color drained out of her face.
She was more beautiful than ever, perhaps because she had
filled
out and looked as big as a house.

"Why, you, you, you!" she stammered, not quite capable of
articulating my name.

She sobbed, and she seemed indignant and reproachful for a moment. I
didn't give her the
chance to continue. My silence was total. In the
end, it affected her. She let me in and we sat
down in her
living room.

"What are you doing here?" she said, quite a bit calmer.
"You can't stay! I'm a married
woman! I have three children!
And I'm very happy in my marriage."

Shooting her words out rapidly, like a machine gun, she told me that her
husband was very
dependable, not too imaginative but a good man,
that he was not sensual, that she had to be very careful because he tired very
easily when they made love, that he got sick easily and sometimes couldn't go
to work but that he had managed to produce three beautiful children, and that
after her
third child, her husband, whose name seemed to be
Herbert, had just simply quit. He didn't have it
anymore, but it
didn't matter to her.

I tried to calm her down by assuring her over and over that 1 had come
to visit her only for a
moment, that it was not my intention
to alter her life or to bother her in any way. I described to
her
how hard it had been to find her.

"I have come here to say good-bye to you," I said, "and
to tell you that you are the love of my
life. I want to
make you a token gift, a symbol of my gratitude and my undying affection."

She seemed to be deeply affected. She smiled openly the way she used
to. The separation between her teeth made her look childlike. I commented to
her that she was more beautiful than ever, which was the truth to me.

She laughed and said that she was going on a strict diet, and if she had
known that I was
coming to see her, she would have started her diet
a long time ago. But she would start now, and I
would find her
the next time as lean as she had always been. She reiterated the horror of our
life
together and how profoundly affected she had been. She
had even thought, in spite of being a
devout Catholic, of committing
suicide, but she had found in her children the solace that she
needed;
whatever we had done were quirks of youth that would never be vacuumed away,
but had
to be swept under the rug.

When I asked if there was some gift that I could make to her as a token
of my gratitude and
affection for her, she laughed and said exactly
what Patricia Turner had said: that I didn't have a pot to piss in, nor would I
ever have one, because that's the way I was made. I insisted that she
name
something.

"Can you buy me a station wagon where all my children could
fit?" she said, laughing. "I
want a Pontiac,
or an Oldsmobile, with all the trimmings."

She said that knowing in her heart of hearts that I could not possibly make
her such a gift. But
I did.

I drove the dealer's car, following him as he delivered the station
wagon to her the next day,
and from the parked car where I was
hiding, I heard her surprise; but congruous with her sensual
being,
her surprise was not an expression of delight. It was a bodily reaction, a sob
of anguish, of
bewilderment. She cried, but I knew that she was
not crying because she had received the gift. She was expressing a longing that
had echoes in me. I crumpled in the seat of the car. On my
train
ride to New York, and my flight to Los Angeles, the feeling that persisted was
that my life
was running out; it was running out of me like clutched
sand. I didn't feel in any way liberated or
changed by
saying thank you and good-bye. Quite the contrary, I felt the burden of that
weird
affection more deeply than ever. I felt like weeping.
What ran through my mind over and over
were the titles
that my friend Rodrigo Cummings had invented for books that were never to be
written.
He specialized in writing titles. His favorite was "We'll All Die in Hollywood"; another
was "We'll Never Change"; and my favorite, the
one that I bought for ten dollars, was "From the
Life and Sins
of Rodrigo Cummings." All those titles played in my mind. I was Rodrigo
Cummings,
and I was stuck in time and space, and I did love two women more than my life,
and that would never change. And like the rest of my friends, I would die in Hollywood.

I told don Juan all of this in my report of what I considered to be my
pseudo-success. He
discarded it shamelessly. He said that what I felt
was merely the result of indulging and self-pity,
and that in
order to say good-bye and thank you, and really mean it and sustain it,
sorcerers had to
remake themselves.

"Vanquish your self-pity right now," he demanded.
"Vanquish the idea that you are hurt and
what do you
have as the irreducible residue?"

What I had as the irreducible residue was the feeling that I had made my
ultimate gift to both of them. Not in the spirit of renewing anything, or harming
anyone, including myself, but in the
true spirit that don Juan had
tried to point out to me-in the spirit of a
warrior-traveler
whose only
virtue,
he had said, is to keep alive the memory of whatever has affected him, whose
only way to
say thank you and good-bye was by this act of magic: of
storing in his silence whatever he has
loved.

I was in don Juan's house in Sonora, sound asleep in my bed, when he
woke me up. I had
stayed up practically all night, mulling over concepts
that he had explained to me.

"You have rested enough," he said firmly, almost gruffly, as
he shook me by the shoulders.
"Don't indulge in being fatigued.
Your fatigue is, more than fatigue, a desire not to be bothered.
Something
in you resents being bothered. But it's most important that you exacerbate that
part of
you until it breaks down. Let's go for a hike."

Don Juan was right. There was some part of me that resented immensely
being bothered. I wanted to sleep for days and not think about don Juan's
sorcery concepts anymore. Thoroughly
against my will, I got up and
followed him. Don Juan had pre-pared a meal, which I devoured as
if
I hadn't eaten for days, and then we walked out of the house and headed east,
toward the
mountains. I had been so dazed that I hadn't noticed that
it was early morning until I saw the sun,
which was
right above the eastern range of mountains. I wanted to comment to don Juan
that I
had slept all night without moving, but he hushed me. He
said that we were going to go on an
expedition to the mountains to
search for specific plants.