The Active Side of Infinity (25 page)

The first time in which the recollection of an event shook me to my
foundations happened
after I had given a lecture at a
college in Oregon. The students in charge of organizing the lecture
took
me and another anthropology friend of mine to a house to spend the night. I was
going to go
to a motel, but they insisted, for our comfort, on taking
us to this house. They said that it was in
the country,
and there were no noises, the quietest place in the world, with no telephones,
no
interference from the outside world. I, like the fool
that I was, agreed to go with them. Don Juan
had not only
warned me to always be a solitary bird, he had demanded that I observe his
recommendation,
something that I did most of the time, but there were occasions when the
gregarious
creature in me took the upper hand.

The committee took us to the house, quite a distance from Portland, of a professor who was
on sabbatical. Very swiftly, they
turned on the lights inside and outside of the house, which was
located
on a hill with spotlights all around it. With the spotlights on, the house must
have been
visible from five miles away. After that, the committee
took off as fast as they could, some-thing
that surprised
me because I thought they were going to stay and talk. The house was a wooden
A-frame, small, but very well constructed. It had an enormous living room and a
mezzanine above it
where the bedroom was. Right above, at the apex of
the A-frame, there was a life-size crucifix
hanging from a strange rotating
hinge, which was drilled into the head of the figure. The
spotlights on the wall were focused on the
crucifix. It was quite an impressive sight, especially
when it rotated, squeaking as if the hinge needed
oil.

The bathroom of the house was another sight. It had mirrored tiles on
the ceiling, the walls,
and the floor, and it was illuminated
with a reddish light. There was no way to go to the bathroom
without
seeing yourself from every conceivable angle. I enjoyed all those features of
the house, which seemed to me stupendous.

When the time came for me to go to sleep, however, I encountered a
serious problem because
there was only one narrow, hard, quite
monastic bed and my anthropologist friend was close to
having
pneumonia, wheezing and retching phlegm every time he coughed. He went straight
for
the bed and passed out. I looked for a place to sleep. I
couldn't find one. That house was barren of
comforts. Besides, it was cold. The
committee had turned on the lights, but not the heater. I
looked for the heater. My search was fruitless, as
was my search for the switch to the spotlights or
to any of the lights in the house, for that
matter. The switches were there on the walls, but they
seemed to be overruled by the effect of some main
switch. The lights were on, and I had no way
to turn them off.

The only place I could find to sleep was on a thin throw rug, and the
only thing I found with
which I could cover myself was the
tanned hide of a giant French poodle. Obviously, it had been the pet of the
house and had been preserved; it had shiny black-marble eyes and an open mouth
with
the tongue hanging out. I put the head of the poodle skin toward my knees. I
still had to
cover myself with the tanned rear end, which was on my
neck. Its
preserved head was like a hard object between my knees,
quite unsettling! If it had been dark,
it wouldn't
have been as bad. I gathered a bundle of washcloths and used them as a pillow.
I used
as many as possible to cover the hide of the French
poodle the best way I could. I couldn't sleep
all night.

It was then, as I lay there cursing myself silently for being so stupid
and not following don
Juan's recommendation, that I had the
first maddeningly clear recollection of my entire life. I had
recollected
the event that don Juan had called the
usher
with equal clarity, but my
tendency had always been to half-disregard what happened to me when I was with
don Juan, on the basis that in his presence anything was possible. This time,
however, I was alone.

Years before I met don Juan, I had worked painting signs on buildings.
My boss's name was
Luigi Palma. One day Luigi got a contract to paint
a sign, advertising the sale and rental of bridal
gowns and
tuxedos, on the back wall of an old building. The owner of the store in the
building
wanted to catch the eye of possible customers with a
large display. Luigi was going to paint a
bride and
groom, and I was going to do the lettering. We went to the flat roof of the
building and set up a scaffold.

I was quite apprehensive although I had no overt reason to be so. I had
painted dozens of signs on high buildings. Luigi thought that I was beginning
to be afraid of heights, but that my
fear was going to pass. When
the time came to start working, he lowered the scaffold a few feet from the
roof and jumped onto its flat boards. He went to one side, while I stood on the
other in
order to be totally out of his way. He was the artist.

Luigi began to show off. His painting movements were so erratic and
agitated that the scaffold moved back and forth. I became dizzy. I wanted to go
back to the flat roof, using the pretext that I
needed more
paint and other painters' paraphernalia. I grabbed the edge of the wall that
fringed the flat roof and tried to hoist myself up, but the tips of my feet got
stuck in the boards of the
scaffold. I tried to pull my feet and
the scaffold toward the
wall; the harder I pulled, the farther
away I pushed the scaffold from the wall. Instead of
helping me
untangle my feet, Luigi sat down and braced himself with the cords that
attached the
scaffold to the flat roof. He crossed himself and looked
at me in horror. From his sitting position, he knelt, weeping quietly as he
recited the Lord's Prayer.

I held on to the edge of the wall for dear life; what gave me the
desperate strength to endure
was the certainty that if I was in
control, I could keep the scaffold from moving farther and
farther
away. I wasn't going to lose my grip and fall thirteen floors to my death.
Luigi, being a compulsive taskmaster to the bitter end, yelled to me, in the
midst of tears, that I should pray. He
swore that
both of us were going to fall to our deaths, and that the least we could do was
to pray
for the salvation of our souls. For a moment, I
deliberated about whether it was functional to
pray. I opted
to yell for help. People in the building must have heard my yelling and sent
for the firemen. I sincerely thought that it had taken only two or three
seconds after I began to yell for the firemen to come onto the roof and grab
Luigi and me and secure the scaffold.

In reality, I had hung on to the side of the building for at least
twenty minutes. When the
firemen finally pulled me onto the
roof, I had lost any vestige of control. I vomited on the hard
floor
of the roof, sick to my stomach from fear and the odious smell of melted tar.
It was
a
very hot day; the tar on the cracks of the scratchy roofing
sheets was melting in the heat. The ordeal
had been so
frightening and embarrassing that I didn't want to remember it, and I ended up
hallucinating
that the firemen had pulled me into a warm, yellow room; they had then put me
in a
supremely comfortable bed, and I had fallen peacefully
asleep, safe, wearing my pajamas,
delivered from danger.

My second recollection was another blast of incommensurable force. I was
talking amiably to
a group of friends when, for no apparent reason I
could account for, I suddenly lost my breath
under the impact
of a thought, a memory, which was vague for an
instant and
then became an engrossing experience. Its force was so intense that I had to
excuse
myself and retreat for a moment to a corner. My friends seemed to understand my
reaction; they disbanded without any comments. What I was remembering
was an incident that
had taken place in my last year of high
school.

My best friend and I used to walk to school, passing a big mansion with
a black wrought-iron
fence at least seven feet high and
ending in pointed spikes. Behind the fence was an extensive, well-kept green
lawn, and a huge, ferocious German shepherd dog. Every day, we used to tease
the
dog and let him charge at us. He stopped physically at the wrought-iron fence,
but his rage
seemed to cross over to us. My friend delighted in
engaging the dog every day in a contest of
mind over
matter. He used to stand a few inches from the dog's snout, which protruded
between the iron bars at least six inches into the street, and bare his teeth,
just like the dog did.

"Yield, yield!" my friend shouted every time. "Obey!
Obey! I am more powerful than you!"

His daily displays of mental power, which lasted at least five minutes,
never affected the dog,
outside of leaving him more furious
than ever. My friend assured me daily, as part of his ritual, that the dog was
either going to obey him or die in front of us of heart failure brought about
by
rage. His conviction was so intense that I believed that
the dog was going to drop dead any day.

One morning, when we came around, the dog wasn't there. We waited for a
moment, but he didn't show up; then we saw him, at the end of the extensive
lawn. He seemed to be busy there, so
we slowly began to walk away.
From the comer of my eye, I noticed that the dog was running at
full
speed, toward us. When he was perhaps six or seven feet from the fence, he took
a gigantic
leap over it. I was sure that he was going to rip his
belly on the spikes. He barely cleared them
and fell onto
the street like a sack of potatoes.

I thought for a moment that he was dead, but he was only stunned.
Suddenly, he got up, and
instead of chasing after the one who
had brought about his rage, he ran after me. I jumped onto
the
roof of a car, but the car was nothing for the dog. He took a leap and was
nearly on top of me.
I scrambled down and climbed the first
tree that was within reach, a flimsy little tree that could
barely
support my weight. I was sure that it would snap in the middle, sending me
right into the
dog's jaws to be mauled to death.

In the tree, I was nearly out of his reach. But the dog jumped again,
and snapped his teeth,
catching me by the seat of my pants and
ripping them. His teeth actually nicked my buttocks. The
moment
I was safe at the top of the tree, the dog left. He just ran up the street, perhaps
looking for
my
friend.

At the infirmary in school, the nurse told me that I had to ask the
owner of the dog for a
certificate of rabies vaccination.

"You must look into this," she said severely. "You may
have rabies already. If the owner
refuses to show you the
vaccination certificate, you are within your rights to call the police."

I talked to the caretaker of the mansion where the dog lived. He
accused me of luring the
owner's most valuable dog, a pedigreed
animal, out into the street.

"You better watch out, boy!" he said in an angry tone.
"The dog got lost. The owner will send
you to jail if
you keep on bothering us."

"But I may have rabies," I said in a sincerely terrified tone.

"I don't give a shit if you have the bubonic plague," the man
snapped. "Scram!"
"I'll call the police," I
said.

"Call whoever you like," he retorted. "You call the
police, we'll turn them against you. In this
house, we have
enough clout to do that!"

I believed him, so I lied to the nurse and said that the dog could not
be found, and that it had
no owner.

"Oh my god!" the woman exclaimed. "Then brace yourself
for the worst. I may have to send
you to the doctor." She
gave me a long list of symptoms that I should look for or wait for until
they
manifested themselves. She said that the injections for rabies were extremely
painful, and
that they had to be administered subcutaneously on the
area of the abdomen.

"I wouldn't wish that treatment on my worst enemy," she said,
plunging me into a horrid
nightmare.

What followed was my first real depression. I just lay in my bed feeling
every one of the
symptoms enumerated by the nurse. I ended up going
to the school infirmary and begging the
woman to give
me the treatment for rabies, no matter how painful. I made a huge scene. I
became
hysterical. I didn't have rabies, but I had totally lost
my control.