The Active Side of Infinity (39 page)

The second person don Juan thought I was indebted to was a ten-year-old
child I'd known
growing up. His name was Armando Velez. Just like
his name, he was extremely dignified,
starchy, a little old man. I
liked him very much because he was firm and yet very friendly. He
was
someone who could not easily be intimidated. He would fight anyone if he needed
to and yet he was not a bully at all.

The two of us used to go on fishing expeditions. We used to catch very
small fish that lived
under rocks and had to be gathered by
hand. We would put the tiny fish we caught to dry in the
sun
and eat them raw, all day sometimes.

I also liked the fact that he was very resourceful and clever as well as
being ambidextrous. He
could throw a rock with his left hand
farther than with his right. We had endless competitive
games
in which, to my ultimate chagrin, he always won. He used to sort of apologize
to me for
winning by saying, "If I slow down and let you win,
you'll hate me. It'll be an affront to your manhood. So try harder."

Because of his excessively starchy behavior, we used to call him
"Senor Velez," but the
"Senor" was shortened to
"Sho," a custom typical of the region in South America where I come
from.

One day, Sho Velez asked me something quite unusual. He began his
request, naturally, as a
challenge to me. "I bet
anything," he said, "that I know something that you wouldn't dare
do."
"What are you talking about, Sho Velez?"

"You wouldn't dare go down a river in a raft."

"Oh yes I would. I've done it in a flooded river. I got stranded on
an island for eight days
once. They had to drift food to
me."

This was the truth. My other best friend was a child nicknamed Crazy
Shepherd. We got
stranded in a flood on an island once, with no way
for anyone to rescue us. Townspeople
expected the flood to overrun
the island and kill us both. They drifted baskets of food down the river in the
hope that they would land on the island, which they did. They kept us alive in
this
fashion until the water had subsided enough for them to
reach us with a raft and pull us to the banks of the river.

"No, this is a different affair," Sho Velez continued with his
erudite attitude. "This one implies
going on a raft
on a subterranean river."

He pointed out that a huge section of a local river went through a
mountain. That subterranean
section of the river had always been a
most intriguing place for me. Its entrance into the mountain
was
a foreboding cave of considerable size, always filled with bats and smelling of
ammonia. Children of the area were told that it was the entrance to hell:
sulfur fumes, heat, stench.

"You bet your friggin' boots, Sho Velez, that I will never go near
that river in my lifetime!" I
said, yelling. "Not in ten
lifetimes! You have to be really crazy to do something like that."

Sho Velez's serious face got even more solemn. "Oh," he said,
"then I will have to do it all by
myself. I
thought for a minute that I could goad you into going with me. I was wrong. My
loss."

"Hey, Sho Velez, what's with you? Why in the world would you go
into that hellish place?"

"I have to," he said in his gruff little voice. "You
see, my father is as crazy as you are, except
that he is a
father and a husband. He has six people who depend on him. Otherwise, he would
be as crazy as a goat. My two sisters, my two brothers, my mother and I depend
on him. He is everything to us."

I didn't know who Sho Velez's father was. I had never seen him. I didn't
know what he did for
a living. Sho Velez revealed that his
father was a businessman, and that everything that he owned
was
on the line, so to speak.

"My father has constructed a raft and wants to go. He wants to make
that expedition. My mother says that he's just letting off steam, but I don't
trust him," Sho Velez continued. "I have seen your crazy look in his
eyes. One of these days, he'll do it, and I am sure that he'll die. So, I
am
going to take his raft and go into that river myself. I know that I will die,
but my father won't."

I felt something like an electric shock go through my neck, and I heard
myself saying in the most agitated tone one can imagine, "I'll do it, Sho
Velez, I'll do it. Yes, yes, it'll be great! I'll go
with you!"

Sho Velez had a smirk on his face. I understood it as a smirk of
happiness at the fact that I
was going with him, not at the fact
that he had succeeded in luring me. He expressed that feeling in his next
sentence. "I know that if you are with me, I will survive," he said.

I didn't care whether Sho Velez survived or not. What had galvanized me
was his courage. I
knew that Sho Velez had the guts to do what he was
saying. He and Crazy Shepherd were the only gutsy kids in town. They both had
something that I considered unique and unheard of:
courage. No one
else in that whole town had any. I had tested them all. As far as I was
concerned,
every one of them was dead, including the love of my
life, my grandfather. I knew this without
the shadow of a
doubt when I was ten. Sho Velez's daring was a staggering realization for me. I
wanted to be with him to the bitter end.

We made plans to meet at the crack of dawn, which we did, and the two of
us carried his
father's lightweight raft for three or four miles
out of town, into some low, green mountains to the
entrance of the
cave where the river became subterranean. The smell of bat manure was
overwhelming. We crawled
on the raft and pushed ourselves into the stream. The raft was
equipped with flashlights, which we had to turn on
immediately. It was pitch black inside the
mountain and humid and hot. The water was deep enough for the raft and
fast enough that we
didn't need to
paddle.

The flashlights would create grotesque shadows. Sho Velez whispered in
my ear that perhaps
it was better not to look at all, because it was
truly something more than frightening. He was
right; it was
nauseating, oppressive. The lights stirred bats so that they began to fly
around us, flapping their wings aimlessly. As we traveled deeper into the cave,
there were not even bats
anymore, just stagnant air that was
heavy and hard to breathe. After what seemed like hours to
me,
we came to a sort of pool where the water was very deep; it hardly moved. It
looked as if the
main stream had been dammed.

"We are stuck," Sho Velez whispered in my ear again.
"There's no way for the raft to go
through, and
there's no way for us to go back."

The current was just too great for us to even attempt a return trip. We
decided that we had to
find a way out. I realized then that
if we stood on top of the raft, we could touch the ceiling of the
cave,
which meant that the water had been dammed almost all the way to the top of the
cave. At
the entrance it was cathedral-like, maybe fifty feet
high. My only conclusion was that we were on top of a pool that was about fifty
feet deep.

We tied the raft to a rock and began to swim downward into the depths,
trying to feel for a
movement of water, a current.
Everything was humid and hot on the surface but very cold a few
feet
below. My body felt the change in temperature and I became frightened, a
strange animal
fear that 1 had never felt before. I surfaced. Sho
Velez must have felt the same. We bumped into
each other on
the surface.

"I think we're close to dying," he said solemnly.

1 didn't share his solemnity or his desire to die. I searched
frantically for an opening. Floodwaters must have carried rocks that had
created a dam. 1 found a hole big enough for my
ten-year-old
body to go through. 1 pulled Sho Velez down and showed the hole to him. It was
impossible
for the raft to go through it. We pulled our clothes from the raft and tied
them into a
very tight bundle and swam downward with them until we
found the hole again and went through
it.

We ended up on a water slide, like the ones in an amusement park. Rocks
covered with lichen
and moss allowed us to slide for a great distance
without being injured at all. Then we came into
an enormous
cathedral-like cave, where the water continued flowing, waist deep. We saw the
light
of the sky at the end of the cave and waded out. Without saying a word, we
spread out our
clothes and let them dry in the sun, then headed
back for town. Sho Velez was nearly
inconsolable because he had lost
his father's raft.

"My father would have died there," he finally conceded.
"His body would never have gone
through the hole we went
through. He's too big for it. My father is a big, fat man," he said.
"But he would have been strong enough to walk his way back to the
entrance."

I doubted it. As I remembered, at times, due to the inclination, the
current was astoundingly
fast. I conceded that perhaps a
desperate, big man could have finally walked his way out with the
aid
of ropes and a lot of effort.

The issue of whether Sho Velez's father would have died there or not was
not resolved then,
but that didn't matter to me. What mattered was
that for the first time in my life I had felt the sting
of
envy. Sho Velez was the only being I have ever envied in my life. He had
someone to die for,
and he had proved to me that he would do it; I had
no one to die for, and I had proved nothing at
all.

In a symbolic fashion, I gave Sho Velez the total cake. His triumph was
complete. I bowed
out. That was his town, those were his people, and
he was the best among them as far as I was
concerned.
When we parted that day, I spoke a banality that turned out to be a deep truth
when I
said, "Be the king of them, Sho Velez. You are the
best."

I never spoke to him again. I purposely ended my friendship with him. I
felt that this was the
only gesture I could make to denote how
profoundly I had been affected by him.

Don Juan believed that my indebtedness to Sho Velez was imperishable,
that he was the only
one who had ever taught me that we
must have something we could die for before we could
think that we
have something to live for.

"If you have nothing to die for," don Juan said to me once,
"how can you claim that you have
something to live for? The two
go hand in hand, with death at the helm."

The third person don Juan thought I was indebted to beyond my life and
my death was my
grandmother on my mother's side. In my blind
affection for my grandfather - the male - I had for
gotten the real
source of strength in that household: my very eccentric grandmother.

Many years before I came to their household, she had saved a local
Indian from being
lynched. He was accused of being a sorcerer. Some
irate young men were actually hanging him
from a tree on
my grandmother's property. She came upon the lynching and stopped it. All the
lynchers
seemed to have been her godsons and they wouldn't dare go against her. She
pulled the
man down and took him home to cure him. The rope had
already cut a deep wound on his neck.

His wounds healed, but he never left my grandmother's side. He claimed
that his life had
ended the day of the lynching, and that whatever
new life he had no longer belonged to him; it
belonged to
her. Being a man of his word, he dedicated his life to serving my grandmother.
He
was her valet, majordomo, and counselor. My aunts said
that it was he who had advised my
grandmother to adopt a newborn
orphan child as her son, something that they resented more than
bitterly.

When I came into my grandparents' house, my grandmother's adopted son
was already in his
late thirties. She had sent him to study in France. One afternoon, out of the blue, a most elegantly
dressed husky
man got out of a taxi in front of the house. The driver carried his leather
suitcases
to the patio. The husky man tipped the driver generously.
I noticed in one glance that the husky
man's features were very striking.
He had long, curly hair, long, curly eyelashes. He was
extremely handsome without being physically beautiful. His best feature
was, however, his
beaming, open
smile, which he immediately turned on me.

"May I ask your name, young man?" he said with the most
beautiful stage voice I had ever
heard.