The Active Side of Infinity (9 page)

I noticed that while he was sitting on the ground, holding the piece of
wood with his feet, the
bones of his legs were so long that
his knees came to his shoulders. When we approached him, he
stopped working and stood
up. He was taller than Jorge Campos, and as thin as a rail. As a
gesture of deference to us, I suppose, he put on
his
gwraches.

"Come in, come in," he said without smiling.

I had a strange feeling then that Lucas Coronado didn't know how to
smile.

"To what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?" he asked Jorge
Campos.

"I've brought this young man here because he wants to ask you some
questions about your
art," Jorge Campos said in a most
patronizing tone. "I vouched that you would answer his questions
truthfully."

"Oh, that's no problem, that's no problem," Lucas Coronado
assured me, sizing me up with his
cold stare.

He shifted into a different language then, which I presumed to be Yaqui.
He and Jorge Campos got into an animated conversation that lasted for some
time. Both of them acted as if I did not exist. Then Jorge Campos turned to me.

"We have a little problem here," he said. "Lucas has just
informed me that this is a very busy
season for him, since the
festivities are approaching, so he won't be able to answer all the
questions
that you ask him, but he will at another time."

"Yes, yes, most certainly," Lucas Coronado said to me in
Spanish. "At another time, indeed; at another time."

"We have to cut our visit short," Jorge Campos said, "but
I'll bring you back again."

As we were leaving, I felt moved to express to Lucas Coronado my
admiration for his
stupendous technique of working with his hands and
feet. He looked at me as if I were mad, his
eyes widening
with surprise.

"You've never seen anyone working on a mask?" he hissed
through clenched teeth. "Where
are you from? Mars?"

I felt stupid. I tried to explain that his technique was quite new to
me. He seemed ready to hit
me on the head. Jorge Campos said to
me in English that I had offended Lucas Coronado with my
comments.
He had understood my praise as a veiled way of making fun of his poverty; my
words
had been to him an ironic statement of how poor and
helpless he was.

"But it's the opposite," I said. "I think he's
magnificent!"

"Don't try to tell him anything like that," Jorge Campos
retorted. "These people are trained to receive and dispense insults in a
most covert form. He thinks it's odd that you run him down when
you
don't even know him, and make fun of the fact that he cannot afford a vise to
hold his
sculpture."

I felt totally at a loss. The last thing I wanted was to foul up my only
possible contact. Jorge
Campos seemed to be utterly aware of my
chagrin.

"Buy one of his masks," he advised me.

I told him that I intended to drive to Los Angeles in one lap, without
stopping, and that I had
just sufficient money to buy gasoline
and food.

"Well, give him your leather jacket," he said
matter-of-factly but in a confidential, helpful
tone.
"Otherwise, you're going to anger him, and all he'll remember about you
will be your insults. But don't tell him that his masks are beautiful. Just buy
one."

When I told Lucas Coronado that I wanted to trade my leather jacket for
one of his masks, he
grinned with satisfaction. He took the
jacket and put it on. He walked to his house, but before he
entered,
he did some strange gyrations. He knelt in front of some sort of religious
altar and moved his arms, as if to stretch them, and rubbed his hands on the
sides of the jacket.

He went inside the house and brought out a bundle wrapped in
newspapers, which he handed to me. I wanted to ask him some questions. He
excused himself, saying that he had to work, but
added that if I
wanted I could come back at another time.

On the way back to the city of Guaymas, Jorge Campos asked me to open
the bundle. He
wanted to make sure that Lucas Coronado had not
cheated me. I didn't care to open the bundle;
my only concern
was the possibility that I could come back by myself to talk to Lucas Coronado.
I was elated.

"I must see what you have," Jorge Campos insisted. "Stop
the car, please. Not under any
conditions or for any reasons
whatsoever would I endanger my clients. You paid me to render
some
services to you. That man is a genuine shaman, therefore very dangerous.
Because you have
offended him, he may have given you a witchcraft
bundle. If that's the case,
we
have to bury it
quickly in this
area."

I felt a wave of nausea and stopped the car. With extreme care, I took
out the bundle. Jorge Campos snatched it out of my hands and opened it. It
contained three beautifully made traditional
Yaqui masks.
Jorge Campos mentioned, in a casual, disinterested tone, that it would be only
proper
that I give him one of them. I reasoned that since he had not yet taken me to
see the old man, I had to preserve my connection with him. I gladly gave him
one of the masks. "If you allow me to choose, I would rather take that
one," he said, pointing.

I told him to go ahead. The masks didn't mean anything to me; I had
gotten what I was after. I
would have given him the other two
masks as well, but I wanted to show them to my
anthropologist
friends.

"These masks are nothing extraordinary," Jorge Campos
declared. "You can buy them in any
store in town.
They sell them to tourists there."

I had seen the Yaqui masks that were sold in the stores in town. They
were very rude masks in
comparison to the ones I had, and Jorge
Campos had indeed picked out the best.

I left him in the city and headed for Los Angeles. Before I said
good-bye, he reminded me that
I practically owed him two thousand dollars because he was
going to start his bribing and
working
toward taking me to meet the big man.

"Do you think that you could give me my two thousand dollars the
next time you come?" he
asked daringly.

His question put me in a terrible position. I believed that to tell him
the truth, that I doubted it, would have made him drop me. I was convinced then
that in spite of his patent greed, he was my
usher.

"I will do my best to have the money," I said in a
noncommittal tone.

"You gotta do better than that, boy," he retorted forcefully,
almost angrily. "I'm going to
spend money on my own, setting
up this meeting, and I must have some reassurance on your part.
I
know that you are a very serious young man. How much is your car worth? Do you
have the
pink slip?"

I told him what my car was worth, and that I did have the pink slip,
but he seemed satisfied
only when 1 gave him my word that 1
would bring him the money in cash on my next visit.

Five months later, I went back to Guaymas to see Jorge Campos. Two
thousand dollars at that
time was a considerable amount of
money, especially for a student. 1 thought that if perhaps he
were
willing to take partial payments, I would be more than happy to commit myself
to pay that
amount in installments.

I couldn't find Jorge Campos anywhere in Guaymas. 1 asked the owner of
the restaurant. He
was as baffled as I was about his disappearance.

"He has just vanished," he said. "I'm sure he went back
to Arizona, or to Texas, where he has
business."

I took a chance and went to see Lucas Coronado by myself. I arrived at
his house at midday. I
couldn't find him either. I asked his
neighbors if they knew where he might be. They looked at me
belligerently
and didn't dignify me with an answer. I left, but went by his house again in
the late
afternoon. 1 didn't expect anything at all. In fact, I
was prepared to leave for Los Angeles immediately. To my surprise, Lucas
Coronado was not only there but was extremely friendly to
me.
He frankly expressed his approval on seeing that I had come without Jorge
Campos, who he
said was an outright pain in the ass. He complained
that Jorge Campos, to whom he referred as a
renegade Yaqui
Indian, took delight in exploiting his fellow Yaquis.

I gave Lucas Coronado some gifts that I had brought him and bought from
him three masks,
an exquisitely carved staff, and a pair of rattling
leggings made out of the cocoons of some
insects from
the desert, leggings which the Yaquis used in their traditional dances. Then I
took him to Guaymas for dinner.

I saw him every day for the five days that I remained in the area, and
he gave me endless
amounts of information about the Yaquis-their
history and social organization, and the meaning and nature of their
festivities. I
was having such fun as a field-worker that I even
felt reluctant to ask him if he knew anything
about the old
shaman. Overcoming second thoughts, I finally asked Lucas Coronado if he knew
the
old man whom Jorge Campos had assured me was such a prominent shaman. Lucas
Coronado
seemed perplexed. He assured me that to his knowledge, no
such man had ever existed in that
part of the country and that
Jorge Campos was a crook who only wanted to cheat me out of my
money.

Hearing Lucas Coronado deny the existence of that old man had a
terrible, unexpected impact
on me. In one instant, it became
evident to me that I really didn't give a damn about field-work. I
only
cared about finding that old man. I knew then that meeting the old shaman had
indeed been
the culmination of something that had nothing to do with
my desires, aspirations, or even
thoughts as an anthropologist.

I wondered more than ever who in the hell that old man was. Without any
inhibitory checks, I
began to rant and yell in frustration.
I stomped on the floor. Lucas Coronado was quite taken
aback by my
display. He looked at me, bewildered, and then started to laugh. I had no idea
that he
could laugh. I apologized to him for my outburst of anger
and frustration. I couldn't explain why I was so out of sorts. Lucas Coronado
seemed to understand my quandary.

"Things like that happen in this area," he said.

I had no idea to what he was referring, nor did I want to ask him. I
was deadly afraid of the
easiness with which he took offense. A
peculiarity of the Yaquis was the facility they had to feel
offended.
They seemed to be perennially on their toes, looking out for insults that were
too subtle to be noticed by anyone else.

"There are magical beings living in the mountains around
here," he continued, "and they can
act on people.
They make people go veritably mad. People rant and rave under their influence,
and
when they finally calm down, exhausted, they don't have any clue as to why they
exploded."

"Do you think that's what happened to me?" I asked.

"Definitely," he replied with total conviction. "You
already have a predisposition to going
bonkers at the
drop of a hat, but you are also very contained. Today, you weren't contained.
You
went bananas over nothing."

"It isn't over nothing," I assured him. "I didn't know it
until now, but to me that old man is the
driving force
of all my efforts."

Lucas Coronado kept quiet, as if in deep thought. Then he began to pace
up and down.
"Do you know any old man who lives around here but
is not quite from this area?" I asked
him.

He didn't understand my question. I had to explain to him that the old
Indian I had met was
perhaps like Jorge Campos, a Yaqui who
had lived somewhere else. Lucas Coronado explained
that the
surname "Matus" was quite common in that area, but that he didn't
know any Matus
whose first name was Juan. He seemed despondent.
Then he had a moment of insight and stated
that because
the man was old, he might have another name, and that perhaps he had given me a
working name, not his real one.

"The only old man I know," he went on, "is Ignacio
Flores's father. He comes to see his son
from time to
time, but he .comes from Mexico City. Come to think of it, he's Ignacio's
father, but he doesn't seem that old. But he's old. Ignacio's old, too. His
father seems younger, though."

He laughed heartily at his realization. Apparently, he had never
thought about the youth of the
old man until that moment. He kept on
shaking his head, as if in disbelief. I, on the other hand,
was
elated beyond measure.