The Active Side Of Infinity ©1999 by Carlos Castaneda:

Part 1 - Chapter 04. A Journey of Power.

At the time I met don Juan, I was a fairly studious anthropology student, and I wanted to begin my career as a professional anthropologist by publishing as much as possible. I was bent on climbing the academic ladder, and in my calculations, I had determined that the first step was to collect data on the uses of medicinal plants by the Indians of the southwestern United States.

I first asked a professor of anthropology who had worked in that area for advice about my project. He was a prominent ethnologist who had published extensively in the late thirties and early forties on the California Indians and the Indians of the Southwest and Sonora, Mexico. He patiently listened to my exposition.

My idea was to write a paper, call it 'Ethnobotanical Data', and publish it in a journal that dealt exclusively with anthropological issues of the southwestern United States.

I proposed to collect medicinal plants, take the samples to the Botanical Garden at UCLA to be properly identified, and then describe why and how the Indians of the Southwest used them. I envisioned collecting thousands of entries. I even envisioned publishing a small encyclopedia on the subject.

The professor smiled forgivingly at me. "I do not want to dampen your enthusiasm," he said in a tired voice, "but I can not help commenting negatively on your eagerness. Eagerness is welcome in anthropology, but it must be properly channeled. We are still in the golden age of anthropology.

"It was my luck to study with Alfred Krober and Robert Lowie, two pillars of social science. I have not betrayed their trust. Anthropology is still the master discipline. Every other discipline should stem from anthropology.

"The entire field of history, for example, should be called 'historical anthropology,' and the field of philosophy should be called 'philosophical anthropology.' Man should be the measure of everything. Therefore, anthropology, the study of man, should be the core of every other discipline. Someday, it will."

I looked at him, bewildered. He was, in my estimation, a totally passive, benevolent old professor who had recently had a heart attack. I seemed to have struck a chord of passion in him.

He continued, saying, "Do you not think that you should pay more attention to your formal studies? Rather than doing fieldwork, would it not be better for you to study linguistics? We have in the department here one of the most prominent linguists in the world. If I were you, I would be sitting at his feet, catching any drift emanating from him.

"We also have a superb authority in comparative religions. And there are some exceptionally competent anthropologists here who have done work on kinship systems in cultures all over the world from the point of view of linguistics, and from the point of view of cognition. You need a lot of preparation. To think that you could do fieldwork now is a travesty. Plunge into your books, young man. That is my advice."

Stubbornly, I took my proposition to another professor; a younger one. He was not in any way more helpful. He laughed at me openly. He told me that the paper I wanted to write was a Mickey Mouse paper, and that it was not anthropology by any stretch of the imagination.

"Anthropologists nowadays," he said professorially, "are concerned with issues that have relevance. Medical and pharmaceutical scientists have done endless research on every possible medicinal plant in the world. There is no longer any bone to chew on there. Your kind of data collecting belongs to the turn of the nineteenth century. Now it is nearly two hundred years later. There is such a thing as progress, you know."

Then he proceeded to give me a definition and a justification of progress and perfectibility as two issues of philosophical discourse which he said were most relevant to anthropology.

"Anthropology is the only discipline in existence," he continued, "which can clearly substantiate the concept of perfectibility and progress. Thank God that there is still a ray of hope in the midst of the cynicism of our times.

"Only anthropology can show the actual development of culture and social organization. Only anthropologists can prove to mankind beyond the shadow of a doubt the progress of human knowledge. Culture evolves, and only anthropologists can present samples of societies that fit definite cubbyholes in a line of progress and perfectibility.

"That is anthropology for you! Not some puny fieldwork, which is not fieldwork at all, but mere masturbation."

It was a blow on the head to me. As a last resort, I went to Arizona to talk to anthropologists who were actually doing field work there. By then, I was ready to give up on the whole idea. I understood what the two professors were trying to tell me. I could not have agreed with them more. My attempts at doing fieldwork were definitely simpleminded.

Yet I wanted to get my feet wet in the field. I did not want to do only library research.

In Arizona, I met with an extremely seasoned anthropologist who had written copiously on the Yaqui Indians of Arizona as well as those of Sonora, Mexico. He was extremely kind. He did not run me down, nor did he give me any advice. He only commented that the Indian societies of the Southwest were extremely isolationist, and that foreigners, especially those of Hispanic origin, were distrusted, even abhorred, by those Indians.

A younger colleague of his, however, was more outspoken. He said that I was better off reading herbalists' books. He was an authority in the field, and his opinion was that anything to be known about medicinal plants from the Southwest had already been classified and talked about in various publications.

He went as far as to say that the sources of any Indian curer of the day were precisely those publications rather than any traditional knowledge. He finished me off with the assertion that if there still were any traditional curing practices, the Indians would not divulge them to a stranger.

"Do something worthwhile," he advised me. "Look into urban anthropology. There is a lot of money for studies on alcoholism among Indians in the big city, for example. Now that is something that any anthropologist can do easily. Go and get drunk with local Indians in a bar.

"Then arrange whatever you find out about them in terms of statistics. Turn everything into numbers. Urban anthropology is a real field."

There was nothing else for me to do except to take the advice of those experienced social scientists. I decided to fly back to Los Angeles, but another anthropologist friend of mine named Bill let me know then that he was going to drive throughout Arizona and New Mexico, visiting all the places where he had done work in the past, renewing in this fashion his relationships with the people who had been his anthropological informants.

"You are welcome to come with me," he said. "I am not going to do any work. I am just going to visit with them, have a few drinks with them, and bullshit with them. I bought gifts for them- blankets, booze, jackets, ammunition for twenty-two caliber rifles. My car is loaded with goodies.

"I usually drive alone whenever I go to see them, but by myself I always run the risk of falling asleep. You could keep me company, keep me from dozing off, or drive a little bit if I am too drunk."

I felt so despondent that I turned him down.

"I am very sorry, Bill," I said. "The trip will not do for me. I see no point in pursuing this idea of fieldwork any longer."

"Do not give up without a fight," Bill said in a tone of paternal concern. "Give all you have to the fight, and if it licks you, then it is okay to give up, but not before. Come with me and see how you like the Southwest."

He put his arm around my shoulders. I could not help noticing how immensely heavy his arm was. He was tall and husky, but in recent years his body had acquired a strange rigidity. He had lost his boyish quality. His round face was no longer filled, youthful, the way it had been. Now it was a worried face.

I believed that he worried because he was losing his hair, but at times it seemed to me that it was something more than that. And it was not that he was fatter. His body was heavy in ways that were impossible to explain. I noticed it in the way that he walked, and got up, and sat down. Bill seemed to me to be fighting gravity with every fiber of his being, in everything he did.

Disregarding my feelings of defeat, I started on a journey with him. We visited every place in Arizona and New Mexico where there were Indians.

One of the end results of this trip was that I found out that my anthropologist friend had two definite facets to his person. He explained to me that his opinions as a professional anthropologist were very measured, and congruous with the anthropological thought of the day, but that as a private person, his anthropological fieldwork had given him a wealth of experiences that he never talked about. These experiences were not congruous with the anthropological thought of the day because they were events that were impossible to catalog.

During the course of our trip, he would invariably have some drinks with his ex-informants, and feel very relaxed afterward. I would take the wheel then and drive as he sat in the passenger seat taking sips from his bottle of thirty year old Ballantine's. It was then that Bill would talk about his uncataloged experiences.

"I have never believed in ghosts," he said abruptly one day. "I never went in for apparitions and floating essences; voices in the dark. You know. I had a very pragmatic, serious upbringing. Science had always been my compass.

"But then, working in the field, all kinds of weird crap began to filter through to me. For instance, I went with some Indians one night on a vision quest. They were going to actually initiate me by some painful business of piercing the muscles of my chest. They were preparing a sweat lodge in the woods.

"I had resigned myself to withstand the pain. I took a couple of drinks to give me strength. And then the man who was going to intercede for me with the people who actually performed the ceremony, yelled in horror, and pointed at a dark, shadowy figure walking toward us.

"When the shadowy figure came closer to me," Bill went on, "I noticed that what I had in front of me was an old Indian dressed in the weirdest getup you could imagine. He had the paraphernalia of shamans. The man I was with that night fainted shamelessly at the sight of the old man.

"The old man came to me and pointed a finger at my chest. His finger was just skin and bone. He babbled incomprehensible things to me. By then, the rest of the people had seen the old man, and started to rush silently toward me.

"The old man turned to look at them, and every one of them froze. He harangued them for a moment. His voice was something unforgettable. It was as if he were talking from a tube, or as if he had something attached to his mouth that carried the words out of him. I swear to you that I saw the man talking inside his body, and his mouth broadcasting the words as a mechanical apparatus.

"After haranguing the men, the old man continued walking, past me, past them, and disappeared, swallowed by the darkness."

Bill said that the plan to have an initiation ceremony went to pot. It was never performed; and the men, including the shamans in charge, were shaking in their boots. He stated that they were so frightened that they disbanded and left.

"People who had been friends for years," Bill went on, "never spoke to each other again. They claimed that what they had seen was the apparition of an incredibly old shaman, and that it would bring bad luck to talk about it among themselves. In fact, they said that the mere act of setting eyes on one another would bring them bad luck. Most of them moved away from the area."

"Why did they feel that talking to each other or seeing each other would bring them bad luck?" I asked him.

"Those are their beliefs," he replied. "A vision of that nature means to them that the apparition spoke to each of them individually. To have a vision of that nature is, for them, the luck of a lifetime."

"And what was the individual thing that the vision told each of them?" I asked.

"Beats me," he replied. "They never explained anything to me. Every time I asked them, they entered into a profound state of numbness. They had not seen anything; they had not heard anything.

"Years after the event, the man who had fainted next to me swore to me that he had just faked the faint because he was so frightened that he did not want to face the old man; and that what the old man had to say was understood by everybody at a level other than language comprehension."

Bill said that in his case, what the apparition voiced to him he understood as having to do with his health and his expectations in life.

"What do you mean by that?" I asked him.

"Things are not that good for me," he confessed. "My body does not feel well."

"But do you know what is really the matter with you?" I asked.

"Oh, yes," he said nonchalantly. "Doctors have told me. But I am not gonna worry about it, or even think about it."

Bill's revelations left me feeling thoroughly uneasy. This was a facet of his person that I did not know. I had always thought that he was a tough old cookie. I could never conceive of him as vulnerable. I did not like our exchange. It was, however, too late for me to retreat. Our trip continued.

On another occasion, he confided that the shamans of the Southwest were capable of transforming themselves into different entities, and that the categorization schemes of 'bear shaman', or 'mountain lion shaman', etc., should not be taken as euphemisms or metaphors because they were not.

"Would you believe it," he said in a tone of great admiration, "that there are some shamans who actually become bears, or mountain lions, or eagles? I am not exaggerating, nor am I fabricating anything when I say that once I witnessed the transformation of a shaman who called himself 'River Man', or 'River Shaman', or 'Proceeding from River and Returning to River.'

"I was out in the mountains of New Mexico with this shaman. I was driving for him. He trusted me, and he was going in search of his origin- or so he said. We were walking along a river when he suddenly got very excited. He told me to move away from the shore to some high rocks, and hide there; put a blanket over my head and shoulders, and peek through it so I would not miss what he was about to do."

"What was he going to do?" I asked him, incapable of containing myself.

"I did not know," he said. "Your guess would have been as good as mine. I had no way of conceiving of what he was going to do. He just walked into the water, fully dressed. When the water reached him at mid-calf, because it was a wide but shallow river, the shaman simply vanished; disappeared.

"Prior to entering the water, he had whispered in my ear that I should go downstream and wait for him. He told me the exact spot to wait. I, of course, did not believe a word of what he was saying, so at first I could not remember where he had said I had to wait for him, but then I found the spot and I saw the shaman coming out of the water. It sounds stupid to say 'coming out of the water.' I saw the shaman turning into water and then being remade out of the water. Can you believe that?"

I had no comments on his stories. It was impossible for me to believe him, but I could not disbelieve him either. He was a very serious man. The only possible explanation that I could think of was that as we continued our trip he drank more and more every day. He had in the trunk of the car a box of twenty-four bottles of Scotch for only himself. He actually drank like a fish.

"I have always been partial to the esoteric mutations of shamans," he said to me another day. "It is not that I can explain the mutations, or even believe that they take place, but as an intellectual exercise I am very interested in considering that mutations into snakes and mountain lions are not as difficult as what the water shaman did.

"It is at moments like this, when I engage my intellect in such a fashion, that I cease to be an anthropologist and I begin to react, following a gut feeling. My gut feeling is that those shamans certainly do something that can not be measured scientifically or even talked about intelligently.

"For instance, there are cloud shamans who turn into clouds, into mist. I have never seen this happen, but I knew a cloud shaman. I never saw him disappearing or turning into mist in front of my eyes as I saw that other shaman turning into water right in front of me. But I chased that cloud shaman once, and he simply vanished in an area where there was no place for him to hide. Although I did not see him turning into a cloud, he disappeared. I could not explain where he went. There were no rocks or vegetation around the place where he ended up. I was there half a minute after he was, but the shaman was gone.

"I chased that man all over the place for information," Bill went on. "He would not give me the time of day. He was very friendly to me, but that was all."

Bill told me endless other stories about strife and political factions among Indians in different Indian reservations; or stories about personal vendettas, animosities, friendships, etc., etc., which did not interest me in the least.

On the other hand, his stories about shamans' mutations and apparitions had caused a true emotional upheaval in me. I was at once both fascinated and appalled by them. However, when I tried to think about why I was fascinated or appalled, I could not tell. All I could have said was that his stories about shamans hit me at an unknown, visceral level.

Another realization brought by this trip was that I verified for myself that the Indian societies of the Southwest were indeed closed to outsiders. I finally came to accept that I did need a great deal of preparation in the science of anthropology, and that it was more functional to do anthropological fieldwork in an area with which I was familiar, or one in which I had an entree.

When the journey ended, Bill drove me to the Greyhound bus depot in Nogales, Arizona, for my return trip to Los Angeles. As we were sitting in the waiting area before the bus came, he consoled me in a paternal manner, reminding me that failures were a matter of course in anthropological fieldwork, and that they meant only the hardening of one's purpose, or the coming to maturity of an anthropologist.

Abruptly, he leaned over and pointed with a slight movement of his chin to the other side of the room. "I think that old man sitting on the bench by the corner over there is the man I told you about," he whispered in my ear. "I am not quite sure because I have had him in front of me, face-to-face, only once."

"What man is that? What did you tell me about him?" I asked.

"When we were talking about shamans and shamans' transformations, I told you that I had once met a cloud shaman."

"Yes, yes, I remember that," I said. "Is that man the cloud shaman?"

"No," he said emphatically. "But I think he is a companion or a teacher of the cloud shaman. I saw both of them together in the distance various times, many years ago."

I did remember Bill mentioning in a very casual manner, although not in relation to the cloud shaman, that he knew about the existence of a mysterious old man who was a retired shaman; an old Indian misanthrope from Yuma who had once been a terrifying sorcerer. The relationship of the old man to the cloud shaman was never voiced by my friend, but obviously it was foremost in Bill's mind to the point where he believed that he had told me about him.

A strange anxiety suddenly possessed me and made me jump out of my seat. As if I had no volition of my own, I approached the old man and immediately began a long tirade on how much I knew about medicinal plants and shamanism among the American Indians of the plains and their Siberian ancestors.

As a secondary theme, I mentioned to the old man that I knew that he was a shaman. I concluded by assuring him that it would be thoroughly beneficial for him to talk to me at length.

"If nothing else," I said petulantly "we could swap stories. You tell me yours and I will tell you mine."

The old man kept his eyes lowered until the last moment. Then he peered at me. "I am Juan Matus," he said, looking me squarely in the eyes.

My tirade should not have ended by any means, but for no reason that I could discern, I felt that there was nothing more I could have said. I wanted to tell him my name. He raised his hand to the height of my lips as if to prevent me from saying it.

At that instant, a bus pulled up to the bus stop. The old man muttered that it was the bus he had to take, then he earnestly asked me to look him up so we could talk with more ease and swap stories. There was an ironic smirk on the comer of his mouth when he said that.

With an incredible agility for a man his age- I figured he must have been in his eighties- he covered, in a few leaps, the fifty yards between the bench where he was sitting and the door of the bus. As if the bus had stopped just to pick him up, it moved away as soon as he had jumped in and the door had closed.

After the old man left, I went back to the bench where Bill was sitting.

"What did he say, what did he say?" he asked excitedly.

"He told me to look him up, and come to his house to visit," I said. "He even said that we could talk there."

"But what did you say to him to get him to invite you to his house?" he demanded.

I told Bill that I had used my best sales pitch, and that I had promised the old man to reveal to him everything I knew from the point of view of my reading about medicinal plants.

Bill obviously did not believe me. He accused me of holding out on him. "I know the people around this area," he said belligerently, "and that old man is a very strange fart. He does not talk to anybody, Indians included. Why would he talk to you; a perfect stranger? You are not even cute!"

It was obvious that Bill was annoyed with me. I could not figure out why though. I did not dare ask him for an explanation. He gave me the impression of being a bit jealous. Perhaps he felt that I had succeeded where he had failed.

However, my success had been so inadvertent that it did not mean anything to me. Except for Bill's casual remarks, I did not have any conception of how difficult it was to approach that old man, and I could not have cared less. At the time, I found nothing remarkable in the exchange. It baffled me that Bill was so upset about it.

"Do you know where his house is?" I asked him.

"I do not have the foggiest idea," he answered curtly. "I have heard people from this area say that he does not live anywhere, that he just appears here and there unexpectedly, but that is a lot of horse-shit. He probably lives in some shack in Nogales, Mexico."

"Why is he so important?" I asked him. My question made me gather enough courage to add, "You seem to be upset because he talked to me. Why?"

Without any ado, he admitted that he was chagrined because he knew how useless it was to try to talk to that man. "That old man is as rude as anyone can be," he added. "At best, he stares at you without saying a word when you talk to him. At other times, he does not even look at you. He treats you as if you did not exist.

"The one time I tried to talk to him, he brutally turned me down. Do you know what he said to me? He said, 'If I were you, I would not waste my energy opening my mouth. Save it. You need it.' If he were not such an old fart, I would have punched him in the nose."

I pointed out to Bill that to call him an 'old' man was more a figure of speech than an actual description.

The Indian did not really appear to be that old, although he was definitely old. He possessed a tremendous vigor and agility. I felt that Bill would have failed miserably if he had tried to punch him in the nose. That old Indian was powerful. In fact, he was downright scary.

I did not voice my thoughts. I let Bill go on telling me how disgusted he was at the nastiness of that old man, and how he would have dealt with him had it not been for the fact that the old man was so feeble.

"Who do you think could give me some information about where he might live?" I asked him.

"Perhaps some people in Yuma," he replied, a bit more relaxed. "Maybe the people I introduced you to at the beginning of our trip. You would not lose anything by asking them. Tell them that I sent you to them."

I changed my plans right then and instead of going back to Los Angeles, I went directly to Yuma, Arizona. I saw the people to whom Bill had introduced me. They did not know where the old Indian lived, but their comments about him inflamed my curiosity even more.

They said that he was not from Yuma, but from Sonora, Mexico, and that in his youth he had been a fearsome sorcerer who did incantations and put spells on people; but that he had mellowed with age, turning into an ascetic hermit.

They remarked that although he was a Yaqui Indian, he had once run around with a group of Mexican men who seemed to be extremely knowledgeable about bewitching practices. They all agreed that they had not seen those men in the area for ages.

One of the men added that the old man was contemporaneous with his grandfather, but that while his grandfather was senile and bedridden, the sorcerer seemed to be more vigorous than ever. The same man referred me to some people in Hermosillo, the capital of Sonora, who might know the old man and who might be able to tell me more about him.

The prospect of going to Mexico was not at all appealing to me. Sonora was too far away from my area of interest. Besides, I reasoned that I was better off doing urban anthropology after all, and I went back to Los Angeles. But before leaving for Los Angeles, I canvassed the area of Yuma, searching for information about the old man. No one knew anything about him.

As the bus drove to Los Angeles, I experienced a unique sensation. On the one hand, I felt totally cured of my obsession with fieldwork or my interest in the old man. On the other hand, I felt a strange nostalgia. It was, truthfully, something I had never felt before. Its newness struck me profoundly.

It was a mixture of anxiety and longing, as if I were missing something of tremendous importance. I had the clear sensation as I approached Los Angeles that whatever had been acting on me around Yuma had begun to fade with distance; but its fading only increased my unwarranted longing.

The Active Side Of Infinity ©1999 by Carlos Castaneda:

Part 1 - Chapter 05. The Intent of Infinity.

"I want you", don Juan said to me, "to think deliberately about every detail of what transpired between you and those two men, Jorge Campos and Lucas Coronado, who are the ones who really delivered you to me; and then tell me all about it."

I found his request very difficult to fulfill, and yet I actually enjoyed remembering everything those two had said to me. Don Juan wanted every detail possible; something that forced me to push my memory to its limits.

In Yuma, Arizona, I had been given the names and addresses of some people in Mexico who, I was told, might be able to shed light on the mystery of the old man I had met in the bus depot.

The story don Juan wanted me to recollect began in the city of to Guaymas, in Sonora, Mexico.

The people I went to see not only did not know any retired old shaman, they even doubted that such a man had ever existed.

They were all filled to the brim, however, with scary stories about Yaqui shamans, and about the belligerent general mood of the Yaqui Indians.

They insinuated that perhaps in Vicam, a railroad-station town between the cities of Guaymas and Ciudad Obregon, I might find someone who could perhaps steer me in the proper direction.

I asked them, "Is there anyone in particular I could look up?"

One of the men suggested, "Your best bet would be to talk to a field inspector of the official government bank. The bank has a lot of field inspectors. They know all the Indians of the area because the bank is the government institution that buys their crops. Every Yaqui is a farmer, and the proprietor of a parcel of land that he can call his own as long as he cultivates it."

I asked, "Do you know any field inspectors?"

They looked at each other, and smiled apologetically at me. They did not know any, but strongly recommended that I should approach one of those inspectors on my own, and put my case to him.

In Vicam Station, my attempts at making contact with the field inspectors of the government bank were a total disaster. I met three of them, but when I told them what I wanted, every one of them looked at me with utter distrust.

They immediately suspected that I was a spy sent there by the Yankees to cause problems that they could not clearly define, but about which they made wild speculations ranging from political agitation to industrial espionage. It was the unsubstantiated belief of everyone around that there were copper deposits in the lands of the Yaqui Indians, and that the Yankees coveted them.

After this resounding failure, I retreated to the city of Guaymas, and stayed at a hotel that was very close to a fabulous restaurant. I went to the restaurant three times a day. The food was superb. I liked it so much that I stayed in Guaymas for over a week. I practically lived in the restaurant, and became, in this manner, acquainted with the owner, Mr. Reyes.

One afternoon while I was eating, Mr. Reyes came to my table with another man whom he introduced to me as Jorge Campos- a full-blooded Yaqui Indian entrepreneur who had lived in Arizona in his youth, who spoke English perfectly, and who was more American than any American. Mr. Reyes praised him as a true example of how hard work and dedication could develop a person into an exceptional man.

Mr. Reyes left and Jorge Campos sat down next to me, and immediately took over. He pretended to be modest, and denied all praise; but it was obvious that he was as pleased as punch with what Mr. Reyes had said about him.

At first sight, I had the clear impression that Jorge Campos was an entrepreneur of the particular kind that one finds in bars or on crowded corners of main streets trying to sell an idea; or simply trying to find a way to con people out of their savings.

Mr. Campos was very pleasant looking, around six feet tall and lean, but with a high pot belly like a habitual drinker of hard liquor. He had a very dark complexion with a touch of green to it, and wore expensive blue jeans and shiny cowboy boots with pointed toes and angular heels as if he needed to dig them into the ground to stop being dragged by a lassoed steer.

He was wearing an impeccably ironed gray plaid shirt. In its right pocket was a plastic pocket guard into which he had inserted a row of pens. I had seen the same pocket guard among office workers who did not want to stain their shirt pockets with ink.

His attire also included an expensive looking fringed reddish brown suede jacket, and a tall Texas style cowboy hat.

His round face was expressionless. He had no wrinkles even though he seemed to be in his early fifties.

For some unknown reason, I believed that he was dangerous.

"Very pleased to meet you, Mr. Campos," I said in Spanish, extending my hand to him.

"Let us dispense with the formalities," he responded, also in Spanish, shaking my hand vigorously. "I like to treat young people as equals regardless of age differences. Call me Jorge."

He was quiet for a moment, no doubt assessing my reaction. I did not know what to say. I certainly did not want to humor him, nor did I want to take him seriously.

"I am curious to know what you are doing in Guaymas," he went on casually. "You do not seem to be a tourist, nor do you seem to be interested in deep-sea fishing."

"I am an anthropology student," I said, "and I am trying to establish my credentials with the local Indians in order to do some field research."

"And I am a businessman," he said. "My business is to supply information; to be the go-between. You have the need, I have the commodity. I charge for my services. However, my services are guaranteed. If you do not get satisfaction, you do not have to pay me."

"If your business is to supply information," I said, "I will gladly pay you whatever you charge."

"Ah!" he exclaimed. "You certainly need a guide; someone with more education than the average Indian here to show you around. Do you have a grant from the United States government or from another big institution?"

"Yes," I lied. "I have a grant from the Esoterical Foundation of Los Angeles."

When I said that, I actually saw a glint of greed in his eyes. "Ah!" he exclaimed again. "How big is that institution?"

"Fairly big," I said.

"My goodness! Is that so?" he said, as if my words were an explanation that he had wanted to hear. "And now, may I ask you, if you do not mind, how big is your grant? How much money did they give you?"

"A few thousand dollars to do preliminary fieldwork," I lied again, to see what he would say.

Relishing his words, he said, "Ah! I like people who are direct. I am sure that you and I are going to reach an agreement. I offer you my services as a guide and as a key that can open many secret doors among the Yaquis. As you can see by my general appearance, I am a man of taste and means."

"Oh, yes, definitely you are a man of good taste," I asserted.

"What I am saying to you," he said, "is that for a small fee, which you will find most reasonable, I will steer you to the right people; people to whom you could ask any question you want. And for some very little more, I will translate their words to you, verbatim, into Spanish or English. I can also speak French and German, but I have the feeling that those languages do not interest you."

"You are right, you are so very right," I said. "Those languages do not interest me at all. But how much would your fees be?"

"Ah! My fees!" he said, and took a leather covered notebook out of his back pocket, and flipped it open in front of my face. He scribbled quick notes on it, flipped it closed again, and put it in his pocket with precision and speed. I was sure that he wanted to give me the impression of being efficient and fast at calculating figures.

"I will charge you fifty dollars a day," he said, "with transportation, plus my meals. I mean, when you eat, I eat. What do you say?"

At that moment, he leaned over to me and, almost in a whisper, said that we should shift into English because he did not want people to know the nature of our transactions. He began to speak to me then in something that was not English at all.

I was at a loss. I did not know how to respond. I began to fret nervously as the man kept on talking gibberish with the most natural air. He did not bat an eyelash. He moved his hands in a very animated fashion and pointed around him as if he were instructing me.

I did not have the impression that he was speaking in tongues. I thought perhaps he was speaking the Yaqui language.

When people came around our table and looked at us, I nodded and said to Jorge Campos, "Yes, yes, indeed." At one point I said, "You could say that again," and this sounded so funny to me that I broke into a belly laugh.

He also laughed heartily, as if I had said the funniest thing possible.

He must have noticed that I was finally at my wits' end, and before I could get up and tell him to get lost, he started to speak Spanish again.

"I do not want to tire you with my silly observations," he said. "But if I am going to be your guide, as I think I am going to be, we will be spending long hours chatting. I was testing you just now, to see if you are a good conversationalist. If I am going to spend time with you driving, I need someone by me who could be a good receptor and initiator. I am glad to tell you that you are both."

Then he stood up, shook my hand, and left.

As if on cue, the owner came to my table, smiling and shaking his head from side to side like a little bear.

"Is he not a fabulous guy?" he asked me.

I did not want to commit myself to a statement.

Mr. Reyes volunteered that Jorge Campos was at that moment a go-between in an extremely delicate and profitable transaction. He said that some mining companies in the United States were interested in the iron and copper deposits that belonged to the Yaqui Indians, and that Jorge Campos was there in line to collect perhaps a five million dollar fee.

I knew then that Jorge Campos was a con man. There were no iron or copper deposits on the lands owned by the Yaqui Indians. If there had been any, private enterprises would have already moved the Yaquis out of those lands and relocated them somewhere else.

I said, "He is fabulous; the most wonderful guy I ever met. How can I get in touch with him again?"

Mr. Reyes said, "Do not worry about that. Jorge asked me all about you. He has been watching you since you came. He will probably come and knock on your door later today or tomorrow."

Mr. Reyes was right. A couple of hours later, somebody woke me from my afternoon nap. It was Jorge Campos.

I had intended to leave Guaymas in the early evening, and drive all night to California. I explained to him that I was leaving, but that I would come back in a month or so.

"Ah! But you must stay now that I have decided to be your guide," he said.

"I am sorry, but we will have to wait for this because my time is very limited now," I replied.

I knew that Jorge Campos was a crook, yet I decided to reveal to him that I already had an informant who was waiting to work with me, and that I had met him in Arizona. I described the old man and said that his name was Juan Matus, and that other people had characterized him as a shaman.

Jorge Campos smiled at me broadly.

I asked him if he knew the old man.

"Ah, yes, I know him," he said jovially. "You may say that we are good friends." Without being invited, Jorge Campos came into the room and sat down at the table just inside the balcony.

"Does he live around here?" I asked.

"He certainly does," he assured me.

"Would you take me to him?"

"I do not see why not," he said. "I would need a couple of days to make my own inquiries, just to make sure that he is there, and then we will go and see him."

I knew that he was lying, yet I did not want to believe it. I even thought that my initial distrust had perhaps been ill-founded. He seemed so convincing at that moment.

"However," he continued, "in order to take you to see the man, I will charge you a flat fee. My honorarium will be two hundred dollars."

That amount was more than I had at my disposal. I politely declined, and said that I did not have enough money with me.

"I do not want to appear mercenary," he said with his most winning smile, "but how much money can you afford? You must take into consideration that I have to do a little bribing. The Yaqui Indians are very private, but there are always ways. There are always doors that open with a magical key- money."

In spite of all my misgivings, I was convinced that Jorge Campos was my entry not only into the Yaqui world, but to finding the old man who had intrigued me so much. I did not want to haggle over money. I was almost embarrassed to offer him the fifty dollars I had in my pocket.

"I am at the end of my stay here," I said as a sort of apology, "so I have nearly run out of money. I have only fifty dollars left."

Jorge Campos stretched his long legs under the table, and crossed his arms behind his head, tipping his hat over his face.

"I will take your fifty dollars and your watch," he said shamelessly. "But for that money, I will take you to meet a minor shaman.

"Do not get impatient," he warned me, as if I were going to protest. "We must step carefully up the ladder, from the lower ranks to the man himself who I assure you is at the very top."

"And when could I meet this minor shaman?" I asked, handing him the money and my watch.

"Right now!" he replied as he sat up straight, and eagerly grabbed the money and the watch. "Let us go! There is not a minute to waste!"

We got into my car and he directed me to head off for the town of Potam, one of the traditional Yaqui towns along the Yaqui River.

As we drove, he revealed to me that we were going to meet Lucas Coronado, a man who was known for his sorcery feats, his shamanistic trances, and for the magnificent masks that he made for the Yaqui festivities of Lent.

Then he shifted the conversation to the old man, and what he said was in total contradiction to what others had said to me about the man. While they had described him as a hermit and retired shaman, Jorge Campos portrayed him as the most prominent curer and sorcerer of the area, a man whose fame had turned him into a nearly inaccessible figure.

He paused, like an actor, and then he delivered his blow: He said that to talk to the old man on a steady basis, the way anthropologists like to do, was going to cost me at least two thousand dollars.

I was going to protest such a drastic hike in price, but he anticipated me.

"For two hundred dollars, I could take you to him," he said. "Out of those two hundred dollars, I would clear about thirty. The rest would go for bribes. But to talk to him at length will cost more. You yourself could figure that out. He has actual bodyguards; people who protect him. I have to sweet-talk them and come up with dough for them.

"In the end," he continued, "I will give you a total account with receipts and everything for your taxes. Then you will know that my commission for setting it all up is minimal."

I felt a wave of admiration for him. He was aware of everything, even receipts for income tax. He was quiet for a while as if calculating his minimal profit. I had nothing to say. I was busy calculating myself, trying to figure out a way to get two thousand dollars. I even thought of really applying for a grant.

I asked, "But are you sure the old man would talk to me?"

"Of course," he assured me. "Not only would he talk to you, he is going to perform sorcery for you for what you pay him. Then you could work out an agreement with him as to how much you could pay him for further lessons."

Jorge Campos kept silent again for a while, peering into my eyes.

"Do you think that you could pay me the two thousand dollars?" he asked in a tone so purposefully indifferent that I instantly knew it was a sham.

"Oh, yes, I can easily afford that," I lied reassuringly.

He could not disguise his glee.

"Good boy! Good boy!" he cheered. "We are going to have a ball!"

I tried to ask him some general questions about the old man, but he forcefully cut me off. "Save all this for the man himself. He will be all yours," he said, smiling.

He began to tell me then about his life in the United States and about his business aspirations; and to my utter bewilderment, since I had already classified him as a phony who did not speak a word of English, he shifted into English.

"You do speak English!" I exclaimed without any attempt at hiding my surprise.

"Of course I do, my boy," he said, affecting a Texan accent, which he carried on for the duration of our conversation. "I told you, I wanted to test you, to see if you are resourceful. You are. In fact, you are quite clever, I may say."

His command of English was superb, and he delighted me with jokes and stories.

In no time at all, we were in Potam. He directed me to a house on the outskirts of town. We got out of the car. He led the way, calling loudly in Spanish for Lucas Coronado.

We heard a voice from the back of the house that said, also in Spanish, "Come over here."

There was a man behind a small shack, sitting on the ground, on a goatskin. He was holding a piece of wood with his bare feet while he worked on it with a chisel and a mallet. By holding the piece of wood in place with the pressure of his feet, he had fashioned a stupendous potter's turning wheel, so to speak. His feet turned the piece as his hands worked the chisel.

I had never seen anything like this in my life. He was making a mask, hollowing it with a curved chisel. His control of his feet in holding the wood and turning it around was remarkable.

The man was very thin. He had a thin face with angular features, high cheekbones, and a dark, copperish complexion. The skin of his face and neck seemed to be stretched to the maximum. He sported a thin, droopy mustache that gave his angular face a malevolent slant. He had an aquiline nose with a very thin bridge, and fierce black eyes. His extremely black eyebrows appeared as if they had been drawn on with a pencil, and so did his jet black hair, combed backward on his head.

I had never seen a more hostile face. The image that came to mind looking at him was that of an Italian poisoner of the era of the Medicis. The words 'truculent' and 'saturnine' seemed to be the most apt descriptions when I focused my attention on Lucas Coronado's face.

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 guaraches.

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

I had a strange feeling then that Lucas Coronado did not know how to smile.

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

"I have 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 is no problem, that is 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 will not 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 will 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 have 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 is the opposite," I said. "I think he is magnificent!"

"Do not 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 is odd that you run him down when you do not 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 in a confidential, helpful tone. "Otherwise, you are going to anger him, and all he will remember about you will be your insults. But do not 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 did not 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, and therefore very dangerous. Because you have offended him, he may have given you a witchcraft bundle. If that is 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 did not 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.

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

"You gotta do better than that, boy," he retorted forcefully, almost angrily. "I am 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 I gave him my word that I 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. I 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 could not find Jorge Campos anywhere in Guaymas. I asked the owner of the restaurant. He was as baffled as I was about his disappearance.

"He has just vanished," he said. "I am 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 could not find him either.

I asked his neighbors if they knew where he might be. They looked at me belligerently and did not dignify me with an answer.

I left, but went by his house again in the late afternoon. I did not 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 did not 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 could not explain why I was so out of sorts. Lucas Coronado seemed to understand my quandary.

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

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.

He continued, saying, "There are magical beings living in the mountains around here, 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 do not have any clue as to why they exploded."

I asked, "Do you think that is what happened to me?"

"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 were not contained. You went bananas over nothing."

"It is not over nothing," I assured him. "I did not 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 did not 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 did not 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 is Ignacio's father, but he does not seem that old. But he is 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.

"That is the man!" I yelled without knowing why.

Lucas Coronado did not know where Ignacio Flores actually lived, but he was very accommodating. He directed me to drive to a nearby Yaqui town where he found Ignacio Flores for me.

Lucas Coronado had warned me that Ignacio Flores had been a career soldier in his youth, and that he still had the bearing of a military man.

Ignacio Flores was a big, corpulent man, perhaps in his mid-sixties. He had an enormous mustache. That and the fierceness of his eyes made him, for me, the personification of a ferocious soldier. He had a dark complexion. His hair was still jet black in spite of his years.

His forceful, gravelly voice seemed to be trained solely to give commands. I had the impression that he had been a cavalry man.

He walked as if he were still wearing spurs, and for some strange reason impossible to fathom, I heard the sound of spurs when he walked.

Lucas Coronado introduced me to him, and said that I had come from Arizona to see his father whom I had met in Nogales. Ignacio Flores did not seem surprised at all.

"Oh yes," he said. "My father travels a great deal." Without any other preliminaries, he directed us to where we could find his father. He did not come with us; I thought out of politeness. He excused himself and marched away as if he were keeping step in a parade.

I prepared myself to go to the old man's house with Lucas Coronado. Instead, he politely declined. He wanted me to drive him back to his house.

"I think you found the man you were looking for, and I feel that you should be alone," he said.

I marveled at how extraordinarily polite these Yaqui Indians were, and yet at the same time, so fierce. I had been told that the Yaquis were savages who had no qualms about killing anyone. As far as I was concerned, though, their most remarkable feature was their politeness and consideration.

I drove to the house of Ignacio Flores's father, and there I found the man I was looking for.

At the end of my account, I said to don Juan, "I wonder why Jorge Campos lied and told me that he knew you."

"He did not lie to you," don Juan said with the conviction of someone who was condoning Jorge Campos's behavior. "He did not even misrepresent himself. He thought you were an easy mark, and was going to cheat you. He could not carry out his plan, though, because infinity overpowered him. Do you know that he disappeared soon after he met you, never to be found?

"Jorge Campos was a most meaningful personage for you," he continued. "You will find in whatever transpired between the two of you a sort of guiding blueprint- because he is the representation of your life."

"Why? I am not a crook!" I protested.

He laughed, as if he knew something that I did not. The next thing I knew, I found myself in the midst of an extensive explanation of my actions, my ideals, and my expectations.

However, a strange thought urged me to consider with the same fervor with which I was explaining myself, that under certain circumstances I might be like Jorge Campos. I found the thought inadmissible, and I used all my available energy to try to disprove it. However, down in the depths of myself, I did not care to apologize if I were like Jorge Campos.

When I voiced my dilemma, don Juan laughed so hard that he choked, many times.

"If I were you," he commented, "I would listen to my inner voice. What difference would it make if you were like Jorge Campos: a crook! He was a cheap crook. You are more elaborate. This is the power of the recounting. This is why sorcerers use it. It puts you into contact with something that you did not even suspect existed in you."

I wanted to leave right then. Don Juan knew exactly how I felt.

"Do not listen to the superficial voice that makes you angry," he said commandingly. "Listen to that deeper voice that is going to guide you from now on; the voice that is laughing. Listen to it! And laugh with it. Laugh! Laugh!"

His words were like a hypnotic command to me. Against my will, I began to laugh. Never had I been so happy. I felt free; unmasked.

Don Juan said, "Recount to yourself the story of Jorge Campos, over and over. You will find endless wealth in it. Every detail is part of a map. It is the nature of infinity, once we cross a certain threshold, to put a blueprint in front of us."

He peered at me for a long time, but he did not merely glance as before. He gazed intently at me.

He finally said, "One deed which Jorge Campos could not avoid performing was to put you in contact with the other man, Lucas Coronado, who is as meaningful to you as Jorge Campos himself; maybe even more.

In the course of recounting the story of those two men, I had realized that I had spent more time with Lucas Coronado than with Jorge Campos; however, our exchanges had not been as intense, and were marked by enormous lagoons of silence. Lucas Coronado was not by nature a talkative man, and by some strange twist, whenever he was silent he managed to drag me with him into that state.

"Lucas Coronado is the other part of your map," don Juan said. "Do not you find it strange that he is a sculptor, like yourself; a super-sensitive artist who was, like yourself at one time, in search of a sponsor for his art? He looked for a sponsor just like you looked for a woman; a lover of the arts, who would sponsor your creativity."

I entered into another terrifying struggle. This time my struggle was between my absolute certainty that I had not mentioned this aspect of my life to him, the fact that all of it was true, and the fact that I was unable to find an explanation for how he could have obtained this information.

Again, I wanted to leave right away. But once more, the impulse was overpowered by a voice that came from a deep place. Without any coaxing, I began to laugh heartily. Some part of me, at a profound level, did not give a hoot about finding out how don Juan had gotten that information. The fact that he had it, and had displayed it in such a delicate but conniving manner was a delightful maneuver to witness. It was of no consequence that the superficial part of me got angry and wanted to leave.

"Very good," don Juan said to me, patting me forcefully on the back, "very good."

He was pensive for a moment, as if he were perhaps seeing things invisible to the average eye.

"Jorge Campos and Lucas Coronado are the two ends of an axis," he said. "That axis is you; at one end, a ruthless, shameless, crass mercenary who takes care of himself; hideous, but indestructible. At the other end, a super-sensitive, tormented artist, weak and vulnerable.

"That should have been the map of your life, were it not for the appearance of another possibility; the one that opened up when you crossed the threshold of infinity. You searched for me, and you found me; and so, you did cross the threshold.

"The intent of infinity told me to look for someone like you. I found you, thus I crossed the threshold myself."

The conversation ended at that point. Don Juan went into one of his habitual long periods of total silence.

It was only at the end of the day when we had returned to his house and we were sitting under his ramada cooling off from the long hike we had taken, that he broke his silence.

Don Juan went on, saying, "In your recounting of what happened between you and Jorge Campos, and you and Lucas Coronado, I found, and I hope you did, too, a very disturbing factor.

"For me, it is an omen. It points to the end of an era, meaning that whatever was standing there cannot remain. Very flimsy elements brought you to me. None of them could stand on their own. This is what I drew from your recounting."

I remembered that don Juan had revealed to me one day that Lucas Coronado was terminally ill. He had some health condition that was slowly consuming him.

"I have sent word to him through my son Ignacio about what he should do to cure himself," don Juan went on, "but he thinks it is nonsense, and does not want to hear it. It is not Lucas's fault. The entire human race does not want to hear anything. They hear only what they want to hear."

I remembered that I had prevailed upon don Juan to tell me what I could say to Lucas Coronado to help him alleviate his physical pain and mental anguish. Don Juan not only told me what to tell him, but asserted that if Lucas Coronado wanted to, he could easily cure himself.

Nevertheless, when I delivered don Juan's message, Lucas Coronado looked at me as if I had lost my mind. Then he shifted into a brilliant, and, had I been a Yaqui, a deeply insulting portrayal of a man who is bored to death by someone's unwarranted insistence. I thought that only a Yaqui Indian could be so subtle.

"Those things do not help me," he finally said defiantly, angered by my lack of sensibility. "It does not really matter. We all have to die. But do not you dare believe that I have lost hope. I am going to get some money from the government bank. I will get an advance on my crops, and then I will get enough money to buy something that will cure me, ipso facto. Its name is Vi-ta-mi-nol."

I asked, "What is Vitaminol?"

"It is something that is advertised on the radio," he said with the innocence of a child. "It cures everything. It is recommended for people who do not eat meat or fish or fowl every day. It is recommended for people like myself who can barely keep body and soul together."

In my eagerness to help Lucas Coronado, I committed right then the biggest blunder imaginable in a society of such hypersensitive beings as the Yaquis. I offered to give him the money to buy Vitaminol. His cold stare was the measure of how deeply I had hurt him. My stupidity was unforgivable. Very softly, Lucas Coronado said that he was capable of affording Vitaminol himself.

I went back to don Juan's house. I felt like weeping. My eagerness had betrayed me.

"Do not waste your energy worrying about things like that," don Juan said coldly. "Lucas Coronado is locked in a vicious cycle, but so are you. So is everyone. He has Vitaminol, which he trusts will cure everything, and resolve every one of his problems. At the moment, he can not afford it, but he has great hopes that he eventually will be able to."

Don Juan peered at me with his piercing eyes. "I told you that Lucas Coronado's acts are the map of your life," he said. "Believe you me, they are. Lucas Coronado pointed out Vitaminol to you, and he did it so powerfully and painfully that he hurt you and made you weep."

Don Juan stopped talking then. It was a long and most effective pause. "And do not tell me that you do not understand what I mean," he said. "One way or another, we all have our own version of Vitaminol."

The Active Side Of Infinity ©1999 by Carlos Castaneda:

Part 1 - Chapter 06. Who Was Don Juan Matus, Really?

The part of my account of meeting don Juan that he did not want to hear about was my feelings and impressions on that fateful day when I walked into his house: the contradictory clash between my expectations and the reality of the situation, and the effect that was caused in me by a cluster of the most extravagant ideas I had ever heard.

"That is more in the line of confession than in the line of events," he had said to me once when I tried to tell him about all this.

"You could not be more wrong, don Juan," I began, but I stopped. Something in the way he looked at me made me realize that he was right. Whatever I was going to say could have sounded only like lip service, flattery. What had taken place on our first real meeting, however, was of transcendental importance to me, an event of ultimate consequence.

During my first encounter with don Juan, in the bus depot in Nogales, Arizona, something of an unusual nature had happened to me, but it had come to me cushioned in my concerns with the presentation of the self. I had wanted to impress don Juan, and in attempting to do so I had focused all my attention on the act of selling my wares, so to speak. It was only months later that a strange residue of forgotten events began to appear.

One day, out of nowhere, and with no coaxing or coaching on my part, I recollected with extraordinary clarity something that had completely bypassed me during my actual encounter with don Juan. When he had stopped me from telling him my name, he had peered into my eyes and had numbed me with his look. There was infinitely more that I could have said to him about myself. I could have expounded on my knowledge and worth for hours if his look had not completely cut me off.

In light of this new realization, I reconsidered everything that had happened to me on that occasion. My unavoidable conclusion was that I had experienced the interruption of some mysterious flow that kept me going; a flow that had never been interrupted before, at least not in the manner in which don Juan had done it.

When I tried to describe to any of my friends what I had physically experienced, a strange perspiration began to cover my entire body; the same perspiration that I had experienced when don Juan had given me that look. I had been, at that moment, not only incapable of voicing a single word, but incapable of having a single thought.

For some time after, I dwelt on the physical sensation of this interruption for which I found no rational explanation. I argued for a while that don Juan must have hypnotized me, but then my memory told me that he had not given any hypnotic commands, nor had he made any movements that could have trapped my attention.

In fact, he had merely glanced at me. It was the intensity of that glance that had made it appear as if he had stared at me for a long time. It had obsessed me, and had rendered me discombobulated at a deep physical level.

When I finally had don Juan in front of me again, the first thing I noticed about him was that he did not look at all as I had imagined him during all the time I had tried to find him. I had fabricated an image of the man I had met at the bus depot, which I perfected every day by allegedly remembering more details.

In my mind, he was an old man, still very strong and nimble, yet almost frail. The man facing me was muscular and decisive. He moved with agility, but not nimbleness. His steps were firm, and, at the same time, light. He exuded vitality and purpose.

My composite memory was not at all in harmony with the real thing. I thought he had short, white hair and an extremely dark complexion. His hair was longer, and not as white as I had imagined. His complexion was not that dark either. I could have sworn that his features were birdlike, because of his age. But that was not so either. His face was full, almost round. In one glance, the most outstanding feature of the man looking at me was his dark eyes, which shone with a peculiar, dancing glow.

Something that had bypassed me completely in my prior assessment of him was the fact that his total countenance was that of an athlete. His shoulders were broad, his stomach flat. He seemed to be planted firmly on the ground. There was no feebleness to his knees, no tremor in his upper limbs. I had imagined detecting a slight tremor in his head and arms, as if he were nervous and unsteady. I had also imagined him to be about five feet six inches tall, three inches shorter than his actual height.

Don Juan had not seemed surprised to see me. I wanted to tell him how difficult it had been for me to find him. I would have liked to be congratulated by him on my titanic efforts, but he just laughed at me, teasingly.

"Your efforts are not important," he said. "What is important is that you found my place. Sit down, sit down," he said, enticing me, pointing to one of the freight boxes under his ramada, and patting me on my back; but it was not a friendly pat.

It felt like he had slapped me on the back although he never actually touched me. His quasi-slap created a strange, unstable sensation, which appeared abruptly and disappeared before I had time to grasp what it was.

What was left in me as a result was a strange peace. I felt at ease. My mind was crystal clear. I had no expectations; no desires. My usual nervousness and sweaty hands- the marks of my existence- were suddenly gone.

"Now you will understand everything I am going to say to you," don Juan said to me, looking into my eyes as he had done in the bus depot.

Ordinarily, I would have found his statement perfunctory, perhaps rhetorical, but when he said it, I could only assure him repeatedly and sincerely that I would understand anything he said to me. He looked me in the eyes again with a ferocious intensity.

"I am Juan Matus," he said, sitting down on another freight box, a few feet away, facing me. "This is my name, and I voice it because, with it, I am making a bridge for you to cross over to where I am."

He stared at me for an instant before he started talking again.

"I am a sorcerer," he went on. "I belong to a lineage of sorcerers that has lasted for twenty-seven generations. I am the 'nagual' of my generation."

He explained to me that the leader of a party of sorcerers like himself was called the nagual, and that this was a generic term applied to a sorcerer in each generation who had some specific energetic configuration that set him apart from the others- not in terms of superiority or inferiority, or anything of the like, but in terms of the capacity to be responsible.

"Only the nagual," he said, "has the energetic capacity to be responsible for the fate of his cohorts. Every one of his cohorts knows this, and they accede. The nagual can be a man or a woman. In the time of the sorcerers who were the founders of my lineage, women were, by rule, the naguals. Their natural pragmatism, the product of their femaleness, led my lineage into pits of practicalities from which they could barely emerge. Then, the males took over, and led my lineage into pits of imbecility from which we are barely emerging now.

"Since the time of the nagual Lujan, who lived about two hundred years ago," he went on, "there has been a joint nexus of effort, shared by a man and a woman. The nagual man brings sobriety; the nagual woman brings innovation."

I wanted to ask him at this point if there was a woman in his life who was the nagual, but the depth of my concentration did not allow me to formulate the question. Instead, he himself formulated it for me.

"Is there a nagual woman in my life?" he asked. "No, there is not any. I am a solitary sorcerer. I have my cohorts, though. At the moment, they are not around."

A thought came with uncontainable vigor into my mind. At that instant, I remembered what some people in Yuma had told me about don Juan running with a party of Mexican men who seemed to be very versed in sorcery maneuvers.

"To be a sorcerer," don Juan continued, "does not mean to practice witchcraft, or to work to affect people, or to be possessed by demons. To be a sorcerer means to reach a level of awareness that makes inconceivable things available.

The term 'sorcery' is inadequate to express what sorcerers do, and so is the term 'shamanism.' The actions of sorcerers are exclusively in the realm of the abstract; the impersonal. Sorcerers struggle to reach a goal that has nothing to do with the quests of an average man. Sorcerers' aspirations are to reach infinity, and to be conscious of it."

Don Juan continued, saying that the task of sorcerers was to face infinity, and that they plunged into it daily, as a fisherman plunges into the sea. It was such an overwhelming task that sorcerers had to state their names before venturing into it. He reminded me that, in Nogales, he had stated his name before any interaction had taken place between us. He had, in this manner, asserted his individuality in front of the infinite.

I understood with unequaled clarity what he was explaining. I did not have to ask him for clarifications. My keenness of thought should have surprised me, but it did not at all.

I knew at that moment that I had always been crystal clear, merely playing dumb for someone else's benefit.

"Without you knowing anything about it," he continued, "I started you on a traditional quest. You are the man I was looking for. My quest ended when I found you, and yours when you found me now."

Don Juan explained to me that, as the nagual of his generation, he was in search of an individual who had a specific energetic configuration, adequate to ensure the continuity of his lineage. He said that at a given moment, the nagual of each generation for twenty-seven successive generations had entered into the most nerve-racking experience of their lives: the search for succession.

Looking me straight in the eyes, he stated that what made human beings into sorcerers was their capacity to perceive energy directly as it flows in the universe, and that when sorcerers perceive a human being in this fashion, they see a luminous ball, or a luminous egg-shaped figure.

His contention was that human beings are not only capable of seeing energy directly as it flows in the universe, but that they actually do see it, although they are not deliberately conscious of seeing it.

He made right then the most crucial distinction for sorcerers; the distinction between the general state of being aware, and the particular state of being deliberately conscious of something.

He categorized all human beings as possessing awareness, in a general sense, which permits them to see energy directly, and he categorized sorcerers as the only human beings who were deliberately conscious of seeing energy directly.

He then defined awareness as 'energy', and energy as constant flux; a luminous vibration that was never stationary, but always moving of its own accord.

He asserted that when a human being was seen, he was perceived as a conglomerate of energy fields held together by the most mysterious force in the universe: a binding, agglutinating, vibratory force that holds energy fields together in a cohesive unit.

He further explained that the nagual was a specific sorcerer in each generation whom the other sorcerers were able to see, not as a single luminous ball but as a set of two spheres of luminosity fused, one over the other.

"This feature of doubleness," he continued, "permits the nagual to perform maneuvers that are rather difficult for an average sorcerer. For example, the nagual is a connoisseur of the force that holds us together as a cohesive unit. The nagual could place his full attention, for a fraction of a second, on that force, and numb the other person.

"I did that to you at the bus depot because I wanted to stop your barrage of me, me, me, me, me, me, me. I wanted you to find me, and cut the crap.

"The sorcerers of my lineage maintained," don Juan went on, "that the presence of a double being-a nagual- is sufficient to clarify things for us. What is odd about it, is that the presence of the nagual clarifies things in a veiled fashion. It happened to me when I met the nagual Julian, my teacher. His presence baffled me for years because every time I was around him, I could think clearly, but when he moved away, I became the same idiot that I had always been.

"I had the privilege," don Juan went on, "of actually meeting and dealing with two naguals.

"For six years, at the request of the nagual Elias, who was the teacher of the nagual Julian, I went to live with him. The nagual Elias is the one who reared me, so to speak. It was a rare privilege. I had a ringside seat for watching what a nagual really is.

"The nagual Elias and the nagual Julian were two men of tremendously different temperaments. The nagual Elias was quieter, and lost in the darkness of his silence.

"The nagual Julian was bombastic; a compulsive talker. It seemed that he lived to dazzle women. There were more women in his life than one would care to think about.

"Yet both of them were astoundingly alike in that there was nothing inside them. They were empty. The nagual Elias was a collection of astounding, haunting stories of regions unknown. The nagual Julian was a collection of stories that would have anybody in stitches, sprawled on the ground laughing.

"Whenever I tried to pin down 'the man' in them, the real man, the way I could pinpoint 'the man' in my father, or 'the man' in everybody I knew, I found nothing. Instead of a real person inside them, there was a bunch of stories about persons unknown. Each of the two men had his own flair, but the end result was just the same: emptiness; an emptiness that reflected not the world, but infinity."

Don Juan went on explaining that the moment one crosses a peculiar threshold in infinity, either deliberately or, as in my case, unwittingly, everything that happens to one from then on is no longer exclusively in one's own domain, but enters into the realm of infinity.

"When we met in Arizona, both of us crossed a peculiar threshold," he continued. "And this threshold was not decided by either one of us, but by infinity itself.

"Infinity is everything that surrounds us." He said this and made a broad gesture with his arms. "The sorcerers of my lineage call it infinity, the spirit, the dark sea of awareness, and say that it is something that exists out there and rules our lives."

I was truly capable of comprehending everything he was saying, and yet I did not know what the hell he was talking about. I asked if crossing the threshold had been an accidental event, born of unpredictable circumstances ruled by chance.

He answered that his steps and mine were guided by infinity, and that circumstances that seemed to be ruled by chance were in essence ruled by the active side of infinity. He called it intent.

"What put you and me together," he went on, "was the intent of infinity. It is impossible to determine what this intent of infinity is, yet it is there, as palpable as you and I are.

"Sorcerers say that it is a tremor in the air. The advantage of sorcerers is to know that the tremor in the air exists, and to know to acquiesce to it without any further ado. For sorcerers, there is no pondering, wondering, or speculating.

"They know that all they have is the possibility of merging with the intent of infinity, and they just do it."

Nothing could have been clearer to me than those statements. As far as I was concerned, the truth of what he was telling me was so self-evident that it did not permit me to ponder how such absurd assertions could have sounded so rational. I knew that everything that don Juan was saying was not only a truism, but I could corroborate it by referring to my own being. I knew about everything that he was saying. I had the sensation that I had lived every twist of his description.

Our interchange ended then. Something seemed to deflate inside me.

It was at that instant that the thought crossed my mind that I was losing my marbles. I had been blinded by weird statements and had lost every conceivable sense of objectivity. Accordingly, I left don Juan's house in a real hurry, feeling threatened to the core by an unseen enemy. Don Juan walked me to my car, fully cognizant of what was going on inside me.

"Do not worry," he said, putting his hand on my shoulder. You are not going crazy. What you felt was a gentle tap of infinity."

As time went by, I was able to corroborate what don Juan had said about his two teachers. Don Juan Matus was exactly as he had described those two men to be. I would go as far as saying that he was an extraordinary blend of both of them; on the one hand, extremely quiet and introspective; on the other, extremely open and funny.

The most accurate statement about what a nagual is, which he voiced the day I found him, was that a nagual is empty, and the nagual's emptiness does not reflect the world, but reflects infinity.

Nothing could have been more true than this in reference to don Juan Matus. His emptiness reflected infinity. There was no boisterousness on his part, or assertions about the self. There was not a speck of a need to have either grievances or remorse.

His was the emptiness of a 'warrior-traveler', seasoned to the point where he does not take anything for granted; a warrior traveler who does not underestimate or overestimate anything; a quiet, disciplined fighter whose elegance is so extreme that no one, no matter how hard they try to look, will ever find the seam where all that complexity has come together.