The Active Side of Infinity (10 page)

"That's the man!" I yelled without knowing why.

Lucas Coronado didn't know where Ignacio Flores actually lived, but he
was very
accommodating and directed me to drive to a nearby Yaqui
town, where he found the man for
me.

Ignacio Flores was a big, corpulent man, perhaps in his mid-sixties.
Lucas Coronado had
warned me that the big man had been a career
soldier in his youth, and that he still had the
bearing of a
military man. Ignacio Flores 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 didn't
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 didn't 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. "I wonder why Jorge Campos lied and told me that he
knew you," I said at the end of my
account.

"He didn't lie to you," don Juan said with the conviction of
someone who was condoning Jorge Campos's behavior. "He didn't even
misrepresent himself. He thought you were an easy
mark and was
going to cheat you. He couldn't 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'm not a crook!" I protested.

He laughed, as if he knew something that I didn't. The next thing I
knew, I found myself in
the midst of an extensive explanation
of my actions, my ideals, 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
didn't 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'd 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 didn't even suspect existed in you."

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

"Don't 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.

"Recount to yourself the story of Jorge Campos, over and
over,"

don Juan said. "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. He didn't merely glance as before, but
he gazed intently at
me. "One deed which Jorge Campos
couldn't avoid performing," he finally said, "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. "Don't 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, didn't 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.
1 found you, thus crossing 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 while we
were sitting
under his ramada, cooling off from the long hike we had taken, that he broke
his
silence.

"In your recounting of what happened between you and Jorge Campos,
and you and Lucas
Coronado," don Juan went on, "I found,
and I hope you did, too, a very disturbing factor. For me,
it's
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's nonsense and doesn't want to hear it. It isn't Lucas's fault. The entire
human race doesn't 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, 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 don't help me," he finally said defiantly,
angered by my lack of sensibility. "It
doesn't really
matter. We all have to die. But don't you dare believe that I have lost hope.
I'm
going to get some money from the government bank. I'll
get an advance on my crops, and then I'll
get enough money
to buy something that will cure me, ipso facto. It's name is
Vi-ta-mi-nol."

"What is Vitaminol?" I had asked.

"It's something that's advertised on the radio," he said with
the innocence of a child. "It cures
everything.
It's recommended for people who don't eat meat or fish or fowl every day. It's
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.

"Don't 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't 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 don't tell me that
you don't understand what I mean,"
he said. "One way or another, we all have our own version of
Vitaminol."

The part of my my account of meeting don Juan that he didn't 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 couldn't 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.