The Active Side of Infinity (20 page)

"Why is it so hard for us to admit something that is so
truthful?" I asked, bewildered by the
magnitude of
our internal contradiction.

"It's really not man's fault," he said in a conciliatory tone.
"Someday, I'll tell you more about the forces that drive a man to act like
an ass."

There wasn't anything else to say. The silence that followed was
ominous. I didn't even want to know what the forces were that don Juan was
referring to.

"It is no great feat for me to assess your professor at a
distance," don Juan went on. "He is an
immortal
scientist. He is never going to die. And when it comes to any concerns about
dying, I
am sure that he has taken care of them already. He has a
plot to be buried in, and a hefty life
insurance
policy that will take care of his family. Having fulfilled those two mandates,
he doesn't
think about death anymore. He thinks only about his work.

"Professor Lorca makes sense when he talks," don Juan
continued, "because he is prepared to
use words
accurately. But he's not prepared to take himself seriously as a man who is
going to
die. Being immortal, he wouldn't know how to do that. It
makes no difference what complex
machines scientists can build. The
machines can in no way help anyone face the unavoidable appointment: the
appointment with
infinity.

"The nagual Julian used to tell me," he went on, "about
the conquering generals of ancient
Rome
. When they
would return home victorious, gigantic parades were staged to honor them.
Displaying
the treasures that they had won, and the defeated people that they had turned
into
slaves, the conquerors paraded, riding in their war
chariots. Riding with them was always a slave
whose job was
to whisper in their ear that all fame and glory is but transitory.

"If we are victorious in any way," don Juan went on, "we
don't have anyone to whisper in our
ear that our victories are
fleeting. Sorcerers, however, do have the upper hand; as beings on their
way
to dying, they have someone whispering in their ear that everything is
ephemeral. The
whisperer is death, the infallible advisor, the
only one who won't ever tell you a lie."

"Warrior-travelers don't leave any debts unpaid," don Juan
said.

"What are you talking about, don Juan?" I asked.

"It is time that you square certain indebtedness you have incurred
in the course of your life,"
he said. "Not that you will
ever pay in full, mind you, but you must make a gesture. You must
make
a token payment in order to atone, in order to appease
infinity.
You
told me about your two
friends who meant so much to you,
Patricia Turner and Sandra Flanagan. It's time for you to go
and
find them and to make to each of them one gift in which you spend everything
you have. You
have to make two gifts that will leave you penniless.
That's the gesture."

"I don't know where they are, don Juan," I said, almost in a
mood of protest.

"To find them is your challenge. In your search for them, you will
not leave any stone
unturned. What you intend to do is something very
simple, and yet nearly impossible. You want
to cross over
the threshold of personal indebtedness and in one sweep be free, in order to
proceed. If you cannot cross that
threshold, there won't be any
point in trying to continue with me-

"But where did you get the idea of this task for me?" I asked.
"Did you invent it yourself,
because you think it is
appropriate?"

"I don't invent anything," he said matter-of-factly. "I
got this task from
infinity
itself. It's not
easy for me to
say all this to you. If you think that I'm enjoying myself pink with your
tribulations,
you're wrong. The success of your mission means more to me than it does to you.
If
you fail, you have very little to lose. What? Your visits
to me. Big deal. But I would lose you, and
that means to
me losing either the continuity of my lineage or the possibility of your
closing it
with a golden key."

Don Juan stopped talking. He always knew when my mind became feverish
with thoughts.

"I have told you over and over that
warrior-travelers
are
pragmatists," he went on. "They are
not involved in
sentimentalism, or nostalgia, or melancholy. For
warrior-travelers,
there
is only
struggle, and it is a struggle with no end. If you think
that you have come here to find peace, or
that this is a
lull in your life, you're wrong. This task of paying your debts is not guided
by any
feelings that you know about. It is guided by the purest
sentiment, the sentiment of a
warrior-
traveler
who
is about to dive into
infinity,
and just before he does, he turns around
to say thank
you to those who favored him.

"You must face this task with all the gravity it deserves," he
continued. "It is your last stop
before
infinity
swallows
you. In fact, unless a warrior-traveler is in a sublime state of being,
infinity
will not touch him with a ten-foot pole. So, don't spare
yourself; don't spare any effort.
Push it mercilessly, but
elegantly, all the way through."

I had met the two people don Juan had referred to as my two friends who
meant so much to
me while going to junior college. I used to live
in the garage apartment of the house belonging to
Patricia
Turner's parents. In exchange for room and board, I took care of vacuuming the
pool, raking the leaves, putting the trash out, and making breakfast for
Patricia and myself. I was also
the handyman in the house as well as the family chauffeur; I
drove Mrs. Turner to do her
shopping and I
bought liquor for Mr. Turner, which I had to sneak into the house and then into
his
studio.

He was an insurance executive who was a solitary drinker. He had
promised his family that he
was not going to touch the bottle ever
again after some serious family altercations due to his
excessive
drinking. He confessed to me that he had tapered off enormously, but that he
needed a
swig from time to time. His studio was, of course, off
limits to everybody except me. I was
supposed to go in to clean it, but what I really did
was hide his bottles inside a beam that
appeared
to support an arch in the ceiling in the studio but that was actually hollow. I
had to sneak the bottles in and sneak the empties out and dump them at the
market.

Patricia was a drama and music major in college and a fabulous singer.
Her goal was to sing
in musicals on Broadway. It goes
without saying that I fell head over heels in love with Patricia
Turner.
She was very slim and athletic, a brunette with angular features and about a
head taller than I am, my ultimate requisite for going bananas over any woman.

I seemed to
fulfill a deep need in her, the need to nurture someone, especially after she
realized that her daddy trusted me implicitly. She
became my little mommy. I couldn't even open
my mouth without her consent. She watched me like a hawk. She even
wrote term papers for me,
read
textbooks and gave me synopses of them. And 1 liked it, but not because I
wanted to be
nurtured; I don't think
that that need was ever part of my cognition. I relished the fact that
she
did
it. I relished her company.

She used to take me to the movies daily. She had passes to all the big
movie theaters in Los
Angeles
, given to her father courtesy of some movie moguls.
Mr. Turner never used them
himself; he felt that it was
beneath his dignity to flash movie passes. The movie clerks always
made
the recipients of such passes sign a receipt. Patricia had no qualms about
signing anything, but sometimes the nasty clerks wanted Mr. Turner to sign, and
when I went to do that, they were
not satisfied with only the
signature of Mr. Turner. They demanded a driver's license. One of
them,
a sassy young guy, made a remark that cracked him up, and me, too, but which
sent Patricia
into a fit of fury.

"I think you're Mr. Turd," he said with the nastiest smile you
could imagine, "not Mr. Turner."
I could have
sloughed off the remark, but then he subjected us to the profound humiliation
of
refusing us entrance to see
Hercules
starring
Steve Reeves.

Usually, we went everywhere with Patricia's best friend, Sandra
Flanagan, who lived next
door with her parents. Sandra was
quite the opposite of Patricia. She was just as tall, but her face
was
round, with rosy cheeks and a sensuous mouth; she was healthier than a raccoon.
She had no interest in singing. She was only interested in the sensual
pleasures of the body. She could eat and
drink anything
and digest it, and-the feature that finished me off about her-after she had
polished off her own plate, she managed to do the same with mine, a thing that,
being a picky eater, I had
never been able to do in all my life.
She was also extremely athletic, but in a rough, wholesome
way.
She could punch like a man and kick like a mule.

As a courtesy to Patricia, I used to do the same chores for Sandra's
parents that I did for hers:
vacuuming their pool, raking the
leaves from their lawn, taking the trash out on trash day, and incinerating
papers and flammable trash. That was the time in Los Angeles when the air
pollution
was increased by the use of backyard incinerators.

Perhaps it was because of the proximity, or the ease of those young
women, that I ended up
madly in love with both of them.

I went to seek advice from a very strange young man who was my friend,
Nicholas van
Hooten. He had two girlfriends, and he lived with both of
them, apparently in a state of bliss. He
began by giving
me, he said, the simplest advice: how to behave in a movie theater if you had
two
girlfriends. He said that whenever he went to a movie
with his two girlfriends, all his attention
was always
centered on whoever sat to his left. After a while, the two girls would go to
the
bathroom and, on their return, he would have them change
the seating arrangement. Anna would sit where Betty had been sitting, and
nobody around them was the wiser. He assured me that this
was
the first step in a long process of breaking the girls into a matter-of-fact
acceptance of the trio
situation; Nicholas was rather corny,
and he used that trite French expression:
menage a trois.

I followed his advice and went to a theater that showed silent movies
on Fairfax Avenue in
Los Angeles
with Patricia
and Sandy. I sat Patricia to my left and poured all my attention on her.
They
went to the bathroom, and when they returned I told them to switch places. I
started then to do what Nicholas van Hooten had advised, but Patricia would not
put up with any nonsense like that. She stood up and left the theater,
offended, humiliated, and raving mad. I wanted to run after her and apologize,
but Sandra stopped me.

"Let her go," she said with a poisonous smile. "She's a
big girl. She has enough money to get
a taxi and go home."

I fell for it and remained in the theater kissing Sandra, rather
nervously, and filled with guilt. I
was in the middle of a
passionate kiss when I felt someone pulling me backward by the hair. It
was
Patricia. The row of seats was loose and tilted backward. Athletic Patricia
jumped out of the
way before the seats where we were sitting crashed
on the row of seats behind. I heard the
frightened
screams of two movie watchers who were sitting at the end of the row, by the
aisle.

Nicholas van Hooten's tip was miserable advice. Patricia, Sandra, and I
returned home in
absolute silence. We patched up our differences, in
the midst of very weird promises, tears, the works. The outcome of our
three-sided relationship was that, in the end, we nearly destroyed
ourselves.
We were not prepared for such an endeavor. We didn't know how to resolve the
problems
of affection, morality, duty, and social mores. I couldn't leave one of them
for the other, and they couldn't leave me. One day, at the climax of a
tremendous upheaval, and out of sheer
desperation, all three of us
fled in different directions, never to see one another again.

I felt devastated. Nothing of what I did could erase their impact on my
life. I left Los Angeles
and got busy with endless things in an
effort to placate my longing. Without exaggerating in the
least,
I can sincerely say that I fell into the depths of hell, I believed, never to
emerge again. If it
hadn't been for the influence that don Juan had on
my life and my person, I would never have
survived my
private demons. I told don Juan that I knew that whatever I had done was wrong,
that I had no business engaging such wonderful people in such sordid,
stupid shenanigans that I had no preparation to face.