The Active Side of Infinity (38 page)

"What are you doing there, Mr. Acosta?" I asked daringly.

"I'm taking a shit while I look at your grandfather's farm,"
he said, "so you better scram before 1 get up unless you like the smell of
shit."

I moved away a short distance. I wanted to know if he was really doing
what he was claiming. He was. He got up. I thought he was going to leave the
bush and come onto my grandfather's land
and perhaps
walk across to the road, but he didn't. He began to walk inward, into the
jungle.
"Hey, hey, Mr. Acosta!" I yelled. "Can I
come with you?"

I noticed that he had stopped walking; it was again more a feeling than
an actual sight because
the bush was so thick.

"You can certainly come with me if you can find an entry into the
bush," he said.

That wasn't difficult for me. In my hours of idleness, I had marked an
entry into the bush with
a good-sized rock. 1 had found out
through an endless process of trial and error that there was a
crawling
space there, which if I followed for three or four yards turned into an actual
trail on
which I could stand up and walk.

Mr. Acosta came to me and said, "Bravo, kid! You've done it. Yes,
come with me if you want
to."

That was the beginning of my association with Mr. Leandro Acosta. We
went on daily
hunting expeditions. Our association became so obvious,
since I was gone from the house from
dawn to sunset, without anybody
ever knowing where I went, that finally my grandfather admonished me severely.

"You must select your acquaintances," he said, "or you
will end up being like them. I will not
tolerate this
man affecting you in any way imaginable. He could certainly transmit to you his
elan, yes. And he could influence your mind to be just like his: useless. I'm
telling you, if you
don't put an end to this, I will. I'll send the authorities after him on
charges of stealing my
chickens, because you
know damn well that he comes every day and steals them."

I tried to show my grandfather the absurdity of his charges. Mr. Acosta
didn't have to steal
chickens. He had the vastness of that
jungle at his command. He could have drawn from that jungle anything he wanted.
But my arguments infuriated my grandfather even more. I realized
then
that my grandfather secretly envied Mr. Acosta's freedom, and Mr. Acosta was
transformed
for me by this realization from a nice hunter into the
ultimate expression of what is at the same
time both
forbidden and desired.

I attempted to curtail my encounters with Mr. Acosta, but the lure was
just too overwhelming
for me. Then, one day, Mr. Acosta and
three of his friends proposed that I do something that Mr.
Acosta
had never done before: catch a vulture alive, uninjured. He explained to me
that the
vultures of the area, which were enormous, with a five-
to six-foot wingspan, had seven different
types of flesh in their bodies, and
each one of those seven types served a specific curative
purpose. He said that the desired state was that
the vulture's body not be injured. The vulture had to be killed by
tranquilizer, not by violence. It was easy to shoot them, but in that case, the
meat
lost its curative value. So the
art was to catch them alive, a thing that he had never done. He had
figured out, though, that with my help and the
help of his three friends he had the problem licked.
He assured me that his was a natural conclusion
arrived at after hundreds of occasions on which
he had observed the behavior of vultures.

"We need a dead donkey in order to perform this feat, something
which we have," he declared
ebulliently.

He looked at me, waiting for me to ask the question of what would be
done with the dead
donkey. Since the question was not asked, he
proceeded.

"We remove the intestines, and we put some sticks in there to keep
the roundness of the belly.

"The leader of the turkey vultures is the king; he is the biggest,
the most intelligent," he went
on. "No sharper eyes
exist. That's what makes him a king. He'll be the one who will spot the dead
donkey,
and the first who will land on it. He'll land downwind from the donkey to
really smell
that it is dead. The intestines and soft organs that we
are going to draw out of the donkey's belly we'll pile by his rear end,
outside. This way, it looks like a wild cat has already eaten some of it.
Then,
lazily, the vulture will come closer to the donkey. He'll take his time. He'll
come hopping-
flying, and then he will land on the dead donkey's hip
and begin to rock the donkey's body. He
would turn it
over if it were not for the four sticks that we will stake into the ground as
part of the
armature. He'll stand on the hip for a while; that will
be the clue for other vultures to come and land there in the vicinity. Only
when he has three or four of his companions down with him will
the
king vulture begin his work."

"And what is my role in all this, Mr. Acosta?" I asked.

"You hide inside the donkey," he said with a deadpan
expression. "Nothing to it. I give you a
pair of
specially designed leather - gloves, and you sit there and wait until the king
turkey vulture
rips the anus of the dead donkey open with his
enormous powerful beak and sticks his head in to
begin eating.
Then you grab him by the neck with both hands and don't let go.

"My three friends and I will be hiding on horseback in a deep
ravine. I'll be watching the
operation with binoculars. When I see
that you have grabbed the king vulture by the neck, we'll
come
at full gallop and throw ourselves on top of the vulture and subdue him."

"Can you subdue that vulture, Mr. Acosta?" I asked him. Not
that I doubted his skill, I just
wanted to be assured.

"Of course I can!" he said with all the confidence in the
world. "We're all going to be wearing
gloves and
leather leggings. The vulture's talons are quite powerful. They could break a
shinbone like a twig."

There was no way out for me. I was caught, nailed by an exorbitant
excitation. My admiration
for Mr. Leandro Acosta knew no limits
at that moment. I saw him as a true hunter-resourceful cunning, knowledgeable.
"Okay, let's do it then!" I said.

"That's my boy!" said Mr. Acosta. "I expected as much from
you." He had put a thick blanket behind his saddle, and one of his friends
just lifted me up and put me on Mr. Acosta's horse, right
behind
the saddle, sitting on the blanket.

"Hold on to the saddle," Mr. Acosta said, "and as you
hold on to the saddle, hold the blanket,
too."

We took off at a leisurely trot. We rode for perhaps an hour until we
came to some flat, dry,
desolate lands. We stopped by a tent
that resembled a vendor's stand in a market. It had a flat roof for shade.
Underneath that roof was a dead brown donkey. It didn't seem that old; it
looked like an adolescent donkey.

Neither Mr. Acosta nor his friends explained to me whether they had
found or killed the dead
donkey. I waited for them to tell me,
but I wasn't going to ask. While they made the preparations,
Mr.
Acosta explained that the tent was in place because vultures were on the
lookout from huge distances out there, circling very high, out of sight, but
certainly capable of seeing everything that
was going on.

"Those creatures are creatures of sight alone," Mr. Acosta
said. "They have miserable ears, and their noses are not as good as their
eyes. We have to plug every hole of the carcass. I don't want you to be peeking
out of any hole, because they will see your eye and never come down.
They
must see nothing."

They put some sticks inside the donkey's belly and crossed them,
leaving enough room for me
to crawl in. At one moment I finally
ventured the question that I was dying to ask.

"Tell me, Mr. Acosta, this donkey surely died of illness, didn't
he? Do you think its disease
could affect me?"

Mr. Acosta raised his eyes to the sky. "Come on! You cannot be
that dumb. Donkey's diseases
cannot be transmitted to man. Let's
live this adventure and not worry about stupid details. If I
were
shorter, I'd be inside that donkey's belly myself. Do you know what it is to
catch the king of
turkey buzzards?"

I believed him. His words were sufficient to set up a cloak of
unequaled confidence over me. I
wasn't going to get sick and miss the
event of events.

The dreaded moment came when Mr. Acosta put me inside the donkey. Then
they stretched the skin over the armature and began to sew it closed. They
left, nevertheless, a large area open at the bottom, against the ground, for
air to circulate in. The horrendous moment for me came when
the
skin was finally closed over my head like the lid of a coffin. I breathed hard,
thinking only
about the excitement of grabbing the king of vultures by
the neck.

Mr. Acosta gave me last-minute instructions. He said that he would let
me know by a whistle
that resembled a birdcall when the
king vulture was flying around and when it had landed, so as
to
keep me informed and prevent me from fretting or getting impatient. Then I
heard them
pulling down the tent, followed by their horses galloping
away. It was a good thing that they
hadn't left a single space open
to look out from because that's what I would have done. The
temptation
to look up and see what was going on was nearly irresistible.

A long time went by in which I didn't think of anything. Then I heard
Mr. Acosta's whistling and I presumed the king vulture was circling around. My
presumption turned to certainty when I
heard the
flapping of powerful wings, and then suddenly, the dead donkey's body began to
rock
as if it were in a windstorm. Then I felt a weight on
the donkey's body, and I knew that the king
vulture had
landed on the donkey and was not moving anymore. I heard the flapping of other
wings and the whistling of Mr. Acosta in the distance. Then I braced myself for
the inevitable.
The body of the donkey began to shake as something
started to rip the skin.

Then, suddenly, a huge, ugly head with a red crest, an enormous beak,
and a piercing, open
eye burst in. I yelled with fright and
grabbed the neck with both hands. I think I stunned the king
vulture
for an instant because he didn't do anything, which gave me the opportunity to
grab his
neck even harder, and then all hell broke loose. He
ceased to be stunned and began to pull with
such force
that I was smashed against the structure, and in the next instant I was
partially out of
the donkey's body, armature and all, holding on to
the neck of the invading beast for dear life.

I heard Mr. Acosta's galloping horse in the distance. I heard him
yelling, "Let go, boy, let go, he's going to fly away with you!"

The king vulture indeed was going to either fly away with me holding on
to his neck or rip me
apart with the force of his talons.
The reason he couldn't reach me was because his head was sunk
halfway
into the viscera and the armature. His talons kept slipping on the loose
intestines and
they never actually touched me. Another thing that
saved me was that the force of the vulture was
involved in
pulling his neck out from my clasp and he could not move his talons far forward
enough to really injure me. The next thing I knew, Mr. Acosta had landed
on top of the vulture at the precise moment that my leather gloves came off my
hands.

Mr. Acosta was beside himself with joy. "We've done it, boy, we've
done it!" he said. "The
next time, we will have longer
stakes on the ground that the vulture cannot yank out, and you will be strapped
to the structure."

My relationship with Mr. Acosta had lasted long enough for us to catch a
vulture. Then my
interest in following him disappeared as
mysteriously as it had appeared and I never really had the opportunity to thank
him for all the things that he had taught me.

Don Juan said that he had taught me the patience of a hunter at the best
time to learn it; and
above all, he had taught me to draw
from solitariness all the comfort that a hunter needs.

"You cannot confuse solitude with solitariness," don Juan
explained to me once. "Solitude for
me is psychological, of the mind.
Solitariness is physical. One is debilitating, the other
comforting."

For all this, don Juan had said, I was indebted to Mr. Acosta forever
whether or not 1
understood indebtedness the way
warrior-travelers
understand it.