The Active Side of Infinity (6 page)

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
parapherna
of shamans. The man 1 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," he 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?" 1 asked.

"Beats me," he replied. "They never explained anything
to me. Every time 1 asked them, they
entered into a profound state of
numbness. They hadn't seen anything, they hadn't 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 didn't want to face
the old man, and that what he 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?" 1 asked him. "Things are not
that good for me," he confessed.
"My body doesn't 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'm 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 didn't
know. I had always thought that he was
a tough old cookie. I could never conceive of him as
vulnerable. I didn't 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'm 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, 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 didn't 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 1
should go
downstream and wait for him. He told me the exact spot to
wait. I, of course, didn't believe a
word of what he was saying, so
at first I couldn't 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's 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't 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 didn't see him
turning into a cloud, he disappeared. I couldn't 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 wouldn't 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. 1
was at once both fascinated and appalled by them. However, when I tried to
think about why I was fascinated or appalled, 1
couldn't tell.
All 1 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've had him in front
of me, face-to-
face, only once."

"What man is that? What did you tell me about him?" 1 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, but 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'll 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 shouldn't 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.