Don Juan, on the other hand, was very sure I had succeeded, and, acting in accordance with my success, let me know he was going to teach me about peyote.
‘You asked me to teach you about Mescalito,’ he said. ‘I wanted to find out if you had enough backbone to meet him face to face. Mescalito is not something to make fun of. You must have command over your resources. Now I know I can take your desire alone as a good reason to learn.’
‘ You really are going to teach me about peyote?’
‘ I prefer to call him Mescalito. Do the same.’
‘ When are you going to start ?’
‘It is not so simple as that. You must be ready first.’
‘I think I am ready.’
‘This is not a joke. You must wait until there is no doubt, and then you will meet him.’
‘Do I have to prepare myself?’
‘No You simply have to wait. You may give up the whole idea after a while. You get tired easily. Last night you were ready to quit as soon as it got difficult. Mescalito requires a very serious intent.’
2
Monday, 7 August 1961
I arrived at don Juan’s house in Arizona about seven o’clock on Friday night. Five other Indians were sitting with him on the porch of his house. I greeted him and sat waiting for them to say something. After a formal silence one of the men got up, walked over to me, and said, ‘Buenas noches.’ I stood up and answered, ‘Buenas noches.’ Then all the other men got up and came to me and we all mumbled ‘Buenas noches’ and shook hands either by barely touching one another’s finger-tips or by holding the hand for an instant and then dropping it quite abruptly.
We all sat down again. They seemed to be rather shy – at a loss for words, although they all spoke Spanish.
It must have been about half past seven when suddenly they all got up and walked towards the back of the house. Nobody had said a word for a long time. Don Juan signalled me to follow and we all got inside an old pickup truck parked there. I sat in the back with don Juan and two younger men. There were no cushions or benches and the metal floor was painfully hard, especially when we left the highway and got onto a dirt road. Don Juan whispered that we were going to the house of one of his friends who had seven mescalitos for me.
I asked him, ‘Don’t you have any of them yourself, don Juan?’
‘I do, but I couldn’t offer them to you. You see, someone else has to do this.’
‘ Can you tell me why?’
‘Perhaps you are not agreeable to “him” and “he” won’t like you, and then you will never be able to know “him” with affection, as one should; and our friendship will be broken.’
‘Why wouldn’t he like me? I have never done anything to
him.’
‘You don’t have to do anything to be liked or disliked. He either takes you, or throws you away.’
‘But, if he doesn’t take me, isn’t there anything I can do to make him like me?’
The other two men seemed to have overheard my question
and laughed.
‘No! I can’t think of anything one can do,’ don Juan said.
He turned half away from me and I could not talk to him any more.
We must have driven for at least an hour before we stopped in front of a small house. It was quite dark, and after the driver had turned off the headlights I could make out only the vague contour of the building.
A young woman, a Mexican, judging by her speech inflection, was yelling at a dog to make him stop barking. We got out of the truck and walked into the house. The men mumbled ‘Buenas noches’ as they went by her. She answered back and went on yelling at the dog.
The room was large and was stacked up with a multitude of objects. A dim light from a very small electric bulb rendered the scene quite gloomy. There were quite a few chairs with broken legs and sagging seats leaning against the walls. Three of the men sat down on a couch, which was the largest single piece of furniture in the room. It was very old and had sagged down all the way to the floor; in the dim light it seemed to be red and dirty. The rest of us sat in chairs. We sat in silence for a long time.
One of the men suddenly got up and went into another room. He was perhaps in his fifties, tall, and husky. He came back a moment later with a coffee jar. He opened the lid and handed the jar to me; inside there were seven odd-looking items. They varied in size and consistency. Some of them were almost round, others were elongated. They felt to the touch like the pulp of walnuts, or the surface of cork. Their brownish colour made them look like hard, dry nutshells. I handled :hem, rubbing their surfaces for quite some time.
‘This is to be chewed [esto se masca],’ [on Juan said in a whisper.
I had not realized that he had sat next tome until he spoke. I looked at the other men, but no one was taking at me; they were talking among themselves in very low voices. This was a moment of acute indecision and fear. I felt almost unable to control myself.
‘I have to go to the bathroom,’ I said to him. ‘I’ll go outside and take a walk.’
He handed me the coffee jar and I put the peyote buttons in it. I was leaving the room when the man who hid given me the jar stood up, came to me, and said he had a toil«t bowl in the other room.
The toilet was almost against the door. Next to it, nearly touching the toilet, was a large bed which occupied more than half of the room. The woman was sleeping there. I stood motionless at the door for a while, then I came back to the room where the other men were.
The man who owned the house spoke to me in English: ‘Don Juan says you’re from South America. Is there any mescal there?’ I told him that I had never even heard of it.
They seemed to be interested in South America and we talked about the Indians for a while. Then one of the men asked me why I wanted to eat peyote. I told him that I waited to know what it was like. They all laughed shyly.
Don Juan urged me softly, ‘Chew it, chew it [ Masca, masca].’
My hands were wet and my stomach contracted. The jar with the peyote buttons was on the floor by the chair. I bent over, took one at random, and put it in my mouth. It had a stale taste. I bit it in two and started to chew one of the pieces. I felt a strong, pungent bitterness; in a moment my whole mouth was numb. The bitterness increased as I kept on chewing, forcing an incredible flow of saliva. My gums and the inside of my mouth felt as if I had eaten salty, dry meat or- fish, which seems to force one to chew more. After a while I chewed the other piece and my mouth was so numb I couldn’t feel the bitterness any more. The peyote button was a bunch of shreds, like the fibrous part of an orange or like sugarcane, and I didn’t know whether to swallow it or spit it out. At that moment the owner of the house got up and invited everybody to go out to the porch.
We went out and sat in the darkness. It was quite comfortable outside, and the host brought out a bottle of tequila.
The men were seated in a row with their backs to the wall. I was at the extreme right of the line. Don Juan, who was next to me, placed the jar with the peyote buttons between my legs. Then he handed me the bottle, which was passed down the line, and told me to take some of the tequila to wash away the bitterness.
I spat out the shreds of the first button and took a sip. He told me not to swallow it, but to just rinse out my mouth with it to stop the saliva. It did not help much with the saliva, but it certainly helped to wash away some of the bitterness.
Don Juan gave me a piece of dried apricot, or perhaps it was a dried fig – I couldn’t see it in the dark, nor could I taste it – and told me to chew it thoroughly and slowly, without rushing. I had difficulty swallowing it; it felt as if it would not go down.