His smile was so mischievous that I couldn’t help laughing.
Then he reminded me that I had already heard his detailed account of the first time the spirit had knocked on his door. For a moment I could not figure out what he was talking about.
“It was not just my benefactor who stumbled upon me as I was dying from the gunshot,” he explained. “The spirit also found me and knocked on my door that day. My benefactor understood that he was there to be a conduit for the spirit. Without the spirit’s intervention, meeting my benefactor would have meant nothing.”
He said that a nagual can be a conduit only after the spirit has manifested its willingness to be used—either almost imperceptibly or with outright commands. It was therefore not possible for a nagual to choose his apprentices according to his own volition, or his own calculations. But once the willingness of the spirit was revealed through omens, the nagual spared no effort to satisfy it.
“After a lifetime of practice,” he continued, “sorcerers, naguals in particular, know if the spirit is inviting them to enter the edifice being flaunted before them. They have learned to discipline their connecting links to intent. So they are always forewarned, always know what the spirit has in store for them.”
Don Juan said that progress along the sorcerers’ path was, in general, a drastic process the purpose of which was to bring this connecting link to order. The average man’s connecting link with intent is practically dead, and sorcerers begin with a link that is useless, because it does not respond voluntarily.
He stressed that in order to revive that link sorcerers needed a rigorous, fierce purpose—a special state of mind called unbending intent. Accepting that the nagual was the only being capable of supplying unbending intent was the most difficult part of the sorcerer’s apprenticeship. I argued that I could not see the difficulty. “An apprentice is someone who is striving to clear and revive his connecting link with the spirit,” he explained. “Once the link is revived, he is no longer an apprentice, but until that time, in order to keep going he needs a fierce purpose, which, of course, he doesn’t have. So he allows the nagual to provide the purpose and to do that he has to relinquish his individuality. That’s the difficult part.”
He reminded me of something he had told me often: that volunteers were not welcome in the sorcerers’ world, because they already had a purpose of their own, which made it particularly hard for them to relinquish their individuality. If the sorcerers’ world demanded ideas and actions contrary to the volunteers’ purpose, the volunteers simply refused to change.
“Reviving an apprentice’s link is a nagual’s most challenging and intriguing work,” don Juan continued, “and one of his biggest headaches too. Depending, of course, on the apprentice’s personality, the designs of the spirit are either sublimely simple or the most complex labyrinths.”
Don Juan assured me that, although I might have had notions to the contrary, my apprenticeship had not been as onerous to him as his must have been to his benefactor. He admitted that I had a modicum of self-discipline that came in very handy, while he had had none whatever. And his benefactor, in turn, had had even less.
“The difference is discernible in the manifestations of the spirit,” he continued. “In some cases, they are barely noticeable; in my case, they were commands. I had been shot. Blood was pouring out of a hole in my chest. My benefactor had to act with speed and sureness, just as his own benefactor had for him. Sorcerers know that the more difficult the command is, the more difficult the disciple turns out to be.”
Don Juan explained that one of the most advantageous aspects of his association with two naguals was that he could hear the same stories from two opposite points of view. For instance, the story about the nagual Elías and the manifestations of the spirit, from the apprentice’s perspective, was the story of the spirit’s difficult knock on his benefactor’s door.
“Everything connected with my benefactor was very difficult,” he said and began to laugh. “When he was twenty-four years old, the spirit didn’t just knock on his door, it nearly banged it down.”
He said that the story had really begun years earlier, when his benefactor had been a handsome adolescent from a good family in Mexico City. He was wealthy, educated, charming, and had a charismatic personality. Women fell in love with him at first sight. But he was already self-indulgent and undisciplined, lazy about anything that did not give him immediate gratification.
Don Juan said that with that personality and his type of upbringing—he was the only son of a wealthy widow who, together with his four adoring sisters, doted on him—^he could only behave one way. He indulged in every impropriety he could think of. Even among his equally self-indulgent friends, he was seen as a moral delinquent who lived to do anything that the world considered morally wrong.
In the long run, his excesses weakened him physically and he fell mortally ill with tuberculosis—the dreaded disease of the time. But his illness, instead of restraining him, created a physical condition in which he felt more sensual than ever. Since he did not have one iota of self-control, he gave himself over fully to debauchery, and his health deteriorated until there was no hope.
The saying that it never rains but it pours was certainly true for don Juan’s benefactor then. As his health declined, his mother, who was his only source of support and the only restraint on him, died. She left him a sizable inheritance, which should have supported him adequately for life, but undisciplined as he was, in a few months he had spent every cent. With no profession or trade to fall back on, he was left to scrounge for a living.
Without money he no longer had friends; and even the women who once loved him turned their backs. For the first time in his life, he found himself confronting a harsh reality. Considering the state of his health, it should have been the end. But he was resilient. He decided to work for a living. His sensual habits, however, could not be changed, and they forced him to seek work in the only place he felt comfortable: the theater. His qualifications were that he was a born ham and had spent most of his adult life in the company of actresses. He joined a theatrical troupe in the provinces, away from his familiar circle of friends and acquaintances, and became a very intense actor, the consumptive hero in religious and morality plays.
Don Juan commented on the strange irony that had always marked his benefactor’s life. There he was, a perfect reprobate, dying as a result of his dissolute ways and playing the roles of saints and mystics. He even played Jesus in the Passion Play during Holy Week.
His health lasted through one theatrical tour of the northern states. Then two things happened in the city of Durango: his life came to an end and the spirit knocked on his door.
Both his death and the spirit’s knock came at the same time—in broad daylight in the bushes. His death caught him in the act of seducing a young woman. He was already extremely weak, and that day he overexerted himself. The young woman, who was vivacious and strong and madly infatuated, had by promising to make love induced him to walk to a secluded spot miles from nowhere. And there she had fought him off for hours. When she finally submitted, he was completely worn out, and coughing so badly that he could hardly breathe.
During his last passionate outburst he felt a searing pain in his shoulder. His chest felt as if it were being ripped apart and a coughing spell made him retch uncontrollably. But his compulsion to seek pleasure kept him going until his death came in the form of a hemorrhage. It was then that the spirit made its entry, borne by an Indian who came to his aid. Earlier he had noticed the Indian following them around, but had not given him a second thought, absorbed as he was in the seduction.
He saw, as in a dream, the girl. She was not scared nor did she lose her composure. Quietly and efficiently she put her clothes back on and took off as fast as a rabbit chased by hounds.
He also saw the Indian rushing to him trying to make him sit up. He heard him saying idiotic things. He heard him pledging himself to the spirit and mumbling incomprehensible words in a foreign language. Then the Indian acted very quickly. Standing behind him, he gave him a smacking blow on the back.
Very rationally, the dying man deduced that the Indian was trying either to dislodge the blood clot or to kill him.