“Nothing you would understand,” he replied.
His answer annoyed me. Belligerently I told him I was not stupid, and he could at least try to explain it tome.
“Well, let me just say that, although you could understand it, you are certainly not going to like it,” he said with the smile he always had when he was setting me up. “You see, I really want to spare you.”
I was hooked, and I insisted that he tell me what he meant.
“Are you sure you want to hear the truth?” he asked, knowing I could never say no, even if my life depended on it.
“Of course I want to hear whatever it is you’re dangling in front of me,” I said cuttingly.
He started to laugh as if at a big joke; the more he laughed, the greater my annoyance.
“I don’t see what’s so funny,” I said.
“Sometimes the underlying truth shouldn’t be tampered with,” he said. “The underlying truth here is like a block at the bottom of a big pile of things, a cornerstone. If we take a hard look at the bottom block, we might not like the results. I prefer to avoid that.”
He laughed again. His eyes, shining with mischievousness, seemed to invite me to pursue the subject further. And I insisted again that I had to know what he was talking about. I tried to sound calm but persistent.
“Well, if that is what you want,” he said with the air of one who had been overwhelmed by the request. “First of all, I’d like to say that everything I do for you is free. You don’t have to pay for it. As you know, I’ve been impeccable with you. And as you also know, my impeccability with you is not an investment. I am not grooming you to take care of me when I am too feeble to look after myself. But I do get something of incalculable value out of our association, a sort of reward for dealing impeccably with that bottom block I’ve mentioned. And what I get is the very thing you are perhaps not going to understand or like.”
He stopped and peered at me, with a devilish glint in his eyes.
“Tell me about it, don Juan!” I exclaimed, irritated with his delaying tactics.
“I want you to bear in mind that I am telling you at your insistence,” he said, still smiling.
He paused again. By then I was fuming.
“If you judge me by my actions with you,” he said, “you would have to admit that I have been a paragon of patience and consistency. But what you don’t know is that to accomplish this I have had to fight for impeccability as I have never fought before. In order to spend time with you, I have had to transform myself daily, restraining myself with the most excruciating effort.”
Don Juan had been right. I did not like what he said. I tried not to lose face and made a sarcastic comeback.
“I’m not that bad, don Juan,” I said.
My voice sounded surprisingly unnatural to me.
“Oh, yes, you are that bad,” he said with a serious expression. “You are petty, wasteful, opinionated, coercive, short-tempered, conceited. You are morose, ponderous, and ungrateful. You have an inexhaustible capacity for self-indulgence. And worst of all, you have an exalted idea of yourself, with nothing whatever to back it up.
“I could sincerely say that your mere presence makes me feel like vomiting.”
I wanted to get angry. I wanted to protest, to complain that he had no right to talk to me that way, but I could not utter a single word. I was crushed. I felt numb.
My expression, upon hearing the bottom truth, must have been something, for don Juan broke into such gales of laughter I thought he was going to choke.
“I told you you were not going to like it or understand it,” he said. “Warriors’ reasons are very simple, but their finesse is extreme. It is a rare opportunity for a warrior to be given a genuine chance to be impeccable in spite of his basic feelings. You gave me such a unique chance. The act of giving freely and impeccably rejuvenates me and renews my wonder. What I get from our association is indeed of incalculable value to me. I am in your debt.”
His eyes were shining, but without mischievousness, as he peered at me.
Don Juan began to explain what he had done.
“I am the nagual, I moved your assemblage point with the shine of my eyes,” he said matter-of-factly. “The nagual’s eyes can do that. It’s not difficult. After all, the eyes of all living beings can move someone else’s assemblage point, especially if their eyes are focused on intent. Under normal conditions, however, people’s eyes are focused on the world, looking for food . . . looking for shelter. …”
He nudged my shoulder.
“Looking for love,” he added and broke into a loud laugh.
Don Juan constantly teased me about my “looking for love.” He never forgot a naive answer I once gave him when he had asked me what I actively looked for in life. He had been steering me toward admitting that I did not have a clear goal, and he roared with laughter when I said that I was looking for love.
“A good hunter mesmerizes his prey with his eyes,” he went on. “With his gaze he moves the assemblage point of his prey, and yet his eyes are on the world, looking for food.”
I asked him if sorcerers could mesmerize people with their gaze. He chuckled and said that what I really wanted to know was if I could mesmerize women with my gaze, in spite of the fact that my eyes were focused on the world, looking for love. He added, seriously, that the sorcerers’ safety valve was that by the time their eyes were really focused on intent, they were no longer interested in mesmerizing anyone.
“But, for sorcerers to use the shine of their eyes to move their own or anyone else’s assemblage point,” he continued, “they have to be ruthless. That is, they have to be familiar with that specific position of the assemblage point called the place of no pity. This is especially true for the naguals.”
He said that each nagual developed a brand of ruthlessness specific to him alone. He took my case as an example and said that, because of my unstable natural configuration, I appeared to seers as a sphere of luminosity not composed of four balls compressed into one —the usual structure of a nagual—but as a sphere composed of only three compressed balls. This configuration made me automatically hide my ruthlessness behind a mask of indulgence and laxness.
“Naguals are very misleading,” don Juan went on. “They always give the impression of something they are not, and they do it so completely that everybody, including those who know them best, believe their masquerade.”
“I really don’t understand how you can say that I am masquerading, don Juan,” I protested.
“You pass yourself off as an indulgent, relaxed man,” he said. “You give the impression of being generous, of having great compassion. And everybody is convinced of your genuineness. They can even swear that that is the way you are.”
“But that is the way I am!”
Don Juan doubled up with laughter.
The direction the conversation had taken was not to my liking. I wanted to set the record straight. I argued vehemently that I was truthful in everything I did, and challenged him to give me an example of my being otherwise. He said I compulsively treated people with unwarranted generosity, giving them a false sense of my ease and openness. And I argued that being open was my nature. He laughed and retorted that if this were the case, why should it be that I always demanded, without voicing it, that the people I dealt with be aware I was deceiving them? The proof was that when they failed to be aware of my ploy and took my pseudo-laxness at face value, I turned on them with exactly the cold ruthlessness I was trying to mask.
His comments made me feel desperate, because I couldn’t argue with them. I remained quiet. I did not want to show that I was hurt. I was wondering what to do when he stood and started to walk away. I stopped him by holding his sleeve. It was an unplanned move on my part which startled me and made him laugh. He sat down again with a look of surprise on his face.
“I didn’t mean to be rude,” I said, “but I’ve got to know more about this. It upsets me.”
“Make your assemblage point move,” he urged. “We’ve discussed ruthlessness before. Recollect it!”
He eyed me with genuine expectation although he must have seen that I could not recollect anything, for he continued to talk about the naguals’ patterns of ruthlessness. He said that his own method consisted of subjecting people to a flurry of coercion and denial, hidden behind sham understanding and reasonableness.