“I ascended the heights of blackness and descended again to the light of the earth. And then I found myself in a shallow grave at the edge of the field, covered with rocks and dirt.”
Don Juan said that he knew instantly what to do. After digging himself out he rearranged the grave to look as if a body were still there, and slipped away. He felt strong and determined. He knew that he had to return to his benefactor’s house. But, before he started on his return journey, he wanted to see his family and explain to them that he was a sorcerer and for that reason he could not stay with them. He wanted to explain that his downfall had been not knowing that sorcerers can never make a bridge to join the people of the world. But, if people desire to do so, they have to make a bridge to join sorcerers.
“I went home,” don Juan continued, “but the house was empty. The shocked neighbors told me that farm workers had come earlier with the news that I had dropped dead at work, and my wife and her children had left.”
“How long were you dead, don Juan?” I asked.
“A whole day, apparently,” he said.
Don Juan’s smile played on his lips. His eyes seemed to be made of shiny obsidian. He was watching my reaction, waiting for my comments.
“What became of your family, don Juan?” I asked.
“Ah, the question of a sensible man,” he remarked. “For a moment I thought you were going to ask me about my death!”
I confessed that I had been about to, but that I knew he was seeing my question as I formulated it in my mind, and just to be contrary I asked something else. I did not mean it as a joke, but it made him laugh.
“My family disappeared that day,” he said. “My wife was a survivor. She had to be, with the conditions we lived under. Since I had been waiting for my death, she believed I had gotten what I wanted. There was nothing for her to do there, so she left.
“I missed the children and I consoled myself with the thought that it wasn’t my fate to be with them. However, sorcerers have a peculiar bent. They live exclusively in the twilight of a feeling best described by the words ‘and yet. . .’ When everything is crumbling down around them, sorcerers accept that the situation is terrible, and then immediately escape to the twilight of ‘and yet. . .’
“I did that with my feelings for those children and the woman. With great discipline—especially on the part of the oldest boy—they had recapitulated their lives with me. Only the spirit could decide the outcome of that affection.”
He reminded me that he had taught me how warriors acted in such situations. They did their utmost, and then, without any remorse or regrets, they relaxed and let the spirit decide the outcome.
“What was the decision of the spirit, don Juan?” I asked.
He scrutinized me without answering. I knew he was completely aware of my motive for asking. I had experienced a similar affection and a similar loss.
“The decision of the spirit is another basic core,” he said. “Sorcery stories are built around it. We’ll talk about that specific decision when we get to discussing that basic core.
“Now, wasn’t there a question about my death you wanted to ask?”
“If they thought you were dead, why the shallow grave?” I asked. “Why didn’t they dig a real grave and bury you?”
“That’s more like you,” he said laughing. “I asked the same question myself and I realized that all those farm workers were pious people. I was a Christian. Christians are not buried just like that, nor are they left to rot like dogs. I think they were waiting for my family to come and claim the body and give it a proper burial. But my family never came.”
“Did you go and look for them, don Juan?” I asked.
“No. Sorcerers never look for anyone,” he replied. “And I was a sorcerer. I had paid with my life for the mistake of not knowing I was a sorcerer, and that sorcerers never approach anyone.
“From that day on, I have only accepted the company or the care of people or warriors who are dead, as I am.”
Don Juan said that he went back to his benefactor’s house, where all of them knew instantly what he had discovered. And they treated him as if he had not left at all.
The nagual Julian commented that because of his peculiar nature don Juan had taken a long time to die.
“My benefactor told me then that a sorcerer’s ticket to freedom was his death,” don Juan went on. “He said that he himself had paid with his life for that ticket to freedom, as had everyone else in his household. And that now we were equals in our condition of being dead.”
“Am I dead too, don Juan?” I asked.
“You are dead,” he said. “The sorcerers’ grand trick, however, is to be aware that they are dead. Their ticket to impeccability must be wrapped in awareness. In that wrapping, sorcerers say, their ticket is kept in mint condition.
“For sixty years, I’ve kept mine in mint condition.”
6
Handling Intent
THE THIRD POINT
Don Juan often took me and the rest of his apprentices on short trips to the western range nearby. On this occasion we left at dawn, and late in the afternoon, started back. I chose to walk with don Juan. To be close to him always soothed and relaxed me; but being with his volatile apprentices always produced in me the opposite effect: they made me feel very tired.
As we all came down from the mountains, don Juan and I made one stop before we reached the flatlands. An attack of profound melancholy came upon me with such speed and strength that all I could do was to sit down. Then, following don Juan’s suggestion, I lay on my stomach, on top of a large round boulder.
The rest of the apprentices taunted me and continued walking. I heard their laughter and yelling become faint in the distance. Don Juan urged me to relax and let my assemblage point, which he said had moved with sudden speed, settle into its new position.
“Don’t fret,” he advised me. “In a short while, you’ll feel a sort of tug, or a pat on your back, as if someone has touched you. Then you’ll be fine.”
The act of lying motionless on the boulder, waiting to feel the pat on my back, triggered a spontaneous recollection so intense and clear that I never noticed the pat I was expecting. I was sure, however, that I got it, because my melancholy indeed vanished instantly.
I quickly described what I was recollecting to don Juan. He suggested I stay on the boulder and move my assemblage point back to the exact place it was when I experienced the event that I was recalling.
“Get every detail of it,” he warned.
It had happened many years before. Don Juan and I had been at that time in the state of Chihuahua in northern Mexico, in the high desert. I used to go there with him because it was an area rich in the medicinal herbs he collected. From an anthropological point of view that area also held a tremendous interest for me. Archaeologists had found, not too long before, the remains of what they concluded was a large, prehistoric trading post. They surmised that the trading post, strategically situated in a natural pass way, had been the epicenter of commerce along a trade route which joined the American Southwest to southern Mexico and Central America.
The few times I had been in that flat, high desert had reinforced my conviction that archaeologists were right in their conclusions that it was a natural pass-way. I, of course, had lectured don Juan on the influence of that passway in the prehistoric distribution of cultural traits on the North American continent. I was deeply interested at that time in explaining sorcery among the Indians of the American Southwest, Mexico, and Central America as a system of beliefs which had been transmitted along trade routes and which had served to create, at a certain abstract level, a sort of pre-Columbian pan-Indianism.
Don Juan, naturally, laughed uproariously every time I expounded my theories.
The event that I recollected had begun in the mid-afternoon. After don Juan and I had gathered two small sacks of some extremely rare medicinal herbs, we took a break and sat down on top of some huge boulders. But before we headed back to where I had left my car, don Juan insisted on talking about the art of stalking. He said that the setting was the most adequate one for explaining its intricacies, but that in order to understand them I first had to enter into heightened awareness.