Version 2006.05.21

## "The Active Side of Infinity" - ©1998 by Carlos Castaneda
Starting on the Definitive Journey

### The Jump into the Abyss

There was only one trail leading to the flat mesa. Once we were on the mesa itself, I realized that it was not as extensive as it had appeared when I had looked at it from a distance. The vegetation on the mesa was not different from the vegetation below: faded green woody shrubs that had the ambiguous appearance of trees.

At first, I didn't see the chasm. It was only when don Juan led me to it that I became aware that the mesa ended in a precipice. It wasn't really a mesa, but merely the flat top of a good-sized mountain. The mountain was round and eroded on its east and south faces. However, on part of its west and north sides, it seemed to have been cut with a knife. From the edge of the precipice, I was able to see the bottom of the ravine, perhaps six hundred feet below. It was covered with the same woody shrubs that grew everywhere.

A whole row of small mountains to the south and to the north of that mountaintop gave the clear impression that they had been part of a gigantic canyon, millions of years old, dug out by a no longer existing river. The edges of that canyon had been erased by erosion. At certain points they had been leveled with the ground. The only portion still intact was the area where I was standing.

"It's solid rock," don Juan said as if he were reading my thoughts. He pointed with his chin toward the bottom of the ravine. "If anything were to fall down from this edge to the bottom, it would get smashed to flakes on the rock, down there."

This was the initial dialogue between don Juan and myself that day on that mountaintop. Prior to going there, he had told me that his time on Earth had come to an end. He was leaving on his definitive journey.

His statements were devastating to me. I truly lost my grip, and entered into a blissful state of fragmentation, perhaps similar to what people experience when they have a mental breakdown. But there was a core fragment of myself that remained cohesive: the me of my childhood. The rest was vagueness, incertitude. I had been fragmented for so long that to become fragmented once again was the only way out of my devastation.

A most peculiar interplay between different levels of my awareness took place afterward. Don Juan, his cohort don Genaro, two of his apprentices, Pablito and Nestor, and I had climbed to that mountaintop. Pablito, Nestor, and I were there to take care of our last task as apprentices: to jump into an abyss, a most mysterious affair which don Juan had explained to me at various levels of awareness, but which has remained an enigma [* enigma- something that baffles understanding and cannot be explained] to me to this day.

Don Juan jokingly said that I should get my writing pad and start taking notes about our last moments together. He gently poked me in the ribs and assured me, as he hid his laughter, that it would have been only proper since I had started on the warrior' travelers' path by taking notes.

Don Genaro cut in and said that other warrior travelers before us had stood on that same flat mountaintop before embarking on their journey to the unknown.

Don Juan turned to me and in a soft voice said that soon I would be entering into infinity by the force of my personal power, and that he and don Genaro were there only to bid me farewell. Don Genaro cut in again and said that I was there also to do the same for them.

"Once you have entered into infinity," don Juan said, "you can't depend on us to bring you back. Your decision is needed then. Only you can decide whether or not to return. I must also warn you that few warrior travelers survive this type of encounter with infinity. Infinity is enticing beyond belief. A warrior traveler finds that to return to the world of disorder, compulsion, noise, and pain is a most unappealing affair. You must know that your decision to stay or to return is not a matter of a reasonable choice, but a matter of intending it.

"If you choose not to return," he continued, "you will disappear as if the earth had swallowed you. But if you choose to come back, you must tighten your belt and wait like a true warrior traveler until your task, whatever it might be, is finished; either in success or in defeat."

A very subtle change began to take place in my awareness then. I started to remember faces of people, but I wasn't sure I had met them. Strange feelings of anguish and affection started to mount.

Don Juan's voice was no longer audible. I longed for people I sincerely doubted I had ever met. I was suddenly possessed by the most unbearable love for those persons, whoever they may have been. My feelings for them were beyond words, and yet I couldn't tell who they were. I only sensed their presence, as if I had lived another life before, or as if I were feeling for people in a dream. I sensed that their outside forms shifted: They began by being tall and ended up petite. What was left intact was their essence; the very thing that produced my unbearable longing for them.

Don Juan came to my side and said to me, "The agreement was that you remain in the awareness of the daily world." His voice was harsh and authoritative. "Today you are going to fulfill a concrete task," he went on, "the last link of a long chain; and you must do it in your utmost mood of reason."

I had never heard don Juan talk to me in that tone of voice. He was a different man at that instant, yet he was thoroughly familiar to me. I meekly obeyed him and went back to the awareness of the world of everyday life. I didn't know that I was doing this, however. To me, it appeared, on that day, as if I had acquiesced to don Juan out of fear and respect.

Don Juan spoke to me next in the tone I was accustomed to. What he said was also very familiar. He said that the backbone of a warrior traveler is humbleness and efficiency; acting without expecting anything, and withstanding anything that lies ahead of him.

I went at that point through another shift in my level of awareness. My mind focused on a thought, or a feeling of anguish. I knew then that I had made a pact with some people to die with them, and I couldn't remember who they were. I felt, without the shadow of a doubt, that it was wrong that I should die alone. My anguish became unbearable.

Don Juan spoke to me. "We are alone," he said. "That's our condition, but to die alone is not to die in loneliness."

I took big gulps of air to erase my tension. As I breathed deeply, my mind became clear.

"The great issue with us males is our frailty," he went on. "When our awareness begins to grow, it grows like a column, right on the midpoint of our luminous being, from the ground up. That column has to reach a considerable height before we can rely on it.

"At this time in your life, as a sorcerer, you easily lose your grip on your new awareness. When you do that, you forget everything you have done and seen on the warrior travelers' path because your consciousness shifts back to the awareness of your everyday life.

"I have explained to you that the task of every male sorcerer is to reclaim everything he has done and seen on the warrior travelers' path while he was on new levels of awareness. The problem of every male sorcerer is that he easily forgets because his awareness loses its new level and falls to the ground at the drop of a hat."

"I understand exactly what you're saying, don Juan," I said.

"Perhaps this is the first time I have come to the full realization of why I forget everything, and why I remember everything later. I have always believed that my shifts were due to a personal pathological condition: I know now why these changes take place, yet I can't verbalize what I know."

"Don't worry about verbalizations," don Juan said. "You'll verbalize all you want in due time. Today, you must act on your inner silence; on what you know without knowing. You know to perfection what you have to do, but this knowledge is not quite formulated in your thoughts yet."

On the level of concrete thoughts or sensations, all I had were vague feelings of knowing something that was not part of my mind. I had, then, the clearest sense of having taken a huge step down: Something seemed to have dropped inside me. It was almost a jolt. I knew that I had entered into another level of awareness at that instant.

Don Juan told me then that it is obligatory that a warrior traveler say good-bye to all the people he leaves behind. He must say his good-bye in a loud and clear voice so that his shout and his feelings will remain forever recorded in those mountains.

I hesitated for a long time, not out of bashfulness, but because I didn't know whom to include in my thanks. I had completely internalized the sorcerers' concept that warrior travelers can't owe anything to anyone.

Don Juan had drilled a sorcerers' axiom into me: "Warrior travelers pay elegantly, generously, and with unequaled ease every favor, every service rendered to them. In this manner, they get rid of the burden of being indebted."

I had paid, or I was in the process of paying, everyone who had honored me with their care or concern. I had recapitulated my life to such an extent that I had not left a single stone unturned. I truthfully believed in those days that I didn't owe anything to anyone. I expressed my beliefs and hesitation to don Juan.

Don Juan said that I had indeed recapitulated my life thoroughly, but he added that I was far from being free of indebtedness.

"How about your ghosts?" he went on. "Those you can no longer touch?"

He knew what he was talking about. During my recapitulation, I had recounted to him every incident of my life. Out of the hundreds of incidents that I related to him, he had isolated three as samples of indebtedness that I incurred very early in life, and added to that, my indebtedness to the person who was instrumental in my meeting him. I had thanked my friend profusely, and I had sensations that something out there acknowledged my thanks. The other three had remained stories from my life; stories of people who had given me an inconceivable gift, and whom I had never thanked.

One of these stories had to do with a man I'd known when I was a child. His name was Mr. Leandro Acosta. He was my grandfather's arch-enemy; his true nemesis. [* nemesis- something causing misery or death]

My grandfather had accused this man repeatedly of stealing chickens from his chicken farm. The man wasn't a vagrant, but someone who did not have a steady, definite job. He was a maverick of sorts, a gambler, a master of many trades: handyman, self-styled curer, hunter and provider of plant and insect specimens for local herbalists and curers and any kind of bird or mammal life for taxidermists or pet shops.

People believed that he made tons of money, but that he couldn't keep it or invest it. His detractors and friends alike believed that he could have established the most prosperous business in the area, doing what he knew best- searching for plants and hunting animals- but that he was cursed with a strange disease of the spirit that made him restless; incapable of tending to anything for any length of time.

One day, while I was taking a stroll on the edge of my grandfather's farm, I noticed that someone was watching me from between the thick bushes at the forest's edge. It was Mr. Acosta. He was squatting inside the bushes of the jungle itself. He would have been totally out of sight had it not been for my sharp eight year old eyes.

"No wonder my grandfather thinks that he comes to steal chickens," I thought. I believed that no one else but me could have noticed him: He was utterly concealed by his motionlessness. I had caught the difference between the bushes and his silhouette by feeling rather than sight. I approached him. The fact that people rejected him so viciously, or liked him so passionately, intrigued me no end.

"What are you doing there, Mr. Acosta?" I asked daringly.

"I'm taking a shit while I look at your grandfather's farm," he said, "so you better scram before I get up unless you like the smell of shit."

I moved away a short distance. I wanted to know if he was really doing what he was claiming. He was. He got up. I thought he was going to leave the bush and come onto my grandfather's land and perhaps walk across to the road, but he didn't. He began to walk inward, into the jungle.

"Hey, hey, Mr. Acosta!" I yelled. "Can I come with you?"

I noticed that he had stopped walking. It was again more a feeling than an actual sight because the bush was so thick.

"You can certainly come with me if you can find an entry into the bush," he said.

That wasn't difficult for me. In my hours of idleness, I had marked an entry into the bush with a good-sized rock. I had found out through an endless process of trial and error that there was a crawling space there, which if I followed for three or four yards turned into an actual trail on which I could stand up and walk.

Mr. Acosta came to me and said, "Bravo, kid! You've done it. Yes, come with me if you want to."

That was the beginning of my association with Mr. Leandro Acosta. We went on daily hunting expeditions. Our association became so obvious- since I was gone from the house from dawn to sunset without anybody ever knowing where I went- that finally my grandfather admonished me severely.

"You must select your acquaintances," he said, "or you will end up being like them. I will not tolerate this man affecting you in any way imaginable. He could certainly transmit to you his elan, [* - a feeling of strong eagerness; distinctive and stylish elegance; enthusiastic and assured vigour and liveliness] yes. And he could influence your mind to be just like his: useless. I'm telling you, if you don't put an end to this, I will. I'll send the authorities after him on charges of stealing my chickens, because you know damn well that he comes every day and steals them."

I tried to show my grandfather the absurdity of his charges. Mr. Acosta didn't have to steal chickens. He had the vastness of that jungle at his command. He could have drawn from that jungle anything he wanted. But my arguments infuriated my grandfather even more.

I realized then that my grandfather secretly envied Mr. Acosta's freedom, and Mr. Acosta was transformed for me by this realization from a nice hunter into the ultimate expression of what is at the same time both forbidden and desired.

I attempted to curtail my encounters with Mr. Acosta, but the lure was just too overwhelming for me. Then, one day, Mr. Acosta and three of his friends proposed that I do something that Mr. Acosta had never done before: catch a vulture alive, uninjured.

He explained to me that the vultures of the area, which were enormous with a five to six-foot wingspan, had seven different types of flesh in their bodies; and each one of those seven types served a specific curative purpose. He said that the desired state was that the vulture's body not be injured. The vulture had to be killed by tranquilizer, not by violence. It was easy to shoot them, but in that case, the meat lost its curative value.

So the art was to catch them alive, a thing that he had never done. He had figured out, though, that with my help and the help of his three friends he had the problem licked. He assured me that his was a natural conclusion arrived at after hundreds of occasions on which he had observed the behavior of vultures.

"We need a dead donkey in order to perform this feat; something which we have," he declared ebulliently.

He looked at me, waiting for me to ask the question of what would be done with the dead donkey. Since the question was not asked, he proceeded.

"We remove the intestines, and we put some sticks in there to keep the roundness of the belly.

"The leader of the turkey vultures is the king: He is the biggest; the most intelligent," he went on. "No sharper eyes exist. That's what makes him a king. He'll be the one who will spot the dead donkey, and the first who will land on it. He'll land downwind from the donkey to really smell that it is dead. The intestines and soft organs that we are going to draw out of the donkey's belly we'll pile by his rear end, outside. This way, it looks like a wild cat has already eaten some of it.

"Then, lazily, the vulture will come closer to the donkey. He'll take his time. He'll come hopping-flying, and then he will land on the dead donkey's hip and begin to rock the donkey's body. He would turn it over if it were not for the four sticks that we will stake into the ground as part of the armature. He'll stand on the hip for a while: That will be the clue for other vultures to come and land there in the vicinity. Only when he has three or four of his companions down with him will the king vulture begin his work."

"And what is my role in all this, Mr. Acosta?" I asked.

"You hide inside the donkey," he said with a deadpan expression. "Nothing to it. I give you a pair of specially designed leather gloves, and you sit there and wait until the king turkey vulture rips the anus of the dead donkey open with his enormous powerful beak and sticks his head in to begin eating. Then you grab him by the neck with both hands and don't let go.

"My three friends and I will be hiding on horseback in a deep ravine. I'll be watching the operation with binoculars. When I see that you have grabbed the king vulture by the neck, we'll come at full gallop and throw ourselves on top of the vulture and subdue him."

"Can you subdue that vulture, Mr. Acosta?" I asked him. Not that I doubted his skill, I just wanted to be assured.

"Of course I can!" he said with all the confidence in the world. "We're all going to be wearing gloves and leather leggings. The vulture's talons are quite powerful. They could break a shinbone like a twig."

There was no way out for me. I was caught; nailed by an exorbitant excitation. My admiration for Mr. Leandro Acosta knew no limits at that moment. I saw him as a true hunter; resourceful, cunning, knowledgeable.

"Okay, let's do it then!" I said.

"That's my boy!" said Mr. Acosta. "I expected as much from you." He had put a thick blanket behind his saddle, and one of his friends just lifted me up and put me on Mr. Acosta's horse, right behind the saddle, sitting on the blanket.

"Hold on to the saddle," Mr. Acosta said, "and as you hold on to the saddle, hold the blanket, too."

We took off at a leisurely trot. We rode for perhaps an hour until we came to some flat, dry, desolate lands. We stopped by a tent that resembled a vendor's stand in a market. It had a flat roof for shade. Underneath that roof was a dead brown donkey. It didn't seem that old. It looked like an adolescent donkey.

Neither Mr. Acosta nor his friends explained to me whether they had found or killed the dead donkey. I waited for them to tell me, but I wasn't going to ask. While they made the preparations, Mr. Acosta explained that the tent was in place because vultures were on the lookout from huge distances out there, circling very high, out of sight, but certainly capable of seeing everything that was going on.

"Those creatures are creatures of sight alone," Mr. Acosta said. "They have miserable ears, and their noses are not as good as their eyes. We have to plug every hole of the carcass. I don't want you to be peeking out of any hole, because they will see your eye and never come down. They must see nothing."

They put some sticks inside the donkey's belly and crossed them, leaving enough room for me to crawl in. At one moment I finally ventured the question that I was dying to ask.

"Tell me, Mr. Acosta, this donkey surely died of illness, didn't he? Do you think its disease could affect me?"

Mr. Acosta raised his eyes to the sky. "Come on! You cannot be that dumb. Donkey's diseases cannot be transmitted to man. Let's live this adventure and not worry about stupid details. If I were shorter, I'd be inside that donkey's belly myself. Do you know what it is to catch the king of turkey buzzards?"

I believed him. His words were sufficient to set up a cloak of unequaled confidence over me. I wasn't going to get sick and miss the event of events.

The dreaded moment came when Mr. Acosta put me inside the donkey. Then they stretched the skin over the armature and began to sew it closed. They left, nevertheless, a large area open at the bottom, against the ground, for air to circulate in. The horrendous moment for me came when the skin was finally closed over my head like the lid of a coffin. I breathed hard, thinking only about the excitement of grabbing the king of vultures by the neck.

Mr. Acosta gave me last minute instructions. He said that he would let me know by a whistle that resembled a birdcall when the king vulture was flying around and when it had landed, so as to keep me informed and prevent me from fretting or getting impatient. Then I heard them pulling down the tent, followed by their horses galloping away. It was a good thing that they hadn't left a single space open to look out from because that's what I would have done. The temptation to look up and see what was going on was nearly irresistible.

A long time went by in which I didn't think of anything. Then I heard Mr. Acosta's whistling and I presumed the king vulture was circling around. My presumption turned to certainty when I heard the flapping of powerful wings, and then suddenly, the dead donkey's body began to rock as if it were in a windstorm. Then I felt a weight on the donkey's body, and I knew that the king vulture had landed on the donkey and was not moving anymore. I heard the flapping of other wings and the whistling of Mr. Acosta in the distance. Then I braced myself for the inevitable. The body of the donkey began to shake as something started to rip the skin.

Then, suddenly, a huge, ugly head with a red crest, an enormous beak, and a piercing, open eye burst in. I yelled with fright and grabbed the neck with both hands. I think I stunned the king vulture for an instant because he didn't do anything, which gave me the opportunity to grab his neck even harder, and then all hell broke loose.

He ceased to be stunned and began to pull with such force that I was smashed against the structure, and in the next instant I was partially out of the donkey's body, armature and all, holding on to the neck of the invading beast for dear life.

I heard Mr. Acosta's galloping horse in the distance. I heard him yelling, "Let go, boy, let go, he's going to fly away with you!"

The king vulture indeed was going to either fly away with me holding on to his neck or rip me apart with the force of his talons. The reason he couldn't reach me was because his head was sunk halfway into the viscera and the armature. His talons kept slipping on the loose intestines and they never actually touched me. Another thing that saved me was that the force of the vulture was involved in pulling his neck out from my clasp and he could not move his talons far forward enough to really injure me. The next thing I knew, Mr. Acosta had landed on top of the vulture at the precise moment that my leather gloves came off my hands.

Mr. Acosta was beside himself with joy. "We've done it, boy, we've done it!" he said. "The next time, we will have longer stakes on the ground that the vulture cannot yank out, and you will be strapped to the structure."

My relationship with Mr. Acosta had lasted long enough for us to catch a vulture. Then my interest in following him disappeared as mysteriously as it had appeared and I never really had the opportunity to thank him for all the things that he had taught me.

Don Juan said that he had taught me the patience of a hunter at the best time to learn it; and above all, he had taught me to draw from solitariness all the comfort that a hunter needs.

"You cannot confuse solitude with solitariness," don Juan explained to me once. "Solitude for me is psychological, of the mind. Solitariness is physical. One is debilitating, the other comforting."

For all this, don Juan had said, I was indebted to Mr. Acosta forever whether or not I understood indebtedness the way warrior travelers understand it.

The second person don Juan thought I was indebted to was a ten year old child I'd known growing up. His name was Armando Velez. Just like his name, he was extremely dignified, and starchy; a little old man. I liked him very much because he was firm and yet very friendly. He was someone who could not easily be intimidated. He would fight anyone if he needed to, and yet he was not a bully at all.

The two of us used to go on fishing expeditions. We used to catch very small fish that lived under rocks and had to be gathered by hand. We would put the tiny fish we caught to dry in the sun and eat them raw, all day sometimes.

I also liked the fact that he was very resourceful and clever as well as being ambidextrous. He could throw a rock with his left hand farther than with his right. We had endless competitive games in which, to my ultimate chagrin, he always won. He used to sort of apologize to me for winning by saying, "If I slow down and let you win, you'll hate me. It'll be an affront to your manhood. So try harder."

Because of his excessively starchy behavior, we used to call him 'Senor Velez', but the 'Senor' was shortened to 'Sho', a custom typical of the region in South America where I come from.

One day, Sho Velez asked me something quite unusual. He began his request, naturally, as a challenge to me. "I bet anything," he said, "that I know something that you wouldn't dare do."

"What are you talking about, Sho Velez?"

"You wouldn't dare go down a river in a raft."

"Oh yes I would. I've done it in a flooded river. I got stranded on an island for eight days once. They had to drift food to me."

This was the truth. My other best friend was a child nicknamed Crazy Shepherd. We got stranded in a flood on an island once; with no way for anyone to rescue us. Townspeople expected the flood to overrun the island and kill us both. They drifted baskets of food down the river in the hope that they would land on the island, which they did. They kept us alive in this fashion until the water had subsided enough for them to reach us with a raft and pull us to the banks of the river.

"No, this is a different affair," Sho Velez continued with his erudite [* erudite- having or showing profound knowledge] attitude. "This one implies going on a raft on a subterranean river."

He pointed out that a huge section of a local river went through a mountain. That subterranean section of the river had always been a most intriguing place for me. Its entrance into the mountain was a foreboding cave of considerable size, always filled with bats and smelling of ammonia. Children of the area were told that it was the entrance to hell: sulfur fumes, heat, stench.

"You bet your friggin' boots, Sho Velez, that I will never go near that river in my lifetime!" I said, yelling. "Not in ten lifetimes! You have to be really crazy to do something like that."

Sho Velez's serious face got even more solemn. "Oh," he said, "then I will have to do it all by myself. I thought for a minute that I could goad you into going with me. I was wrong. My loss."

"Hey, Sho Velez, what's with you? Why in the world would you go into that hellish place?"

"I have to," he said in his gruff little voice. "You see, my father is as crazy as you are, except that he is a father and a husband. He has six people who depend on him. Otherwise, he would be as crazy as a goat. My two sisters, my two brothers, my mother and I depend on him. He is everything to us."

I didn't know who Sho Velez's father was. I had never seen him. I didn't know what he did for a living. Sho Velez revealed that his father was a businessman, and that everything that he owned was on the line, so to speak.

"My father has constructed a raft and wants to go. He wants to make that expedition. My mother says that he's just letting off steam, but I don't trust him," Sho Velez continued. "I have seen your crazy look in his eyes. One of these days, he'll do it, and I am sure that he'll die. So, I am going to take his raft and go into that river myself. I know that I will die, but my father won't."

I felt something like an electric shock go through my neck, and I heard myself saying in the most agitated tone one can imagine, "I'll do it, Sho Velez, I'll do it. Yes, yes, it'll be great! I'll go with you!"

Sho Velez had a smirk on his face. I understood it as a smirk of happiness at the fact that I was going with him, not at the fact that he had succeeded in luring me. He expressed that feeling in his next sentence. "I know that if you are with me, I will survive," he said.

I didn't care whether Sho Velez survived or not. What had galvanized me was his courage. I knew that Sho Velez had the guts to do what he was saying. He and Crazy Shepherd were the only gutsy kids in town. They both had something that I considered unique and unheard of: courage. No one else in that whole town had any. I had tested them all. As far as I was concerned, every one of them was dead, including the love of my life, my grandfather. I knew this without the shadow of a doubt when I was ten. Sho Velez's daring was a staggering realization for me. I wanted to be with him to the bitter end.

We made plans to meet at the crack of dawn, which we did, and the two of us carried his father's lightweight raft for three or four miles out of town, into some low, green mountains to the entrance of the cave where the river became subterranean. The smell of bat manure was overwhelming. We crawled on the raft and pushed ourselves into the stream. The raft was equipped with flashlights, which we had to turn on immediately. It was pitch black inside the mountain and humid and hot. The water was deep enough for the raft and fast enough that we didn't need to paddle.

The flashlights would create grotesque shadows. Sho Velez whispered in my ear that perhaps it was better not to look at all, because it was truly something more than frightening. He was right; it was nauseating, oppressive. The lights stirred bats so that they began to fly around us, flapping their wings aimlessly. As we traveled deeper into the cave, there were not even bats anymore, just stagnant air that was heavy and hard to breathe. After what seemed like hours to me, we came to a sort of pool where the water was very deep: It hardly moved. It looked as if the main stream had been dammed.

"We are stuck," Sho Velez whispered in my ear again. "There's no way for the raft to go through, and there's no way for us to go back."

The current was just too great for us to even attempt a return trip. We decided that we had to find a way out. I realized then that if we stood on top of the raft, we could touch the ceiling of the cave, which meant that the water had been dammed almost all the way to the top of the cave. At the entrance it was cathedral-like, maybe fifty feet high. My only conclusion was that we were on top of a pool that was about fifty feet deep.

We tied the raft to a rock and began to swim downward into the depths, trying to feel for a movement of water, a current. Everything was humid and hot on the surface but very cold a few feet below. My body felt the change in temperature and I became frightened; a strange animal fear that I had never felt before. I surfaced. Sho Velez must have felt the same. We bumped into each other on the surface.

"I think we're close to dying," he said solemnly.

I didn't share his solemnity or his desire to die. I searched frantically for an opening. Floodwaters must have carried rocks that had created a dam. I found a hole big enough for my ten-year-old body to go through. I pulled Sho Velez down and showed the hole to him. It was impossible for the raft to go through it. We pulled our clothes from the raft and tied them into a very tight bundle and swam downward with them until we found the hole again and went through it.

We ended up on a water slide, like the ones in an amusement park. Rocks covered with lichen and moss allowed us to slide for a great distance without being injured at all. Then we came into an enormous cathedral-like cave, where the water continued flowing, waist deep. We saw the light of the sky at the end of the cave and waded out. Without saying a word, we spread out our clothes and let them dry in the sun, then headed back for town. Sho Velez was nearly inconsolable because he had lost his father's raft.

"My father would have died there," he finally conceded. "His body would never have gone through the hole we went through. He's too big for it. My father is a big, fat man," he said. "But he would have been strong enough to walk his way back to the entrance."

I doubted it. As I remembered, at times, due to the inclination, the current was astoundingly fast. I conceded that perhaps a desperate, big man could have finally walked his way out with the aid of ropes and a lot of effort.

The issue of whether Sho Velez's father would have died there or not was not resolved then, but that didn't matter to me. What mattered was that for the first time in my life I had felt the sting of envy. Sho Velez was the only being I have ever envied in my life. He had someone to die for, and he had proved to me that he would do it: I had no one to die for, and I had proved nothing at all.

In a symbolic fashion, I gave Sho Velez the total cake. His triumph was complete. I bowed out. That was his town, those were his people, and he was the best among them as far as I was concerned. When we parted that day, I spoke a banality that turned out to be a deep truth when I said, "Be the king of them, Sho Velez. You are the best."

I never spoke to him again. I purposely ended my friendship with him. I felt that this was the only gesture I could make to denote how profoundly I had been affected by him.

Don Juan believed that my indebtedness to Sho Velez was imperishable, that he was the only one who had ever taught me that we must have something we could die for before we could think that we have something to live for.

"If you have nothing to die for," don Juan said to me once, "how can you claim that you have something to live for? The two go hand in hand, with death at the helm."

The third person don Juan thought I was indebted to beyond my life and my death was my grandmother on my mother's side. In my blind affection for my grandfather- the male- I had forgotten the real source of strength in that household: my very eccentric grandmother.

Many years before I came to their household, she had saved a local Indian from being lynched. He had been accused of being a sorcerer. Some irate young men were actually hanging him from a tree on my grandmother's property. She came upon the lynching and stopped it. All the lynchers seemed to have been her godsons and they wouldn't dare go against her. She pulled the man down and took him home to cure him. The rope had already cut a deep wound on his neck.

His wounds healed, but he never left my grandmother's side. He claimed that his life had ended the day of the lynching, and that whatever new life he had no longer belonged to him: It belonged to her. Being a man of his word, he dedicated his life to serving my grandmother. He was her valet, major-domo, [* 'major-domo'- the chief steward or butler of a great household] and counselor.

My aunts said that it was he who had advised my grandmother to adopt a newborn orphan child as her son, something that they resented more than bitterly. When I came into my grandparents' house, my grandmother's adopted son was already in his late thirties; and she had sent him to study in France.

One afternoon, out of the blue, a most elegantly dressed husky man got out of a taxi in front of the house. The driver carried his leather suitcases to the patio. The husky man tipped the driver generously.

I noticed in one glance that the husky man's features were very striking. He had long, curly hair, long, curly eyelashes. He was extremely handsome without being physically beautiful. His best feature was, however, his beaming, open smile, which he immediately turned on me.

"May I ask your name, young man?" he said with the most beautiful stage voice I had ever heard.

The fact that he had addressed me as young man had won me over instantly. "My name is Carlos Aranha, sir," I said, "and may I ask in turn, what is yours?"

He made a gesture of mock surprise. He opened his eyes wide and jumped backward as if he had been attacked. Then he began to laugh uproariously.

At the sound of his laughter, my grandmother came out to the patio. When she saw the husky man, she screamed like a small girl and threw her arms around him in a most affectionate embrace. He lifted her up as if she weighed nothing and twirled her around. I noticed then that he was very tall. His huskiness hid his height. He actually had the body of a professional fighter. He seemed to notice that I was eyeing him. He flexed his biceps.

"I've done some boxing in my day, sir," he said, thoroughly aware of what I was thinking.

My grandmother introduced him to me. She said that he was her son Antoine; her baby; the apple of her eye. She said that he was a dramatist; a theater director; a writer; a poet.

The fact that he was so athletic was his winning ticket with me.

I didn't understand at first that he was adopted. I noticed, however, that he didn't look at all like the rest of the family. While every one of the members of my family were corpses that walked, he was alive; vital from the inside out. We hit it off marvelously. I liked the fact that he worked out every day, punching a bag. I liked immensely that, not only did he punch the bag, he kicked it, too, in the most astounding style; a mixture of boxing and kicking. His body was as hard as a rock.

One day Antoine confessed to me that his only fervent desire in life was to be a writer of note.

"I have everything," he said. "Life has been very generous to me. The only thing I don't have is the only thing I want: talent. The muses do not like me. I appreciate what I read, but I cannot create anything that I like to read. That's my torment; I lack the discipline or the charm to entice the muses, so my life is as empty as anything can be."

Antoine went on to tell me that the one reality that he had was his mother. He called my grandmother his bastion, [* bastion- a group that defends a principle; a stronghold into which people could go for shelter during a battle] his support, his twin soul. He ended up by voicing a very disturbing thought to me.

He said, "If I didn't have my mother, I wouldn't live."

I realized then how profoundly tied he was to my grandmother. All the horror stories that my aunts had told me about the spoiled child Antoine became suddenly very vivid for me. My grandmother had really spoiled him beyond salvation.

Yet they seemed so very happy together. I saw them sitting for hours on end; his head on her lap as if he were still a child. I had never heard my grandmother converse with anybody for such lengths of time.

Abruptly, one day Antoine started to produce a lot of writing. He began to direct a play at the local theater, a play that he had written himself. When it was staged, it became an instant success. His poems were published in the local paper. He seemed to have hit a creative streak.

But only a few months later it all came to an end. The editor of the town's paper publicly denounced Antoine: He accused him of plagiarism and published in the paper the proof of Antoine's guilt.

My grandmother, of course, would not hear of her son's misbehavior. She explained it all as a case of profound envy. Every one of those people in that town was envious of the elegance; the style of her son. They were envious of his personality; of his wit. Indeed, he was the personification of elegance and savoir faire.

But he was a plagiarist for sure. There was no doubt about it.

Antoine never explained his behavior to anyone. I liked him too much to ask him anything about it. Besides, I didn't care. His reasons were his reasons, as far as I was concerned.

But something was broken: From then on, our lives moved in leaps and bounds, so to speak. Things changed so drastically in the house from one day to the next that I grew accustomed to expect anything; the best or the worst.

One night my grandmother walked into Antoine's room in a most dramatic fashion. There was a look of hardness in her eyes that I had never seen before. Her lips trembled as she spoke.

"Something terrible has happened, Antoine," she began.

Antoine interrupted her. He begged her to let him explain.

She cut him off abruptly. "No, Antoine, no," she said firmly. "This has nothing to do with you. It has to do with me. At this very difficult time for you, something of greater importance yet has happened. Antoine, my dear son, I have run out of time.

"I want you to understand that this is inevitable," she went on. "I have to leave, but you must remain. You are the sum total of everything that I have done in this life. Good or bad, Antoine, you are all I am. Give life a try. In the end, we will be together again anyway. Meanwhile, however, 'do', Antoine: Do. Whatever, it doesn't matter what, as long as you do."

I saw Antoine's body as it shivered with anguish. I saw how he contracted his total being; all the muscles of his body; all his strength. It was as if he had shifted gears from his problem, which was like a river, to the ocean.

"Promise me that you won't die until you die!" she shouted at him.

Antoine nodded his head.

My grandmother, the next day, on the advice of her Indian sorcerer counselor, sold all her holdings, which were quite sizable, and turned the money over to her son Antoine. And the following day, very early in the morning, the strangest scene that I had ever witnessed took place in front of my ten year old eyes; the moment in which Antoine said good-bye to his mother. It was a scene as unreal as the set of a moving picture; unreal in the sense that it seemed to have been concocted; written down somewhere; created by a series of adjustments that a writer makes and a director carries out.

The patio of my grandparents' house was the setting. Antoine was the main protagonist; his mother the leading actress. Antoine was traveling that day. He was going to the port. He was going to catch an Italian liner and go over the Atlantic to Europe on a leisurely cruise. He was as elegantly dressed as ever. A taxi driver was waiting for him outside the house, blowing the horn of his taxi impatiently.

I had witnessed Antoine's last feverish night when he tried as desperately as anyone can try to write a poem for his mother.

"It is crap," he said to me. "Everything that I write is crap. I'm a nobody."

I assured him, even though I was nobody to assure him, that whatever he was writing was great. At one moment, I got carried away and stepped over certain boundaries I should never have crossed.

"Take it from me, Antoine," I yelled. "I am a worse nobody than you! You have a mother. I have nothing. Whatever you are writing is fine."

Very politely, he asked me to leave his room. I had succeeded in making him feel stupid; having to listen to advice from a nobody kid. I bitterly regretted my outburst. I would have liked him to keep on being my friend.

Antoine had his elegant overcoat neatly folded, draped over his right shoulder. He was wearing a most beautiful green suit of English cashmere.

My grandmother spoke. "You have to hurry up, dear," she said. "Time is of the essence. You have to leave. If you don't, these people will kill you for the money."

She was referring to her daughters, and their husbands, who were beyond fury when they found out that their mother had quietly disinherited them; and that the hideous Antoine, their arch-enemy, was going to get away with everything that was rightfully theirs.

"I'm sorry I have to put you through all this," my grandmother apologized. "But, as you know, time is independent of our wishes."

Antoine spoke with his grave, beautifully modulated voice. He sounded more than ever like a stage actor. "It'll take but a minute, Mother," he said. "I'd like to read something that I have written for you."

It was a poem of thanks. When he had finished reading, he paused. There was such a wealth of feeling in the air; such a tremor.

"It was sheer beauty, Antoine," my grandmother said, sighing. "It expressed everything that you wanted to say. Everything that I wanted to hear." She paused for an instant. Then her lips broke into an exquisite smile.

"Plagiarized, Antoine?" she asked.

Antoine's smile in response to his mother was equally beaming. "Of course, Mother," he said. "Of course."

They embraced, weeping. The horn of the taxi sounded more impatient yet. Antoine looked at me where I was hiding under the stairway. He nodded his head slightly, as if to say, "Good-bye. Take care."

Then he turned around, and without looking at his mother again, he ran toward the door. He was thirty-seven years old, but he looked like he was sixty, he seemed to carry such a gigantic weight on his shoulders. He stopped before he reached the door, when he heard his mother's voice admonishing him for the last time.

"Don't turn around to look, Antoine," she said. "Don't turn around to look, ever. Be happy, and do. Do! There is the trick. Do!"

The scene filled me with a strange sadness that lasts to this day; a most inexplicable melancholy that don Juan explained as my first-time knowledge that we do run out of time.

The next day my grandmother left with her 'counselor/ manservant/ valet' on a journey to a mythical place called Rondonia, where her sorcerer-helper was going to elicit her cure. My grandmother was terminally ill, although I didn't know it.

She never returned, and don Juan explained the selling of her holdings and giving them to Antoine as a supreme sorcerers' maneuver executed by her counselor to detach her from the care of her family. They were so angry with Mother for her deed that they didn't care whether or not she returned. I had the feeling that they didn't even realize that she had left.

On the top of that flat mountain, I recollected those three events as if they had happened only an instant before. When I expressed my thanks to those three persons, I succeeded in bringing them back to that mountaintop. At the end of my shouting, my loneliness was something inexpressible. I was weeping uncontrollably.

Don Juan very patiently explained to me that loneliness is inadmissible in a warrior. He said that warrior travelers can count on one being on which they can focus all their love; all their care: this marvelous Earth, the mother, the matrix, the epicenter of everything we are and everything we do; the very being to which all of us return; the very being that allows warrior travelers to leave on their definitive journey.

Don Genaro proceeded to perform then an act of magical intent for my benefit. Lying on his stomach, he executed a series of dazzling movements. He became a blob of luminosity that seemed to be swimming as if the ground were a pool.

Don Juan said that it was Genaro's way of hugging the immense earth, and that in spite of the difference in size, the earth acknowledged Genaro's gesture. The sight of Genaro's movements, and the explanation of them replaced my loneliness with sublime joy.

"I can't stand the idea that you are leaving, don Juan," I heard myself saying. The sound of my voice and what I had said made me feel embarrassed. When I began to sob, involuntarily, driven by self-pity, I felt even more chagrined. "What is the matter with me, don Juan?" I muttered. "I'm not ordinarily like this."

"What's happening to you is that your awareness is on your toes again," he replied, laughing.

Then I lost any vestige of control and gave myself fully to my feelings of dejection and despair.

"I'm going to be left alone," I said in a shrieking voice. "What's going to happen to me? What's going to become of me?"

"Let's put it this way," don Juan said calmly. "In order for me to leave this world and face the unknown, I need all my strength, all my forbearance, all my luck; but above all, I need every bit of a warrior traveler's guts of steel. To remain behind and fare like a warrior traveler, you need everything of what I myself need. To venture out there, the way we are going to, is no joking matter; but neither is it to stay behind."

I had an emotional outburst, and kissed his hand.

"Whoa, whoa, whoa!" he said. "Next thing you're going to make a shrine for my guaraches!"

The anguish that gripped me turned from self-pity to a feeling of unequaled loss. "You are leaving!" I muttered. "My god! Leaving forever!"

At that moment don Juan did something to me that he had done repeatedly since the first day I had met him. His face puffed up as if the deep breath he was taking inflated him. He tapped my back forcefully with the palm of his left hand and said, "Get up from your toes! Lift yourself up!"

In the next instant, I was once again coherent, complete, in control. I knew what was expected of me. There was no longer any hesitation on my part, or any concern about myself. I didn't care what was going to happen to me when don Juan left. I knew that his departure was imminent. He looked at me, and in that look his eyes said it all.

"We will never be together again," he said softly. "You don't need my help anymore; and I don't want to offer it to you because if you are worth your salt as a warrior traveler, you'll spit in my eye for offering it to you.

"Beyond a certain point, the only joy of a warrior traveler is his aloneness. I wouldn't like you to try to help me either. Once I leave, I am gone. Don't think about me, for I won't think about you. If you are a worthy warrior traveler, be impeccable! Take care of your world. Honor it: Guard it with your life!"

He moved away from me. The moment was beyond self-pity or tears or happiness. He shook his head as if to say good-bye, or as if he were acknowledging what I felt.

"Forget the self and you will fear nothing in whatever level of awareness you find yourself to be," he said.

He had an outburst of levity. He teased me for the last time on this Earth.

"I hope you find love!" he said.

He raised his palm toward me and stretched his fingers like a child, then contracted them against the palm.

"Ciao," he said

I knew that it was futile to feel sorry or to regret anything; and that it was as difficult for me to stay behind as it was for don Juan to leave. Both of us were caught in an irreversible energetic maneuver that neither of us could stop.

Nevertheless, I wanted to join don Juan, follow him wherever he went. The thought crossed my mind that perhaps if I died, he would take me with him.

I saw then how don Juan Matus, the nagual, led the fifteen other seers who were his companions- his wards, his delight- one by one to disappear in the haze of that mesa toward the north.

I saw how every one of them turned into a blob of luminosity, and together they ascended and floated above the mountaintop like phantom lights in the sky. They circled above the mountain once, as don Juan had said they would do: their last survey; the one for their eyes only; their last look at this marvelous Earth. And then they vanished.

I knew what I had to do. I had run out of time. I took off at my top speed toward the precipice and leaped into the abyss. I felt the wind on my face for a moment, and then the most merciful blackness swallowed me like a peaceful subterranean river.