Version 2007.06.28

## "The Active Side of Infinity" - ©1998 by Carlos Castaneda

### Introduction

This book is a collection of the memorable events in my life.

I gathered them following the recommendation of don Juan Matus.

Don Juan was a Yaqui [* Yaqui- a group of Indians in Mexico] Indian shaman [* shaman- one who acts as a medium between the visible and spirit worlds; a practitioner of sorcery for healing or prophecy using supernatural means] nagual [* nagual- natural leader and teacher] from Mexico.

As a teacher, he tried for thirteen years to make me aware of the cognitive [* cognitive- relating to the psychological result of perception and learning and reasoning] world of the shamans who lived in Mexico in ancient times.

Don Juan Matus's suggestion that I gather my memorable events was made as if it were a casual suggestion; something that occurred to him on the spur of the moment.

That was don Juan's style of teaching. He veiled the importance of certain maneuvers behind the mundane. In this fashion, he hid the sting of finality.

He presented his suggestion as if it were something no different from any other concern of my everyday life.

As time went by, Don Juan revealed to me that the shamans of ancient Mexico had conceived of this collection of memorable events as a bona-fide [* bona-fide- undertaken in good faith; not counterfeit or copied] device to stir caches of energy that exist within the self.

The ancient shamans explained these caches as being composed of energy that originates in the body itself, and becomes displaced and pushed out of reach by the circumstances of our daily lives.

In this sense for don Juan and the shamans of his lineage, the collection of memorable events was a means for redeploying their unused energy.

The prerequisite for this collection was the genuine and all-consuming act of putting together the sum total of one's emotions and realizations without sparing anything.

According to don Juan, the shamans of his lineage were convinced that the collection of memorable events was a vehicle for the emotional and energetic adjustment necessary for venturing, in terms of perception, into the unknown.

Don Juan described the total goal of the shamanistic knowledge that he handled as the preparation for facing the definitive journey that every human being has to take at the end of his or her life.

He said that through their discipline and resolve, shamans were capable of retaining their individual awareness and purpose after death.

For shamans, the vague, idealistic state that modern man calls 'life after death' is a concrete region filled to capacity with practical affairs of a different order, yet bearing a similar functional practicality to the practical affairs of our daily life.

Don Juan considered that, for shamans, collecting the memorable events in their lives was the preparation for their entrance into that concrete region which they called the active side of infinity.

Don Juan and I had been talking one afternoon under his ramada: His ramada was a loose structure made of thin poles of bamboo. It looked like a roofed porch that was partially shaded from the sun, but that would not provide protection at all from the rain.

There were some small, sturdy freight boxes there that served as benches. Their freight brands were faded, and appeared to be more ornament than identification.

I was sitting on one of them. My back was against the front wall of the house.

Don Juan was sitting on another box, and was leaning against a pole that supported the ramada.

I had just driven in a few minutes earlier. It had been a daylong ride in hot, humid weather. I was nervous, fidgety, and sweaty.

Don Juan began talking to me as soon as I had comfortably settled down on the box. With a broad smile, he commented that overweight people hardly ever knew how to fight fatness. The smile that played on his lips gave me an inkling that he wasn't being facetious. He was just pointing out to me, in a most direct and at the same time indirect way, that I was overweight.

I became so nervous that I tipped over the freight box on which I was sitting and my back banged very hard against the thin wall of the house. The impact shook the house to its foundations.

Don Juan looked at me inquiringly, but instead of asking me if I was all right, he assured me that I had not cracked the house.

Then he expansively explained to me that his house was a temporary dwelling for him; that he really lived somewhere else.

When I asked him where he really lived, he stared at me.

HTML EDITOR:

Carlos has already been to Juan's other house, but Carlos did not recall this at the time.

END HTML EDITOR

His look was not belligerent: It was, rather, a firm deterrent to improper questions.

I didn't comprehend what he wanted. I was about to ask the same question again, but he stopped me.

"Questions of that sort are not asked around here," he said firmly. "Ask anything you wish about procedures or ideas. Whenever I'm ready to tell you where I live, if ever, I will tell you without your having to ask me."

I instantly felt rejected. My face turned red involuntarily. I was definitely offended.

Don Juan's explosion of laughter added immensely to my chagrin. Not only had he rejected me, he had insulted me and then laughed at me.

"I live here temporarily," he went on, unconcerned with my foul mood, "because this is a magical center. In fact, I live here because of you."

That statement unraveled me. I couldn't believe it. I thought that he was probably saying that to ease my irritation at being insulted. Unable to contain my curiosity, I finally asked him, "Do you really live here because of me?"

"Yes," he said evenly. "I have to groom you. You are like me. I will repeat to you now what I have already told you.

"The quest of every nagual, or leader, in every generation of shamans, or sorcerers, is to find a new man or woman who, like himself, shows a double energetic structure.

"I saw this feature in you when we were in the bus depot in Nogales. When I see your energy, I see two balls of luminosity superimposed, one on top of the other, and that feature binds us together. I can't refuse you any more than you can refuse me."

His words caused a most strange agitation in me. An instant before I had been angry, but now I wanted to weep.

He went on, saying that he wanted to start me off on something shamans called the warriors' way, backed by the strength of the area where he lived which was the center of very strong emotions and reactions. Warlike people had lived there for thousands of years, soaking the land with their concern with war.

He lived at that time in the state of Sonora in northern Mexico, about a hundred miles south of the city of Guaymas. I always went there to visit him under the auspices of conducting my fieldwork.

"Do I need to enter into war, don Juan?" I asked, genuinely worried after he declared that the concern with war was something that I would need someday. I had already learned to take everything he said with the utmost seriousness.

"You bet your boots," he replied, smiling. "When you have absorbed all there is to be absorbed in this area, I'll move away."

I had no grounds to doubt what he was saying, but I couldn't conceive of him as living anywhere else. He was absolutely part of everything that surrounded him.

His house, however, seemed indeed to be a temporary dwelling. It was a shack typical of the Yaqui farmers. It was made out of wattle and daub with a flat, thatched roof. It had one big room for eating and sleeping, and had a roofless kitchen in the back.

"It's very difficult to deal with overweight people," he said.

It seemed to be a non sequitur, [* non sequitur- a reply that has no relevance to what preceded it] but it wasn't. Don Juan was simply going back to the subject he had introduced before I had interrupted him by hitting my back on the wall of his house.

"A minute ago, you hit my house like a demolition ball," he said, shaking his head slowly from side to side. "What an impact! An impact worthy of a portly man."

I had the uncomfortable feeling that he was talking to me from the point of view of someone who had given up on me. I immediately took on a defensive attitude.

He listened, smirking, to my frantic explanations that my weight was normal for my bone structure.

"That's right," he conceded facetiously. "You have big bones. You could probably carry thirty more pounds with great ease and no one, I assure you, no one would notice. I would not notice."

His mocking smile told me that I was definitely pudgy. He asked me then about my health in general, and I went on talking, desperately trying to get out of any further comment about my weight. He changed the subject himself.

"What's new about your eccentricities and aberrations?" he asked with a deadpan expression.

I idiotically answered that they were okay.

Eccentricities and aberrations was how he labeled my interest in being a collector. At that time, I had taken up, with renewed zeal, something that I had enjoyed doing all my life: collecting anything collectible. I collected magazines, stamps, records, World War II paraphernalia such as daggers, military helmets, flags, etc.

"All I can tell you, don Juan, about my aberrations, is that I'm trying to sell my collections," I said with the air of a martyr who is being forced to do something odious.

"To be a collector is not such a bad idea," he said as if he really believed it. "The crux of the matter is not that you collect, but what you collect.

"You collect junk; worthless objects that imprison you as surely as your pet dog does. You can't just up and leave if you have your pet to look after, or if you have to worry about what would happen to your collections if you were not around."

"I'm seriously looking for buyers, don Juan, believe me," I protested.

"No, no, no. Don't feel that I'm accusing you of anything," he retorted. "In fact, I like your collector's spirit. I just don't like your collections, that's all.

"I would like, though, to engage your collector's eye. I would like to propose to you a worthwhile collection."

Don Juan paused for a long moment.

He seemed to be in search of words; or perhaps it was only a dramatic, well-placed hesitation. He looked at me with a deep, penetrating stare.

"Every warrior, as a matter of duty, collects a special album," don Juan went on, "an album that reveals the warrior's personality; an album that attests to the circumstances of his life."

"Why do you call this a collection, don Juan?" I asked in an argumentative tone. "Or an album, for that matter?"

"Because it is both," he retorted. "But above all, it is like an album of pictures made out of memories; pictures made out of the recollection of memorable events."

"Are those memorable events memorable in some specific way?" I asked.

"They are memorable because they have a special significance in one's life," he said. "My proposal is that you assemble this album by putting in it the complete account of various events that have had profound significance for you."

"Every event in my life has had profound significance for me, don Juan!" I said forcefully, and felt instantly the impact of my own pomposity.

"Not really," he replied, smiling, apparently enjoying my reactions immensely. "Not every event in your life has had profound significance for you.

"There are a few, however, that I would consider likely to have changed things for you; to have illuminated your path. Ordinarily, events that change our path are impersonal affairs, and yet are extremely personal."

"I'm not trying to be difficult, don Juan, but believe me, everything that has happened to me meets those qualifications," I said, knowing that I was lying.

Immediately after voicing this statement, I wanted to apologize, but don Juan didn't pay attention to me. It was as if I hadn't said a thing.

He said, "Don't think about this album in terms of banalities, or in terms of a trivial rehashing of your life experiences."

I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and tried to quiet my mind. I was talking to myself frantically about my insoluble problem.

I most certainly didn't like to visit don Juan at all. In his presence, I felt threatened. He verbally accosted me and didn't leave me any room whatsoever to show my worth. I detested losing face every time I opened my mouth. I detested being the fool.

But there was another voice inside me; a voice that came from a greater depth; more distant; almost faint.

In the midst of my barrages of dialogue, I heard myself saying that it was too late for me to turn back.

But it wasn't really my voice or my thoughts that I was experiencing. It was, rather, like an unknown voice that said I was too far gone into don Juan's world, and that I needed him more than I needed air.

"Say whatever you wish," the voice seemed to say to me, "but if you were not the egomaniac that you are, you wouldn't be so chagrined."

"That's the voice of your other mind," don Juan said, just as if he had been listening to, or reading my thoughts.

My body jumped involuntarily. My fright was so intense that tears came to my eyes. I confessed to don Juan the whole nature of my turmoil.

"Your conflict is a very natural one," he said. "And believe you me, I don't exacerbate it that much. I'm not the type.

"I have some stories to tell you about what my teacher, the nagual Julian, used to do to me. I detested him with my entire being.

I was very young, and I saw how women adored him; gave themselves to him like anything. And when I tried to say hello to them, they would turn against me like lionesses ready to bite my head off. They hated my guts and loved him. How do you think I felt?"

"How did you resolve this conflict, don Juan?" I asked with more than genuine interest.

"I didn't resolve anything," he declared. "It, the conflict or whatever, was the result of the battle between my two minds. Every one of us human beings has two minds.

One is a foreign installation. It brings us conflict, self-assertion, doubts, and hopelessness.

The other mind is totally ours. It is like a faint voice that always brings us order, directness, and purpose."

My fixation on my own mental concatenations [* concatenation- the state of being linked together as in a chain] was so intense that I completely missed what don Juan had said. I could clearly remember every one of his words, but they had no meaning for me.

Don Juan looked directly into my eyes, and very calmly repeated what he had just said.

I was still incapable of grasping what he meant. I couldn't focus my attention on his words.

"For some strange reason, don Juan, I can't concentrate on what you're telling me," I said.

"I understand perfectly why you can't," he said, smiling expansively, "and so will you someday at the same time that you resolve the conflict of whether you like me or not; the day you cease to be the me-me center of the world.

"In the meantime," he continued, "let's put the topic of our two minds aside, and go back to the idea of preparing your album of memorable events.

"I should add that such an album is an exercise in discipline and impartiality. Consider this album to be an act of war."

Don Juan's assertion that my conflict of both liking and not liking to see him was going to end whenever I abandoned my egocentrism, was no solution for me.

In fact, that assertion made me angrier. It frustrated me all the more. And when I heard don Juan speak of the album as an act of war, I lashed out at him with all my poison.

I said in a tone of protest, "The idea that this is a collection of events is already hard to understand. On top of all this, when you call it an album and you say that such an album is an act of war, that is too much for me. It's too obscure. Being obscure makes the metaphor lose its meaning."

Don Juan replied calmly, "How strange! It's the opposite for me. Such an album being an act of war has all the meaning in the world for me. I wouldn't like my album of memorable events to be anything but an act of war."

I wanted to argue my point further and explain to him that I did understand the idea of an album of memorable events, but that I objected to the perplexing way he was describing it. I thought of myself in those days as an advocate of clarity and functionalism in the use of language.

Don Juan didn't comment on my belligerent mood. He only nodded his head as if he were fully agreeing with me.

After a while, I either completely ran out of energy, or I got a gigantic surge of it. All of a sudden without any effort on my part, I realized the futility of my outbursts. I felt embarrassed no end.

I asked don Juan in earnest, "What possesses me to act the way I do?"

At that instant I was utterly baffled. I was so shaken by my realization that without any volition [* volition- the capability of conscious choice] on my part, I began to weep.

Don Juan said reassuringly, "Don't worry about stupid details. Every one of us, male and female, is like this."

I asked, "Do you mean, don Juan, that we are naturally petty and contradictory?"

"No," he replied. "We are not naturally petty and contradictory. Our pettiness and contradictions are, rather, the result of a conflict that afflicts every one of us. But only sorcerers are painfully and hopelessly aware of the conflict of our two minds."

Don Juan peered at me. His eyes were like two black charcoals.

I said, "You've been telling me on and on about our two minds, but my brain can't register what you are saying. Why?"

"You'll get to know why in due time," he said. "For the present, it will be sufficient that I repeat to you what I have said before about our two minds.

"One mind we use daily for everything we do is a foreign installation.

"The other is our true mind; the product of all our life experiences; the one that rarely speaks because it has been defeated and relegated to obscurity."

I said, "I think that the crux of the matter is that the concept of the mind being a foreign installation is so outlandish that my mind refuses to take it seriously." I felt that I had made a real discovery.

Don Juan did not comment on what I had said. He continued explaining the issue of the two minds as if I hadn't said a word.

He said, "To resolve the conflict of the two minds is a matter of intending it."

"Intent is a force that exists in the universe. Sorcerers beckon intent by voicing the word intent loud and clear. When sorcerers beckon intent, it comes to them and sets up the path for attainment. In this way, sorcerers always accomplish what they set out to do."

"Do you mean, don Juan, that sorcerers get anything they want, even if it is something petty and arbitrary?" I asked.

"No, I didn't mean that. Intent can be called, of course, for anything," he replied, "but sorcerers have found out, the hard way, that intent comes to them only for something that is abstract. That's the safety valve for sorcerers; otherwise they would be unbearable.

"In your case, beckoning intent to resolve the conflict of your two minds, or to hear the voice of your true mind is not a petty or arbitrary matter- quite the contrary. It is ethereal and abstract, and yet as vital to you as anything can be."

Don Juan paused for a moment and then he began to talk again about the album.

"My own album," he said, "being an act of war, demanded a super-careful selection.

"It is now a precise collection of the unforgetable moments of my life, and everything that led me to those moments. I have concentrated in my collection what has been, and will be meaningful to me. In my opinion, a warrior's album is something most concrete; something so to-the-point that it is shattering."

I had no clue as to what don Juan wanted, and yet I did understand him to perfection.

He advised me to sit down, alone, and let my thoughts, memories, and ideas come to me freely.

He recommended that I make an effort to let the voice from the depths of me speak out and tell me what to select.

Don Juan told me then to go inside the house and lie down on a bed that I had there. It was made of wooden boxes and dozens of empty burlap sacks that served as a mattress. My whole body ached, and when I lay on the bed it was actually extremely comfortable.

I took don Juan's suggestions to heart and began to think about my past; looking for events that had left a mark on me. I soon realized that my assertion that every event in my life had been meaningful was nonsense.

As I pressed myself to recollect, I found that I didn't even know where to start. Through my mind ran endless disassociated thoughts and memories of events that had happened to me, but I couldn't decide whether or not they had had any meaning for me.

The impression I got was that nothing had had any significance whatsoever. It looked as if I had gone through life like a corpse empowered to walk and talk, but not to feel anything.

Having no concentration whatsoever to pursue the subject beyond a shallow attempt, I gave up and fell asleep.

"Did you have any success?" don Juan asked me when I woke up hours later.

Instead of being at ease after sleeping and resting, I was again moody and belligerent.

"No, I didn't have any success!" I barked.

"Did you hear that voice from the depths of you?" he asked.

"I think I did," I lied.

"What did it say to you?" he inquired in an urgent tone.

"I can't think of it, don Juan," I muttered.

"Ah, you are back in your daily mind," he said and patted me forcefully on the back. "Your daily mind has taken over again. Let's relax it by talking about your collection of memorable events.

"I should tell you that the selection of what to put in your album is not an easy matter. This is the reason I say that making this album is an act of war. You have to remake yourself ten times over in order to know what to select."

I clearly understood then, if only for a second, that I had two minds. However, the thought was so vague that I lost it instantly.

What remained was just the sensation of an incapacity to fulfill don Juan's requirement. Instead of graciously accepting my incapacity, though, I allowed it to become a threatening affair.

The driving force of my life in those days was to appear always in a good light. To be incompetent was the equivalent of being a loser; something that was thoroughly intolerable to me. Since I didn't know how to respond to the challenge don Juan was posing, I did the only thing I knew how to do: I got angry.

I said, "I've got to think a great deal more about this, don Juan. I've got to give my mind some time to settle on the idea."

"Of course, of course," don Juan assured me. "Take all the time in the world, but hurry."

Nothing else was said about the subject at that time.

At home, I forgot about the album completely. But one day quite abruptly in the middle of a lecture I was attending, the imperious [* imperious- dealing authoritatively with affairs] command to search for the memorable events of my life hit me like a bodily jolt. A nervous spasm shook my entire body from head to toe.

I began to work in earnest. It took me months to rehash experiences in my life that I believed were meaningful to me. However, upon examining my collection, I realized that I was dealing only with ideas that had no substance whatsoever. The events I remembered were just vague points of reference that I remembered abstractly.

Once again, I had the most unsettling suspicion that I had been reared just to act without ever stopping to feel anything.

One of the vaguest events I recalled which I wanted to make memorable at any cost was the day I found out I had been admitted to graduate school at UCLA.

Yet no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't remember what I had been doing that day. There was nothing interesting or unique that I remembered about that day, except for the idea that it had to be memorable. Entering graduate school should have made me happy or proud of myself, but it didn't.

Another sample in my collection was the day I almost got married to Kay Condor. Her last name wasn't really Condor, but she had changed it because she wanted to be an actress. Her ticket to fame was that she actually looked like Carole Lombard.

That day was memorable in my mind not so much because of the events that took place, but because she was beautiful and wanted to marry me. She was a head taller than I was which made her all the more interesting to me.

I was thrilled with the idea of marrying a tall woman in a church ceremony. I rented a gray tuxedo. The pants were quite wide for my height. They were not bell-bottoms. They were just wide, and that bothered me no end.

Another thing that annoyed me immensely was that the sleeves of the pink shirt I had bought for the occasion were about three inches too long. I had to use rubber bands to hold them up.

Outside of that, everything was perfect until the moment when the guests and I found out that Kay Condor had gotten cold feet, and wasn't going to show up. Being a very proper young lady, she had sent me a note of apology by motorcycle messenger.

She wrote that she didn't believe in divorce, and that she couldn't commit herself for the rest of her days to someone who didn't quite share her views on life. She reminded me that I snickered every time I said the name 'Condor'; something that showed a total lack of respect for her person.

She said that she had discussed the matter with her mother. Both of them loved me dearly, but not enough to make me part of their family. She added that, bravely and wisely, we all had to cut our losses.

My state of mind had been one of total numbness.

When I tried to recollect that day, I couldn't remember whether I felt horribly humiliated at being left standing in front of a lot of people in my gray, rented tuxedo with the wide-legged pants, or whether I was crushed because Kay Condor didn't marry me.

These were the only two events I was capable of isolating with clarity. They were meager examples, but after rehashing them, I had succeeded in re-dressing them as tales of philosophical acceptance. I thought of myself as a being who goes through life with no real feelings, who has only intellectual views of everything.

Taking don Juan's metaphors as models, I even constructed one of my own: a being who lives his life vicariously in terms of what it should be.

I believed, for instance, that the day I was admitted to graduate school at UCLA should have been a memorable day. Since it wasn't, I tried my best to imbue it with an importance I was far from feeling.

A similar thing happened with the day I nearly married Kay Condor. It should have been a devastating day for me, but it wasn't. At the moment of recollecting it, I knew that there was nothing there and began to work as hard as I could to construct what I should have felt.

The next time I went to don Juan's house, I presented to him my two samples of memorable events as soon as I arrived.

"This is a pile of nonsense," he declared. "None of it will do. The stories are related exclusively to you as a person who thinks, feels, cries, or doesn't feel anything at all.

"The memorable events of a shaman's album are affairs that will stand the test of time because they have nothing to do with him, and yet he is in the thick of them. He'll always be in the thick of them, for the duration of his life, and perhaps beyond, but not quite personally."

His words left me feeling dejected; totally defeated. I sincerely believed in those days that don Juan was an intransigent [* intransigent- impervious to pleas, persuasion, requests, or reason] old man who found special delight in making me feel stupid.

He reminded me of a master craftsman I had met at a sculptor's foundry where I worked while going to art school. The master artisan used to criticize and find flaws with everything his advanced apprentices did, and would demand that they correct their work according to his recommendations.

His apprentices would turn around, and pretend to correct their work. I remembered the glee of the master when upon being presented with the same work he would say, "Now you have a real thing!"

Don Juan, shaking me out of my recollection, said, "Don't feel bad. In my time, I was in the same spot. For years, not only did I not know what to choose, I thought I had no experiences to choose from. It seemed that nothing had ever happened to me.

"Of course, everything had happened to me, but in my effort to defend the idea of myself, I had no time or inclination to notice anything."

"Can you tell me, don Juan, specifically, what is wrong with my stories? I know that they are nothing, but the rest of my life is just like that."

"I will repeat this to you," he said. "The stories of a warrior's album are not personal. Your story of the day you were admitted to school is nothing but your assertion about you as the center of everything. You feel, you don't feel; you realize, you don't realize. Do you see what I mean? All of the story is just you."

I asked, "But how can it be otherwise, don Juan?"

"In your other story, you almost touch on what I want, but you turn it again into something extremely personal. I know that you could add more details, but all those details would be an extension of your person and nothing else."

I protested, saying, "I sincerely cannot see your point, don Juan. Every story seen through the eyes of the witness has to be, perforce, personal."

"Yes, yes, of course," he said, smiling, delighted as usual by my confusion. "But then they are not stories for a warrior's album. They are stories for other purposes.

"The memorable events we are after have the dark touch of the impersonal. That touch permeates them. I don't know how else to explain this."

I believed then that I had a moment of inspiration, and that I understood what he meant by the dark touch of the impersonal. I thought that he meant something a bit morbid, and darkness meant that for me.

I related to him a story from my childhood.

One of my older cousins was in medical school. He was an intern, and one day he took me to the morgue. He assured me that a young man owed it to himself to see dead people because that sight was very educational. It demonstrated the transitoriness of life.

He harangued me, on and on, in order to convince me to go. The more he talked about how unimportant we were in death, the more curious I became. I had never seen a corpse, and in the end, my curiosity to see one overwhelmed me and I went with him.

He showed me various corpses and succeeded in scaring me stiff. I found nothing educational or illuminating about them. They were, outright, the most frightening things I had ever seen.

As he talked to me, he kept looking at his watch as if he were waiting for someone who was going to show up at any moment. He obviously wanted to keep me in the morgue longer than my strength permitted. Being the competitive creature that I was, I believed that he was testing my endurance; my manhood.

I clenched my teeth, and made up my mind to stay until the bitter end. The bitter end came in ways that I had not dreamed of.

A corpse that was covered with a sheet actually moved up with a rattle on the marble table where all the corpses were lying as if it were getting ready to sit up. It made a burping sound that was so awful that it burned through me, and will remain in my memory for the rest of my life.

My cousin, the doctor, the scientist, explained that it was the corpse of a man who had died of tuberculosis, and that his lungs had been eaten away by bacilli that had left enormous holes filled with air. He said that in cases like this, when the air changed temperature, it sometimes forced the body to sit up or at least convulse.

"No, you haven't gotten it yet," don Juan said, shaking his head from side to side. "It is merely a story about your fear. I would have been scared to death myself. However, being scared like that doesn't illuminate anyone's path. But I'm curious to know what happened to you."

"I yelled like a banshee," I said. "My cousin called me a coward; a yellow-belly, for hiding my face against his chest, and for getting sick to my stomach all over him."

I had definitely hooked on to a morbid strand in my life. I came up with another story about a sixteen year old boy I knew in high school who had a glandular disease and grew to a gigantic height. His heart did not grow at the same rate as the rest of his body and one day he died of heart failure.

I went with another boy to the mortuary out of morbid curiosity. The mortician, who was perhaps more morbid than the two of us, opened the back door, and let us in. He showed us his masterpiece. He had put the gigantic boy, who had been over seven feet, seven inches tall, into a coffin for a normal person by sawing off his legs. He showed us how he had arranged his legs as if the dead boy were holding them with his arms like two trophies.

The fright I experienced then was comparable to the fright I had experienced in the morgue as a child, but this new fright was not a physical reaction. It was a reaction of psychological revulsion.

"You're almost there," don Juan said. "However, your story is still too personal. It's revolting. It makes me sick, but I see great potential."

Don Juan and I laughed at the horror found in situations of everyday life. By then I was hopelessly lost in the morbid strands I had caught and released.

I told him then the story of my best friend, Roy Goldpiss. He actually had a Polish surname, but his friends called him Goldpiss because whatever he touched, he turned to gold. He was a great businessman.

His talent for business made him a super-ambitious being. He wanted to be the richest man in the world. However, he found that the competition was too tough.

According to him, doing business alone he couldn't possibly compete, for instance, with the head of an Islamic sect who, at that time, got paid his weight in gold every year. The head of the sect would fatten himself as much as his body allowed him before he was weighed.

Then my friend Roy lowered his sights to being the richest man in the United States. The competition in this sector was ferocious.

He went down a notch: Perhaps he could be the richest man in California. He was too late for that, too. He gave up hope that with his chains of pizza and ice cream parlors, he could ever rise in the business world to compete with the established families who owned California.

He settled for being the richest man in Woodland Hills, the suburb of Los Angeles where he lived. Unfortunately for him, down the street from his house lived Mr. Marsh, who owned factories that produced A-one quality mattresses all over the United States, and he was rich beyond belief.

Roy's frustration knew no limits. His drive to accomplish was so intense that it finally impaired his health. One day he died from an aneurysm in his brain.

His death brought, as a consequence, my third visit to a morgue or a mortuary. Roy's wife begged me, as his best friend, to make sure that the corpse was properly dressed.

I went to the funeral parlor where I was led by a male secretary to the inner chambers. At the precise moment I arrived, the mortician was at a high marble-topped table working on Roy's corpse which had already entered rigor mortis.

The mortician was forcefully pushing up the corners of the upper lip with the index and little finger of his right hand while he held his middle finger against his palm. As a grotesque smile appeared on Roy's dead face, the mortician half-turned to me, and said in a servile tone, "I hope all this is to your satisfaction, sir."

Roy's wife- it will never be known whether she liked him or not- decided to bury him with all the garishness that, in her opinion, his life deserved. She had bought a very expensive coffin; a custom-made affair that looked like a telephone booth. She had gotten the idea from a movie. Roy was going to be buried sitting, as if he were making a business call on the telephone.

I didn't stay for the ceremony. I left in the midst of a most violent reaction; a mixture of impotence and anger; the kind of anger that couldn't be vented on anyone.

"You certainly are morbid today," don Juan commented, laughing. "But in spite of that, or perhaps because of that, you're almost there. You're touching it."

I never ceased to marvel at the way in which my mood changed every time I went to see don Juan. I always arrived moody, grouchy, filled with self-assertions and doubts. After a while, my mood would mysteriously change, and I would become more expansive by degrees until I was as calm as I had ever been.

However, my new mood was always couched in my old vocabulary, and my usual way of talking then was that of a totally dissatisfied person who is containing himself from complaining out loud, but whose endless complaints are implied at every turn of the conversation.

"Can you give me an example of a memorable event from your album, don Juan?" I asked in my habitual tone of veiled complaint. "If I knew the pattern you were after, I might be able to come up with something. As it is, I am whistling hopelessly in the dark."

"Don't explain yourself so much," don Juan said with a stern look in his eyes. "Sorcerers say that in every explanation there is a hidden apology. So, when you are explaining why you cannot do this or that, you're really apologizing for your shortcomings; hoping that whoever is listening to you will have the kindness to understand them."

My most useful maneuver, when I was attacked, had always been to turn my attackers off by not listening to them. Don Juan, however, had the disgusting ability to trap every bit of my attention. No matter how he attacked me, no matter what he said, he always managed to have me riveted to his every word.

On this occasion, what he was saying about me didn't please me at all because it was the naked truth.

I avoided his eyes. I felt, as usual, defeated, but it was a peculiar defeat this time. It didn't bother me as it would have if it had happened in the world of everyday life, or right after I had arrived at his house.

After a very long silence, don Juan spoke to me again. "I'll do better than give you an example of a memorable event from my album," he said. "I'll give you a memorable event from your own life; one that should go for sure in your collection. Or I should say, if I were you, I would certainly put it in my collection of memorable events."

I thought don Juan was joking and I laughed stupidly.

He said cuttingly, "This is not a laughing matter. I am serious. You once told me a story that fits the bill."

"What story is that, don Juan?"

"The story of 'figures in front of a mirror,'" he said. "Tell me that story again. But tell it to me in all the detail you can remember."

I began to retell the story in a cursory fashion.

He stopped me and demanded a careful, detailed narration, starting at the beginning.

I tried again, but my rendition didn't satisfy him.

"Let's go for a walk," he proposed. "When you walk, you are much more accurate than when you're sitting down. It is not an idle idea that you should pace back and forth when you try to relate something."

We had been sitting, as we usually did during the day, under the house ramada. I had developed a pattern: Whenever I sat there, I always did it on the same spot with my back against the wall. Don Juan sat in various places under the ramada, but never on the same spot.

We went for a hike at the worst time of the day; noon. He outfitted me with an old straw hat as he always did whenever we went out in the heat of the sun.

We walked for a long time in complete silence. I tried to the best of my ability to force myself to remember all the details of the story. It was mid afternoon when we sat down under the shade of some tall bushes, and I retold the full story.

Years before, while I was studying sculpture in a fine arts school in Italy, I had a close friend, Eddie; a Scotsman who was studying art in order to become an art critic.

What stood out most vividly in my mind about him, and had to do with the story I was telling don Juan, was the bombastic idea he had of himself. He thought he was the most licentious, [* Licentious- lacking moral discipline; especially sexually unrestrained] lusty, all-around scholar and craftsman; a man of the Renaissance. Licentious he was, but lustiness was something in complete contradiction to his bony, dry, serious person.

He was a vicarious follower of the English philosopher Bertrand Russell and dreamed of applying the principles of logical positivism to art criticism. To be an all-around scholar and craftsman was perhaps his wildest fantasy because he was a procrastinator. [* procrastinator- someone who postpones work especially out of laziness or habitual carelessness] Work was his nemesis. [* nemesis- something causing misery or death]

His dubious specialty wasn't art criticism, but rather his personal knowledge of all the prostitutes of the local bordellos of which there were plenty. The colorful and lengthy accounts he used to give me- in order to keep me, according to him, up to date about all the marvelous things he did in the world of his specialty- were delightful. It was not surprising to me, therefore, that one day he came to my apartment, all excited, nearly out of breath, and told me that something extraordinary had happened to him and that he wanted to share it with me.

"I say, old man, you must see this for yourself!" he said excitedly in the Oxford accent he affected every time he talked to me. He paced the room nervously. "It's hard to describe, but I know it's something you will appreciate. Something the impression of which will last you for a lifetime. I am going to give you a marvelous gift for life. Do you understand?"

I understood that he was a hysterical Scotsman. It was always my pleasure to humor him and tag along. I had never regretted it.

"Calm down, calm down, Eddie," I said. "What are you trying to tell me?"

He related to me that he had been in a bordello, where he had found an unbelievable woman who did an incredible thing she called 'figures in front of a mirror'. He assured me repeatedly, almost stuttering, that I owed it to myself to experience this unbelievable event personally.

"I say, don't worry about money!" he said, since he knew I didn't have any. "I've already paid the price. All you have to do is go with me. Madame Ludmilla will show you her 'figures in front of a mirror.' It's a blast!"

In a fit of uncontrollable glee, Eddie laughed uproariously, oblivious to his bad teeth, which he normally hid behind a tight-lipped smile or laugh. "I say, it's absolutely great!"

My curiosity mounted by the minute. I was more than willing to participate in his new delight. Eddie drove me to the outskirts of the city.

We stopped in front of a dusty, badly kept building. The paint was peeling off the walls. It had the air of having been a hotel at one time; a hotel that had been turned into an apartment building. I could see the remnants of a hotel sign that seemed to have been ripped to pieces. On the front of the building there were rows of dirty single balconies filled with flowerpots, or draped with carpets put out to dry.

At the entrance to the building were two dark, shady-looking men wearing pointed black shoes that seemed too tight on their feet. They greeted Eddie effusively. They had black, shifty, menacing eyes. Both of them were wearing shiny light-blue suits, also too tight for their bulky bodies.

One of them opened the door for Eddie. They didn't even look at me.

We went up two flights of stairs on a dilapidated staircase that at one time must have been luxurious.

Eddie led the way and walked the length of an empty, hotel-like corridor with doors on both sides. All the doors were painted in the same drab, dark, olive green. Every door had a brass number tarnished with age, and barely visible against the painted wood.

Eddie stopped in front of a door. I noticed the number 112 on it. He rapped repeatedly. The door opened, and a round, short woman with bleached-blonde hair beckoned us in without saying a word. She was wearing a red silk robe with feathery, flouncy sleeves and red slippers with furry balls on top. Once we were inside a small hall, and she had closed the door behind us, she greeted Eddie in terribly accented English. "Hallo, Eddie. You brought friend, eh?"

Eddie shook her hand, and then kissed it, gallantly. He acted as if he were most calm, yet I noticed his unconscious gestures of being ill at ease.

"How are you today, Madame Ludmilla?" he said, trying to sound like an American and flubbing it.

I never discovered why Eddie always wanted to sound like an American whenever he was transacting business in those houses of ill repute. I had the suspicion that he did it because Americans were known to be wealthy, and he wanted to establish his rich man's bona fides with them.

Eddie turned to me and said in his phony American accent, "I leave you in good hands, kiddo."

He sounded so awful, so foreign to my ears, that I laughed out loud. Madame Ludmilla didn't seem perturbed at all by my explosion of mirth. Eddie kissed Madame Ludmilla's hand again, and left.

"You speak English, my boy?" she shouted as if I were deaf. "You look Eyipcian, or perhaps Torkish."

I assured Madame Ludmilla that I was neither, and that I did speak English. She asked me then if I fancied her 'figures in front of a mirror'. I didn't know what to say. I just nodded my head affirmatively.

"I give you good show," she assured me. "Figures in front of a mirror is only foreplay. When you are hot and ready, tell me to stop."

From the small hall where we were standing we walked into a dark and eerie room. The windows were heavily curtained. There were some low-voltage light bulbs on fixtures attached to the wall. The bulbs were shaped like tubes and protruded straight out at right angles from the wall.

There was a profusion of objects around the room: pieces of furniture like small chests of drawers, antique tables and chairs, a roll-top desk set against the wall crammed with papers, pencils, rulers, and at least a dozen pairs of scissors. Madame Ludmilla made me sit down on an old stuffed chair.

"The bed is in the other room, darling," she said, pointing to the other side of the room. "This is my antisala. Here I give show to get you hot and ready."

She dropped her red robe, kicked off her slippers, and opened the double doors of two armoires standing side by side against the wall. Attached to the inside of each door was a full-length mirror.

"And now the music, my boy," Madame Ludmilla said, then cranked a Victrola that appeared to be in mint condition, shiny, like new. She put on a record. The music was a haunting melody that reminded me of a circus march.

"And now my show," she said, and began to twirl around to the accompaniment of the haunting melody. The skin of Madame Ludmilla's body was tight, for the most part, and extraordinarily white; though she was not young. She must have been in her well-lived late forties.

Her belly sagged, not a great deal, but a bit, and so did her voluminous breasts. The skin of her face also sagged into noticeable jowls. She had a small nose and heavily painted red lips. She wore thick black mascara. She brought to mind the prototype of an aging prostitute. Yet there was something childlike about her; a girlish abandon and trust; a sweetness that jolted me.

"And now, figures in front of a mirror," Madame Ludmilla announced while the music continued.

"Leg, leg, leg!" she said, kicking one leg up in the air, and then the other, in time with the music. She had her right hand on top of her head, like a little girl who is not sure that she can perform the movements.

"Turn, turn, turn!" she said, turning like a top.

"Butt, butt, butt!" she said then, showing me her bare behind like a cancan dancer.

She repeated the sequence over and over until the music began to fade when the Victrola's spring wound down. I had the feeling that Madame Ludmilla was twirling away into the distance, becoming smaller and smaller as the music faded.

Some despair and loneliness that I didn't know existed in me came to the surface from the depths of my very being. It made me get up and run like a madman out of the room, down the stairs, out of the building, and into the street.

Eddie was standing outside the door talking to the two men in light-blue shiny suits. Seeing me running like that, he began to laugh uproariously.

"Wasn't it a blast?" he said, still trying to sound like an American. "'Figures in front of a mirror is only the foreplay.' What a thing! What a thing!"

The first time I had mentioned the story to don Juan, I had told him that I had been deeply affected by the haunting melody and the old prostitute clumsily twirling to the music; and I had been deeply affected also by the realization of how callous my friend was.

When I had finished retelling my story to don Juan as we sat in the hills of a range of mountains in Sonora, I was shaking; mysteriously affected by something quite undefined.

"That story," don Juan said, "should go in your album of memorable events. Your friend, without having any idea of what he was doing, gave you, as he himself said, something that will indeed last you for a lifetime."

I declared, "I see this as a sad story, don Juan, but that's all."

Don Juan replied, "It is indeed a sad story, just like your other stories; but what makes it different and memorable to me is that it touches every one of us human beings; not just you, like your other tales.

"You see, like Madame Ludmilla, every one of us, young and old alike, is making figures in front of a mirror in one way or another. Tally what you know about people. Think of any human being on this earth, and you will know, without the shadow of a doubt, that no matter who they are, or what they think of themselves, or what they do, the result of their actions is always the same: senseless figures in front of a mirror."