Part Two: The Sorcerer’s Ring of Power

In May of 1971, I paid Don Juan the last visit of my apprenticeship. I went to see him on that occasion in the same spirit I had gone to see him during the ten years of our association; that is to say, I was once again seeking the amenity of his company. His friend Don Genaro, a Mazatec Indian sorcerer, was with him. I had seen both of them during my previous visit six months earlier. I was considering whether or not to ask them if they had been together all that time, when Don Genaro explained that he liked the northern desert so much that he had returned just in time to see me. Both of them laughed as if they knew a secret.

“I came back just for you,” Don Genaro said.

“That’s true,” Don Juan echoed.

I reminded Don Genaro that the last time I had been there, his attempts to help me to “stop the world” had been disastrous for me. That was my friendly way of letting him know that I was afraid of him. He laughed uncontrollably, shaking his body and kicking his legs like a child. Don Juan avoided looking at me and also laughed. “You’re not going to try to help me any more, are you, Don Genaro?” I asked.

My question threw both of them into spasms of laughter. Don Genaro rolled on the ground, laughing, then lay on his stomach and began to swim on the floor. When I saw him doing that I knew I was lost. At that moment my body somehow became aware that I had arrived at the end. I did not know what that end was. My personal tendency to dramatization and my previous experience with Don Genaro made me believe that it might be the end of my life. During my last visit to them, Don Genaro had attempted to push me to the brink of “stopping the world.” His efforts had been so bizarre and direct that Don Juan himself had had to tell me to leave. Don Genaro’s demonstrations of “power” were so extraordinary and so baffling that they forced me to a total reevaluation of myself. I went home, reviewed the notes that I had taken in the very beginning of my apprenticeship, and a whole new feeling mysteriously set in on me, although I had not been fully aware of it until I saw Don Genaro swimming on the floor.

The act of swimming on the floor, which was congruous with other strange and bewildering acts he had performed in front of my very eyes, started as he was lying face down. He was first laughing so hard that his body shook as in a convulsion, then he began kicking, and finally the movement of his legs became coordinated with a paddling movement of his arms, and Don Genaro started to slide on the ground as if he were lying on a board fitted with ball bearings. He changed directions various times and covered the entire area of the front of Don Juan’s house, maneuvering around me and Don Juan.

Don Genaro had clowned in front of me before, and every time he had done it Don Juan had asserted that I had been on the brink of “seeing.” My failure to “see” was a result of my insistence on trying to explain every one of Don Genaro’s actions from a rational point of view. This time I was on guard and when he began to swim I did not attempt to explain or understand the event. I simply watched him. Yet I could not avoid the sensation of being dumbfounded. He was actually sliding on his stomach and chest. My eyes began to cross as I watched him. I felt a surge of apprehension. I was convinced that if I did not explain what was happening I would “see,” and that thought filled me with an extraordinary anxiety. My nervous anticipation was so great that in some way I was back at the same point, locked once more in some rational endeavor. Don Juan must have been watching me. He suddenly tapped me; I automatically turned to face him, and for an instant I took my eyes away from Don Genaro. When I looked at him again he was standing by me with his head slightly tilted and his chin almost resting on my right shoulder. I had a delayed startled reaction. I looked at him for a second and then I jumped back. His expression of feigned surprise was so comical that I laughed hysterically. I could not help being aware, however, that my laughter was unusual. My body shook with nervous spasms originating from the middle part of my stomach. Don Genaro put his hand on my stomach and the convulsion-like ripples ceased.

“This little Carlos is always so exaggerated!” he exclaimed as if he were a fastidious man. Then he added, imitating Don Juan’s voice and mannerisms, “Don’t you know that a warrior never laughs that way?” His caricature of Don Juan was so perfect that I laughed even harder.

Then both of them left together and were gone for over two hours, until about midday. When they returned they sat in the area in front of Don Juan’s house. They did not say a word. They seemed to be sleepy, tired, almost absent-minded. They stayed motionless for a long time, yet they seemed to be so comfortable and relaxed. Don Juan’s mouth was slightly opened, as if he were really asleep, but his hands were clasped over his lap and his thumbs moved rhythmically. I fretted and changed sitting positions for a while, then I began to feel a soothing placidity. I must have fallen asleep. Don Juan’s chuckle woke me up. I opened my eyes. Both of them were staring at me.

“If you don’t talk, you fall asleep,” Don Juan said, laughing.

“I’m afraid I do,” I said.

Don Genaro lay on his back and began to kick his legs in the air. I thought for a moment that he was going to start his disturbing clowning again, but he went back right away to his cross-legged sitting position.

“There is something you ought to be aware of by now,” Don Juan said. “I call it the cubic centimeter of chance. All of us, whether or not we are warriors, have a cubic centimeter of chance that pops out in front of our eyes from time to time. The difference between an average man and a warrior is that the warrior is aware of this, and one of his tasks is to be alert, deliberately waiting, so that when his cubic centimeter pops out he has the necessary speed, the prowess to pick it up.

“Chance, good luck, personal power, or whatever you may call it, is a peculiar state of affairs. It is like a very small stick that comes out in front of us and invites us to pluck it. Usually we are too busy, or too preoccupied, or just too stupid and lazy to realize that that is our cubic centimeter of luck. A warrior, on the other hand, is always alert and tight and has the spring, the gumption necessary to grab it.”

“Is your life very tight?” Don Genaro asked me abruptly.

“I think it is,” I said with conviction.

“Do you think that you can pluck your cubic centimeter of luck?” Don Juan asked me with a tone of incredulity. “I believe I do that all the time,” I said.

“I think you are only alert about things you know,” Don Juan said.

“Maybe I’m kidding myself, but I do believe that nowadays I am more aware than at any other time in my life,” I said and really meant it. Don Genaro nodded his head in approval. “Yes,” he said softly, as if talking to himself. “Little Carlos is really tight, and absolutely alert.”

I felt that they were humoring me. I thought that perhaps my assertion about my alleged condition of tightness may have annoyed them.

“I didn’t mean to brag,” I said.

Don Genaro arched his eyebrows and enlarged his nostrils. He glanced at my notebook and pretended to be writing.

“I think Carlos is tighter than ever,” Don Juan said to Don Genaro.

“Maybe he’s too tight,” Don Genaro snapped.

“He may very well be,” Don Juan conceded.

I did not know what to interject at that point so I remained quiet.

“Do you remember the time when I jammed your car?” Don Juan asked casually.

His question was abrupt and unrelated to what we had been talking about. He was referring to a time when I could not start the engine of my car until he said I could. I remarked that no one could forget such an event. “That was nothing,” Don Juan asserted in a factual tone.

“Nothing at all. True, Genaro?”

“True,” Don Genaro said indifferently.

“What do you mean?” I said in a tone of protest. “What you did that day was something truly beyond my comprehension.”

“That’s not saying much,” Don Genaro retorted.

They both laughed loudly and then Don Juan patted me on the back.

“Genaro can do something much better than jamming your car,” he went on. “True, Genaro?”

“True,” Don Genaro replied, puckering up his lips like a child.

“What can he do?” I asked, trying to sound unruffled.

“Genaro can take your whole car away!” Don Juan exclaimed in a booming voice; and then he added in the same tone, “True, Genaro?”

“True!” Don Genaro retorted in the loudest human tone I had ever heard.

I jumped involuntarily. My body was convulsed by three or four nervous spasms.

“What do you mean, he can take my whole car away?” I asked.

“What did I mean, Genaro?” Don Juan asked.

“You meant that I can get into his car, turn the motor on, and drive away,” Don Genaro replied with unconvincing seriousness.

“Take the car away, Genaro,” Don Juan urged him in a joking tone.

“It’s done!” Don Genaro said, frowning and looking at me askew. I noticed that as he frowned his eyebrows rippled, making the look in his eyes mischievous and penetrating.

“All right!” Don Juan said calmly. “Let’s go down there and examine the car.”

“Yes!” Don Genaro echoed. “Let’s go down there and examine the car.”

They stood up, very slowly. For an instant I did not know what to do, but Don Juan signaled me to stand up. We began walking up the small hill in front of Don Juan’s house. Both of them flanked me, Don Juan to my right and Don Genaro to my left. They were perhaps six or seven feet ahead of me, always within my full field of vision.

“Let’s examine the car,” Don Genaro said again.

Don Juan moved his hands as if he were spinning an invisible thread; Don Genaro did likewise and repeated, “Let’s examine the car.” They walked with a sort of bounce. Their steps were longer than usual, and their hands moved as though they were whipping or batting some invisible objects in front of them. I had never seen Don Juan clowning like that and felt almost embarrassed to look at him.

We reached the top and I looked down to the area at the foot of the hill, some fifty yards away, where I had parked my car. My stomach contracted with a jolt. The car was not there! I ran down the hill. My car was not anywhere in sight. I experienced a moment of great confusion. I was disoriented. My car had been parked there since I had arrived early in the morning. Perhaps half an hour before, I had come down to get a new pad of writing paper. At that time I had thought of leaving the windows open because of the excessive heat, but the number of mosquitoes and other flying insects that abounded in the area had made me change my mind, and I had left the car locked as usual.

I looked all around again. I refused to believe that my car was gone. I walked to the edge of the cleared area. Don Juan and Don Genaro joined me and stood by me, doing exactly what I was doing, peering into the distance to see if the car was somewhere in sight. I had a moment of euphoria that gave way to a disconcerting sense of annoyance. They seemed to have noticed it and began to walk around me, moving their hands as if they were rolling dough in them.

“What do you think happened to the car, Genaro?” Don Juan asked in a meek tone.

“I drove it away,” Don Genaro said and made the most astounding motion of shifting gears and steering. He bent his legs as though he were sitting, and remained in that position for a few moments, obviously sustained only by the muscles of his legs; then he shifted his weight to his right leg and stretched his left foot to mimic the action on the clutch. He made the sound of a motor with his lips; and finally, to top everything, he pretended to have hit a bump in the road and bobbed up and down, giving me the complete sensation of an inept driver that bounces without letting go of the steering wheel.

Don Genaro’s pantomime was stupendous. Don Juan laughed until he was out of breath. I wanted to join them in their mirth but I was unable to relax. I felt threatened and ill at ease. An anxiety that had no precedence in my life possessed me. I felt I was burning up inside and began kicking small rocks on the ground and ended up hurling them with an unconscious and unpredictable fury. It was as if the wrath was actually outside of myself and had suddenly enveloped me.

Then the feeling of annoyance left me, as mysteriously as it had hit me. I took a deep breath and felt better. I did not dare to look at Don Juan. My display of anger embarrassed me, but at the same time I wanted to laugh. Don Juan came to my side and patted me on the back. Don Genaro put his arm on my shoulder.

“It’s all right!” Don Genaro said. “Indulge yourself. Punch yourself in the nose and bleed. Then you can get a rock and knock your teeth out. It’ll feel good! And if that doesn’t help, you can mash your balls with the same rock on that big boulder over there.” Don Juan giggled. I told them that I was ashamed of myself for having behaved so poorly. I did not know what had gotten into me. Don Juan said that he was sure I knew exactly what was going on, that I was pretending not to know, and that it was the act of pretending that made me angry.

Don Genaro was unusually comforting; he patted my back repeatedly.

“It happens to all of us,” Don Juan said.

“What do you mean by that, Don Juan?” Don Genaro asked, imitating my voice, mocking my habit of asking Don Juan questions.

Don Juan said some absurd things like “When the world is upside down we are right side up, but when the world is right side up we are upside down. Now when the world and we are right side up, we think we are upside down. . . .” He went on and on, talking gibberish while Don Genaro mimicked my taking notes. He wrote on an invisible pad, enlarging his nostrils as he moved his hand, keeping his eyes wide open and fixed on Don Juan. Don Genaro had caught on to my efforts to write without looking at my pad in order to avoid altering the natural flow of conversation. His portrayal was genuinely hilarious.

I suddenly felt very at ease, happy. Their laughter was soothing. For a moment I let go and had a belly laugh. But then my mind entered into a new state of apprehension, confusion, and annoyance. I thought that whatever was taking place there was impossible; in fact, it was inconceivable according to the logical order by which I am accustomed to judge the world at hand. Yet, as the perceiver, I perceived that my car was not there. The thought occurred to me, as it always had happened when Don Juan had confronted me with inexplicable phenomena, that I was being tricked by ordinary means. My mind had always, under stress, involuntarily and consistently repeated the same construct. I began to consider how many confederates Don Juan and Don Genaro would have needed in order to lift my car and remove it from where I had parked it. I was absolutely sure that I had compulsively locked the doors; the handbrake was on; it was in gear; and the steering wheel was locked. In order to move it they would have had to lift it up bodily. That task would have required a labor force that I was convinced neither of them could have brought together. Another possibility was that someone in agreement with them had broken into my car, wired it, and driven it away. To do that would have required a specialized knowledge that was beyond their means. The only other possible explanation was that perhaps they were mesmerizing me. Their movements were so novel to me and so suspicious that I entered into a spin of rationalizations. I thought that if they were hypnotizing me I was then in a state of altered consciousness.

In my experience with Don Juan I had noticed that in such states one is incapable of keeping a consistent mental record of the passage of time. There had never been an enduring order, in matters of passage of time, in all the states of nonordinary reality I had experienced, and my conclusion was that if I kept myself alert a moment would come when I would lose my order of sequential time. As if, for example, I were looking at a mountain at a given moment, and then in my next moment of awareness I found myself looking at a valley in the opposite direction, but without remembering having turned around. I felt that if something of that nature would happen to me I could then explain what was taking place with my car as, perhaps, a case of hypnosis. I decided that the only thing I could do was to watch every detail with excruciating thoroughness.

“Where’s my car?” I asked, addressing both of them.

“Where’s the car, Genaro?” Don Juan asked with a look of utmost seriousness.

Don Genaro began turning over small rocks and looking underneath them. He worked feverishly over the whole flat area where I had parked my car. He actually turned over every rock. At times he would pretend to get angry and I would hurl the rock into the bushes.

Don Juan seemed to enjoy the scene beyond words. He giggled and chuckled and was almost oblivious to my presence.

Don Genaro had just finished hurling a rock in a display of sham frustration when he came upon a good-sized boulder, the only large and heavy rock in the parking area. He attempted to turn it over but it was too heavy and too deeply imbedded in the ground. He struggled and puffed until he was perspiring. Then he sat on the rock and called Don Juan to help him. Don Juan turned to me with a beaming smile and said, “Come on, let’s give Genaro a hand.”

“What’s he doing?” I asked.

“He’s looking for your car,” Don Juan said in a casual and factual tone.

“For heaven’s sake! How can he find it under the rocks?” I protested.

“For heaven’s sake, why not?” Don Genaro retorted and both of them roared with laughter.

We could not budge the rock. Don Juan suggested that we go to the house and look for a thick piece of wood to use as a lever.

On our way to the house I told them that their acts were absurd and that whatever they were doing to me was unnecessary.

Don Genaro peered at me. “Genaro is a very thorough man,” Don Juan said with a serious expression. “He’s as thorough and meticulous as you are. You yourself said that you never leave a stone unturned. He’s doing the same.” Don Genaro patted me on the shoulder and said that Don Juan was absolutely right and that, in fact, he wanted to be like me. He looked at me with an insane glint and opened his nostrils.

Don Juan clapped his hands and threw his hat to the ground. After a long search around the house for a thick piece of wood, Don Genaro found a long and fairly thick tree trunk, a part of a house beam. He put it across his shoulders and we started back to the place where my car had been.

As we were going up the small hill and were about to reach a bend in the trail from where I would see the flat parking area, I had a sudden insight. It occurred to me that I was going to find my car before they did, but when I looked down, there was no car at the foot of the hill. Don Juan and Don Genaro must have understood what I had had in mind and ran after me, laughing uproariously.

Once we got to the bottom of the hill they immediately went to work. I watched them for a few moments. Their acts were incomprehensible. They were not pretending that they were working, they were actually immersed in the task of turning over a boulder to see if my car was underneath. That was too much for me and I joined them. They puffed and yelled and Don Genaro howled like a coyote. They were soaked in perspiration. I noticed how terribly strong their bodies were, especially Don Juan’s. Next to them I was a flabby young man.

Very soon I was also perspiring copiously. Finally we succeeded in turning over the boulder and Don Genaro examined the dirt underneath the rock with the most maddening patience and thoroughness.

“No. It isn’t here,” he announced.

That statement brought both of them down to the ground with laughter. I laughed nervously. Don Juan seemed to have true spasms of pain and covered his face and lay down as his body shook with laughter. “In which direction do we go now?” Don Genaro asked after a long rest. Don Juan pointed with a nod of his head.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“To look for your car!” Don Juan said and did not crack a smile.

They again flanked me as we walked into the brush. We had only covered a few yards when Don Genaro signaled us to stop. He tiptoed to a round bush a few steps away, looked in the inside branches for a few moments, and said that the car was not there.

We kept on walking for a while and then Don Genaro made a gesture with his hand to be quiet. He arched his back as he stood on his toes and extended his arms over his head. His fingers were contracted like a claw. From where I stood, Don Genaro’s body had the shape of a letter S. He maintained that position for an instant and then virtually plunged headfirst on a long twig with dry leaves. He carefully lifted it up and examined it and again remarked that the car was not there.

As we walked into the deep chaparral he looked behind bushes and climbed small paloverde trees to look into their foliage, only to conclude that the car was not there either.

Meanwhile I kept a most meticulous mental record of everything I touched or saw. My sequential and orderly view of the world around me was as continuous as it had always been. I touched rocks, bushes, trees. I shifted my view from the foreground to the background by looking out of one eye and then out of the other. By all calculations I was walking in the chaparral as I had done scores of times during my ordinary life.

Next Don Genaro lay down on his stomach and asked us to do likewise. He rested his chin on his clasped hands. Don Juan did the same. Both of them stared at a series of small protuberances on the ground that looked like minute hills. Suddenly Don Genaro made a sweeping movement with his right hand and clasped something. He hurriedly stood up and so did Don Juan. Don Genaro held his clasped hand in front of us and signaled us to come closer and look. Then he slowly began to open his hand. When it was half open a big black object flew away. The motion was so sudden and the flying object was so big that I jumped back and nearly lost my balance. Don Juan propped me up.

“That wasn’t the car,” Don Genaro complained. “It was a goddamn fly. Sorry!” Both of them scrutinized me. They were standing in front of me and were not looking directly at me but out of the corners of their eyes. It was a prolonged look.

“It was a fly, wasn’t it?” Don Genaro asked me.

“I think so,” I said.

“Don’t think,” Don Juan ordered me imperiously. “What did you see?”

“I saw something as big as a crow flying out of his hand,” I said.

My statement was congruous with what I had perceived and was not intended as a joke, but they took it as perhaps the most hilarious statement that anyone had made that day. Both of them jumped up and down and laughed until they choked. “I think Carlos has had enough,” Don Juan said. His voice sounded hoarse from laughing.

Don Genaro said that he was about to find my car, that the feeling was getting hotter and hotter. Don Juan said we were in a rugged area and that to find the car there was not a desirable thing. Don Genaro took off his hat and rearranged the strap with a piece of string from his pouch, then he attached his woolen belt to a yellow tassel affixed to the brim of the hat.

“I’m making a kite out of my hat,” he said to me.

I watched him and I knew that he was joking. I had always considered myself to be an expert on kites. When I was a child I used to make the most complex kites and I knew that the brim of the straw hat was too brittle to resist the wind. The hat’s crown, on the other hand, was too deep and the wind would circulate inside it, making it impossible to lift the hat off the ground.

“You don’t think it’ll fly, do you?” Don Juan asked me.

“I know it won’t,” I said.

Don Genaro was unconcerned and finished attaching a long string to his kite-hat. It was a windy day and Don Genaro ran downhill as Don Juan held his hat, then Don Genaro pulled the string and the damn thing actually flew.

“Look, look at the kite!” Don Genaro yelled. It bobbed a couple of times but it remained in the air.

“Don’t take your eyes off of the kite,” Don Juan said firmly. For a moment I felt dizzy. Looking at the kite, I had had a complete recollection of another time; it was as if I were flying a kite myself, as I used to, when it was windy in the hills of my home town.

For a brief moment the recollection engulfed me and I lost my awareness of the passage of time.

I heard Don Genaro yelling something and I saw the hat bobbing up and down and then falling to the ground, where my car was. It all took place with such speed that I did not have a clear picture of what had happened. I became dizzy and absent-minded. My mind held on to a very confusing image. I either saw Don Genaro’s hat turning into my car, or I saw the hat falling over on top of the car. I wanted to believe the latter, that Don Genaro had used his hat to point at my car. Not that it really mattered, one thing was as awesome as the other, but just the same my mind hooked on that arbitrary detail in order to keep my original mental balance. “Don’t fight it,” I heard Don Juan saying. I felt that something inside me was about to surface. Thoughts and images came in uncontrollable waves as if I were falling asleep. I stared at the car dumbfounded. It was sitting on a rocky flat area about a hundred feet away. It actually looked as if someone had just placed it there. I ran towards it and began to examine it.

“Goddammit!” Don Juan exclaimed. “Don’t stare at the car. Stop the world!”

Then as in a dream I heard him yelling, “Genaro’s hat! Genaro’s hat!”

I looked at them. They were staring at me directly. Their eyes were piercing. I felt a pain in my stomach. I had an instantaneous headache and got ill. Don Juan and Don Genaro looked at me curiously. I sat by the car for a while and then, quite automatically, I unlocked the door and let Don Genaro get in the back seat. Don Juan followed him and sat next to him. I thought that was strange because he usually sat in the front seat. I drove my car to Don Juan’s house in a sort of haze. I was not myself at all. My stomach was very upset, and the feeling of nausea demolished all my sobriety. I drove mechanically.

I heard Don Juan and Don Genaro in the back seat laughing and giggling like children. I heard Don Juan asking me, “Are we getting closer?” It was at that point that I took deliberate notice of the road. We were actually very close to his house. “We’re about to get there,” I muttered. They howled with laughter. They clapped their hands and slapped their thighs. When we arrived at the house I automatically jumped out of the car and opened the door for them. Don Genaro stepped out first and congratulated me for what he said was the nicest and smoothest ride he had ever taken in his life. Don Juan said the same. I did not pay much attention to them. I locked my car and barely made it to the house. I heard Don Juan and Don Genaro roaring with laughter before I fell asleep. The next day as soon as I woke up I began asking Don Juan questions. He was cutting firewood in the back of his house, but Don Genaro was nowhere in sight. He said that there was nothing to talk about. I pointed out that I had succeeded in remaining aloof and had observed Don Genaro’s “swimming on the floor” without wanting or demanding any explanation whatsoever, but my restraint had not helped me to understand what was taking place. Then, after the disappearance of the car, I became automatically locked in seeking a logical explanation, but that did not help me either. I told Don Juan that my insistence on finding explanations was not something that I had arbitrarily devised myself, just to be difficult, but was something so deeply ingrained in me that it overruled every other consideration. “It’s like a disease,” I said.

“There are no diseases,” Don Juan replied calmly. “There is only indulging. And you indulge yourself in trying to explain everything. Explanations are no longer necessary in your case.”

I insisted that I could function only under conditions of order and understanding. I reminded him that I had drastically changed my personality during the time of our association, and that the condition that had made that change possible was that I had been capable of explaining to myself the reasons for that change.

Don Juan laughed softly. He did not speak for a long time.

“You are very clever,” he finally said. “You go back to where you have always been. This time you are finished though. You have no place to go back to. I will not explain anything to you any more. Whatever Genaro did to you yesterday he did it to your body, so let your body decide what’s what.”

Don Juan’s tone was friendly but unusually detached and that made me feel an overwhelming loneliness. I expressed my feelings of sadness. He smiled. His fingers gently clasped the top of my hand. “We both are beings who are going to die,” he said softly. “There is no more time for what we used to do. Now you must employ all the not-doing I have taught you and stop the world.”

He clasped my hand again. His touch was firm and friendly; it was like a reassurance that he was concerned and had affection for me, and at the same time it gave me the impression of an unwavering purpose. “This is my gesture for you,” he said, holding the grip he had on my hand for an instant. “Now you must go by yourself into those friendly mountains.” He pointed with his chin to the distant range of mountains towards the southeast. He said that I had to remain there until my body told me to quit and then return to his house. He let me know that he did not want me to say anything or to wait any longer by shoving me gently in the direction of my car. “What am I supposed to do there?” I asked. He did not answer but looked at me, shaking his head.

“No more of that,” he finally said. Then he pointed his finger to the southeast.

“Go there,” he said cuttingly. I drove south and then east, following the roads I had always taken when driving with Don Juan. I parked my car around the place where the dirt road ended and then I hiked on a familiar trail until I reached a high plateau. I had no idea what to do there. I began to meander, looking for a resting place. Suddenly I became aware of a small area to my left. It seemed that the chemical composition of the soil was different on that spot, yet when I focused my eyes on it there was nothing visible that would account for the difference. I stood a few feet away and tried to “feel” as Don Juan had always recommended I should do. I stayed motionless for perhaps an hour. My thoughts began to diminish by degrees until I was no longer talking to myself. I then had a sensation of annoyance. The feeling seemed to be confined to my stomach and was more acute when I faced the spot in question. I was repulsed by it and felt compelled to move away from it. I began scanning the area with crossed eyes and after a short walk I came upon a large flat rock. I stopped in front of it. There was nothing in particular about the rock that attracted me. I did not detect any specific color or any shine on it, and yet I liked it. My body felt good. I experienced a sensation of physical comfort and sat down for a while.

I meandered in the high plateau and the surrounding mountains all day without knowing what to do or what to expect. I came back to the flat rock at dusk. I knew that if I spent the night there I would be safe. The next day I ventured farther east into the high mountains. By late afternoon I came to another even higher plateau.

I thought I had been there before. I looked around to orient myself but I could not recognize any of the surrounding peaks. After carefully selecting a suitable place, I sat down to rest at the edge of a barren rocky area. I felt very warm and peaceful there. I tried to pour out some food from my gourd, but it was empty. I drank some water. It was warm and stale. I thought that I had nothing else to do but to return to Don Juan’s house and began to wonder whether or not I should start on my way back right away. I lay down on my stomach and rested my head on my arm. I felt uneasy and changed positions various times until I found myself facing the west.

The sun was already low. My eyes were tired. I looked down at the ground and caught sight of a large black beetle. It came out from behind a small rock, pushing a ball of dung twice its size. I followed its movements for a long time. The insect seemed unconcerned with my presence and kept on pushing its load over rocks, roots, depressions, and protuberances on the ground. For all I knew, the beetle was not aware that I was there. The thought occurred to me that I could not possibly be sure that the insect was not aware of me; that thought triggered a series of rational evaluations about the nature of the insect’s world as opposed to mine. The beetle and I were in the same world and obviously the world was not the same for both of us. I became immersed in watching it and marveled at the gigantic strength it needed to carry its load over rocks and down crevices.

I observed the insect for a long time and then I became aware of the silence around me. Only the wind hissed between the branches and leaves of the chaparral. I looked up, turned to my left in a quick and involuntary fashion, and caught a glimpse of a faint shadow or a flicker on a rock a few feet away. At first I paid no attention to it but then I realized that that flicker had been to my left. I turned again suddenly and was able to clearly perceive a shadow on the rock. I had the weird sensation that the shadow instantly slid down to the ground and the soil absorbed it as a blotter dries an ink blotch. A chill ran down my back. The thought crossed my mind that death was watching me and the beetle. I looked for the insect again but I could not find it. I thought that it must have arrived at its destination and then had dropped its load into a hole in the ground. I put my face against a smooth rock.

The beetle emerged from a deep hole and stopped a few inches away from my face. It seemed to look at me and for a moment I felt that it became aware of my presence, perhaps as I was aware of the presence of my death. I experienced a shiver. The beetle and I were not that different after all. Death, like a shadow, was stalking both of us from behind the boulder. I had an extraordinary moment of elation. The beetle and I were on a par. Neither of us was better than the other. Our death made us equal. My elation and joy were so overwhelming that I began to weep. Don Juan was right. He had always been right. I was living in a most mysterious world and, like everyone else, I was a most mysterious being, and yet I was no more important than a beetle. I wiped my eyes and as I rubbed them with the back of my hand I saw a man, or something which had the shape of a man. It was to my right about fifty yards away. I sat up straight and strained to see. The sun was almost on the horizon and its yellowish glow prevented me from getting a clear view. I heard a peculiar roar at that moment. It was like the sound of a distant jet plane. As I focused my attention on it, the roar increased to a prolonged sharp metallic whizzing and then it softened until it was a mesmerizing, melodious sound. The melody was like the vibration of an electrical current. The image that came to my mind was that two electrified spheres were coming together, or two square blocks of electrified metal were rubbing against each other and then coming to rest with a thump when they were perfectly leveled with each other. I again strained to see if I could distinguish the person that seemed to be hiding from me, but I could only detect a dark shape against the bushes. I shielded my eyes by placing my hands above them. The brilliancy of the sunlight changed at that moment and then I realized that what I was seeing was only an optical illusion, a play of shadows and foliage.

I moved my eyes away and I saw a coyote calmly trotting across the field. The coyote was around the spot where I thought I had seen the man. It moved about fifty yards in a southerly direction and then it stopped, turned, and began walking towards me. I yelled a couple of times to scare it away, but it kept on coming. I had a moment of apprehension. I thought that it might be rabid and I even considered gathering some rocks to defend myself in case of an attack. When the animal was ten to fifteen feet away I noticed that it was not agitated in any way; on the contrary, it seemed calm and unafraid. It slowed down its gait, coming to a halt barely four or five feet from me. We looked at each other, and then the coyote came even closer. Its brown eyes were friendly and clear. I sat down on the rocks and the coyote stood almost touching me. I was dumbfounded. I had never seen a wild coyote that close, and the only thing that occurred to me at that moment was to talk to it. I began as one would talk to a friendly dog. And then I thought that the coyote “talked” back to me. I had the absolute certainty that it had said something. I felt confused but I did not have time to ponder upon my feelings, because the coyote “talked” again. It was not that the animal was voicing words the way I am accustomed to hearing words being voiced by human beings, it was rather a “feeling” that it was talking. But it was not like a feeling that one has when a pet seems to communicate with its master either. The coyote actually said something; it relayed a thought and that communication came out in something quite similar to a sentence. I had said, “How are you, little coyote?” and I thought I had heard the animal respond, “I’m all right, and you?” Then the coyote repeated the sentence and I jumped to my feet. The animal did not make a single movement. It was not even startled by my sudden jump. Its eyes were still friendly and clear. It lay down on its stomach and tilted its head and asked, “Why are you afraid?” I sat down facing it and I carried on the weirdest conversation I had ever had. Finally it asked me what I was doing there and I said I had come there to “stop the world.” The coyote said, “Que bueno!” and then I realized that it was a bilingual coyote. The nouns and verbs of its sentences were in English, but the conjunctions and exclamations were in Spanish. The thought crossed my mind that I was in the presence of a Chicano coyote. I began to laugh at the absurdity of it all and I laughed so hard that I became almost hysterical. Then the full weight of the impossibility of what was happening struck me and my mind wobbled. The coyote stood up and our eyes met. I stared fixedly into them. I felt they were pulling me and suddenly the animal became iridescent; it began to glow. It was as if my mind were replaying the memory of another event that had taken place ten years before, when under the influence of peyote I witnessed the metamorphosis of an ordinary dog into an unforgettable iridescent being. It was as though the coyote had triggered the recollection, and the memory of that previous event was summoned and became superimposed on the coyote’s shape; the coyote was a fluid, liquid, luminous being. Its luminosity was dazzling. I wanted to cover my eyes with my hands to protect them, but I could not move. The luminous being touched me in some undefined part of myself and my body experienced such an exquisite indescribable warmth and well-being that it was as if the touch had made me explode. I became transfixed. I could not feel my feet, or my legs, or any part of my body, yet something was sustaining me erect.

I have no idea how long I stayed in that position. In the meantime, the luminous coyote and the hilltop where I stood melted away. I had no thoughts or feelings. Everything had been turned off and I was floating freely. Suddenly I felt that my body had been struck and then it became enveloped by something that kindled me. I became aware then that the sun was shining on me. I could vaguely distinguish a distant range of mountains towards the west. The sun was almost over the horizon. I was looking directly into it and then I saw the “lines of the world.” I actually perceived the most extraordinary profusion of fluorescent white lines which crisscrossed everything around me. For a moment I thought that I was perhaps experiencing sunlight as it was being refracted by my eyelashes. I blinked and looked again. The lines were constant and were superimposed on or were coming through everything in the surroundings. I turned around and examined an extraordinarily new world. The lines were visible and steady even if I looked away from the sun.

I stayed on the hilltop in a state of ecstasy for what appeared to be an endless time, yet the whole event may have lasted only a few minutes, perhaps only as long as the sun shone before it reached the horizon, but to me it seemed an endless time. I felt something warm and soothing oozing out of the world and out of my own body. I knew I had discovered a secret. It was so simple. I experienced an unknown flood of feelings. Never in my life had I had such a divine euphoria, such peace, such an encompassing grasp, and yet I could not put the discovered secret into words, or even into thoughts, but my body knew it. Then I either fell asleep or I fainted. When I again became aware of myself I was lying on the rocks. I stood up. The world was as I had always seen it. It was getting dark and I automatically started on my way back to my car. Don Juan was alone in the house when I arrived the next morning. I asked him about Don Genaro and he said that he was somewhere in the vicinity, running an errand. I immediately began to narrate to him the extraordinary experiences I had had. He listened with obvious interest. “You have simply stopped the world,” he commented after I had finished my account. We remained silent for a moment and then Don Juan said that I had to thank Don Genaro for helping me. He seemed to be unusually pleased with me. He patted my back repeatedly and chuckled.

“But it is inconceivable that a coyote could talk,” I said.

“It wasn’t talk,” Don Juan replied.

“What was it then?”

“Your body understood for the first time. But you failed to recognize that it was not a coyote to begin with and that it certainly was not talking the way you and I talk.”

“But the coyote really talked, Don Juan!”

“Now look who is talking like an idiot. After all these years of learning you should know better. Yesterday you stopped the world and you might have even seen. A magical being told you something and your body was capable of understanding it because the world had collapsed.”

“The world was like it is today, Don Juan.”

“No, it wasn’t. Today the coyotes do not tell you anything, and you cannot see the lines of the world. Yesterday you did all that simply because something had stopped in you.”

“What was the thing that stopped in me?”

“What stopped inside you yesterday was what people have been telling you the world is like. You see, people tell us from the time we are born that the world is such and such and so and so, and naturally we have no choice but to see the world the way people have been telling us it is.”

We looked at each other.

“Yesterday the world became as sorcerers tell you it is,” he went on. “In that world coyotes talk and so do deer, as I once told you, and so do rattlesnakes and trees and all other living beings. But what I want you to learn is seeing. Perhaps you know now that seeing happens only when one sneaks between the worlds, the world of ordinary people and the world of sorcerers. You are now smack in the middle point between the two. Yesterday you believed the coyote talked to you. Any sorcerer who doesn’t see would believe the same, but one who sees knows that to believe that is to be pinned down in the realm of sorcerers. By the same token, not to believe that coyotes talk is to be pinned down in the realm of ordinary men.”

“Do you mean, Don Juan, that neither the world of ordinary men nor the world of sorcerers is real?”

“They are real worlds. They could act upon you. For example, you could have asked that coyote about anything you wanted to know and it would have been compelled to give you an answer. The only sad part is that coyotes are not reliable. They are tricksters. It is your fate not to have a dependable animal companion.”

Don Juan explained that the coyote was going to be my companion for life and that in the world of sorcerers to have a coyote friend was not a desirable state of affairs. He said that it would have been ideal for me to have talked to a rattlesnake, since they were stupendous companions.

“If I were you,” he added, “I would never trust a coyote. But you are different and you may even become a coyote sorcerer.”

“What is a coyote sorcerer?”

“One who draws a lot of things from his coyote brothers.” I wanted to keep on asking questions but he made a gesture to stop me.

“You have seen the lines of the world,” he said. “You have seen a luminous being. You are now almost ready to meet the ally. Of course you know that the man you saw in the bushes was the ally. You heard its roar like the sound of a jet plane. He’ll be waiting for you at the edge of a plain, a plain I will take you to myself.”

We were quiet for a long time. Don Juan had his hands clasped over his stomach. His thumbs moved almost imperceptibly. “Genaro will also have to go with us to that valley,” he said all of a sudden. “He is the one who has helped you to stop the world.”

Don Juan looked at me with piercing eyes. “I will tell you one more thing,” he said and laughed. “It really does matter now. Genaro never moved your car from the world of ordinary men the other day. He simply forced you to look at the world like sorcerers do, and your car was not in that world. Genaro wanted to soften your certainty. His clowning told your body about the absurdity of trying to understand everything. And when he flew his kite you almost saw. You found your car and you were in both worlds. The reason we nearly split our guts laughing was because you really thought you were driving us back from where you thought you had found your car.”

“But how did he force me to see the world as sorcerers do?”

“I was with him. We both know that world. Once one knows that world all one needs to bring it about is to use that extra ring of power I have told you sorcerers have. Genaro can do that as easily as snapping his fingers. He kept you busy turning over rocks in order to distract your thoughts and allow your body to see.”

I told him that the events of the last three days had done some irreparable damage to my idea of the world. I said that during the ten years I had been associated with him I had never been so moved, not even during the times I had ingested psychotropic plants.

“Power plants are only an aid,” Don Juan said. “The real thing is when the body realizes that it can see. Only then is one capable of knowing that the world we look at every day is only a description. My intent has been to show you that. Unfortunately you have very little time left before the ally tackles you.”

“Does the ally have to tackle me?”

“There is no way to avoid it. In order to see one must learn the way sorcerers look at the world and thus the ally has to be summoned, and once that is done it comes.”

“Couldn’t you have taught me to see without summoning the ally?”

“No. In order to see one must learn to look at the world in some other fashion, and the only other fashion I know is the way of a sorcerer.”

Don Genaro returned around noon and at Don Juan’s suggestion the three of us drove down to the range of mountains where I had been the day before. We hiked on the same trail I had taken but instead of stopping in the high plateau, as I had done, we kept on climbing until we reached the top of the lower range of mountains, then we began to descend into a flat valley.

We stopped to rest on top of a high hill. Don Genaro picked the spot. I automatically sat down, as I have always done in their company, with Don Juan to my right and Don Genaro to my left, making a triangle. The desert chaparral had acquired an exquisite moist sheen. It was brilliantly green after a short spring shower.

“Genaro is going to tell you something,” Don Juan said to me all of a sudden. “He is going to tell you the story of his first encounter with his ally. Isn’t that so, Genaro?”

There was a tone of coaxing in Don Juan’s voice. Don Genaro looked at me and contracted his lips until his mouth looked like a round hole. He curled his tongue against his palate and opened and closed his mouth as if he were having spasms.

Don Juan looked at him and laughed loudly. I did not know what to make out of it.

“What’s he doing?” I asked Don Juan.

“He’s a hen!” he said.

“A hen?”

“Look, look at his mouth. That’s the hen’s ass and it is about to lay an egg.”

The spasms of Don Genaro’s mouth seemed to increase. He had a strange, crazy look in his eyes. His mouth opened up as if the spasms were dilating the round hole. He made a croaking sound in his throat, folded his arms over his chest with his hands bent inward, and then unceremoniously spat out some phlegm.

“Damn it! It wasn’t an egg,” he said with a concerned look on his face.

The posture of his body and the expression on his face were so ludicrous that I could not help laughing.

“Now that Genaro almost laid an egg maybe he will tell you about his first encounter with his ally,” Don Juan insisted.

“Maybe,” Don Genaro said, uninterested. I pleaded with him to tell me.

Don Genaro stood up, stretched his arms and back. His bones made a cracking sound. Then he sat down again. “I was young when I first tackled my ally,” he finally said. “I remember that it was in the early afternoon. I had been in the fields since daybreak and I was returning to my house. Suddenly, from behind a bush, the ally came out and blocked my way. He had been waiting for me and was inviting me to wrestle him. I began to turn around in order to leave him alone but the thought came to my mind that I was strong enough to tackle him. I was afraid though. A chill ran up my spine and my neck became stiff as a board. By the way, that is always the sign that you’re ready, I mean, when your neck gets hard.”

He opened up his shirt and showed me his back. He stiffened the muscles of his neck, back, and arms. I noticed the superb quality of his musculature. It was as if the memory of the encounter had activated every muscle in his torso. “In such a situation,” he continued, “you must always close your mouth.”

He turned to Don Juan and said, “Isn’t that so?”

“Yes,” Don Juan said calmly. “The jolt that one gets from grabbing an ally is so great that one might bite off one’s tongue or knock one’s teeth out. One’s body must be straight and well-grounded, and the feet must grab the ground.” Don Genaro stood up and showed me the proper position: his body slightly bent at the knees, his arms hanging at his sides with the fingers curled gently. He seemed relaxed and yet firmly set on the ground. He remained in that position for an instant, and when I thought he was going to sit down he suddenly lunged forward in one stupendous leap, as if he had springs attached to his heels. His movement was so sudden that I fell down on my back; but as I fell I had the clear impression that Don Genaro had grabbed a man, or something which had the shape of a man.

I sat up again. Don Genaro was still maintaining a tremendous tension all over his body, then he relaxed his muscles abruptly and went back to where he had been sitting before and sat down.

“Carlos just saw your ally right now,” Don Juan remarked casually, “but he’s still weak and fell down.”

“Did you?” Don Genaro asked in a naive tone and enlarged his nostrils.

Don Juan assured him that I had “seen” it.

Don Genaro leaped forward again with such a force that I fell on my side. He executed his jump so fast that I really could not tell how he had sprung to his feet from a sitting position in order to lunge forward.

Both of them laughed loudly and then Don Genaro changed his laughter into a howling indistinguishable from a coyote’s.

“Don’t think that you have to jump as well as Genaro in order to grab your ally,” Don Juan said in a cautioning tone. “Genaro jumps so well because he has his ally to help him. All you have to do is to be firmly grounded in order to sustain the impact. You have to stand just like Genaro did before he jumped, then you have to leap forward and grab the ally.”

“He’s got to kiss his medallion first,” Don Genaro interjected.

Don Juan, with feigned severity, said that I had no medallions.

“What about his notebooks?” Don Genaro insisted. “He’s got to do something with his notebooks – put them down somewhere before he jumps, or maybe he’ll use his notebooks to beat the ally.”

“I’ll be damned!” Don Juan said with seemingly genuine surprise. “I have never thought of that. I bet it’ll be the first time an ally is beaten down to the ground with notebooks.”

When Don Juan’s laughter and Don Genaro’s coyote howlings subsided we were all in a very fine mood. “What happened when you grabbed your ally, Don Genaro?” I asked. “It was a powerful jolt,” Don Genaro said after a moment’s hesitation. He seemed to have been putting his thoughts in order.

“Never would I have imagined it was going to be like that,” he went on. “It was something, something, something… like nothing I can tell. After I grabbed it we began to spin. The ally made me twirl, but I didn’t let go. We spun through the air with such speed and force that I couldn’t see any more. Everything was foggy. The spinning went on, and on, and on. Suddenly I felt that I was standing on the ground again. I looked at myself. The ally had not killed me. I was in one piece. I was myself! I knew then that I had succeeded. At long last I had an ally. I jumped up and down with delight. What a feeling! What a feeling it was!

“Then I looked around to find out where I was. The surroundings were unknown to me. I thought that the ally must have taken me through the air and dumped me somewhere very far from the place where we started to spin. I oriented myself. I thought that my home must be towards the east, so I began to walk in that direction. It was still early. The encounter with the ally had not taken too long. Very soon I found a trail and then I saw a bunch of men and women coming towards me. They were Indians. I thought they were Mazatec Indians. They surrounded me and asked me where I was going. ‘I’m going home to Ixtlan,’ I said to them. ‘Are you lost?’ someone asked. ‘I am,’ I said. ‘Why?’ ‘Because Ixtlan is not that way. Ixtlan is in the opposite direction. We ourselves are going there,’ someone else said. ‘Join us!’ they all said. ‘We have food!'”

Don Genaro stopped talking and looked at me as if he were waiting for me to ask a question.

“Well, what happened?” I asked. “Did you join them?”

“No. I didn’t,” he said. “Because they were not real. I knew it right away, the minute they came to me. There was something in their voices, in their friendliness that gave them away, especially when they asked me to join them. So I ran away. They called me and begged me to come back. Their pleas became haunting, but I kept on running away from them.”

“Who were they?” I asked.

“People,” Don Genaro replied cuttingly. “Except that they were not real.”

“They were like apparitions,” Don Juan explained. “Like phantoms.”

“After walking for a while,” Don Genaro went on, “I became more confident. I knew that Ixtlan was in the direction I was going. And then I saw two men coming down the trail towards me. They also seemed to be Mazatec Indians. They had a donkey loaded with firewood. They went by me and mumbled, ‘Good afternoon.’

“‘Good afternoon!’ I said and kept on walking. They did not pay any attention to me and went their way. I slowed down my gait and casually turned around to look at them. They were walking away unconcerned with me. They seemed to be real. I ran after them and yelled, ‘Wait, wait!’ “They held their donkey and stood on either side of the animal, as if they were protecting the load. ‘I am lost in these mountains,’ I said to them. ‘Which way is Ixtlan?’ They pointed in the direction they were going. ‘You’re very far,’ one of them said. ‘It is on the other side of those mountains. It’ll take you four or five days to get there.’ Then they turned around and kept on walking. I felt that those were real Indians and I begged them to let me join them. “We walked together for a while and then one of them got his bundle of food and offered me some. I froze on the spot. There was something terribly strange in the way he offered me his food. My body felt frightened, so I jumped back and began to run away. They both said that I would die in the mountains if I did not go with them and tried to coax me to join them. Their pleas were also very haunting, but I ran away from them with all my might. “I kept on walking. I knew then that I was on the right way to Ixtlan and that those phantoms were trying to lure me out of my way.

“I encountered eight of them; they must have known that my determination was unshakable. They stood by the road and looked at me with pleading eyes. Most of them did not say a word; the women among them, however, were more daring and pleaded with me. Some of them even displayed food and other goods that they were supposed to be selling, like innocent merchants by the side of the road. I did not stop nor did I look at them.

“By late afternoon I came to a valley that I seemed to recognize. It was somehow familiar. I thought I had been there before, but if that was so I was actually south of Ixtlan. I began to look for landmarks to properly orient myself and correct my route when I saw a little Indian boy tending some goats. He was perhaps seven years old and was dressed the way I had been when I was his age. In fact, he reminded me of myself tending my father’s two goats. “I watched him for some time; the boy was talking to himself, the same way I used to, then he would talk to his goats. From what I knew about tending goats he was really good at it. He was thorough and careful. He didn’t pamper his goats, but he wasn’t cruel to them either.

“I decided to call him. When I talked to him in a loud voice he jumped up and ran away to a ledge and peeked at me from behind some rocks. He seemed to be ready to run for his life. I liked him. He seemed to be afraid and yet he still found time to herd his goats out of my sight.

“I talked to him for a long time; I said that I was lost and that I did not know my way to Ixtlan. I asked the name of the place where we were and he said it was the place I had thought it was. That made me very happy. I realized I was no longer lost and pondered on the power that my ally had in order to transport my whole body that far in less time than it takes to bat an eyelash.

“I thanked the boy and began to walk away. He casually came out of his hiding place and herded his goats into an almost unnoticeable trail. The trail seemed to lead down into the valley. I called the boy and he did not run away. I walked towards him and he jumped into the bushes when I came too close. I commended him on being so cautious and began to ask him some questions.

“‘Where does this trail lead?’ I asked. ‘Down,’ he said. ‘Where do you live?’ ‘Down there.’ ‘Are there lots of houses down there?’ ‘No, just one.’ ‘Where are the other houses?’ The boy pointed towards the other side of the valley with indifference, the way boys his age do. Then he began to go down the trail with his goats.

“Wait,” I said to the boy. “I’m very tired and hungry. Take me to your folks.”

“I have no folks,” the little boy said and that jolted me. I don’t know why but his voice made me hesitate. The boy, noticing my hesitation, stopped and turned to me. ‘There’s nobody at my house,’ he said. ‘My uncle is gone and his wife went to the fields. There is plenty of food. Plenty. Come with me.'”I almost felt sad. The boy was also a phantom. The tone of his voice and his eagerness had betrayed him. The phantoms were out there to get me but I wasn’t afraid. I was still numb from my encounter with the ally. I wanted to get mad at the ally or at the phantoms but somehow I couldn’t get angry like I used to, so I gave up trying. Then I wanted to get sad, because I had liked that little boy, but I couldn’t, so I gave up on that too.

“Suddenly I realized that I had an ally and that there was nothing that the phantoms could do to me. I followed the boy down the trail. Other phantoms lurched out swiftly and tried to make me trip over the precipices, but my will was stronger than they were. They must have sensed that, because they stopped pestering me. After a while they simply stood by my path; from time to time some of them would leap towards me but I stopped them with my will. And then they quit bothering me altogether.” Don Genaro remained quiet for a long time. Don Juan looked at me.

“What happened after that, Don Genaro?” I asked.

“I kept on walking,” he said factually.

It seemed that he had finished his tale and there was nothing he wanted to add. I asked him why was the fact that they offered him food a clue to their being phantoms. He did not answer. I probed further and asked whether it was a custom among Mazatec Indians to deny that they had any food, or to be heavily concerned with matters of food. He said that the tone of their voices, their eagerness to lure him out, and the manner in which the phantoms talked about food were the clues-and that he knew that because his ally was helping him. He asserted that by himself alone he would have never noticed those peculiarities. “Were those phantoms allies, Don Genaro?” I asked.

“No. They were people.”

“People? But you said they were phantoms.”

“I said that they were no longer real. After my encounter with the ally nothing was real any more.”

We were quiet for a long time.

“What was the final outcome of that experience, Don Genaro?” I asked.

“Final outcome?”

“I mean, when and how did you finally reach Ixtlan?”

Both of them broke into laughter at once.

“So that’s the final outcome for you,” Don Juan remarked.

“Let’s put it this way then. There was no final outcome to Genaro’s journey. There will never be any final outcome. Genaro is still on his way to Ixtlan!” Don Genaro glanced at me with piercing eyes and then turned his head to look into the distance, towards the south.

“I will never reach Ixtlan,” he said. His voice was firm but soft, almost a murmur. “Yet in my feelings… in my feelings sometimes I think I’m just one step from reaching it. Yet I never will. In my journey I don’t even find the familiar landmarks I used to know. Nothing is any longer the same.”

Don Juan and Don Genaro looked at each other. There was something so sad about their look.

“In my journey I find only phantom travelers,” he said softly. I looked at Don Juan. I had not understood what Don Genaro had meant.

“Everyone Genaro finds on his way to Ixtlan is only an ephemeral being,” Don Juan explained. “Take you, for instance. You are a phantom. Your feelings and your eagerness are those of people. That’s why he says that he encounters only phantom travelers on his journey.”

I suddenly realized that Don Genaro’s journey was a metaphor. “Your journey is not real then,” I said.

“It is real!” Don Genaro interjected. “The travelers are not real.”

He pointed to Don Juan with a nod of his head and said emphatically, “This is the only one who is real. The world is real only when I am with this one.” Don Juan smiled.

“Genaro was telling his story to you,” Don Juan said, “because yesterday you stopped the world, and he thinks that you also saw, but you are such a fool that you don’t know it yourself. I keep on telling him that you are weird, and that sooner or later you will see. At any rate, in your next meeting with the ally, if there is a next time for you, you will have to wrestle with it and tame it. If you survive the shock, which I’m sure you will, since you’re strong and have been living like a warrior, you will find yourself alive in an unknown land. Then, as is natural to all of us, the first thing you will want to do is to start on your way back to Los Angeles. But there is no way to go back to Los Angeles. What you left there is lost forever. By then, of course, you will be a sorcerer, but that’s no help; at a time like that what’s important to all of us is the fact that everything we love or hate or wish for has been left behind. Yet the feelings in a man do not die or change, and the sorcerer starts on his way back home knowing that he will never reach it, knowing that no power on earth, not even his death, will deliver him to the place, the things, the people he loved. That’s what Genaro told you.”

Don Juan’s explanation was like a catalyst; the full impact of Don Genaro’s story hit me suddenly when I began to link the tale to my own life.

“What about the people I love?” I asked Don Juan. “What would happen to them?”

“They would all be left behind,” he said.

“But is there no way I could retrieve them? Could I rescue them and take them with me?”

“No. Your ally will spin you, alone, into unknown worlds.”

“But I could go back to Los Angeles, couldn’t I? I could take the bus or a plane and go there. Los Angeles would still be there, wouldn’t it?”

“Sure,” Don Juan said, laughing. “And so will Manteca and Temecula and Tucson.”

“And Tecate,” Don Genaro added with great seriousness.

“And Piedras Negras and Tranquitas,” Don Juan said, smiling.

Don Genaro added more names and so did Don Juan; and they became involved in enumerating a series of the most hilarious and unbelievable names of cities and towns.

“Spinning with your ally will change your idea of the world,” Don Juan said. “That idea is everything; and when that changes, the world itself changes.”

He reminded me that I had read a poem to him once and wanted me to recite it. He cued me with a few words of it and I recalled having read to him some poems of Juan Ramon Jimenez. The particular one he had in mind was entitled “El Viaje Definitivo” (The Definitive Journey). I recited it.

and I will leave. But the birds will stay, singing: and my garden will stay, with its green tree, with its water well. Many afternoons the skies will be blue and placid, and the bells in the belfry will chime, as they are chiming this very afternoon. The people who have loved me will pass away, and the town will burst anew every year. But my spirit will always wander nostalgic in the same recondite corner of my flowery garden.

“That is the feeling Genaro is talking about,” Don Juan said. “In order to be a sorcerer a man must be passionate. A passionate man has earthly belongings and things dear to him – if nothing else, just the path where he walks. “What Genaro told you in his story is precisely that. Genaro left his passion in Ixtlan: his home, his people, all the things he cared for. And now he wanders around in his feelings; and sometimes, as he says, he almost reaches Ixtlan. All of us have that in common. For Genaro it is Ixtlan; for you it will be Los Angeles; for me…” I did not want Don Juan to tell me about himself. He paused as if he had read my mind. Genaro sighed and paraphrased the first lines of the poem. “I left. And the birds stayed, singing.” For an instant I sensed a wave of agony and an indescribable loneliness engulfing the three of us. I looked at Don Genaro and I knew that, being a passionate man, he must have had so many ties of the heart, so many things he cared for and left behind. I had the clear sensation that at that moment the power of his recollection was about to landslide and that Don Genaro was on the verge of weeping. I hurriedly moved my eyes away. Don Genaro’s passion, his supreme loneliness, made me cry.

I looked at Don Juan. He was gazing at me. “Only as a warrior can one survive the path of knowledge,” he said. “Because the art of a warrior is to balance the terror of being a man with the wonder of being a man.” I gazed at the two of them, each in turn. Their eyes were clear and peaceful. They had summoned a wave of overwhelming nostalgia, and when they seemed to be on the verge of exploding into passionate tears, they held back the tidal wave. For an instant I think I saw. I saw the loneliness of man as a gigantic wave which had been frozen in front of me, held back by the invisible wall of a metaphor. My sadness was so overwhelming that I felt euphoric. I embraced them. Don Genaro smiled and stood up. Don Juan also stood up and gently put his hand on my shoulder.

“We are going to leave you here,” he said. “Do what you think is proper. The ally will be waiting for you at the edge of that plain.”

He pointed to a dark valley in the distance. “If you don’t feel that this is your time yet, don’t keep your appointment,” he went on. “Nothing is gained by forcing the issue. If you want to survive you must be crystal clear and deadly sure of yourself.”

Don Juan walked away without looking at me, but Don Genaro turned a couple of times and urged me with a wink and a movement of his head to go forward. I looked at them until they disappeared in the distance and then I walked to my car and drove away. I knew that it was not my time, yet.

(Carlos Castaneda, Journey to Ixtlan)