JOURNEY TO IXTLAN -- THE LESSONS OF DON JUAN

Chapter 7:  BEING INACCESSIBLE

Thursday, June 29, 1961

Again don Juan, as he had done every day for nearly a week, held me spellbound with his knowledge of specific details about the behavior of game. He first explained and then corroborated a number of hunting tactics based on what he called "the quirks of quails." I became so utterly involved in his explanations that a whole day went by and I had not noticed the passage of time. I even forgot to eat lunch. Don Juan made joking remarks that it was quite unusual for me to miss a meal.

By the end of the day he had caught five quail in a most ingenious trap, which he had taught me to assemble and set up.

"Two are enough for us," he said and let three of them loose.

He then taught me how to roast quail. I had wanted to cut some shrubs and make a barbecue pit, the way my grandfather used to make it, lined with green branches and leaves and sealed with dirt, but don Juan said that there was no need to injure the shrubs, since we had already injured the quail.

After we finished eating we walked very leisurely towards a rocky area. We sat on a sandstone hillside and I said jokingly that if he would have left the matter up to me I would have cooked all five of the quail, and that my barbecue would have tasted much better than his roast.

"No doubt," he said. "But if you would have done all that, we might have never left this place in one piece."

"What do you mean?" 1 asked. "What would have prevented us?"

"The shrubs, the quail, everything around would have pitched in."

"I never know when you are talking seriously," I said. He made a gesture of feigned impatience and smacked his lips.

"You have a weird notion of what it means to talk seriously," he said. "I laugh a great deal because I like to laugh, yet everything I say is deadly serious, even if you don't understand it. Why should the world be only as you think it is? Who gave you the authority to say so?"

"There is no proof that the world is otherwise," I said.

It was getting dark. I was wondering if it was time to go back to his house, but he did not seem to be in a hurry and I was enjoying myself.

The wind was cold.  Suddenly he stood up and told me that we had to climb to the hilltop and stand up on an area clear of shrubs.

"Don't be afraid," he said. "I'm your friend and I'll see that nothing bad happens to you."

"What do you mean?" I asked, alarmed.

Don Juan had the most insidious facility to shift me from sheer enjoyment to sheer fright.

"The world is very strange at this time of the day," he said. "That's what I mean. No matter what you see, don't be afraid."

"What am I going to see?"

"I don't know yet," he said, peering into the distance towards the south.

He did not seem to be worried. I also kept on looking in the same direction.

Suddenly he perked up and pointed with his left hand towards a dark area in the desert shrubbery.

"There it is," he said, as if he had been waiting for something which had suddenly appeared.

"What is it?" I asked.

"There it is," he repeated. "Look! Look!"

I did not see anything; just the shrubs.

"It is here now," he said with great urgency in his voice. "It is here."

A sudden gust of wind hit me at that instant and made my eyes burn. I stared towards the area in question. There was absolutely nothing out of the ordinary.

"I can't see a thing," I said.

"You just felt it," he replied. "Right now. It got into your eyes and kept you from seeing."

"What are you talking about?"

"I have deliberately brought you to a hilltop,"', he said. "We are very noticeable here and something is coming to us."

"What? The wind?"

"Not just the wind," he said sternly. "It may seem to be wind to you, because wind is all you know."

I strained my eyes staring into the desert shrubs. Don Juan stood silently by me for a moment and then walked into the nearby chaparral and began to tear some big branches from the surrounding shrubs; he gathered eight of them and made a bundle. He ordered me to do the same and to apologize to the plants in a loud voice for mutilating them.

When we had two bundles he made me run with them to the hilltop and lie down on my back between two large rocks. With tremendous speed he arranged the branches of my bundle to cover my entire body, then he covered himself in the same manner and whispered through the leaves that I should watch how the so-called wind would cease to blow once we had become unnoticeable.

At one moment, to my utter amazement, the wind actually ceased to blow as don Juan had predicted. It happened so gradually that I would have missed the change had I not been deliberately waiting for it. For a while, the wind had hissed through the leaves over my face and then gradually it became quiet all around us.

I whispered to don Juan that the wind had stopped and he whispered back that I should not make any overt noise or movement, because what I was calling the wind was not wind at all but something that had a volition of its own and could actually recognize us.

I laughed out of nervousness.

In a muffled voice don Juan called my attention to the quietness around us and whispered that he was going to stand up and I should follow him, putting the branches aside very gently with my left hand.

We stood up at the same time. Don Juan stared for a moment into the distance towards the south and then turned around abruptly and faced the west.

"Sneaky. Really sneaky," he muttered, pointing to an area towards the southwest.

"Look! Look!" he urged me.

I stared with all the intensity I was capable of. I wanted to see whatever he was referring to, but I did not notice anything at all. Or rather I did not notice anything I had not seen before; there were just shrubs which seemed to be agitated by a soft wind; they rippled.

"It's here," don Juan said.

At that moment I felt a blast of air in my face. It seemed that the wind had actually begun to blow after we stood up. I could not believe it; there had to be a logical explanation for it.

Don Juan chuckled softly and told me not to tax my brain trying to reason it out.

"Let's go gather the shrubs once more," he said. "I hate to do this to these little plants, but we must stop you."

He picked up the branches we had used to cover ourselves and piled small rocks and dirt over them. Then, repeating the same movements we had made before, each of us gathered eight new branches. In the meantime the wind kept on blowing ceaselessly. I could feel it ruffling the hair around my ears. Don Juan whispered that once he had covered me I should not make the slightest movement or sound. He very quickly put the branches over my body and then he lay down and covered himself.

We stayed in that position for about twenty minutes and during that time a most extraordinary phenomenon occurred; the wind again changed from a hard continuous gust to a mild vibration.

I held my breath, waiting for don Juan's signal. At a given moment he gently shoved off the branches. I did the same and we stood up. The hilltop was very quiet. There was only a slight, soft vibration of leaves in the surrounding chaparral.

Don Juan's eyes were fixedly staring at an area in the shrubs south of us.

"There it is again!" he exclaimed in a loud voice.

I involuntarily jumped, nearly losing my balance, and he ordered me in a loud imperative voice to look.

"What am I supposed to see?" I asked desperately.

He said that it, the wind or whatever, was like a cloud or a whorl that was quite a ways above the shrubs, twirling its way to the hilltop where we were.

I saw a ripple forming on the bushes in the distance.

"There it comes," don Juan said in my ear. "Look how it is searching for us."

Right then a strong steady gust of wind hit my face, as it had hit it before. This time, however, my reaction was different. I was terrified. I had not seen what don Juan had described, but I had seen a most eerie wave rippling the shrubs. I did not want to succumb to my fear and deliberately sought any kind of suitable explanation. I said to myself that there must be continuous air currents in the area, and don Juan, being thoroughly acquainted with the whole region, was not only aware of that but was capable of mentally plotting their occurrence. All he had to do was to lie down, count, and wait for the wind to taper off; and once he stood up he had only to wait again for its reoccurrence.

Don Juan's voice shook me out of my mental deliberations. He was telling me that it was time to leave. I stalled; I wanted to stay to make sure that the wind would taper off.

"I didn't see anything, don Juan," I said.

"You noticed something unusual though."

"Perhaps you should tell me again what I was supposed to see."

"I've already told you," he said. "Something that hides in the wind and looks like a whorl, a cloud, a mist, a face that twirls around."

Don Juan made a gesture with his hands to depict a horizontal and a vertical motion.

"It moves in a specific direction," he went on. "It either tumbles or it twirls. A hunter must know all that in order to move correctly."

I wanted to humor him, but he seemed to be trying so hard to make his point that I did not dare. He looked at me for a moment and I moved my eyes away.

"To believe that the world is only as you think it is, is stupid," he said. "The world is a mysterious place. Especially in the twilight."

He pointed towards the wind with a movement of his chin.

"This can follow us," he said. "It can make us tired or it might even kill us."

"That wind?"

"At this time of the day, in the twilight, there is no wind. At this time there is only power."

We sat on the hilltop for an hour. The wind blew hard and constantly all that time.

Friday, June 30, 1961

In the late afternoon, after eating, don Juan and I moved to the area in front of his door. I sat on my "spot" and began working on my notes. He lay down on his back with his hands folded over his stomach. We had stayed around the house all day on account of the "wind." Don Juan explained that we had disturbed the wind deliberately and that it was better not to fool around with it. I had even had to sleep covered with branches.

A sudden gust of wind made don Juan get up in one incredibly agile jump.

"Damn it, " he said. "The wind is looking for you."

"I can't buy that, don Juan," I said, laughing. "I really can't."

I was not being stubborn, I just found it impossible to endorse the idea that the wind had its own volition and was looking for me, or that it had actually spotted us and rushed to us on top of the hill. I said that the idea of a "willful wind" was a view of the world that was rather simplistic.

"What is the wind then?" he asked in a challenging tone.

I patiently explained to him that masses of hot and cold air produced different pressures and that the pressure made the masses of air move vertically and horizontally. It took me a long while to explain all the details of basic meteorology.

"You mean that all there is to the wind is hot and cold air?" he asked in a tone of bafflement.

"I'm afraid so," I said and silently enjoyed my triumph.

Don Juan seemed to be dumbfounded. But then he looked at me and began to laugh uproariously.

"Your opinions are final opinions," he said with a note of sarcasm. "They are the last word, aren't they?! For a hunter, however, your opinions are pure crap. It makes no difference whether the pressure is one or two or ten; if you would live out here in the wilderness you would know that during the twilight the wind becomes power. A hunter that is worth his salt knows that, and acts accordingly."

"How does he act?"

"He uses the twilight and that power hidden in the wind."

"How?"

"If it is convenient to him, the hunter hides from the power by covering himself and remaining motionless until the twilight is gone and the power has sealed him into its protection."

Don Juan made a gesture of enveloping something with his hands.

"Its protection is like a ..."

He paused in search of a word and I suggested "cocoon."

"That is right," he said. "The protection of the power seals you like in a cocoon. A hunter can stay out in the open and no puma or coyote or slimy bug could bother him. A mountain lion could come up to the hunter's nose and sniff him, and if the hunter does not move, the lion would leave. I can guarantee you that.

"If the hunter, on the other hand, wants to be noticed all he has to do is to stand on a hilltop at the time of the twilight and the power will nag him and seek him all night. Therefore, if a hunter wants to travel at night or if he wants to be kept awake he must make himself available to the wind.

"Therein lies the secret of great hunters. To be available and unavailable at the precise turn of the road."

I felt a bit confused and asked him to recapitulate his point. Don Juan very patiently explained that he had used the twilight and the wind to point out the crucial importance of the interplay between hiding and showing oneself.

"You must learn to become deliberately available and unavailable," he said. "As your life goes now, you are unwittingly available at all times."

I protested. My feeling was that my life was becoming increasingly more and more secretive. He said I had not understood his point, and that to be unavailable did not mean to hide or to be secretive but to be inaccessible.

"Let me put it in another way," he proceeded patiently. "It makes no difference to hide if everyone knows that you are hiding.

"Your problems right now stem from that. When you are hiding, everyone knows that you are hiding, and when you are not, you are available for everyone to take a poke at you. "

I was beginning to feel threatened and hurriedly tried to defend myself.

"Don't explain yourself," don Juan said dryly. "There is no need. We are fools, all of us, and you cannot be different. At one time in my life I, like you, made myself available over and over again until there was nothing of me left for anything except perhaps crying. And that I did, just like yourself."

Don Juan sized me up for a moment and then sighed loudly.

"I was younger than you, though," he went on, "but one day I had enough and I changed. Let's say that one day, when I was becoming a hunter, I learned the secret of being available and unavailable."

I told him that his point was bypassing me. I truly could not understand what he meant by being available. He had used the Spanish idioms "ponerse al alcance" and "ponerse en el medio del camino," to put oneself within reach, and to put oneself in the middle of a trafficked way.

"You must take yourself away," he explained. "You must retrieve yourself from the middle of a trafficked way. Your whole being is there, thus it is of no use to hide; you would only imagine that you are hidden. Being in the middle of the road means that everyone passing by watches your comings and goings."

His metaphor was interesting, but at the same time it was also obscure.

"You are talking in riddles," I said.

He stared at me fixedly for a long moment and then began to hum a tune. I straightened my back and sat attentively. I knew that when don Juan hummed a Mexican tune he was about to clobber me.

"Hey," he said, smiling, and peered at me. "Whatever happened to your blond friend? That girl that you used to really like."

I must have looked at him like a confounded idiot. He laughed with great delight. I did not know what to say.

"You told me about her," he said reassuringly.

But I did not remember ever telling him about anybody, much less about a blond girl.

"I've never mentioned anything like that to you," I said.

"Of course you have," he said as if dismissing the argument.

I wanted to protest, but he stopped me, saying that it did not matter how he knew about her, that the important issue was that I had liked her.

I sensed a surge of animosity towards him building up within myself.

"Don't stall," don Juan said dryly. "This is a time when you should cut off your feelings of importance.

"You once had a woman, a very dear woman, and then one day you lost her."

I began to wonder if I had ever talked about her to don Juan. I concluded that there had never been an opportunity. Yet I might have. Every time he drove with me we had always talked incessantly about everything. I did not remember everything we had talked about because I could not take notes while driving. I felt somehow appeased by my conclusions. I told him that he was right. There had been a very important blond girl in my life.

"Why isn't she with you?" he asked.

"She left."

"Why?"

"There were many reasons."

"There were not so many reasons. There was only one. You made yourself too available."

I earnestly wanted to know what he meant. He again had touched me. He seemed to be cognizant of the effect of his touch and puckered up his lips to hide a mischievous smile.

"Everyone knew about you two," he said with unshaken conviction.

"Was it wrong?"

"It was deadly wrong. She was a fine person."

I expressed the sincere feeling that his fishing in the dark was odious to me, especially the fact that he always made his statements with the assurance of someone who had been at the scene and had seen it all.

"But that's true," he said with a disarming candor. "I have seen it all. She was a fine person."

I knew that it was meaningless to argue, but I was angry with him for touching that sore spot in my life and I said that the girl in question was not such a fine person after all, that in my opinion she was rather weak.

"So are you," he said calmly. "But that is not important. What counts is that you have looked for her everywhere; that makes her a special person in your world, and for a special person one should have only fine words."

I felt embarrassed; a great sadness had begun to engulf me.

"What are you doing to me, don Juan?" I asked. "You always succeed in making me sad. Why?"

"You are now indulging in sentimentality," he said accusingly.

"What is the point of all this, don Juan?"

"Being inaccessible is the point," he declared. "I brought up the memory of this person only as a means to show you directly what I couldn't show you with the wind.

"You lost her because you were accessible; you were always within her reach and your life was a routine one."

"No!" I said. "You're wrong. My life was never a routine.

"It was and it is a routine," he said dogmatically. "It is an unusual routine and that gives you the impression that it is not a routine, but I assure you it is."

I wanted to sulk and get lost in moroseness, but somehow his eyes made me feel restless; they seemed to push me on and on.

"The art of a hunter is to become inaccessible," he said. "In the case of that blond girl it would've meant that you had to become a hunter and meet her sparingly. Not the way you did. You stayed with her day after day, until the only feeling that remained was boredom. True?"

I did not answer. I felt I did not have to. He was right.

"To be inaccessible means that you touch the world around you sparingly. You don't eat five quail; you eat one. You don't damage the plants just to make a barbecue pit. You don't expose yourself to the power of the wind unless it is mandatory. You don't use and squeeze people until they have shriveled to nothing, especially the people you love."

"I have never used anyone," I said sincerely.

But don Juan maintained that I had, and thus I could bluntly state that I became tired and bored with people.

"To be unavailable means that you deliberately avoid exhausting yourself and others," he continued. "It means that you are not hungry and desperate, like the poor bastard that feels he will never eat again and devours all the food he can, all five quail!"

Don Juan was definitely hitting me below the belt. I ] laughed and that seemed to please him. He touched my back lightly.

"A hunter knows he will lure game into his traps over and over again, so he doesn't worry. To worry is to become accessible, unwittingly accessible. And once you worry you cling to anything out of desperation; and once you cling you are bound to get exhausted or to exhaust whoever or whatever you are clinging to."

I told him that in my day-to-day life it was inconceivable to be inaccessible. My point was that in order to function I had to be within reach of everyone that had something to do with me.

"I've told you already that to be inaccessible does not mean to hide or to be secretive," he said calmly. "It doesn't mean that you cannot deal with people either. A hunter uses his world sparingly and with tenderness, regardless of whether the world might be things, or plants, or animal, or people, or power. A hunter deals intimately with his world and yet he is inaccessible to that same world."

"That's a contradiction," I said. "He cannot be inaccessible if he is there in his world, hour after hour, day after day."

"You did not understand," don Juan said patiently. "He is inaccessible because he's not squeezing his world out of shape.  He taps it lightly, stays for as long as he needs to, and then swiftly moves away leaving hardly a mark."

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