At the time I met don Juan, I was a fairly studious anthropology student, and I wanted to begin my career as a professional anthropologist by publishing as much as possible. I was bent on climbing the academic ladder, and in my calculations, I had determined that the first step was to collect data on the uses of medicinal plants by the Indians of the southwestern United States.
I first asked a professor of anthropology who had worked in that area for advice about my project. He was a prominent ethnologist [* ethnologist- an anthropologist who studies the division of humankind into races, their origins and distribution, and their distinctive characteristics] who had published extensively in the late thirties and early forties on the California Indians and the Indians of the Southwest and Sonora, Mexico. He patiently listened to my exposition.
My idea was to write a paper, call it 'Ethnobotanical Data', and publish it in a journal that dealt exclusively with anthropological issues of the southwestern United States.
I proposed to collect medicinal plants, take the samples to the Botanical Garden at UCLA to be properly identified, and then describe why and how the Indians of the Southwest used them. I envisioned collecting thousands of entries. I even envisioned publishing a small encyclopedia on the subject.
The professor smiled forgivingly at me. "I don't want to dampen your enthusiasm," he said in a tired voice, "but I can't help commenting negatively on your eagerness. Eagerness is welcome in anthropology, but it must be properly channeled. We are still in the golden age of anthropology.
"It was my luck to study with Alfred Krober and Robert Lowie, two pillars of social science. I haven't betrayed their trust. Anthropology is still the master discipline. Every other discipline should stem from anthropology.
"The entire field of history, for example, should be called 'historical anthropology,' and the field of philosophy should be called 'philosophical anthropology.' Man should be the measure of everything. Therefore, anthropology, the study of man, should be the core of every other discipline. Someday, it will."
I looked at him, bewildered. He was, in my estimation, a totally passive, benevolent old professor who had recently had a heart attack. I seemed to have struck a chord of passion in him.
He continued, saying, "Don't you think that you should pay more attention to your formal studies? Rather than doing fieldwork, wouldn't it be better for you to study linguistics? We have in the department here one of the most prominent linguists in the world. If I were you, I'd be sitting at his feet, catching any drift emanating from him.
"We also have a superb authority in comparative religions. And there are some exceptionally competent anthropologists here who have done work on kinship systems in cultures all over the world from the point of view of linguistics, and from the point of view of cognition. You need a lot of preparation. To think that you could do fieldwork now is a travesty. Plunge into your books, young man. That's my advice."
Stubbornly, I took my proposition to another professor; a younger one. He wasn't in any way more helpful. He laughed at me openly. He told me that the paper I wanted to write was a Mickey Mouse paper, and that it wasn't anthropology by any stretch of the imagination.
"Anthropologists nowadays," he said professorially, "are concerned with issues that have relevance. Medical and pharmaceutical scientists have done endless research on every possible medicinal plant in the world. There's no longer any bone to chew on there. Your kind of data collecting belongs to the turn of the nineteenth century. Now it's nearly two hundred years later. There is such a thing as progress, you know."
Then he proceeded to give me a definition and a justification of progress and perfectibility as two issues of philosophical discourse which he said were most relevant to anthropology.
"Anthropology is the only discipline in existence," he continued, "which can clearly substantiate the concept of perfectibility and progress. Thank God that there's still a ray of hope in the midst of the cynicism of our times.
"Only anthropology can show the actual development of culture and social organization. Only anthropologists can prove to mankind beyond the shadow of a doubt the progress of human knowledge. Culture evolves, and only anthropologists can present samples of societies that fit definite cubbyholes in a line of progress and perfectibility.
"That's anthropology for you! Not some puny fieldwork, which is not fieldwork at all, but mere masturbation."
It was a blow on the head to me. As a last resort, I went to Arizona to talk to anthropologists who were actually doing field work there. By then, I was ready to give up on the whole idea. I understood what the two professors were trying to tell me. I couldn't have agreed with them more. My attempts at doing fieldwork were definitely simpleminded.
Yet I wanted to get my feet wet in the field. I didn't want to do only library research.
In Arizona, I met with an extremely seasoned anthropologist who had written copiously on the Yaqui Indians of Arizona as well as those of Sonora, Mexico. He was extremely kind. He didn't run me down, nor did he give me any advice. He only commented that the Indian societies of the Southwest were extremely isolationist, and that foreigners, especially those of Hispanic origin, were distrusted, even abhorred, by those Indians.
A younger colleague of his, however, was more outspoken. He said that I was better off reading herbalists' books. He was an authority in the field, and his opinion was that anything to be known about medicinal plants from the Southwest had already been classified and talked about in various publications.
He went as far as to say that the sources of any Indian curer of the day were precisely those publications rather than any traditional knowledge. He finished me off with the assertion that if there still were any traditional curing practices, the Indians would not divulge them to a stranger.
"Do something worthwhile," he advised me. "Look into urban anthropology. There's a lot of money for studies on alcoholism among Indians in the big city, for example. Now that's something that any anthropologist can do easily. Go and get drunk with local Indians in a bar.
"Then arrange whatever you find out about them in terms of statistics. Turn everything into numbers. Urban anthropology is a real field."
There was nothing else for me to do except to take the advice of those experienced social scientists. I decided to fly back to Los Angeles, but another anthropologist friend of mine named Bill let me know then that he was going to drive throughout Arizona and New Mexico, visiting all the places where he had done work in the past, renewing in this fashion his relationships with the people who had been his anthropological informants.
"You're welcome to come with me," he said. "I'm not going to do any work. I'm just going to visit with them, have a few drinks with them, bullshit with them. I bought gifts for them- blankets, booze, jackets, ammunition for twenty-two caliber rifles. My car is loaded with goodies.
"I usually drive alone whenever I go to see them, but by myself I always run the risk of falling asleep. You could keep me company, keep me from dozing off, or drive a little bit if I'm too drunk."
I felt so despondent that I turned him down.
"I'm very sorry, Bill," I said. "The trip won't do for me, I see no point in pursuing this idea of fieldwork any longer."
"Don't give up without a fight," Bill said in a tone of paternal concern. "Give all you have to the fight, and if it licks you, then it's okay to give up, but not before. Come with me and see how you like the Southwest."
He put his arm around my shoulders. I couldn't help noticing how immensely heavy his arm was. He was tall and husky, but in recent years his body had acquired a strange rigidity. He had lost his boyish quality. His round face was no longer filled, youthful, the way it had been. Now it was a worried face.
I believed that he worried because he was losing his hair, but at times it seemed to me that it was something more than that. And it wasn't that he was fatter. His body was heavy in ways that were impossible to explain. I noticed it in the way that he walked, and got up, and sat down. Bill seemed to me to be fighting gravity with every fiber of his being, in everything he did.
Disregarding my feelings of defeat, I started on a journey with him. We visited every place in Arizona and New Mexico where there were Indians.
One of the end results of this trip was that I found out that my anthropologist friend had two definite facets to his person. He explained to me that his opinions as a professional anthropologist were very measured, and congruous with the anthropological thought of the day, but that as a private person, his anthropological fieldwork had given him a wealth of experiences that he never talked about. These experiences were not congruous with the anthropological thought of the day because they were events that were impossible to catalog.
During the course of our trip, he would invariably have some drinks with his ex-informants, and feel very relaxed afterward. I would take the wheel then and drive as he sat in the passenger seat taking sips from his bottle of thirty year old Ballantine's. It was then that Bill would talk about his uncataloged experiences.
"I have never believed in ghosts," he said abruptly one day. "I never went in for apparitions and floating essences; voices in the dark. You know. I had a very pragmatic, serious upbringing. Science had always been my compass.
"But then, working in the field, all kinds of weird crap began to filter through to me. For instance, I went with some Indians one night on a vision quest. They were going to actually initiate me by some painful business of piercing the muscles of my chest. They were preparing a sweat lodge in the woods.
"I had resigned myself to withstand the pain. I took a couple of drinks to give me strength. And then the man who was going to intercede for me with the people who actually performed the ceremony, yelled in horror, and pointed at a dark, shadowy figure walking toward us.
"When the shadowy figure came closer to me," Bill went on, "I noticed that what I had in front of me was an old Indian dressed in the weirdest getup you could imagine. He had the parapherna of shamans. The man I was with that night fainted shamelessly at the sight of the old man.
"The old man came to me and pointed a finger at my chest. His finger was just skin and bone. He babbled incomprehensible things to me. By then, the rest of the people had seen the old man, and started to rush silently toward me.
"The old man turned to look at them, and every one of them froze. He harangued them for a moment. His voice was something unforgettable. It was as if he were talking from a tube, or as if he had something attached to his mouth that carried the words out of him. I swear to you that I saw the man talking inside his body, and his mouth broadcasting the words as a mechanical apparatus.
"After haranguing the men, the old man continued walking, past me, past them, and disappeared, swallowed by the darkness."
Bill said that the plan to have an initiation ceremony went to pot. It was never performed; and the men, including the shamans in charge, were shaking in their boots. He stated that they were so frightened that they disbanded and left.
"People who had been friends for years," Bill went on, "never spoke to each other again. They claimed that what they had seen was the apparition of an incredibly old shaman, and that it would bring bad luck to talk about it among themselves. In fact, they said that the mere act of setting eyes on one another would bring them bad luck. Most of them moved away from the area."
"Why did they feel that talking to each other or seeing each other would bring them bad luck?" I asked him.
"Those are their beliefs," he replied. "A vision of that nature means to them that the apparition spoke to each of them individually. To have a vision of that nature is, for them, the luck of a lifetime."
"And what was the individual thing that the vision told each of them?" I asked.
"Beats me," he replied. "They never explained anything to me. Every time I asked them, they entered into a profound state of numbness. They hadn't seen anything; they hadn't heard anything.
"Years after the event, the man who had fainted next to me swore to me that he had just faked the faint because he was so frightened that he didn't want to face the old man; and that what the old man had to say was understood by everybody at a level other than language comprehension."
Bill said that in his case, what the apparition voiced to him he understood as having to do with his health and his expectations in life.
"What do you mean by that?" I asked him.
"Things are not that good for me," he confessed. "My body doesn't feel well."
"But do you know what is really the matter with you?" I asked.
"Oh, yes," he said nonchalantly. "Doctors have told me. But I'm not gonna worry about it, or even think about it."
Bill's revelations left me feeling thoroughly uneasy. This was a facet of his person that I didn't know. I had always thought that he was a tough old cookie. I could never conceive of him as vulnerable. I didn't like our exchange. It was, however, too late for me to retreat. Our trip continued.
On another occasion, he confided that the shamans of the Southwest were capable of transforming themselves into different entities, and that the categorization schemes of 'bear shaman', or 'mountain lion shaman', etc., should not be taken as euphemisms or metaphors because they were not.
"Would you believe it," he said in a tone of great admiration, "that there are some shamans who actually become bears, or mountain lions, or eagles? I'm not exaggerating, nor am I fabricating anything when I say that once I witnessed the transformation of a shaman who called himself 'River Man', or 'River Shaman', or 'Proceeding from River: Returning to River.'
"I was out in the mountains of New Mexico with this shaman. I was driving for him. He trusted me, and he was going in search of his origin- or so he said. We were walking along a river when he suddenly got very excited. He told me to move away from the shore to some high rocks, and hide there; put a blanket over my head and shoulders, and peek through it so I would not miss what he was about to do."
"What was he going to do?" I asked him, incapable of containing myself.
"I didn't know," he said. "Your guess would have been as good as mine. I had no way of conceiving of what he was going to do. He just walked into the water, fully dressed. When the water reached him at mid-calf, because it was a wide but shallow river, the shaman simply vanished; disappeared.
"Prior to entering the water, he had whispered in my ear that I should go downstream and wait for him. He told me the exact spot to wait. I, of course, didn't believe a word of what he was saying, so at first I couldn't remember where he had said I had to wait for him, but then I found the spot and I saw the shaman coming out of the water. It sounds stupid to say 'coming out of the water.' I saw the shaman turning into water and then being remade out of the water. Can you believe that?"
I had no comments on his stories. It was impossible for me to believe him, but I could not disbelieve him either. He was a very serious man. The only possible explanation that I could think of was that as we continued our trip he drank more and more every day. He had in the trunk of the car a box of twenty-four bottles of Scotch for only himself. He actually drank like a fish.
"I have always been partial to the esoteric mutations of shamans," he said to me another day. "It's not that I can explain the mutations, or even believe that they take place, but as an intellectual exercise I am very interested in considering that mutations into snakes and mountain lions are not as difficult as what the water shaman did.
"It is at moments like this, when I engage my intellect in such a fashion, that I cease to be an anthropologist and I begin to react, following a gut feeling. My gut feeling is that those shamans certainly do something that can't be measured scientifically or even talked about intelligently.
"For instance, there are cloud shamans who turn into clouds, into mist. I have never seen this happen, but I knew a cloud shaman. I never saw him disappearing or turning into mist in front of my eyes as I saw that other shaman turning into water right in front of me. But I chased that cloud shaman once, and he simply vanished in an area where there was no place for him to hide. Although I didn't see him turning into a cloud, he disappeared. I couldn't explain where he went. There were no rocks or vegetation around the place where he ended up. I was there half a minute after he was, but the shaman was gone.
"I chased that man all over the place for information," Bill went on. "He wouldn't give me the time of day. He was very friendly to me, but that was all."
Bill told me endless other stories about strife and political factions among Indians in different Indian reservations; or stories about personal vendettas, animosities, friendships, etc., etc., which did not interest me in the least.
On the other hand, his stories about shamans' mutations and apparitions had caused a true emotional upheaval in me. I was at once both fascinated and appalled by them. However, when I tried to think about why I was fascinated or appalled, I couldn't tell. All I could have said was that his stories about shamans hit me at an unknown, visceral [* visceral- obtained through intuition rather than from reasoning or observation] level.
Another realization brought by this trip was that I verified for myself that the Indian societies of the Southwest were indeed closed to outsiders. I finally came to accept that I did need a great deal of preparation in the science of anthropology, and that it was more functional to do anthropological fieldwork in an area with which I was familiar, or one in which I had an entree.
When the journey ended, Bill drove me to the Greyhound bus depot in Nogales, Arizona, for my return trip to Los Angeles. As we were sitting in the waiting area before the bus came, he consoled me in a paternal manner, reminding me that failures were a matter of course in anthropological fieldwork, and that they meant only the hardening of one's purpose, or the coming to maturity of an anthropologist.
Abruptly, he leaned over and pointed with a slight movement of his chin to the other side of the room. "I think that old man sitting on the bench by the corner over there is the man I told you about," he whispered in my ear. "I am not quite sure because I've had him in front of me, face-to-face, only once."
"What man is that? What did you tell me about him?" I asked.
"When we were talking about shamans and shamans' transformations, I told you that I had once met a cloud shaman."
"Yes, yes, I remember that," I said. "Is that man the cloud shaman?"
"No," he said emphatically. "But I think he is a companion or a teacher of the cloud shaman. I saw both of them together in the distance various times, many years ago."
I did remember Bill mentioning in a very casual manner, although not in relation to the cloud shaman, that he knew about the existence of a mysterious old man who was a retired shaman; an old Indian misanthrope [* misanthrope- someone who dislikes people in general] from Yuma who had once been a terrifying sorcerer. The relationship of the old man to the cloud shaman was never voiced by my friend, but obviously it was foremost in Bill's mind to the point where he believed that he had told me about him.
A strange anxiety suddenly possessed me and made me jump out of my seat. As if I had no volition of my own, I approached the old man and immediately began a long tirade on how much I knew about medicinal plants and shamanism among the American Indians of the plains and their Siberian ancestors.
As a secondary theme, I mentioned to the old man that I knew that he was a shaman. I concluded by assuring him that it would be thoroughly beneficial for him to talk to me at length.
"If nothing else," I said petulantly, [* petulanty- in an easily irritated or annoyed manner] "we could swap stories. You tell me yours and I'll tell you mine."
The old man kept his eyes lowered until the last moment. Then he peered at me. "I am Juan Matus," he said, looking me squarely in the eyes.
My tirade shouldn't have ended by any means, but for no reason that I could discern, I felt that there was nothing more I could have said. I wanted to tell him my name. He raised his hand to the height of my lips as if to prevent me from saying it.
At that instant, a bus pulled up to the bus stop. The old man muttered that it was the bus he had to take, then he earnestly asked me to look him up so we could talk with more ease and swap stories. There was an ironic smirk on the comer of his mouth when he said that.
With an incredible agility for a man his age- I figured he must have been in his eighties- he covered, in a few leaps, the fifty yards between the bench where he was sitting and the door of the bus. As if the bus had stopped just to pick him up, it moved away as soon as he had jumped in and the door had closed.
After the old man left, I went back to the bench where Bill was sitting.
"What did he say, what did he say?" he asked excitedly.
"He told me to look him up, and come to his house to visit," I said. "He even said that we could talk there."
"But what did you say to him to get him to invite you to his house?" he demanded.
I told Bill that I had used my best sales pitch, and that I had promised the old man to reveal to him everything I knew from the point of view of my reading about medicinal plants.
Bill obviously didn't believe me. He accused me of holding out on him. "I know the people around this area," he said belligerently, "and that old man is a very strange fart. He doesn't talk to anybody, Indians included. Why would he talk to you; a perfect stranger? You're not even cute!"
It was obvious that Bill was annoyed with me. I couldn't figure out why though. I didn't dare ask him for an explanation. He gave me the impression of being a bit jealous. Perhaps he felt that I had succeeded where he had failed.
However, my success had been so inadvertent that it didn't mean anything to me. Except for Bill's casual remarks, I didn't have any conception of how difficult it was to approach that old man, and I couldn't have cared less. At the time, I found nothing remarkable in the exchange. It baffled me that Bill was so upset about it.
"Do you know where his house is?" I asked him.
"I haven't the foggiest idea," he answered curtly. "I have heard people from this area say that he doesn't live anywhere, that he just appears here and there unexpectedly, but that's a lot of horse-shit. He probably lives in some shack in Nogales, Mexico."
"Why is he so important?" I asked him. My question made me gather enough courage to add, "You seem to be upset because he talked to me. Why?"
Without any ado, he admitted that he was chagrined because he knew how useless it was to try to talk to that man. "That old man is as rude as anyone can be," he added. "At best, he stares at you without saying a word when you talk to him. At other times, he doesn't even look at you. He treats you as if you didn't exist.
"The one time I tried to talk to him, he brutally turned me down. Do you know what he said to me? He said, 'If I were you, I wouldn't waste my energy opening my mouth. Save it. You need it.' If he weren't such an old fart, I would have punched him in the nose."
I pointed out to Bill that to call him an 'old' man was more a figure of speech than an actual description.
The Indian didn't really appear to be that old, although he was definitely old. He possessed a tremendous vigor and agility. I felt that Bill would have failed miserably if he had tried to punch him in the nose. That old Indian was powerful. In fact, he was downright scary.
I didn't voice my thoughts. I let Bill go on telling me how disgusted he was at the nastiness of that old man, and how he would have dealt with him had it not been for the fact that the old man was so feeble.
"Who do you think could give me some information about where he might live?" I asked him.
"Perhaps some people in Yuma," he replied, a bit more relaxed. "Maybe the people I introduced you to at the beginning of our trip. You wouldn't lose anything by asking them. Tell them that I sent you to them."
I changed my plans right then and instead of going back to Los Angeles, I went directly to Yuma, Arizona. I saw the people to whom Bill had introduced me. They didn't know where the old Indian lived, but their comments about him inflamed my curiosity even more.
They said that he was not from Yuma, but from Sonora, Mexico, and that in his youth he had been a fearsome sorcerer who did incantations and put spells on people; but that he had mellowed with age, turning into an ascetic [* ascetic- someone who practices self denial as a spiritual discipline] hermit.
They remarked that although he was a Yaqui Indian, he had once run around with a group of Mexican men who seemed to be extremely knowledgeable about bewitching practices. They all agreed that they hadn't seen those men in the area for ages.
One of the men added that the old man was contemporaneous with his grandfather, but that while his grandfather was senile and bedridden, the sorcerer seemed to be more vigorous than ever. The same man referred me to some people in Hermosillo, the capital of Sonora, who might know the old man and who might be able to tell me more about him.
The prospect of going to Mexico was not at all appealing to me. Sonora was too far away from my area of interest. Besides, I reasoned that I was better off doing urban anthropology after all, and I went back to Los Angeles. But before leaving for Los Angeles, I canvassed the area of Yuma, searching for information about the old man. No one knew anything about him.
As the bus drove to Los Angeles, I experienced a unique sensation. On the one hand, I felt totally cured of my obsession with fieldwork or my interest in the old man. On the other hand, I felt a strange nostalgia. It was, truthfully, something I had never felt before. Its newness struck me profoundly.
It was a mixture of anxiety and longing, as if I were missing something of tremendous importance. I had the clear sensation as I approached Los Angeles that whatever had been acting on me around Yuma had begun to fade with distance; but its fading only increased my unwarranted longing.