Читать «Карлос Кастанеда, книги 1-11 (на английском языке)» онлайн - страница 1729

I followed her advice, and of course, I focused on don Juan, and I remembered everything that had transpired at any given moment. I remembered details that I had no business remembering. Thanks to the work of Florinda, I was able to reconstruct enormous chunks of activity with don Juan, as well as details of tremendous importance that had bypassed me completely.

The spirit of the quotations from The Eagle's Gift was most shocking to me because the quotations revealed the profound emphasis that don Juan had put on the items of his world, on the warriors' way as the epitome of human accomplishment. That drive had survived his person, and was as alive as ever. Sometimes, I sincerely felt that don Juan had never left. I got to the point of actually hearing him moving around the house. I asked Florinda about it.

She said, "Oh, that's nothing. It's just the nagual Juan Matus's emptiness that reaches out to touch you, no matter where his awareness is at the moment."

Her answer left me more puzzled, more intrigued, and more despondent than ever. Although Florinda was the closest person to the nagual Juan Matus, they were astoundingly different. One thing that they both shared was the emptiness of their persons. They were no longer people. Don Juan Matus did not exist as a person. But what existed instead of his person was a collection of stories, each of them apropos to the situation he was discussing, didactic stories and jokes that bore the mark of his sobriety and his frugality.

Florinda was the same; she had stories upon stories. But her stories were about people. They were like a high form of gossip, or gossip elevated, due to her impersonality, to inconceivable heights of effectiveness and enjoyment.

"I want you to examine one man who bears a tremendous resemblance to you," she said one day to me. "I want you to recapitulate him as if you had known him all your life. This man was transcendental in the formation of our lineage. His name was Elias, the nagual Elias. I call him "the nagual who lost heaven."

"The story is that the nagual Elias was reared by a Jesuit priest, who taught him to read and write and to play the harpsichord. He taught him Latin. The nagual Elias could read the scriptures in Latin as fluently as any scholar could. His destiny was to be a priest, but he was an Indian, and Indians in those days did not fit into clerical hierarchies. They were too awesome - looking, too dark, too Indian. Priests were from the upper social classes, descendants of Spaniards, with white skin, blue eyes; they were handsome, presentable. The nagual Elias was a bear in comparison, but he struggled long, kindled by his mentor's promise that God would see that he was accepted into the priesthood.

"He was the sexton of the church where his mentor was the parish priest, and one day, an actual witch walked in. Her name was Amalia. They say that she was a wild card. Be that as it may, she ended up seducing the poor sexton, who fell so deeply, so hopelessly in love with Amalia that he ended up in the hut of a nagual man. In time, he became the nagual Elias, a figure to reckon with, cultured, well-read. It seemed that the niche of nagual was made for him. It allowed him the anonymity and the effectiveness that was denied him in the world.