The Active Side of Infinity (4 page)

His talent for business made him a super-ambitious being. He wanted to
be the richest man in
the world. However, he found that the
competition was too tough. According to him, doing
business alone
he couldn't possibly compete, for instance, with the head of an Islamic sect
who, at
that time, got paid his weight in gold every year. The
head of the sect would fatten himself as
much as his
body allowed him before he was weighed.

Then my friend Roy lowered his sights to being the richest man in the United States. The
competition in this sector was ferocious. He went down a
notch: Perhaps he could be the richest
man in California. He was too late for that, too. He gave up hope that, with his chains of pizza
and
ice cream parlors, he could ever rise in the business world to compete with the
established
families who owned California. He settled for being the
richest man in Woodland Hills, the suburb of Los Angeles where he lived.
Unfortunately for him, down the street from his house
lived Mr.
Marsh, who owned factories that produced A-one quality mattresses all over the United
States
,
and he was rich beyond belief. Roy's frustration knew no limits. His drive to
accomplish was so intense that it finally impaired his health. One day he died
from an aneurysm in his brain.

His death brought, as a consequence, my third visit to a morgue or a
mortuary. Roy's wife
begged me, as his best friend, to make
sure that the corpse was properly dressed. I went to the
funeral
parlor, where I was led by a male secretary to the inner chambers. At the
precise moment
I arrived, the mortician, working on a high
marble-topped table, was forcefully pushing up the
corners of the
upper lip of the corpse, which had already entered rigor mortis, with the index
and
little finger of his right hand while he held his middle
finger against his palm. As a grotesque
smile appeared
on Roy's dead face, the mortician half-turned to me and said in a servile tone,
"I
hope all this is to your satisfaction, sir."

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

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

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

I never ceased to marvel at the way in which my mood changed every time
I went to see don
Juan. I always arrived moody, grouchy, filled with
self-assertions and doubts. After a while, my
mood would
mysteriously change and I would become more expansive, by degrees, until I was
as
calm as I had ever been. However, my new mood was
couched in my old vocabulary. My usual
way of talking was that of a totally
dissatisfied person who is containing himself from
complaining out loud, but whose endless complaints are implied at every
turn of the conversation.

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

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

My most useful maneuver, when 1 was attacked, had always been to turn
my attackers off by
not listening to them. Don Juan, however, had the
disgusting ability to trap every bit of my
attention. No
matter how he attacked me, no matter what he said, he always managed to have me
riveted to his every word. On this occasion, what he was saying about me didn't
please me at all
because it was the naked truth.

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

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

1 thought don Juan was joking and I laughed stupidly. "This is not
a laughing matter," he said
cuttingly. "I am serious. You
once told me a story that fits the bill." "What story is that, don
Juan?"

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

I began to retell the story in a cursory fashion. He stopped me and
demanded a careful, detailed narration, starting at the beginning. I tried
again, but my rendition didn't satisfy him.

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

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

We went for a hike at the worst time of the day, noon. He outfitted me
with an old straw hat, as he always did whenever we went out in the heat of the
sun. We walked for a long time in
complete silence. I tried to
the best of my ability to force myself to remember all the details of the
story.
It was mid afternoon when we sat down under the shade of some tall bushes, and
I retold
the full story.

Years before, while I was studying sculpture in a fine arts school in Italy, I had a close friend,
a Scotsman who was studying art in order to become
an art critic. What stood out most vividly in
my mind about
him, and had to do with the story I was telling don Juan, was the bombastic
idea he had of himself; he thought he was the most licentious, lusty,
all-around scholar and craftsman,
a man of the Renaissance.
Licentious he was, but lustiness was something in complete
contradiction
to his bony, dry, serious person. He was a vicarious follower of the English
philosopher
Bertrand Russell and dreamed of applying the principles of logical positivism
to art
criticism. To be an all-around scholar and craftsman was
perhaps his wildest fantasy because he was a procrastinator; work was his
nemesis.

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

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

I understood that he was a hysterical Scotsman. It was always my
pleasure to humor him and
tag along. I had never regretted it.
"Calm down, calm down, Eddie," I said. "What are you trying to
tell me?”

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

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

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

My curiosity mounted by the minute. I was more than willing to
participate in his new delight.
Eddie drove me to the outskirts of the
city. We stopped in front of a dusty, badly kept building; the paint was
peeling off the walls. It had the air of having been a hotel at one time, a
hotel that
had been turned into an apartment building. I could see
the remnants of a hotel sign that seemed
to have been ripped to pieces. On
the front of the building there were rows of dirty single
balconies filled with flowerpots or draped with
carpets put out to dry.

At the entrance to the building were two dark, shady-looking men
wearing pointed black
shoes that seemed too tight on their
feet; they greeted Eddie effusively. They had black, shifty,
menacing
eyes. Both of them were wearing shiny light-blue suits, also too tight for
their bulky
bodies. One of them opened the door for Eddie. They
didn't even look at me.

We went up two flights of stairs on a dilapidated staircase that at one
time must have been luxurious. Eddie led the way and walked the length of an
empty, hotellike corridor with doors on
both sides.
All the doors were painted in the same drab, dark, olive green. Every door had
a brass
number, tarnished with age, barely visible against the
painted wood.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the small hall where we were standing we walked into a dark and eerie
room. The
windows were heavily curtained. There were some
low-voltage light bulbs on fixtures attached to
the wall. The
bulbs were shaped like tubes and protruded straight out at right angles from
the
wall. There was a profusion of objects around the room:
pieces of furniture like small chests of drawers, antique tables and chairs; a
roll-top desk set against the wall and crammed with papers,
pencils,
rulers, and at least a dozen pairs of scissors. Madame Ludmilla made me sit
down on an
old stuffed chair.