The Power of Silence Read Online Free

get
soaked in that cave. I was sure don Juan was aware of that, but he seemed to
ignore it.
    "It
won't rain again until tomorrow morning," he said.
    Hearing my
inner thoughts being answered made me jump involuntarily and hit the top of my
head on the cave roof. It was a thud that sounded worse than it felt.
    Don Juan
held his sides laughing. After a while my head really began to hurt and I had
to massage it.
    "Your
company is as enjoyable to me as mine must have been to my benefactor," he
said and began to laugh again.
    We were
quiet for a few minutes. The silence around me was ominous. I fancied that I
could hear the rustling of the low clouds as they descended on us from the
higher mountains. Then I realized that what I was hearing was the soft wind.
From my position in the shallow cave, it sounded like the whispering of human
voices.
    "I had
the incredible good luck to be taught by two naguals," don Juan said and
broke the mesmeric grip the wind had on me at that moment. "One was, of
course, my benefactor, the nagual Julian, and the other was his benefactor, the
nagual Elias. My case was unique."
    "Why
was your case unique?" I asked.
    "Because
for generations naguals have gathered their apprentices years after their own
teachers have left the world," he explained. "Except my benefactor. I
became the nagual Julian's apprentice eight years before his benefactor left
the world. I had eight years' grace. It was the luckiest thing that could have
happened to me, for I had the opportunity to be taught by two opposite
temperaments. It was like being reared by a powerful father and an even more
powerful grandfather who don't see eye to eye. In such a contest, the
grandfather always wins. So I'm properly the product of the nagual Elias's
teachings. I was closer to him not only in temperament but also in looks. I'd
say that I owe him my fine tuning. However, the bulk of the work that went into
turning me from a miserable being into an impeccable warrior I owe to my
benefactor, the nagual Julian."
    "What
was the nagual Julian like physically?" I asked.
    "Do
you know that to this day it's hard for me to visualize him?" don Juan
said. "I know that sounds absurd, but depending on his needs or the
circumstances, he could be either young or old, handsome or homely, effete and
weak or strong and virile, fat or slender, of medium height or extremely
short."
    "Do
you mean he was an actor acting out different roles with the aid of
props?"
    "No,
there were no props involved and he was not merely an actor. He was, of course,
a great actor in his own right, but that is different. The point is that he was
capable of transforming himself and becoming all those diametrically opposed
persons. Being a great actor enabled him to portray all the minute
peculiarities of behavior that made each specific being real. Let us say that
he was at ease in every change of being. As you are at ease in every change of
clothes."
    Eagerly, I
asked don Juan to tell me more about his benefactor's transformations. He said
that someone taught him how to elicit those transformations, but that to
explain any further would force him to overlap into different stories.
    "What
did the nagual Julian look like when he wasn't transforming himself?" I
asked.
    "Let's
say that before he became a nagual he was very slim and muscular," don
Juan said. "His hair was black, thick, and wavy. He had a long, fine nose,
strong big white teeth, an oval face, strong jaw, and shiny dark-brown eyes. He
was about five feet eight inches tall. He was not Indian or even a brown
Mexican, but he was not Anglo white either. In fact, his complexion seemed to be
like no one else's, especially in his later years when his ever-changing
complexion shifted constantly from dark to very light and back again to dark.
When I first met him he was a light-brown old man, then as time went by, he
became a light-skinned young man, perhaps only a few years older than me. I was
twenty at that time.
    "But
if the changes