– It's an honour to make your acquaintance - I said, to the
woman who greeted me in the hallway.
– I’m Florinda - she said
We looked at each other in silence. I was awestruck. My state
of awareness was as keen as it had ever been. Never again have I experienced a
comparable sensation.
– That’s a beautiful name - I managed to say, but I meant
more than that. Soft and long pronunciation of the Spanish vowels made the name
soft and sonorous. Especially the “i” after the “r”.
The name was not rare . I simply had never met anyone until
that day who was the essence of that name.
The woman in front of me fit into it as if it had been made
for her. Or perhaps as if she herself had made her person fit into it.
Physically she looked exactly like Nelida, except she seemed more physical,
more powerful. She had the olive skin of mediterranean people. Spanish or
perhaps French. She was old and yet she was not feeble or even aged. Her body
seemed to be supple and lean. Long legs, angular features, small mouth, a
beautifully chiselled nose, dark eyes and braided white hair. No jowls. No
sagging skin on her face and neck. She was old as if she had been made up to
look old.
– What do we have here - she said - pinching me. Soft. Indulging
to the core, no doubt.
Her bluntness reminded me of don Juan’s. So did the inner
life of her eyes.
It occurred to me, looking back at my life with don Juan, that his eyes were
always in repose. One could see no agitation in them. It was not that don Juan’s
eyes were beautiful to look at. I have seen gorgeous eyes, but never have I
found them to say anything.
Florinda’s eyes, like don Juan’s, gave me the feeling that they had witnessed
all there is to witness. They were calm, but not bland. The excitement had been
driven inward and had been turned into something that I could only described as
“inner life”.
Florinda took me through the living room and out onto a roofed patio; we sat on
some comfortable sofa-like chairs. Her eyes seemed to look for something in my
face.
– Do you know who I am, and what I’m supposed to do for you?
- she asked
I said that all I know about her and what she was to do to
me was what don Juan had sketched out.
In the course of explaining my position, I called her doña Florinda
– Don’t call me doña Florinda - she said, with a childish
gesture of annoyance and embarrassment - I'm not that old yet, or even that
respectable
I asked her what she wanted me to call her
– Just Florinda will do - she said. Insofar as “who” I am, I
am a warrior who knows the secrets of stalking And insofar as what I am
supposed to do for you, I can tell you that I am going to teach you the first seven
principles of stalking., the first three principles of the rules for stalkers,
and the first three manoeuvres of stalking.
She added that the normal thing was for every warrior to get
what transpires when the interaction is on the left side, and that it would
take years for me to come to grips with whatever she was going to teach me. She
said that her instruction was merely the beginning, and that someday she would
finish teaching me, but under different circumstances.
I asked her if she minded my asking her questions.
– Do as you please - she said - all I need from you is your
commitment to practice; after all, you know in one way or another whatever we’re
going to discuss, your shortcomings are that you have no self-confidence and
are unwilling to claim your knowledge as power. The nagual, being a man, mesmerised
you; you cannot act on your own, only a woman can liberate you from that.
I will begin by telling you the story of my life, and in doing so, things will
become clear to you; I will have to tell it to you in bits, so you will have to
come here quite often.
Her apparent willingness to tell me about her life struck me
at odds with the reticence of everyone else to reveal anything personal about themselves.
After years with them I had accepted their ways so unquestioningly that her
voluntary intent to reveal her personal life was freakish to me. Her statement
put me immediately on guard.
– I beg your pardon - I said - did you say that you’re going
to reveal your personal life to me?
– Why not? - she answered
I answered her with a long explanation of what don Juan had
told me about the encumbering force of personal history, and the need that a
warrior has to erase it. I wrapped it up by telling her that he had prohibited
me from ever talking about my life.
She laughed in a high falsetto voice. She seemed to be delighted.
– That applies only to men - she said -the not-doing of your
personal life is to tell endless stories but not a single one about your real
self. You see, being a man means that you have a solid history behind you. You have
family, friends, acquaintances, and every one of them has a definite idea of
you; being a man means that you are accountable. You cannot disappear that
easily. In order to erase yourself you needed a lot of work.
My case is different. I am a woman, and that gives me a splendid advantage. I'm
not accountable. Don’t you know that women are not accountable?
– I don’t know what you mean by “accountable” - I said
– I mean that a woman can easily disappear - she replied – a
woman can, if nothing else, get married. A woman belongs to the husband. In a
family with lots of children the daughters are discarded very early. No one
counts on them… chances are that some will vanish without leaving a trace.
Their disappearance is easily accepted.
A son, on the other hand, is something one banks on. It’s
not that easy for a son to slip off and vanish, and even if he does, he will
leave traces behind him. A son feels guilty for disappearing, a daughter does
not.
When the nagual told you to be accountable for your personal life, he intended you
to overcome the feeling of having done wrong to your family and friends, who
have counted on you one way or another. After a lifetime struggle, the male
warrior ends up, of course, erasing himself, but that struggle takes its toll on
the man: he becomes secretive, forever on guard against himself.
A woman doesn’t have to contend with that hardship. A woman is already prepared
to disintegrate into thin air. In fact, it’s expected of her.
Being a woman, I’m not compelled to secrecy. I don’t give a fig about it.
Secrecy is the price you men have to pay for being important to society. The
struggle is only for the men, because they resent erasing themselves, and would
find curious ways to pop up somewhere, somehow. Take yourself, for instance:
you go around giving lectures….
Florinda made me nervous in a very peculiar way. I felt
strangely restless in her presence. I would admit, without hesitation, that don
Juan and Silvio Manuel also made me feel nervous and apprehensive, but it was a
different feeling. I was actually afraid of them, especially Silvio
Manuel: he terrified me, and yet I had learned to live with my terror.
Florinda did not frighten me. My nervousness was rather the result of being
annoyed… threatened by her savoir faire. She didn’t stare at me the way Silvio
Manuel and Don Juan used to do: they would always stare at me until I moved my
face away in a gesture of submission. Florinda only glanced at me. Her eyes
moved continually from thing to thing. She seemed to examine not only my eyes,
but every inch of my face my body. As she talked, she would shift in quick
glances to my face, to my hands, or to her feet, or to the roof.
– I make you ill at ease, don’t I? - she asked
Her question caught me thoroughly off-guard. I laughed. Her
tone was not threatening… at all.
– You do - I said.
– Oh, it’s perfectly understandable - she went on - you are
used to being a man. A woman, for you, is something made for your benefit. A
woman is stupid, to you, and the fact that you are a man and the nagual makes
things even more difficult.
I felt obligated to defend myself. I thought that she was a
very opinionated lady and I wanted to tell her so. I started off in great form,
but petered out almost immediately, upon hearing her laughter. It was a joyous,
youthful laughter. Don Juan and Don
Gennaro used to laugh at me all the time and their laughter was also youthful,
but Florinda’s had a different vibration. There was no hurry in her laughter.
No pressure.
– I think we’d better go inside - she said - there shouldn’t
be any distraction. The nagual don Mathus has already taken you around, showing
you the world. That was important for what he had to tell you.
I have other things to talk about, which require another setting.
We sat on a leather couch in a den off the patio. I felt
more at ease indoors.
She went right into the story of her life. She said that she had been born in a
fairly large Mexican city to a well-to-do family. As she was an only child, her
parents spoiled her from the moment she was born. Without a trace of false
modesty, Florinda admitted that she had always been aware of being beautiful.
She said that beauty is a demon that breeds and proliferates when admired. She
assured me that she could say without the shadow of a doubt that that demon is
the hardest one to overcome, and that if I would look around to find those who
were beautiful, I would find the most wretched beings imaginable.
I did not want to argue with her, yet I had the most intense
desire to tell her that she was somehow… dogmatic. She must have caught my
feelings - she winked at me.
– They are wretched - you’re better believe it - she continued
- try them! Be unwilling to go along with their idea that they are beautiful
and because if it, important. You’ll see what I mean.
She said that she could hardly give her parents or herself
full blame for her conceit. Everyone around her had conspired from her infancy
to make her feel important and unique.
– When I was fifteen - she went on - I thought that I was
about the greatest thing that ever came to Earth… everybody said so -
especially men.
She confessed that throughout her adolescent years she
indulged in the attention and adulation of scores of admirers. At eighteen, she
judiciously chose the best possible husband from the ranks of no less than eleven
serious suitors.
She married Celestino, a man of means fifteen years her senior.
Florinda described her married life as heaven on earth. To the enormous circle
of friends she already had, she added Celestino’s friends. The total effect was
that of a perennial holiday. Her bliss, however, lasted only six months, which
went by almost unnoticed. It all came to a most abrupt and brutal end when she
contracted a mysterious and crippling disease. Her left foot, ankle and calf began
to swell. The line of her beautiful leg was ruined. The swelling became so
intense that the cutaneous tissues started to blister and burst. Her whole
lower leg, from the knee down became the site of scabs and a pestilent
secretion. The skin became hard. The
disease was diagnosed as elephantiasis. Doctors’ attempts to cure her condition
were clumsy and painful and their final conclusion was that only in Europe were
there medical centres advanced enough to possibly attempt a cure.
In a matter of three months, Florinda’s paradise had turned
to hell on earth.
From The Eagle's Gift by Carlos Castaneda
(chapter 14)
