The Eagle's Gift: an excerpt

 

– 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)