The Toltec Art of Life and Death

“A boy’s body is beginning,” she mused.

“A body that will grow into manhood. The soul will see to that.”

“And what of God?”

“Yes,” said Lala from the shadows. “Tell us what you know of God.”

“It is all God,” answered Leonardo with a glance into the shadows. He pointed dramatically to the bed. “Is this not God in action?”

“No, tell me,” Lala said, over the moans of the two lovers. “Tell me of God.”

“We have had our promenade already, señora. I have nothing more to say about God. I am witnessing God.”

“Do we take this memory with us?” asked Sarita, impatient to go.

“No,” Lala flared.

“Yes, indeed!” said the man. “Let it be the first of many such events—events that describe the life of my grandson!”

“And the next event?” pressed the old woman, grabbing her bag.

“I have an idea,” said Leonardo with a glint of inspiration in his eyes. Over Lala’s grumbles of protest, the room seemed to spin, turning bright and then dark with each revolution. The sound of a woman moaning continued, becoming sharper and more urgent as another room lit up, this one with fluorescent lamps and shiny metallic objects.

“A hospital?” muttered Sarita, leaning against a glistening wall. “I need to sit down again.” As her father pulled up a metal stool for her, the moaning stopped. They looked at the scene in front of them. It was not the death of her son she was witnessing now, but the moment of his arrival.

“Why the silence?” asked Leonardo. “Has he emerged? Has he been born?”

“He has,” said Sarita, remembering. The conversation in the room had stopped with the mother’s last push. All that remained were a few anxious whispers, as a nurse fussed over the newborn, coaching him to take a breath. The doctor busied himself with Sara, who lay still on the bed, pale as death and too exhausted to listen for the sounds of her infant son.

“They thought we would both perish that morning,” the old woman recalled.

There was the feel of tragedy in the room. The needs of the mother had become urgent, so the nurse holding the baby was called to help. She laid his lifeless little body on a metal table, an offering to fate.

“I smell fear,” Lala remarked. “Lots of it.” She moved from the far wall and stood at the center of the room, her elegant nose in the air. “Yes, fear . . . mixed with blood.” She backed away, repelled.

“Not to your taste?” the old man goaded.

Lala ignored him and cast her eyes around the room disapprovingly. Blood was everywhere. It covered the bedsheets, the inert mother, the anxious doctor. It had splashed onto the white-tiled floor and smeared the metal surface where the body of the child lay, cold and silent. It smelled, yes. It smelled of copper mines and manure. It smelled of fertile things—secret, undiscovered things. It smelled of life.

“Not to my taste, no,” she conceded. “I prefer my world of named things over the world of oozing, writhing things.”

“Yours is no world at all, my dear.”

“It is exactly the same world you once occupied—but without the detestable mess.”

They regarded each other suspiciously, and the silence in the room grew heavy.

“Father,” Sarita exclaimed. “I can’t bear the horror again! He doesn’t breathe!”

“Wait, hija,” said the old man. “Here it comes . . .”

Don Leonardo stretched his right hand toward the lifeless infant, palm open, and there was movement, then the unmistakable signs of struggle, as the baby’s frail lungs billowed and contracted, sucking in air. With the next gasp came shock, then sound, as the boy announced his existence with a vigorous scream. Half-conscious, his mother cried out and lunged toward the sound, almost tumbling from the bed. The nurse dropped her tray of soiled towels and shrieked in alarm.

“Ah, no. He wasn’t going so easily!” said Leonardo with a laugh. “Nor will he today, my daughter.”

“This is a waste of precious time,” Lala said, raising her voice in a show of authority. “Am I in charge of this expedition or not?”

“Please, yes,” Sarita replied. She collected her nylon bag and rose to meet the woman in the center of the busy room, where doctors and nurses celebrated the miraculous resurrection of mother and child. Sarita had a mission, and very little time. If this mysterious woman had the answers, she must be obeyed.

She nodded to her father, and the three spectral guests walked out of the room, the older woman taking the lead. Leonardo gazed back at the operating room, marveling at the chaotic wonder of it. He thought he saw someone familiar standing by the wall, but before he could get another look, he was pushed abruptly from the room. Lala followed close behind him. She, too, hesitated by the door, and turned.

Miguel Ruiz was clearly visible, standing in the light of an operating lamp. He was a grown man, radiant though dressed in a hospital gown, just as Sarita had last seen him—a man whose recent heart attack had hurled him out of the human play and into a world between two worlds. His gown showed flecks of blood, the blood of his own birth. He bore the stains of humanness that Lala so abhorred. She suspected that he had come here to feel the invitation. He had come to remind himself of the thrill—of the fearless daring a newborn feels as he launches headfirst into the human dream, taking a sharp breath and crying out in delirious exultation. He had come to watch, and to imagine.

Miguel and Lala looked at each other wordlessly. Each recognized the other, as any person might recognize himself in the mirror; but there was something more to the way they regarded one another. In Miguel’s eyes shone the full expression of love, without fear or doubt. In her eyes lay suspicion and the expectation of loss.

It was hard to say in that moment whether either of them could sense an opportunity for union, for laughter, or for the sweet submission to desire. It was hard to imagine how many directions this journey might take. Lala seemed as capricious as any woman, and just as eager to steer the events of the dream her way. Hearing Sarita’s call, she offered Miguel only the slightest of smiles, and then she was gone. Miguel stayed where he was, watching the hospital doors swing shut behind her, and let his imagination carry him gently into another dream . . . a dream of times forgotten and feelings exchanged.

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It gives me comfort to watch Sarita now . . . with her esteemed father again, and so present within my memory. When I was a small child, my mother was the only woman I really knew. I had older sisters, but they were already married and remote from my everyday life. I adored my mother, and respected her above all other beings. She was beautiful, wise, and pure. She was the Virgin, as every woman was in my young imagination; and as I matured, I would hold all girls to the same standard.

Growing up, I saw how my older brothers acted with their girlfriends, and I envied their cool, their gift with the opposite sex. I was amazed by their apparent confidence—it seemed they had special talents and rare insights into the minds of women, and I hardly hoped to achieve their success in romance. Well, hope is a trickster. It feeds illusions to hungry hearts, much as my great-grandfather Eziquio did. It seduces the mind with promises it cannot keep. As it happened, though, it wasn’t hope that made me a success with women; it was action.

My romantic life began at six years old, when I spontaneously asked a pretty classmate to be my girlfriend. Her immediate response was to laugh in my face. A few days later, when she reconsidered the offer, it was my turn to laugh. I rejected her. Yes, already I had learned to reciprocate the pain, a typical stratagem for emotional survival.

It seemed like a lifetime before I had the courage to try my luck with the opposite sex again. Before I turned twelve, however, my brothers had experienced enough pain of their own to sympathize with me. Jaime, the one closest to me in age, insisted that I try again. He gave me a motivational talk one morning, explaining how I was sure to get one girl if I was brave enough to ask ten or twelve. Whoever accepted me wouldn’t be the most desirable, of course, but my confidence would be restored. So, with borrowed courage, I asked a shy little friend at school to be my girlfriend. She said yes immediately. I was stunned. On my way home from school, still delirious with excitement, I asked another girl. She also said yes. By the end of the week, I had eight girlfriends and no idea what to do with any of them. They all seemed happy with the arrangement, as was I. My confidence, only just discovered, soon turned to expertise. Even Jaime was amazed, though the rest of my brothers were merely amused. They still teased me, but for the first time, their jokes carried some male pride and approval.

I was a little guy, but slowly I became a rock star in the arena of scared boys and giggling girls—all eager for romantic stories to tell. It wasn’t long before I became a favorite among the older girls. Sweet words ran like guava juice off my lips, making them all laugh and blush and warm to my little boy kisses. I was cute and funny, and they told themselves I was too young to be dangerous. Sex is a simple enough thing when fear doesn’t intrude on the moment, and with one blissful moment of success, innocence was happily lost for me. I would never again be hungry for love. After a short lifetime of poverty, it seemed that I was on my way to becoming a sexual billionaire.

I say all this to make a point about seduction. Seduction is a skill conspicuous to all living things, and one that is vital to life. Just as it works in the natural world, so does it work in the universe of thought. An idea spoken fearlessly causes a contagion of agreement. An invitation spoken sweetly erases any sense of danger. Suggestion provokes imagination, and imagination builds reality. When we can see these things clearly, we can also see beyond words and suggestions, to the messenger. Any messenger uses knowledge to gain access to a dream. “What do you know? I know it, too,” is one way to start. Or “What do you like? I like it, too.” Once invited in, the messenger can begin to change the shape of that dream. It is an unusual messenger who uses seductions of the mind to benefit another human being. It is an iconic messenger who applies this skill to benefit humanity as a whole.

The creature my mother met on her visit to the Tree of Knowledge is and always has been a skilled messenger. She has been moving and shifting the human story for as long as that story has been told. I refer to her as a woman, not for the reason the world does, with its peculiar distrust of feminine insight, but because I recognized early on that, like most men, I was born to love and cherish women. Once I tasted love, I never stopped wanting it. As a young man, I had a similar infatuation with knowledge. Just like a clever woman, a woman of remarkable power, knowledge captivated me. I suppose I was spellbound and obsessed for many years, but once I saw knowledge for what she was, I used all my talent to break the spell. I felt a desire to redeem knowledge, to guide her into awareness and to live with her in peace. I used the talent that came naturally to me—my talent for romance. By seeing knowledge as a woman who wanted above all to be known and to be heard, I could begin to listen, and to take the fury from her. By recognizing her need to be loved, touched, and tasted, I could transform her.

After I became a shaman, I finally saw that this was the revelation that my grandfather, don Leonardo, most wanted me to have. I finally understood his words, always understated and free of pretense. They weren’t like other wise words, laced with charming guile. Such guile is the character of knowledge, making it a clever messenger, but not a messenger for truth. My grandfather was a man who had heard the voice of knowledge in his own head, and then silenced it. In that silence, life finally made itself known to him. In that silence, he met his own authenticity. The wisdom he was able to share with me was wisdom he had achieved by seducing the temptress. Knowledge is the thing that moves men and women to think and behave as they do. Its authority begins with our initial attempts to speak; then, as we master language, it evolves into thought. It becomes the voice we listen to most, our most trusted informant. Knowledge gains power with every belief we embrace, regardless of that belief’s impact on the human being.

We master death when we finally know ourselves as life; when we can see from the perspective of life, not just knowledge. Each of us is the main character our story, and the main character is afraid of not knowing and not being known. Death represents the greatest threat to knowing and has therefore assumed a terrifying significance in the human dream. Death to an individual means the end to the physical body and the conclusion of thought. Death doesn’t mean the end of life as a whole, however, nor does it mean the end of humanity.

When knowledge serves our fears, it can make the sensible seem satanic, the satanic sensible. And yet knowledge, the single greatest devilry for humanity, can also be its savior. It’s up to each of us to recognize knowledge as the voice in our own head—the voice we have come to trust and obey. It’s up to each of us to modify that voice and to reform the tyrant. For, in the process of mastering knowledge, we have become knowledge. We have become the tyrant, the tempter, prompting fear with every opportunity. By redeeming knowledge, we redeem ourselves.

I have the feeling I should be elsewhere,” said don Leonardo as he paced the little schoolroom. He was walking between rows of desks, absently glancing at first graders as they scribbled symbols on paper.

“I need you here with me,” Sarita reminded him quietly. She was sitting at one of the desks, her body jammed between bench and tabletop as she watched the teacher in action.

“Shush. Listen to the teacher,” chided Lala, her red hair swept high on her head in the fashion of the day. “What she says is important.”

All the same, Lala was looking at the young teacher with disapproval. “Why is her appearance so shabby?” she asked her fellow itinerants. “Teaching is the single most important job there is, yet she brings no style to it! She wears no heels, no rouge. Learning should arouse us, should it not?”

“Not the kind of arousal I’m familiar with,” said the old man, straightening his tie as he checked out the teacher, who was wearing a cardigan and simple skirt. “If I may imagine her without the clothes—well, then . . .”