CHAPTER 2: EL BRUJO

 

EL  BRUJO

 

PART 1: JANNO

 

Janno stared at the immensity of the yellow and ochre plains that terminated in an upsweep of bluish-brown mountains framed by a deep and cloudless blue sky.

The Guadalupe mountains never looked so clear and stark, the outlines sketched with a clarity that brooked no fuzziness or hesitation. This was the Chihuahuan desert west of the cities of El Paso and Juarez, where the  ocotillo, the agave and the desert brush sprang  thorny and sharp from the silt left behind millions of years ago by a long evaporated inland sea. In parts of this desert, that silt took the form of dunes of gypsum that glittered blindingly white in the hot sun.

In an  unimaginably long span of time that serves to put man’s overweening sense of his own self-importance in perspective, between distant  times to the era when humans inhabited and built civilizations in this area, forms of inner consciousness grew. The earth of itself may be unconscious and uncaring, but humanity imbued it with  a spirit that , in the nature perhaps of a self- fulfilling prophecy, it soon proceeded to manifest.

Trees acquired souls, winds howled out prophecies, caves became portals to mysterious lands. Every creature that crawled, hopped, strutted or flew over the desiccated landscape had stories of survival that depended as much on  their  natural instincts   as on nature’s innate magic.

Seated in his rented Ford Compass, Janno regarded the expanse before him with a sense of tranquility and anticipation. He felt as one with the landscape, but something in him wanted more out of it. He wanted to truly feel its essence, its magic. He wanted to transform himself into that kestrel that flew up to the air when his jeep crunched to a halt nearby, startled into flight from its nest hidden in the grass.

He wanted to fly like a bird , to glide like a snake, to lope like a coyote  or  pounce like a mountain lion.

He had been told that there was someone living in this area, a brujo, a witch in the shape of an ordinary Mexican Indian, who could help him transform himself into  whatever magical creature he wanted to become.  He drove all the way out here, thirty miles from El Paso, in desert land within sight of the looming reefy cliff of El Capitan, to find this brujo and see if he was who he was whispered about  to be. Janno, you see,  wanted to be a brujo himself.

For anyone to understand how Janno, who was neither American or Indian but Asiatic, hailing from the small city of Ormoc, Leyte in the Philippines, one would have to go back to the 70’s, when he was a high school student in a seminary in Palo, Leyte. At that time, he was studying for the priesthood, though he eventually gave up on it. But in the seminary, he was omnivorous, reading novels, books on philosophy, and in a time when he was not found out to be a fraud, Carlos Castaneda’s “Way of the Yaqui”. In this series of books. Carlos recounted how he met up with a brujo in the Mexican desert who taught him the metaphysical ways of native Indian philosophy. He showed him a mental portal to another dimension of existence that was as real as the  one he was currently living in. He described how, after one mystical encounter in a sweat lodge,  the brujo, whose name was Juan, transformed himself into a jaguar.

Janno was aware that in later years, Carlos Castaneda was shown to have made up some of the episodes in his encounter with the Yaqui. In fact, skeptics questioned whether such a man existed at all except as a figment in Castaneda’s imagination.

However, Janno was hooked. The debunking didn’t matter. Castaneda’s brujo took a hold on his memory and imagination up until the moment when he found himself making the long journey as an immigrant from the Philippines to New York, USA. He had found a place among relatives in Jackson Heights, Queens and worked in the Big Apple in various jobs: as waiter, dishwasher, Dunkin’ Donut attendant, till finally, finding the winter conditions of New York  intolerable, he accepted an invitation from a friend from El Paso to stay with him the winter of year 2---. When he saw the desert, the brown Franklin Mountains that were not so much mountains as ancient tilted land, and further west the Guadalupe Mountains, the eroded remnant of the reefs of an ancient sea that straddled the border of West Texas and New Mexico, he knew he was home. This was the ancestral home of Castaneda’s yaqui, in spirit and in fact. This was where he might find a way to fathom and dig deep into the mystery of transcendental transformation as part of a larger, unseen universe. This is where he hoped he could transform himself into a jaguar.

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