Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [162]
I had seldom, if ever, liked anybody so much so quickly—a feeling that remains undiminished after more than twenty-five years. It wasn’t so much what Castaneda had to say as his presence—a kind of charm that was partly subtle intelligence, partly a real affection for people, and partly a kind of innocence, not of the naive kind but of the kind one likes to suppose saints, holy men, prophets, and gurus have. Castaneda’s spirit was definitely Rabelaisian and ribald, and he had a wicked sense of humor, but nevertheless he gave off in some way the authentic, potent whiff of otherworldly power, to such a degree that I have never doubted for a moment the truth of his stories about Don Juan or of the miracles he says he witnessed and, later, participated in.
Something of this was borne out by his choice of a restaurant, a small, elegant steak house off Santa Monica. I had vaguely supposed that he might be a vegetarian, but he ordered rack of lamb and, when it arrived, ate it with gusto. There was, in fact, nothing at all of the vegan, sandal-wearing, ascetic, California crank about him. That his mind was on this world as opposed to the next was evident from the glint in his eyes whenever an attractive woman entered the room. Celibacy, it was clear, was not part of his belief system, nor was he opposed to drink, for he ordered wine with a discriminating judgment and drank it with obvious pleasure. Smoking, however, was against his principles, for reasons of health and wind—the sorcerous path, he made it clear, called for physical strength. It was not just the mind that had to be trained but the body.
Carlos, as I was already calling him, was not only a good talker in a town where good talkers are a dime a dozen, but, far rarer, a good listener. He transformed listening into a physical act, his dark eyes fixed on me, his mobile, expressive face showing, like a good actor’s, a combination of attention, sympathy, and warm amusement. Chunky and solid as he was—he was no beauty—Castaneda had an actor’s physical grace and an exact sense of timing, together with the ability to convey, by small subtle gestures and changes of expression, a whole range of emotion. I wondered if he had ever actually been an actor, but he laughed and denied it. Since, however, everything he said about his early years was open to dispute and he often contradicted himself, I was not convinced. But then, the truth is that all successful shamans and holy men are performers, and none more so than Don Juan, who combined the gifts of a stage magician with a great actor’s gift for the dramatic moment. Perhaps Castaneda had acted on stage at school, in Brazil, or Argentina, or wherever it was that he had grown up (a matter that was never altogether clear), but his natural gift for acting would have made him a successful student at the Actors Studio. Nevertheless, I believed every word of his book then and still do. Behind the sly tricks—the Garbo-like seclusion, the deliberate obfuscation of his biography, his delight in leaving false clues to confuse journalists—Carlos Castaneda was the real thing. More real, in fact, then even his most devoted readers supposed him to be, for he had a kind of earthy, peasant common sense that is sometimes missing from the bumbling and innocent academic whom he describes in his books and at whose embarrassing antics he often laughed.
He ate with a certain delicacy—there were many signs that Castaneda had been brought up with a considerable degree of gentility—but great determination. What did I think of the book, he asked, between mouthfuls. I was bowled over by it, I said. At one level I thought it could be read as a straightforward adventure story, in the doughty Lawrence of Arabia tradition—city boy goes to the desert and learns how to survive there; at another, it was an anthropological classic, like Colin M. Turnbull’s The Forest People. Turnbull, who was to