Edward Abseyou coming here [to my home]. It is because the people remain with
the doubt.” In other words, Don Patricio meant that the suspicion
and busybody speculations of others had taken the form of an invis-
ible sinister influence that works to break our relationship of mutual
trust, or confianza, by entering into our dreams.
What I find most interesting about this episode—insofar as it might
shed light on other cases of the fear of magical aggression—is that it
signals the emergence of a kind of paranoia that would later develop
into the apperception of sorcery attacks against us by Don Nicolás.
In general, Mazatecs seem unwilling or unable to think that internal
conflict is inherent to the self, or that ambivalence is intrinsic to social
relationships. When either makes an appearance, as in this dream, it
is instead construed as a contingent evil coming from without, threat-
ening to affect the integrity of the self or of social relationships. In ret-
rospect, I now believe that the sense of sorcery’s presence, as it devel-
oped later on in this case, was really born out of Don Patricio’s sense
of guilt—disavowed and so turned inside out, as it were—derived from
his working with me. Even so, it must be said that it would be a mis-
take to reduce his desire to collaborate with me to motives of mere
profit. For one thing, the bottom line for him is drawn at a different
level than that. Given the risks of sorcery attacks and even death, the
stakes were way too high to have been worth it for him had it been
only a question of positive economy.
The doubts expressed in Don Patricio’s dreams are obviously his
own, and are at least in part manifest as a kind of self-accusation and
guilt, but in his brief interpretation of them, they are projected onto
a diffuse Other, as the malignant force of slanderous rumor. It is just
this externalized doubt and self-reproach that will later take on the
more tightly focused shape of a condensed hostility coming from the
outside, in the image of Don Nicolás and his imputed sorcery attacks
against us. Indeed, the way toward that transformation appears to
have been opened by Don Patricio’s decision to name the meddle-
some agency as ’ntjao, Mazatec for “evil wind.” But, then again, per-
haps, as suggested by Don Patricio, evil winds were simply the form
taken by multiple chismes, the result of many different people’s mis-
chievous talk and uncertainties, literally, a kind of malevolent “gos-
sip” on the breeze.