The Anarchist

The dialogues between young David and the shaman, guru and magician: Don Iván

De: Leandro Taub

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

Was Don Iván a Shaman, Magician, or Guru? What made him so influential for his time? Why did the most powerful consult him? How can it be that he was present in so many decisions in the world and, even so, the majority knew so little about him?

The Anarchist is the personal diary of David, a twelve-year-old who hardly speaks. He does not have friends nor does he like to interact with others. His parents send him to therapy. However, the sessions are a failure; David refuses to communicate with the therapist. One day, while he is returning from school to his house, he meets Don Iván, a mysterious character, with whom he establishes a relationship, first philosophical and then friendship.

Today David says that Don Iván was an envoy who sacrificed himself in his attempt to free humanity from the prisons of spheres.

This book is the compilation of the notes taken by this boy between his twelve and thirteen years, from his talks with this man. I have named him David to remain anonymous since he asked me to do so. In the same way, I have changed the name of the character he met and the city where these events took place. I didn't know him at twelve, but at sixty. He approached me after a conference I gave in San Cristóbal de las Casas (Mexico). He told me that he wanted to show me some notebooks that he had kept for half a century without showing them to anyone yet. We met in a cafe near the Zócalo and he told me a wonderful story. He told me how he had met Don Iván, a kind of magical vagabond in the streets of his town. He told me that Don Iván was a very large, imposing man, aesthetically different, who carried with him teachings that he had transmitted to him through conversations.

This book is made up of annotations from a young man between the ages of twelve and thirteen, his notes over the subsequent fifty years, and the translation and interpretation that I gave to this material.

David doesn't want to show himself, so he asked me to deliver this information through a book. My work here has been more of an editor than a writer; I worked on deciphering what David had written, and then organizing it, so it became nice to read him. You will notice that Don Iván is someone difficult to define. We don't really know who he is. David does not know, although he spent months with him; nor do I know, although I spent months working on these notebooks. How to define someone indefinable to title this book? Through the sheets that David gave me, I got to know Don Iván. And, based on this, I think Don Iván would not have liked a book about his talks published. However, as we have our conscious desires, there is our unconscious force that also pushes. I believe that Don Iván, by taking David's notebook and writing texts in it, wanted his passage through this world to be recorded somewhere beyond the memory of his followers.

The Anarchist is the story of little David and Don Iván, a special character who could have changed the history of the world.