When we returned to Yarinacocha on our way back to Lima, we spent one last night with the linguists. It was a working session, during which they questioned Matos Mar and Juan Comas as to their impressions. At the end of the meeting I asked Edwin Schneil if he was willing to talk with me a while longer. He took me to his house, where his wife made us a cup of tea. They lived in one of the last cabins, where the Institute ended and the jungle began. The regular, harmonious, rhythmical chirring of insects served as background music to our chat, which went on for a long time, with Mrs. Schneil occasionally joining in. It was she who told me of the river cosmogony of the Machiguengas, in which the Milky Way is the river Meshiareni, plied by innumerable great and minor gods in their descent from their pantheon to the earth, and by the souls of the dead as they mount to paradise. I asked them whether they had photographs of the families they had lived with. They said they didn’t, but showed me many Machiguenga artifacts. Large and small monkey-skin drums, cane flutes and a sort of panpipe, made of reeds of graduated lengths bound together with vegetable fibers, which, when placed against the lower lip and blown across, produced a rich scale of sounds ranging from a shrill high note to a deep bass one. Sieves made of cane leaves cut in strips and braided, like little baskets, to filter the cassava used to make masato. Necklaces and bangles of seeds, teeth, and bones. Anklets, bracelets. Headpieces of parrot, macaw, toucan, and cockatoo feathers set into circlets of wood. Bows, arrowheads of chipped stone, horns used to store the curare used for poisoning their arrows and the dyes for their tattooing. The Schneils had made a number of drawings on cardboard, copying the designs the Machiguengas painted on their faces and bodies. They were geometrical; some very simple, others like complicated labyrinths. They explained that they were used according to the circumstances and the social status of a person. Their function was to attract good luck and ward off bad luck. These were for bachelors, these for married men, these for going hunting, and as for others, they weren’t quite sure yet. Machiguenga symbolism was extremely subtle. There was one design, an X-shape like a Saint Andrew’s Cross inscribed in a half circle, which, apparently, they painted on themselves when they were going to die.
It was only at the end, when I was looking for a break in the conversation so as to take my leave, that, quite incidentally, there arose the subject which, seen from afar, blots out all the others of that night and is surely the reason why I am now devoting my days in Firenze, not so much to Dante, Machiavelli, and Renaissance art, as to weaving together the memories and fantasies of this story. I don’t know how it came up. I asked a lot of questions, and some of them must have been about witch doctors and medicine men (there were two sorts: the good ones, seripigaris, and the bad ones, machikanaris). Perhaps that was what led up to it. Or perhaps my asking them about the myths, legends, and stories they had collected in their travels brought about the association of ideas. They didn’t know much about the magic practices of the seripigaris or the machikanaris, except that both, like the shamans of other tribes, used tobacco, ayahuasca, and other hallucinogenic plants, such as kobuiniri bark, during their trances, which they called la mareada, the very same word they used for being drunk on masato. The Machiguengas were naturally loquacious, superb informants, but the Schneils had not wanted to press them too hard on the subject of sorcery, for fear of violating their sense of privacy.
“Yes, and besides the seripigaris and the machikanaris, there is also that curious personage who doesn’t seem to be either a medicine man or a priest,” Mrs. Schneil said all of a sudden. She turned uncertainly toward her husband. “Well, perhaps a bit of both, wouldn’t you say, Edwin?”
“Ah, you mean the…” Mr. Schneil said, and hesitated. He uttered a long, loud guttural sound full of s’s. Remained silent, searching for a word. “How would you translate it?”
She half closed her eyes and bit a knuckle. She was blond, with very blue eyes, extremely thin lips, and a childish smile.
“A talker, perhaps. Or, better yet, a speaker,” she said at last. And uttered the same sound again: harsh, sibilant, prolonged.
“Yes.” He smiled. “I think that’s the closest. Hablador: a speaker.”
They had never seen one. And their punctilious discretion—their fear of rubbing their hosts the wrong way—had stopped them from asking for a detailed account of the functions the hablador fulfilled among the Machiguengas; whether there were several of them or only one; and also, though they tended to discard this theory, whether, rather than an actual, concrete person, they were talking of some fabulous entity such as Kientibakori, chief of demons and creator of all things poisonous and inedible. It was certain, however, that the word “hablador” was uttered with a great show of respect by all the Machiguengas, and each time someone uttered it in front of the Schneils the others had changed the subject. But they didn’t think it was a question of a taboo. For the fact was that the strange word escaped them very frequently, seeming to indicate that the hablador was always on their minds. Was he a leader or teacher of the whole community? No, he didn’t seem to exercise any specific power over that loose, scattered archipelago, Machiguenga society, which, moreover, lacked any sort of authorities. The Schneils had no doubts on that score. The only headmen they had ever had were those imposed by the Viracochas, as in the little settlements of Koribeni and Chirumbia, set up by the Dominicans, or at the time of the haciendas and the rubber camps, when the bosses designated one of them as cacique so as to control them more easily. Perhaps the hablador exercised some sort of spiritual leadership or was responsible for carrying out certain religious practices. But from the allusions that they had caught, an odd sentence here, an answer there, they had gathered that the function of the hablador was above all what his name implied: to speak.
An odd thing had happened to Mrs. Schneil a few months before, near the Kompiroshiato River. The Machiguenga family she was living with—eight people: two old men, a grown man, four women, and a young girl—suddenly disappeared, without a word of explanation to her. She was very surprised, since they had never done anything of the sort before. All eight of them reappeared a few days later, as mysteriously as they had disappeared. Where had they gone off to like that? “To hear the hablador,” the young girl said. The meaning of the sentence was quite clear, but Mrs. Schneil didn’t find out any more, for nobody volunteered any further details, nor did she ask for any. But the eight Machiguengas had been extremely excited and whispered together endlessly during the following days. Seeing them engrossed in their interminable conclaves, Mrs. Schneil knew they were remembering the hablador.
The Schneils had made conjectures and carpentered up theories. The hablador, or habladores, must be something like the courier service of the community. Messengers who went from one settlement to another in the vast territory over which the Machiguengas were dispersed, relating to some what the others were doing, keeping them informed of the happenings, the fortunes and misfortunes of the brothers whom they saw very rarely or not at all. Their name defined them. They spoke. Their mouths were the connecting links of this society that the fight for survival had forced to split up and scatter to the four winds. Thanks to the habladores, fathers had news of their sons, brothers of their sisters, and thanks to them they were all kept informed of the deaths, births, and other happenings in the tribe.
“And of something more besides,” Mr. Schneil said. “I have a feeling that the hablador not only brings current news but also speaks of the past. He is probably also the memory of the community, fulfilling a function similar to that of the jongleurs and troubadours of the Middle Ages.”
Mrs. Schneil interrupted to explain to me that it was difficult to be sure of that. The Machiguenga verb system was complicated and misleading, among other reasons because it readily mixed up past and present. Just as the word for “many”—tobaiti—was used to express any quantity above four, “now” also included at least today and yesterday, and the present tense of verbs was frequently used to recount events in the recent past
. It was as though to them only the future was something clearly defined. Our conversation turned to linguistics and ended with a string of examples of the humorous and unsettling implications of a form of speech in which before and now were barely differentiated.
I was deeply moved by the thought of that being, those beings, in the unhealthy forests of eastern Cusco and Madre de Dios, making long journeys of days or weeks, bringing stories from one group of Machiguengas to another and taking away others, reminding each member of the tribe that the others were alive, that despite the great distances that separated them, they still formed a community, shared a tradition and beliefs, ancestors, misfortunes and joys: the fleeting, perhaps legendary figures of those habladores who—by occupation, out of necessity, to satisfy a human whim—using the simplest, most time-hallowed of expedients, the telling of stories, were the living sap that circulated and made the Machiguengas into a society, a people of interconnected and interdependent beings. It still moves me to think of them, and even now, here, as I write these lines, in the Caffe Strozzi in old Firenze, under the torrid July sun, I break out in goose pimples.
“And why is it you break out in goose pimples?” Mascarita said. “What is it you find so fascinating? What’s so special about habladores?”
A good question. Why hadn’t I been able to get them out of my mind since that night?
“They’re a tangible proof that storytelling can be something more than mere entertainment,” it occurred to me to say to him. “Something primordial, something that the very existence of a people may depend on. Maybe that’s what impressed me so. One doesn’t always know why one is moved by things, Mascarita. They strike some secret chord, and that’s that.”
Saúl laughed and clapped me on the shoulder. I had been speaking seriously, but he took it as a joke.
“Oh, I see. It’s the literary side that interests you,” he exclaimed. He sounded disappointed, as though that aspect diminished the value of my curiosity. “Well, don’t let your imagination run away with you. I’ll bet it’s those gringos who told you that story about storytellers. Things just can’t be the way they seem to be to them. I assure you the gringos understand the Machiguengas even less than the missionaries do.”
We were in a little café on the Avenida España, having bread and cracklings. It was several days after my return from Amazonia. As soon as I got back I had looked for him around the university and left messages for him at La Estrella, but I hadn’t been able to contact him. I was afraid I’d be off to Europe without having said goodbye to Saúl when, on the eve of my departure for Madrid, I ran into him as I got off a bus on a corner of the Avenida España. We went to that little cafe, where he’d treat me, he said, to a farewell meal of crackling sandwiches and ice-cold beer, the memory of which would stay with me during the whole time I was in Europe. But the memory that remained etched on my mind was, rather, his evasive answers and his incomprehensible lack of interest in a subject—the Machiguenga storytellers—which I’d thought he’d be all excited about. Was it really lack of interest? Of course not. I know now that he pretended not to be interested and lied to me when, on being backed into a corner by my questions, he assured me that he’d never heard a word about any such storytellers.
Memory is a snare, pure and simple: it alters, it subtly rearranges the past to fit the present. I have tried so many times to reconstruct that conversation in August 1958 with my friend Saúl Zuratas in the seedy café on the Avenida España, with its broken-down chairs and rickety tables, that by now I’m no longer sure of anything, with the exception, perhaps, of his enormous birthmark, the color of wine vinegar, that attracted the stares of the customers, his rebellious crest of red hair, his red-and-blue-checkered flannel shirt, and his heavy hiking shoes.
But my memory cannot have entirely invented Mascarita’s fierce diatribe against the Summer Institute of Linguistics, which still rings in my ears twenty-seven years later, or my stunned surprise at the contained fury with which he spoke. It was the only time I ever saw him like that: livid with anger. I discovered that day that the archangelic Saúl, like other mortals, was capable of letting himself go, in one of those rages that, according to his Machiguenga friends, could destabilize the universe.
I said as much in the hope of distracting him. “You’re going to bring on an apocalypse with your tantrum, Mascarita.”
But he paid no attention to me. “Those apostolic linguists of yours are the worst of all. They work their way into the tribes to destroy them from within, just like chiggers. Into their spirit, their beliefs, their subconscious, the roots of their way of being. The others steal their vital space and exploit them or push them farther into the interior. At worst, they kill them physically. Your linguists are more refined. They want to kill them in another way. Translating the Bible into Machiguenga! How about that!”
He was so agitated I didn’t argue. Several times, listening to him, I had to bite my tongue so as not to contradict him. I knew that, in Saúl Zurata’s case, his objections to the Institute were not frivolous or motivated by political prejudice; that, however questionable they might seem to me, they represented a point of view long pondered and deeply felt. Why did the work of the Institute strike him as more insidious than that of the bearded Dominicans and the little Spanish nuns of Quillabamba, Koribeni, and Chirumbia?
He had to postpone his answer, as the waitress came up at that moment with a fresh batch of bread and cracklings. She set the platter down on the table and stood for a long moment looking, fascinated, at Saúl’s birthmark. I saw her cross herself as she went back to her stove.
“You’re mistaken. I don’t find it more insidious,” he finally answered sarcastically, still beside himself. “They, too, want to steal their souls, of course. But the jungle is swallowing up the missionaries, the way it did Arturo Cova in The Vortex. Didn’t you see them on your trip? Half dead of hunger, and, what’s more, very few of them. They live in such need they’re in no state to evangelize anybody, luckily. Their isolation has dulled their catechistic spirit. They survive, and that’s all. The jungle has clipped their claws, pal. And the way things are going in the Catholic Church, there soon won’t be any priests at all, not even for Lima, let alone Amazonia.”
The linguists were a different matter altogether. They were backed by economic power and an extremely efficient organization which might well enable them to implant their progress, their religion, their values, their culture. Learn the aboriginal languages! What a swindle! What for? To make the Amazonian Indians into good Westerners, good modern men, good capitalists, good Christians of the Reformed Church? Not even that. Just to wipe their culture, their gods, their institutions off the map and corrupt even their dreams. Just as they’d done to the redskins and the others back in their own country. Was that what I wanted for our jungle compatriots? To make them into what the original inhabitants of North America now were? Servants and shoeshine boys for the Viracochas?
He paused, noticing that three men at the next table had stopped talking to listen to him, their attention attracted by his birthmark and his rage. The unmarked side of his face was congested, his mouth was half open and his lower lip pushed forward and trembling. I got up to go urinate without really needing to, hoping my absence would calm him. The señora at the stove asked me, with lowered voice as I passed, whether what was wrong with his face was very serious. I whispered that it was only a birthmark, no different from the mole you have on your arm, señora. “Poor thing, it makes you feel sorry for him just looking at it,” she murmured.
I returned to our table and Mascarita tried his best to smile as he lifted his glass: “To your good health, friend. Forgive me for getting so worked up.”
But in fact he hadn’t calmed down and was obviously still tense and about to explode again. I told him his expression reminded me of a poem, and I recited in Machiguenga the lines I remembered of the song about sadness.
I managed to make him smile, for a moment.
“You speak Machigu
enga with a slight California accent,” he joked. “How does that happen, I wonder?”
But a while later he lashed out at me again on the subject that was keeping him on hot coals. Without meaning to, I had stirred up something that distressed and deeply wounded him. He spoke without stopping, as if holding his breath.
Up till now nobody had succeeded, but it was possible that the linguists would get away with it. In four hundred, five hundred years of trying, all the others had failed. They had never been able to subjugate those tiny tribes they despised. I must have read about it in the Chronicles I was doing research on at Porras Barrenechea’s. Hadn’t I, pal? What happened to the Incas every time they sent armies to the Antisuyo. To Túpac Yupanqui, especially. Hadn’t I read about it? How their warriors disappeared in the jungle, how the Antis slipped through their fingers. They hadn’t subjugated a single one, and out of spite, the people of Cusco began to look down on them. That’s why they invented all those disparaging Quechua words for the Amazonian Indians: savages, degenerates. Yet, despite all that, what had happened to the Inca empire, the Tahuantinsuyo, when it was forced to confront a more powerful civilization? The barbarians of the Antisuyo, at least, went on being what they had been. Wasn’t that so? And had the Spaniards been any more successful than the Incas? Hadn’t all their “expeditions” into Anti territory been a total failure? They killed them whenever they could lay their hands on them, but that rarely happened. Were the thousands of soldiers, adventurers, outlaws, and missionaries who descended on the Oriente between 1500 and 1800 able to bring one single tribe under the dominion of illustrious Christian and Western civilization? Did all this mean nothing to me?
The Storyteller Page 9