The Storyteller

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  “I’d rather you told me what it means to you, Mascarita,” I said.

  “That these cultures must be respected,” he said softly, as though finally beginning to calm down. “And the only way to respect them is not to go near them. Not touch them. Our culture is too strong, too aggressive. It devours everything it touches. They must be left alone. Haven’t they amply demonstrated that they have the right to go on being what they are?”

  “You’re an Indigenist to the nth degree, Mascarita,” I teased him. “Just like the ones in the thirties. Like Dr. Luis Valcárcel when he was young, wanting all the colonial churches and convents demolished because they represented Anti-Peru. Or should we bring back the Tahuantinsuyo? Human sacrifice, quipus, trepanation with stone knives? It’s a laugh that Peru’s last Indigenist turns out to be Jewish, Mascarita.”

  “Well, a Jew is better prepared than most people to defend the rights of minority cultures,” he retorted. “And, after all, as my old man says, the problem of the Boras, of the Shapras, of the Piros, has been our problem for three thousand years.”

  Is that what he said? Could one at least infer something of the sort from what he was saying? I’m not sure. Perhaps this is pure invention on my part after the event. Saúl didn’t practice his religion, or even believe in it. I often heard him say that the only reason he went to the synagogue was so as not to disappoint Don Salomón. On the other hand, some such association, whether superficial or profound, must have existed. Wasn’t Saúl’s stubborn defense of the life led by those Stone Age Peruvians explained, at least in part, by the stories he’d heard at home, at school, in the synagogue, through his inevitable contacts with other members of the community, stories of persecution and of dispersion, of attempts by more powerful cultures to stamp out Jewish faith, language, and customs, which, at the cost of great sacrifice, the Jewish people had resisted, preserving their identity?

  “No, I’m not an Indigenist like the ones of the thirties. They wanted to restore the Tahuantinsuyo, and I know very well that there’s no turning back for the descendants of the Incas. The only course left them is integration. The sooner they can be Westernized, the better: it’s a process that’s bogged down halfway and should be speeded up. For them, it’s the lesser evil now. So you see I’m not being utopian. But in Amazonia it’s different. The great trauma that turned the Incas into a people of sleepwalkers and vassals hasn’t yet occurred there. We’ve attacked them ferociously but they’re not beaten. We know now what an atrocity bringing progress, trying to modernize a primitive people, is. Quite simply, it wipes them out. Let’s not commit this crime. Let’s leave them with their arrows, their feathers, their loincloths. When you approach them and observe them with respect, with a little fellow feeling, you realize it’s not right to call them barbarians or backward. Their culture is adequate for their environment and for the conditions they live in. And, what’s more, they have a deep and subtle knowledge of things that we’ve forgotten. The relationship between man and Nature, for instance. Man and the trees, the birds, the rivers, the earth, the sky. Man and God, as well. We don’t even know what the harmony that exists between man and those things can be, since we’ve shattered it forever.”

  That he did say. Surely not in those words. But in a form that could be transcribed that way. Did he speak of God? Yes, I’m certain he spoke of God, because I remember asking him, surprised at what he said, trying to make a joke of what was eminently serious, if that meant that now we, too, had to begin believing in God.

  He remained silent, head bent. A bluebottle fly had found its way into the café and was buzzing about, bumping against the sooty walls. The señora behind the counter never stopped looking at Mascarita. When Saúl raised his head, he seemed embarrassed. His tone of voice was even more serious now.

  “Well, I no longer know whether I believe in God or not, pal. One of the problems of our ever-so-powerful culture is that it’s made God superfluous. For them, on the contrary, God is air, water, food, a vital necessity, something without which life wouldn’t be possible. They’re more spiritual than we are, though you may not believe it. Even the Machiguengas, who by comparison with the others are relatively materialistic. That’s why what the Institute is doing is so damaging, taking away their gods and replacing them with their own, an abstract God who’s of no use to them at all in their daily life. The linguists are the smashers of idols of our time. With planes, penicillin, vaccination, and whatever else is needed to destroy the jungle. And since they’re all fanatics, when something happens to them such as happened to those gringos in Ecuador, they feel even more inspired. Nothing like martyrdom to spur on fanatics, don’t you agree, pal?”

  What had happened in Ecuador, some weeks before, was that three American missionaries of some Protestant church had been murdered by a Jíbaro tribe with which one of them was living. The other two happened to be passing through the region. No details were known. The corpses, beheaded and pierced with arrows, had been found by a military patrol. Since the Jíbaros are headhunters, the reason for the decapitation was obvious. It had stirred up a great scandal in the press. The victims were not members of the Institute of Linguistics. I asked Saúl, intuitively anticipating what his answer would be, what he thought of those three corpses.

  “I can assure you of one thing at least,” he said. “They were beheaded without cruelty. Don’t laugh! Believe me, it’s true. With no desire to make them suffer. In that respect, the tribes are all alike, regardless of how different they may be otherwise. They kill only out of necessity. When they feel threatened, when it’s a question of kill or be killed. Or when they’re hungry. But the Jíbaros aren’t cannibals. They didn’t kill them to eat them. The missionaries either said something or did something that suddenly made the Jíbaros feel they were in great danger. A sad story, I grant you. But don’t draw hasty conclusions. It has nothing in common with Nazi gas chambers or with dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.”

  We sat there together for a long time, perhaps three or four hours. We ate a lot of crackling sandwiches and finally the woman who owned the café served us a dish of corn-flour pudding, “on the house.” As we left, unable to contain herself and pointing at Saúl’s birthmark, she asked “whether his affliction caused him great pain.”

  “No, señora, it doesn’t hurt at all, fortunately. I’m not even aware that I have such a thing,” Saúl replied, smiling.

  We walked along together for a while, still talking of the one subject of the afternoon, of that I’m certain. As we said goodbye on the corner of the Plaza Bolognesi and the Paseo Colón, we embraced.

  “I really must apologize,” he said, suddenly remorseful. “I’ve chattered like a parrot and didn’t let you open your mouth. You didn’t even have a chance to tell me what you’re planning to do in Europe.”

  We agreed to write to each other, if only a postcard now and then, to keep in touch. I wrote three times in the following years, but he never answered me.

  That was the last time I saw Saúl Zuratas. The image floats unchanged above the tumultuous surge of the years, the gray air, the overcast sky, and the penetrating damp of a Lima winter serving as a backdrop. Behind him, a confusion of cars, trucks, and buses coiling around the monument to Bolognesi, and Mascarita, with the great dark stain on his face, his flaming red hair, and his checkered shirt, waving goodbye and shouting: “We’ll see if you come back a real Madrileiio,, lisping your z’s and using archaic second-person plurals. Have a good trip, and lots of luck to you over there, pal!”

  Four years went by without any news of him. None of the Peruvians who came through Madrid or Paris, where I lived after finishing my postgraduate studies, was ever able to tell me anything about Saúl. I thought of him often, in Spain especially, not only because of my liking for him but also because of the Machiguengas. The story the Schneils had told me about habladores kept coming back to my mind, enticing me, exciting my imagination and desire as a beautiful girl might. I had only morning classes at the universi
ty, and each afternoon I used to spend several hours at the National Library, on Castella, reading novels of chivalry. One day I remembered the name of the Dominican missionary who had written about the Machiguengas: Fray Vicente de Cenitagoya. I looked in the catalogue, and there was the book.

  I read it in one sitting. It was short and naïve. The Machiguengas, whom the good Dominican frequently called savages and chided paternally for being childish, lazy, and drunken, as well as for their sorcery—which Fray Vicente called “nocturnal sabbaths”—seemed to have been observed from outside and from a considerable distance, even though the missionary had lived among them for more than twenty years. But Fray Vicente praised their honesty, their respect for their given word, and their gentle ways. Moreover, his book confirmed certain information I had which finally convinced me. They had a natural inclination, little short of unhealthy, toward listening to and telling stories, and they were incorrigible gossips. They couldn’t stay still, felt no attachment whatsoever to the place where they lived, and seemed possessed by the demon of movement. The forest cast a sort of spell over them. Using all sorts of blandishments, the missionaries attracted them to the settlements of Chirumbia, Koribeni, and Panticollo. They wore themselves out trying to get the Machiguengas to settle down. They gave them mirrors, food, seed: they taught them the advantages of living in a community, for their health, for their education, for their very survival. They seemed persuaded. They put up their huts, cleared their fields, agreed to send their children to the little mission school, and appeared themselves, painted and punctual, at the evening Rosary and the morning Mass. They seemed well on their way along the path of Christian civilization. Then all of a sudden, one fine day, without saying thank you or goodbye, they vanished into the forest. A force more powerful than they drove them: an ancestral instinct impelled them irresistibly toward a life of wandering, scattered them through the tangled virgin forests.

  That same night I wrote to Mascarita sending him my comments on Father Cenitagoya’s book. I told him I’d decided to write something about Machiguenga storytellers. Would he help me? Here in Madrid, out of homesickness perhaps, or because I had constantly found myself mulling over our conversations in my mind, I no longer found his ideas as absurd or unrealistic as I once had. In any case, I would try to make my story as authentic and as intimate a portrayal of the Machiguenga way of life as I could. Would you lend me a hand, pal?

  I set to work, brimming over with enthusiasm. But the result was lamentable. How could I write about storytellers without having at least a superficial knowledge of their beliefs, myths, customs, history? The Dominican monastery in the Calle Claudio Coello gave me invaluable help. It had a complete collection of Misiones Dominicanas, the journal of the missionaries of the Order in Peru, and in it I found numerous articles on the Machiguengas and also Father José Pío Aza’s excellent studies of the language and folklore of the tribe.

  But perhaps I learned most from the talk I had with a bearded missionary in the vast resounding library of the monastery, where the high ceiling echoed back what we were saying. Fray Elicerio Maluenda had lived for many years in the Alto Urubamba, and had become interested in Machiguenga mythology. He was a keen-minded, very learned old man, with the rather rustic manners of one who has spent his life out-of-doors, roughing it in the jungle. Every so often, as though to make a greater impression on me, he larded his pure Spanish with a peculiar-sounding Machiguenga word.

  I was delighted with what he told me of the cosmogony of the tribe, full of complex symmetries and Dantesque echoes—as I discover now in Firenze, reading the Commedia in Italian for the first time. The earth was the center of the cosmos and there were two regions above it and two below, each one with its own sun, moon, and tangle of rivers. In the highest, Inkite, lived Tasurinchi, the all-powerful, the breather-out of people, and through it, bathing fertile banks with fruit-laden trees, flowed the Meshiareni, or river of immortality, that could be dimly made out from the earth, for it was the Milky Way. Below Inkite floated the weightless region of clouds, or Menkoripatsa, with its transparent river, the Manaironchaari. The earth, Kipacha, was the abode of the Machiguengas, a wandering people. Beneath it was the gloomy region of the dead, almost all of whose surface was covered by the river Kamabiría, plied by the souls of the deceased before taking up their new abode. And last of all, the lowest and most terrible region, that of the Gamaironi, a river of black waters where there were no fish, and of wastelands where there was nothing to eat, either. This was the domain of Kientibakori, creator of filthy things, the spirit of evil and the chief of a legion of demons, the kamagarinis. The sun of each region was less powerful and less bright than the one above. The sun of Inkite was motionless, a radiant white. The sun of Gamaironi was dark and frozen. The hesitant sun of earth came and went, its survival mythically linked to the conduct of the Machiguengas.

  But how much of this—and the many other details that Fray Maluenda had given me—was true? Hadn’t the admirable missionary added to or adapted much of the material he had collected? I queried Mascarita on the subject in my second letter. Again there was no answer.

  I must have sent him the third one a year or so later, since by then I was in Paris. I took him to task for his stubborn silence and confessed that I’d given up the idea of writing about the habladores. I filled any number of composition books with my scribblings and spent many hours in the Place du Trocadéro, in the library of the Musée de l’Homme and in front of its display cases, trying in vain to understand the storytellers, to intuit what they were like. The voices of the ones that I’d contrived sounded all wrong. So I had resigned myself to writing other stories. But what was he doing? How was he getting on? What had he been doing all this time, and what were his plans?

  It was not until the end of 1963, when Matos Mar turned up in Paris, to speak at an anthropological congress, that I heard of Mascarita’s whereabouts. What I learned left me flabbergasted.

  “Saúl Zuratas went to live in Israel?”

  We were in the Old Navy in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, drinking hot grog to withstand the cold of a depressing ash-gray December evening. We sat smoking as I eagerly plied him with questions about friends and developments in far-off Peru.

  “Something to do with his father, it seems,” Matos Mar said, bundled up in such a bulky overcoat and heavy scarf he looked like an Eskimo. “Don Salomón, from Talara. Did you know him? Saúl was very fond of him. Remember how he refused that fellowship to Bordeaux so as not to leave him alone? Apparently the old man took it into his head to go off to Israel to die. And devoted as he was to his father, Mascarita of course let him have his way. They decided the whole thing very suddenly, from one day to the next, more or less. Because, when Saúl told me, they’d already sold the little shop in Breña, La Estrella, and had their bags all packed.”

  And did Saúl like the idea of settling in Israel? Because once there, he’d have to learn Hebrew, do his military service, reorganize his life from A to Z. Matos Mar thought he might have been exempted from military service because of his birthmark. I searched my memory trying to remember whether I’d ever heard Mascarita mention Zionism, returning to the Homeland, Alyah. Never.

  “Well, maybe it wasn’t a bad thing for Saúl, starting all over again from zero,” Matos Mar reflected. “He must have adapted to Israel, since all this happened some four years ago, and as far as I know, he hasn’t come back to Peru. I can well imagine him living in a kibbutz. The truth of the matter is that Saúl wasn’t getting anywhere in Lima. Ethnology and the university had both been a disappointment to him, for reasons I never quite understood. He never finished his doctoral dissertation. And I think even his love affair with the Machiguengas was a thing of the past. ‘Aren’t you going to miss your naked savages there in Urubamba?’ I asked him when we said goodbye. ‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘I can adapt to anything. And there must be plenty of people who go around naked in Israel, too.’ ”

  Unlike Matos Mar, I didn’t think Saúl wo
uld have found Alyah easy going. Because he was, viscerally, a part of Peru, too torn and revolted by Peruvian affairs—one of them at least—to cast everything aside overnight, the way one changes shirts. I often tried to imagine him in the Middle East. Knowing him, I could readily foresee that in his new country the Palestine question and the occupied territories would confront Saúl Zuratas, the Israeli citizen, with all sorts of moral dilemmas. My mind wandered, trying to see him in his new surroundings, jabbering away in his new language, going about his new job—what was it?—and I prayed to Tasurinchi that no bullet might have come Mascarita’s way in the wars and border incidents in Israel since he’d arrived there.

  A mischievous kamagarini disguised as a wasp stung the tip of Tasurinchi’s penis while he was urinating. He’s walking. How? I don’t know, but he’s walking. I saw him. They haven’t killed him. He could have lost his eyes or his head, his soul could have left him after what he did there among the Yaminahuas. Nothing happened to him, it seems. He’s well, walking, content. Not angry, laughing, perhaps. Saying “What’s all the fuss about?” As I headed toward the river Mishahua to visit him, I thought: He won’t be there. If it’s really true that he did that, he’ll have taken off somewhere far away, where the Yaminahuas won’t find him. Or maybe they’ve already killed him; him and his kinfolk as well. But there he was, and his family too, and the woman he stole. “Are you there, Tasurinchi?” “Ehé, ehé, here I am.”

  She’s learning to speak. “Say something so the hablador sees you can speak, too,” he ordered her. You could hardly understand what the Yaminahua woman was saying, and the other women made fun of her: “What are those noises we keep hearing?” Pretending to search about: “What animal can have gotten into the house?” Looking under the mats. They make her work and they treat her badly. Saying: “When she opens her legs, fish are going to come out of her, like they did out of Pareni.” And worse things still. But it’s quite true, she’s learning to speak. I understood some of the things she said. “Man walks,” I understood.