The Storyteller

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  Can things that once happened happen again? The herb doctor says yes: “They’re there, in one of the worlds, and like souls, they can come back. It’ll be our fault if that happens, perhaps.” Best to be prudent and to keep memory alive.

  Three of the sons of Tasurinchi, the herb doctor, have gone since he’s been living up there. Seeing them go one after the other, he thought: Can the evil that carried off whole families be back? He hasn’t been able to find out whether their souls came back. “Maybe so, maybe not,” he said to me. He’s not yet thoroughly acquainted with the place where he’s living and doesn’t know why certain things happen. Everything there is still mysterious to him. But there are a great many herbs there. Some he already knew; others not. He’s learning to know them. He gathers them, spends a long time looking at them, comparing them, smelling them, and sometimes he puts them in his mouth. He chews them and spits them out, or else swallows them. Saying: “This one is useful.”

  His three sons all went the same way. They woke up dizzy in the head, shivering and sweating. And tottering as though they’d been drunk. They couldn’t stand up. They tried to walk, to dance, and fell down. They couldn’t even talk, it seems. When it happened to the eldest, Tasurinchi thought it was a warning that he should leave. It wasn’t a good place to live, perhaps. “I couldn’t tell,” he says. “This evil was different from the others. There were no herbs against it.” Kamagarini evils, maybe. Those little devils always come out to do harm when it’s raining. Kientibakori watches them from the edge of the forest, laughing. It had thundered and torrents of rain had fallen the evening before, and it’s well known that when that happens, a kamagarini is drawing near.

  When that son went, Tasurinchi’s family moved a little higher up in the forest. Shortly thereafter, the second son started feeling dizzy and falling down. Just like the first one. When that one died, they went somewhere else. Then the same thing happened to the third one. Tasurinchi decided not to move again. “The ones who have gone will see to it that we’re protected against the kamagarini that’s trying to throw us out of here,” he said. That must have been how it was. No one else has had a dizzy spell and fallen down since then.

  “There’s an explanation for that,” the herb doctor says. “There’s one for everything. Even the manhunts during the tree-bleeding. But it’s not easy to learn what it is. Even the seripigari doesn’t always succeed. It may be that the three of them went to talk with the mothers of this place. With three dead here, the mothers aren’t likely to look on us as intruders. We belong here now. Don’t these trees and birds know us? The water and the air here? That may be the explanation. Since they went, we haven’t felt any enmity. As though we’re accepted here.”

  I spent many moons with him. I very nearly stayed on to live there, near the herb doctor. I helped him set traps for pavitas and went to the lake with him to fish for boquichicos. I worked with Tasurinchi clearing the forest, where he’s going to make his new field when the one he has now needs to rest. During the afternoons we used to talk. As the women killed each other’s lice, spun, wove mats and cushmas, or chewed and spat out cassava for masato, we talked together.

  The herb doctor had me tell him stories of men who walk. Ones he’d known, and ones he’d never seen as well. I told him about all of you, the way I tell all of you about him. Moons went by and I had no desire to leave. Something was happening that had never happened to me before. “Are you getting tired of walking?” he asked me. “It happens to a lot of people. Don’t worry, storyteller. If that’s how it is, change your ways. Stay in one place and have a family. Build your hut, clear the forest, take care of your field. You’ll have children. Give up walking, and give up being a storyteller. You can’t stay here; there are a great many of us in my family. But you can go farther up, cutting a path through the forest, a two or three moons’ journey. There’s a ravine with a stream at the bottom waiting for you, I think. I can go with you that far. Do you want a family? I can help you there too, if that’s what you want. Take that woman, she’s old and quiet and she’ll help you because she knows how to cook and spin far better than most. Or here’s my youngest daughter, if she’s more to your liking. You won’t be able to touch her yet because she hasn’t bled. If you mounted her now, some misfortune would happen, perhaps. But wait a little, and meanwhile she’ll be learning how to be your wife. Her mothers will teach her. Once she bleeds, you’ll bring me a peccary, fish, fruits of the earth, showing me gratitude and respect. Is that what you want, Tasurinchi?”

  I thought his proposal over for quite some time. I felt like accepting it. I even dreamed I’d accepted it and was leading a different life. It’s a good life I’m living, that I know. The men who walk receive me gladly, give me food, pay me compliments. But my days are spent journeying, and how much longer will I be able to keep that up? Distances between families grow greater and greater. Lately, I often think as I’m walking that one day my strength will give out. Isn’t that so, little parrot? And there I’ll lie, exhausted, on one forest trail or another. No Machiguenga will pass that way, perhaps. My soul will go and my empty body begin to rot as birds peck at it and ants crawl over it. The grass will grow between my bones, perhaps. And the capybara will gnaw away the garment of my soul. When such fear comes to a man, shouldn’t he change his habits? So it seemed to Tasurinchi, the herb doctor.

  “I accept your proposal, then,” I said to him. He went with me to the place that was waiting for me. It took us two moons to get there. We had to go up and down through stretches of forest where the path disappeared altogether, and as we climbed up a slope, shimbillo monkeys, with earsplitting screams, hurled bits of bark down at us from the branches overhead. In the ravine we found a jaguar cub caught in a thornbush. “This little jaguar means something,” the herb doctor fretted. But he couldn’t discover what. And so, instead of killing it and skinning it, he let it loose in the forest. “Isn’t this a good place to live?” he asked me, pointing. “You can make your cassava patch up there in that high forest. It will never be flooded. There are lots of trees and not much grass, so the earth should be good and the cassava grow well.” Yes, it was a place that was livable. Though the nights were the coldest I’d ever felt anywhere. “Before making up your mind, we’ll see if there’s game to hunt,” said Tasurinchi. We set traps. We caught a capybara and a majaz. Later, we shot a pavita kanari from a shelter at the top of a tree. I decided to stay there and put up my hut.

  But before we’d begun felling the trees, the herb doctor’s son appeared, the one who had guided me to his new hut. Saying: “Something’s happened.” We went back. The old woman Tasurinchi was going to give me as a wife was dead. She’d pounded barbasco and made a brew, muttering: “I don’t want them to rage at me, saying: ‘Because of her we’ve been left without a storyteller.’ They’ll say I tricked him, that I gave him a potion so he’d take me as his wife. I’d rather go.”

  I helped the herb doctor burn the hut, the cushma, the pots, the necklaces, and all the other things that belonged to the woman. We wrapped her in several straw mats and placed her on a raft of tucuma palm planks. We pushed it out into the river till the current carried her away downstream.

  “It’s a warning that you must either pay heed to or ignore,” Tasurinchi said to me. “If I were you, I wouldn’t ignore it. Because each man has his obligation. Why is it we walk? So there will be light and warmth, so that everything will be peaceful. That is the order of the world. The man who talks to fireflies does what he’s obliged to do. I move on when Viracochas appear. That’s my destiny, perhaps. And yours? To visit people, speak to them, tell them stories. It is dangerous to disobey fate. Look, the woman who was to be your wife has gone. If I were you, I’d start walking at once. What’s your decision?”

  I decided to do what Tasurinchi, the herb doctor, advised. And the next morning, as the eye of the sun began to gaze down at this world from Inkite, I was already walking. I am thinking now of that Machiguenga woman who went so as not to be my wife.
I am talking now to all of you. Tomorrow will be as it will be.

  That, anyway, is what I have learned.

  For six months in 1981, I was responsible for a program on Peruvian television called the Tower of Babel. The owner of the channel, Genaro Delgado, had lured me into this venture by flashing before my eyes three shiny glass beads: the need to raise the standard of the channel’s programs, which had fallen to an absolute low of stupidity and vulgarity during the preceding twelve years of state ownership imposed by the military dictatorship; the excitement of experimenting with a means of communication which, in a country such as Peru, was the only one able to reach, simultaneously, a number of very different audiences; and a good salary.

  It really was an extraordinary experience, though also the most tiring and most exasperating one that has ever come my way. “If you organize your time well and devote just half your day to the program, that’ll be enough,” Genaro had predicted. “And you’ll be able to go on with your writing in the afternoon.” But in this case, as in so many others, theory was one thing and practice another. The truth was that I devoted every single morning, afternoon, and evening of those months to the Tower of Babel, and most important, the many hours when I didn’t seem to be actually working but was nonetheless busy worrying about what had gone wrong on the previous program and trying to anticipate what would go worse still on the next one.

  There were four of us who got out the Tower of Babel programs: Luis Llosa, the producer and director of photography; Moshé dan Furgang, the editor; Alejandro Pérez, the cameraman; and myself. I had brought Lucho and Moshé to the channel. They both had film experience—they had each made shorts—but neither they nor I had worked in television before. The title of the program was indicative of its intent: to show something of everything, to create a kaleidoscope of subjects. We naïvely hoped to prove that a cultural program need not be soporific, esoteric, or pedantic, but could be entertaining and not over any viewer’s head, since “culture” was not synonymous with science, literature, or any other specialized field, but a way of looking at things, an approach capable of tackling anything of human interest. The idea was that during our hour-long program each week—which often stretched to an hour and a half—we would touch on two or three themes as different as possible, so that the audience would see that a cultural program had as much to offer as, let us say, soccer or boxing, or salsa and humor, and that political reporting or a documentary on the Indian tribes of Amazonia could be entertaining as well as instructive.

  When Lucho and Moshé and I drew up lists of subjects, people, and locales that the Tower of Babel could use and planned the most lively way of presenting them, everything went like a charm. We were full of ideas and eager to discover the creative possibilities of the most popular medium of communication of our time.

  What we discovered in practice, however, was our dependence on material factors in an underdeveloped country, the subtle way in which they subvert the best intentions and thwart the most diligent efforts. I can say, without exaggeration, that most of the time that Lucho, Moshé, and I put in on the Tower of Babel was spent not on creative work, on trying to improve the program intellectually and artistically, but was wasted in an attempt to solve problems that at first sight seemed trivial and unworthy of our notice. What to do, for instance, to get the channel’s vans to pick us up at the agreed time so as not to miss appointments, planes, interviews? The answer was for us to go personally to the drivers’ homes and wake them up, go with them to the channel’s offices to collect the recording equipment and from there to the airport or wherever. But as a solution it cost us hours of sleep and didn’t always work. It could turn out that, on top of everything else, the blessed van’s battery had gone dead, or higher-ups had neglected to authorize the replacement of an oil pan, an exhaust pipe, a tire ripped to shreds the day before on the murderous potholes along the Avenida Arequipa.

  From the very first program, I noticed that the images on the screen were marred by strange smudges. What were those dirty half-moons anyway? Alejandro Pérez explained that they were due to defective camera filters. They were worn out and needed replacing. Okay then, replace them. But how to go about getting this done? We tried everything short of murder, and nothing worked. We sent memos to Maintenance, we begged, we got on the phone, we argued face-to-face with engineers, technicians, department heads, and I believe we even took the problem to the owner-director of the channel. They all agreed with us, they were all indignant, they all issued strict orders that the filters be replaced. They may well have been. But the grayish half-moons disfigured all our programs, from first to last. Sometimes, when I tune in on a television program, I can still see those intrusive shadows and think—with a touch of melancholy: Ah, Alejandro’s camera.

  I don’t know who it was who decided that Alejandro Pérez would work with us. It turned out to be a good idea, for when allowances have been made for the “underdevelopment handicap”—which he accepted philosophically, never turning a hair—Alejandro is a very skillful cameraman. His talent is purely intuitive, an innate sense of composition, movement, angle, distance. Alejandro became a cameraman by accident. He’d started out as a house painter, come to Lima from Huánuco, and someone had given him the idea that he might earn himself a little extra money by helping to load the cameras in the stadium on days when a soccer match was being televised. From having to load them so often he learned how to handle them. One day he stood in for an absent cameraman, then another day for another, and almost before he knew it, he turned out to be the channel’s star cameraman.

  At first his habitual silence made me nervous. Lucho was the only one who managed to talk to him. Or, at any rate, they understood each other subliminally, for in all those six months I can’t remember ever hearing Alejandro utter a complete sentence, with subject, verb, and predicate. Only short grunts of approval or dismay, and an exclamation that I feared like the plague, because it meant that, once again, we had been defeated by all-powerful, omnipresent imponderables: “It’s fucked up again!” How many times did the sound equipment, the film, the reflector, the monitor “fuck up”? Everything could “fuck up” innumerable times: every one of the things we worked with possessed that fundamental property, perhaps the only one toward which all of them, always, gave proof of a dog-like loyalty. How often did minutely planned projects, interviews obtained after exhausting negotiations, go all to hell because close-mouthed Alejandro came out with his fateful grunt: “It’s fucked up again!”

  I remember especially well what happened to us in Puerto Maldonado, a town in Amazonia where we had gone to make a documentary short on the death of the poet and guerrilla fighter Javier Heraud. Alaín Elías, Heraud’s comrade and the leader of the guerrilla detachment that had been scattered or captured the day Heraud was killed, had agreed to recount, in front of the camera, everything that had happened on that occasion. His testimony was interesting and moving—Alaín had been in the canoe with Javier Heraud when the latter had been shot to death, and he himself had been wounded in the shoot-out. We had decided to round the documentary out with views of the locale where the incident had taken place and, if possible, with accounts from the inhabitants of Puerto Maldonado who could recall the events of twenty years before.

  Even Moshé—who ordinarily stayed behind in Lima to keep up with the editing of the programs—went off to the jungle with Lucho, Alejandro Pérez, and me. In Puerto Maldonado several witnesses agreed to be interviewed. Our great find was a member of the police force who had participated, first off, in the initial incident in the center of town that had revealed the presence of the guerrilleros in Puerto Maldonado to the authorities—an encounter in which a civil guard had been killed—and then later, in the manhunt for Javier Heraud and the shoot-out. The man had since retired from the police force and was working on a farm. Persuading the ex-policeman to allow himself to be interviewed had been extremely difficult, since he was filled with apprehension and reluctant to talk. We finally convinced
him and even managed to get permission to interview him in the police station from which the patrols had set out on that day long ago.

  At the very moment we started interviewing the ex-policeman, Alejandro’s reflectors began to burst like carnival balloons. And when they had all exploded—so that there would be no doubt that the household gods of Amazonia were against the Tower of Babel—the battery of our portable generator quit and the recording equipment went dead. Fucked up again. And one of the first fruits of the program as well. We returned to Lima empty-handed.

  Am I exaggerating things so that they stand out more clearly? Perhaps. But I don’t think I’m stretching things much. I could tell dozens of stories like this one. And many others to illustrate what is perhaps the very symbol of underdevelopment: the divorce between theory and practice, decisions and facts. During those six months we suffered from this irreducible distance at every stage of our work. There were schedules that gave each of the various producers their fair share of time in the cutting rooms and the sound studios. But in point of fact it was not the schedules but the cunning and the clever maneuvering of each producer or technician that determined who would have more or less time for editing and recording, and who could count on the best equipment.

  Of course we very soon caught on to the stratagems, ruses, wiles, or charm that had to be used, not to obtain special privileges, but merely to do a more or less decent job of what we were being paid to do. We were not above such tricks ourselves, but all of them had the disadvantage of taking up precious time that we ought to have devoted to purely creative work. Since I’ve been through this experience, my admiration is boundless whenever I happen to see a program on television that is well edited and recorded, lively and original. For I know that behind it there is much more than talent and determination: there is witchcraft, miracle. Some weeks, after viewing the program on the monitor one last time, looking for the perfect finishing touch, we would say to each other: “Good, it came out exactly right in the end.” But despite that, on the television screen that Sunday, the sound would fade away altogether, the image leap out of focus, and completely blank frames appear…What had “fucked up” this time? The technician on duty was drunk or asleep, he’d pressed the wrong button or run the film backward…Television is a risky business for perfectionists; it is responsible for countless cases of insomnia, tachycardia, ulcers, heart attacks…