The Storyteller

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  In spite of all this, and by and large, those six months were exciting and intense. I remember how moved I was interviewing Borges in his apartment in downtown Buenos Aires, where his mother’s room was kept exactly the way she left it the day she died (an old lady’s purple dress laid out on the bed); he apparently never forgave me for having said that his home was a modest one, with a leaky roof. I remember being moved, too, by the portraits of writers painted by Ernesto Sábato, which he allowed us to film in his little house in Santos Lugares, where we went to visit him. Ever since I’d lived in Spain in the early seventies, I had wanted to interview Corín Tellado, whose sentimental Románces, radio soap operas, photo-novels, and television melodramas are devoured by countless thousands in Spain and Hispano-America. She agreed to appear on the Tower of Babel and I spent an afternoon with her, on the outskirts of Gijón, in Asturias—she showed me the basement of the house she was occupying, with thousands of novelettes stowed away on bookshelves: she finishes one every two days, each exactly a hundred pages long. She was living there in seclusion because at the time she had been the victim of attempted extortion, though whether a political group or common criminals were behind it was not clear.

  From the houses of writers we took our cameras to the stadiums—we did a program on one of the best Brazilian soccer clubs, the Flamengo, and interviewed Zico, the star of the moment, in Rio de Janeiro. We went to Panama, where we visited amateur and professional boxing rings, trying to discover how and why this small Central American country had been the cradle of so many Latin American and world champions in nearly every weight class. In Brazil, we managed to get our cameras into the exclusive clinic of trim, athletic Dr. Pitanguí, whose scalpels made all the women in the world who could pay for his services young and beautiful; and in Santiago de Chili we spoke with Pinochet’s Chicago Boys and with his Christian Democratic opponents, who, in the midst of extreme repression, were resisting dictatorship.

  We went to Nicaragua on the second anniversary of the revolution, to report on the Sandinistas and their adversaries; and to the University of California at Berkeley, where the great poet, Czeslaw Milosz, a recent winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, worked in a tiny office in the Department of Slavonic Languages. We went to Coclecito, Panama, where we visited General Omar Torrijos at his home there; though theoretically no longer active in government, he was still the lord and master of the country. We spent the entire day with him, and although he was most affable with me, I was not left as agreeably impressed by him as were other writers who had been his guests. He struck me as the typical Latin American caudillo of unhappy memory, the providential “strongman,” authoritative and macho, adulated by civil and military courtiers, who filed through the place all day, flattering him with sickening servility. The most exciting person in the general’s Coclecito house was one of his mistresses, a curvaceous blonde we came upon reclining in a hammock. She was just another piece of furniture, for the general neither spoke to her nor introduced her to the guests who came and went…

  Two days after our return to Lima from Panama, Lucho Llosa, Alejandro Pérez, and I felt a cold shiver run down our spines. Torrijos had just died in a fatal crash of the little plane in which he had sent us back to Panama City from Coclecito. The pilot was the same one we had flown with.

  I fainted in Puerto Rico, just a day after recording a short program on the marvelous restoration of old San Juan, guided by Ricardo Alegría, who had been the moving spirit of the project. I was suffering from dehydration as a result of stomach poisoning, contracted in the chicha bars of a north Peruvian village, Catacaos, where we had gone to do a program on straw-hat weaving, a craft the inhabitants have been practicing for centuries; on the secrets of the tondero, a regional dance; and on its picanterías, where fine chicha and highly spiced stews are served (these latter responsible, naturally, for my case of poisoning). Words cannot express my thanks to all the Puerto Rican friends who virtually terrorized the kind doctors of San Jorge Hospital into curing me in time for the Tower of Babel to appear on the air at the usual hour that Sunday.

  The program ran regularly every week, and considering the conditions under which we worked, this was quite a feat. I wrote the scripts in vans or planes, went from airport to sound studio to cutting room, and from there to catch another plane to travel hundreds of miles to be in another town or country, often for less time than it had taken me to get there. During those six months, I skipped sleeping, eating, reading, and, naturally, writing. As the channel’s budget was limited, I arranged for several of my trips abroad to coincide with invitations to attend literary congresses or give lectures, thus relieving the channel of having to pay my travel and per-diem expenses. The trouble with this arrangement was that it forced me to become a psychic quick-change artist, shifting within seconds from a lecturer to a journalist, from an author with a microphone placed before him to an interviewer who took his revenge by interviewing his interviewers.

  Though we did a fair number of programs on the current scene in other countries, most of them dealt with Peruvian subjects. Popular dances and fiestas, university problems, pre-Hispanic archaeological sites, an old ice-cream vendor whose tricycle had cruised the streets of Miraflores for half a century, the story of a Piura bordello, the sub-world of prisons. We discovered how wide an audience the Tower of Babel was reaching when we started getting requests and considerable pressure from various personalities and institutions who wanted us to take notice of them. The most unexpected was perhaps the PIP, the Peruvian Secret Police. A colonel appeared in my office one day, suggesting that I devote a Tower of Babel broadcast to the PIP to celebrate some anniversary or other; to make the program more exciting, the PIP would stage a mock arrest of cocaine smugglers, complete with a shoot-out…

  One of the calls I received, when the six-month period I had agreed to work for the channel was nearly over, came from a friend I hadn’t seen for ages: Rosita Corpancho. There was her warm voice with its drawling Loretano accent, just as in my university years. There, too, intact or perhaps even increased, was her enthusiastic devotion to the Summer Institute of Linguistics. Surely I remembered the Institute? Of course, Rosita…Well, the Institute was about to celebrate its I-don’t-know-how-many-years in Peru, and what was more, it would soon be packing its bags, having decided that its mission in Amazonia had ended. Would it be possible, perhaps, for the Tower of Babel…? I interrupted her to say that, yes, I would be pleased to do a documentary on the work of the linguist-missionaries. And would take advantage of the trip to the jungle to do a program on some of the lesser-known tribes, something we’d had in mind from the beginning. Rosita was delighted and told me she would coordinate everything with the Institute so that we could get about readily in the jungle. Had I any particular tribe in mind? Without hesitation I answered: “The Machiguengas.”

  Ever since my unsuccessful attempts in the early sixties at writing about the Machiguenga storytellers, the subject had never been far from my mind. It returned every now and then, like an old love, not quite dead coals yet, whose embers would suddenly burst into flame. I had gone on taking notes and scribbling rough drafts that I invariably tore up. And reading, every time I could lay my hands on them, the papers and articles about Machiguengas that kept appearing here and there in scientific journals. The lack of interest in the tribe was giving way to curiosity on several counts. The French anthropologist France-Marie Casevitz-Renard, and another, an American, Johnson Allen, had spent long periods among them and had described their organization, their work methods, their kinship structure, their symbolism, their sense of time. A Swiss ethnologist, Gerhard Baer, who had also lived among them, had made a thorough study of their religion, and Father Joaquin Barriales had begun publishing, in Spanish translation, his large collection of Machiguenga myths and songs. A number of Peruvian anthropologists, classmates of Mascarita’s, notably Camino Díez Canseco and Víctor J. Guevara, had studied the tribe’s customs and beliefs.

  But never in any
of these contemporary works had I found any information whatsoever about storytellers. Oddly enough, all reference to them broke off around the fifties. Had the function of storyteller been dying out and finally disappeared at the very time that the Schneils had discovered it? In the reports that the Dominican missionaries—Fathers Pío Aza, Vicente de Cenitagoya, and Andrés Ferrero—wrote about them in the thirties and forties, there were frequent allusions to storytellers. And even earlier, among nineteenth-century travelers as well. One of the first references occurs in the book written by Paul Marcoy, the explorer. On the banks of the Urubamba he came across an “orateur,” whom the French traveler witnessed literally hypnotizing an audience of Antis for hours on end. “Do you think those Antis were Machiguengas?” the anthropologist Luis Román asked me, showing me the reference. I was certain they were. Why did modern anthropologists never mention storytellers? It was a question I asked myself each time one of these studies or field observations came to my attention, and I saw, once again, that no mention was made, even in passing, of those wandering tellers of tales, who seemed to me to be the most exquisite and precious exemplars of that people, numbering a mere handful, and who, in any event, had forged that curious emotional link between the Machiguengas and my own vocation (not to say, quite simply, my own life).

  Why, in the course of all those years, had I been unable to write my story about storytellers? The answer I used to offer myself, each time I threw the half-finished manuscript of that elusive story into the wastebasket, was the difficulty of inventing, in Spanish and within a logically consistent intellectual framework, a literary form that would suggest, with any reasonable degree of credibility, how a primitive man with a magico-religious mentality would go about telling a story. All my attempts led each time to the impasse of a style that struck me as glaringly false, as implausible as the various ways in which philosophers and novelists of the Enlightenment had put words into the mouths of their exotic characters in the eighteenth century, when the theme of the “noble savage” was fashionable in Europe. Despite these failures, perhaps because of them, the temptation was still there, and every now and then, revived by some fortuitous circumstance, it took on new life, and the murmurous, fleeting, rude, and untamed silhouette of the storyteller invaded my house and my dreams. How could I fail to have been moved at the thought of seeing the Machiguengas face-to-face at last?

  Since that trip in mid-1958 when I discovered the Peruvian jungle, I had returned to Amazonia several times: to Iquitos, to San Martín, to the Alto Marañón, to Madre de Dios, to Tingo Maria. But I had not been back to Pucallpa. In the twenty-three years that had gone by, that tiny, dusty village that I remembered as being full of dark, gloomy houses and evangelical churches, had been through an industrial and commercial “boom,” followed by a depression, and now, as Lucho Llosa, Alejandro Pérez, and I landed there one September afternoon in 1981 to film what was to be the next-to-last program of the Tower of Babel, it was in the first stages of another “boom,” though for bad reasons this time: trafficking in cocaine. The rush of heat and the burning light, in whose embrace people and things stand out so sharply (unlike Lima, where even bright sunlight has a grayish cast), are something that always has the effect on me of an emulsive draft of enthusiasm.

  But that morning brought the discovery that it was the Schneils whom the Institute had sent to meet us at the Pucallpa airport, and that impressed me even more than the heat and the beautiful landscape of Amazonia. The Schneils in person. They had come to the end of their quarter of a century in the Amazon, the whole of it spent working with the Machiguengas. They were surprised that I remembered them—I have the feeling they didn’t remember me at all—and could still recall so many details of what they had told me back then, during our two conversations at the Yarinacocha base. As we bounced this way and that in the jeep on our way to the Institute, they showed me photographs of their children, young people, some already through college, living in the States. Did they all speak Machiguenga? Of course, it was the family’s second language, even before Spanish. I was pleased to learn that the Schneils would be our guides and interpreters in the villages we visited.

  Lake Yarina was still a picture postcard, and dusk there more beautiful than ever. The bungalows of the Institute had proliferated along the lakeshore. The minute we climbed out of the jeep, Lucho, Alejandro, and I set to work. We agreed that as soon as night fell, to serve as an introduction to our trip to the forests of the Alto Urubamba, the Schneils would brief us on the places and people we would be seeing up there.

  Other than the Schneils, not one of the linguists whom I had met on my previous journey was still in Yarinacocha. Some had gone back to the States; others were doing fieldwork in other jungle regions around the world; and some had died, as had Dr. Townsend, the founder of the Institute. But the linguists whom we met and interviewed, who acted as our guides as we photographed the place from various angles, appeared to be the identical twins of the ones I remembered. The men had close-cropped hair and the athletic, healthy appearance of people who exercise daily, eat according to the instructions of a dietician, don’t smoke, and take neither coffee nor alcohol, and the women, encased in dresses as plain as they were decent, without a speck of makeup or a shadow of coquetry, exuded an overwhelming air of efficiency. Men and women alike had the cheerful, imperturbable look of people who believe, who are doing what they believe in, and who know for certain that the truth is on their side: the sort of people who have always fascinated and terrified me.

  As long as the light and the caprices of Alejandro Pérez’s equipment permitted, we went on collecting material for the program on the Institute: a seminar of bilingual teachers from various villages that was taking place at the time; the elementary readers and grammar books compiled by the linguists; their personal testimony and an overall view of the small town that the Yarinacocha base of operations had become, with its school, its hospital, its sports field, its library, its churches, its communications center, and its airport.

  As darkness fell, after a combined work session and meal during which we rounded off our plans for the part of the program devoted to the Institute, we began mapping out the part we would be recording during the following days: the Machiguengas. In Lima I had unearthed and consulted all the documents concerning them that I had been accumulating over the years. But it was chiefly a conversation with the Schneils—once again at their house, once again over tea and cookies prepared by Mrs. Schneil—that provided us with firsthand information on the state of the community that they knew inside out, since it had been their home for the past twenty-five years.

  Things had changed considerably for the Machiguengas of the Alto Urubamba and Madre de Dios since the day when Edwin Schneil, stark-naked, had approached that family and it had not fled. Had things changed for the better? The Schneils were firmly convinced that they had. For the moment, the dispersion that had characterized Machiguenga life had largely come to an end—and this was true of the ones on the other side of the Pongo de Mainique as well. The diaspora—little groups scattered here and there with virtually no contact between them, each one fighting desperately for survival—was over; had it continued, it would have meant, purely and simply, the disintegration of the community, the disappearance of its language, and the assimilation of its members by other groups and cultures. After many efforts on the part of the authorities, Catholic missionaries, anthropologists, ethnologists, and the Institute itself, the Machiguengas had begun to accept the idea of forming villages, of coming together in places suitable for working the soil, breeding animals, and developing trade relations with the rest of Peru. Things were evolving rapidly. There were already six settlements, some of them very recent. We would be visiting two of them, New World and New Light.

  Of the five thousand surviving Machiguengas—an approximate figure—nearly half were now living in those settlements. One of them, moreover, was half Machiguenga and half Campa (Ashaninka), and thus far the cohabitation of members of
the two tribes had not given rise to the slightest problem. The Schneils were optimistic and believed that the remaining Machiguengas—including the most elusive of all, the ones known as Kogapakori, would gradually abandon their refuges in the heart of the forest and form new settlements when they saw the advantages that living in community brought to their brothers: a less uncertain life and the possibility of being helped in case of emergency. With heartfelt enthusiasm the Schneils told us of the concrete steps that had already been taken in the villages to integrate them into national life. Schools and agricultural cooperatives, for instance. Both in New World and in New Light there were bilingual schools, with native teachers. We would be seeing them.

  Did this mean that the Machiguengas were slowly ceasing to be that primitive people, shut in on itself, pessimistic and defeated, that they had described to me in 1958? To a certain extent, yes. They were less reluctant—the ones who lived in communities, at any rate—to try out novelties, to progress; they had more love of life, perhaps. But as far as their isolation was concerned, one couldn’t talk thus far of any real change. Because, even though we could reach their villages in two or three hours in the Institute planes, a journey by river to one of these settlements from any sizable Amazonian town was a matter of days and sometimes weeks. So the idea of their becoming an integral part of Peru was perhaps a little less remote than in the past, but was certainly not a reality as yet.