The Storyteller

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  I stopped. Was I offending them? I myself didn’t know what conclusion to draw from this whole hasty process of reasoning.

  “Yes, of course.” Edwin Schneil coughed, somewhat disconcerted. “Naturally. Hundreds of years of beliefs and customs don’t disappear overnight. It’ll take time. What’s important is that they’ve begun to change. Today’s Machiguengas are no longer what they were when we arrived, I assure you.”

  “I’ve realized that there are depths in them they won’t yet allow to be touched,” I interrupted him. “I asked the schoolmistress in New World, and Martín as well, about habladores. And they both reacted in exactly the same way: denying that they existed, pretending they didn’t even know what I was talking about. It means that even in the most Westernized Machiguengas, such as the schoolmistress and Martín, there’s an inviolable inner loyalty to their own beliefs. There are certain taboos they’re not prepared to give up. That’s why they keep them so thoroughly hidden from outsiders.”

  There was a long silence in which the chirring of the invisible night insects seemed to grow deafening. Was he going to ask me who habladores were? Would the Schneils also tell me, as the schoolmistress and the village chief-pastor had, that they’d never heard of them? I thought for a moment that habladores didn’t exist: that I’d invented them and then housed them in false memories so as to make them real.

  “Ah, habladores!” Mrs. Schneil exclaimed at last. And the Machiguenga word or sentence crackled like dead leaves. It seemed to me that it came to greet me, across time, from the bungalow on the shores of Yarinacocha where I had heard it for the first time when I was little more than an adolescent.

  “Ah,” Edwin Schneil repeated, mimicking the crackling sound twice in a faintly uneasy tone of voice. “Habladores. Speakers. Yes, of course, that’s one possible translation.”

  “And how is it that you know about them?” Mrs. Schneil said, turning her head just slightly in my direction.

  “Through you. Through the two of you,” I murmured.

  I sensed that they opened their eyes wide in the darkness and exchanged a look, not understanding. I explained that since that night in their bungalow on the shores of Lake Yarina when they had told me about them, the Machiguenga habladores had lived with me, intriguing me, disturbing me, that since then I had tried a thousand times to imagine them as they wandered through the forest, collecting and repeating stories, fables, gossip, tales they’d invented, from one little Machiguenga island to another in this Amazonian sea in which they drifted, borne on the current of adversity. I told them that, for some reason I found hard to pin down, the existence of those storytellers, finding out what they were doing and what importance it had in the life of their people, had been, for twenty-three years, a great stimulus for my own work, a source of inspiration and an example I would have liked to emulate. I realized how excited my voice sounded, and fell silent.

  By a sort of unspoken agreement, we had halted alongside a pile of tree trunks and branches heaped up in the center of the clearing as though ready to be set alight for a bonfire. We had sat down or leaned back against the logs. Kashiri could now be seen, a yellow-orange crescent, surrounded by his vast harem of sparkling fireflies. There were a lot of mosquitoes as well as clouds of gnats, and we waved our hands back and forth to shoo them away from our faces.

  “How really odd. Who would ever have thought that you’d remember a thing like that? And, stranger still, that it would take on such importance in your life?” Edwin Schneil said at last, just to say something. He seemed perplexed and a little flustered. “I didn’t even remember our having touched, back then, on the subject of—storytellers? No, speakers—is that the right word? How odd, how very odd.”

  “It doesn’t surprise me at all that Martín and the schoolmistress of New World didn’t want to tell you anything about them,” Mrs. Schneil broke in after a moment. “It’s a subject no Machiguenga likes to talk about. It’s something very private, very secret. Not even with the two of us, who’ve known them for such a long time now, who’ve seen so many of them born. I don’t understand it. Because they tell you everything, about their beliefs, their ayahuasca rites, the witch doctors. They don’t keep anything to themselves. Except anything having to do with the habladores. It’s the one thing they always shy away from. Edwin and I have often wondered why there’s that taboo.”

  “Yes, it’s a strange thing,” Edwin Schneil agreed. “It’s hard to understand, because they’re very communicative and never object to answering any question they’re asked. They’re the best informants in the world; ask any anthropologist who’s been around here. Maybe they don’t want to talk about them or have people meet them, because the habladores are the repositories of their family secrets. They know all the Machiguengas’ private affairs. What’s that proverb? You don’t wash dirty linen in public. Perhaps the taboo about habladores has to do with some feeling of that sort.”

  In the darkness, Mrs. Schneil laughed. “Well, that’s a theory that doesn’t convince me,” she said. “Because the Machiguengas aren’t at all secretive about their personal concerns. If you only knew how often they’ve left me flabbergasted and red in the face from what they tell me…”

  “But, in any case, I can assure you you’re wrong if you think it’s a religious taboo,” Edwin Schneil declared. “It isn’t. The habladores aren’t sorcerers or priests, like the seripigari or the machikanari. They’re tellers of tales, that’s all.”

  “I know that,” I said. “You explained that to me the first time. And that’s precisely what moves me. That the Machiguengas consider mere storytellers so important that they have to keep their existence a secret.”

  Every so often a silent shadow passed by, crackled briefly, and the Schneils crackled back what must have been the equivalent of a “Good night,” and the shadow disappeared into the darkness. Not a sound came from the huts. Was the whole village already fast asleep?

  “And in all these years, you’ve never heard an hablador?” I asked.

  “I’ve never been that lucky,” Mrs. Schneil said. “Up until now they’ve never offered me that opportunity. But Edwin’s had the chance.”

  “Twice, even.” He laughed. “Though in a quarter of a century that’s not very often, is it? I hope what I’m going to say won’t disappoint you. But I do believe I wouldn’t want to repeat the experience.”

  The first time had been by sheer happenstance, ten years or more before. The Schneils had been living in a small Machiguenga settlement on the Tikompinía for several months, when one morning, leaving his wife in the village, Edwin had gone off to visit another family of the community a few hours upriver by canoe, taking with him a young boy to help him paddle. On reaching their destination, they found that instead of the five or six Machiguengas who lived there, whom Edwin knew, there were at least twenty people gathered together, a number of them from distant hamlets. Oldsters and young children, men and women were squatting in a half circle, facing a man sitting cross-legged in front of them, declaiming. He was a storyteller. Nobody objected to Edwin Schneil and the lad sitting down to listen. And the storyteller did not interrupt his monologue when they joined the audience.

  “He was a man getting on in years and spoke so fast that I had trouble following him. He must have been speaking for a good while already. But he didn’t seem tired; quite the contrary. The performance went on for several hours more. Every now and then they’d hand him a gourdful of masato and he’d take a swallow to clear his throat. No, I’d never seen that storyteller before. Quite old, at first sight, but as you know, one ages quickly here in the jungle. An old man, among the Machiguengas, can mean one no more than thirty. He was a short man, with a powerful build, very expressive. You or I or anyone else who talked on and on for that many hours would be hoarse-voiced and worn out. But he wasn’t. He went on and on, putting everything he had into it. It was his job, after all, and I don’t doubt he did it well.”

  What did he talk about? It was impossible to rem
ember. What a hodgepodge! A bit of everything, anything that came into his head. What he’d done the day before, and the four worlds of the Machiguenga cosmos; his travels, magic herbs, people he’d known; the gods, the little gods, and fabulous creatures of the tribe’s pantheon. Animals he’d seen and celestial geography, a maze of rivers with names nobody could possibly remember. Edwin Schneil had had to concentrate to follow the torrent of words that leapt from a cassava crop to the armies of demons of Kientibakori, the spirit of evil, and from there to births, marriages, and deaths in different families or the iniquities of the time of the tree-bleeding, as they called the rubber boom. Very soon Edwin Schneil found himself less interested in the storyteller than in the fascinated, rapt attention with which the Machiguengas listened to him, greeting his jokes with great roars of laughter or sharing his sadness. Their eyes avid, their mouths agape, not one pause, not a single inflection of what the man said was lost on them.

  I listened to the linguist the way the Machiguengas had listened to the storyteller. Yes, they did exist, and were like the ones in my dreams.

  “To tell the truth, I remember very little of what he said,” Edwin Schneil added. “I’m just giving you a few examples. What a mishmash! I can remember his telling about the initiation ceremony of a young shaman, with ayahuasca, under the guidance of a seripigari. He recounted the visions he’d had. Strange, incoherent ones, like certain modern poems. He also spoke of the properties of a little bird, the chobíburiti; if you crush the small bones of its wing and bury them in the floor of the hut, that assures peace in the family.”

  “We tried his formula and it really didn’t work all that well,” Mrs. Schneil joked. “Would you say it did, Edwin?”

  He laughed.

  “The storytellers are their entertainment. They’re their films and their television,” he added after a pause, serious once more. “Their books, their circuses, all the diversions we civilized people have. They have only one diversion in the world. The storytellers are nothing more than that.”

  “Nothing less than that,” I corrected him gently.

  “What’s that you say?” he put in, disconcerted. “Well, yes. But forgive me for pressing one point. I don’t think there’s anything religious behind it. That’s why all this mystery, the secrecy they surround them with, is so odd.”

  “If something matters greatly to you, you surround it with mystery,” it occurred to me to say.

  “There’s no doubt about that,” Mrs. Schneil agreed. “The habladores matter a great deal to them. But we haven’t discovered why.”

  Another silent shadow passed by and crackled, and the Schneils crackled back. I asked Edwin whether he’d talked with the old storyteller that time.

  “I had practically no time to. I was exhausted when he’d finished talking. All my bones ached, and I fell asleep immediately. I’d sat for four or five hours, remember, without changing position, after having paddled against the current nearly all day. And listened to that chittering of anecdotes. I was all tuckered out. I fell asleep, and when I woke up, the storyteller had gone. And since the Machiguengas don’t like to talk about them, I never heard anything more about him.”

  There he was. In the murmurous darkness of New Light all around me I could see him: skin somewhere between copper and greenish, gathered by the years into innumerable folds; cheekbones, nose, and forehead decorated with lines and circles meant to protect him from the claws and fangs of wild beasts, the harshness of the elements, the enemy’s magic and his darts; squat of build, with short muscular legs and a small loincloth around his waist; and no doubt carrying a bow and a quiver of arrows. There he was, walking amid the bushes and the tree trunks, barely visible in the dense undergrowth, walking, walking, after speaking for ten hours, toward his next audience, to go on with his storytelling. How had he begun? Was it a hereditary occupation? Was he specially chosen? Was it something forced upon him by others?

  Mrs. Schneil’s voice erased the image. “Tell him about the other storyteller,” she said. “The one who was so aggressive. The albino. I’m sure that will interest him.”

  “Well, I don’t know whether he was really an albino.” Edwin Schneil laughed in the darkness. “Among ourselves, we also called him the gringo.”

  This time it hadn’t been by chance. Edwin Schneil was staying in a settlement by the Timpía with a family of old acquaintances, when other families from around about began arriving unexpectedly, in a state of great excitement. Edwin became aware of great palavers going on; they pointed at him, then went off to argue. He guessed the reason for their alarm and told them not to worry; he would leave at once. But when the family he was staying with insisted, the others all agreed that he could stay. However, when the person they were waiting for appeared, another long and violent argument ensued, because the storyteller, gesticulating wildly, rudely insisted that the stranger leave, while his hosts were determined that he should stay. Edwin Schneil decided to take his leave of them, telling them he didn’t want to be the cause of dissension. He bundled up his things and left. He was on his way down the path toward another settlement when the Machiguengas he’d been staying with caught up with him. He could come back, he could stay. They’d persuaded the storyteller.

  “In fact, nobody was really convinced that I should stay, least of all the storyteller,” he added. “He wasn’t at all pleased at my being there. He made his feeling of hostility clear to me by not looking at me even once. That’s the Machiguenga way: using your hatred to make someone invisible. But we and that family on theTimpía had a very close relationship, a spiritual kinship. We called each other ‘father’ and ‘son’…”

  “Is the law of hospitality a very powerful one among the Machiguengas?”

  “The law of kinship, rather,” Mrs. Schneil answered. “If ‘relatives’ go to stay with their kin, they’re treated like princes. It doesn’t happen often, because of the great distances that separate them. That’s why they called Edwin back and resigned themselves to his hearing the storyteller. They didn’t want to offend a ‘kinsman.’ ”

  “They’d have done better to be less hospitable and let me leave.” Edwin Schneil sighed. “My bones still ache and my mouth even more, I’ve yawned so much remembering that night.”

  It was twilight and the sun had not yet set when the storyteller began talking, and he went on with his stories all night long, without once stopping. When at last he fell silent, the light was gilding the tops of the trees and it was nearly mid-morning. Edwin Schneil’s legs were so cramped, his body so full of aches and pains, that they had to help him stand up, take a few steps, learn to walk again.

  “I’ve never felt so awful in my life,” he muttered. “I was half dead from fatigue and physical discomfort. An entire night fighting off sleep and muscle cramp. If I’d gotten up, they would have been very offended. I only followed his tales for the first hour, or perhaps two. After that, all I could do was to keep trying not to fall asleep. And hard as I tried, I couldn’t keep my head from nodding from one side to the other like the clapper of a bell.”

  He laughed softly, lost in his memories.

  “Edwin still has nightmares remembering that night’s vigil, swallowing his yawns and massaging his legs.” Mrs. Schneil laughed.

  “And the storyteller?” I asked.

  “He had a huge birthmark,” Edwin Schneil said. He paused, searching his memories or looking for words to describe them. “And hair redder than mine. A strange person. What the Machiguengas call a serigórompi. Meaning an eccentric; someone different from the rest. Because of that carrot-colored hair of his, we called him the albino or the gringo among ourselves.”

  The mosquitoes were drilling into my ankles. I could feel their bites and almost see them piercing my skin, which would now swell into horribly painful little blisters. It was the price I had to pay every time I came to the jungle. Amazonia had never failed to exact it of me.

  “A huge birthmark?” I stammered, scarcely able to get the words out. “Do
you mean uta? An ulcer eating his face away, like that little boy we saw this morning in New World…”

  “No, no. A birthmark. An enormous dark birthmark,” Edwin Schneil interrupted, raising his hand. “It covered the whole right side of his face. An impressive sight, I assure you. I’d never seen a man with one like it, never. Neither among the Machiguengas nor anywhere else. And I haven’t seen its like since, either.”

  I could feel the mosquitoes biting me on all the parts of my body that had no protection: face, neck, arms, hands. The clouds that had hidden the moon were gone and there was Kashiri, clear and bright and not yet full, looking at us. A shiver ran down my body from head to foot.

  “He had red hair?” I murmured very slowly. My mouth was dry, but my hands were sweating.

  “Redder than mine.” He laughed. “A real gringo, I swear. Though perhaps an albino, after all. I didn’t have much time to get a close look at him. I’ve told you what a state I was in after that storytelling session. As though I’d been anesthetized. And when I came to, he was gone, of course. So he wouldn’t have to talk to me or bear the sight of my face any longer.”

  “How old would you say he was?” I managed to get out, with immense fatigue, as though I’d been the one who’d been talking all night long.

  Edwin Schneil shrugged. “Who knows?” He sighed. “You’ve doubtless realized how hard it is to tell how old they are. They themselves don’t know. They don’t calculate their age the same way we do, and what’s more, they all reach that average age very quickly. What you might call Machiguenga age. But certainly younger than I am. About your age, or perhaps a bit younger.”

  I pretended to cough two or three times to conceal how unnerved I was. I suddenly felt a fierce, intolerable desire to smoke. It was as though every pore in my body had suddenly opened, demanding to inhale a thousand and one puffs of smoke. Five years before, I had smoked what I thought would be my last cigarette; I was convinced that I’d freed myself from tobacco forever; for a long time now, the very smell of cigarette smoke had irritated me, and here, out of the blue, in the darkness of New Light, an overwhelming urge to smoke had arisen from who knows what mysterious depths.