The Storyteller

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  “Did he speak well?” I heard myself ask softly.

  “Speak well?” Edwin Schneil asked. “He spoke on and on, without stopping, without pausing, without punctuation marks.” He laughed, deliberately exaggerating. “The way storytellers talk. Spilling out all the things that ever were and ever will be. He was what he was, in a word: a teller of tales, and a real chatterbox.”

  “I mean Machiguenga,” I said. “Did he speak it well? Couldn’t he…”

  “Go on,” Schneil said.

  “Nothing,” I said. “A nonsensical idea. Nothing, nothing.”

  Though I was under the impression that my attention was concentrated on the gnats and mosquitoes biting me and my longing to smoke, I must have asked Edwin Schneil, as in a dream, with a strange ache in my jaws and tongue, as though I were exhausted from using them too much, how long ago all this had been—“Oh, it must have been three and a half years or so ago,” he replied—and whether he had heard him again, or seen him, or had news of him, and listened as he answered no to all three questions, as I knew he would: it was a subject the Machiguengas didn’t like to talk about.

  When I said good night to the Schneils—they were sleeping at Martín’s—and went off to the hut where my hammock was, I woke up Lucho Llosa to ask him for a cigarette. “Since when have you smoked?” he said in surprise as he handed me one with hands fumbling from sleep.

  I didn’t light it. I held it between my fingers at my lips, going through the motions of smoking, all through that long night, while I swung gently in the hammock, listening to the quiet breathing of Lucho, Alejandro, and the pilots, hearing the chirring of the forest, feeling the seconds go by, one by one, slow, solemn, improbable, filled with wonder.

  We returned to Yarinacocha very early. Halfway there, we were forced to land because we were overtaken by a storm. In the small Campa village on the banks of the Urubamba where we took refuge, there was an American missionary who might have been a character out of Faulkner—single-minded, fearlessly stubborn, and frighteningly heroic. He had lived in this remote corner of the world for years with his wife and several small children. In my memory I can still see him standing in the torrential rain, energetically leading hymns with both arms and singing in his throaty voice to set a good example, under a flimsy shelter that threatened to collapse at any moment beneath the tremendous downpour. The twenty or so Campas barely moved their lips and gave the impression that they were making no sound, yet kept their eyes riveted on him with the same rapt fascination with which the Machiguengas doubtless contemplated their storytellers.

  When we resumed our flight, the Schneils asked me whether I wasn’t feeling well. Yes, perfectly well, I replied, though rather tired, since I hadn’t slept very much. We stayed in Yarinacocha just long enough to climb into the jeep that would take us to Pucallpa to catch the Fawcett flight to Lima. In the plane Lucho asked me: “Why the long face? What went wrong this time?” I was on the point of explaining why I wasn’t saying a word and looked more or less stunned, but when I opened my mouth I realized I wouldn’t be able to. It couldn’t be summed up in a mere anecdote; it was too unreal and too literary to be plausible, and too serious to joke about as though it were just an amusing incident.

  I now knew the reason for the taboo. Did I? Yes. Could it be possible? Yes, it could. That was why they avoided talking about them, that was why they had jealously hidden them from anthropologists, linguists, Dominican missionaries over the last twenty years. That was why they did not appear in the writings of modern ethnologists on the Machiguengas. They were not protecting the institution or the idea of the storyteller in the abstract. They were protecting him. No doubt because he had asked them to. So as not to arouse the Viracochas’ curiosity about this strange graft onto the tribe. And they had gone on doing as he asked for so many years now, providing him refuge by way of a taboo which had spread to the entire institution, to the hablador in the abstract. If that was how it had been, they had a great deal of respect for him. If that was how it was, in their eyes he was one of them.

  We began editing the program that same night at the channel after going home to shower and change, and I to a pharmacy for ointment and antihistamines for the insect bites. We decided that the program would be in the form of a travelogue, intercutting commentaries and recollections with the interviews we’d done in Yarinacocha and the Alto Urubamba. As he edited the material, Moshé grumbled at us as usual for not having taken certain shots some other way, or for having taken others the way we had. It was then that I remembered that he, too, was Jewish.

  “How do you get along with the Chosen People here in Peru?”

  “Like a monkey with a mirror, of course,” he said. “Why? Do you want to get yourself circumcised?”

  “I wonder if you’d do me a favor. Would you have any way of finding out where a family of the community that went to Israel is now?”

  “Are we going to do a Tower of Babel on kibbutzim?” Lucho said. “In that case, we’ll have to do one on the Palestinian refugees. But how can we? Doesn’t the program end next week?”

  “The Zuratas. The father, Don Salomón, had a little grocery store in Breña. The son, Saúl, was a friend of mine. They went to Israel in the early seventies, it seems. If you could find out their address there, you’d be doing me a favor.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Moshé answered. “I imagine they keep a register of such things in the community.”

  The program on the Institute of Linguistics and the Machiguengas turned out to be longer than we’d foreseen. When we gave it to Control they informed us that on that particular Sunday they’d sold space for a definite time slot, so that if we didn’t cut the program ourselves to exactly one hour, the operator would do it any old way he pleased when he put it on the air. Thoroughly pissed off, we had to cut it in a rush, as time was running short. We were already editing the final Tower of Babel for the following Sunday. We’d decided that it would be an anthology of the twenty-four previous programs. But as usual we had to change our plans. For the very start of the program, I’d tried to persuade Doris Gibson to let herself be interviewed and help us compile a short biography of her life as a founder and director of magazines, a businesswoman, a fighter against dictatorship and also its victim—on one famous occasion she’d hauled off and slapped the policemen who had come to seize copies of Caretas—and above all, a woman who, in a society that in those days was far more macho and prejudiced than it is now, had been able to make a career for herself and achieve success in fields that were considered male monopolies. At the same time, Doris had been one of the most beautiful women in Lima, courted by millionaires, and the muse of famous painters and poets. The impetuous Doris, who is nonetheless very shy, had turned me down, because, she said, the cameras intimidated her. But that last week she had changed her mind and sent word that she was willing to appear on the program.

  I interviewed her, and that interview, together with the anthology, saw the end of the Tower of Babel. Faithful to its destiny, the final program, which Moshé, Lucho, Alejandro, and I watched at my house, sitting around a tableful of Chinese food and ice-cold beer, fell victim to technical imponderables. For one of those mysterious reasons—celestial sabotage—which were the daily bread of the channel, unexpected jazz numbers appeared out of nowhere just as the broadcast began and provided background music to all of Doris’s stories about General Odría’s dictatorship, police seizures of Caretas, and Sérvulo Gutiérrez’s paintings.

  After the program was over and we were drinking to its death and non-resurrection, the phone rang. It was Doris, asking me whether it wouldn’t have been more appropriate to have backed her interview with Arequipan yaravíes (she is, among other things, a fiercely loyal Arequipeña) rather than that outlandish jazz. After Lucho, Moshé, and Alejandro had had a good laugh at the explanations I had invented to justify the use of jazz on the program, Moshé said: “By the way, before I forget, I found out what you asked me to.”

  More than
a week had gone by and I hadn’t reminded him, because I could guess the answer and was a little unnerved at the prospect of having my suspicions confirmed.

  “It seems they never did go to Israel,” he said. “Where did you get the idea they’d left the country?”

  “You mean the Zuratas?” I asked, knowing very well what he was talking about.

  “Don Salomón, at least, didn’t go. He died here. He’s buried in the Jewish cemetery in Lima, the one on the Avenida Colonial.” Moshé took a scrap of paper out of his pocket and read: “October 23, 1960. That’s the day they buried him, if you need further details. My grandfather knew him and attended his funeral. As for his son, your friend, he may have gone to Israel, but I couldn’t find out for sure. None of the people I asked knew anything about him.”

  But I do, I thought. I know everything.

  “Did he have a big birthmark on his face?” Moshé asked. “My grandfather even remembers that. Did they call him the Phantom of the Opera?”

  “An enormous one. We called him Mascarita.”

  Good things happen and bad things happen. It’s bad that wisdom should be getting lost. Before, there were any number of seripigaris, and if the man who walks had any doubts about what to eat, how to cure the evil, or which stones protect against Kientibakori and his little devils, he went and asked. There was always a seripigari close by. Smoking, drinking brew, thinking, talking with the saankarites in the worlds up above, he could find the answer. But now there are few of them and some of them shouldn’t call themselves seripigaris. Can they counsel you? Their wisdom has dried up on them like a worm-eaten root, it seems. This brings much confusion. Wherever I go, that’s what the men who walk say. Could it be because we don’t keep on the move enough? they say. Can it be that we’ve grown lazy? We’re not fulfilling our obligation, perhaps.

  That, anyway, is what I have learned.

  The wisest seripigari I ever knew has gone. Maybe he’s come back; maybe not. He lived on the other side of the Gran Pongo, by the Kompiroshiato. His name was Tasurinchi. Nothing held any secrets for him, in this world or in the others. He could tell which worms you can eat by the color of their rings and the way they crawled. He looked at them like this, wrinkling up his eyes, with his deep gaze. He would study them for a good while. And there it came; he knew. Everything I know about worms I learned from him. The one that lives on giant reeds, the chakokieni, is good; the one that lives on lupana is bad. The one that lives on rotten tree trunks, the shigopi, is good, and also the one that lives on cassava fibers. The one that lodges in the shells of tortoises is extremely bad. The best and the tastiest is the one that lives on the pulp left after maize or cassava go through a sieve to make masato. This worm, the kororo, sweetens the mouth, relieves hunger, and brings untroubled sleep. But the worm that lives on the corpses of caimans washed up on the shores of a lake does the body harm and brings on the same visions as a bad trance.

  Tasurinchi, the one from the Kompiroshiato, made people’s lives better. He had recipes for everything. Using everything. He taught me many of them. Here’s one I still remember. If someone dies from snakebite, his body must be burned immediately; otherwise, it will breed reptiles and the forest all around will teem with poisonous beings. And here’s another. It’s not enough just to burn the house of someone who’s gone; you have to do it with your back turned. Looking at the flames brings misfortune. It was frightening talking with that seripigari. You realized how much you didn’t know. Ignorance has its dangers, perhaps. “How have you learned so many things?” I asked him. And I said: “It’s as though you’d been living since before we started walking, and you’d seen everything and tried everything.”

  “The most important thing is not to be impatient and allow what must happen to happen,” he answered. Saying: “If a man lives calmly, without getting impatient, he has time to think and to remember.” That way, he’ll meet his destiny, perhaps. He’ll live content, maybe. He won’t forget what he’s learned. If he gets impatient, rushing to outstrip time, the world gets out of order, it seems. And the soul falls into a spiderweb of mud. That is confusion. The worst thing that can happen, let’s say. In this world and in the soul of the man who walks. Then he doesn’t know what to do, where to go. He doesn’t know how to protect himself either, saying: What shall I do? What must I do? Then the devils and the little devils creep into his life and play with it. The way, perhaps, that children play with frogs, making them jump. Mistakes are always the result of confusion, it seems.”

  “What should one do so as not to lose one’s serenity, Tasurinchi?” “Eat what’s permitted and respect the taboos, storyteller. “ Otherwise, what happened to Tasurinchi that time could happen to anyone.

  What happened to him?

  This happened to him. That was before.

  He was a great hunter. He knew how big the trap should be for the sajino, or the noose for the paujil. He knew how to hide a cage so that the ronsoco would walk into it. But, above all, he knew how to shoot a bow. The very first arrow he loosed always hit the mark.

  One day when he’d gone out to hunt, after fasting and painting his face in the proper way, he felt the leaves moving not far from where he was. He sensed a shape and halted, saying: A big animal! He approached slowly, heedlessly. Not taking the time to make sure what it was, he boldly shot his arrow. He ran to see. There it was, lying on the ground, dead. What had fallen? A deer. He was very frightened, of course. Some evil would befall him now. What happens to someone who kills a forbidden animal? There was no seripigari close by to put that question to. Would his body be covered with blisters? Would he be racked by horrible pains? Would the kamagarinis snatch one of his souls and carry it off to the top of a tree for the buzzards to peck at? Many moons passed and nothing happened. Then Tasurinchi swelled with pride. “That story about not killing deer is all humbug,” his family heard him say. “Just coward’s talk.” “How dare you say that!” they scolded him, looking about in all directions, and above and below, in fright. “I killed one and I feel quite peaceful and happy,” he answered.

  That’s what Tasurinchi kept saying, and finally all the saying led to doing. He started hunting deer. He followed their trail to the collpa where they went to lick the salty earth. He followed them to the pool where they gathered to drink. He sought out the caves where the females went to give birth. He lay in wait in a hiding place, and when he saw the deer he shot his arrows at them. They lay there dying, looking at him with their big eyes. Sorrowful, as though asking: What have you done to me? He slung them across his back. He was pleased, perhaps. He didn’t mind being stained with the blood of what he had hunted. Nothing mattered to him now. He wasn’t afraid of anything, it seems. He brought the kill to his hut. “Cook it. Like sachavaca, the very same way,” he ordered his wife. She obeyed, trembling with fear. Sometimes she tried to warn him. “This food is going to bring evil upon us,” she whimpered. “Upon you and me and everybody, perhaps. It’s as though you ate your children or your mothers, Tasurinchi. We’re not Chonchoites, are we? When have Machiguengas ever eaten human flesh?” Chewing and choking on great mouthfuls of meat, he would say: “If deer are people who have turned into something else, the Chonchoites are quite right. It’s food, and it’s delicious. Look what a feast I’m having; look how I’m enjoying this food.” And he farted and farted. In the forest Kientibakori drank masato, dancing and feasting. His farts were like thunder; his belches like the jaguar’s roar.

  And it was true; despite the deer he shot and ate, nothing happened to Tasurinchi. Some families took fright; others, persuaded by his example, started eating forbidden flesh. The world was thrown into confusion, then.

  One day, Tasurinchi found tracks in the forest. That made him very happy. The trail was wide and easy to follow and his experience told him it was a herd of deer. He followed it for many moons, full of hope, his heart pounding. How many shall I kill? he dreamed. If I’m lucky, as many as I have arrows. I’ll drag them home one at a time, cut them up, salt
them, and we’ll have food for a long time.

  The trail came to an end in the dark waters of a small lake; in one corner was a waterfall, half hidden by the branches and leaves of the trees. The vegetation muffled the sound of the water and the place did not seem to be this world but Inkite. Just as peaceful, perhaps. Here the herd came to drink. Here the deer gathered to chew the cud. Here they slept, keeping each other warm. Excited by his discovery, Tasurinchi looked all around. There it was; that was the best tree. He would have a clear view from there; from there he could shoot off his arrows. He climbed up, made his hiding place with branches and leaves. Quietly, quietly, as though his souls had leaked away and his body were an empty skin, he waited.

  Not for long. Soon his sharp hunter’s ears caught the sound, troc, troc, far away, the drumbeat of deer hoofs in the forest: troc, troc, troc. Suddenly he saw it: a stag, tall and proud, with the sad look of one who has been a man. Tasurinchi’s eyes shone. His mouth watered perhaps. Thinking: How tender, how tasty! He aimed and shot. But the arrow whistled past the stag, as though curving so as to miss it, and flew on, lost in the depths of the forest. How many times can a man die? Many times, it seems. This stag did not die. Nor was it frightened. What was happening? Instead of fleeing, it began drinking. Stretching its neck from the shore of the lake, plunging its muzzle into the water, lifting it out, clacking its tongue, it drank, shh, shh. Shh, shh, content. As though unaware of danger. Calm. Could it be deaf? Could it be a deer with no sense of smell? Tasurinchi now had a second arrow ready. Troc, troc. Then he saw another stag arriving, pushing through the branches, making the leaves rustle. It took its place next to the first one and began drinking. They seemed content, both of them, drinking water. Shh, shh, shh. Tasurinchi loosed his arrow. It missed this time, too. What was happening? The two stags went on drinking, not taking fright, not fleeing. What’s happening to you, Tasurinchi? Is your hand trembling? Have you lost your eyesight? Can you no longer judge distance? What was he going to do? He was utterly bewildered; he couldn’t believe it. His world had gone dark. And there he was, shooting. He shot all his arrows. Troc, troc. Troc, troc. The deer kept on coming. More and more, so many, so very many. The drumbeat of their hoofs echoed and reechoed in Tasurinchi’s ears. Troc, troc. They didn’t seem to be coming from this world, but from the one below or above. Troc, troc. He understood then. Perhaps. Was it you or they who’d fallen into the trap, Tasurinchi?