The Storyteller (11 page)

We were in a little café on the Avenida España, having bread and cracklings. It was several days after my return from Amazonia. As soon as I got back I had looked for him around the university and left messages for him at La Estrella, but I hadn't been able to contact him. I was afraid I'd be off to Europe without having said goodbye to Saúl when, on the eve of my departure for Madrid, I ran into him as I got off a bus on a corner of the Avenida España. We went to that little cafe, where he'd treat me, he said, to a farewell meal of crackling sandwiches and ice-cold beer, the memory of which would stay with me during the whole time I was in Europe. But the memory that remained etched on my mind was, rather, his evasive answers and his incomprehensible lack of interest in a subject—the Machiguenga storytellers—which I'd thought he'd be all excited about. Was it really lack of interest? Of course not. I know now that he pretended not to be interested and lied to me when, on being backed into a corner by my questions, he assured me that he'd never heard a word about any such storytellers.

Memory is a snare, pure and simple: it alters, it subtly rearranges the past to fit the present. I have tried so many times to reconstruct that conversation in August 1958 with my friend Saúl Zuratas in the seedy café on the Avenida España, with its broken-down chairs and rickety tables, that by now I'm no longer sure of anything, with the exception, perhaps, of his enormous birthmark, the color of wine vinegar, that attracted the stares of the customers, his rebellious crest of red hair, his red-and-blue-checkered flannel shirt, and his heavy hiking shoes.

But my memory cannot have entirely invented Mascarita's fierce diatribe against the Summer Institute of Linguistics, which still rings in my ears twenty-seven years later, or my stunned surprise at the contained fury with which he spoke. It was the only time I ever saw him like that: livid with anger. I discovered that day that the archangelic Saúl, like other mortals, was capable of letting himself go, in one of those rages that, according to his Machiguenga friends, could destabilize the universe.

I said as much in the hope of distracting him. “You're going to bring on an apocalypse with your tantrum, Mascarita.”

But he paid no attention to me. “Those apostolic linguists of yours are the worst of all. They work their way into the tribes to destroy them from within, just like chiggers. Into their spirit, their beliefs, their subconscious, the roots of their way of being. The others steal their vital space and exploit them or push them farther into the interior. At worst, they kill them physically. Your linguists are more refined. They want to kill them in another way. Translating the Bible into Machiguenga! How about that!”

He was so agitated I didn't argue. Several times, listening to him, I had to bite my tongue so as not to contradict him. I knew that, in Saúl Zurata's case, his objections to the Institute were not frivolous or motivated by political prejudice; that, however questionable they might seem to me, they represented a point of view long pondered and deeply felt. Why did the work of the Institute strike him as more insidious than that of the bearded Dominicans and the little Spanish nuns of Quillabamba, Koribeni, and Chirumbia?

He had to postpone his answer, as the waitress came up at that moment with a fresh batch of bread and cracklings. She set the platter down on the table and stood for a long moment looking, fascinated, at Saúl's birthmark. I saw her cross herself as she went back to her stove.

“You're mistaken. I don't find it more insidious,” he finally answered sarcastically, still beside himself. “They, too, want to steal their souls, of course. But the jungle is swallowing up the missionaries, the way it did Arturo Cova in
The Vortex
. Didn't you see them on your trip? Half dead of hunger, and, what's more, very few of them. They live in such need they're in no state to evangelize anybody, luckily. Their isolation has dulled their catechistic spirit. They survive, and that's all. The jungle has clipped their claws, pal. And the way things are going in the Catholic Church, there soon won't be any priests at all, not even for Lima, let alone Amazonia.”

The linguists were a different matter altogether. They were backed by economic power and an extremely efficient organization which might well enable them to implant their progress, their religion, their values, their culture. Learn the aboriginal languages! What a swindle! What for? To make the Amazonian Indians into good Westerners, good modern men, good capitalists, good Christians of the Reformed Church? Not even that. Just to wipe their culture, their gods, their institutions off the map and corrupt even their dreams. Just as they'd done to the redskins and the others back in their own country. Was that what I wanted for our jungle compatriots? To make them into what the original inhabitants of North America now were? Servants and shoeshine boys for the Viracochas?

He paused, noticing that three men at the next table had stopped talking to listen to him, their attention attracted by his birthmark and his rage. The unmarked side of his face was congested, his mouth was half open and his lower lip pushed forward and trembling. I got up to go urinate without really needing to, hoping my absence would calm him. The señora at the stove asked me, with lowered voice as I passed, whether what was wrong with his face was very serious. I whispered that it was only a birthmark, no different from the mole you have on your arm, señora. “Poor thing, it makes you feel sorry for him just looking at it,” she murmured.

I returned to our table and Mascarita tried his best to smile as he lifted his glass: “To your good health, friend. Forgive me for getting so worked up.”

But in fact he hadn't calmed down and was obviously still tense and about to explode again. I told him his expression reminded me of a poem, and I recited in Machiguenga the lines I remembered of the song about sadness.

I managed to make him smile, for a moment.

“You speak Machiguenga with a slight California accent,” he joked. “How does that happen, I wonder?”

But a while later he lashed out at me again on the subject that was keeping him on hot coals. Without meaning to, I had stirred up something that distressed and deeply wounded him. He spoke without stopping, as if holding his breath.

Up till now nobody had succeeded, but it was possible that the linguists would get away with it. In four hundred, five hundred years of trying, all the others had failed. They had never been able to subjugate those tiny tribes they despised. I must have read about it in the Chronicles I was doing research on at Porras Barrenechea's. Hadn't I, pal? What happened to the Incas every time they sent armies to the Antisuyo. To Túpac Yupanqui, especially. Hadn't I read about it? How their warriors disappeared in the jungle, how the Antis slipped through their fingers. They hadn't subjugated a single one, and out of spite, the people of Cusco began to look down on them. That's why they invented all those disparaging Quechua words for the Amazonian Indians: savages, degenerates. Yet, despite all that, what had happened to the Inca empire, the Tahuantinsuyo, when it was forced to confront a more powerful civilization? The barbarians of the Antisuyo, at least, went on being what they had been. Wasn't that so? And had the Spaniards been any more successful than the Incas? Hadn't all their “expeditions” into Anti territory been a total failure? They killed them whenever they could lay their hands on them, but that rarely happened. Were the thousands of soldiers, adventurers, outlaws, and missionaries who descended on the Oriente between 1500 and 1800 able to bring one single tribe under the dominion of illustrious Christian and Western civilization? Did all this mean nothing to me?

“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.”