The Storyteller (12 page)

“No, señora, it doesn't hurt at all, fortunately. I'm not even aware that I have such a thing,” Saúl replied, smiling.

We walked along together for a while, still talking of the one subject of the afternoon, of that I'm certain. As we said goodbye on the corner of the Plaza Bolognesi and the Paseo Colón, we embraced.

“I really must apologize,” he said, suddenly remorseful. “I've chattered like a parrot and didn't let you open your mouth. You didn't even have a chance to tell me what you're planning to do in Europe.”

We agreed to write to each other, if only a postcard now and then, to keep in touch. I wrote three times in the following years, but he never answered me.

That was the last time I saw Saúl Zuratas. The image floats unchanged above the tumultuous surge of the years, the gray air, the overcast sky, and the penetrating damp of a Lima winter serving as a backdrop. Behind him, a confusion of cars, trucks, and buses coiling around the monument to Bolognesi, and Mascarita, with the great dark stain on his face, his flaming red hair, and his checkered shirt, waving goodbye and shouting: “We'll see if you come back a real Madrileiio,, lisping your
z
's and using archaic second-person plurals. Have a good trip, and lots of luck to you over there, pal!”

Four years went by without any news of him. None of the Peruvians who came through Madrid or Paris, where I lived after finishing my postgraduate studies, was ever able to tell me anything about Saúl. I thought of him often, in Spain especially, not only because of my liking for him but also because of the Machiguengas. The story the Schneils had told me about habladores kept coming back to my mind, enticing me, exciting my imagination and desire as a beautiful girl might. I had only morning classes at the university, and each afternoon I used to spend several hours at the National Library, on Castella, reading novels of chivalry. One day I remembered the name of the Dominican missionary who had written about the Machiguengas: Fray Vicente de Cenitagoya. I looked in the catalogue, and there was the book.

I read it in one sitting. It was short and naïve. The Machiguengas, whom the good Dominican frequently called savages and chided paternally for being childish, lazy, and drunken, as well as for their sorcery—which Fray Vicente called “nocturnal sabbaths”—seemed to have been observed from outside and from a considerable distance, even though the missionary had lived among them for more than twenty years. But Fray Vicente praised their honesty, their respect for their given word, and their gentle ways. Moreover, his book confirmed certain information I had which finally convinced me. They had a natural inclination, little short of unhealthy, toward listening to and telling stories, and they were incorrigible gossips. They couldn't stay still, felt no attachment whatsoever to the place where they lived, and seemed possessed by the demon of movement. The forest cast a sort of spell over them. Using all sorts of blandishments, the missionaries attracted them to the settlements of Chirumbia, Koribeni, and Panticollo. They wore themselves out trying to get the Machiguengas to settle down. They gave them mirrors, food, seed: they taught them the advantages of living in a community, for their health, for their education, for their very survival. They seemed persuaded. They put up their huts, cleared their fields, agreed to send their children to the little mission school, and appeared themselves, painted and punctual, at the evening Rosary and the morning Mass. They seemed well on their way along the path of Christian civilization. Then all of a sudden, one fine day, without saying thank you or goodbye, they vanished into the forest. A force more powerful than they drove them: an ancestral instinct impelled them irresistibly toward a life of wandering, scattered them through the tangled virgin forests.

That same night I wrote to Mascarita sending him my comments on Father Cenitagoya's book. I told him I'd decided to write something about Machiguenga storytellers. Would he help me? Here in Madrid, out of homesickness perhaps, or because I had constantly found myself mulling over our conversations in my mind, I no longer found his ideas as absurd or unrealistic as I once had. In any case, I would try to make my story as authentic and as intimate a portrayal of the Machiguenga way of life as I could. Would you lend me a hand, pal?

I set to work, brimming over with enthusiasm. But the result was lamentable. How could I write about storytellers without having at least a superficial knowledge of their beliefs, myths, customs, history? The Dominican monastery in the Calle Claudio Coello gave me invaluable help. It had a complete collection of
Misiones Dominicanas
, the journal of the missionaries of the Order in Peru, and in it I found numerous articles on the Machiguengas and also Father José Pío Aza's excellent studies of the language and folklore of the tribe.

But perhaps I learned most from the talk I had with a bearded missionary in the vast resounding library of the monastery, where the high ceiling echoed back what we were saying. Fray Elicerio Maluenda had lived for many years in the Alto Urubamba, and had become interested in Machiguenga mythology. He was a keen-minded, very learned old man, with the rather rustic manners of one who has spent his life out-of-doors, roughing it in the jungle. Every so often, as though to make a greater impression on me, he larded his pure Spanish with a peculiar-sounding Machiguenga word.

I was delighted with what he told me of the cosmogony of the tribe, full of complex symmetries and Dantesque echoes—as I discover now in Firenze, reading the
Commedia
in Italian for the first time. The earth was the center of the cosmos and there were two regions above it and two below, each one with its own sun, moon, and tangle of rivers. In the highest, Inkite, lived Tasurinchi, the all-powerful, the breather-out of people, and through it, bathing fertile banks with fruit-laden trees, flowed the Meshiareni, or river of immortality, that could be dimly made out from the earth, for it was the Milky Way. Below Inkite floated the weightless region of clouds, or Menkoripatsa, with its transparent river, the Manaironchaari. The earth, Kipacha, was the abode of the Machiguengas, a wandering people. Beneath it was the gloomy region of the dead, almost all of whose surface was covered by the river Kamabiría, plied by the souls of the deceased before taking up their new abode. And last of all, the lowest and most terrible region, that of the Gamaironi, a river of black waters where there were no fish, and of wastelands where there was nothing to eat, either. This was the domain of Kientibakori, creator of filthy things, the spirit of evil and the chief of a legion of demons, the kamagarinis. The sun of each region was less powerful and less bright than the one above. The sun of Inkite was motionless, a radiant white. The sun of Gamaironi was dark and frozen. The hesitant sun of earth came and went, its survival mythically linked to the conduct of the Machiguengas.

But how much of this—and the many other details that Fray Maluenda had given me—was true? Hadn't the admirable missionary added to or adapted much of the material he had collected? I queried Mascarita on the subject in my second letter. Again there was no answer.

I must have sent him the third one a year or so later, since by then I was in Paris. I took him to task for his stubborn silence and confessed that I'd given up the idea of writing about the habladores. I filled any number of composition books with my scribblings and spent many hours in the Place du Trocadéro, in the library of the Musée de l'Homme and in front of its display cases, trying in vain to understand the storytellers, to intuit what they were like. The voices of the ones that I'd contrived sounded all wrong. So I had resigned myself to writing other stories. But what was he doing? How was he getting on? What had he been doing all this time, and what were his plans?

It was not until the end of 1963, when Matos Mar turned up in Paris, to speak at an anthropological congress, that I heard of Mascarita's whereabouts. What I learned left me flabbergasted.

“Saúl Zuratas went to live in Israel?”

We were in the Old Navy in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, drinking hot grog to withstand the cold of a depressing ash-gray December evening. We sat smoking as I eagerly plied him with questions about friends and developments in far-off Peru.

“Something to do with his father, it seems,” Matos Mar said, bundled up in such a bulky overcoat and heavy scarf he looked like an Eskimo. “Don Salomón, from Talara. Did you know him? Saúl was very fond of him. Remember how he refused that fellowship to Bordeaux so as not to leave him alone? Apparently the old man took it into his head to go off to Israel to die. And devoted as he was to his father, Mascarita of course let him have his way. They decided the whole thing very suddenly, from one day to the next, more or less. Because, when Saúl told me, they'd already sold the little shop in Breña, La Estrella, and had their bags all packed.”

And did Saúl like the idea of settling in Israel? Because once there, he'd have to learn Hebrew, do his military service, reorganize his life from A to Z. Matos Mar thought he might have been exempted from military service because of his birthmark. I searched my memory trying to remember whether I'd ever heard Mascarita mention Zionism, returning to the Homeland, Alyah. Never.

“Well, maybe it wasn't a bad thing for Saúl, starting all over again from zero,” Matos Mar reflected. “He must have adapted to Israel, since all this happened some four years ago, and as far as I know, he hasn't come back to Peru. I can well imagine him living in a kibbutz. The truth of the matter is that Saúl wasn't getting anywhere in Lima. Ethnology and the university had both been a disappointment to him, for reasons I never quite understood. He never finished his doctoral dissertation. And I think even his love affair with the Machiguengas was a thing of the past. ‘Aren't you going to miss your naked savages there in Urubamba?' I asked him when we said goodbye. ‘Of course not,' he said. ‘I can adapt to anything. And there must be plenty of people who go around naked in Israel, too.' ”

Unlike Matos Mar, I didn't think Saúl would have found Alyah easy going. Because he was, viscerally, a part of Peru, too torn and revolted by Peruvian affairs—one of them at least—to cast everything aside overnight, the way one changes shirts. I often tried to imagine him in the Middle East. Knowing him, I could readily foresee that in his new country the Palestine question and the occupied territories would confront Saúl Zuratas, the Israeli citizen, with all sorts of moral dilemmas. My mind wandered, trying to see him in his new surroundings, jabbering away in his new language, going about his new job—what was it?—and I prayed to Tasurinchi that no bullet might have come Mascarita's way in the wars and border incidents in Israel since he'd arrived there.

A mischievous kamagarini disguised as a wasp stung the tip of Tasurinchi's penis while he was urinating. He's walking. How? I don't know, but he's walking. I saw him. They haven't killed him. He could have lost his eyes or his head, his soul could have left him after what he did there among the Yaminahuas. Nothing happened to him, it seems. He's well, walking, content. Not angry, laughing, perhaps. Saying “What's all the fuss about?” As I headed toward the river Mishahua to visit him, I thought: He won't be there. If it's really true that he did that, he'll have taken off somewhere far away, where the Yaminahuas won't find him. Or maybe they've already killed him; him and his kinfolk as well. But there he was, and his family too, and the woman he stole. “Are you there, Tasurinchi?” “Ehé, ehé, here I am.”

She's learning to speak. “Say something so the hablador sees you can speak, too,” he ordered her. You could hardly understand what the Yaminahua woman was saying, and the other women made fun of her: “What are those noises we keep hearing?” Pretending to search about: “What animal can have gotten into the house?” Looking under the mats. They make her work and they treat her badly. Saying: “When she opens her legs, fish are going to come out of her, like they did out of Pareni.” And worse things still. But it's quite true, she's learning to speak. I understood some of the things she said. “Man walks,” I understood.

“So it's true, you stole yourself a Yaminahua woman,” I remarked to Tasurinchi. He says he didn't steal her. He traded a sachavaca, a sack of maize, and one of cassava, for her. “The Yaminahuas should be pleased. What I gave them is worth more than she is,” he assured me.

“Isn't that so?” he asked the Yaminahua woman in front of me, and she agreed. “Yes, it is,” she said. I understood that, too.

Since the mischievous kamagarini stung the tip of his penis, Tasurinchi feels obliged to do certain things, suddenly, without his knowing how or why. “It's an order I hear and I have to obey it,” he says. “I expect it comes from a little god or a little devil, from something that's gotten deep down inside me through my penis, whatever it may be.” Stealing that woman was one of those orders, it seems.

His penis is now the same as it was before. But a spirit has stayed on, there in his soul, which tells him to be different and do things that the others don't understand. He showed me where he was urinating when the kamagarini stung him. Ay! Ay! it made him squeal, made him leap about, and he wasn't able to go on urinating. He chased the wasp away with a smack of his hand, and he heard it laugh, perhaps. A while later his penis started getting bigger. Every night it swelled up, and every morning more still. Everybody laughed at him. He was so ashamed he had them weave him a bigger cushma. He hid his penis in its pouch. But it went on growing, growing, and he could no longer hide it. It got in his way when he moved. He dragged it along the way an animal drags its tail. Sometimes people stepped on it just to hear him yelp. Ay! Atatau! He had to roll it up and perch it on his shoulder, the way I do with my little parrot. That's how they went along on their travels, heads together, keeping each other company. Tasurinchi talked to it to keep himself amused. The other listened to him, silent, attentive, just the way all of you listen to me, looking at him with its big eye. One-Eye—Little One-Eye!—just stared at him. It had grown a whole lot. The birds perched on it to sing, thinking it was a tree. When Tasurinchi urinated, a cataract of warm water, foamy as the rapids of the Gran Pongo, came out of its big mouth. Tasurinchi could have bathed in it, and his family too, maybe. He used it as a seat when he stopped to rest. And at night it was his pallet. When he went hunting, it was both sling and spear. He could shoot it to the very top of a tree to knock down the shimbillo monkeys, and using it as a club, he could kill a puma.

To purify him, the seripigari wrapped his penis in fern fronds that had been heated over live coals. He made him sip their juice and sing, for a whole night, while he himself drank tobacco brew and ayahuasca. He danced, he disappeared through the roof and came back changed into a saankarite. After that, he was able to suck the evil from him and spit it out. It was thick and yellow and smelled like drunkard's vomit. By morning his penis started shrinking, and a few moons later it was the little dwarf it had been before. But since then Tasurinchi hears those orders. “In some of my souls there's a capricious mother,” he says. “That's why I got myself the Yaminahua woman.”

It seems she's become used to her new husband. There she is, by the Mishahua, settled down nicely, as though she'd always been Tasurinchi's wife. But the other women are furious, insulting her and finding any excuse to hit her. I saw them and heard them. “She's not like us” is what they say. “She's not people, whatever she may be. A monkey, perhaps, the fish perhaps that stuck in Kashiri's gullet.” She went on slowly chewing at her cassava as though she didn't hear them.

Another time she was carrying a pitcher full of water, and without noticing she bumped into a child, knocking him over. Whereupon the women all set upon her. “You did it on purpose, you wanted to kill him” was what they said. It wasn't true, but that was what they said to her. She picked up a stick and confronted them, without anger. “One day they're going to kill her,” I said to Tasurinchi. “She knows how to look after herself,” he answered. “She hunts animals. Something I've never known women to do. And she's the one who carries the heaviest load on her back when we bring cassavas in from the field. What I'm afraid of, and what's more likely, is that she'll kill the other women. The Yaminahuas are fighting people, just like the Mashcos. Their women too, maybe.”

I said that, for that very reason, he ought to be worried. And go off somewhere else right away. The Yaminahuas must be furious at what he'd done to them. What if they came to take revenge? Tasurinchi burst out laughing. The whole matter had been settled, it seems. The husband of the Yaminahua woman, along with two others, had come to see him. They'd drunk masato together and talked. And eventually come to an agreement. What they were after wasn't the woman but a shotgun, on top of the sachavaca, the maize, and the cassava he gave them. The White Fathers had told them he had a shotgun. “Look around for it,” he offered. “If you can find it, take it.” Finally they left. Satisfied, it seems. Tasurinchi isn't going to give the Yaminahua woman back to her kinfolk. Because she's already learning to speak. “The others will get used to her when she has a child,” Tasurinchi says. The children are already used to her. They treat her as though she were people, a woman who walks. “Mother,” they call her.

That, anyway, is what I have learned.

Who knows whether this woman will make Tasurinchi, the one from the Mishahua, happy? She may just as well bring him unhappiness. Coming down to this world to marry a Machiguenga brought misfortune to Kashiri, the moon. So they say, anyway. But maybe we ought not to lament what befell him. Kashiri's mischance brings us food and allows us to warm ourselves. Isn't the moon the father of the sun by a Machiguenga woman?

That was before.

A strong, serene youth, Kashiri was bored in the sky above, Inkite, where there were no stars yet. Instead of cassava and plantain, men ate earth. It was their only food. Kashiri came down the river Meshiareni, paddling with his arms, without a pole. His canoe skirted the rocks and the whirlpools. Down it came, floating. The world was still dark and the wind blew fiercely. The rain came down in buckets. Kashiri jumped ashore on the Oskiaje, where this earth meets the worlds of the sky, where monsters live and all the rivers go to die. He looked around him. He didn't know where he was, but he was content. He started walking. Not long thereafter, he spied the Machiguenga girl who was to bring him happiness and unhappiness, sitting weaving a mat and softly singing a song to keep away the vipers. Her cheeks and forehead were painted; two red lines went up from her mouth to her temples. So, then, she was unmarried: she would learn to cook food and make masato.

To please her, Kashiri, the moon, taught her what cassava and plantain were. He showed her how they were planted, harvested, and eaten. Since then there has been food and masato in the world. That is when after began, it seems. Then Kashiri presented himself at her father's hut. His arms were laden with the animals he had hunted and fished for him. Finally he offered to clear a field for him in the highest part of the forest and to work for him, sowing cassava and pulling out weeds till it grew. Tasurinchi agreed to let him take his daughter. They had to wait for the girl's first blood. It was a long time coming, and meanwhile the moon cleared and burned and weeded the forest patch and sowed plantain, maize, and cassava for his future family. Everything was going very well.

The girl, then, started to bleed. She stayed locked up, not speaking a word to her kinfolk. The old woman who watched over her never left her, by day or by night. The girl ceaselessly spun cotton thread, never resting. Not once did she go near the fire or eat chili peppers, so as not to bring misfortune upon herself or her kinfolk. Not once did she look at the man who was to be her husband, nor did she speak to him. She went on in that way until she stopped bleeding, Then she cut her hair and the old woman helped her to bathe herself, wetting her body with warm water poured from a pitcher. At last the girl could go live with Kashiri. At last she could be his wife.

Everything followed its course. The world was peaceful. Flocks of parrots flew overhead, noisy and content. But there was another girl in the hamlet, who may not have been a woman but an itoni, that wicked little devil. It disguises itself as a pigeon now, but then it dressed as a woman. She waxed furious, it seems, seeing all the presents Kashiri brought his new family. She would have liked to have him as her husband; she would have liked, in a word, to give birth to the sun. Because the moon's wife had given birth to the healthy child whose fire would give light and heat to our world when he grew up. So everyone would know how angry she was, she painted her face red with annatto dye. She went and posted herself at a bend in the path where Kashiri had to pass on his way back from the cassava patch. Squatting down, she emptied her body. She pushed hard, swelling herself up. Then she dug her hands into the filth and waited, storing up fury. When she saw him coming, she threw herself at him from among the trees. And before the moon could escape, she'd rubbed his face with the shit she'd just shat.

Kashiri knew at once that those stains could never be washed away. Marked by such shame, what was he going to do in this world? Sadly, he went back to Inkite, the sky above. There he has remained. Because of the stains, his light was dimmed. Yet his son is resplendent. Doesn't the sun shine? Doesn't he warm us? We help him by walking. Rise, we say to him each night as he sinks. His mother was a Machiguenga, after all.

That, anyway, is what I have learned.

But the seripigari of Segakiato tells the story differently.

Kashiri came down to the earth and spied the girl in the river, bathing and singing. He approached and threw a handful of dirt at her that hit her in the belly. She was angry and started throwing stones at him. It had started raining all of a sudden. Kientibakori must have been in the forest, dancing, having drunk his fill of masato. “Stupid woman,” said the moon to the girl. “I threw mud at you so you'd have a son.” All the little devils were happily farting at each other under the trees. And that's what happened. The girl got pregnant. But when her time came to give birth, she died. And her son died, too. The Machiguengas were furious. They seized their arrows and their knives. They went to Kashiri and surrounded him, saying: “You must eat that corpse.” They threatened him with their bows. They thrust their stones under his nose. The moon resisted, trembling. But they said: “Eat her up. You must eat up the dead woman.”

At last, weeping bitter tears, he slit open his wife's belly. There was the baby, twinkling. He pulled it out and it came to life, it seems. It moved and whimpered in thanks. It was alive. Kashiri, on his knees, began swallowing his wife's body, starting with the feet. “That's all right, you can go now,” the Machiguengas said when he'd reached her stomach. Then the moon, hoisting the remains onto his shoulder, went on his way, back to the sky above. There he is still, looking at us. Listening to me. The stains that show on him are the pieces he didn't eat.

Furious at what they'd done to Kashiri, his father, the sun stayed put, burning us. He dried up the rivers, parched the fields and the woods. Made the animals die of thirst. “He's never going to move again,” said the Machiguengas, tearing their hair. They were frightened. “We're doomed to die,” they sang sadly. So then the seripigari went up to Inkite. He spoke to the sun. He persuaded him, it seems. He would move again. “We'll walk together,” they say he said. That's the way life was from then on, the way it is now. That's where before ended and after began. That's why we go on walking.

“Is that why Kashiri's light is so weak?” I asked the seripigari of the Segakiato. “Yes,” he answered. “The moon is only half a man. Others say that a bone got stuck in his throat while he was eating a fish. And that, ever since, his light has been dim.”

That, anyway, is what I have learned.

As I was coming here, even though I knew the way, I got lost. It must have been Kientibakori's fault, or his little devils', or a very powerful machikanari's. Without any warning, it suddenly started raining; the sky hadn't darkened or the air turned briny. I was fording a river and the rain was coming down so hard I couldn't climb up the bank. After two or three steps I slipped back, the earth gave way beneath my feet, and I found myself at the bottom of the channel. My little parrot was frightened, flapped his wings, and flew away squawking. The bank became a gully. Mud and water, stones, branches, bushes, trees split in two by the storm, bodies of birds and insects. All rolling down on top of me. The sky turned black; bolts of lightning flashed and crashed. The peals of thunder sounded like all the animals of the forest roaring at once. When the lord of thunder rages like that, something grave is happening. I went on trying to climb up the gully. Would I succeed? If I don't clamber up a really tall tree, I'll be carried away, I thought. Any moment now, all this is going to be a boiling caldron of water pouring down from heaven. I had no strength left to struggle; my arms and legs were badly injured from my many hard falls. I was swallowing water through my nose and my mouth. Even my eyes and my anus seemed to be taking in water. This is going to be the end of you, Tasurinchi. Your soul will take off to goodness knows where. And I touched the top of my head to feel it leaving.