The Storyteller (20 page)

“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.

“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.”