The Storyteller (26 page)

The yaniri and his band of females had barely disappeared when the parrots came back. In even greater numbers. I began observing them. They were of every sort. Large, small, tiny; with long curved beaks or stubby ones; there were parakeets and toucans and macaws, but mostly cockatoos. All chattering loudly at the same time, without a letup, a thundering of parrots in my ears. I felt uneasy, looking at them. Slowly I looked at each and every one of them. What were they doing there? Something was going to happen, that was certain, in spite of my herbs against strange things. “What do you want, what are you saying?” I started screaming at them. “What are you talking about, what are you laughing at?” I was frightened, but also curious. I'd never seen so many all together. It couldn't be by chance. It couldn't be for no reason at all. So what was the explanation? Who had sent them to me?

Remembering Tasurinchi, the friend of fireflies, I tried to understand their chattering. Since they were all around me, talking so insistently, could they have come on my account? Were they trying, perhaps, to tell me something? I shut my eyes, listening closely, concentrating on their chatter. Trying to feel that I was a parrot. It wasn't easy. But the effort made me forget the pain in my foot. I imitated their cries, their gurgles; I imitated their cooing. All the sounds they made. Then, between one pause and another, little by little, I began to hear single words, little lights in the darkness. “Calm down, Tasurinchi.” “Don't be scared, storyteller.” “Nobody's going to hurt you.” Understanding what they were saying, perhaps. Don't laugh; I wasn't dreaming. I could understand what they were saying more and more clearly. I felt at peace. My body stopped trembling. The cold went away. So they hadn't been sent here by Kientibakori. Or by a machikanari's spell. Could they have come out of curiosity, rather? To keep me company?

“That's exactly the reason, Tasurinchi,” a voice murmured, standing out clearly from the others. Now there was no doubt. It spoke and I understood it. “We're here to keep you company and keep your spirits up while you get well. We'll stay here till you can walk again. Why were you frightened of us? Your teeth were chattering, storyteller. Have you ever seen a parrot eat a Machiguenga? We, on the other hand, have seen lots of Machiguengas eat parrots. Go ahead and laugh, Tasurinchi: it's better that way. We've been following you for a long time. Wherever you go, we're there. Haven't you ever noticed before?”

I never had. In a trembling voice I asked: “Are you making fun of me?” “I'm telling the truth,” the parrot insisted, beating the leaves with its wings. “You've had to get a thorn stuck in you to discover your companions, storyteller.”

We had a long conversation, it seems. We talked together all the time I was there waiting for the pain to go away. While I held my foot to the fire to make it sweat, we talked. With that parrot; with others, too. They kept interrupting each other as we chatted. At times I couldn't understand what they said. “Be quiet, be quiet. Speak a little more slowly, and one at a time.” They didn't obey me. They were like all of you. Exactly like you. Why are you laughing so hard? You sound like parrots, you know. They never waited for one to finish speaking before they all started talking at once. They were pleased that we were able to understand each other at last. They nudged each other, flapping their wings. I felt relieved. Content. What's happening is very strange, I thought.

“Luckily, you've realized we're talkers,” one of them suddenly said. All the others were silent. There was a great stillness in the forest. “Now you doubtless understand why we're here, accompanying you. Now you realize why we've been following you ever since you were born again and started walking and talking. Day and night; through forests, across rivers. You're a talker too, aren't you, Tasurinchi? We're alike, don't you think?”

Then I remembered. Each man who walks has his animal which follows him. Isn't that so? Even if he doesn't see it and never guesses which animal it is. According to what he is, according to what he does, the mother of the animal chooses him and says to her little one: “This man is for you, look after him.” The animal becomes his shadow, it seems. Was mine a parrot? Yes, it was. Isn't it a talking animal? I knew it and felt that I'd known it from before. If not, why was it that I had always been particularly fond of parrots? Many times in my travels I've stopped to listen to their chattering and laughed at the uproar and all the flapping of wings. We were kinfolk, perhaps.

It's been a good thing knowing that my animal is the parrot. I'm more confident now when I'm traveling. I'll never feel alone again, perhaps. If I'm tired or frightened, if I feel angry about something, I know what to do now. Look up at the trees and wait. I don't think I'll be disappointed. Like gentle rain after heat, the chattering will come. The parrots will be there. Saying: “Yes, here we are, we haven't abandoned you.” That's doubtless why I've been able to journey alone for such a long time. Because I wasn't journeying alone, you see.

When I first started wearing a cushma and painting myself with huito and annatto, breathing in tobacco through my nose and walking, many people thought it strange that I should travel alone. “It's foolhardy,” they warned me. “Don't you know the forest is full of horrible demons and obscene devils breathed out by Kientibakori? What will you do if they come out to meet you? Travel the way the Machiguengas do, with a youngster and at least one woman. They'll carry the animals you kill and remove those that fall into your traps. You won't become unclean from touching the dead bodies of the animals you've killed. And what's more, you'll have someone to talk to. Several people together are better able to deal with any kamagarinis that might appear. Who's ever seen a Machiguenga entirely on his own in the forest!” I paid no attention, for in my wanderings I'd never felt lonely. There, among the branches, hidden in the leaves of the trees, looking at me with their green eyes, my companions were following me, most likely. I felt they were there, even if I didn't know it, perhaps.

But that's not the reason why I have this little parrot. Because that's a different story. Now that he's asleep, I can tell it to you. If I suddenly stop and start talking nonsense, don't think I've gone out of my head. It will just mean that the little parrot has woken up. It's a story he doesn't like to hear, one which must hurt him as much as that nettle hurt me.

That was after.

I was headed toward the Cashiriari to visit Tasurinchi and I'd caught a cashew bird in a trap. I cooked it and started eating it, when suddenly I heard a lot of chattering just above my head. There was a nest in the branches, half hidden by a large spiderweb. This little parrot had just hatched. It hadn't yet opened its eyes and was still covered with white mucus, like all chicks when they break out of the shell. I was watching, not moving, keeping very quiet, so as not to upset the mother parrot, so as not to make her angry by coming too near her newborn chick. But she was paying no attention to me. She was examining it closely, gravely. She seemed displeased. And suddenly she started pecking at it. Yes, pecking at it with her curved beak. Was she trying to remove the white mucus? No. She was trying to kill it. Was she hungry? I grabbed her by the wings, keeping her from pecking me, and took her out of the nest. And to calm her I gave her some leftovers of the cashew bird. She ate with gusto; chattering and flapping her wings, she ate and ate. But her big eyes were still furious. Once she'd finished her meal, she flew back to the nest. I went to look and she was pecking at the chick again. You haven't woken up, my little parrot? Don't, then; let me finish your story first. Why did she want to kill her chick? It wasn't out of hunger. I caught the mother parrot by the wings and flung her as high in the air as I could. After flapping around a bit, she came back. Facing up to me, furious, pecking and squawking, she came back. She was determined to kill the chick, it seems.

It was only then that I realized why. It wasn't the chick she'd hoped it would be, perhaps. Its leg was twisted, and its three claws were just a stump. Back then I hadn't yet learned what all of you know: that animals kill their young when they're born different. Why do pumas claw their cubs that are lame or one-eyed? Who do sparrow hawks tear their young to pieces if they have a broken wing? They must sense, since the life of young such as that is not perfect, it will be difficult, with much suffering. They won't know how to defend themselves, to fly, or hunt, or flee, or how to fulfill their obligation. They must sense that they won't live long, for other animals will soon eat them. “That's why I'll eat it myself, so that it feeds me at least,” they perhaps tell themselves. Or could it be that, like Machiguengas, they refuse to accept imperfection? Do they, too, believe that imperfect offspring were breathed out by Kientibakori? Who knows?

That's the story of the little parrot. He's always curled up on my shoulder, like this. What do I care if he's not pure, if he's got a game leg and limps, if he flies even this high he'll fall? Because, besides his stump of a foot, his wings turned out to be too short, it seems. Am I perfect? Since we're alike, we get on well together and keep each other company. He travels on this shoulder, and every now and then, to amuse himself, he climbs up over my head and settles on the other shoulder. He goes and comes, comes and goes. He clings to my hair when he's climbing, pulling it as though to warn me: “Be careful or I'll fall; be careful or you'll have to pick me up off the ground.” He weighs nothing; I don't feel him. He sleeps here, inside my cushma. Since I can't call him father or kinsman or Tasurinchi, I call him by a name I invented for him. A parrot noise. Let's hear you imitate it. Let's wake him up; let's call him. He's learned it and repeats it very well: Mas-ca-ri-ta, Mas-ca-ri-ta, Mas-ca-ri-ta…

Florentines are famous, in Italy, for their arrogance and for their hatred of the tourists that inundate them, each summer, like an Amazonian river. At the moment, it is hard to determine whether this is true, since there are virtually no natives left in Firenze. They have been leaving, little by little, as the temperature rose, the evening breeze stopped blowing, the waters of the Arno dwindled to a trickle, and mosquitoes took over the city. They are veritable flying hordes that successfully resist repellents and insecticides and gorge on their victims' blood day and night, particularly in museums. Are the zanzare of Firenze the totem animals, the guardian angels of Leonardos, Cellinis, Botticellis, Filippo Lippis, Fra Angelicos? It would seem so. Because it is while contemplating their statues, frescoes, and paintings that I have gotten most of the bites that have raised lumps on my arms and legs neither more nor less ugly than the ones I've gotten every time I've visited the Peruvian jungle.

Or are mosquitoes the weapon that the absent Florentines resort to in an attempt to put their detested invaders to flight? In any case, it's a hopeless battle. Neither insects nor heat nor anything else in this world would serve to stave off the invasion of the multitudes. Is it merely its paintings, its palaces, the stones of its labyrinthine old quarter that draw us myriads of foreigners to Firenze like a magnet, despite the discomforts of the summer season? Or is it the odd combination of fanaticism and license, piety and cruelty, spirituality and sensual refinement, political corruption and intellectual daring, of its past that holds us in its sway in this stifling city deserted by its inhabitants?

Over the last two months, everything has gradually been closing: the shops, the laundries, the uncomfortable Bibliotèca Nazionale alongside the river, the movie theaters that were my refuge at night, and, finally, the cafés where I went to read Dante and Machiavelli and think about Mascarita and the Machiguengas of the headwaters of the Alto Urubamba and the Madre de Dios. The first to close was the charming Caffè Strozzi, with its Art Deco furniture and interior, and air-conditioning besides, making it a marvelous oasis on scorching afternoons; then the next to close was the Caffè Paszkowski, where, though drenched with sweat, one could be by oneself, on its time-hallowed, démodé upstairs floor, with its leather easy chairs and blood-red velvet drapes; then after that the Caffè Gillio; and last of all, the one that was in all the guidebooks and always jammed, the Caffè Rivoire, in the Piazza della Signoria, where a Caffè macchiato cost me as much as an entire meal in a neighborhood trattoria. Since it is not even remotely possible to read or write in a gelateria or a pizzeria (the few hospitable enclaves still open), I have had to resign myself to reading in my pensione in the Borgo dei Santi Apostoli, sweating profusely in the sickly light of a lamp seemingly designed to make reading arduous or to condemn the stubborn reader to premature blindness. These are inconveniences which, as the terrible little monk of San Marcos would have said (the unexpected consequence of my stay in Firenze has been the discovery, thanks to his biographer Rodolfo Ridolfi, that the much maligned Savonarola was, all in all, an interesting figure, one better, perhaps, than those who burned him at the stake), favorably predispose the spirit toward understanding better, to the point of virtually experiencing them personally, the Dantesque tortures of the infernal pilgrimage; or to reflecting, with due calm, upon the terrifying conclusions concerning the cities of men and the government of their affairs drawn by Machiavelli, the icy analyst of the history of this republic, from his experiences as one of its functionaries.

The little gallery in the Via Santa Margherita, between an optician's shop and a grocery store and directly opposite the so-called Church of Dante, where Gabriele Malfatti's Machiguenga photographs were being shown, has also shut, of course. But I managed to see them several times more before its chiusura estivale. The third time she saw me come in, the thin girl in glasses who was in charge of the gallery informed me that she had a fidanzato. I was obliged to assure her in my bad Italian that my interest in the exhibition had no ulterior personal motives, that it was more or less patriotic; it had nothing to do with her beauty, only with Malfatti's photographs. She never quite believed that I spent such a long time peering at them out of sheer homesickness for my native land. And why especially the one of the group of Indians sitting in a sort of lotus position, listening, enthralled, to that gesticulating man? I am sure she never took my assertions seriously when I declared that the photograph was a consummate masterpiece, something to be savored slowly, the way one contemplates
The Allegory of Spring
or
The Battle of San Remo
in the Uffizi. But at last, after seeing me four or five times in the deserted gallery, she was a little less mistrustful of me, and one day she even permitted herself a friendly overture, informing me that an “Inca combo” played Peruvian music on traditional instruments every night in front of the Church of San Lorenzo: why didn't I go see them; they would bring back memories of my homeland. (I obeyed, I went, and I discovered that the Incas were two Bolivians and two Portuguese from Rome who were trying out an incompatible synthesis of Portuguese fados and Santa Cruz carnival music.) The Santa Margherita gallery closed a week ago and the thin girl in glasses is now spending her vacation in Ancona, with her parents.

No matter: I don't need to see that photograph again. I know it by heart, millimeter by millimeter. And I've thought about it so much that, curiously enough, I know that the naked seated figures with their long locks of straight hair, the silhouette of the storyteller, the background of thick tree trunks, tangled branches, and feathery fronds outlined against the horizon beneath a mass of great potbellied gray clouds will be the most lasting memory of this Florentine summer. More enduring and more moving, perhaps, than the artistic and architectonic marvels of the Renaissance, the harmonious murmur of Dante's terza rima, or the rustic ritornellos (in his case unfailingly compatible with diabolical intelligence) of Machiavelli's prose.

I am certain that the photograph shows a Machiguenga storyteller. It is the only thing about which I have no doubts. Who could that man, declaiming before that enraptured audience, be, except that figure ancestrally entrusted with the task of arousing the curiosity, the fantasy, the memory, the appetite for dreams and fabrication of the Machiguenga people? How did Gabriele Malfatti manage to be present on that occasion, to be allowed to take photographs? Perhaps the reason for the secrecy that surrounded the storyteller of recent years—the stranger who had turned into a Machiguenga—no longer existed when the Italian visited that region. Or perhaps in these last years the situation in the Alto Urubamba had evolved so rapidly that the storytellers no longer fulfill their age-old function, have lost their authenticity and become a pantomime put on for tourists, like the ceremonies with annatto or the healings by shamans of other tribes.

But I don't think that's the case. Life has admittedly changed in that region, but not in any way likely to increase tourism. First came the oil wells, and with them, camps for those who were taken on as workers: many Campas, Yaminahuas, Piros, and, surely, Machiguengas. Later on, or at the same time, the drug traffic began and, like a biblical plague, spread its network of coca plantations, laboratories, and secret landing strips, with—as a logical consequence—periodic killings and vendettas between rival gangs of Colombians and Peruvians; the burning of coca crops, the police searches and wholesale roundups. And finally—or perhaps at the same time, closing the triangle of horror—terrorism and counterterrorism. Detachments of the revolutionary Sendero Luminoso movement, severely repressed in the Andes, have come down to the jungle and operate in this part of Amazonia, now periodically reconnoitered by the Army and even, it is said, bombarded by the Air Force.

What effect has all this had on the Machiguenga people? Has it hastened its dismemberment and disintegration? Do the villages that had begun to bring them together some five or six years ago still exist? These villages will, of course, have been exposed to the irreversible disruptive mechanism of this contradictory civilization, represented by the high wages paid by Shell and Petro Perú, the coffers stuffed full of dollars from the drug trade, and the risks of being drawn into the bloody wars of smugglers, guerrilleros, police, and soldiers, without having the faintest idea of what the deadly game is all about. As happened when they were invaded by the Inca armies, the explorers, the Spanish conquistadors and missionaries, the rubber and wood traders in the days of the Republic, the gold prospectors and the twentieth-century immigrants. For the Machiguengas, history marches neither forward nor backward: it goes around and around in circles, repeats itself. But even though the damage to the community has been considerable because of all this, it is likely that many of them, faced with the upheavals of the last few years, will have opted for the traditional response ensuring their survival: diaspora. Start walking. Once again. As in the most persistent of their myths.

Does my ex-friend, ex-Jew, ex-white man, and ex-Westerner, Saúl Zuratas, walk with them, taking those short steps with the whole foot planted flat on the ground, like palmipeds, so typical of all the Amazonian tribes? I have decided that it is he who is the storyteller in Malfatti's photograph. A personal decision, since objectively I have no way of knowing. It's true that the face of the figure standing is the most heavily shadowed—on the right side, where his birthmark was. This might be a key to identifying him. But at that distance the impression could be misleading; it might be no more than the sun's shadow (his face is tilted in such a way that the dying light, falling from the opposite side, casts a shadow over the entire right side of men, trees, and clouds as the sun begins to set). Perhaps the most reliable clue is the shape of the silhouette. Even though he is far off, there is no doubt: that is not the build of a typical jungle Indian, who is usually squat, with short, bowed legs and a broad chest. The one who is talking has an elongated body and I would swear that his skin—he is naked from the waist up—is much lighter than that of his listeners. His hair, however, has that circular cut, like a medieval monk's, of the Machiguengas. I have also decided that the hump on the left shoulder of the storyteller in the photograph is a parrot. Wouldn't it be the most natural thing in the world for a storyteller to travel through the forest with a totemic parrot, companion or acolyte?

After turning the pieces of the puzzle around and around many times and shuffling them this way and that, I see they fit. They outline a more or less coherent story, as long as one sticks strictly to anecdote and does not begin pondering what Fray Luis de León called “the inherent and hidden principle of things.”

From that first journey to Quillabamba, where the farmer who was related to his mother lived, Mascarita came into contact with a world that intrigued and attracted him. What must in the beginning have been a feeling of intellectual curiosity and sympathy for the customs and conditions of life of the Machiguengas became, with time, as he got to know them better, learned their language, studied their history, and began to share their existence for longer and longer periods, a conversion, in both the cultural and the religious meaning of the word, an identification with their ways and their traditions, in which, for reasons I can intuit but not entirely understand, Saúl found spiritual sustenance, an incentive and a justification for his life, a commitment that he had not found in those other Peruvian tribes—Jewish, Christian, Marxist, etc.—among which he had lived.

This transformation must have been a very gradual one, taking place unconsciously during the years he spent studying ethnology at San Marcos. That he should have become disillusioned with his studies, that he should consider the scientific outlook of ethnologists a threat to that primitive and archaic culture (adjectives that even that early on he would not have accepted), an intrusion of destructive modern concepts, a form of corruption, is something that I can understand. The idea of an equilibrium between man and the earth, the awareness of the rape of the environment by industrial culture and today's technology, the reevaluation of the wisdom of primitive peoples, forced either to respect their habitat or face extinction, was something that, during those years, although not yet an intellectual fashion, had already begun to take root everywhere, even in Peru. Mascarita must have lived all this with particular intensity, seeing with his own eyes the havoc wreaked by civilized peoples in the jungle, as compared with the way the Machiguengas lived in harmony with the natural world.

The decisive factor that led him to take the final step was, undoubtedly, Don Salomón's death; he was the only person to whom Saúl was attached and to whom he felt obliged to render an account of his life. It is probable, considering how Saúl's conduct changed in his second or third year at the university, that he had already decided that after his father's death he would abandon everything and go to the Alto Urubamba. Up to that point, however, there is nothing extraordinary about his story. In the sixties and seventies—the years of student revolt against a consumer society—many middle-class young people left Lima, motivated partly by adventure-seeking and partly by disgust at life in the capital, and went to the jungle or the mountains, where they lived in conditions that were frequently precarious. One of the Tower of Babel programs—unfortunately ruined, for the most part, by the chronic aberrations of Alejandro Pérez's camera—was, in fact, concerned with a group of kids from Lima who had gone off to the department of Cusco, where they survived by taking up picturesque occupations. That, like them, Mascarita should have decided to turn his back on a bourgeois future and go to Amazonia in search of adventure—a return to fundamentals, to the source—was not particularly remarkable.