The Storyteller (6 page)

The White Father was lying on his straw mat and they could see him making faces. Achoo! Achoo! When they came to ask him “What's the matter? Why are you puckering your face up like that? What's that noise?” he answered, “It's nothing, it'll soon be over.” Evil had entered everyone's soul. Children, women, old men. And also, so they say, macaws, cashew birds, little mountain pigs, partridges, all the animals they had. They, too: Achoo! Achoo! At first they laughed, thinking it was some sort of playful trance. They beat their chests and pushed each other in fun. And screwing up their faces: Achoo! Snot ran out their noses, spittle out their mouths. They spat and laughed. But they could no longer start walking. The time had passed. Their souls, broken in pieces, had begun leaving their bodies through the tops of their heads. All they could do was resign themselves to what was going to happen.

They felt as though a fire had been lighted inside their bodies. They were burning up, they were aflame. They bathed in the river, but instead of putting out the fire, the water made it worse. Then they felt a terrible chill, as though they'd been in a downpour all night. Though the sun was there, looking with its yellow eye, they shivered, frightened, dizzy, as in a trance or a drunken stupor, not seeing what they saw, not recognizing what they knew. Raging, sensing that the evil was deep within them, like a chigger under the nail. They had not heeded the warning, they had not started walking at the first achoo! from the White Father. Even the lice died, it seems. The ants, the beetles, the spiders that went near there died, they say. Nobody, ever, has gone back to live in that place by the river Timpía. Though no one really knows where it is now, because the forest grew over it again. It's best not to go anywhere near it, to go around it, avoiding it altogether. You can recognize it by a white mist that stinks and a piercing whistle. Do the souls of those who go like that come back? Who knows? Maybe they come back, or maybe they keep floating on the Kamabiría, the watery way of the dead.

I am well, walking. Now I am well. The evil was in me a while ago and I thought the time had come for me to put up my shelter of branches on the riverbank. I had set out to visit Tasurinchi, the blind one who lives by the river Cashiriari. Suddenly everything started streaming out of me as I walked. I didn't realize it till I saw my dirtied legs. What evil is this? What has entered my body? I went on walking, but I still had a long way to go to reach the Cashiriari. When I sat down to rest, the shivers came over me. I wondered what I could do, and casting my eyes all round, I finally saw a datura tree and tore off all the leaves I could reach. I made a brew and sprinkled it on my body. I warmed the water in the pot again. I heated the stone the seripigari had given me till it was red-hot and put it in. I breathed the steam from it till sleep came over me. I was like that for many moons, who knows how many, lying on my straw mat without the strength to walk, without even strength enough to sit up. Ants crawled over my body and I didn't brush them off. When one came close to my mouth I swallowed it, and that was my only food. Between dreams I heard the little parrot calling me: “Tasurinchi! Tasurinchi!” Half asleep, half awake, and always cold, so cold. I felt great sadness perhaps.

Then some men appeared. I saw their faces above me, leaning over to look at me. One pushed me with his foot and I couldn't speak to him. They weren't men who walk. They weren't Mashcos either, happily. Ashaninkas, I think they were, because I could understand some of what they said. They stood there looking at me, asking me questions I didn't have the strength to answer, even though I heard them, far away. They seemed to be having an argument as to whether I was a kamagarini or not. And also about what it was best to do if you met up with a little devil in the forest. They argued and argued. One said it would bring evil on them to have seen someone like me on their path and the prudent thing to do was to kill me. They couldn't agree. They talked it over and thought for a long time. Luckily for me, they finally decided to treat me well. They left me some cassavas, and seeing I hadn't strength enough to pick them up, one of them put a bit in my mouth. It wasn't poison; it was cassava. They put the rest in a plantain leaf and placed it in this hand. Maybe I dreamed it all. I don't know. But later, when I felt better and my strength came back, there were the cassavas. I ate them, and the little parrot ate, too. Now I could continue my journey. I walked slowly, stopping every so often to rest.

When I arrived at the place by the river Cashiriari where Tasurinchi, the blind one, lives, I told him what had happened to me. He breathed smoke on me and prepared a tobacco brew. “What happened to you was that your soul divided itself into many souls,” he explained to me. “The evil entered your body because some machikanari sent it or because, quite by accident, you crossed its path. The body is merely the soul's cushma. Its wrapping, like a worm's. Once the evil had gotten inside, your soul tried to defend itself. It ceased to be one and became many so as to confuse the evil, which stole the ones it could. One, two, several. It can't have taken many or you'd have gone altogether. It was a good thing to bathe in tohé water and breathe its steam, but you should have done something more cunning. Rubbed the top of your head with annatto dye till it was red all over. Then the evil couldn't have gotten out of your body with its load of souls. That's where it gets out, that's its door. The annatto blocks its path. Feeling itself a prisoner inside, it loses its strength and dies. It's the same with bodies as with houses. Don't devils who enter houses steal souls by escaping through the crown of the roof? Why do we weave the slats in the top of the roof so carefully? So the devil can't escape, taking the souls of those who are asleep along with him. It's the same with the body. You felt weak because of the souls you'd lost. But they've already come back to you and that's why you're here. They must have escaped from Kientibakori, taking advantage of his kamagarinis' carelessness, and come back looking for you—aren't you their home?—and found you there in the same place, gasping, dying. They entered your body and you were born again. Now, inside of you, all the souls are back together again. Now they're just one soul again.”

That, anyway, is what I have learned.

Tasurinchi, the blind one, the one who lives by the Cashiriari, is well. Though he can see almost nothing most of the time, he can still work his fields. He's walking. He says he sees more in his trance now than before he went blind. What happened to him was a good thing, perhaps. He thinks so. He's managing things so his blindness bothers him and his family as little as possible. His youngest son, who was crawling last time I came to visit him, has gone. A viper bit him in the leg. When they noticed, Tasurinchi prepared a brew and did what he could to save him, but a long time had gone by. He changed color, turned as black as huito dye, and went.

But his mother and father had the joy of seeing him once again.

This is how it came about.

They went to the seripigari and told him they were very unhappy because of the child's going. They said to him: “Find out what's become of him, which of the worlds he's in. And ask him to come visit us, even if it's just one time.” That's what the seripigari did. In the trance, his soul, guided by a saankarite, traveled to the river of pure souls, the Meshiareni. There he found the child. The saankarites had bathed him, he had grown, he had a house, and soon he would have a wife as well. Telling him how sad his mother and father still were, the seripigari persuaded him to come back to this earth to visit them one last time. He promised he would, and he did.

Tasurinchi, the blind one, said that a young man dressed in a new cushma suddenly appeared in the house by the Cashiriari. They all recognized him even though he was no longer a child but a young man. Tasurinchi, the blind one, knew it was his son because of the pleasant odor he gave off. He sat down among them and tasted a mouthful of cassava and a few drops of masato. He told them about his journey, from the time his soul escaped from his body through the top of his head. It was dark, but he recognized the entrance to the cavern leading down to the river of dead souls. He cast himself into the Kamabiría and floated on the dense waters without sinking. He didn't have to move his hands or his feet. The current, silvery as a spiderweb, bore him slowly along. Around him, other souls were also journeying on the Kamabiría, that wide river along whose banks rise cliffs steeper than those of the Gran Pongo, perhaps. At last he arrived at the place where the waters divide, dragging over their precipice of rapids and whirlpools those who descend to the Gamaironi to suffer. The current itself sorted the souls out. With relief, the son of Tasurinchi the blind one felt the waters bearing him away from the falls; he was happy, knowing that he would continue journeying along the Kamabiría with those who were going to rise, by way of the river Meshiareni, to the world above, the world of the sun, Inkite. He still had a long way to go to reach it. He had to make his way past the end of this world, the Ostiake, into which all rivers flow. It is a swampy region, full of monsters. Kashiri, the moon, sometimes goes there to plot his mischief.

They waited till the sky was free of clouds and the stars were reflected brightly in the water. Then Tasurinchi's son and his traveling companions could ascend the Meshiareni, which is a stairway of bright stars, to Inkite. The saankarites received them with a feast. He ate a sweet-tasting fruit that made him grow and they showed him the house where he would live. And now, on his return, they would have a wife waiting for him. He was happy, it seems, in the world above. He didn't remember being bitten by the viper.

“Don't you miss anything on this earth?” his kinfolk asked him. Yes. Something. The bliss he felt when his mother suckled him. The blind one from the Cashiriari told me that, asking permission to do so, the youth went to his mother, opened her cushma, and very gently sucked her breasts, the way he used to as a newborn babe. Did her milk come? Who knows? But he was filled with bliss, perhaps. He said goodbye to them, pleased and satisfied.

The two younger sisters of Tasurinchi's wife have also gone. Punarunas who appeared round about the Cashiriari carried her off and kept her for many moons, making her cook and using her as a woman. It was the time when she ought to have been pure, with her hair cut short, not eating, not talking to anyone, her husband not touching her. Tasurinchi said he did not shame her for what had happened to her. But she was tormented by the fate that had befallen her. “I don't deserve to be spoken to now,” she said. “I don't even know whether I deserve to live.” She slowly walked down to the shore of the river just as night was falling, made her bed of branches, and plunged a chambira thorn into herself. “She was so sad I suspected she'd do that,” Tasurinchi, the blind one, told me. They wrapped her in two cushmas so the vultures wouldn't peck at her, and instead of casting her adrift in a canoe on the river or burying her, they suspended her from a treetop. A wise thing to do, for her bones are licked by the sun's rays morning and evening. Tasurinchi showed me where, and I was amazed. “That high! How did you get way up there?” “I may not be able to see, but you don't need eyes to climb a tree, only legs and arms, and mine are still strong.”

The other sister of the wife of Tasurinchi, the blind one by the Cashiriari, fell down a ravine coming back from the cassava patch. Tasurinchi had sent her to check the traps he puts around the farm, which the agoutis always fall into, he says. The morning went by and she didn't come back. They went out to look for her and found her at the bottom of the ravine. She'd rolled down; perhaps she'd slipped, perhaps the ground gave way beneath her feet. But that surprised me. It's not a deep ravine. Anyone could jump or roll to the bottom without killing himself. She died before, perhaps, and her empty body, without a soul, rolled down to the bottom of the ravine. Tasurinchi, the Cashiriari blind one, says: “We always thought that girl would go without any explanation.” She spent her life humming songs that nobody had ever heard. She had strange trances, she spoke of unknown places, and apparently animals would tell her secrets when there was nobody around to hear them. According to Tasurinchi, those are sure signs that someone will go soon. “Now that those two have gone, there's more food to share around. Aren't we lucky?” he joked.

He has taught his littlest sons to hunt. He makes them practice all day long because of what might happen to him. He asked them to show me what they had learned. It's quite true, they can already handle a bow and a knife, even the ones who are just beginning to walk. They're good at making traps and fishing as well. “As you can see, they won't run short of food,” Tasurinchi said to me. I like the spirit he shows. He's a man who never loses heart. I stayed with him for several days, going with him to set out his fishhooks and lay his traps, and I helped him clear his field of weeds. He worked bent double, pulling them out as though his eyes could see. We also went to a lake where there are súngaro fish, but we didn't catch anything. He never tired of listening to me. He made me repeat the same stories. “That way, once you've gone, I can tell myself all over again what you're telling me now,” he said.

“What a miserable life it must be for those who don't have people who talk, as we do,” he mused. “Thanks to the things you tell us, it's as though what happened before happens again, many times.” One of his daughters had fallen asleep as I spoke. He woke her with one shake, saying: “Listen, child! Don't waste these stories. Know the wickedness of Kientibakori. Learn the evils his kamagarinis have done us and can still do us.”

We now know many things about Kientibakori that those who came before didn't know. We know he has many intestines, like inkiro the tadpole. We know he hates us Machiguengas. He has tried many times to destroy us. We know he breathed out all the badness there is, from the Mashcos to the evil. Sharp rocks, dark clouds, rain, mud, the rainbow—he breathed them out. And lice, fleas, chiggers, poisonous snakes and vipers, mice and toads. He breathed out flies, gnats, mosquitoes, bats and vampires, ants and turkey buzzards. He breathed out the plants that burn the skin and those that can't be eaten; and the red earth that's good for making pots but not for growing cassava. This I learned by the river Shivankoreni, from the mouth of the seripigari. The one who knows the most about the things and the beings breathed out by Kientibakori, perhaps.