The Storyteller (8 page)

That, anyway, is what I have learned.

I first became acquainted with the Amazon jungle halfway through 1958, thanks to my friend Rosita Corpancho. Her function at the University of San Marcos was vague; her power unlimited. She prowled among the professors without being one of them, and they all did whatever she asked; thanks to her wiles, doors of officialdom stuck shut were opened and paths of bureaucracy smoothed.

“There's a place available for someone on an expedition to the Alto Marañón that's been organized by the Institute of Linguistics for a Mexican anthropologist,” she said to me one day when I ran into her on the campus of the Faculty of Letters. “Would you like to go?”

I had finally managed to obtain the fellowship to Europe I'd coveted and was to leave for Spain the following month. But I accepted without a moment's hesitation.

Rosita is from Loreto, and if you listen carefully you can still catch in her voice an echo of the delightful singsong accent of eastern Peru. She protected and promoted—as no doubt she still does—the Summer Institute of Linguistics, an organization which, in the forty years of its existence in Peru, has been the object of virulent controversy. I understand that as I write these lines it is packing its bags to leave the country. Not because it has been expelled (though this was on the verge of happening during General Velasco's dictatorship), but on its own initiative, since it considers that it has fulfilled the mission that brought it to Yarinacocha, its base of operations on the banks of the Ucayali, some ten kilometers from Pucallpa, from which it has spread into nearly all the remote folds and corners of Amazonia.

What exactly is the purpose of the Institute? According to its enemies, it is a tentacle of American imperialism which, under cover of doing scientific research, has been engaged in gathering intelligence and has taken the first steps toward a neocolonialist penetration of the cultures of the Amazonian Indians. These accusations stem, first and foremost, from the Left. But certain sectors of the Catholic Church—mainly the jungle missionaries—are also hostile to it and accuse it of being nothing more than a phalanx of Protestant evangelists passing themselves off as linguists. Among the anthropologists, there are those who criticize it for perverting the aboriginal cultures, attempting to Westernize them and draw them into a mercantile economy. A number of conservatives disapprove of the presence of the Institute in Peru for nationalist and Hispanist reasons. Among these latter was my professor and academic adviser back in those days, the historian Porras Barrenechea, who, when he heard that I was going on that expedition, solemnly cautioned me: “Be careful. Those gringos will try to buy you.” He couldn't bear the thought that, because of the Institute, the jungle Indians would probably learn to speak English before they did Spanish.

Friends of the Institute, such as Rosita Corpancho, defended it on pragmatic grounds. The work of the linguists—studying the languages and dialects of Amazonia, compiling lexicons and grammars of the various tribes—served the country, and besides, it was supervised, in theory at least, by the Ministry of Education, which had to approve of all its projects and received copies of all the material it collected. As long as that same Ministry or Peruvian universities didn't take the trouble to pursue such research themselves, it was to Peru's advantage that it was being undertaken by others. Moreover, the infrastructure set up by the Institute in Amazonia, with its fleet of hydroplanes and its system of radio communication between the headquarters at Yarinacocha and the network of linguists living with the tribes, was also of benefit to the country, since teachers, civil servants, and the military forces in remote jungle localities were in the habit of making use of it, and not just in cases of emergency.

The controversy has not ended, nor is it likely to end soon.

That expedition of just a few short weeks' duration which I was lucky enough to be able to join made such a great impression on me that, twenty-seven years later, I still remember it in abundant detail and still write about it. As I am doing now, in Firenze. We went first to Yarinacocha and talked with the linguists and then, a long way from there, to the region of the Alto Marañón, visiting a series of settlements and villages of two tribes of the Jíbaro family: the Aguarunas and the Huambisas. We then went up to Lake Morona to visit the Shapras.

We traveled in a small hydroplane, and in some places in native canoes, along narrow river channels so choked with tangled vegetation overhead that in bright daylight it seemed dark as night. The strength and the solitude of Nature—the tall trees, the mirror-smooth lagoons, the immutable rivers—brought to mind a newly created world, untouched by man, a paradise of plants and animals. When we reached the tribes, by contrast, there before us was prehistory, the elemental, primeval existence of our distant ancestors: hunters, gatherers, bowmen, nomads, shamans, irrational and animistic. This, too, was Peru, and only then did I become fully aware of it: a world still untamed, the Stone Age, magico-religious cultures, polygamy, head-shrinking (in a Shapra village of Moronacocha, the cacique, Tariri, explained to us, through an interpreter, the complicated technique of steeping and stuffing with herbs required by the operation)-that is to say, the dawn of human history.

I am quite sure that throughout the entire trip I thought continually of Saúl Zuratas. I often spoke about him with his mentor, Dr. Matos Mar, who was also a member of the expedition; it was on this journey, in fact, that we became good friends. Matos Mar told me that he had invited Saúl to come with us, but that Zuratas had refused because he strongly disapproved of the work of the Institute.

Thanks to this expedition, I was better able to understand Mascarita's fascination with this region and these people, to get some idea of the forcefulness of the impact that changed the course of his life. But, besides that, it gave me firsthand experience that enabled me to justify many of the differences of opinion which, more out of instinct than out of real knowledge, I had had with Saúl over Amazonian cultures. Why did he cling to that illusion of his: wanting to preserve these tribes just as they were, their way of life just as it was? To begin with, it wasn't possible. All of them, some more slowly, others more rapidly, were being contaminated by Western and mestizo influences. Moreover, was this chimerical preservation desirable? Was going on living the way they were, the way purist anthropologists of Saúl's sort wanted them to do, to the tribes' advantage? Their primitive state made them, rather, victims of the worst exploitation and cruelty.

In an Aguaruna village, Urakusa, where we arrived one evening, we saw through the portholes of the hydroplane the scene which had become familiar each time we touched down near some tribe: the eyes of the entire population of men and women, half naked and daubed with paint, attracted by the noise of the plane, followed its maneuvers as they slapped at their faces and chests with both hands to drive away the insects. But in Urakusa, besides the copper-colored bodies, the dangling tits, the children with parasite-swollen bellies and skins striped red or black, a sight awaited us that I have never forgotten: that of a man recently tortured. It was the headman of the locality, whose name was Jum.

A party of whites and mestizos from Santa Maria de Nieva—a trading post on the banks of the Nieva River that we had also visited, put up in a Catholic mission—had arrived in Urakusa a few weeks before us. The party included the civil authorities of the settlement plus a soldier from a frontier post. Jum went out to meet them, and was greeted by a blow that split his forehead open. Then they burned down the huts of Urakusa, beat up all the Indians they could lay their hands on, and raped several women. They carried Jum off to Santa Maria de Nieva, where they submitted him to the indignity of having his hair cut off. Then they tortured him in public. They flogged him, burned his armpits with hot eggs, and finally hoisted him up a tree the way they do paiche, large river fish, to drain them off They left him there for several hours, then untied him and let him go back to his village.

The ostensible reason for this savagery was a minor incident that had taken place in Urakusa between the Aguarunas and a detachment of soldiers passing through. But the real reason was that Jum had tried to set up a cooperative among the Aguaruna villages of the Alto Marañón. The cacique was a quick-witted and determined man, and the Institute linguist working with the Aguarunas encouraged him to take a course at Yarinacocha so as to become a bilingual teacher. This was a program drawn up by the Ministry of Education with the aid of the Institute of Linguistics. Men of the tribes who, like Jum, seemed capable of setting up an educational project in their villages were sent to Yarinacocha, where they took a course—a fairly superficial one, I imagine—given by the linguists and Peruvian instructors, to enable them to teach their people to read and write in their own language. They then returned to their native villages with classroom aids and the somewhat optimistic title of bilingual teacher.

The program did not attain the goal it had set—making the Amazonian Indians literate—but, as far as Jum was concerned, it had unforeseeable consequences. His stay in Yarinacocha, his contacts with “civilization” caused the cacique of Urakusa to discover—by himself or with the help of his instructors—that he and his people were being iniquitously exploited by the bosses with whom they traded. These bosses, whites or Amazonian mestizos, periodically visited the tribes to buy rubber and animal skins. They themselves fixed the price of what they bought, and paid for it in kind—machetes, fishhooks, clothing, guns; the price of these articles was also set to suit their own whim or convenience. Jum's stay at Yarinacocha made him realize that if, instead of trading with the bosses, the Aguarunas took the trouble to go sell their rubber and hides in the cities—at the offices of the Banco Hipotecario, for instance—they would get far better prices for what they had to sell and could buy for far less the same articles that the bosses sold them.

Discovering the value of money had tragic consequences for Urakusa. Jum informed the bosses that he would no longer trade with them. This decision meant pure and simple ruin for the Viracochas of Santa María de Nieva who had received us so warmly, and who were themselves nothing more than a handful of miserable whites and mestizos, most of them illiterate and barefoot, living in conditions nearly as wretched as those of their victims. The fierce extortions they practiced on the Aguarunas did not make them rich; they earned barely enough to survive. Exploitation in this part of the world was carried out at a level little short of subhuman. That was the reason for the punitive expedition, and as they tortured Jum they kept repeating: “Forget the cooperative.”

All this had just happened. Jum's wounds were still oozing pus. His hair had not grown back in. As they translated this story for us in the peaceful clearing, of Urakusa—Jum could get out little more than a few hoarse sentences in Spanish—I thought: “I must talk this over with Saúl.” What would Mascarita say? Would he admit that in a case like this it was quite obvious that what was to Urakusa's advantage, to Jum's, was not going backward but forward? That is to say, setting up their own cooperative, trading with the towns, prospering economically and socially so that it would no longer be possible to treat them the way the “civilized” people of Santa Maria de Nieva had done. Or would Saúl, unrealistically, deny that this was so, insist that the true solution was for the Viracochas to go away and let the inhabitants of Urakusa return to their traditional way of life?

Matos Mar and I stayed awake all that night, talking about Jum's story and the horrifying condition of the weak and the poor in our country that it revealed. Invisible and silent, Saúl Zurata's ghost took part in our conversation; both of us would have liked to have him there, offering his opinion and arguing. Matos Mar thought that Jum's misfortune would provide Mascarita with further arguments to support his theory. Didn't the entire episode prove that coexistence was impossible, that it led inevitably to the Viracochas' domination of the Indians, to the gradual and systematic destruction of the weaker culture? Those savage drunkards from Santa María de Nieva would never, under any circumstances, lead the inhabitants of Urakusa on the path to modernization, but only to their extinction; their “culture” had no more right to hegemony than that of the Aguarunas, who, however primitive they might be, had at least developed sufficient knowledge and skill to coexist with Amazonia. In the name of age-old prior occupation, of history, of morality, it was necessary to recognize the Aguarunas' sovereignty over these territories and to expel the foreign intruders from Santa María de Nieva.

I didn't agree with Matos Mar; I thought Jum's story was more likely to bring Saúl around to a more practical point of view, to accepting the lesser evil. Was there the slightest chance that a Peruvian government, of whatever political persuasion, would grant the tribes extraterritorial rights in the jungle? Obviously not. That being the case, why not change the Viracochas so that they'd treat the Indians differently?

We were stretched out on a floor of beaten earth, sharing a mosquito net, in a hut reeking of rubber (it was the storeroom of Urakusa), surrounded by the breathing of our slumbering companions and the unfamiliar sounds of the jungle. At the time, Matos Mar and I also shared socialist ideas and enthusiasms, and in the course of our talk together, the familiar subject of the social relations of production, which like a magic wand served to explain and resolve all problems, naturally cropped up. The problem of the Urakusas, that of all the tribes, should be seen as part of the general problem resulting from the class structure of Peruvian society. By substituting for the obsession with profit—individual gain—the idea of service to the community as the incentive to work, and reintroducing an attitude of solidarity and humanity into social relations, socialism would make possible that coexistence between modern and primitive Peru that Mascarita thought impossible and undesirable. In the new Peru, infused with the science of Marx and Mariategui, the Amazonian tribes would, at one and the same time, be able to adopt modern ways and to preserve their essential traditions and customs within the mosaic of cultures that would go to make up the future civilization of Peru. Did we really believe that socialism would ensure the integrity of our magico-religious cultures? Wasn't there already sufficient evidence that industrial development, whether capitalist or communist, inevitably meant the annihilation of those cultures? Was there one exception anywhere in the world to this terrible, inexorable law? Thinking it over—in the light of the years that have since gone by, and from the vantage point of this broiling—hot Firenze—we were as unrealistic and romantic as Mascarita with his archaic, anti—historical utopia.