The Storyteller

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  Hi pal,

  Let’s see if this magic bone calms that impetuosity of yours and you stop punching poor lushes. The bone is from a tapir and the drawing is not the awkward scrawl it appears to be—just a few primitive strokes—but a symbolic inscription. Morenanchiite, the lord of thunder, dictated it to a jaguar, who dictated it to a witch-doctor friend of mine from the forests of the Alto Picha. If you think these symbols are whirlpools in the river or two coiled boa constrictors taking a nap, you may be right. But, above all, they represent the order that reigns in the world. Anyone who lets anger get the better of him distorts these lines, and when they’re distorted they can no longer hold up the earth. You wouldn’t want life, through your fault, to fall apart and men to return to the original chaos out of which Tasurinchi, the god of good, and Kientibakori, the god of evil, brought us by breathing us out, now would you, pal? So no more tantrums, and especially not because of me. Anyhow, thanks.

  Ciao,

  Saúl

  I asked him to tell me more about the thunder and the tiger, the distorted lines, Tasurinchi and Kientibakori. He had me hanging on his words for an entire afternoon at his house in Breña as he talked to me of the beliefs and customs of a tribe scattered through the jungles of Cusco and Madre de Dios.

  I was lying on his bed and he was sitting on a trunk with his parrot on his shoulder. The creature kept nibbling at his bright red hair and interrupting him with its peremptory squawks of “Mascarita!” “You be still now, Gregor Samsa,” he soothed him.

  The designs on their utensils and their cushmas, the tattoos on their faces and bodies, were neither fanciful nor decorative, pal. They were a coded writing that contained the secret names of people and magic formulas to protect things from damage and their owners from evil spells laid on them through such objects. The patterns were set by a noisy bearded deity, Morenanchiite, the lord of thunder, who in the middle of a storm passed on the key to a tiger from the heights of a mountain peak. The tiger passed it on to a medicine man, or shaman, in the course of a trance brought on by ayahuasca, the hallucinogenic plant, which, boiled into a brew, was drunk at all Indian ceremonies. That witch doctor of Alto Picha—“or, better put, a wise man, chum; I’m calling him a witch doctor so you’ll understand what I’m talking about”—had explained to him the philosophy that had allowed the tribe to survive until now. The most important thing to them was serenity. Never to make mountains out of molehills or tempests in teapots. Any sort of emotional upheaval had to be controlled, for there is a fatal correspondence between the spirit of man and the spirits of Nature, and any violent disturbance in the former causes some catastrophe in the latter.

  “A man throwing a fit can make a river overflow, and a murder make lightning burn down the village. Perhaps that bus crash on the Avenida Arequipa this morning was caused by your punching that drunk yesterday. Doesn’t your conscience trouble you?”

  I was amazed at how much he knew about the tribe. And even more so as I realized what a torrent of fellow feeling this knowledge aroused in him. He talked of those Indians, of their customs and myths, of their surroundings and their gods, with the respect and admiration that were mine when I brought up the names of Sartre, Malraux, and Faulkner, my favorite authors that year. I never heard him speak with such emotion even of Kafka, whom he revered, as he did of that tribe of Indians.

  I must have suspected even then that Saúl would never be a lawyer, and I suspected also that his interest in the Amazonian Indians was something more than “ethnological.” Not a professional, technical interest, but something much more personal, though hard to pin down. Surely more emotional than rational, an act of love rather than intellectual curiosity or the appetite for adventure that seemed to lurk in the choice of career made by so many of his fellow students in the Department of Ethnology. Saúl’s attitude toward this new calling, the devotion he manifested for the world of the Amazon, were frequently the subject of conjecture on the campus of the San Marcos Faculty of Letters.

  Was Don Salomón aware that Saúl was studying ethnology, or did he think he was concentrating on his law studies? The fact was that, even though Mascarita was still enrolled in the Faculty of Law, he never went to class. With the exception of Kafka, and The Metamorphosis in particular, which he had read countless times and virtually knew by heart, all his reading was now in the field of anthropology. I remember his consternation at how little had been written about the tribes and his complaints about how difficult it was to trace down material scattered in various monographs and journals that did not always reach San Marcos or the National Library.

  It had all begun, he told me once, with a trip to Quillabamba during the national holidays. He had gone there at the invitation of a relative, a first cousin of his mother’s and an uncle of his, who had emigrated from Piura to that region, had a small farm, and also dealt in timber. The man would go deep into the jungle in search of mahogany and rosewood, hiring Indians to clear trails and cut down trees. Mascarita had gotten on well with the Indians—most of them pretty well Westernized—and they had taken him with them on their expeditions and welcomed him in their camps up and down the vast region irrigated by the Alto Urubamba and the Alto Madre de Dios and their respective tributaries. He spent an entire night enthusiastically telling me what it was like to ride a raft hurtling through, the Pongo de Mainique, where the Urubamba, squeezed between two foothills of the Cordillera, became a labyrinth of rapids and whirlpools.

  “Some of the porters are so terrified they have to be tied to the rafts, the way they do with cows, to get them through the gorge. You can’t imagine what it’s like, pal!”

  A Spanish missionary from the Dominican mission in Quillabamba had shown him mysterious petroglyphs scattered throughout the area; Saúl had eaten monkey, turtle, and grubs and gotten incredibly soused on cassava masato.

  “The natives of the region believe the world began in the Pongo de Mainique. And I swear to you there’s a sacred aura about the place, something indefinable that makes your hair stand on end. You can’t imagine what it’s like, pal. Really far out!”

  This experience had consequences that no one could have envisaged. Not even Saúl himself, of that I’m sure.

  He went back to Quillabamba for Christmas and spent the long year-end vacation there. He returned during the July vacation between terms and again the following December. Every time there was a break at San Marcos, even for only a few days, he’d head for the jungle in anything he could find: trucks, trains, jitneys, buses. He came back from these trips full of enthusiasm and eager to talk, his eyes bright with amazement at the treasures he’d discovered. Everything that came from there interested and excited him tremendously. Meeting the legendary Fidel Pereira, for instance. The son of a white man from Cusco and a Machiguenga woman, he was a mixture of feudal lord and aboriginal cacique. In the last third of the nineteenth century a man from a good Cusco family, fleeing from the law, went deep into those forests, where the Machiguengas had sheltered him. He had married a woman of the tribe. His son, Fidel, lived astride the two cultures, acting like a white when with whites and like a Machiguenga when with Machiguengas. He had several lawfully wedded wives, any number of concubines, and a constellation of sons and daughters, thanks to whom he ran all the coffee plantations and farms between Quillabamba and the Pongo de Mainique, putting the whole tribe to work and paying them next to nothing. But, in spite of that, Mascarita felt a certain liking for him:

  “He uses them, of course. But at least he doesn’t despise them. He knows all about their culture and is proud of it. And when other people try to trample on them, he protects them.”

  In the stories he told me, Saúl’s enthusiasm made the most trivial happening—clearing a patch of forest or fishing for gamitana—take on heroic dimensions. But, above all, it was the world of the Indians with their primitive practices and their frugal life, their animism and their magic, that seemed to have bewitched him. I now know that those Indians, whose language he had begun to lear
n with the help of native pupils in the Dominican mission of Quillabamba—he once sang me a sad, repetitive, incomprehensible song, shaking a seed-filled gourd to mark the rhythm—were the Machiguengas. I now know that he had made the posters with their little drawings showing the dangers of fishing with dynamite that I had seen piled up in his house in Breña, to distribute to the whites and mestizos of the Alto Urubamba—the children, grandchildren, nephews, bastards, and stepsons of Fidel Pereira—in the hope of protecting the species of fish that fed those same Indians who, a quarter of a century later, would be photographed by the now deceased Gabriele Malfatti.

  With hindsight, knowing what happened to him later—I have thought about this a lot—I can say that Saúl experienced a conversion. In a cultural sense and perhaps in a religious one also. It is the only concrete case I have had occasion to observe from close at hand that has seemed to give meaning to, to make real, what the priests at the school where I studied tried to convey to us during catechism through phrases such as “receiving grace,” “being touched by grace,” “falling into the snares of grace.” From his first contact with the Amazon jungle, Mascarita was caught in a spiritual trap that made a different person of him. Not just because he lost all interest in law and began working for a degree in ethnology, or because of the new direction his reading took, leaving precisely one surviving literary character, Gregor Samsa, but because from that moment on he began to be preoccupied, obsessed, by two concerns which in the years to come would be his only subjects of conversation: the plight of Amazonian cultures and the death throes of the forests that sheltered them.

  “You have a one-track mind these days, Mascarita. A person can’t talk with you about anything else lately.”

  “Pucha! That’s true, old buddy. I haven’t let you get a word in edgewise. How about a little lecture, if you’re so inclined, on Tolstoy, class war, novels of chivalry?”

  “Aren’t you exaggerating a little, Saúl?”

  “No, pal. As a matter of fact, I’m understating. I swear. What’s being done in the Amazon is a crime. There’s no justification for it, whatever way you look at it. Believe me, man, it’s no laughing matter. Put yourself in their place, if only for a second. Where do they have left to go? They’ve been driven out of their lands for centuries, pushed farther into the interior each time, farther and farther. The extraordinary thing is that, despite so many disasters, they haven’t disappeared. They’re still there, surviving. Makes you want to take your hat off to them. Damn it all, there I go again! Come on, let’s talk about Sartre. What gets my back up is that nobody gives a hoot in hell about what’s happening to them.”

  Why did it matter to him so much? It certainly wasn’t for political reasons, at any rate. Politics to Mascarita was the most uninteresting thing in the world. When we talked about politics I was aware that he was making an effort to please me, since at that time I had revolutionary enthusiasms and had taken to reading Marx and talking about the social relations of production. Such subjects bored Saúl as much as the rabbi’s sermons did. Nor would it be accurate to say that these subjects interested him on the broad ethical grounds that the plight of the Indians in the jungle mirrored the social iniquities of our country, inasmuch as Saúl did not react in the same way to other injustices closer to home, which he may not even have noticed. The situation of the Andean Indians, for instance—and there were several million of them, instead of the few thousand in the Amazon jungle—or the way middle- and upper-class Peruvians paid and treated their servants.

  No, it was only that specific expression of human lack of conscience, irresponsibility, and cruelty, to which the men, the trees, the animals, and the rivers of the jungle had fallen prey, that—for reasons I found hard to understand at the time, as perhaps he did, too—transformed Saúl Zuratas, erasing all other concerns from his mind and turning him into a man with a fixation. With the result that, if he had not been such a good person, so generous and helpful, I would very likely have stopped seeing him. For there was no doubt that he’d become a bore on the subject.

  Occasionally, to see how far his obsession might lead him, I would provoke him. What did he suggest, when all was said and done? That, in order not to change the way of life and the beliefs of a handful of tribes still living, many of them, in the Stone Age, the rest of Peru abstain from developing the Amazon region? Should sixteen million Peruvians renounce the natural resources of three-quarters of their national territory so that seventy or eighty thousand Indians could quietly go on shooting at each other with bows and arrows, shrinking heads and worshipping boa constrictors? Should we forgo the agricultural, cattle-raising, and commercial potential of the region so that the world’s ethnologists could enjoy studying at first hand kinship ties, potlatches, the rites of puberty, marriage, and death that these human oddities had been practicing, virtually unchanged, for hundreds of years? No, Mascarita, the country had to move forward. Hadn’t Marx said that progress would come dripping blood? Sad though it was, it had to be accepted. We had no alternative. If the price to be paid for development and industrialization for the sixteen million Peruvians meant that those few thousand naked Indians would have to cut their hair, wash off their tattoos, and become mestizos—or, to use the ethnologists’ most detested word, become acculturated—well, there was no way round it.

  Mascarita didn’t get angry with me, because he never got angry with anyone about anything, nor did he put on a superior I-forgive-you-for-you-know-not-what-you-say air. But I could feel that when I provoked him in this way I was hurting him as much as if I’d run down Don Salomón Zuratas. He hid it perfectly, I admit. Perhaps he had already achieved the Machiguenga ideal of never feeling anger so that the parallel lines that uphold the earth would not give way. Moreover, he would never discuss this subject, or any other, in a general way, in ideological terms. He had a built-in resistance to any sort of abstract pronouncement. Problems always presented themselves to him in concrete form: what he’d seen with his own eyes, and the consequences that anyone with an ounce of brains in his head could infer from it.

  “Fishing with explosives, for example. People assume it’s forbidden. But go have a look, pal. There isn’t a river or a stream where the mountain people and the Viracochas—that’s what they call us white people—don’t save time by fishing wholesale with dynamite. Save time! Can you imagine what that means? Charges of dynamite blowing up schools of fish day and night. Whole species are disappearing, old man.”

  We were talking at a table in the Bar Palermo in La Colmena, drinking beer. Outside, the sun was shining, people hurried past, jalopies honked aggressively, and inside we were surrounded by the smoky atmosphere, smelling of frying oil and urine, typical of all the little cafés in downtown Lima.

  “How about fishing with poison, Mascarita? Wasn’t that invented by the tribal Indians? That makes them despoilers of the Amazon basin, too.”

  I said that so he’d fire his heavy artillery at me. And he did, of course. It was untrue, totally untrue. They did fish with barbasco and cumo, but only in the side channels and backwaters of the rivers, or in water holes that remained on islands after the floodwaters had receded. And only at certain times of year. Never in the spawning season, the signs of which they knew by heart. At those times they fished with nets, harpoons, or traps, or with their bare hands. You’d be goggle-eyed if you saw them, pal. On the other hand, the Creoles used barbasco and cumo all year round, and everywhere. Water poisoned thousands of times, decade after decade. Did I realize? Not only did they kill off all the fry at spawning time, but they were rotting the roots of trees and plants along the riverbanks as well.

  Did he idealize them? I’m sure he did. And also, perhaps without meaning to, he exaggerated the extent of the disasters so as to reinforce his arguments. But it was evident that for Mascarita all those shad and catfish poisoned by barbasco and cumo, all the paiche destroyed by the fishers of Loreto, Madre de Dios, San Martín, or Amazonas, hurt him neither more nor less than if the victim had be
en his talking parrot. And, of course, it was the same when he spoke of the extensive tree felling done by order of the timber men—“My uncle Hipólito is one of them, I’m sorry to say”—who were cutting down the most valuable trees. He spoke to me at length of the practices of the Viracochas and the mountain people who had come down from the Andes to conquer the jungle and clear the woods with fires that burn over enormous areas of land, which after one or two crops become barren because of the lack of humus and the erosion caused by rain. Not to mention, pal, the extermination of animals, the frantic greed for hides and skins which, for example, had made of jaguars, lizards, pumas, snakes, and dozens of other species biological rarities on the point of vanishing. It was a long speech that I remember very well on account of something that cropped up at the end of the conversation, after we had polished off several bottles of beer and some cracklings (which he was extremely fond of). From the trees and the fish his peroration always circled back to the main reason for his anxiety: the tribes. At this rate they, too, would die out.

  “Seriously, Mascarita, do you think polygamy, animism, head shrinking, and witch doctoring with tobacco brews represent a superior form of culture?”

  An Andean boy was throwing bucketfuls of sawdust on the spittle and other filth lying on the red tile floor of the Bar Palermo as a half-breed followed behind him, sweeping up. Saúl looked at me for a long while without answering.

  At last he shook his head. “Superior, no. I’ve never said or thought so, little brother.” He was very serious now. “Inferior, perhaps, if the question is posed in terms of infant mortality, the status of women, polygamy or monogamy, handcrafts or industry. Don’t think I idealize them. Not in the least.”