Mario Vargas Llosa - The Storyteller

“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.

The time he was closest to destroying us was that time. It was no longer the time of abundance, nor was it that of the tree-bleeding. After the first and before the second, it seems. A kamagarini disguised as a man appeared and said to the men who walk: “The one who really needs help is not the sun. But rather Kashiri, the moon, who is the father of the sun.” He gave them his reasons, which set them to thinking. Wasn’t the sun so strong it made people’s eyes water if they dared look at it directly without blinking? So what help did it need? The old story about its falling and then rising again was a trick. Kashiri, on the other hand, with his faint, gentle light was always fighting against the darkness, under difficult conditions. If the moon weren’t there at night, watching in the sky, the darkness would be total, a thick blackness: men would fall down the precipice, would step on vipers, wouldn’t be able to find their canoes or go out to plant cassava or hunt. They’d be prisoners in just one place, and the Mashcos could surround them, shoot them down with arrows, cut off their heads, and steal their souls. If the sun fell altogether, it would be night, perhaps. But as long as there was the moon it would never be entirely night, just half darkness, and life would go on, perhaps. So shouldn’t men help Kashiri instead? Wasn’t this to their advantage? If they did, the light of the moon would be brighter and night would be less dark, a half light, good to walk by.

The one who said those things appeared to be a man but he was a kamagarini. One of the ones that Kientibakori breathed out to go about this world sowing misfortune. The ones before did not recognize him. Even though he arrived in the midst of a great storm, the way little devils always arrive in the villages. The ones before didn’t understand that, perhaps. If someone appears as the lord of thunder is roaring and rain is falling in torrents, it’s not a man, it’s a kamagarini. We know now. They hadn’t learned that yet. They allowed themselves to be persuaded. And, changing their habits, they started doing by night what they had done by day before and by day what they had done by night. Thinking that Kashiri, the moon, would be brighter that way.

Once the eye of the sun appeared in the sky, they took refuge beneath their roofs, saying to each other: “It’s time to rest.” “It’s time to light the fires.” “It’s time to sit and listen to the one who talks.” That’s what they did: they rested while the sun shone, or they gathered around to listen to the storyteller till darkness began to fall. Then, shaking off their drowsiness, they said: “The time has come to live.” They traveled by night, they hunted by night, they built their dwellings by night, they cleared the forest and cleaned the weeds and the underbrush from the cassava fields by night. They got used to this new way of life. To the point that they could no longer bear being out of doors in the daylight. The heat of the sun burned their skin and the fire of its eye blinded them. Rubbing themselves, they said: “We cannot see. How terrible this light is. We hate it.” On the other hand, their eyes had grown used to the dark and they could see in the night the way you and I can see in the daytime. They said: “It’s quite true. Kashiri, the moon, is grateful to us for the help we give him.” They started calling themselves not men of the earth, as before, or men who walk, or men who talk. But men of darkness.