Mario Vargas Llosa - The Storyteller

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?