Mario Vargas Llosa - The Storyteller

What the Schneils had been able to discover of their mythology, beliefs, and customs suggested that they had always led a very hard life and afforded a few glimpses of their history. They had been breathed out by the god Tasurinchi, creator of everything that existed, and did not have personal names. Their names were always temporary, related to a passing phenomenon and subject to change: the one who arrives, or the one who leaves, the husband of the woman who just died, or the one who is climbing out of his canoe, the one just born, or the one who shot the arrow. Their language had expressions only for the quantities one, two, three, and four. All the others were covered by the adjective “many.” Their notion of paradise was modest: a place where the rivers had fish and the woods had game. They associated their nomad life with the movement of the stars through the firmament. There was a high incidence of self-inflicted death among them. The Schneils told us of several cases they had witnessed: Machiguenga men and women — mostly the latter — who took their own lives by plunging chambira thorns into their hearts or into their temples, or by swallowing potions of deadly poison, for pointless reasons: an argument, an arrow that had missed, a reprimand by one of their kin. The most trivial frustration could lead a Machiguenga to kill himself. It was as though their will to live, their instinct for survival, had been reduced to a minimum.

The slightest illness brought on death. They were terrified of head colds, as were many of the tribes of Amazonia — sneezing in front of them always meant frightening them — but, and in this they differed from the other tribes, they refused to take care of themselves once they fell ill. At the least headache, bleeding, or accident, they prepared themselves for death. They would not take medicine or let themselves be looked after. “What’s the use, if we must go in one way or another?” they would say. Their witch doctors or medicine men — the seripigaris — were consulted and called upon to exorcize bad spirits and evils of the soul; but as soon as these manifested themselves as bodily ills, they regarded them as more or less incurable. A sick person making his way to the riverbank to lie down and await death was a frequent sight.

Their wariness and mistrust of strangers were extreme, as were their fatalism and timidity. The sufferings the community had endured during the rubber boom, when they were hunted by the “suppliers” of the camps or by Indians of other tribes who could thereby pay their debts to the bosses, had left a mark of terror in their myths and legends of that period, which they referred to as the tree-bleeding. Perhaps it was true, as a Dominican missionary, Father José Pío Aza — the first to study their language — maintained, that they were the last vestiges of a Pan-Amazonian civilization (attested, so he claimed, by the mysterious petroglyphs scattered throughout the Alto Urubamba) which had suffered defeat after defeat since its encounters with the Incas and was gradually dying out.

Making the first contacts had been very difficult for the Schneils. A full year after these first attempts had gone by before he, and only he, had succeeded in being received by a Machiguenga family. He told us what a touch-and-go experience it had been, how anxious and hopeful he had been that morning, at one of the headwaters of the Timpía river, as, stark-naked, he had approached the solitary hut, made of strips of bark and roofed with straw, which he had already visited on three occasions, leaving presents — without meeting anybody, but feeling behind his back the eyes of Machiguengas watching him from the forest — and seen that this time the half dozen people who lived there did not run away.

From then on, the Schneils had spent brief periods — either one of them at a time or the two of them together — with that family of Machiguengas or others living along the Alto Urubamba and its tributaries. They had accompanied groups of them when they went fishing or hunting in the dry season, and had made recordings that they played for us. An odd crackling sound with sudden sharp notes and, now and again, a guttural outpouring that they informed us were songs. They had a transcription and translation of one of these songs, made by a Dominican missionary in the thirties; the Schneils had heard it again, a quarter of a century later, in a ravine of the Sepahua River. The text admirably illustrated the state of mind of the community as it had been described to us. So much so that I copied it out. Since then I have always carried it with me, folded in four in a corner of my billfold, as a charm. It can still be deciphered:

Opampogyakyena shinoshinonkarintsi

Sadness is looking at me

opampogyakyena shinoshinonkarintsi

sadness is looking at me

ogakyena kabako shinoshinonkarintsi

sadness is looking hard at me

ogakyena kabako shinoshinonkarintsi

sadness is looking hard at me

okisabintsatana shinoshinonkarintsi

sadness troubles me very much

okisabintsatana shinoshinonkarintsi

sadness troubles me very much

amakyena tampia tampia tampia

air, wind has brought me

ogaratinganaa tampia tampia

air has borne me away

okisabintsatana shinoshinonkarintsi

sadness troubles me very much

okisabintsatana shinoshinonkarintsi

sadness troubles me very much

amaanatyomba tampia tampia

air, wind has brought me

onkisabintsatenatyo shinonka

sadness troubles me very much

shinoshinonkarintsi

sadness

amakyena popyenti pogyentima pogyenti

the little worm, the little worm has brought me

tampia tampia tampia

air, wind, air

Though they had a working knowledge of the Machiguenga language, the Schneils were still a long way from mastering the secrets of its structure. It was an archaic tongue, vibrantly resonant and agglutinative, in which a single word made up of many others could express a great overarching thought.

Mrs. Schneil was pregnant, which was the reason the two of them had returned to the base at Yarinacocha. As soon as their first child was born, the couple would return to the Urubamba. Their son or daughter, they said, would be brought up there and would master Machiguenga more thoroughly, and perhaps sooner, than they would.

The Schneils, like all the other linguists, had degrees from the University of Oklahoma, but they and their colleagues were motivated above all by a spiritual goal: spreading the Glad Tidings of the Bible. I don’t know what their precise religious affiliation was, since there were members of a number of different churches among the linguists of the Institute. The ultimate purpose that had led them to study primitive cultures was religious: translating the Bible into the tribes’ own languages so that those peoples could hear God’s word in the rhythms and inflections of their own tongue. This was the aim that had led Dr. Peter Townsend to found the Institute. He was an interesting person, half evangelist and half pioneer, a friend of the Mexican president Lázaro Cárdenas and the author of a book about him. The goal set by Dr. Townsend still motivates the linguists to continue the patient labor they have undertaken. I have always been both moved and frightened by the strong, unshakable faith that leads men to dedicate their lives to that faith and accept any sacrifice in its name; for heroism and fanaticism, selfless acts and crimes alike can spring from this attitude. But as far as I could gather in the course of that journey, the faith of the linguists from the Institute seemed benign enough. I still remember that woman, little more than a girl, who had lived for years among the Shapras of the Morona, and that family settled among the Huambisas, whose children — little redheaded gringos — splashed about naked along the banks of the river together with the copper-colored children of the village, talking and spitting in the very same way they did. (The Huambisas spit as they talk, to prove they’re telling the truth. As they see it, a man who doesn’t spit as he talks is a liar.)