Mario Vargas Llosa - The Storyteller

An odd thing had happened to Mrs. Schneil a few months before, near the Kompiroshiato River. The Machiguenga family she was living with — eight people: two old men, a grown man, four women, and a young girl — suddenly disappeared, without a word of explanation to her. She was very surprised, since they had never done anything of the sort before. All eight of them reappeared a few days later, as mysteriously as they had disappeared. Where had they gone off to like that? “To hear the hablador,” the young girl said. The meaning of the sentence was quite clear, but Mrs. Schneil didn’t find out any more, for nobody volunteered any further details, nor did she ask for any. But the eight Machiguengas had been extremely excited and whispered together endlessly during the following days. Seeing them engrossed in their interminable conclaves, Mrs. Schneil knew they were remembering the hablador.

The Schneils had made conjectures and carpentered up theories. The hablador, or habladores, must be something like the courier service of the community. Messengers who went from one settlement to another in the vast territory over which the Machiguengas were dispersed, relating to some what the others were doing, keeping them informed of the happenings, the fortunes and misfortunes of the brothers whom they saw very rarely or not at all. Their name defined them. They spoke. Their mouths were the connecting links of this society that the fight for survival had forced to split up and scatter to the four winds. Thanks to the habladores, fathers had news of their sons, brothers of their sisters, and thanks to them they were all kept informed of the deaths, births, and other happenings in the tribe.

“And of something more besides,” Mr. Schneil said. “I have a feeling that the hablador not only brings current news but also speaks of the past. He is probably also the memory of the community, fulfilling a function similar to that of the jongleurs and troubadours of the Middle Ages.”

Mrs. Schneil interrupted to explain to me that it was difficult to be sure of that. The Machiguenga verb system was complicated and misleading, among other reasons because it readily mixed up past and present. Just as the word for “many”—tobaiti — was used to express any quantity above four, “now” also included at least today and yesterday, and the present tense of verbs was frequently used to recount events in the recent past. It was as though to them only the future was something clearly defined. Our conversation turned to linguistics and ended with a string of examples of the humorous and unsettling implications of a form of speech in which before and now were barely differentiated.

I was deeply moved by the thought of that being, those beings, in the unhealthy forests of eastern Cusco and Madre de Dios, making long journeys of days or weeks, bringing stories from one group of Machiguengas to another and taking away others, reminding each member of the tribe that the others were alive, that despite the great distances that separated them, they still formed a community, shared a tradition and beliefs, ancestors, misfortunes and joys: the fleeting, perhaps legendary figures of those habladores who — by occupation, out of necessity, to satisfy a human whim — using the simplest, most time-hallowed of expedients, the telling of stories, were the living sap that circulated and made the Machiguengas into a society, a people of interconnected and interdependent beings. It still moves me to think of them, and even now, here, as I write these lines, in the Caffe Strozzi in old Firenze, under the torrid July sun, I break out in goose pimples.

“And why is it you break out in goose pimples?” Mascarita said. “What is it you find so fascinating? What’s so special about habladores?”

A good question. Why hadn’t I been able to get them out of my mind since that night?

“They’re a tangible proof that storytelling can be something more than mere entertainment,” it occurred to me to say to him. “Something primordial, something that the very existence of a people may depend on. Maybe that’s what impressed me so. One doesn’t always know why one is moved by things, Mascarita. They strike some secret chord, and that’s that.”

Saúl laughed and clapped me on the shoulder. I had been speaking seriously, but he took it as a joke.

“Oh, I see. It’s the literary side that interests you,” he exclaimed. He sounded disappointed, as though that aspect diminished the value of my curiosity. “Well, don’t let your imagination run away with you. I’ll bet it’s those gringos who told you that story about storytellers. Things just can’t be the way they seem to be to them. I assure you the gringos understand the Machiguengas even less than the missionaries do.”

We were in a little café on the Avenida España, having bread and cracklings. It was several days after my return from Amazonia. As soon as I got back I had looked for him around the university and left messages for him at La Estrella, but I hadn’t been able to contact him. I was afraid I’d be off to Europe without having said goodbye to Saúl when, on the eve of my departure for Madrid, I ran into him as I got off a bus on a corner of the Avenida España. We went to that little cafe, where he’d treat me, he said, to a farewell meal of crackling sandwiches and ice-cold beer, the memory of which would stay with me during the whole time I was in Europe. But the memory that remained etched on my mind was, rather, his evasive answers and his incomprehensible lack of interest in a subject — the Machiguenga storytellers — which I’d thought he’d be all excited about. Was it really lack of interest? Of course not. I know now that he pretended not to be interested and lied to me when, on being backed into a corner by my questions, he assured me that he’d never heard a word about any such storytellers.

Memory is a snare, pure and simple: it alters, it subtly rearranges the past to fit the present. I have tried so many times to reconstruct that conversation in August 1958 with my friend Saúl Zuratas in the seedy café on the Avenida España, with its broken-down chairs and rickety tables, that by now I’m no longer sure of anything, with the exception, perhaps, of his enormous birthmark, the color of wine vinegar, that attracted the stares of the customers, his rebellious crest of red hair, his red-and-blue-checkered flannel shirt, and his heavy hiking shoes.

But my memory cannot have entirely invented Mascarita’s fierce diatribe against the Summer Institute of Linguistics, which still rings in my ears twenty-seven years later, or my stunned surprise at the contained fury with which he spoke. It was the only time I ever saw him like that: livid with anger. I discovered that day that the archangelic Saúl, like other mortals, was capable of letting himself go, in one of those rages that, according to his Machiguenga friends, could destabilize the universe.

I said as much in the hope of distracting him. “You’re going to bring on an apocalypse with your tantrum, Mascarita.”

But he paid no attention to me. “Those apostolic linguists of yours are the worst of all. They work their way into the tribes to destroy them from within, just like chiggers. Into their spirit, their beliefs, their subconscious, the roots of their way of being. The others steal their vital space and exploit them or push them farther into the interior. At worst, they kill them physically. Your linguists are more refined. They want to kill them in another way. Translating the Bible into Machiguenga! How about that!”

He was so agitated I didn’t argue. Several times, listening to him, I had to bite my tongue so as not to contradict him. I knew that, in Saúl Zurata’s case, his objections to the Institute were not frivolous or motivated by political prejudice; that, however questionable they might seem to me, they represented a point of view long pondered and deeply felt. Why did the work of the Institute strike him as more insidious than that of the bearded Dominicans and the little Spanish nuns of Quillabamba, Koribeni, and Chirumbia?