Mario Vargas Llosa - The Storyteller

He had to postpone his answer, as the waitress came up at that moment with a fresh batch of bread and cracklings. She set the platter down on the table and stood for a long moment looking, fascinated, at Saúl’s birthmark. I saw her cross herself as she went back to her stove.

“You’re mistaken. I don’t find it more insidious,” he finally answered sarcastically, still beside himself. “They, too, want to steal their souls, of course. But the jungle is swallowing up the missionaries, the way it did Arturo Cova in The Vortex . Didn’t you see them on your trip? Half dead of hunger, and, what’s more, very few of them. They live in such need they’re in no state to evangelize anybody, luckily. Their isolation has dulled their catechistic spirit. They survive, and that’s all. The jungle has clipped their claws, pal. And the way things are going in the Catholic Church, there soon won’t be any priests at all, not even for Lima, let alone Amazonia.”

The linguists were a different matter altogether. They were backed by economic power and an extremely efficient organization which might well enable them to implant their progress, their religion, their values, their culture. Learn the aboriginal languages! What a swindle! What for? To make the Amazonian Indians into good Westerners, good modern men, good capitalists, good Christians of the Reformed Church? Not even that. Just to wipe their culture, their gods, their institutions off the map and corrupt even their dreams. Just as they’d done to the redskins and the others back in their own country. Was that what I wanted for our jungle compatriots? To make them into what the original inhabitants of North America now were? Servants and shoeshine boys for the Viracochas?

He paused, noticing that three men at the next table had stopped talking to listen to him, their attention attracted by his birthmark and his rage. The unmarked side of his face was congested, his mouth was half open and his lower lip pushed forward and trembling. I got up to go urinate without really needing to, hoping my absence would calm him. The señora at the stove asked me, with lowered voice as I passed, whether what was wrong with his face was very serious. I whispered that it was only a birthmark, no different from the mole you have on your arm, señora. “Poor thing, it makes you feel sorry for him just looking at it,” she murmured.

I returned to our table and Mascarita tried his best to smile as he lifted his glass: “To your good health, friend. Forgive me for getting so worked up.”

But in fact he hadn’t calmed down and was obviously still tense and about to explode again. I told him his expression reminded me of a poem, and I recited in Machiguenga the lines I remembered of the song about sadness.

I managed to make him smile, for a moment.

“You speak Machiguenga with a slight California accent,” he joked. “How does that happen, I wonder?”

But a while later he lashed out at me again on the subject that was keeping him on hot coals. Without meaning to, I had stirred up something that distressed and deeply wounded him. He spoke without stopping, as if holding his breath.

Up till now nobody had succeeded, but it was possible that the linguists would get away with it. In four hundred, five hundred years of trying, all the others had failed. They had never been able to subjugate those tiny tribes they despised. I must have read about it in the Chronicles I was doing research on at Porras Barrenechea’s. Hadn’t I, pal? What happened to the Incas every time they sent armies to the Antisuyo. To Túpac Yupanqui, especially. Hadn’t I read about it? How their warriors disappeared in the jungle, how the Antis slipped through their fingers. They hadn’t subjugated a single one, and out of spite, the people of Cusco began to look down on them. That’s why they invented all those disparaging Quechua words for the Amazonian Indians: savages, degenerates. Yet, despite all that, what had happened to the Inca empire, the Tahuantinsuyo, when it was forced to confront a more powerful civilization? The barbarians of the Antisuyo, at least, went on being what they had been. Wasn’t that so? And had the Spaniards been any more successful than the Incas? Hadn’t all their “expeditions” into Anti territory been a total failure? They killed them whenever they could lay their hands on them, but that rarely happened. Were the thousands of soldiers, adventurers, outlaws, and missionaries who descended on the Oriente between 1500 and 1800 able to bring one single tribe under the dominion of illustrious Christian and Western civilization? Did all this mean nothing to me?

“I’d rather you told me what it means to you, Mascarita,” I said.

“That these cultures must be respected,” he said softly, as though finally beginning to calm down. “And the only way to respect them is not to go near them. Not touch them. Our culture is too strong, too aggressive. It devours everything it touches. They must be left alone. Haven’t they amply demonstrated that they have the right to go on being what they are?”

“You’re an Indigenist to the nth degree, Mascarita,” I teased him. “Just like the ones in the thirties. Like Dr. Luis Valcárcel when he was young, wanting all the colonial churches and convents demolished because they represented Anti-Peru. Or should we bring back the Tahuantinsuyo? Human sacrifice, quipus, trepanation with stone knives? It’s a laugh that Peru’s last Indigenist turns out to be Jewish, Mascarita.”

“Well, a Jew is better prepared than most people to defend the rights of minority cultures,” he retorted. “And, after all, as my old man says, the problem of the Boras, of the Shapras, of the Piros, has been our problem for three thousand years.”

Is that what he said? Could one at least infer something of the sort from what he was saying? I’m not sure. Perhaps this is pure invention on my part after the event. Saúl didn’t practice his religion, or even believe in it. I often heard him say that the only reason he went to the synagogue was so as not to disappoint Don Salomón. On the other hand, some such association, whether superficial or profound, must have existed. Wasn’t Saúl’s stubborn defense of the life led by those Stone Age Peruvians explained, at least in part, by the stories he’d heard at home, at school, in the synagogue, through his inevitable contacts with other members of the community, stories of persecution and of dispersion, of attempts by more powerful cultures to stamp out Jewish faith, language, and customs, which, at the cost of great sacrifice, the Jewish people had resisted, preserving their identity?

“No, I’m not an Indigenist like the ones of the thirties. They wanted to restore the Tahuantinsuyo, and I know very well that there’s no turning back for the descendants of the Incas. The only course left them is integration. The sooner they can be Westernized, the better: it’s a process that’s bogged down halfway and should be speeded up. For them, it’s the lesser evil now. So you see I’m not being utopian. But in Amazonia it’s different. The great trauma that turned the Incas into a people of sleepwalkers and vassals hasn’t yet occurred there. We’ve attacked them ferociously but they’re not beaten. We know now what an atrocity bringing progress, trying to modernize a primitive people, is. Quite simply, it wipes them out. Let’s not commit this crime. Let’s leave them with their arrows, their feathers, their loincloths. When you approach them and observe them with respect, with a little fellow feeling, you realize it’s not right to call them barbarians or backward. Their culture is adequate for their environment and for the conditions they live in. And, what’s more, they have a deep and subtle knowledge of things that we’ve forgotten. The relationship between man and Nature, for instance. Man and the trees, the birds, the rivers, the earth, the sky. Man and God, as well. We don’t even know what the harmony that exists between man and those things can be, since we’ve shattered it forever.”