Mario Vargas Llosa - The Storyteller

That he did say. Surely not in those words. But in a form that could be transcribed that way. Did he speak of God? Yes, I’m certain he spoke of God, because I remember asking him, surprised at what he said, trying to make a joke of what was eminently serious, if that meant that now we, too, had to begin believing in God.

He remained silent, head bent. A bluebottle fly had found its way into the café and was buzzing about, bumping against the sooty walls. The señora behind the counter never stopped looking at Mascarita. When Saúl raised his head, he seemed embarrassed. His tone of voice was even more serious now.

“Well, I no longer know whether I believe in God or not, pal. One of the problems of our ever-so-powerful culture is that it’s made God superfluous. For them, on the contrary, God is air, water, food, a vital necessity, something without which life wouldn’t be possible. They’re more spiritual than we are, though you may not believe it. Even the Machiguengas, who by comparison with the others are relatively materialistic. That’s why what the Institute is doing is so damaging, taking away their gods and replacing them with their own, an abstract God who’s of no use to them at all in their daily life. The linguists are the smashers of idols of our time. With planes, penicillin, vaccination, and whatever else is needed to destroy the jungle. And since they’re all fanatics, when something happens to them such as happened to those gringos in Ecuador, they feel even more inspired. Nothing like martyrdom to spur on fanatics, don’t you agree, pal?”

What had happened in Ecuador, some weeks before, was that three American missionaries of some Protestant church had been murdered by a Jíbaro tribe with which one of them was living. The other two happened to be passing through the region. No details were known. The corpses, beheaded and pierced with arrows, had been found by a military patrol. Since the Jíbaros are headhunters, the reason for the decapitation was obvious. It had stirred up a great scandal in the press. The victims were not members of the Institute of Linguistics. I asked Saúl, intuitively anticipating what his answer would be, what he thought of those three corpses.

“I can assure you of one thing at least,” he said. “They were beheaded without cruelty. Don’t laugh! Believe me, it’s true. With no desire to make them suffer. In that respect, the tribes are all alike, regardless of how different they may be otherwise. They kill only out of necessity. When they feel threatened, when it’s a question of kill or be killed. Or when they’re hungry. But the Jíbaros aren’t cannibals. They didn’t kill them to eat them. The missionaries either said something or did something that suddenly made the Jíbaros feel they were in great danger. A sad story, I grant you. But don’t draw hasty conclusions. It has nothing in common with Nazi gas chambers or with dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.”

We sat there together for a long time, perhaps three or four hours. We ate a lot of crackling sandwiches and finally the woman who owned the café served us a dish of corn-flour pudding, “on the house.” As we left, unable to contain herself and pointing at Saúl’s birthmark, she asked “whether his affliction caused him great pain.”

“No, señora, it doesn’t hurt at all, fortunately. I’m not even aware that I have such a thing,” Saúl replied, smiling.

We walked along together for a while, still talking of the one subject of the afternoon, of that I’m certain. As we said goodbye on the corner of the Plaza Bolognesi and the Paseo Colón, we embraced.

“I really must apologize,” he said, suddenly remorseful. “I’ve chattered like a parrot and didn’t let you open your mouth. You didn’t even have a chance to tell me what you’re planning to do in Europe.”

We agreed to write to each other, if only a postcard now and then, to keep in touch. I wrote three times in the following years, but he never answered me.

That was the last time I saw Saúl Zuratas. The image floats unchanged above the tumultuous surge of the years, the gray air, the overcast sky, and the penetrating damp of a Lima winter serving as a backdrop. Behind him, a confusion of cars, trucks, and buses coiling around the monument to Bolognesi, and Mascarita, with the great dark stain on his face, his flaming red hair, and his checkered shirt, waving goodbye and shouting: “We’ll see if you come back a real Madrileiio, lisping your z ’s and using archaic second-person plurals. Have a good trip, and lots of luck to you over there, pal!”

Four years went by without any news of him. None of the Peruvians who came through Madrid or Paris, where I lived after finishing my postgraduate studies, was ever able to tell me anything about Saúl. I thought of him often, in Spain especially, not only because of my liking for him but also because of the Machiguengas. The story the Schneils had told me about habladores kept coming back to my mind, enticing me, exciting my imagination and desire as a beautiful girl might. I had only morning classes at the university, and each afternoon I used to spend several hours at the National Library, on Castella, reading novels of chivalry. One day I remembered the name of the Dominican missionary who had written about the Machiguengas: Fray Vicente de Cenitagoya. I looked in the catalogue, and there was the book.

I read it in one sitting. It was short and naïve. The Machiguengas, whom the good Dominican frequently called savages and chided paternally for being childish, lazy, and drunken, as well as for their sorcery — which Fray Vicente called “nocturnal sabbaths”—seemed to have been observed from outside and from a considerable distance, even though the missionary had lived among them for more than twenty years. But Fray Vicente praised their honesty, their respect for their given word, and their gentle ways. Moreover, his book confirmed certain information I had which finally convinced me. They had a natural inclination, little short of unhealthy, toward listening to and telling stories, and they were incorrigible gossips. They couldn’t stay still, felt no attachment whatsoever to the place where they lived, and seemed possessed by the demon of movement. The forest cast a sort of spell over them. Using all sorts of blandishments, the missionaries attracted them to the settlements of Chirumbia, Koribeni, and Panticollo. They wore themselves out trying to get the Machiguengas to settle down. They gave them mirrors, food, seed: they taught them the advantages of living in a community, for their health, for their education, for their very survival. They seemed persuaded. They put up their huts, cleared their fields, agreed to send their children to the little mission school, and appeared themselves, painted and punctual, at the evening Rosary and the morning Mass. They seemed well on their way along the path of Christian civilization. Then all of a sudden, one fine day, without saying thank you or goodbye, they vanished into the forest. A force more powerful than they drove them: an ancestral instinct impelled them irresistibly toward a life of wandering, scattered them through the tangled virgin forests.

That same night I wrote to Mascarita sending him my comments on Father Cenitagoya’s book. I told him I’d decided to write something about Machiguenga storytellers. Would he help me? Here in Madrid, out of homesickness perhaps, or because I had constantly found myself mulling over our conversations in my mind, I no longer found his ideas as absurd or unrealistic as I once had. In any case, I would try to make my story as authentic and as intimate a portrayal of the Machiguenga way of life as I could. Would you lend me a hand, pal?

I set to work, brimming over with enthusiasm. But the result was lamentable. How could I write about storytellers without having at least a superficial knowledge of their beliefs, myths, customs, history? The Dominican monastery in the Calle Claudio Coello gave me invaluable help. It had a complete collection of Misiones Dominicanas , the journal of the missionaries of the Order in Peru, and in it I found numerous articles on the Machiguengas and also Father José Pío Aza’s excellent studies of the language and folklore of the tribe.