Mario Vargas Llosa - The Storyteller

But perhaps I learned most from the talk I had with a bearded missionary in the vast resounding library of the monastery, where the high ceiling echoed back what we were saying. Fray Elicerio Maluenda had lived for many years in the Alto Urubamba, and had become interested in Machiguenga mythology. He was a keen-minded, very learned old man, with the rather rustic manners of one who has spent his life out-of-doors, roughing it in the jungle. Every so often, as though to make a greater impression on me, he larded his pure Spanish with a peculiar-sounding Machiguenga word.

I was delighted with what he told me of the cosmogony of the tribe, full of complex symmetries and Dantesque echoes — as I discover now in Firenze, reading the Commedia in Italian for the first time. The earth was the center of the cosmos and there were two regions above it and two below, each one with its own sun, moon, and tangle of rivers. In the highest, Inkite, lived Tasurinchi, the all-powerful, the breather-out of people, and through it, bathing fertile banks with fruit-laden trees, flowed the Meshiareni, or river of immortality, that could be dimly made out from the earth, for it was the Milky Way. Below Inkite floated the weightless region of clouds, or Menkoripatsa, with its transparent river, the Manaironchaari. The earth, Kipacha, was the abode of the Machiguengas, a wandering people. Beneath it was the gloomy region of the dead, almost all of whose surface was covered by the river Kamabiría, plied by the souls of the deceased before taking up their new abode. And last of all, the lowest and most terrible region, that of the Gamaironi, a river of black waters where there were no fish, and of wastelands where there was nothing to eat, either. This was the domain of Kientibakori, creator of filthy things, the spirit of evil and the chief of a legion of demons, the kamagarinis. The sun of each region was less powerful and less bright than the one above. The sun of Inkite was motionless, a radiant white. The sun of Gamaironi was dark and frozen. The hesitant sun of earth came and went, its survival mythically linked to the conduct of the Machiguengas.

But how much of this — and the many other details that Fray Maluenda had given me — was true? Hadn’t the admirable missionary added to or adapted much of the material he had collected? I queried Mascarita on the subject in my second letter. Again there was no answer.

I must have sent him the third one a year or so later, since by then I was in Paris. I took him to task for his stubborn silence and confessed that I’d given up the idea of writing about the habladores. I filled any number of composition books with my scribblings and spent many hours in the Place du Trocadéro, in the library of the Musée de l’Homme and in front of its display cases, trying in vain to understand the storytellers, to intuit what they were like. The voices of the ones that I’d contrived sounded all wrong. So I had resigned myself to writing other stories. But what was he doing? How was he getting on? What had he been doing all this time, and what were his plans?

It was not until the end of 1963, when Matos Mar turned up in Paris, to speak at an anthropological congress, that I heard of Mascarita’s whereabouts. What I learned left me flabbergasted.

“Saúl Zuratas went to live in Israel?”

We were in the Old Navy in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, drinking hot grog to withstand the cold of a depressing ash-gray December evening. We sat smoking as I eagerly plied him with questions about friends and developments in far-off Peru.

“Something to do with his father, it seems,” Matos Mar said, bundled up in such a bulky overcoat and heavy scarf he looked like an Eskimo. “Don Salomón, from Talara. Did you know him? Saúl was very fond of him. Remember how he refused that fellowship to Bordeaux so as not to leave him alone? Apparently the old man took it into his head to go off to Israel to die. And devoted as he was to his father, Mascarita of course let him have his way. They decided the whole thing very suddenly, from one day to the next, more or less. Because, when Saúl told me, they’d already sold the little shop in Breña, La Estrella, and had their bags all packed.”

And did Saúl like the idea of settling in Israel? Because once there, he’d have to learn Hebrew, do his military service, reorganize his life from A to Z. Matos Mar thought he might have been exempted from military service because of his birthmark. I searched my memory trying to remember whether I’d ever heard Mascarita mention Zionism, returning to the Homeland, Alyah. Never.

“Well, maybe it wasn’t a bad thing for Saúl, starting all over again from zero,” Matos Mar reflected. “He must have adapted to Israel, since all this happened some four years ago, and as far as I know, he hasn’t come back to Peru. I can well imagine him living in a kibbutz. The truth of the matter is that Saúl wasn’t getting anywhere in Lima. Ethnology and the university had both been a disappointment to him, for reasons I never quite understood. He never finished his doctoral dissertation. And I think even his love affair with the Machiguengas was a thing of the past. ‘Aren’t you going to miss your naked savages there in Urubamba?’ I asked him when we said goodbye. ‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘I can adapt to anything. And there must be plenty of people who go around naked in Israel, too.’ ”

Unlike Matos Mar, I didn’t think Saúl would have found Alyah easy going. Because he was, viscerally, a part of Peru, too torn and revolted by Peruvian affairs — one of them at least — to cast everything aside overnight, the way one changes shirts. I often tried to imagine him in the Middle East. Knowing him, I could readily foresee that in his new country the Palestine question and the occupied territories would confront Saúl Zuratas, the Israeli citizen, with all sorts of moral dilemmas. My mind wandered, trying to see him in his new surroundings, jabbering away in his new language, going about his new job — what was it? — and I prayed to Tasurinchi that no bullet might have come Mascarita’s way in the wars and border incidents in Israel since he’d arrived there.

A mischievous kamagarini disguised as a wasp stung the tip of Tasurinchi’s penis while he was urinating. He’s walking. How? I don’t know, but he’s walking. I saw him. They haven’t killed him. He could have lost his eyes or his head, his soul could have left him after what he did there among the Yaminahuas. Nothing happened to him, it seems. He’s well, walking, content. Not angry, laughing, perhaps. Saying “What’s all the fuss about?” As I headed toward the river Mishahua to visit him, I thought: He won’t be there. If it’s really true that he did that, he’ll have taken off somewhere far away, where the Yaminahuas won’t find him. Or maybe they’ve already killed him; him and his kinfolk as well. But there he was, and his family too, and the woman he stole. “Are you there, Tasurinchi?” “Ehé, ehé, here I am.”

She’s learning to speak. “Say something so the hablador sees you can speak, too,” he ordered her. You could hardly understand what the Yaminahua woman was saying, and the other women made fun of her: “What are those noises we keep hearing?” Pretending to search about: “What animal can have gotten into the house?” Looking under the mats. They make her work and they treat her badly. Saying: “When she opens her legs, fish are going to come out of her, like they did out of Pareni.” And worse things still. But it’s quite true, she’s learning to speak. I understood some of the things she said. “Man walks,” I understood.