Mario Vargas Llosa - The Storyteller

“So it’s true, you stole yourself a Yaminahua woman,” I remarked to Tasurinchi. He says he didn’t steal her. He traded a sachavaca, a sack of maize, and one of cassava, for her. “The Yaminahuas should be pleased. What I gave them is worth more than she is,” he assured me.

“Isn’t that so?” he asked the Yaminahua woman in front of me, and she agreed. “Yes, it is,” she said. I understood that, too.

Since the mischievous kamagarini stung the tip of his penis, Tasurinchi feels obliged to do certain things, suddenly, without his knowing how or why. “It’s an order I hear and I have to obey it,” he says. “I expect it comes from a little god or a little devil, from something that’s gotten deep down inside me through my penis, whatever it may be.” Stealing that woman was one of those orders, it seems.

His penis is now the same as it was before. But a spirit has stayed on, there in his soul, which tells him to be different and do things that the others don’t understand. He showed me where he was urinating when the kamagarini stung him. Ay! Ay! it made him squeal, made him leap about, and he wasn’t able to go on urinating. He chased the wasp away with a smack of his hand, and he heard it laugh, perhaps. A while later his penis started getting bigger. Every night it swelled up, and every morning more still. Everybody laughed at him. He was so ashamed he had them weave him a bigger cushma. He hid his penis in its pouch. But it went on growing, growing, and he could no longer hide it. It got in his way when he moved. He dragged it along the way an animal drags its tail. Sometimes people stepped on it just to hear him yelp. Ay! Atatau! He had to roll it up and perch it on his shoulder, the way I do with my little parrot. That’s how they went along on their travels, heads together, keeping each other company. Tasurinchi talked to it to keep himself amused. The other listened to him, silent, attentive, just the way all of you listen to me, looking at him with its big eye. One-Eye — Little One-Eye! — just stared at him. It had grown a whole lot. The birds perched on it to sing, thinking it was a tree. When Tasurinchi urinated, a cataract of warm water, foamy as the rapids of the Gran Pongo, came out of its big mouth. Tasurinchi could have bathed in it, and his family too, maybe. He used it as a seat when he stopped to rest. And at night it was his pallet. When he went hunting, it was both sling and spear. He could shoot it to the very top of a tree to knock down the shimbillo monkeys, and using it as a club, he could kill a puma.

To purify him, the seripigari wrapped his penis in fern fronds that had been heated over live coals. He made him sip their juice and sing, for a whole night, while he himself drank tobacco brew and ayahuasca. He danced, he disappeared through the roof and came back changed into a saankarite. After that, he was able to suck the evil from him and spit it out. It was thick and yellow and smelled like drunkard’s vomit. By morning his penis started shrinking, and a few moons later it was the little dwarf it had been before. But since then Tasurinchi hears those orders. “In some of my souls there’s a capricious mother,” he says. “That’s why I got myself the Yaminahua woman.”

It seems she’s become used to her new husband. There she is, by the Mishahua, settled down nicely, as though she’d always been Tasurinchi’s wife. But the other women are furious, insulting her and finding any excuse to hit her. I saw them and heard them. “She’s not like us” is what they say. “She’s not people, whatever she may be. A monkey, perhaps, the fish perhaps that stuck in Kashiri’s gullet.” She went on slowly chewing at her cassava as though she didn’t hear them.

Another time she was carrying a pitcher full of water, and without noticing she bumped into a child, knocking him over. Whereupon the women all set upon her. “You did it on purpose, you wanted to kill him” was what they said. It wasn’t true, but that was what they said to her. She picked up a stick and confronted them, without anger. “One day they’re going to kill her,” I said to Tasurinchi. “She knows how to look after herself,” he answered. “She hunts animals. Something I’ve never known women to do. And she’s the one who carries the heaviest load on her back when we bring cassavas in from the field. What I’m afraid of, and what’s more likely, is that she’ll kill the other women. The Yaminahuas are fighting people, just like the Mashcos. Their women too, maybe.”

I said that, for that very reason, he ought to be worried. And go off somewhere else right away. The Yaminahuas must be furious at what he’d done to them. What if they came to take revenge? Tasurinchi burst out laughing. The whole matter had been settled, it seems. The husband of the Yaminahua woman, along with two others, had come to see him. They’d drunk masato together and talked. And eventually come to an agreement. What they were after wasn’t the woman but a shotgun, on top of the sachavaca, the maize, and the cassava he gave them. The White Fathers had told them he had a shotgun. “Look around for it,” he offered. “If you can find it, take it.” Finally they left. Satisfied, it seems. Tasurinchi isn’t going to give the Yaminahua woman back to her kinfolk. Because she’s already learning to speak. “The others will get used to her when she has a child,” Tasurinchi says. The children are already used to her. They treat her as though she were people, a woman who walks. “Mother,” they call her.

That, anyway, is what I have learned.

Who knows whether this woman will make Tasurinchi, the one from the Mishahua, happy? She may just as well bring him unhappiness. Coming down to this world to marry a Machiguenga brought misfortune to Kashiri, the moon. So they say, anyway. But maybe we ought not to lament what befell him. Kashiri’s mischance brings us food and allows us to warm ourselves. Isn’t the moon the father of the sun by a Machiguenga woman?

That was before.

A strong, serene youth, Kashiri was bored in the sky above, Inkite, where there were no stars yet. Instead of cassava and plantain, men ate earth. It was their only food. Kashiri came down the river Meshiareni, paddling with his arms, without a pole. His canoe skirted the rocks and the whirlpools. Down it came, floating. The world was still dark and the wind blew fiercely. The rain came down in buckets. Kashiri jumped ashore on the Oskiaje, where this earth meets the worlds of the sky, where monsters live and all the rivers go to die. He looked around him. He didn’t know where he was, but he was content. He started walking. Not long thereafter, he spied the Machiguenga girl who was to bring him happiness and unhappiness, sitting weaving a mat and softly singing a song to keep away the vipers. Her cheeks and forehead were painted; two red lines went up from her mouth to her temples. So, then, she was unmarried: she would learn to cook food and make masato.

To please her, Kashiri, the moon, taught her what cassava and plantain were. He showed her how they were planted, harvested, and eaten. Since then there has been food and masato in the world. That is when after began, it seems. Then Kashiri presented himself at her father’s hut. His arms were laden with the animals he had hunted and fished for him. Finally he offered to clear a field for him in the highest part of the forest and to work for him, sowing cassava and pulling out weeds till it grew. Tasurinchi agreed to let him take his daughter. They had to wait for the girl’s first blood. It was a long time coming, and meanwhile the moon cleared and burned and weeded the forest patch and sowed plantain, maize, and cassava for his future family. Everything was going very well.

The girl, then, started to bleed. She stayed locked up, not speaking a word to her kinfolk. The old woman who watched over her never left her, by day or by night. The girl ceaselessly spun cotton thread, never resting. Not once did she go near the fire or eat chili peppers, so as not to bring misfortune upon herself or her kinfolk. Not once did she look at the man who was to be her husband, nor did she speak to him. She went on in that way until she stopped bleeding, Then she cut her hair and the old woman helped her to bathe herself, wetting her body with warm water poured from a pitcher. At last the girl could go live with Kashiri. At last she could be his wife.