Mario Vargas Llosa - The Storyteller

The first man to speak must have been Pachakamue. Tasurinchi had breathed out Pareni. She was the first woman. She bathed in the Gran Pongo and put on a white cushma. There she was: Pareni. Existing. Then Tasurinchi breathed out Pareni’s brother: Pachakamue. He bathed in the Gran Pongo and put on a clay-colored cushma. There he was: Pachakamue. The one who, by speaking, would give birth to so many animals. He gave them their name, spoke the word, and men and women became what Pachakamue said. He didn’t do it intentionally. But he had that power.

This is the story of Pachakamue, whose words were born animals, trees, and rocks.

That was before.

One day he went to visit his sister, Pareni. They were sitting on mats, drinking masato, when he asked after her children. “They’re playing over there, up in a tree,” she said. “Be careful they don’t turn into little monkeys.” Pachakamue laughed. The words were barely out of his mouth when the children they’d been, with hair and tails all of a sudden, deafened the day with their screeching. Hanging by their tails from the branches, swinging happily to and fro.

On another visit to his sister, Pachakamue asked Pareni: “How is your daughter?” The girl had just had her first blood and was purifying herself in a shelter behind the hut. “You’re keeping her shut up like a sachavaca,” Pachakamue remarked. “Whatever does ‘sachavaca’ mean?” Pareni exclaimed. At that moment they heard a bellowing and a scraping of hoofs on the ground. And there came the terrified sachavaca, sniffing the air, heading for the forest. “Well then, that’s what it means,” Pachakamue murmured, pointing at it.

Thereupon, Pareni and her husband, Yagontoro, became alarmed. Wasn’t Pachakamue upsetting the order of the world with the words he uttered? The prudent thing to do was to kill him. What evils might come about if he went on speaking? They offered him masato. Once he’d gotten drunk, they lured him to the edge of a precipice. “Look, look,” they said. He looked and then they pushed him off. Pachakamue rolled and rolled. By the time he got to the bottom, he hadn’t even waked up. He went on sleeping and belching, his cushma covered with masato vomit.

When he opened his eyes, he was amazed. Pareni was watching him from the edge. “Help me out of here!” he begged her. “Change yourself into an animal and climb up the precipice yourself,” she mocked him. “Isn’t that what you do to Machiguengas?” Following her advice, Pachakamue spoke the word “sankori.” And there and then he changed himself into a sankori ant, the one that builds a hanging nest in a tree trunk or on a cliff. But this time the little ant’s constructions behaved oddly; they fell apart each time they had nearly reached the edge of the precipice. “What do I do now?” moaned the speaker-of-words in despair. Pareni counseled him: “Make something grow between the stones, with words, and climb up it.” Pachakamue said, “Reed,” and a reed sprouted and grew. But every time he hoisted himself up it, the reed broke in two and he rolled to the bottom of the ravine.

So then Pachakamue set off in the opposite direction, following the curve of the precipice. He was furious, saying, “I’ll wreak havoc.” Yagontoro took off after him to kill him. It was a long, hard chase. Moons went by and Pachakamue’s trail grew faint. One morning, Yagontoro came across a maize plant. In a trance, he learned that the plant had grown from toasted maize seeds that Pachakamue was carrying in his pouch; they had fallen to the ground without his noticing. He was catching up with him at last. And not long after, he spied him. Pachakamue was damming a river, blocking its flow by rolling trees and boulders down into the water. He was trying to change its course so as to flood a cluster of huts and drown the Machiguengas. He was still in a rage, farting furiously. There in the forest, Kientibakori and his kamagarinis must have been dancing, drunk with joy.

Then Yagontoro spoke to him. He made him think things over, and persuaded him, it seems. He suggested they go back to Pareni together. But soon after they had set out, he killed him. A storm arose that made the rivers boil and uprooted many trees. The rain came down in torrents; the thunder rolled. Unperturbed, Yagontoro went on cutting the head off Pachakamue’s corpse. Then he drove two chonta thorns through the head, a vertical one and a horizontal one, and buried it in a secret place. But he neglected to cut off the tongue, a mistake we’re still paying for. As long as we don’t cut it off, we’ll go on being in danger, it seems. Because sometimes that tongue speaks, putting things all out of kilter. It is not known where the head is buried. The place stinks of rotten fish, they say. And the ferns around it give off smoke continually, like a fire that’s going out.

After cutting Pachakamue’s head off, Yagontoro set out to return to Pareni. He was pleased, believing he had saved this world from disorder. Now everyone will be able to live in peace, he was no doubt thinking. But he hadn’t walked far when he started feeling sluggish. And why was it such slow going? Horrified, he saw that his legs were insect legs, his hands antennae, his arms now wings. Instead of being a man who walks, he was now a carachupa, just what his name says he is. Beneath the forest, choking on earth, through the two darts piercing it, Pachakamue’s tongue had said: “Yagontoro.” And so Yagontoro had become a yagontoro.

Dead and decapitated, Pachakamue went on transforming things so they would be like his words. What was going to happen to the world? By then, Pareni had another husband and was walking, content. One morning, as she was weaving a cushma, crossing and uncrossing the cotton threads, her husband came to lick the sweat running down her back. “You look like a little bee that sucks flowers,” said a voice from deep within the earth. He heard no more, for he was flying about, a happy buzzing bee borne lightly on the air.

Shortly thereafter, Pareni married Tzonkiri, who was still a man. He noticed that every time he came back from weeding the cassava patch, his wife gave him unknown fish to eat: boquichicos. What river or lake did they come from? Pareni never ate a single mouthful of them. Tzonkiri suspected that something unusual was happening. Instead of going to his cassava patch, he hid in the underbrush and watched. What he saw gave him a terrible scare: the fish were coming out from between Pareni’s legs. She was giving birth to them, like children. Tzonkiri was enraged. He threw himself upon her to kill her. But before he could do so, a distant voice, from out of the earth, spoke his name. Who ever heard of a hummingbird killing a woman? “You’ll never eat boquichicos again,” Pareni mocked. “You’ll go from flower to flower now, sipping pollen.” And since then, Tzonkiri has been what he is.

By now, Pareni didn’t want another husband. Together with her daughter, she started walking. She climbed into a canoe and went up the rivers; she clambered up ravines, made her way through tangled forests. After many moons, the two of them reached the Cerro de la Sal. Where both of them heard, from far, far away, words of the buried head that turned them into stone. They are now two great gray rocks, covered with moss. They are still there, perhaps. The Machiguengas used to sit in the shadow of them, drinking masato and talking together, it seems. When they went up to collect salt.

That, anyway, is what I have learned.

Tasurinchi, the herb doctor, the one who lived by the Tikompinía, is walking. He gave me the herbs I carry in my pouch and explained what each little leaf and each handful is for. This leaf, the one with burned edges, is for stopping up the jaguar’s nostrils, so it can’t catch the scent of the man who walks. This other one, the yellow one, wards off vipers. There are so many of them I get them all mixed up. Each one has a different use. Against evil and strangers. So the fish in the lake will swim into the net. So the arrow doesn’t stray from the target. And, this one, so as not to trip or fall into a ravine.