Mario Vargas Llosa: The Storyteller

Every so often, between classes, we used to go over to a run-down billiard parlor, which was also a bar, on the Jirón Azángaro, to have ourselves a game. Walking through the streets with Saúl showed how painful a life he must have led at the hands of insolent, nasty people. They would turn around or block his path as he passed, to get a better look at him, staring wide-eyed and making no effort to conceal the amazement or disgust that his face aroused in them, and it was not a rare thing for someone, children mostly, to come out with some insulting remark. He didn’t appear to mind, and always answered their abuse with a bit of cheerful repartee. The incident as we entered the billiard parlor didn’t provoke him, but it did me, since by nature I’m a far cry from an archangel.

The drunk was bending his elbow at the bar. The moment he laid eyes on us, he came staggering over and stood in front of Saúl with arms akimbo. “Son of a bitch! What a monster! What zoo did you escape from?”

“Well, which one would you say, pal? The only one around here, the one in Barranco, of course,” Mascarita replied. “If you dash right over, you’ll find my cage still open.”

And he tried to make his way past. But the drunk stretched out his hands, making hex signs with his fingers, the way children do when they’re called bad names.

“You’re not coming in here, monster.” He was suddenly furious. “With a face like that, you should keep off the streets. You scare people.”

“But if this is the only one I’ve got, what do you suggest I do?” Saúl said, smiling. “Come on, don’t be a drag — let us by.”

At that, I lost my patience. I grabbed the toper by the lapels and started shaking him. There was a show of fists, people milling round, some pushing and shoving, and Mascarita and I had to leave without having had our billiard game.

The next day I received a present from him. It was a small bone shaped like a diamond and engraved with a geometric design in a yellowish-brick color. The design represented two parallel mazes made up of bars of different sizes, separated by identical distances, the larger ones seemingly nestled inside the smaller ones. His brief accompanying letter, good-humored and enigmatic, went something like this:

Hi pal ,

Let’s see if this magic bone calms that impetuosity of yours and you stop punching poor lushes. The bone is from a tapir and the drawing is not the awkward scrawl it appears to be — just a few primitive strokes — but a symbolic inscription. Morenanchiite, the lord of thunder, dictated it to a jaguar, who dictated it to a witch-doctor friend of mine from the forests of the Alto Picha. If you think these symbols are whirlpools in the river or two coiled boa constrictors taking a nap, you may be right. But, above all, they represent the order that reigns in the world. Anyone who lets anger get the better of him distorts these lines, and when they’re distorted they can no longer hold up the earth. You wouldn’t want life, through your fault, to fall apart and men to return to the original chaos out of which Tasurinchi, the god of good, and Kientibakori, the god of evil, brought us by breathing us out, now would you, pal? So no more tantrums, and especially not because of me. Anyhow, thanks .

Ciao,

Saúl

I asked him to tell me more about the thunder and the tiger, the distorted lines, Tasurinchi and Kientibakori. He had me hanging on his words for an entire afternoon at his house in Breña as he talked to me of the beliefs and customs of a tribe scattered through the jungles of Cusco and Madre de Dios.

I was lying on his bed and he was sitting on a trunk with his parrot on his shoulder. The creature kept nibbling at his bright red hair and interrupting him with its peremptory squawks of “Mascarita!” “You be still now, Gregor Samsa,” he soothed him.

The designs on their utensils and their cushmas, the tattoos on their faces and bodies, were neither fanciful nor decorative, pal. They were a coded writing that contained the secret names of people and magic formulas to protect things from damage and their owners from evil spells laid on them through such objects. The patterns were set by a noisy bearded deity, Morenanchiite, the lord of thunder, who in the middle of a storm passed on the key to a tiger from the heights of a mountain peak. The tiger passed it on to a medicine man, or shaman, in the course of a trance brought on by ayahuasca, the hallucinogenic plant, which, boiled into a brew, was drunk at all Indian ceremonies. That witch doctor of Alto Picha—“or, better put, a wise man, chum; I’m calling him a witch doctor so you’ll understand what I’m talking about”—had explained to him the philosophy that had allowed the tribe to survive until now. The most important thing to them was serenity. Never to make mountains out of molehills or tempests in teapots. Any sort of emotional upheaval had to be controlled, for there is a fatal correspondence between the spirit of man and the spirits of Nature, and any violent disturbance in the former causes some catastrophe in the latter.

“A man throwing a fit can make a river overflow, and a murder make lightning burn down the village. Perhaps that bus crash on the Avenida Arequipa this morning was caused by your punching that drunk yesterday. Doesn’t your conscience trouble you?”

I was amazed at how much he knew about the tribe. And even more so as I realized what a torrent of fellow feeling this knowledge aroused in him. He talked of those Indians, of their customs and myths, of their surroundings and their gods, with the respect and admiration that were mine when I brought up the names of Sartre, Malraux, and Faulkner, my favorite authors that year. I never heard him speak with such emotion even of Kafka, whom he revered, as he did of that tribe of Indians.

I must have suspected even then that Saúl would never be a lawyer, and I suspected also that his interest in the Amazonian Indians was something more than “ethnological.” Not a professional, technical interest, but something much more personal, though hard to pin down. Surely more emotional than rational, an act of love rather than intellectual curiosity or the appetite for adventure that seemed to lurk in the choice of career made by so many of his fellow students in the Department of Ethnology. Saúl’s attitude toward this new calling, the devotion he manifested for the world of the Amazon, were frequently the subject of conjecture on the campus of the San Marcos Faculty of Letters.

Was Don Salomón aware that Saúl was studying ethnology, or did he think he was concentrating on his law studies? The fact was that, even though Mascarita was still enrolled in the Faculty of Law, he never went to class. With the exception of Kafka, and The Metamorphosis in particular, which he had read countless times and virtually knew by heart, all his reading was now in the field of anthropology. I remember his consternation at how little had been written about the tribes and his complaints about how difficult it was to trace down material scattered in various monographs and journals that did not always reach San Marcos or the National Library.

It had all begun, he told me once, with a trip to Quillabamba during the national holidays. He had gone there at the invitation of a relative, a first cousin of his mother’s and an uncle of his, who had emigrated from Piura to that region, had a small farm, and also dealt in timber. The man would go deep into the jungle in search of mahogany and rosewood, hiring Indians to clear trails and cut down trees. Mascarita had gotten on well with the Indians — most of them pretty well Westernized — and they had taken him with them on their expeditions and welcomed him in their camps up and down the vast region irrigated by the Alto Urubamba and the Alto Madre de Dios and their respective tributaries. He spent an entire night enthusiastically telling me what it was like to ride a raft hurtling through, the Pongo de Mainique, where the Urubamba, squeezed between two foothills of the Cordillera, became a labyrinth of rapids and whirlpools.