Mario Vargas Llosa - The Storyteller

Can things that once happened happen again? The herb doctor says yes: “They’re there, in one of the worlds, and like souls, they can come back. It’ll be our fault if that happens, perhaps.” Best to be prudent and to keep memory alive.

Three of the sons of Tasurinchi, the herb doctor, have gone since he’s been living up there. Seeing them go one after the other, he thought: Can the evil that carried off whole families be back? He hasn’t been able to find out whether their souls came back. “Maybe so, maybe not,” he said to me. He’s not yet thoroughly acquainted with the place where he’s living and doesn’t know why certain things happen. Everything there is still mysterious to him. But there are a great many herbs there. Some he already knew; others not. He’s learning to know them. He gathers them, spends a long time looking at them, comparing them, smelling them, and sometimes he puts them in his mouth. He chews them and spits them out, or else swallows them. Saying: “This one is useful.”

His three sons all went the same way. They woke up dizzy in the head, shivering and sweating. And tottering as though they’d been drunk. They couldn’t stand up. They tried to walk, to dance, and fell down. They couldn’t even talk, it seems. When it happened to the eldest, Tasurinchi thought it was a warning that he should leave. It wasn’t a good place to live, perhaps. “I couldn’t tell,” he says. “This evil was different from the others. There were no herbs against it.” Kamagarini evils, maybe. Those little devils always come out to do harm when it’s raining. Kientibakori watches them from the edge of the forest, laughing. It had thundered and torrents of rain had fallen the evening before, and it’s well known that when that happens, a kamagarini is drawing near.

When that son went, Tasurinchi’s family moved a little higher up in the forest. Shortly thereafter, the second son started feeling dizzy and falling down. Just like the first one. When that one died, they went somewhere else. Then the same thing happened to the third one. Tasurinchi decided not to move again. “The ones who have gone will see to it that we’re protected against the kamagarini that’s trying to throw us out of here,” he said. That must have been how it was. No one else has had a dizzy spell and fallen down since then.

“There’s an explanation for that,” the herb doctor says. “There’s one for everything. Even the manhunts during the tree-bleeding. But it’s not easy to learn what it is. Even the seripigari doesn’t always succeed. It may be that the three of them went to talk with the mothers of this place. With three dead here, the mothers aren’t likely to look on us as intruders. We belong here now. Don’t these trees and birds know us? The water and the air here? That may be the explanation. Since they went, we haven’t felt any enmity. As though we’re accepted here.”

I spent many moons with him. I very nearly stayed on to live there, near the herb doctor. I helped him set traps for pavitas and went to the lake with him to fish for boquichicos. I worked with Tasurinchi clearing the forest, where he’s going to make his new field when the one he has now needs to rest. During the afternoons we used to talk. As the women killed each other’s lice, spun, wove mats and cushmas, or chewed and spat out cassava for masato, we talked together.

The herb doctor had me tell him stories of men who walk. Ones he’d known, and ones he’d never seen as well. I told him about all of you, the way I tell all of you about him. Moons went by and I had no desire to leave. Something was happening that had never happened to me before. “Are you getting tired of walking?” he asked me. “It happens to a lot of people. Don’t worry, storyteller. If that’s how it is, change your ways. Stay in one place and have a family. Build your hut, clear the forest, take care of your field. You’ll have children. Give up walking, and give up being a storyteller. You can’t stay here; there are a great many of us in my family. But you can go farther up, cutting a path through the forest, a two or three moons’ journey. There’s a ravine with a stream at the bottom waiting for you, I think. I can go with you that far. Do you want a family? I can help you there too, if that’s what you want. Take that woman, she’s old and quiet and she’ll help you because she knows how to cook and spin far better than most. Or here’s my youngest daughter, if she’s more to your liking. You won’t be able to touch her yet because she hasn’t bled. If you mounted her now, some misfortune would happen, perhaps. But wait a little, and meanwhile she’ll be learning how to be your wife. Her mothers will teach her. Once she bleeds, you’ll bring me a peccary, fish, fruits of the earth, showing me gratitude and respect. Is that what you want, Tasurinchi?”

I thought his proposal over for quite some time. I felt like accepting it. I even dreamed I’d accepted it and was leading a different life. It’s a good life I’m living, that I know. The men who walk receive me gladly, give me food, pay me compliments. But my days are spent journeying, and how much longer will I be able to keep that up? Distances between families grow greater and greater. Lately, I often think as I’m walking that one day my strength will give out. Isn’t that so, little parrot? And there I’ll lie, exhausted, on one forest trail or another. No Machiguenga will pass that way, perhaps. My soul will go and my empty body begin to rot as birds peck at it and ants crawl over it. The grass will grow between my bones, perhaps. And the capybara will gnaw away the garment of my soul. When such fear comes to a man, shouldn’t he change his habits? So it seemed to Tasurinchi, the herb doctor.

“I accept your proposal, then,” I said to him. He went with me to the place that was waiting for me. It took us two moons to get there. We had to go up and down through stretches of forest where the path disappeared altogether, and as we climbed up a slope, shimbillo monkeys, with earsplitting screams, hurled bits of bark down at us from the branches overhead. In the ravine we found a jaguar cub caught in a thornbush. “This little jaguar means something,” the herb doctor fretted. But he couldn’t discover what. And so, instead of killing it and skinning it, he let it loose in the forest. “Isn’t this a good place to live?” he asked me, pointing. “You can make your cassava patch up there in that high forest. It will never be flooded. There are lots of trees and not much grass, so the earth should be good and the cassava grow well.” Yes, it was a place that was livable. Though the nights were the coldest I’d ever felt anywhere. “Before making up your mind, we’ll see if there’s game to hunt,” said Tasurinchi. We set traps. We caught a capybara and a majaz. Later, we shot a pavita kanari from a shelter at the top of a tree. I decided to stay there and put up my hut.

But before we’d begun felling the trees, the herb doctor’s son appeared, the one who had guided me to his new hut. Saying: “Something’s happened.” We went back. The old woman Tasurinchi was going to give me as a wife was dead. She’d pounded barbasco and made a brew, muttering: “I don’t want them to rage at me, saying: ‘Because of her we’ve been left without a storyteller.’ They’ll say I tricked him, that I gave him a potion so he’d take me as his wife. I’d rather go.”

I helped the herb doctor burn the hut, the cushma, the pots, the necklaces, and all the other things that belonged to the woman. We wrapped her in several straw mats and placed her on a raft of tucuma palm planks. We pushed it out into the river till the current carried her away downstream.

“It’s a warning that you must either pay heed to or ignore,” Tasurinchi said to me. “If I were you, I wouldn’t ignore it. Because each man has his obligation. Why is it we walk? So there will be light and warmth, so that everything will be peaceful. That is the order of the world. The man who talks to fireflies does what he’s obliged to do. I move on when Viracochas appear. That’s my destiny, perhaps. And yours? To visit people, speak to them, tell them stories. It is dangerous to disobey fate. Look, the woman who was to be your wife has gone. If I were you, I’d start walking at once. What’s your decision?”