Mario Vargas Llosa - The Storyteller

The program ran regularly every week, and considering the conditions under which we worked, this was quite a feat. I wrote the scripts in vans or planes, went from airport to sound studio to cutting room, and from there to catch another plane to travel hundreds of miles to be in another town or country, often for less time than it had taken me to get there. During those six months, I skipped sleeping, eating, reading, and, naturally, writing. As the channel’s budget was limited, I arranged for several of my trips abroad to coincide with invitations to attend literary congresses or give lectures, thus relieving the channel of having to pay my travel and per-diem expenses. The trouble with this arrangement was that it forced me to become a psychic quick-change artist, shifting within seconds from a lecturer to a journalist, from an author with a microphone placed before him to an interviewer who took his revenge by interviewing his interviewers.

Though we did a fair number of programs on the current scene in other countries, most of them dealt with Peruvian subjects. Popular dances and fiestas, university problems, pre-Hispanic archaeological sites, an old ice-cream vendor whose tricycle had cruised the streets of Miraflores for half a century, the story of a Piura bordello, the sub-world of prisons. We discovered how wide an audience the Tower of Babel was reaching when we started getting requests and considerable pressure from various personalities and institutions who wanted us to take notice of them. The most unexpected was perhaps the PIP, the Peruvian Secret Police. A colonel appeared in my office one day, suggesting that I devote a Tower of Babel broadcast to the PIP to celebrate some anniversary or other; to make the program more exciting, the PIP would stage a mock arrest of cocaine smugglers, complete with a shoot-out…

One of the calls I received, when the six-month period I had agreed to work for the channel was nearly over, came from a friend I hadn’t seen for ages: Rosita Corpancho. There was her warm voice with its drawling Loretano accent, just as in my university years. There, too, intact or perhaps even increased, was her enthusiastic devotion to the Summer Institute of Linguistics. Surely I remembered the Institute? Of course, Rosita…Well, the Institute was about to celebrate its I-don’t-know-how-many-years in Peru, and what was more, it would soon be packing its bags, having decided that its mission in Amazonia had ended. Would it be possible, perhaps, for the Tower of Babel…? I interrupted her to say that, yes, I would be pleased to do a documentary on the work of the linguist-missionaries. And would take advantage of the trip to the jungle to do a program on some of the lesser-known tribes, something we’d had in mind from the beginning. Rosita was delighted and told me she would coordinate everything with the Institute so that we could get about readily in the jungle. Had I any particular tribe in mind? Without hesitation I answered: “The Machiguengas.”

Ever since my unsuccessful attempts in the early sixties at writing about the Machiguenga storytellers, the subject had never been far from my mind. It returned every now and then, like an old love, not quite dead coals yet, whose embers would suddenly burst into flame. I had gone on taking notes and scribbling rough drafts that I invariably tore up. And reading, every time I could lay my hands on them, the papers and articles about Machiguengas that kept appearing here and there in scientific journals. The lack of interest in the tribe was giving way to curiosity on several counts. The French anthropologist France-Marie Casevitz-Renard, and another, an American, Johnson Allen, had spent long periods among them and had described their organization, their work methods, their kinship structure, their symbolism, their sense of time. A Swiss ethnologist, Gerhard Baer, who had also lived among them, had made a thorough study of their religion, and Father Joaquin Barriales had begun publishing, in Spanish translation, his large collection of Machiguenga myths and songs. A number of Peruvian anthropologists, classmates of Mascarita’s, notably Camino Díez Canseco and Víctor J. Guevara, had studied the tribe’s customs and beliefs.

But never in any of these contemporary works had I found any information whatsoever about storytellers. Oddly enough, all reference to them broke off around the fifties. Had the function of storyteller been dying out and finally disappeared at the very time that the Schneils had discovered it? In the reports that the Dominican missionaries — Fathers Pío Aza, Vicente de Cenitagoya, and Andrés Ferrero — wrote about them in the thirties and forties, there were frequent allusions to storytellers. And even earlier, among nineteenth-century travelers as well. One of the first references occurs in the book written by Paul Marcoy, the explorer. On the banks of the Urubamba he came across an “orateur,” whom the French traveler witnessed literally hypnotizing an audience of Antis for hours on end. “Do you think those Antis were Machiguengas?” the anthropologist Luis Román asked me, showing me the reference. I was certain they were. Why did modern anthropologists never mention storytellers? It was a question I asked myself each time one of these studies or field observations came to my attention, and I saw, once again, that no mention was made, even in passing, of those wandering tellers of tales, who seemed to me to be the most exquisite and precious exemplars of that people, numbering a mere handful, and who, in any event, had forged that curious emotional link between the Machiguengas and my own vocation (not to say, quite simply, my own life).

Why, in the course of all those years, had I been unable to write my story about storytellers? The answer I used to offer myself, each time I threw the half-finished manuscript of that elusive story into the wastebasket, was the difficulty of inventing, in Spanish and within a logically consistent intellectual framework, a literary form that would suggest, with any reasonable degree of credibility, how a primitive man with a magico-religious mentality would go about telling a story. All my attempts led each time to the impasse of a style that struck me as glaringly false, as implausible as the various ways in which philosophers and novelists of the Enlightenment had put words into the mouths of their exotic characters in the eighteenth century, when the theme of the “noble savage” was fashionable in Europe. Despite these failures, perhaps because of them, the temptation was still there, and every now and then, revived by some fortuitous circumstance, it took on new life, and the murmurous, fleeting, rude, and untamed silhouette of the storyteller invaded my house and my dreams. How could I fail to have been moved at the thought of seeing the Machiguengas face-to-face at last?

Since that trip in mid-1958 when I discovered the Peruvian jungle, I had returned to Amazonia several times: to Iquitos, to San Martín, to the Alto Marañón, to Madre de Dios, to Tingo Maria. But I had not been back to Pucallpa. In the twenty-three years that had gone by, that tiny, dusty village that I remembered as being full of dark, gloomy houses and evangelical churches, had been through an industrial and commercial “boom,” followed by a depression, and now, as Lucho Llosa, Alejandro Pérez, and I landed there one September afternoon in 1981 to film what was to be the next-to-last program of the Tower of Babel, it was in the first stages of another “boom,” though for bad reasons this time: trafficking in cocaine. The rush of heat and the burning light, in whose embrace people and things stand out so sharply (unlike Lima, where even bright sunlight has a grayish cast), are something that always has the effect on me of an emulsive draft of enthusiasm.

But that morning brought the discovery that it was the Schneils whom the Institute had sent to meet us at the Pucallpa airport, and that impressed me even more than the heat and the beautiful landscape of Amazonia. The Schneils in person. They had come to the end of their quarter of a century in the Amazon, the whole of it spent working with the Machiguengas. They were surprised that I remembered them — I have the feeling they didn’t remember me at all — and could still recall so many details of what they had told me back then, during our two conversations at the Yarinacocha base. As we bounced this way and that in the jeep on our way to the Institute, they showed me photographs of their children, young people, some already through college, living in the States. Did they all speak Machiguenga? Of course, it was the family’s second language, even before Spanish. I was pleased to learn that the Schneils would be our guides and interpreters in the villages we visited.