Mario Vargas Llosa: The Storyteller

“Some of the porters are so terrified they have to be tied to the rafts, the way they do with cows, to get them through the gorge. You can’t imagine what it’s like, pal!”

A Spanish missionary from the Dominican mission in Quillabamba had shown him mysterious petroglyphs scattered throughout the area; Saúl had eaten monkey, turtle, and grubs and gotten incredibly soused on cassava masato.

“The natives of the region believe the world began in the Pongo de Mainique. And I swear to you there’s a sacred aura about the place, something indefinable that makes your hair stand on end. You can’t imagine what it’s like, pal. Really far out!”

This experience had consequences that no one could have envisaged. Not even Saúl himself, of that I’m sure.

He went back to Quillabamba for Christmas and spent the long year-end vacation there. He returned during the July vacation between terms and again the following December. Every time there was a break at San Marcos, even for only a few days, he’d head for the jungle in anything he could find: trucks, trains, jitneys, buses. He came back from these trips full of enthusiasm and eager to talk, his eyes bright with amazement at the treasures he’d discovered. Everything that came from there interested and excited him tremendously. Meeting the legendary Fidel Pereira, for instance. The son of a white man from Cusco and a Machiguenga woman, he was a mixture of feudal lord and aboriginal cacique. In the last third of the nineteenth century a man from a good Cusco family, fleeing from the law, went deep into those forests, where the Machiguengas had sheltered him. He had married a woman of the tribe. His son, Fidel, lived astride the two cultures, acting like a white when with whites and like a Machiguenga when with Machiguengas. He had several lawfully wedded wives, any number of concubines, and a constellation of sons and daughters, thanks to whom he ran all the coffee plantations and farms between Quillabamba and the Pongo de Mainique, putting the whole tribe to work and paying them next to nothing. But, in spite of that, Mascarita felt a certain liking for him:

“He uses them, of course. But at least he doesn’t despise them. He knows all about their culture and is proud of it. And when other people try to trample on them, he protects them.”

In the stories he told me, Saúl’s enthusiasm made the most trivial happening — clearing a patch of forest or fishing for gamitana — take on heroic dimensions. But, above all, it was the world of the Indians with their primitive practices and their frugal life, their animism and their magic, that seemed to have bewitched him. I now know that those Indians, whose language he had begun to learn with the help of native pupils in the Dominican mission of Quillabamba — he once sang me a sad, repetitive, incomprehensible song, shaking a seed-filled gourd to mark the rhythm — were the Machiguengas. I now know that he had made the posters with their little drawings showing the dangers of fishing with dynamite that I had seen piled up in his house in Breña, to distribute to the whites and mestizos of the Alto Urubamba — the children, grandchildren, nephews, bastards, and stepsons of Fidel Pereira — in the hope of protecting the species of fish that fed those same Indians who, a quarter of a century later, would be photographed by the now deceased Gabriele Malfatti.

With hindsight, knowing what happened to him later — I have thought about this a lot — I can say that Saúl experienced a conversion. In a cultural sense and perhaps in a religious one also. It is the only concrete case I have had occasion to observe from close at hand that has seemed to give meaning to, to make real, what the priests at the school where I studied tried to convey to us during catechism through phrases such as “receiving grace,” “being touched by grace,” “falling into the snares of grace.” From his first contact with the Amazon jungle, Mascarita was caught in a spiritual trap that made a different person of him. Not just because he lost all interest in law and began working for a degree in ethnology, or because of the new direction his reading took, leaving precisely one surviving literary character, Gregor Samsa, but because from that moment on he began to be preoccupied, obsessed, by two concerns which in the years to come would be his only subjects of conversation: the plight of Amazonian cultures and the death throes of the forests that sheltered them.

“You have a one-track mind these days, Mascarita. A person can’t talk with you about anything else lately.”

“Pucha! That’s true, old buddy. I haven’t let you get a word in edgewise. How about a little lecture, if you’re so inclined, on Tolstoy, class war, novels of chivalry?”

“Aren’t you exaggerating a little, Saúl?”

“No, pal. As a matter of fact, I’m understating. I swear. What’s being done in the Amazon is a crime. There’s no justification for it, whatever way you look at it. Believe me, man, it’s no laughing matter. Put yourself in their place, if only for a second. Where do they have left to go? They’ve been driven out of their lands for centuries, pushed farther into the interior each time, farther and farther. The extraordinary thing is that, despite so many disasters, they haven’t disappeared. They’re still there, surviving. Makes you want to take your hat off to them. Damn it all, there I go again! Come on, let’s talk about Sartre. What gets my back up is that nobody gives a hoot in hell about what’s happening to them.”

Why did it matter to him so much? It certainly wasn’t for political reasons, at any rate. Politics to Mascarita was the most uninteresting thing in the world. When we talked about politics I was aware that he was making an effort to please me, since at that time I had revolutionary enthusiasms and had taken to reading Marx and talking about the social relations of production. Such subjects bored Saúl as much as the rabbi’s sermons did. Nor would it be accurate to say that these subjects interested him on the broad ethical grounds that the plight of the Indians in the jungle mirrored the social iniquities of our country, inasmuch as Saúl did not react in the same way to other injustices closer to home, which he may not even have noticed. The situation of the Andean Indians, for instance — and there were several million of them, instead of the few thousand in the Amazon jungle — or the way middle- and upper-class Peruvians paid and treated their servants.

No, it was only that specific expression of human lack of conscience, irresponsibility, and cruelty, to which the men, the trees, the animals, and the rivers of the jungle had fallen prey, that — for reasons I found hard to understand at the time, as perhaps he did, too — transformed Saúl Zuratas, erasing all other concerns from his mind and turning him into a man with a fixation. With the result that, if he had not been such a good person, so generous and helpful, I would very likely have stopped seeing him. For there was no doubt that he’d become a bore on the subject.

Occasionally, to see how far his obsession might lead him, I would provoke him. What did he suggest, when all was said and done? That, in order not to change the way of life and the beliefs of a handful of tribes still living, many of them, in the Stone Age, the rest of Peru abstain from developing the Amazon region? Should sixteen million Peruvians renounce the natural resources of three-quarters of their national territory so that seventy or eighty thousand Indians could quietly go on shooting at each other with bows and arrows, shrinking heads and worshipping boa constrictors? Should we forgo the agricultural, cattle-raising, and commercial potential of the region so that the world’s ethnologists could enjoy studying at first hand kinship ties, potlatches, the rites of puberty, marriage, and death that these human oddities had been practicing, virtually unchanged, for hundreds of years? No, Mascarita, the country had to move forward. Hadn’t Marx said that progress would come dripping blood? Sad though it was, it had to be accepted. We had no alternative. If the price to be paid for development and industrialization for the sixteen million Peruvians meant that those few thousand naked Indians would have to cut their hair, wash off their tattoos, and become mestizos — or, to use the ethnologists’ most detested word, become acculturated — well, there was no way round it.