Mario Vargas Llosa - The Storyteller

The mosquitoes were drilling into my ankles. I could feel their bites and almost see them piercing my skin, which would now swell into horribly painful little blisters. It was the price I had to pay every time I came to the jungle. Amazonia had never failed to exact it of me.

“A huge birthmark?” I stammered, scarcely able to get the words out. “Do you mean uta? An ulcer eating his face away, like that little boy we saw this morning in New World…”

“No, no. A birthmark. An enormous dark birthmark,” Edwin Schneil interrupted, raising his hand. “It covered the whole right side of his face. An impressive sight, I assure you. I’d never seen a man with one like it, never. Neither among the Machiguengas nor anywhere else. And I haven’t seen its like since, either.”

I could feel the mosquitoes biting me on all the parts of my body that had no protection: face, neck, arms, hands. The clouds that had hidden the moon were gone and there was Kashiri, clear and bright and not yet full, looking at us. A shiver ran down my body from head to foot.

“He had red hair?” I murmured very slowly. My mouth was dry, but my hands were sweating.

“Redder than mine.” He laughed. “A real gringo, I swear. Though perhaps an albino, after all. I didn’t have much time to get a close look at him. I’ve told you what a state I was in after that storytelling session. As though I’d been anesthetized. And when I came to, he was gone, of course. So he wouldn’t have to talk to me or bear the sight of my face any longer.”

“How old would you say he was?” I managed to get out, with immense fatigue, as though I’d been the one who’d been talking all night long.

Edwin Schneil shrugged. “Who knows?” He sighed. “You’ve doubtless realized how hard it is to tell how old they are. They themselves don’t know. They don’t calculate their age the same way we do, and what’s more, they all reach that average age very quickly. What you might call Machiguenga age. But certainly younger than I am. About your age, or perhaps a bit younger.”

I pretended to cough two or three times to conceal how unnerved I was. I suddenly felt a fierce, intolerable desire to smoke. It was as though every pore in my body had suddenly opened, demanding to inhale a thousand and one puffs of smoke. Five years before, I had smoked what I thought would be my last cigarette; I was convinced that I’d freed myself from tobacco forever; for a long time now, the very smell of cigarette smoke had irritated me, and here, out of the blue, in the darkness of New Light, an overwhelming urge to smoke had arisen from who knows what mysterious depths.

“Did he speak well?” I heard myself ask softly.

“Speak well?” Edwin Schneil asked. “He spoke on and on, without stopping, without pausing, without punctuation marks.” He laughed, deliberately exaggerating. “The way storytellers talk. Spilling out all the things that ever were and ever will be. He was what he was, in a word: a teller of tales, and a real chatterbox.”

“I mean Machiguenga,” I said. “Did he speak it well? Couldn’t he…”

“Go on,” Schneil said.

“Nothing,” I said. “A nonsensical idea. Nothing, nothing.”

Though I was under the impression that my attention was concentrated on the gnats and mosquitoes biting me and my longing to smoke, I must have asked Edwin Schneil, as in a dream, with a strange ache in my jaws and tongue, as though I were exhausted from using them too much, how long ago all this had been—“Oh, it must have been three and a half years or so ago,” he replied — and whether he had heard him again, or seen him, or had news of him, and listened as he answered no to all three questions, as I knew he would: it was a subject the Machiguengas didn’t like to talk about.

When I said good night to the Schneils — they were sleeping at Martín’s — and went off to the hut where my hammock was, I woke up Lucho Llosa to ask him for a cigarette. “Since when have you smoked?” he said in surprise as he handed me one with hands fumbling from sleep.

I didn’t light it. I held it between my fingers at my lips, going through the motions of smoking, all through that long night, while I swung gently in the hammock, listening to the quiet breathing of Lucho, Alejandro, and the pilots, hearing the chirring of the forest, feeling the seconds go by, one by one, slow, solemn, improbable, filled with wonder.

We returned to Yarinacocha very early. Halfway there, we were forced to land because we were overtaken by a storm. In the small Campa village on the banks of the Urubamba where we took refuge, there was an American missionary who might have been a character out of Faulkner — single-minded, fearlessly stubborn, and frighteningly heroic. He had lived in this remote corner of the world for years with his wife and several small children. In my memory I can still see him standing in the torrential rain, energetically leading hymns with both arms and singing in his throaty voice to set a good example, under a flimsy shelter that threatened to collapse at any moment beneath the tremendous downpour. The twenty or so Campas barely moved their lips and gave the impression that they were making no sound, yet kept their eyes riveted on him with the same rapt fascination with which the Machiguengas doubtless contemplated their storytellers.

When we resumed our flight, the Schneils asked me whether I wasn’t feeling well. Yes, perfectly well, I replied, though rather tired, since I hadn’t slept very much. We stayed in Yarinacocha just long enough to climb into the jeep that would take us to Pucallpa to catch the Fawcett flight to Lima. In the plane Lucho asked me: “Why the long face? What went wrong this time?” I was on the point of explaining why I wasn’t saying a word and looked more or less stunned, but when I opened my mouth I realized I wouldn’t be able to. It couldn’t be summed up in a mere anecdote; it was too unreal and too literary to be plausible, and too serious to joke about as though it were just an amusing incident.

I now knew the reason for the taboo. Did I? Yes. Could it be possible? Yes, it could. That was why they avoided talking about them, that was why they had jealously hidden them from anthropologists, linguists, Dominican missionaries over the last twenty years. That was why they did not appear in the writings of modern ethnologists on the Machiguengas. They were not protecting the institution or the idea of the storyteller in the abstract. They were protecting him. No doubt because he had asked them to. So as not to arouse the Viracochas’ curiosity about this strange graft onto the tribe. And they had gone on doing as he asked for so many years now, providing him refuge by way of a taboo which had spread to the entire institution, to the hablador in the abstract. If that was how it had been, they had a great deal of respect for him. If that was how it was, in their eyes he was one of them.

We began editing the program that same night at the channel after going home to shower and change, and I to a pharmacy for ointment and antihistamines for the insect bites. We decided that the program would be in the form of a travelogue, intercutting commentaries and recollections with the interviews we’d done in Yarinacocha and the Alto Urubamba. As he edited the material, Moshé grumbled at us as usual for not having taken certain shots some other way, or for having taken others the way we had. It was then that I remembered that he, too, was Jewish.

“How do you get along with the Chosen People here in Peru?”

“Like a monkey with a mirror, of course,” he said. “Why? Do you want to get yourself circumcised?”

“I wonder if you’d do me a favor. Would you have any way of finding out where a family of the community that went to Israel is now?”