Mario Vargas Llosa - The Storyteller

“Are we going to do a Tower of Babel on kibbutzim?” Lucho said. “In that case, we’ll have to do one on the Palestinian refugees. But how can we? Doesn’t the program end next week?”

“The Zuratas. The father, Don Salomón, had a little grocery store in Breña. The son, Saúl, was a friend of mine. They went to Israel in the early seventies, it seems. If you could find out their address there, you’d be doing me a favor.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” Moshé answered. “I imagine they keep a register of such things in the community.”

The program on the Institute of Linguistics and the Machiguengas turned out to be longer than we’d foreseen. When we gave it to Control they informed us that on that particular Sunday they’d sold space for a definite time slot, so that if we didn’t cut the program ourselves to exactly one hour, the operator would do it any old way he pleased when he put it on the air. Thoroughly pissed off, we had to cut it in a rush, as time was running short. We were already editing the final Tower of Babel for the following Sunday. We’d decided that it would be an anthology of the twenty-four previous programs. But as usual we had to change our plans. For the very start of the program, I’d tried to persuade Doris Gibson to let herself be interviewed and help us compile a short biography of her life as a founder and director of magazines, a businesswoman, a fighter against dictatorship and also its victim — on one famous occasion she’d hauled off and slapped the policemen who had come to seize copies of Caretas— and above all, a woman who, in a society that in those days was far more macho and prejudiced than it is now, had been able to make a career for herself and achieve success in fields that were considered male monopolies. At the same time, Doris had been one of the most beautiful women in Lima, courted by millionaires, and the muse of famous painters and poets. The impetuous Doris, who is nonetheless very shy, had turned me down, because, she said, the cameras intimidated her. But that last week she had changed her mind and sent word that she was willing to appear on the program.

I interviewed her, and that interview, together with the anthology, saw the end of the Tower of Babel. Faithful to its destiny, the final program, which Moshé, Lucho, Alejandro, and I watched at my house, sitting around a tableful of Chinese food and ice-cold beer, fell victim to technical imponderables. For one of those mysterious reasons — celestial sabotage — which were the daily bread of the channel, unexpected jazz numbers appeared out of nowhere just as the broadcast began and provided background music to all of Doris’s stories about General Odría’s dictatorship, police seizures of Caretas , and Sérvulo Gutiérrez’s paintings.

After the program was over and we were drinking to its death and non-resurrection, the phone rang. It was Doris, asking me whether it wouldn’t have been more appropriate to have backed her interview with Arequipan yaravíes (she is, among other things, a fiercely loyal Arequipeña) rather than that outlandish jazz. After Lucho, Moshé, and Alejandro had had a good laugh at the explanations I had invented to justify the use of jazz on the program, Moshé said: “By the way, before I forget, I found out what you asked me to.”

More than a week had gone by and I hadn’t reminded him, because I could guess the answer and was a little unnerved at the prospect of having my suspicions confirmed.

“It seems they never did go to Israel,” he said. “Where did you get the idea they’d left the country?”

“You mean the Zuratas?” I asked, knowing very well what he was talking about.

“Don Salomón, at least, didn’t go. He died here. He’s buried in the Jewish cemetery in Lima, the one on the Avenida Colonial.” Moshé took a scrap of paper out of his pocket and read: “October 23, 1960. That’s the day they buried him, if you need further details. My grandfather knew him and attended his funeral. As for his son, your friend, he may have gone to Israel, but I couldn’t find out for sure. None of the people I asked knew anything about him.”

But I do, I thought. I know everything.

“Did he have a big birthmark on his face?” Moshé asked. “My grandfather even remembers that. Did they call him the Phantom of the Opera?”

“An enormous one. We called him Mascarita.”

Good things happen and bad things happen. It’s bad that wisdom should be getting lost. Before, there were any number of seripigaris, and if the man who walks had any doubts about what to eat, how to cure the evil, or which stones protect against Kientibakori and his little devils, he went and asked. There was always a seripigari close by. Smoking, drinking brew, thinking, talking with the saankarites in the worlds up above, he could find the answer. But now there are few of them and some of them shouldn’t call themselves seripigaris. Can they counsel you? Their wisdom has dried up on them like a worm-eaten root, it seems. This brings much confusion. Wherever I go, that’s what the men who walk say. Could it be because we don’t keep on the move enough? they say. Can it be that we’ve grown lazy? We’re not fulfilling our obligation, perhaps.

That, anyway, is what I have learned.

The wisest seripigari I ever knew has gone. Maybe he’s come back; maybe not. He lived on the other side of the Gran Pongo, by the Kompiroshiato. His name was Tasurinchi. Nothing held any secrets for him, in this world or in the others. He could tell which worms you can eat by the color of their rings and the way they crawled. He looked at them like this, wrinkling up his eyes, with his deep gaze. He would study them for a good while. And there it came; he knew. Everything I know about worms I learned from him. The one that lives on giant reeds, the chakokieni, is good; the one that lives on lupana is bad. The one that lives on rotten tree trunks, the shigopi, is good, and also the one that lives on cassava fibers. The one that lodges in the shells of tortoises is extremely bad. The best and the tastiest is the one that lives on the pulp left after maize or cassava go through a sieve to make masato. This worm, the kororo, sweetens the mouth, relieves hunger, and brings untroubled sleep. But the worm that lives on the corpses of caimans washed up on the shores of a lake does the body harm and brings on the same visions as a bad trance.

Tasurinchi, the one from the Kompiroshiato, made people’s lives better. He had recipes for everything. Using everything. He taught me many of them. Here’s one I still remember. If someone dies from snakebite, his body must be burned immediately; otherwise, it will breed reptiles and the forest all around will teem with poisonous beings. And here’s another. It’s not enough just to burn the house of someone who’s gone; you have to do it with your back turned. Looking at the flames brings misfortune. It was frightening talking with that seripigari. You realized how much you didn’t know. Ignorance has its dangers, perhaps. “How have you learned so many things?” I asked him. And I said: “It’s as though you’d been living since before we started walking, and you’d seen everything and tried everything.”

“The most important thing is not to be impatient and allow what must happen to happen,” he answered. Saying: “If a man lives calmly, without getting impatient, he has time to think and to remember.” That way, he’ll meet his destiny, perhaps. He’ll live content, maybe. He won’t forget what he’s learned. If he gets impatient, rushing to outstrip time, the world gets out of order, it seems. And the soul falls into a spiderweb of mud. That is confusion. The worst thing that can happen, let’s say. In this world and in the soul of the man who walks. Then he doesn’t know what to do, where to go. He doesn’t know how to protect himself either, saying: What shall I do? What must I do? Then the devils and the little devils creep into his life and play with it. The way, perhaps, that children play with frogs, making them jump. Mistakes are always the result of confusion, it seems.”