Mario Vargas Llosa - The Storyteller

We ate; we lay down for a night’s rest on the mats; in just a little while, long before dawn, I heard him get up. I saw him go out and sit down on a stone a few paces away from the hut. There was Tasurinchi, sitting brooding in the moonlight. I got up in the semi-darkness and went out to talk to him. He was grinding up tobacco to inhale. I saw him tamp down the powder in the hollow turkey bone, and then he asked me to blow it up his nose for him. I placed it in one nostril and blew; he breathed it in deeply, anxiously, closing his eyes. Then I placed it in his other nostril and blew. And after that he breathed the powder that was left into my nose. He was worried, Tasurinchi was. Tormented, even. Saying: “I can’t sleep,” in the voice of a man who is very tired. “Two things have happened that make a person think. The river stole one of my hens and the earth started shaking. And, what’s more, the sky grew dark. What must I do?” I didn’t know; I was as bewildered as he was. Why are you asking me that, Tasurinchi? “These things happening, one right after the other, almost at the same time, mean that I must do something,” he said to me. “But I don’t know what. There’s no one I can ask hereabouts. The seripigari is many moons’ walk away, up the Sepahua.”

Tasurinchi spent the whole day sitting on that stone, not speaking to anyone. Neither drinking nor eating. When his wife came out to bring him some mashed bananas, he wouldn’t even let her come near; he made a threatening gesture with his hand as though he were about to hit her again. That night he didn’t come inside his hut. Kashiri shone brightly up in the sky and I could see Tasurinchi, not moving, his head buried in his chest, trying his best to understand these misfortunes. What were they telling him to do? Who knows? The whole family was silent, worried, even the little ones. Watching him anxiously, not daring to move. Wondering: What’s going to happen?

Around midday, Tasurinchi, the one by the Timpanía, got up from the stone. He approached the hut with a lively step; we saw him coming, beckoning to us with open arms. A determined expression on his face, it seemed.

“We start walking,” he said, his voice earnest, commanding. “Get moving. This minute. We must go far from here. That’s what it means. If we stay, evils will come, catastrophes will occur. That’s the message. I’ve understood it at last. This place has had enough of us. So we must go.”

It must have been hard for him to make up his mind. The faces of the women and of the men too, the sadness of the family showed how painful it was for them to leave. They’d been by the Timpanía for a good while. With the crops they sold to the White Fathers of the Sepahua they’d been buying things. They seemed happy, perhaps. Had they perhaps met their destiny? They hadn’t, it seems. Were they becoming corrupt staying in the same place such a long time? Who knows? Leaving everything like that, all of a sudden, without knowing where they were going, without knowing whether they would ever again have what they had left behind, must have been a great sacrifice. It must have meant sorrow for one and all.

But nobody in the family protested; neither the wife, nor the children, nor the lad who was living close by because he wanted to marry Tasurinchi’s eldest daughter. Not one of them protested. Old and young began getting ready, there and then. “Quickly, quickly, we must get away from here; this place has become an enemy,” Tasurinchi said, hurrying them along. He was bursting with energy again, impatient to leave. Saying: “Yes, quickly, quickly, we must go, we must escape,” bustling about, spurring himself on.

I helped them get ready and left with them. Before leaving, we burned down the two huts and anything that couldn’t be carried, as though someone had died. “All the impure things we have remain here,” Tasurinchi assured his family. We walked for several moons. There was little food. No animals fell into the traps. At last we caught some catfish in a pond. We ate. When night came, we sat and talked. I talked to them all night long, perhaps.

“I feel more at peace now,” Tasurinchi said to me when I left them several moons later. “I don’t believe I’ll fall into such a rage again. I’ve done so very often of late. Perhaps that’s over and done with. I did the right thing by starting to walk, it seems. I feel it here, in my breast.” “How did you know you had to leave that place?” I asked him. “I remembered something I knew when I was born,” he answered. “Or perhaps I learned it in a trance. If an evil occurs on the earth, it’s because people have stopped paying attention to the earth, because they don’t look after it the way it ought to be looked after. Can it talk the way we do? To say what it wants to say, it has to do something. Shake, perhaps. To say: Don’t forget me. To say: I’m alive, too. I don’t want to be ill-treated. That’s what it could have been complaining of when it jiggled around. Perhaps I made it sweat too much. Perhaps the White Fathers aren’t what they seem, but kamagarinis, allies of Kientibakori, advising me to go on living there where I was, just because they want to harm the earth. Who knows? But if it complained, then I had to do something, you see. How do we help the sun, the rivers? How do we help this world, everything that’s alive? By walking. I’ve fulfilled the obligation, I believe. Look, it already shows. Listen to the ground beneath your feet; walk on it, storyteller. How still and firm it is! It must be pleased, now that it can feel us walking on it once again.”

Where can Tasurinchi be now? I don’t know. Can he have stayed on in that region where we parted? Who knows? Someday I’ll know. He is well, most likely. Content. Walking, perhaps.

That, anyway, is what I have learned.

When I left Tasurinchi, I turned around and started walking toward the Timpanía. I hadn’t been to visit the Machiguengas there for some time. But before I got there, various unexpected things happened and I had to take off in another direction. That’s why I’m here with you, perhaps.

As I was trying to jump over a bed of nettles, I got a thorn in my foot. Here, in this foot. I sucked and spat the thorn out. Some evil must have remained inside my foot because, very soon, it started hurting. It hurt a lot. I stopped walking and sat down. Why had this happened to me? I searched in my pouch. That’s where I keep the herbs the seripigari gave me against snakebite, against sickness, against strange things. And in the strap of my knapsack was the iserepito that wards off bad spells. I still carry that little stone about with me. Why didn’t the herbs or the iserepito protect me from the little devil in the nettles? My foot was so swollen it looked as if it were somebody else’s. Was I changing into a monster? I made a fire and put my foot close to the flames so the evil would come out from inside with the sweat. It hurt terribly; I roared, trying to frighten away the pain. I must have fallen asleep from all that sweating and roaring. And in my sleep I kept hearing parrots chattering and laughing.

I had to stay in that place for many moons while the swelling in my foot went down. I tried to walk, but ay, ay, it hurt dreadfully. I wasn’t short of food, happily; I had cassava and maize and some bananas in my knapsack. And what’s more, luck was with me, it seems. Right there, without having to get up, by crawling just a little way, I managed to break off a small green branch and pin it down with a knotted cord that I hid in the dirt. Very soon a partridge got caught in the trap. That gave me food for several days. But they were days of torment, not because of the thorn, but because of the parrots. Why were there so many of them? Why were they watching me so closely? There were any number of flocks; they settled on all the branches and bushes around. More and more kept arriving. They had all begun looking at me. Was something happening? Why were they squawking so much? Did all that chattering have anything to do with me? Were they talking about me? Now and then they would come out with one of those odd parrot laughs that sound so human. Were they making mock of me? Saying: You’ll never leave here, storyteller. I threw stones at them to scare them off. Useless. They flapped about for a moment and settled on their perches again. There they were, myriads of them, above my head. What is it they want? What’s going to happen?