Mario Vargas Llosa: The Storyteller

Mascarita didn’t get angry with me, because he never got angry with anyone about anything, nor did he put on a superior I-forgive-you-for-you-know-not-what-you-say air. But I could feel that when I provoked him in this way I was hurting him as much as if I’d run down Don Salomón Zuratas. He hid it perfectly, I admit. Perhaps he had already achieved the Machiguenga ideal of never feeling anger so that the parallel lines that uphold the earth would not give way. Moreover, he would never discuss this subject, or any other, in a general way, in ideological terms. He had a built-in resistance to any sort of abstract pronouncement. Problems always presented themselves to him in concrete form: what he’d seen with his own eyes, and the consequences that anyone with an ounce of brains in his head could infer from it.

“Fishing with explosives, for example. People assume it’s forbidden. But go have a look, pal. There isn’t a river or a stream where the mountain people and the Viracochas — that’s what they call us white people — don’t save time by fishing wholesale with dynamite. Save time! Can you imagine what that means? Charges of dynamite blowing up schools of fish day and night. Whole species are disappearing, old man.”

We were talking at a table in the Bar Palermo in La Colmena, drinking beer. Outside, the sun was shining, people hurried past, jalopies honked aggressively, and inside we were surrounded by the smoky atmosphere, smelling of frying oil and urine, typical of all the little cafés in downtown Lima.

“How about fishing with poison, Mascarita? Wasn’t that invented by the tribal Indians? That makes them despoilers of the Amazon basin, too.”

I said that so he’d fire his heavy artillery at me. And he did, of course. It was untrue, totally untrue. They did fish with barbasco and cumo, but only in the side channels and backwaters of the rivers, or in water holes that remained on islands after the floodwaters had receded. And only at certain times of year. Never in the spawning season, the signs of which they knew by heart. At those times they fished with nets, harpoons, or traps, or with their bare hands. You’d be goggle-eyed if you saw them, pal. On the other hand, the Creoles used barbasco and cumo all year round, and everywhere. Water poisoned thousands of times, decade after decade. Did I realize? Not only did they kill off all the fry at spawning time, but they were rotting the roots of trees and plants along the riverbanks as well.

Did he idealize them? I’m sure he did. And also, perhaps without meaning to, he exaggerated the extent of the disasters so as to reinforce his arguments. But it was evident that for Mascarita all those shad and catfish poisoned by barbasco and cumo, all the paiche destroyed by the fishers of Loreto, Madre de Dios, San Martín, or Amazonas, hurt him neither more nor less than if the victim had been his talking parrot. And, of course, it was the same when he spoke of the extensive tree felling done by order of the timber men—“My uncle Hipólito is one of them, I’m sorry to say”—who were cutting down the most valuable trees. He spoke to me at length of the practices of the Viracochas and the mountain people who had come down from the Andes to conquer the jungle and clear the woods with fires that burn over enormous areas of land, which after one or two crops become barren because of the lack of humus and the erosion caused by rain. Not to mention, pal, the extermination of animals, the frantic greed for hides and skins which, for example, had made of jaguars, lizards, pumas, snakes, and dozens of other species biological rarities on the point of vanishing. It was a long speech that I remember very well on account of something that cropped up at the end of the conversation, after we had polished off several bottles of beer and some cracklings (which he was extremely fond of). From the trees and the fish his peroration always circled back to the main reason for his anxiety: the tribes. At this rate they, too, would die out.

“Seriously, Mascarita, do you think polygamy, animism, head shrinking, and witch doctoring with tobacco brews represent a superior form of culture?”

An Andean boy was throwing bucketfuls of sawdust on the spittle and other filth lying on the red tile floor of the Bar Palermo as a half-breed followed behind him, sweeping up. Saúl looked at me for a long while without answering.

At last he shook his head. “Superior, no. I’ve never said or thought so, little brother.” He was very serious now. “Inferior, perhaps, if the question is posed in terms of infant mortality, the status of women, polygamy or monogamy, handcrafts or industry. Don’t think I idealize them. Not in the least.”

He fell silent, as though distracted by something, perhaps the quarrel at a neighboring table that had flared up and died down rhythmically since we first sat down. But it wasn’t that. Memory had distracted him. Suddenly he seemed sad. “Among the men who walk and those of other tribes there are many things that would shock you very much, old man. I don’t deny that.”

The fact, for instance, that the Aguarunas and the Huambisas of the Alto Marañón tear out their daughters’ hymen at her menarche and eat it, that slavery exists in many tribes, and in some communities they let the old people die at the first signs of weakness, on the pretext that their souls have been called away and their destiny fulfilled. But the worst thing of all, the hardest to accept, perhaps, from our point of view, is what, with a little black humor, could be called the perfectionism of the tribes of the Arawak family. Perfectionism, Saúl? Yes, something that from the outset would appear as cruel to me as it had to him, old buddy. That babies born with physical defects, lame, maimed, blind, with more or fewer fingers than usual, or a harelip, were killed by their own mothers, who threw them in the river or buried them alive. Anybody would naturally be shocked by such customs.

He looked at me for a good while, silent and thoughtful, as if searching for the right words for what he wanted to say to me.

Suddenly he touched his enormous birthmark. “I wouldn’t have passed the test, pal. They’d have liquidated me,” he whispered. “They say the Spartans did the same thing, right? That little monsters, Gregor Samsas, were hurled down from the top of Mount Taygetus, right?”

He laughed, I laughed, but we both knew that he wasn’t joking and that there was no cause for laughter. He explained to me that, curiously enough, though they were pitiless when it came to babies born defective, they were very tolerant with all those, children or adults, who were victims of some accident or illness that damaged them physically. Saúl, at least, had noticed no hostility toward the disabled or the demented in the tribes. His hand was still on the deep purple scab of his half-face.

“But that’s the way they are and we should respect them. Being that way has helped them to live in harmony with their forests for hundreds of years. Though we don’t understand their beliefs and some of their customs offend us, we have no right to kill them off.”

I believe that that morning in the Bar Palermo was the only time he ever alluded, not jokingly but seriously, even dramatically, to what was undoubtedly a tragedy in his life, even though he concealed it with such style and grace: the excrescence that made him a walking incitement to mockery and disgust, and must have affected all his relationships, especially with women. (He was extremely shy with them; I had noticed at San Marcos that he avoided them and only entered into conversation with one of our women classmates if she spoke to him first.) At last he removed his hand from his face with a gesture of annoyance, as though regretting that he had touched the birthmark, and launched into another lecture.