Mario Vargas Llosa: The Storyteller

But Saúl had not gone off in the same way they had. He erased all trace of his departure and of his intentions, leading those who knew him to believe that he was emigrating to Israel. What else could the alibi of the Jew making the Return mean, except that, on leaving Lima, Saúl Zuratas had irrevocably decided that he was going to change his life, his name, his habits, his traditions, his god, everything he had been up until then? It is evident that he left Lima with the intention of never coming back, of being another person forever.

I am able to follow him this far, though not without difficulty. I believe that his identification with this small, marginal, nomadic community had — as his father conjectured — something to do with the fact that he was Jewish, a member of another community which had also been a wandering, marginal one throughout its history, a pariah among the world’s societies, like the Machiguengas in Peru, grafted onto them, yet not assimilated and never entirely accepted. And, surely, his fellow feeling for the Machiguengas was influenced, as I used to tease him, by that enormous birthmark that made of him a marginal among marginals, a man whose destiny would always bear the stigma of ugliness. I can accept that among the worshippers of the spirits of trees and thunder, the ritual users of tobacco and ayahuasca brews, Mascarita would feel more at home — dissolved in a collective being — than among the Jews or the Christians of his country. In a very subtle and personal way, by going to the Alto Urubamba to be born again, Saúl made his Alyah .

Where I find it impossible to follow him — an insuperable difficulty that pains and frustrates me — is in the next stage: the transformation of the convert into the storyteller. It is this facet of Saúl’s story, naturally, that moves me most; it is what makes me think of it continually and weave and unweave it a thousand times; it is what has impelled me to put it into writing in the hope that if I do so, it will cease to haunt me.

Becoming a storyteller was adding what appeared impossible to what was merely improbable. Going back in time from trousers and tie to a loincloth and tattoos, from Spanish to the agglutinative crackling of Machiguenga, from reason to magic and from a monotheistic religion or Western agnosticism to pagan animism, is a feat hard to swallow, though still possible, with a certain effort of imagination. The rest of the story, however, confronts me only with darkness, and the harder I try to see through it, the more impenetrable it becomes.

Talking the way a storyteller talks means being able to feel and live in the very heart of that culture, means having penetrated its essence, reached the marrow of its history and mythology, given body to its taboos, images, ancestral desires, and terrors. It means being, in the most profound way possible, a rooted Machiguenga, one of that ancient lineage who — in the period in which this Firenze, where I am writing, produced its dazzling effervescence of ideas, paintings, buildings, crimes, and intrigues — roamed the forests of my country, bringing and bearing away those tales, lies, fictions, gossip, and jokes that make a community of that people of scattered beings, keeping alive among them the feeling of oneness, of constituting something fraternal and solid. That my friend Saúl gave up being all that he was and might have become so as to roam through the Amazonian jungle, for more than twenty years now, perpetuating against wind and tide — and, above all, against the very concepts of modernity and progress — the tradition of that invisible line of wandering storytellers, is something that memory now and again brings back to me, and, as on that day when I first heard of it, in the starlit darkness of the village of New Light, it opens my heart more forcefully than fear or love has ever done.

Darkness has fallen and there are stars in the Florentine night, though not as bright as those in the jungle. I have a feeling that at any moment I’ll run out of ink (the shops in this city where I might get a refill for my pen are also locked up tight for their chiusura estivale, naturally). The heat is unbearable, and my room in the Pensione Alejandra is alive with mosquitoes buzzing and circling around my head. I could take a shower and go out for a stroll in search of diversion. There might be a breath of a breeze on the Lungarno, and if I walk along it, the spectacle of the floodlit embankments, bridges, and palaces, always beautiful, will lead to another, fiercer, spectacle: the one on the Cascine, by day the respectable promenade of ladies and children, but at this time of night the hangout of whores, gays, and drug dealers. I could mingle with the young people, high on music and marijuana in the Piazza del Santo Spirito or the Piazza della Signoria, become at this hour a motley Cour des Miracles where four, five, even ten different impromptu shows are simultaneously staged: Caribbean maraca players and acrobats, Turkish ropewalkers, Moroccan fire-eaters, Spanish student serenaders, French mimes, American jazz musicians, gypsy fortune-tellers, German guitarists, Hungarian flutists. Sometimes it is enjoyable to lose oneself in this colorful, youthful multitude. But tonight I know that wherever I might wander — on the ocher stone bridges over the Arno, or beneath the trees of the Cascine, each with its waiting prostitute, or the straining muscles of the Neptune fountain, or Cellini’s bronze statue of Perseus stained with pigeon droppings — wherever I might try to find refuge from the heat, the mosquitoes, the rapture of my spirit, I would still hear, close by, unceasing, crackling, immemorial, that Machiguenga storyteller.

Firenze, July 1985

London, May 13, 1987

Like all the novels I have written, this one owes much to the help, voluntary or involuntary, of a number of institutions and individuals. I should like to mention the Summer Institute of Linguistics, the Dominican Mission to the Urubamba, and the CIPA (Centro de Investigacidn y PromodSn Amazdnica), and thank them for the hospitality offered me in the jungle; Vicente de Szyszlo and Luis Román, my excellent traveling companions in Amazonia; and Father Joaquin Barriales, O.P., the collector and translator of many Machiguenga songs and myths that appear in my book .