Discovering the value of money had tragic consequences for Urakusa. Jum informed the bosses that he would no longer trade with them. This decision meant pure and simple ruin for the Viracochas of Santa María de Nieva who had received us so warmly, and who were themselves nothing more than a handful of miserable whites and mestizos, most of them illiterate and barefoot, living in conditions nearly as wretched as those of their victims. The fierce extortions they practiced on the Aguarunas did not make them rich; they earned barely enough to survive. Exploitation in this part of the world was carried out at a level little short of subhuman. That was the reason for the punitive expedition, and as they tortured Jum they kept repeating: “Forget the cooperative.”
All this had just happened. Jum’s wounds were still oozing pus. His hair had not grown back in. As they translated this story for us in the peaceful clearing, of Urakusa — Jum could get out little more than a few hoarse sentences in Spanish — I thought: “I must talk this over with Saúl.” What would Mascarita say? Would he admit that in a case like this it was quite obvious that what was to Urakusa’s advantage, to Jum’s, was not going backward but forward? That is to say, setting up their own cooperative, trading with the towns, prospering economically and socially so that it would no longer be possible to treat them the way the “civilized” people of Santa Maria de Nieva had done. Or would Saúl, unrealistically, deny that this was so, insist that the true solution was for the Viracochas to go away and let the inhabitants of Urakusa return to their traditional way of life?
Matos Mar and I stayed awake all that night, talking about Jum’s story and the horrifying condition of the weak and the poor in our country that it revealed. Invisible and silent, Saúl Zurata’s ghost took part in our conversation; both of us would have liked to have him there, offering his opinion and arguing. Matos Mar thought that Jum’s misfortune would provide Mascarita with further arguments to support his theory. Didn’t the entire episode prove that coexistence was impossible, that it led inevitably to the Viracochas’ domination of the Indians, to the gradual and systematic destruction of the weaker culture? Those savage drunkards from Santa María de Nieva would never, under any circumstances, lead the inhabitants of Urakusa on the path to modernization, but only to their extinction; their “culture” had no more right to hegemony than that of the Aguarunas, who, however primitive they might be, had at least developed sufficient knowledge and skill to coexist with Amazonia. In the name of age-old prior occupation, of history, of morality, it was necessary to recognize the Aguarunas’ sovereignty over these territories and to expel the foreign intruders from Santa María de Nieva.
I didn’t agree with Matos Mar; I thought Jum’s story was more likely to bring Saúl around to a more practical point of view, to accepting the lesser evil. Was there the slightest chance that a Peruvian government, of whatever political persuasion, would grant the tribes extraterritorial rights in the jungle? Obviously not. That being the case, why not change the Viracochas so that they’d treat the Indians differently?
We were stretched out on a floor of beaten earth, sharing a mosquito net, in a hut reeking of rubber (it was the storeroom of Urakusa), surrounded by the breathing of our slumbering companions and the unfamiliar sounds of the jungle. At the time, Matos Mar and I also shared socialist ideas and enthusiasms, and in the course of our talk together, the familiar subject of the social relations of production, which like a magic wand served to explain and resolve all problems, naturally cropped up. The problem of the Urakusas, that of all the tribes, should be seen as part of the general problem resulting from the class structure of Peruvian society. By substituting for the obsession with profit — individual gain — the idea of service to the community as the incentive to work, and reintroducing an attitude of solidarity and humanity into social relations, socialism would make possible that coexistence between modern and primitive Peru that Mascarita thought impossible and undesirable. In the new Peru, infused with the science of Marx and Mariategui, the Amazonian tribes would, at one and the same time, be able to adopt modern ways and to preserve their essential traditions and customs within the mosaic of cultures that would go to make up the future civilization of Peru. Did we really believe that socialism would ensure the integrity of our magico-religious cultures? Wasn’t there already sufficient evidence that industrial development, whether capitalist or communist, inevitably meant the annihilation of those cultures? Was there one exception anywhere in the world to this terrible, inexorable law? Thinking it over — in the light of the years that have since gone by, and from the vantage point of this broiling — hot Firenze — we were as unrealistic and romantic as Mascarita with his archaic, anti — historical utopia.
That long conversation with Matos Mar under the mosquito net, watching the dark pouches hanging from the palm-leaf roof sway back and forth — by daybreak they had mysteriously disappeared, and turned out to be balls of hundreds of spiders that curled up together in the huts at night, by the warmth of the fire — is one of the undying memories of that journey. Another: a prisoner of an enemy tribe whom the Shapras of Lake Morona allowed to wander peacefully around the village. His dog, however, was shut up in a cage and was watched very closely. Captors and captive were evidently in agreement as to the symbolic import of this; in the minds of both parries the caged animal kept the prisoner from running away and bound him to his captors more securely — the force of ritual, of belief, of magic — than any iron chain could have. And yet another: the gossip and fantastic tales we heard all during the journey concerning a Japanese adventurer, rogue, and feudal lord called Tushía, who was said to live on an island in the Pastaza River with a harem of girls he’d abducted from all over Amazonia.
But, in the long run, the most haunting memory of that trip — one that on this Florentine afternoon is almost as searing as the summer sun of Tuscany — is doubtless the story I heard a couple of linguists, Mr. and Mrs. Schneil, tell in Yarinacocha. At first I had the impression that I had never heard the name of that tribe before. But suddenly I realized that it was the same one that Saúl had told me so many stories about, the one he had come in contact with on his first trip to Quillabamba: the Machiguengas. Yet, except for the name, the two didn’t seem to have much in common.
Little by little I began to understand the reason for the discrepancy. Though it was the same tribe — numbering between four and five thousand — the Machiguengas were a people split apart. This explained the differences between the two groups and their different relationships with the rest of Peru. A dividing line, whose chief topographical feature was the Pongo de Mainique, separated the Machiguengas scattered about in the ceja de montaña — a wooded region below the high sierra where whites and mestizos were numerous — from the Machiguengas of the eastern region, on the far side of the Pongo, where the Amazonian plain begins. A geographical accident, the narrow gorge between mountains where the Urubamba becomes a raging torrent, filled with foam, whirlpools, and deafening tumult, separated the Machiguengas above, who were in contact with the white and mestizo world and had begun the process of acculturation, from the others, scattered through the forests of the plain, living in near-total isolation and preserving their traditional way of life more or less unchanged. The Dominicans had established missions — such as Chirumbia, Koribeni, and Panticollo — among the former, and in that region there were also Viracocha farms, where a few Machiguengas worked as hired hands. This was the domain of the famous Fidel Pereira and the Machiguenga world described in Saúl’s stories: the one most Westernized and most exposed to the outside.