It was only at the end, when I was looking for a break in the conversation so as to take my leave, that, quite incidentally, there arose the subject which, seen from afar, blots out all the others of that night and is surely the reason why I am now devoting my days in Firenze, not so much to Dante, Machiavelli, and Renaissance art, as to weaving together the memories and fantasies of this story. I don’t know how it came up. I asked a lot of questions, and some of them must have been about witch doctors and medicine men (there were two sorts: the good ones, seripigaris, and the bad ones, machikanaris). Perhaps that was what led up to it. Or perhaps my asking them about the myths, legends, and stories they had collected in their travels brought about the association of ideas. They didn’t know much about the magic practices of the seripigaris or the machikanaris, except that both, like the shamans of other tribes, used tobacco, ayahuasca, and other hallucinogenic plants, such as kobuiniri bark, during their trances, which they called la mareada, the very same word they used for being drunk on masato. The Machiguengas were naturally loquacious, superb informants, but the Schneils had not wanted to press them too hard on the subject of sorcery, for fear of violating their sense of privacy.
“Yes, and besides the seripigaris and the machikanaris, there is also that curious personage who doesn’t seem to be either a medicine man or a priest,” Mrs. Schneil said all of a sudden. She turned uncertainly toward her husband. “Well, perhaps a bit of both, wouldn’t you say, Edwin?”
“Ah, you mean the…” Mr. Schneil said, and hesitated. He uttered a long, loud guttural sound full of s’s. Remained silent, searching for a word. “How would you translate it?”
She half closed her eyes and bit a knuckle. She was blond, with very blue eyes, extremely thin lips, and a childish smile.
“A talker, perhaps. Or, better yet, a speaker,” she said at last. And uttered the same sound again: harsh, sibilant, prolonged.
“Yes.” He smiled. “I think that’s the closest. Hablador: a speaker.”
They had never seen one. And their punctilious discretion — their fear of rubbing their hosts the wrong way — had stopped them from asking for a detailed account of the functions the hablador fulfilled among the Machiguengas; whether there were several of them or only one; and also, though they tended to discard this theory, whether, rather than an actual, concrete person, they were talking of some fabulous entity such as Kientibakori, chief of demons and creator of all things poisonous and inedible. It was certain, however, that the word “hablador” was uttered with a great show of respect by all the Machiguengas, and each time someone uttered it in front of the Schneils the others had changed the subject. But they didn’t think it was a question of a taboo. For the fact was that the strange word escaped them very frequently, seeming to indicate that the hablador was always on their minds. Was he a leader or teacher of the whole community? No, he didn’t seem to exercise any specific power over that loose, scattered archipelago, Machiguenga society, which, moreover, lacked any sort of authorities. The Schneils had no doubts on that score. The only headmen they had ever had were those imposed by the Viracochas, as in the little settlements of Koribeni and Chirumbia, set up by the Dominicans, or at the time of the haciendas and the rubber camps, when the bosses designated one of them as cacique so as to control them more easily. Perhaps the hablador exercised some sort of spiritual leadership or was responsible for carrying out certain religious practices. But from the allusions that they had caught, an odd sentence here, an answer there, they had gathered that the function of the hablador was above all what his name implied: to speak.
An odd thing had happened to Mrs. Schneil a few months before, near the Kompiroshiato River. The Machiguenga family she was living with — eight people: two old men, a grown man, four women, and a young girl — suddenly disappeared, without a word of explanation to her. She was very surprised, since they had never done anything of the sort before. All eight of them reappeared a few days later, as mysteriously as they had disappeared. Where had they gone off to like that? “To hear the hablador,” the young girl said. The meaning of the sentence was quite clear, but Mrs. Schneil didn’t find out any more, for nobody volunteered any further details, nor did she ask for any. But the eight Machiguengas had been extremely excited and whispered together endlessly during the following days. Seeing them engrossed in their interminable conclaves, Mrs. Schneil knew they were remembering the hablador.
The Schneils had made conjectures and carpentered up theories. The hablador, or habladores, must be something like the courier service of the community. Messengers who went from one settlement to another in the vast territory over which the Machiguengas were dispersed, relating to some what the others were doing, keeping them informed of the happenings, the fortunes and misfortunes of the brothers whom they saw very rarely or not at all. Their name defined them. They spoke. Their mouths were the connecting links of this society that the fight for survival had forced to split up and scatter to the four winds. Thanks to the habladores, fathers had news of their sons, brothers of their sisters, and thanks to them they were all kept informed of the deaths, births, and other happenings in the tribe.
“And of something more besides,” Mr. Schneil said. “I have a feeling that the hablador not only brings current news but also speaks of the past. He is probably also the memory of the community, fulfilling a function similar to that of the jongleurs and troubadours of the Middle Ages.”
Mrs. Schneil interrupted to explain to me that it was difficult to be sure of that. The Machiguenga verb system was complicated and misleading, among other reasons because it readily mixed up past and present. Just as the word for “many”—tobaiti — was used to express any quantity above four, “now” also included at least today and yesterday, and the present tense of verbs was frequently used to recount events in the recent past. It was as though to them only the future was something clearly defined. Our conversation turned to linguistics and ended with a string of examples of the humorous and unsettling implications of a form of speech in which before and now were barely differentiated.