I was deeply moved by the thought of that being, those beings, in the unhealthy forests of eastern Cusco and Madre de Dios, making long journeys of days or weeks, bringing stories from one group of Machiguengas to another and taking away others, reminding each member of the tribe that the others were alive, that despite the great distances that separated them, they still formed a community, shared a tradition and beliefs, ancestors, misfortunes and joys: the fleeting, perhaps legendary figures of those habladores who — by occupation, out of necessity, to satisfy a human whim — using the simplest, most time-hallowed of expedients, the telling of stories, were the living sap that circulated and made the Machiguengas into a society, a people of interconnected and interdependent beings. It still moves me to think of them, and even now, here, as I write these lines, in the Caffe Strozzi in old Firenze, under the torrid July sun, I break out in goose pimples.
“And why is it you break out in goose pimples?” Mascarita said. “What is it you find so fascinating? What’s so special about habladores?”
A good question. Why hadn’t I been able to get them out of my mind since that night?
“They’re a tangible proof that storytelling can be something more than mere entertainment,” it occurred to me to say to him. “Something primordial, something that the very existence of a people may depend on. Maybe that’s what impressed me so. One doesn’t always know why one is moved by things, Mascarita. They strike some secret chord, and that’s that.”
Saúl laughed and clapped me on the shoulder. I had been speaking seriously, but he took it as a joke.
“Oh, I see. It’s the literary side that interests you,” he exclaimed. He sounded disappointed, as though that aspect diminished the value of my curiosity. “Well, don’t let your imagination run away with you. I’ll bet it’s those gringos who told you that story about storytellers. Things just can’t be the way they seem to be to them. I assure you the gringos understand the Machiguengas even less than the missionaries do.”
We were in a little café on the Avenida España, having bread and cracklings. It was several days after my return from Amazonia. As soon as I got back I had looked for him around the university and left messages for him at La Estrella, but I hadn’t been able to contact him. I was afraid I’d be off to Europe without having said goodbye to Saúl when, on the eve of my departure for Madrid, I ran into him as I got off a bus on a corner of the Avenida España. We went to that little cafe, where he’d treat me, he said, to a farewell meal of crackling sandwiches and ice-cold beer, the memory of which would stay with me during the whole time I was in Europe. But the memory that remained etched on my mind was, rather, his evasive answers and his incomprehensible lack of interest in a subject — the Machiguenga storytellers — which I’d thought he’d be all excited about. Was it really lack of interest? Of course not. I know now that he pretended not to be interested and lied to me when, on being backed into a corner by my questions, he assured me that he’d never heard a word about any such storytellers.
Memory is a snare, pure and simple: it alters, it subtly rearranges the past to fit the present. I have tried so many times to reconstruct that conversation in August 1958 with my friend Saúl Zuratas in the seedy café on the Avenida España, with its broken-down chairs and rickety tables, that by now I’m no longer sure of anything, with the exception, perhaps, of his enormous birthmark, the color of wine vinegar, that attracted the stares of the customers, his rebellious crest of red hair, his red-and-blue-checkered flannel shirt, and his heavy hiking shoes.
But my memory cannot have entirely invented Mascarita’s fierce diatribe against the Summer Institute of Linguistics, which still rings in my ears twenty-seven years later, or my stunned surprise at the contained fury with which he spoke. It was the only time I ever saw him like that: livid with anger. I discovered that day that the archangelic Saúl, like other mortals, was capable of letting himself go, in one of those rages that, according to his Machiguenga friends, could destabilize the universe.
I said as much in the hope of distracting him. “You’re going to bring on an apocalypse with your tantrum, Mascarita.”
But he paid no attention to me. “Those apostolic linguists of yours are the worst of all. They work their way into the tribes to destroy them from within, just like chiggers. Into their spirit, their beliefs, their subconscious, the roots of their way of being. The others steal their vital space and exploit them or push them farther into the interior. At worst, they kill them physically. Your linguists are more refined. They want to kill them in another way. Translating the Bible into Machiguenga! How about that!”
He was so agitated I didn’t argue. Several times, listening to him, I had to bite my tongue so as not to contradict him. I knew that, in Saúl Zurata’s case, his objections to the Institute were not frivolous or motivated by political prejudice; that, however questionable they might seem to me, they represented a point of view long pondered and deeply felt. Why did the work of the Institute strike him as more insidious than that of the bearded Dominicans and the little Spanish nuns of Quillabamba, Koribeni, and Chirumbia?
He had to postpone his answer, as the waitress came up at that moment with a fresh batch of bread and cracklings. She set the platter down on the table and stood for a long moment looking, fascinated, at Saúl’s birthmark. I saw her cross herself as she went back to her stove.
“You’re mistaken. I don’t find it more insidious,” he finally answered sarcastically, still beside himself. “They, too, want to steal their souls, of course. But the jungle is swallowing up the missionaries, the way it did Arturo Cova in The Vortex. Didn’t you see them on your trip? Half dead of hunger, and, what’s more, very few of them. They live in such need they’re in no state to evangelize anybody, luckily. Their isolation has dulled their catechistic spirit. They survive, and that’s all. The jungle has clipped their claws, pal. And the way things are going in the Catholic Church, there soon won’t be any priests at all, not even for Lima, let alone Amazonia.”
The linguists were a different matter altogether. They were backed by economic power and an extremely efficient organization which might well enable them to implant their progress, their religion, their values, their culture. Learn the aboriginal languages! What a swindle! What for? To make the Amazonian Indians into good Westerners, good modern men, good capitalists, good Christians of the Reformed Church? Not even that. Just to wipe their culture, their gods, their institutions off the map and corrupt even their dreams. Just as they’d done to the redskins and the others back in their own country. Was that what I wanted for our jungle compatriots? To make them into what the original inhabitants of North America now were? Servants and shoeshine boys for the Viracochas?
He paused, noticing that three men at the next table had stopped talking to listen to him, their attention attracted by his birthmark and his rage. The unmarked side of his face was congested, his mouth was half open and his lower lip pushed forward and trembling. I got up to go urinate without really needing to, hoping my absence would calm him. The señora at the stove asked me, with lowered voice as I passed, whether what was wrong with his face was very serious. I whispered that it was only a birthmark, no different from the mole you have on your arm, señora. “Poor thing, it makes you feel sorry for him just looking at it,” she murmured.
I returned to our table and Mascarita tried his best to smile as he lifted his glass: “To your good health, friend. Forgive me for getting so worked up.”