I must have sent him the third one a year or so later, since by then I was in Paris. I took him to task for his stubborn silence and confessed that I’d given up the idea of writing about the habladores. I filled any number of composition books with my scribblings and spent many hours in the Place du Trocadéro, in the library of the Musée de l’Homme and in front of its display cases, trying in vain to understand the storytellers, to intuit what they were like. The voices of the ones that I’d contrived sounded all wrong. So I had resigned myself to writing other stories. But what was he doing? How was he getting on? What had he been doing all this time, and what were his plans?
It was not until the end of 1963, when Matos Mar turned up in Paris, to speak at an anthropological congress, that I heard of Mascarita’s whereabouts. What I learned left me flabbergasted.
“Saúl Zuratas went to live in Israel?”
We were in the Old Navy in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, drinking hot grog to withstand the cold of a depressing ash-gray December evening. We sat smoking as I eagerly plied him with questions about friends and developments in far-off Peru.
“Something to do with his father, it seems,” Matos Mar said, bundled up in such a bulky overcoat and heavy scarf he looked like an Eskimo. “Don Salomón, from Talara. Did you know him? Saúl was very fond of him. Remember how he refused that fellowship to Bordeaux so as not to leave him alone? Apparently the old man took it into his head to go off to Israel to die. And devoted as he was to his father, Mascarita of course let him have his way. They decided the whole thing very suddenly, from one day to the next, more or less. Because, when Saúl told me, they’d already sold the little shop in Breña, La Estrella, and had their bags all packed.”
And did Saúl like the idea of settling in Israel? Because once there, he’d have to learn Hebrew, do his military service, reorganize his life from A to Z. Matos Mar thought he might have been exempted from military service because of his birthmark. I searched my memory trying to remember whether I’d ever heard Mascarita mention Zionism, returning to the Homeland, Alyah. Never.
“Well, maybe it wasn’t a bad thing for Saúl, starting all over again from zero,” Matos Mar reflected. “He must have adapted to Israel, since all this happened some four years ago, and as far as I know, he hasn’t come back to Peru. I can well imagine him living in a kibbutz. The truth of the matter is that Saúl wasn’t getting anywhere in Lima. Ethnology and the university had both been a disappointment to him, for reasons I never quite understood. He never finished his doctoral dissertation. And I think even his love affair with the Machiguengas was a thing of the past. ‘Aren’t you going to miss your naked savages there in Urubamba?’ I asked him when we said goodbye. ‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘I can adapt to anything. And there must be plenty of people who go around naked in Israel, too.’ ”
Unlike Matos Mar, I didn’t think Saúl would have found Alyah easy going. Because he was, viscerally, a part of Peru, too torn and revolted by Peruvian affairs — one of them at least — to cast everything aside overnight, the way one changes shirts. I often tried to imagine him in the Middle East. Knowing him, I could readily foresee that in his new country the Palestine question and the occupied territories would confront Saúl Zuratas, the Israeli citizen, with all sorts of moral dilemmas. My mind wandered, trying to see him in his new surroundings, jabbering away in his new language, going about his new job — what was it? — and I prayed to Tasurinchi that no bullet might have come Mascarita’s way in the wars and border incidents in Israel since he’d arrived there.
A mischievous kamagarini disguised as a wasp stung the tip of Tasurinchi’s penis while he was urinating. He’s walking. How? I don’t know, but he’s walking. I saw him. They haven’t killed him. He could have lost his eyes or his head, his soul could have left him after what he did there among the Yaminahuas. Nothing happened to him, it seems. He’s well, walking, content. Not angry, laughing, perhaps. Saying “What’s all the fuss about?” As I headed toward the river Mishahua to visit him, I thought: He won’t be there. If it’s really true that he did that, he’ll have taken off somewhere far away, where the Yaminahuas won’t find him. Or maybe they’ve already killed him; him and his kinfolk as well. But there he was, and his family too, and the woman he stole. “Are you there, Tasurinchi?” “Ehé, ehé, here I am.”
She’s learning to speak. “Say something so the hablador sees you can speak, too,” he ordered her. You could hardly understand what the Yaminahua woman was saying, and the other women made fun of her: “What are those noises we keep hearing?” Pretending to search about: “What animal can have gotten into the house?” Looking under the mats. They make her work and they treat her badly. Saying: “When she opens her legs, fish are going to come out of her, like they did out of Pareni.” And worse things still. But it’s quite true, she’s learning to speak. I understood some of the things she said. “Man walks,” I understood.
“So it’s true, you stole yourself a Yaminahua woman,” I remarked to Tasurinchi. He says he didn’t steal her. He traded a sachavaca, a sack of maize, and one of cassava, for her. “The Yaminahuas should be pleased. What I gave them is worth more than she is,” he assured me.
“Isn’t that so?” he asked the Yaminahua woman in front of me, and she agreed. “Yes, it is,” she said. I understood that, too.
Since the mischievous kamagarini stung the tip of his penis, Tasurinchi feels obliged to do certain things, suddenly, without his knowing how or why. “It’s an order I hear and I have to obey it,” he says. “I expect it comes from a little god or a little devil, from something that’s gotten deep down inside me through my penis, whatever it may be.” Stealing that woman was one of those orders, it seems.
His penis is now the same as it was before. But a spirit has stayed on, there in his soul, which tells him to be different and do things that the others don’t understand. He showed me where he was urinating when the kamagarini stung him. Ay! Ay! it made him squeal, made him leap about, and he wasn’t able to go on urinating. He chased the wasp away with a smack of his hand, and he heard it laugh, perhaps. A while later his penis started getting bigger. Every night it swelled up, and every morning more still. Everybody laughed at him. He was so ashamed he had them weave him a bigger cushma. He hid his penis in its pouch. But it went on growing, growing, and he could no longer hide it. It got in his way when he moved. He dragged it along the way an animal drags its tail. Sometimes people stepped on it just to hear him yelp. Ay! Atatau! He had to roll it up and perch it on his shoulder, the way I do with my little parrot. That’s how they went along on their travels, heads together, keeping each other company. Tasurinchi talked to it to keep himself amused. The other listened to him, silent, attentive, just the way all of you listen to me, looking at him with its big eye. One-Eye — Little One-Eye! — just stared at him. It had grown a whole lot. The birds perched on it to sing, thinking it was a tree. When Tasurinchi urinated, a cataract of warm water, foamy as the rapids of the Gran Pongo, came out of its big mouth. Tasurinchi could have bathed in it, and his family too, maybe. He used it as a seat when he stopped to rest. And at night it was his pallet. When he went hunting, it was both sling and spear. He could shoot it to the very top of a tree to knock down the shimbillo monkeys, and using it as a club, he could kill a puma.
To purify him, the seripigari wrapped his penis in fern fronds that had been heated over live coals. He made him sip their juice and sing, for a whole night, while he himself drank tobacco brew and ayahuasca. He danced, he disappeared through the roof and came back changed into a saankarite. After that, he was able to suck the evil from him and spit it out. It was thick and yellow and smelled like drunkard’s vomit. By morning his penis started shrinking, and a few moons later it was the little dwarf it had been before. But since then Tasurinchi hears those orders. “In some of my souls there’s a capricious mother,” he says. “That’s why I got myself the Yaminahua woman.”