It seems she’s become used to her new husband. There she is, by the Mishahua, settled down nicely, as though she’d always been Tasurinchi’s wife. But the other women are furious, insulting her and finding any excuse to hit her. I saw them and heard them. “She’s not like us” is what they say. “She’s not people, whatever she may be. A monkey, perhaps, the fish perhaps that stuck in Kashiri’s gullet.” She went on slowly chewing at her cassava as though she didn’t hear them.
Another time she was carrying a pitcher full of water, and without noticing she bumped into a child, knocking him over. Whereupon the women all set upon her. “You did it on purpose, you wanted to kill him” was what they said. It wasn’t true, but that was what they said to her. She picked up a stick and confronted them, without anger. “One day they’re going to kill her,” I said to Tasurinchi. “She knows how to look after herself,” he answered. “She hunts animals. Something I’ve never known women to do. And she’s the one who carries the heaviest load on her back when we bring cassavas in from the field. What I’m afraid of, and what’s more likely, is that she’ll kill the other women. The Yaminahuas are fighting people, just like the Mashcos. Their women too, maybe.”
I said that, for that very reason, he ought to be worried. And go off somewhere else right away. The Yaminahuas must be furious at what he’d done to them. What if they came to take revenge? Tasurinchi burst out laughing. The whole matter had been settled, it seems. The husband of the Yaminahua woman, along with two others, had come to see him. They’d drunk masato together and talked. And eventually come to an agreement. What they were after wasn’t the woman but a shotgun, on top of the sachavaca, the maize, and the cassava he gave them. The White Fathers had told them he had a shotgun. “Look around for it,” he offered. “If you can find it, take it.” Finally they left. Satisfied, it seems. Tasurinchi isn’t going to give the Yaminahua woman back to her kinfolk. Because she’s already learning to speak. “The others will get used to her when she has a child,” Tasurinchi says. The children are already used to her. They treat her as though she were people, a woman who walks. “Mother,” they call her.
That, anyway, is what I have learned.
Who knows whether this woman will make Tasurinchi, the one from the Mishahua, happy? She may just as well bring him unhappiness. Coming down to this world to marry a Machiguenga brought misfortune to Kashiri, the moon. So they say, anyway. But maybe we ought not to lament what befell him. Kashiri’s mischance brings us food and allows us to warm ourselves. Isn’t the moon the father of the sun by a Machiguenga woman?
That was before.
A strong, serene youth, Kashiri was bored in the sky above, Inkite, where there were no stars yet. Instead of cassava and plantain, men ate earth. It was their only food. Kashiri came down the river Meshiareni, paddling with his arms, without a pole. His canoe skirted the rocks and the whirlpools. Down it came, floating. The world was still dark and the wind blew fiercely. The rain came down in buckets. Kashiri jumped ashore on the Oskiaje, where this earth meets the worlds of the sky, where monsters live and all the rivers go to die. He looked around him. He didn’t know where he was, but he was content. He started walking. Not long thereafter, he spied the Machiguenga girl who was to bring him happiness and unhappiness, sitting weaving a mat and softly singing a song to keep away the vipers. Her cheeks and forehead were painted; two red lines went up from her mouth to her temples. So, then, she was unmarried: she would learn to cook food and make masato.
To please her, Kashiri, the moon, taught her what cassava and plantain were. He showed her how they were planted, harvested, and eaten. Since then there has been food and masato in the world. That is when after began, it seems. Then Kashiri presented himself at her father’s hut. His arms were laden with the animals he had hunted and fished for him. Finally he offered to clear a field for him in the highest part of the forest and to work for him, sowing cassava and pulling out weeds till it grew. Tasurinchi agreed to let him take his daughter. They had to wait for the girl’s first blood. It was a long time coming, and meanwhile the moon cleared and burned and weeded the forest patch and sowed plantain, maize, and cassava for his future family. Everything was going very well.
The girl, then, started to bleed. She stayed locked up, not speaking a word to her kinfolk. The old woman who watched over her never left her, by day or by night. The girl ceaselessly spun cotton thread, never resting. Not once did she go near the fire or eat chili peppers, so as not to bring misfortune upon herself or her kinfolk. Not once did she look at the man who was to be her husband, nor did she speak to him. She went on in that way until she stopped bleeding, Then she cut her hair and the old woman helped her to bathe herself, wetting her body with warm water poured from a pitcher. At last the girl could go live with Kashiri. At last she could be his wife.
Everything followed its course. The world was peaceful. Flocks of parrots flew overhead, noisy and content. But there was another girl in the hamlet, who may not have been a woman but an itoni, that wicked little devil. It disguises itself as a pigeon now, but then it dressed as a woman. She waxed furious, it seems, seeing all the presents Kashiri brought his new family. She would have liked to have him as her husband; she would have liked, in a word, to give birth to the sun. Because the moon’s wife had given birth to the healthy child whose fire would give light and heat to our world when he grew up. So everyone would know how angry she was, she painted her face red with annatto dye. She went and posted herself at a bend in the path where Kashiri had to pass on his way back from the cassava patch. Squatting down, she emptied her body. She pushed hard, swelling herself up. Then she dug her hands into the filth and waited, storing up fury. When she saw him coming, she threw herself at him from among the trees. And before the moon could escape, she’d rubbed his face with the shit she’d just shat.
Kashiri knew at once that those stains could never be washed away. Marked by such shame, what was he going to do in this world? Sadly, he went back to Inkite, the sky above. There he has remained. Because of the stains, his light was dimmed. Yet his son is resplendent. Doesn’t the sun shine? Doesn’t he warm us? We help him by walking. Rise, we say to him each night as he sinks. His mother was a Machiguenga, after all.
That, anyway, is what I have learned.
But the seripigari of Segakiato tells the story differently.
Kashiri came down to the earth and spied the girl in the river, bathing and singing. He approached and threw a handful of dirt at her that hit her in the belly. She was angry and started throwing stones at him. It had started raining all of a sudden. Kientibakori must have been in the forest, dancing, having drunk his fill of masato. “Stupid woman,” said the moon to the girl. “I threw mud at you so you’d have a son.” All the little devils were happily farting at each other under the trees. And that’s what happened. The girl got pregnant. But when her time came to give birth, she died. And her son died, too. The Machiguengas were furious. They seized their arrows and their knives. They went to Kashiri and surrounded him, saying: “You must eat that corpse.” They threatened him with their bows. They thrust their stones under his nose. The moon resisted, trembling. But they said: “Eat her up. You must eat up the dead woman.”