“There’s an explanation for that,” the herb doctor says. “There’s one for everything. Even the manhunts during the tree-bleeding. But it’s not easy to learn what it is. Even the seripigari doesn’t always succeed. It may be that the three of them went to talk with the mothers of this place. With three dead here, the mothers aren’t likely to look on us as intruders. We belong here now. Don’t these trees and birds know us? The water and the air here? That may be the explanation. Since they went, we haven’t felt any enmity. As though we’re accepted here.”
I spent many moons with him. I very nearly stayed on to live there, near the herb doctor. I helped him set traps for pavitas and went to the lake with him to fish for boquichicos. I worked with Tasurinchi clearing the forest, where he’s going to make his new field when the one he has now needs to rest. During the afternoons we used to talk. As the women killed each other’s lice, spun, wove mats and cushmas, or chewed and spat out cassava for masato, we talked together.
The herb doctor had me tell him stories of men who walk. Ones he’d known, and ones he’d never seen as well. I told him about all of you, the way I tell all of you about him. Moons went by and I had no desire to leave. Something was happening that had never happened to me before. “Are you getting tired of walking?” he asked me. “It happens to a lot of people. Don’t worry, storyteller. If that’s how it is, change your ways. Stay in one place and have a family. Build your hut, clear the forest, take care of your field. You’ll have children. Give up walking, and give up being a storyteller. You can’t stay here; there are a great many of us in my family. But you can go farther up, cutting a path through the forest, a two or three moons’ journey. There’s a ravine with a stream at the bottom waiting for you, I think. I can go with you that far. Do you want a family? I can help you there too, if that’s what you want. Take that woman, she’s old and quiet and she’ll help you because she knows how to cook and spin far better than most. Or here’s my youngest daughter, if she’s more to your liking. You won’t be able to touch her yet because she hasn’t bled. If you mounted her now, some misfortune would happen, perhaps. But wait a little, and meanwhile she’ll be learning how to be your wife. Her mothers will teach her. Once she bleeds, you’ll bring me a peccary, fish, fruits of the earth, showing me gratitude and respect. Is that what you want, Tasurinchi?”
I thought his proposal over for quite some time. I felt like accepting it. I even dreamed I’d accepted it and was leading a different life. It’s a good life I’m living, that I know. The men who walk receive me gladly, give me food, pay me compliments. But my days are spent journeying, and how much longer will I be able to keep that up? Distances between families grow greater and greater. Lately, I often think as I’m walking that one day my strength will give out. Isn’t that so, little parrot? And there I’ll lie, exhausted, on one forest trail or another. No Machiguenga will pass that way, perhaps. My soul will go and my empty body begin to rot as birds peck at it and ants crawl over it. The grass will grow between my bones, perhaps. And the capybara will gnaw away the garment of my soul. When such fear comes to a man, shouldn’t he change his habits? So it seemed to Tasurinchi, the herb doctor.
“I accept your proposal, then,” I said to him. He went with me to the place that was waiting for me. It took us two moons to get there. We had to go up and down through stretches of forest where the path disappeared altogether, and as we climbed up a slope, shimbillo monkeys, with earsplitting screams, hurled bits of bark down at us from the branches overhead. In the ravine we found a jaguar cub caught in a thornbush. “This little jaguar means something,” the herb doctor fretted. But he couldn’t discover what. And so, instead of killing it and skinning it, he let it loose in the forest. “Isn’t this a good place to live?” he asked me, pointing. “You can make your cassava patch up there in that high forest. It will never be flooded. There are lots of trees and not much grass, so the earth should be good and the cassava grow well.” Yes, it was a place that was livable. Though the nights were the coldest I’d ever felt anywhere. “Before making up your mind, we’ll see if there’s game to hunt,” said Tasurinchi. We set traps. We caught a capybara and a majaz. Later, we shot a pavita kanari from a shelter at the top of a tree. I decided to stay there and put up my hut.
But before we’d begun felling the trees, the herb doctor’s son appeared, the one who had guided me to his new hut. Saying: “Something’s happened.” We went back. The old woman Tasurinchi was going to give me as a wife was dead. She’d pounded barbasco and made a brew, muttering: “I don’t want them to rage at me, saying: ‘Because of her we’ve been left without a storyteller.’ They’ll say I tricked him, that I gave him a potion so he’d take me as his wife. I’d rather go.”
I helped the herb doctor burn the hut, the cushma, the pots, the necklaces, and all the other things that belonged to the woman. We wrapped her in several straw mats and placed her on a raft of tucuma palm planks. We pushed it out into the river till the current carried her away downstream.
“It’s a warning that you must either pay heed to or ignore,” Tasurinchi said to me. “If I were you, I wouldn’t ignore it. Because each man has his obligation. Why is it we walk? So there will be light and warmth, so that everything will be peaceful. That is the order of the world. The man who talks to fireflies does what he’s obliged to do. I move on when Viracochas appear. That’s my destiny, perhaps. And yours? To visit people, speak to them, tell them stories. It is dangerous to disobey fate. Look, the woman who was to be your wife has gone. If I were you, I’d start walking at once. What’s your decision?”
I decided to do what Tasurinchi, the herb doctor, advised. And the next morning, as the eye of the sun began to gaze down at this world from Inkite, I was already walking. I am thinking now of that Machiguenga woman who went so as not to be my wife. I am talking now to all of you. Tomorrow will be as it will be.
That, anyway, is what I have learned.
For six months in 1981, I was responsible for a program on Peruvian television called the Tower of Babel. The owner of the channel, Genaro Delgado, had lured me into this venture by flashing before my eyes three shiny glass beads: the need to raise the standard of the channel’s programs, which had fallen to an absolute low of stupidity and vulgarity during the preceding twelve years of state ownership imposed by the military dictatorship; the excitement of experimenting with a means of communication which, in a country such as Peru, was the only one able to reach, simultaneously, a number of very different audiences; and a good salary.
It really was an extraordinary experience, though also the most tiring and most exasperating one that has ever come my way. “If you organize your time well and devote just half your day to the program, that’ll be enough,” Genaro had predicted. “And you’ll be able to go on with your writing in the afternoon.” But in this case, as in so many others, theory was one thing and practice another. The truth was that I devoted every single morning, afternoon, and evening of those months to the Tower of Babel, and most important, the many hours when I didn’t seem to be actually working but was nonetheless busy worrying about what had gone wrong on the previous program and trying to anticipate what would go worse still on the next one.