Ever since my unsuccessful attempts in the early sixties at writing about the Machiguenga storytellers, the subject had never been far from my mind. It returned every now and then, like an old love, not quite dead coals yet, whose embers would suddenly burst into flame. I had gone on taking notes and scribbling rough drafts that I invariably tore up. And reading, every time I could lay my hands on them, the papers and articles about Machiguengas that kept appearing here and there in scientific journals. The lack of interest in the tribe was giving way to curiosity on several counts. The French anthropologist France-Marie Casevitz-Renard, and another, an American, Johnson Allen, had spent long periods among them and had described their organization, their work methods, their kinship structure, their symbolism, their sense of time. A Swiss ethnologist, Gerhard Baer, who had also lived among them, had made a thorough study of their religion, and Father Joaquin Barriales had begun publishing, in Spanish translation, his large collection of Machiguenga myths and songs. A number of Peruvian anthropologists, classmates of Mascarita’s, notably Camino Díez Canseco and Víctor J. Guevara, had studied the tribe’s customs and beliefs.
But never in any of these contemporary works had I found any information whatsoever about storytellers. Oddly enough, all reference to them broke off around the fifties. Had the function of storyteller been dying out and finally disappeared at the very time that the Schneils had discovered it? In the reports that the Dominican missionaries — Fathers Pío Aza, Vicente de Cenitagoya, and Andrés Ferrero — wrote about them in the thirties and forties, there were frequent allusions to storytellers. And even earlier, among nineteenth-century travelers as well. One of the first references occurs in the book written by Paul Marcoy, the explorer. On the banks of the Urubamba he came across an “orateur,” whom the French traveler witnessed literally hypnotizing an audience of Antis for hours on end. “Do you think those Antis were Machiguengas?” the anthropologist Luis Román asked me, showing me the reference. I was certain they were. Why did modern anthropologists never mention storytellers? It was a question I asked myself each time one of these studies or field observations came to my attention, and I saw, once again, that no mention was made, even in passing, of those wandering tellers of tales, who seemed to me to be the most exquisite and precious exemplars of that people, numbering a mere handful, and who, in any event, had forged that curious emotional link between the Machiguengas and my own vocation (not to say, quite simply, my own life).
Why, in the course of all those years, had I been unable to write my story about storytellers? The answer I used to offer myself, each time I threw the half-finished manuscript of that elusive story into the wastebasket, was the difficulty of inventing, in Spanish and within a logically consistent intellectual framework, a literary form that would suggest, with any reasonable degree of credibility, how a primitive man with a magico-religious mentality would go about telling a story. All my attempts led each time to the impasse of a style that struck me as glaringly false, as implausible as the various ways in which philosophers and novelists of the Enlightenment had put words into the mouths of their exotic characters in the eighteenth century, when the theme of the “noble savage” was fashionable in Europe. Despite these failures, perhaps because of them, the temptation was still there, and every now and then, revived by some fortuitous circumstance, it took on new life, and the murmurous, fleeting, rude, and untamed silhouette of the storyteller invaded my house and my dreams. How could I fail to have been moved at the thought of seeing the Machiguengas face-to-face at last?
Since that trip in mid-1958 when I discovered the Peruvian jungle, I had returned to Amazonia several times: to Iquitos, to San Martín, to the Alto Marañón, to Madre de Dios, to Tingo Maria. But I had not been back to Pucallpa. In the twenty-three years that had gone by, that tiny, dusty village that I remembered as being full of dark, gloomy houses and evangelical churches, had been through an industrial and commercial “boom,” followed by a depression, and now, as Lucho Llosa, Alejandro Pérez, and I landed there one September afternoon in 1981 to film what was to be the next-to-last program of the Tower of Babel, it was in the first stages of another “boom,” though for bad reasons this time: trafficking in cocaine. The rush of heat and the burning light, in whose embrace people and things stand out so sharply (unlike Lima, where even bright sunlight has a grayish cast), are something that always has the effect on me of an emulsive draft of enthusiasm.
But that morning brought the discovery that it was the Schneils whom the Institute had sent to meet us at the Pucallpa airport, and that impressed me even more than the heat and the beautiful landscape of Amazonia. The Schneils in person. They had come to the end of their quarter of a century in the Amazon, the whole of it spent working with the Machiguengas. They were surprised that I remembered them — I have the feeling they didn’t remember me at all — and could still recall so many details of what they had told me back then, during our two conversations at the Yarinacocha base. As we bounced this way and that in the jeep on our way to the Institute, they showed me photographs of their children, young people, some already through college, living in the States. Did they all speak Machiguenga? Of course, it was the family’s second language, even before Spanish. I was pleased to learn that the Schneils would be our guides and interpreters in the villages we visited.
Lake Yarina was still a picture postcard, and dusk there more beautiful than ever. The bungalows of the Institute had proliferated along the lakeshore. The minute we climbed out of the jeep, Lucho, Alejandro, and I set to work. We agreed that as soon as night fell, to serve as an introduction to our trip to the forests of the Alto Urubamba, the Schneils would brief us on the places and people we would be seeing up there.
Other than the Schneils, not one of the linguists whom I had met on my previous journey was still in Yarinacocha. Some had gone back to the States; others were doing fieldwork in other jungle regions around the world; and some had died, as had Dr. Townsend, the founder of the Institute. But the linguists whom we met and interviewed, who acted as our guides as we photographed the place from various angles, appeared to be the identical twins of the ones I remembered. The men had close-cropped hair and the athletic, healthy appearance of people who exercise daily, eat according to the instructions of a dietician, don’t smoke, and take neither coffee nor alcohol, and the women, encased in dresses as plain as they were decent, without a speck of makeup or a shadow of coquetry, exuded an overwhelming air of efficiency. Men and women alike had the cheerful, imperturbable look of people who believe, who are doing what they believe in, and who know for certain that the truth is on their side: the sort of people who have always fascinated and terrified me.