But even more than the Bahian troubadour, it was the Irish seanchaí who had reminded me, so forcefully, of the Machiguenga storytellers. Seanchaí: “teller of ancient stories,” “the one who knows things,” as someone in a Dublin bar had offhandedly translated the word into English. How to explain, if it was not because of the Machiguengas, the rush of emotion, the sudden quickening of my heartbeat that impelled me to intrude, to ask questions, and later on to pester and infuriate Irish friends and acquaintances until they finally sat me down in front of a seanchaí? A living relic of the ancient bards of Hibernia, like those ancestors of his whose faint outline blends, in the night of time, with the Celtic myths and legends that are the intellectual foundations of Ireland, the seanchaí still recounts, in our own day, old legends, epic deeds, terrible loves, and disturbing miracles, in the smoky warmth of pubs; at festive gatherings where the magic of his words calls forth a sudden silence; in friendly houses, next to the hearth, as outside the rain falls or the storm rages. He can be a tavernkeeper, a truck driver, a parson, a beggar, someone mysteriously touched by the magic wand of wisdom and the art of reciting, of remembering, of reinventing and enriching tales told and retold down through the centuries; a messenger from the times of myth and magic, older than history, to whom Irishmen of today listen spellbound for hours on end. I always knew that the intense emotion I felt on that trip to Ireland, thanks to the seanchaí, was metaphorical, a way of hearing, through him, the storyteller, and of living the illusion that, sitting there squeezed in among his listeners, I was part of a Machiguenga audience.
And at last, tomorrow, in this unexpected way, guided by the Schneils themselves, I was going to meet the Machiguengas. So life has its novelistic side, does it? Indeed it does! “I’ve already told you I want to end with a zoom shot, Alejandro you cunt,” Lucho Llosa raved in the next bed, tossing and turning under the mosquito net.
We left at dawn in two of the Institute’s single-engine Cessnas, carrying three passengers each. Despite his adolescent face, the pilot of the little plane I was in had already spent several years with the linguist-missionaries, and before piloting planes for them in Amazonia, he had done the same thing in the jungles of Central America and Borneo. The morning was bright and clear and from the air we could easily make out all the meanders of the Ucayali and then of the Urubamba — the little islands, the spluttering launches with outboard motors or pequepeques, the canoes, the channels, the rapids and tributaries — and the tiny villages that at rare intervals showed up as a clearing of huts and reddish earth in the endless green plain. We flew over the penal colony of Sepa, and over the Dominican mission of Sepahua, then left the Alto Urubamba to follow the winding course of the Mipaya, a muddy snake on whose banks, around ten in the morning, we spotted our first destination: New World.
The name Mipaya has historical echoes. Beneath the tangle of vegetation, rubber camps proliferated a century ago. After the terrible death toll that the tribe suffered in the years of the tree-bleeding, the ruined rubber tappers, once the boom was over, tried to clear plantations in the region during the twenties, recruiting their labor by the old system of hunting Indians. It was then that there occurred, here on the shores of the Mipaya, the only instance of Machiguenga resistance known to history. When a planter of the region came to carry off the young men and women of the tribe, the Machiguengas received him with a rain of arrows and killed or wounded several Viracochas before being exterminated. The jungle had covered over the scene of the violence with its thick undergrowth of tree trunks, branches, and dead leaves, and not a trace remained of that infamy. Before landing, the pilot circled around the twenty or so conical-roofed huts several times, so that the Machiguengas of New World would remove their children from the one street of the settlement, which served as the landing strip. The Schneils had flown in the same Cessna as I, and the minute they climbed out of the plane, a hundred or so villagers surrounded them, showing signs of great excitement and joy, jostling each other to touch and pat them, all talking at the same time in a rhythmic tongue full of harsh sounds and extreme tonal shifts. Save for the schoolmistress dressed in a skirt and blouse and wearing sandals, all the Machiguengas were barefoot, the men in skimpy loincloths or cushmas, the women in yellow or gray cotton tunics of the sort worn by many tribes. Only a few old women wore pampanillas, a thin shawl tucked in at the waist, leaving their breasts bare. Nearly all of them, men and women, had red or black tattoos.
So there they were. Those were the Machiguengas.
I had no time to be carried away by emotion. To make the most of the light, we started work immediately, and fortunately no catastrophe kept us from filming the huts — all of them exactly the same: a simple platform of tree trunks supported on pilings, with thin walls of cane that reached only halfway up on each side, and a tuft of palm leaves for a roof; the interiors were austere, no more than a place for storing rolled-up mats, baskets, fishing nets, bows and arrows, small quantities of cassava and maize, and a few hollow gourds containing liquids — or from interviewing the schoolmistress, the only one who could express herself in Spanish, though with difficulty. She also looked after the village store, to which a motor launch brought provisions twice a month. My attempts to get any information about storytellers out of her were of no avail. Could she understand who it was I was asking her about? Apparently not. She looked at me with a surprised, slightly anxious expression, as though begging me to express myself in an intelligible way again.
Although we could not talk with them directly but only through the Schneils, the other Machiguengas were obliging enough and we were able to record some dances and songs and film an old woman delicately painting geometric designs on her face with annatto dye. We took shots of the crops sprouting in the fields, the poultry runs, the school, where the teacher insisted that we listen to the national anthem in Machiguenga. The face of one of the children was eaten away by a form of leprosy known as uta, which the Machiguengas attribute to the sting of a pink firefly whose abdomen is speckled with gleaming little dots of light. From the natural, uninhibited way in which the boy acted, running about among the other children, he did not seem, at first sight, to be the object of either discrimination or mockery because of his disfigurement.
As evening set in and we were loading our equipment for the flight to the village — New Light — where we were to spend the night, we learned that New World would probably have to change its location soon. What had happened? One of those chance geographical occurrences that are the daily bread of life in the jungle. During the last rainy season the Mipaya had radically changed its course because of heavy floods and was now so far distant from New World that when the waters were down to their winter level the inhabitants had to go a very long way to reach its shores. So they were looking for another spot, less subject to unforeseeable mischances, in order to resettle. That would not be difficult for people who had spent their lives on the move — their settlements were evidently born under an atavistic sign of eternal wandering, of a peripatetic destiny — and besides, their huts of tree trunks, cane, and palm leaves were far easier to take down and put up again than were the little houses of civilization.