The Storyteller (10 page)

The Schneils, like all the other linguists, had degrees from the University of Oklahoma, but they and their colleagues were motivated above all by a spiritual goal: spreading the Glad Tidings of the Bible. I don't know what their precise religious affiliation was, since there were members of a number of different churches among the linguists of the Institute. The ultimate purpose that had led them to study primitive cultures was religious: translating the Bible into the tribes' own languages so that those peoples could hear God's word in the rhythms and inflections of their own tongue. This was the aim that had led Dr. Peter Townsend to found the Institute. He was an interesting person, half evangelist and half pioneer, a friend of the Mexican president Lázaro Cárdenas and the author of a book about him. The goal set by Dr. Townsend still motivates the linguists to continue the patient labor they have undertaken. I have always been both moved and frightened by the strong, unshakable faith that leads men to dedicate their lives to that faith and accept any sacrifice in its name; for heroism and fanaticism, selfless acts and crimes alike can spring from this attitude. But as far as I could gather in the course of that journey, the faith of the linguists from the Institute seemed benign enough. I still remember that woman, little more than a girl, who had lived for years among the Shapras of the Morona, and that family settled among the Huambisas, whose children—little redheaded gringos—splashed about naked along the banks of the river together with the copper-colored children of the village, talking and spitting in the very same way they did. (The Huambisas spit as they talk, to prove they're telling the truth. As they see it, a man who doesn't spit as he talks is a liar.)

They lived, admittedly, in primitive conditions among the tribes, but at the same time they could rely on an infrastructure that protected them: planes, radio, doctors, medicines. Even so, their profound conviction and their ability to adapt were exceptional. Save for the fact that they wore clothes, while their hosts went around nearly naked, the linguists we visited who had settled in with the tribes lived in much the same way they did: in identical huts or virtually in the open air, in the most precarious of shelters, sharing the frugal diet and Spartan ways of the Indians. All of them had that taste for adventure—the pull of the frontier—that is so frequent an American trait, shared by people of the most diverse backgrounds and occupations. The Schneils were very young, their married life was just beginning, and as we gathered from our conversation with them, they did not regard their coming to Amazonia as something temporary but, rather, as a vital, long-term commitment.

What they told us of the Machiguengas kept running through my mind all during our travels through the Alto Marañón. It was something I wanted to talk over with Saúl: I needed to hear his criticisms and comments on what the Schneils reported. And, besides, I had a surprise for him: I had learned the words of that song by heart and would recite it to him in Machiguenga. I could imagine his astonishment and his great burst of friendly laughter…

The tribes we visited in the Alto Marañón and Moronacocha were very different from those of the Urubamba and the Madre de Dios. The Aguarunas had contact with the rest of Peru and some of their villages were undergoing a process of outbreeding whose results were visible at first glance. The Shapras were more isolated, and until recently—chiefly because they were headhunters—they had had a reputation for violence; but one did not find among them any of those symptoms of depression or moral disintegration that the Schneils had described in the Machiguengas.

When we returned to Yarinacocha on our way back to Lima, we spent one last night with the linguists. It was a working session, during which they questioned Matos Mar and Juan Comas as to their impressions. At the end of the meeting I asked Edwin Schneil if he was willing to talk with me a while longer. He took me to his house, where his wife made us a cup of tea. They lived in one of the last cabins, where the Institute ended and the jungle began. The regular, harmonious, rhythmical chirring of insects served as background music to our chat, which went on for a long time, with Mrs. Schneil occasionally joining in. It was she who told me of the river cosmogony of the Machiguengas, in which the Milky Way is the river Meshiareni, plied by innumerable great and minor gods in their descent from their pantheon to the earth, and by the souls of the dead as they mount to paradise. I asked them whether they had photographs of the families they had lived with. They said they didn't, but showed me many Machiguenga artifacts. Large and small monkey-skin drums, cane flutes and a sort of panpipe, made of reeds of graduated lengths bound together with vegetable fibers, which, when placed against the lower lip and blown across, produced a rich scale of sounds ranging from a shrill high note to a deep bass one. Sieves made of cane leaves cut in strips and braided, like little baskets, to filter the cassava used to make masato. Necklaces and bangles of seeds, teeth, and bones. Anklets, bracelets. Headpieces of parrot, macaw, toucan, and cockatoo feathers set into circlets of wood. Bows, arrowheads of chipped stone, horns used to store the curare used for poisoning their arrows and the dyes for their tattooing. The Schneils had made a number of drawings on cardboard, copying the designs the Machiguengas painted on their faces and bodies. They were geometrical; some very simple, others like complicated labyrinths. They explained that they were used according to the circumstances and the social status of a person. Their function was to attract good luck and ward off bad luck. These were for bachelors, these for married men, these for going hunting, and as for others, they weren't quite sure yet. Machiguenga symbolism was extremely subtle. There was one design, an X-shape like a Saint Andrew's Cross inscribed in a half circle, which, apparently, they painted on themselves when they were going to die.

It was only at the end, when I was looking for a break in the conversation so as to take my leave, that, quite incidentally, there arose the subject which, seen from afar, blots out all the others of that night and is surely the reason why I am now devoting my days in Firenze, not so much to Dante, Machiavelli, and Renaissance art, as to weaving together the memories and fantasies of this story. I don't know how it came up. I asked a lot of questions, and some of them must have been about witch doctors and medicine men (there were two sorts: the good ones, seripigaris, and the bad ones, machikanaris). Perhaps that was what led up to it. Or perhaps my asking them about the myths, legends, and stories they had collected in their travels brought about the association of ideas. They didn't know much about the magic practices of the seripigaris or the machikanaris, except that both, like the shamans of other tribes, used tobacco, ayahuasca, and other hallucinogenic plants, such as kobuiniri bark, during their trances, which they called la mareada, the very same word they used for being drunk on masato. The Machiguengas were naturally loquacious, superb informants, but the Schneils had not wanted to press them too hard on the subject of sorcery, for fear of violating their sense of privacy.

“Yes, and besides the seripigaris and the machikanaris, there is also that curious personage who doesn't seem to be either a medicine man or a priest,” Mrs. Schneil said all of a sudden. She turned uncertainly toward her husband. “Well, perhaps a bit of both, wouldn't you say, Edwin?”

“Ah, you mean the…” Mr. Schneil said, and hesitated. He uttered a long, loud guttural sound full of
s
's. Remained silent, searching for a word. “How would you translate it?”

She half closed her eyes and bit a knuckle. She was blond, with very blue eyes, extremely thin lips, and a childish smile.

“A talker, perhaps. Or, better yet, a speaker,” she said at last. And uttered the same sound again: harsh, sibilant, prolonged.

“Yes.” He smiled. “I think that's the closest. Hablador: a speaker.”

They had never seen one. And their punctilious discretion—their fear of rubbing their hosts the wrong way—had stopped them from asking for a detailed account of the functions the hablador fulfilled among the Machiguengas; whether there were several of them or only one; and also, though they tended to discard this theory, whether, rather than an actual, concrete person, they were talking of some fabulous entity such as Kientibakori, chief of demons and creator of all things poisonous and inedible. It was certain, however, that the word “hablador” was uttered with a great show of respect by all the Machiguengas, and each time someone uttered it in front of the Schneils the others had changed the subject. But they didn't think it was a question of a taboo. For the fact was that the strange word escaped them very frequently, seeming to indicate that the hablador was always on their minds. Was he a leader or teacher of the whole community? No, he didn't seem to exercise any specific power over that loose, scattered archipelago, Machiguenga society, which, moreover, lacked any sort of authorities. The Schneils had no doubts on that score. The only headmen they had ever had were those imposed by the Viracochas, as in the little settlements of Koribeni and Chirumbia, set up by the Dominicans, or at the time of the haciendas and the rubber camps, when the bosses designated one of them as cacique so as to control them more easily. Perhaps the hablador exercised some sort of spiritual leadership or was responsible for carrying out certain religious practices. But from the allusions that they had caught, an odd sentence here, an answer there, they had gathered that the function of the hablador was above all what his name implied: to speak.

An odd thing had happened to Mrs. Schneil a few months before, near the Kompiroshiato River. The Machiguenga family she was living with—eight people: two old men, a grown man, four women, and a young girl—suddenly disappeared, without a word of explanation to her. She was very surprised, since they had never done anything of the sort before. All eight of them reappeared a few days later, as mysteriously as they had disappeared. Where had they gone off to like that? “To hear the hablador,” the young girl said. The meaning of the sentence was quite clear, but Mrs. Schneil didn't find out any more, for nobody volunteered any further details, nor did she ask for any. But the eight Machiguengas had been extremely excited and whispered together endlessly during the following days. Seeing them engrossed in their interminable conclaves, Mrs. Schneil knew they were remembering the hablador.

The Schneils had made conjectures and carpentered up theories. The hablador, or habladores, must be something like the courier service of the community. Messengers who went from one settlement to another in the vast territory over which the Machiguengas were dispersed, relating to some what the others were doing, keeping them informed of the happenings, the fortunes and misfortunes of the brothers whom they saw very rarely or not at all. Their name defined them. They spoke. Their mouths were the connecting links of this society that the fight for survival had forced to split up and scatter to the four winds. Thanks to the habladores, fathers had news of their sons, brothers of their sisters, and thanks to them they were all kept informed of the deaths, births, and other happenings in the tribe.

“And of something more besides,” Mr. Schneil said. “I have a feeling that the hablador not only brings current news but also speaks of the past. He is probably also the memory of the community, fulfilling a function similar to that of the jongleurs and troubadours of the Middle Ages.”

Mrs. Schneil interrupted to explain to me that it was difficult to be sure of that. The Machiguenga verb system was complicated and misleading, among other reasons because it readily mixed up past and present. Just as the word for “many”—tobaiti—was used to express any quantity above four, “now” also included at least today and yesterday, and the present tense of verbs was frequently used to recount events in the recent past. It was as though to them only the future was something clearly defined. Our conversation turned to linguistics and ended with a string of examples of the humorous and unsettling implications of a form of speech in which before and now were barely differentiated.

I was deeply moved by the thought of that being, those beings, in the unhealthy forests of eastern Cusco and Madre de Dios, making long journeys of days or weeks, bringing stories from one group of Machiguengas to another and taking away others, reminding each member of the tribe that the others were alive, that despite the great distances that separated them, they still formed a community, shared a tradition and beliefs, ancestors, misfortunes and joys: the fleeting, perhaps legendary figures of those habladores who—by occupation, out of necessity, to satisfy a human whim—using the simplest, most time-hallowed of expedients, the telling of stories, were the living sap that circulated and made the Machiguengas into a society, a people of interconnected and interdependent beings. It still moves me to think of them, and even now, here, as I write these lines, in the Caffe Strozzi in old Firenze, under the torrid July sun, I break out in goose pimples.

“And why is it you break out in goose pimples?” Mascarita said. “What is it you find so fascinating? What's so special about habladores?”

A good question. Why hadn't I been able to get them out of my mind since that night?

“They're a tangible proof that storytelling can be something more than mere entertainment,” it occurred to me to say to him. “Something primordial, something that the very existence of a people may depend on. Maybe that's what impressed me so. One doesn't always know why one is moved by things, Mascarita. They strike some secret chord, and that's that.”

Saúl laughed and clapped me on the shoulder. I had been speaking seriously, but he took it as a joke.

“Oh, I see. It's the literary side that interests you,” he exclaimed. He sounded disappointed, as though that aspect diminished the value of my curiosity. “Well, don't let your imagination run away with you. I'll bet it's those gringos who told you that story about storytellers. Things just can't be the way they seem to be to them. I assure you the gringos understand the Machiguengas even less than the missionaries do.”