The Storyteller (19 page)

When we got back to New Light, young Martín (his manners were exquisite and his gestures genuinely elegant) invited me to drink lemon verbena tea with him in his hut next to the school and the village store. He had a radio transmitter, his means of communication with the headquarters of the Institute at Yarinacocha. There were just the two of us in the room, which was as meticulously neat and clean as Martín himself. Lucho Llosa and Alejandro Pérez had gone to help the pilots unload the hammocks and mosquito nets we were to sleep in. The light was failing fast and the dark shadows were deepening around us. The entire jungle had set up a rhythmical chirring, as always at this hour, reminding me that, beneath its green tangle, myriads of insects dominated the world. Soon the sky would be full of stars.

Did the Machiguengas really believe that the stars were the beams of light from the crowns of spirits? Martín nodded impassively. That shooting stars were the fiery arrows of those little child-gods, the ananeriites, and the morning dew their urine? This time Martín laughed. Yes, that was their belief. And now that the Machiguengas had stopped walking, so as to put down roots in villages, would the sun fall? Surely not: God would take care of keeping it in place. He looked at me for a moment with an amused expression: how had I found out about these beliefs? I told him that I'd been interested in the Machiguengas for nearly a quarter of a century and that from the first I'd made a point of reading everything that was written about them. I told him why. As I spoke, his face, friendly and smiling to begin with, grew stern and distrustful. He listened to me grimly, not a muscle of his face moving.

“So, you see, my questions about storytellers aren't just vulgar curiosity but something much more serious. They're very important to me. Perhaps as important as to the Machiguengas, Martín.” He remained silent and motionless, with a watchful gleam in the depth of his eyes. “Why didn't you want to tell me anything about them? The schoolmistress at New World wouldn't tell me anything about them, either. Why all this mystery about the habladores, Martín?”

He assured me he didn't understand what I was talking about. What was all this business about “habladores”? He'd never heard a word about them, either in this village or in any other of the community. There might be habladores in other tribes perhaps, but not among the Machiguengas. He was telling me this when the Schneils came in. We hadn't drunk up all that lemon verbena, the most fragrant in all Amazonia, had we? Martín changed the subject, and I thought it best not to pursue the matter.

But an hour later, after we'd taken our leave of Martín and I'd put up my hammock and mosquito net in the hut they'd loaned us, I went out with the Schneils to enjoy the cool evening air, and as we walked in the open surrounded by the dwellings of New Light, the subject came irresistibly to my lips once again.

“In the few hours I've been with the Machiguengas, there are many things I haven't been able to figure out yet,” I said. “I have realized one thing, however. Something important.”

The sky was a forest of stars and a dark patch of clouds hid the moon, its presence visible only as a diffuse brightness. A fire had been made at one end of New Light, and fleeting silhouettes suddenly stole around it. All the huts were dark except for the one they'd lent to us, some fifty meters away, which was lit by the greenish light of a portable kerosene lamp. The Schneils waited for me to go on. We were walking slowly over soft ground where tall grass grew. Even though I was wearing boots, I had begun to feel mosquitoes biting my ankles and insteps.

“And what is that?” Mrs. Schneil finally asked.

“That all this is quite relative,” I went on impetuously. “I mean, baptizing this place New Light and calling the village chief Martín. The New Testament in Machiguenga; sending the Indians to Bible school and making pastors out of them; the violent transition from a nomadic life to a sedentary one; accelerated Westernization and Christianization. So-called modernization. I've realized that it's just outward show. Even though they've started trading and using money, the weight of their own traditions exerts a much stronger pull on them than all that.”

I stopped. Was I offending them? I myself didn't know what conclusion to draw from this whole hasty process of reasoning.

“Yes, of course.” Edwin Schneil coughed, somewhat disconcerted. “Naturally. Hundreds of years of beliefs and customs don't disappear overnight. It'll take time. What's important is that they've begun to change. Today's Machiguengas are no longer what they were when we arrived, I assure you.”

“I've realized that there are depths in them they won't yet allow to be touched,” I interrupted him. “I asked the schoolmistress in New World, and Martín as well, about habladores. And they both reacted in exactly the same way: denying that they existed, pretending they didn't even know what I was talking about. It means that even in the most Westernized Machiguengas, such as the schoolmistress and Martín, there's an inviolable inner loyalty to their own beliefs. There are certain taboos they're not prepared to give up. That's why they keep them so thoroughly hidden from outsiders.”

There was a long silence in which the chirring of the invisible night insects seemed to grow deafening. Was he going to ask me who habladores were? Would the Schneils also tell me, as the schoolmistress and the village chief-pastor had, that they'd never heard of them? I thought for a moment that habladores didn't exist: that I'd invented them and then housed them in false memories so as to make them real.

“Ah, habladores!” Mrs. Schneil exclaimed at last. And the Machiguenga word or sentence crackled like dead leaves. It seemed to me that it came to greet me, across time, from the bungalow on the shores of Yarinacocha where I had heard it for the first time when I was little more than an adolescent.

“Ah,” Edwin Schneil repeated, mimicking the crackling sound twice in a faintly uneasy tone of voice. “Habladores.
Speakers
. Yes, of course, that's one possible translation.”

“And how is it that you know about them?” Mrs. Schneil said, turning her head just slightly in my direction.

“Through you. Through the two of you,” I murmured.

I sensed that they opened their eyes wide in the darkness and exchanged a look, not understanding. I explained that since that night in their bungalow on the shores of Lake Yarina when they had told me about them, the Machiguenga habladores had lived with me, intriguing me, disturbing me, that since then I had tried a thousand times to imagine them as they wandered through the forest, collecting and repeating stories, fables, gossip, tales they'd invented, from one little Machiguenga island to another in this Amazonian sea in which they drifted, borne on the current of adversity. I told them that, for some reason I found hard to pin down, the existence of those storytellers, finding out what they were doing and what importance it had in the life of their people, had been, for twenty-three years, a great stimulus for my own work, a source of inspiration and an example I would have liked to emulate. I realized how excited my voice sounded, and fell silent.

By a sort of unspoken agreement, we had halted alongside a pile of tree trunks and branches heaped up in the center of the clearing as though ready to be set alight for a bonfire. We had sat down or leaned back against the logs. Kashiri could now be seen, a yellow-orange crescent, surrounded by his vast harem of sparkling fireflies. There were a lot of mosquitoes as well as clouds of gnats, and we waved our hands back and forth to shoo them away from our faces.

“How really odd. Who would ever have thought that you'd remember a thing like that? And, stranger still, that it would take on such importance in your life?” Edwin Schneil said at last, just to say something. He seemed perplexed and a little flustered. “I didn't even remember our having touched, back then, on the subject of—storytellers? No, speakers—is that the right word? How odd, how very odd.”

“It doesn't surprise me at all that Martín and the schoolmistress of New World didn't want to tell you anything about them,” Mrs. Schneil broke in after a moment. “It's a subject no Machiguenga likes to talk about. It's something very private, very secret. Not even with the two of us, who've known them for such a long time now, who've seen so many of them born. I don't understand it. Because they tell you everything, about their beliefs, their ayahuasca rites, the witch doctors. They don't keep anything to themselves. Except anything having to do with the habladores. It's the one thing they always shy away from. Edwin and I have often wondered why there's that taboo.”

“Yes, it's a strange thing,” Edwin Schneil agreed. “It's hard to understand, because they're very communicative and never object to answering any question they're asked. They're the best informants in the world; ask any anthropologist who's been around here. Maybe they don't want to talk about them or have people meet them, because the habladores are the repositories of their family secrets. They know all the Machiguengas' private affairs. What's that proverb? You don't wash dirty linen in public. Perhaps the taboo about habladores has to do with some feeling of that sort.”

In the darkness, Mrs. Schneil laughed. “Well, that's a theory that doesn't convince me,” she said. “Because the Machiguengas aren't at all secretive about their personal concerns. If you only knew how often they've left me flabbergasted and red in the face from what they tell me…”

“But, in any case, I can assure you you're wrong if you think it's a religious taboo,” Edwin Schneil declared. “It isn't. The habladores aren't sorcerers or priests, like the seripigari or the machikanari. They're tellers of tales, that's all.”

“I know that,” I said. “You explained that to me the first time. And that's precisely what moves me. That the Machiguengas consider mere storytellers so important that they have to keep their existence a secret.”

Every so often a silent shadow passed by, crackled briefly, and the Schneils crackled back what must have been the equivalent of a “Good night,” and the shadow disappeared into the darkness. Not a sound came from the huts. Was the whole village already fast asleep?

“And in all these years, you've never heard an hablador?” I asked.

“I've never been that lucky,” Mrs. Schneil said. “Up until now they've never offered me that opportunity. But Edwin's had the chance.”

“Twice, even.” He laughed. “Though in a quarter of a century that's not very often, is it? I hope what I'm going to say won't disappoint you. But I do believe I wouldn't want to repeat the experience.”

The first time had been by sheer happenstance, ten years or more before. The Schneils had been living in a small Machiguenga settlement on the Tikompinía for several months, when one morning, leaving his wife in the village, Edwin had gone off to visit another family of the community a few hours upriver by canoe, taking with him a young boy to help him paddle. On reaching their destination, they found that instead of the five or six Machiguengas who lived there, whom Edwin knew, there were at least twenty people gathered together, a number of them from distant hamlets. Oldsters and young children, men and women were squatting in a half circle, facing a man sitting cross-legged in front of them, declaiming. He was a storyteller. Nobody objected to Edwin Schneil and the lad sitting down to listen. And the storyteller did not interrupt his monologue when they joined the audience.

“He was a man getting on in years and spoke so fast that I had trouble following him. He must have been speaking for a good while already. But he didn't seem tired; quite the contrary. The performance went on for several hours more. Every now and then they'd hand him a gourdful of masato and he'd take a swallow to clear his throat. No, I'd never seen that storyteller before. Quite old, at first sight, but as you know, one ages quickly here in the jungle. An old man, among the Machiguengas, can mean one no more than thirty. He was a short man, with a powerful build, very expressive. You or I or anyone else who talked on and on for that many hours would be hoarse-voiced and worn out. But he wasn't. He went on and on, putting everything he had into it. It was his job, after all, and I don't doubt he did it well.”

What did he talk about? It was impossible to remember. What a hodgepodge! A bit of everything, anything that came into his head. What he'd done the day before, and the four worlds of the Machiguenga cosmos; his travels, magic herbs, people he'd known; the gods, the little gods, and fabulous creatures of the tribe's pantheon. Animals he'd seen and celestial geography, a maze of rivers with names nobody could possibly remember. Edwin Schneil had had to concentrate to follow the torrent of words that leapt from a cassava crop to the armies of demons of Kientibakori, the spirit of evil, and from there to births, marriages, and deaths in different families or the iniquities of the time of the tree-bleeding, as they called the rubber boom. Very soon Edwin Schneil found himself less interested in the storyteller than in the fascinated, rapt attention with which the Machiguengas listened to him, greeting his jokes with great roars of laughter or sharing his sadness. Their eyes avid, their mouths agape, not one pause, not a single inflection of what the man said was lost on them.

I listened to the linguist the way the Machiguengas had listened to the storyteller. Yes, they did exist, and were like the ones in my dreams.

“To tell the truth, I remember very little of what he said,” Edwin Schneil added. “I'm just giving you a few examples. What a mishmash! I can remember his telling about the initiation ceremony of a young shaman, with ayahuasca, under the guidance of a seripigari. He recounted the visions he'd had. Strange, incoherent ones, like certain modern poems. He also spoke of the properties of a little bird, the chobíburiti; if you crush the small bones of its wing and bury them in the floor of the hut, that assures peace in the family.”