The Storyteller (25 page)

That, anyway, is what I have learned.

Tasurinchi is well. Walking. I was on my way to visit him there where he lives, by the Timpanía, when I met him on the trail. He and two of his sons were returning from a visit to the White Fathers, the ones who live on the banks of the Sepahua. He'd brought them his maize harvest. He'd been doing so for some time now, he told me. The White Fathers give him seed, machetes to clear the forest, spades to work the ground and grow potatoes, yams, maize, tobacco, coffee, and cotton. Later on, he sells them what he doesn't need, and that way he can buy more things. He showed me what he's already acquired: clothes, food, an oil lamp, fishhooks, a knife. “Maybe next time I can buy myself a shotgun as well,” he said. Then he'd be able to hunt anything in the forest, he told me. But he wasn't happy, Tasurinchi wasn't. Worried, rather; his forehead wrinkled and his eyes hard. “In the ground here by the Timpanía you can only sow a crop a couple of times in the same place, never more,” he lamented. “And in some places only once. It's bad earth, it seems. My last sowing of cassavas and yams produced a miserable yield.” It's land that tires quickly, it appears. “It wants me to leave it in peace,” Tasurinchi said. “This earth here along the Timpanía is lazy,” he complained bitterly. “You barely put it to work and it starts asking for a rest. That's its nature.”

Talking of this and that, we reached his hut. His wife ran out to meet us, all upset. She'd painted her face in mourning, and waving her hands and pointing, she said the river was a thief. It had stolen one of her three hens, it seemed. She was holding it in her arms to warm it, since it appeared to be sick, as she filled her water jar. And then, all of a sudden, everything started shaking. The earth, the forest, the hut, everything started shaking. “Like when you have the evil,” she said. It shook as though it were dancing. In her fright she let go of the hen and saw the current carry it away and devour it before she could rescue it. It's true that the current is very swift there in that gorge of the Timpanía. Even close into shore, there is white-water.

Tasurinchi was furious and began beating her. Saying: “I'm not beating you because you let it fall into the river. That could happen to anyone. I'm beating you because you lied. Instead of making up a story about the earth shaking, why don't you say you fell asleep? It slipped out of your arms, didn't it? Or maybe you left it on the bank and it fell in. Or you threw it into the river in a fit of temper. Don't talk of things that didn't happen. Are you a storyteller, may I ask? Don't lies bring harm to a family? Who's going to believe you when you say the earth began dancing? If it had, I'd have felt it, too.”

And as Tasurinchi scolded her, raging and beating her, the earth began shaking. Don't laugh. I'm not making it up; I didn't dream it. It happened. It started dancing. First we heard a deep growling, as though the lord of thunder were down below, making his jaguars roar. A sound of war, many drums beating all together, down in the earth's entrails. A deep, threatening sound. We suddenly felt that the world was restless. The earth was moving about, dancing, leaping as though it were drunk. The trees moved, and Tasurinchi's hut; the waters of the river bubbled and seethed, like cassava boiling in a tub. There was anger in the air, it seemed. The sky filled with terrified birds; parrots squawked in the trees; from the forest came the grunts, whistles, and croaks of frightened animals. “Again!” Tasurinchi's wife screamed. We looked all about, confused, not knowing whether to run or to stay where we were. The children were crying; clinging to Tasurinchi, they howled. He, too, was frightened, and so was I. “Is this world coming to an end?” he said. “Is darkness returning, is chaos coming?”

When the shaking stopped at last, the sky turned black, as though the sun had begun to fall. Then all at once, very suddenly, it was dark. A great dust storm arose, from everywhere, blanketing this world in an ashen color. I could hardly see Tasurinchi and his family with all the dust blowing in the strong wind. Everything was gray. “Something very grave is happening and we don't know what it is,” said Tasurinchi fearfully. “Can it be the end of us men who walk? The time has come for us to go, perhaps. The sun has fallen. It may not rise again.”

I know now that it didn't fall. I know now that if it had fallen, we wouldn't be here. The dust storm moved on, the sky cleared, and the earth was still at last. A smell of brine and rotted plants lingered in the air, a sickening stench. The world wasn't pleased, it seemed. “You see, I didn't lie; it did shake. That's why the river swallowed up the hen,” said Tasurinchi's wife. But he was hardheaded, insisting: “That's not certain.” He was enraged. “You lied,” he screamed at his wife. “Perhaps that's why the earth shook just now.” He began beating her again, thrusting his chest out, roaring from the sheer effort he was expending. Tasurinchi, the one from the Timpanía, is a very stubborn man. It's not the first time he's fallen into a fury. I've seen him have fits of rage at other times. That may be why few people visit him. He refused to admit he'd been wrong, but I could see, as anyone could have, that his wife had spoken the truth.

We ate; we lay down for a night's rest on the mats; in just a little while, long before dawn, I heard him get up. I saw him go out and sit down on a stone a few paces away from the hut. There was Tasurinchi, sitting brooding in the moonlight. I got up in the semi-darkness and went out to talk to him. He was grinding up tobacco to inhale. I saw him tamp down the powder in the hollow turkey bone, and then he asked me to blow it up his nose for him. I placed it in one nostril and blew; he breathed it in deeply, anxiously, closing his eyes. Then I placed it in his other nostril and blew. And after that he breathed the powder that was left into my nose. He was worried, Tasurinchi was. Tormented, even. Saying: “I can't sleep,” in the voice of a man who is very tired. “Two things have happened that make a person think. The river stole one of my hens and the earth started shaking. And, what's more, the sky grew dark. What must I do?” I didn't know; I was as bewildered as he was. Why are you asking me that, Tasurinchi? “These things happening, one right after the other, almost at the same time, mean that I must do something,” he said to me. “But I don't know what. There's no one I can ask hereabouts. The seripigari is many moons' walk away, up the Sepahua.”

Tasurinchi spent the whole day sitting on that stone, not speaking to anyone. Neither drinking nor eating. When his wife came out to bring him some mashed bananas, he wouldn't even let her come near; he made a threatening gesture with his hand as though he were about to hit her again. That night he didn't come inside his hut. Kashiri shone brightly up in the sky and I could see Tasurinchi, not moving, his head buried in his chest, trying his best to understand these misfortunes. What were they telling him to do? Who knows? The whole family was silent, worried, even the little ones. Watching him anxiously, not daring to move. Wondering: What's going to happen?

Around midday, Tasurinchi, the one by the Timpanía, got up from the stone. He approached the hut with a lively step; we saw him coming, beckoning to us with open arms. A determined expression on his face, it seemed.

“We start walking,” he said, his voice earnest, commanding. “Get moving. This minute. We must go far from here. That's what it means. If we stay, evils will come, catastrophes will occur. That's the message. I've understood it at last. This place has had enough of us. So we must go.”

It must have been hard for him to make up his mind. The faces of the women and of the men too, the sadness of the family showed how painful it was for them to leave. They'd been by the Timpanía for a good while. With the crops they sold to the White Fathers of the Sepahua they'd been buying things. They seemed happy, perhaps. Had they perhaps met their destiny? They hadn't, it seems. Were they becoming corrupt staying in the same place such a long time? Who knows? Leaving everything like that, all of a sudden, without knowing where they were going, without knowing whether they would ever again have what they had left behind, must have been a great sacrifice. It must have meant sorrow for one and all.

But nobody in the family protested; neither the wife, nor the children, nor the lad who was living close by because he wanted to marry Tasurinchi's eldest daughter. Not one of them protested. Old and young began getting ready, there and then. “Quickly, quickly, we must get away from here; this place has become an enemy,” Tasurinchi said, hurrying them along. He was bursting with energy again, impatient to leave. Saying: “Yes, quickly, quickly, we must go, we must escape,” bustling about, spurring himself on.

I helped them get ready and left with them. Before leaving, we burned down the two huts and anything that couldn't be carried, as though someone had died. “All the impure things we have remain here,” Tasurinchi assured his family. We walked for several moons. There was little food. No animals fell into the traps. At last we caught some catfish in a pond. We ate. When night came, we sat and talked. I talked to them all night long, perhaps.

“I feel more at peace now,” Tasurinchi said to me when I left them several moons later. “I don't believe I'll fall into such a rage again. I've done so very often of late. Perhaps that's over and done with. I did the right thing by starting to walk, it seems. I feel it here, in my breast.” “How did you know you had to leave that place?” I asked him. “I remembered something I knew when I was born,” he answered. “Or perhaps I learned it in a trance. If an evil occurs on the earth, it's because people have stopped paying attention to the earth, because they don't look after it the way it ought to be looked after. Can it talk the way we do? To say what it wants to say, it has to do something. Shake, perhaps. To say: Don't forget me. To say: I'm alive, too. I don't want to be ill-treated. That's what it could have been complaining of when it jiggled around. Perhaps I made it sweat too much. Perhaps the White Fathers aren't what they seem, but kamagarinis, allies of Kientibakori, advising me to go on living there where I was, just because they want to harm the earth. Who knows? But if it complained, then I had to do something, you see. How do we help the sun, the rivers? How do we help this world, everything that's alive? By walking. I've fulfilled the obligation, I believe. Look, it already shows. Listen to the ground beneath your feet; walk on it, storyteller. How still and firm it is! It must be pleased, now that it can feel us walking on it once again.”

Where can Tasurinchi be now? I don't know. Can he have stayed on in that region where we parted? Who knows? Someday I'll know. He is well, most likely. Content. Walking, perhaps.

That, anyway, is what I have learned.

When I left Tasurinchi, I turned around and started walking toward the Timpanía. I hadn't been to visit the Machiguengas there for some time. But before I got there, various unexpected things happened and I had to take off in another direction. That's why I'm here with you, perhaps.

As I was trying to jump over a bed of nettles, I got a thorn in my foot. Here, in this foot. I sucked and spat the thorn out. Some evil must have remained inside my foot because, very soon, it started hurting. It hurt a lot. I stopped walking and sat down. Why had this happened to me? I searched in my pouch. That's where I keep the herbs the seripigari gave me against snakebite, against sickness, against strange things. And in the strap of my knapsack was the iserepito that wards off bad spells. I still carry that little stone about with me. Why didn't the herbs or the iserepito protect me from the little devil in the nettles? My foot was so swollen it looked as if it were somebody else's. Was I changing into a monster? I made a fire and put my foot close to the flames so the evil would come out from inside with the sweat. It hurt terribly; I roared, trying to frighten away the pain. I must have fallen asleep from all that sweating and roaring. And in my sleep I kept hearing parrots chattering and laughing.

I had to stay in that place for many moons while the swelling in my foot went down. I tried to walk, but ay, ay, it hurt dreadfully. I wasn't short of food, happily; I had cassava and maize and some bananas in my knapsack. And what's more, luck was with me, it seems. Right there, without having to get up, by crawling just a little way, I managed to break off a small green branch and pin it down with a knotted cord that I hid in the dirt. Very soon a partridge got caught in the trap. That gave me food for several days. But they were days of torment, not because of the thorn, but because of the parrots. Why were there so many of them? Why were they watching me so closely? There were any number of flocks; they settled on all the branches and bushes around. More and more kept arriving. They had all begun looking at me. Was something happening? Why were they squawking so much? Did all that chattering have anything to do with me? Were they talking about me? Now and then they would come out with one of those odd parrot laughs that sound so human. Were they making mock of me? Saying: You'll never leave here, storyteller. I threw stones at them to scare them off. Useless. They flapped about for a moment and settled on their perches again. There they were, myriads of them, above my head. What is it they want? What's going to happen?

The second day, all of a sudden, they left. The parrots flew off in terror. All at the same time, squawking, shedding feathers, flying into each other, as though an enemy were approaching. They'd smelled danger, it seems. Because just then, right over my head, leaping from branch to branch, there came a talking monkey, a yaniri. Yes, the very same, the big red howling monkey, the yaniri. Enormous, noisy, surrounded by his band of females. Leaping and swinging all around him, happy at being with him. Happy to be his females, perhaps. “Yaniri, yaniri,” I shouted. “Help me! Weren't you a seripigari once? Come down and cure this foot of mine; I want to continue my journey.” But the talking monkey paid no attention to me. Can it be true that it was once, before, a seripigari who walked? That's why it must not be hunted or eaten, perhaps. When you cook a talking monkey, the air is filled with the smell of tobacco, they say. The tobacco that the seripigari he once was used to inhale and drink in his trances.