The Storyteller (3 page)

“Seriously, Mascarita, do you think polygamy, animism, head shrinking, and witch doctoring with tobacco brews represent a superior form of culture?”

An Andean boy was throwing bucketfuls of sawdust on the spittle and other filth lying on the red tile floor of the Bar Palermo as a half-breed followed behind him, sweeping up. Saúl looked at me for a long while without answering.

At last he shook his head. “Superior, no. I've never said or thought so, little brother.” He was very serious now. “Inferior, perhaps, if the question is posed in terms of infant mortality, the status of women, polygamy or monogamy, handcrafts or industry. Don't think I idealize them. Not in the least.”

He fell silent, as though distracted by something, perhaps the quarrel at a neighboring table that had flared up and died down rhythmically since we first sat down. But it wasn't that. Memory had distracted him. Suddenly he seemed sad. “Among the men who walk and those of other tribes there are many things that would shock you very much, old man. I don't deny that.”

The fact, for instance, that the Aguarunas and the Huambisas of the Alto Marañón tear out their daughters' hymen at her menarche and eat it, that slavery exists in many tribes, and in some communities they let the old people die at the first signs of weakness, on the pretext that their souls have been called away and their destiny fulfilled. But the worst thing of all, the hardest to accept, perhaps, from our point of view, is what, with a little black humor, could be called the perfectionism of the tribes of the Arawak family. Perfectionism, Saúl? Yes, something that from the outset would appear as cruel to me as it had to him, old buddy. That babies born with physical defects, lame, maimed, blind, with more or fewer fingers than usual, or a harelip, were killed by their own mothers, who threw them in the river or buried them alive. Anybody would naturally be shocked by such customs.

He looked at me for a good while, silent and thoughtful, as if searching for the right words for what he wanted to say to me.

Suddenly he touched his enormous birthmark. “I wouldn't have passed the test, pal. They'd have liquidated me,” he whispered. “They say the Spartans did the same thing, right? That little monsters, Gregor Samsas, were hurled down from the top of Mount Taygetus, right?”

He laughed, I laughed, but we both knew that he wasn't joking and that there was no cause for laughter. He explained to me that, curiously enough, though they were pitiless when it came to babies born defective, they were very tolerant with all those, children or adults, who were victims of some accident or illness that damaged them physically. Saúl, at least, had noticed no hostility toward the disabled or the demented in the tribes. His hand was still on the deep purple scab of his half-face.

“But that's the way they are and we should respect them. Being that way has helped them to live in harmony with their forests for hundreds of years. Though we don't understand their beliefs and some of their customs offend us, we have no right to kill them off.”

I believe that that morning in the Bar Palermo was the only time he ever alluded, not jokingly but seriously, even dramatically, to what was undoubtedly a tragedy in his life, even though he concealed it with such style and grace: the excrescence that made him a walking incitement to mockery and disgust, and must have affected all his relationships, especially with women. (He was extremely shy with them; I had noticed at San Marcos that he avoided them and only entered into conversation with one of our women classmates if she spoke to him first.) At last he removed his hand from his face with a gesture of annoyance, as though regretting that he had touched the birthmark, and launched into another lecture.

“Do our cars, guns, planes, and Coca-Colas give us the right to exterminate them because they don't have such things? Or do you believe in ‘civilizing the savages,' pal? How? By making soldiers of them? By putting them to work on the farms as slaves to Creoles like Fidel Pereira? By forcing them to change their language, their religion, and their customs, the way the missionaries are trying to do? What's to be gained by that? Being able to exploit them more easily, that's all. Making them zombies and caricatures of men, like those semi-acculturated Indians you see in Lima.”

The Andean boy throwing bucketfuls of sawdust on the floor in the Palermo had on the sort of sandals—a sole and two cross-strips cut from an old rubber tire—made and sold by peddlers, and a pair of patched pants held up with a length of rope round his waist. He was a child with the face of an old man, coarse hair, blackened nails, and a reddish scab on his nose. A zombie? A caricature? Would it have been better for him to have stayed in his Andean village, wearing a wool cap with earflaps, leather sandals, and a poncho, never learning Spanish? I didn't know, and I still don't. But Mascarita knew. He spoke without vehemence, without anger, with quiet determination. He explained to me at great length what counter-balanced their cruelty (the price they pay for survival, as he put it: a view of Nature that struck him as an admirable trait in those cultures. It was something that the tribes, despite the many differences between them, all had in common: their understanding of the world in which they were immersed, the wisdom born of long practice which had allowed them, through an elaborate system of rites, taboos, fears, and routines, perpetuated and passed on from father to son, to preserve that Nature, seemingly so superabundant, but actually so vulnerable, upon which they depended for subsistence. These tribes had survived because their habits and customs had docilely followed the rhythms and requirements of the natural world, without doing it violence or disturbing it deeply, just the minimum necessary so as not to be destroyed by it. The very opposite of what we civilized people were doing, wasting those elements without which we would end up withering like flowers without water.

I listened to him and pretended to be taking an interest in what he was saying. But I was really thinking about his birthmark. Why had he suddenly alluded to it while explaining to me his feelings about the Amazonian Indians? Was this the key to Mascarita's conversion? In the Peruvian social order those Shipibos, Huambisas, Aguarunas, Yaguas, Shapras, Campas, Mashcos represented something that he could understand better than anyone else: a picturesque horror, an aberration that other people ridiculed or pitied without granting it the respect and dignity deserved only by those whose physical appearance, customs, and beliefs were “normal.” Both he and they were anomalies in the eyes of other Peruvians. His birthmark aroused in them, in us, the same feelings, deep down, as those creatures living somewhere far away, half naked, eating each other's lice and speaking incomprehensible dialects. Was this the origin of Mascarita's love at first sight for the tribal Indians, the “chunchos”? Had he unconsciously identified with those marginal beings because of the birthmark that made him, too, a marginal being, every time he went out on the streets?

I suggested this interpretation to him to see if it put him in a better mood, and in fact he burst out laughing.

“I take it you passed Dr. Guerrita's psych course?” he joked. “I'd have been more likely to flunk you, myself.”

And still laughing, he told me that Don Salomón Zuratas, being sharper than I was, had suggested a Jewish interpretation.

“That I'm identifying the Amazonian Indians with the Jewish people, always a minority and always persecuted for their religion and their mores that are different from those of the rest of society. How does that strike you? A far nobler interpretation than yours, which might be called the Frankenstein syndrome. To each madman his own mania, pal.”

I retorted that the two interpretations didn't exclude each other. He wound up, highly amused, giving free play to his imagination.

“Okay, supposing you're right. Supposing being half Jewish and half monster has made me more sensitive to the fate of the jungle tribes than someone as appallingly normal as you.”

“Poor jungle tribes! You're using them for a crying towel. You're taking advantage of them, too, you know.”

“Well, let's leave it at that. I've got a class.” He said goodbye as he got up from the table without a trace of the dark mood of a moment before. “But remind me next time to set you straight on those ‘poor jungle tribes.' I'll tell you a few things that'll make your hair stand on end. What was done to them, for instance, in the days of the rubber boom. If they could live through that, they don't deserve to be called ‘poor savages.' Supermen, rather. Just wait—you'll see.”

Apparently he had spoken of his “mania” to Don Salomón. The old man must have come around to accepting the fact that, rather than in halls of justice, Saúl would bring prestige to the name Zuratas in university lecture halls and in the field of anthropological research. Was that what he had decided to be in life? A professor, a researcher? That he had the aptitude I heard confirmed by one of his professors, Dr. José Matos Mar, who was then head of the Department of Ethnology at San Marcos.

“Young Zuratas has turned out to be a first-rate student. He spent the three months of the year-end vacation in the Urubamba region, doing fieldwork with the Machiguengas, and the lad has brought back some excellent material.”

He was talking to Raúl Porras Barrenechea, a historian with whom I worked in the afternoons, who had a holy horror of ethnology and anthropology, which he accused of replacing man by artifacts as the focal point of culture, and of butchering Spanish prose (which, let it be said in passing, he himself wrote beautifully).

“Well then, let's make a historian of the young man and not a classifier of bits of stone, Dr. Matos. Don't be selfish. Hand him on to me in the History Department.”

The work Saúl did in the summer of '56 among the Machiguengas later became, in expanded form, his thesis for his bachelor's degree. He defended it in our fifth year at San Marcos, and I can remember clearly the expression of pride and deep personal happiness on Don Salomón's face. Dressed for the occasion in a starched shirt under his jacket, he watched the ceremony from the front row of the auditorium, and his little eyes shone as Saúl read out his conclusions, answered the questions of the jury, headed by Matos Mar, had his thesis accepted, and was draped in the academic sash he had thus earned.

Don Salomón invited Saul and me to lunch, at the Raimondi in downtown Lima, to celebrate the event. But he himself didn't touch a single mouthful, perhaps so as not to transgress the Jewish dietary laws inadvertently. (One of Saúl's jokes when ordering cracklings or shellfish was: “And besides, the idea of committing a sin as I swallow them down gives them a very special taste, pal. A taste you'll never know.”) Don Salomón was bursting with pleasure at his son's brand-new degree.

Halfway through lunch he turned to me and begged me, in earnest tones, in his guttural Central European accent: “Convince your friend he should accept the scholarship.” And noting the look of surprise on my face, he explained: “He doesn't want to go to Europe, so as not to leave me alone—as though I weren't old enough to know how to look after myself! I've told him that if he insists on being so foolish, he's going to force me to die so that he can go off to France to specialize with his mind at rest.”

That was how I found out that Matos Mar had gotten Saúl a fellowship to study for a doctorate at the University of Bordeaux. Not wanting to leave his father all by himself, Mascarita had refused it. Was that really the reason why he didn't go off to Bordeaux? I believed it at the time; today I'm sure he was lying. I know now, though he confessed it to no one and kept his secret under lock and key, that his conversion had continued to work its way within him until it had taken on the lineaments of a mystical ecstasy, perhaps even of a seeking after martyrdom. I have no doubt, today, that he took the trouble to write a thesis and obtain a bachelor's degree in ethnology just to please his father, knowing the while that he would never be an ethnologist. Though at the time I was wearing myself out trying to land some sort of fellowship that would get me to Europe, I attempted several times to persuade him not to waste such an opportunity. “It's something that won't come your way again, Mascarita. Europe! France! Don't throw a chance like that away, man!” His mind was made up, once and for all: he couldn't go, he was the only one Don Salomón had in the world and he wasn't going to abandon him for two or three years, knowing what an elderly man his father was.

Naturally I believed him. The one who didn't believe him at all was the one who had secured him his fellowship and had such high academic hopes for him: his professor, Matos Mar. The latter appeared one afternoon, as was his habit, at Professor Porras Barrenechea's to exchange ideas and have tea and biscuits, and told him the news:

“You win, Dr. Porras. The History Department can fill the Bordeaux fellowship this year. Our candidate has turned it down. What do you make of all this?”

“As far as I know, it's the first time in the history of San Marcos that a student has refused a fellowship to France,” Porras said. “What in the world got into the boy?”

I was there in the room where they were talking, taking notes on the myths of El Dorado and the Seven Cities of Cibola as set down by the chroniclers of the Discovery and the Conquest, and I put my oar in to say that the reason for Saúl's refusal was Don Salomón and his not wanting to leave him all by himself.

“Yes, that's the reason Zuratas gives, and I wish it were true,” Matos Mar said, with a skeptical wave of his hand. “But I'm afraid there's something far deeper than that. Saúl's starting to have doubts about research and fieldwork. Ethical doubts.”

Porras Barrenechea thrust his chin out and his little eyes had the sly expression they always had when he was about to make a nasty remark.

“Well, if Zuratas has realized that ethnology is a pseudoscience invented by gringos to destroy the Humanities, he's more intelligent than one might have expected.”