The Storyteller (7 page)

The time he was closest to destroying us was that time. It was no longer the time of abundance, nor was it that of the tree-bleeding. After the first and before the second, it seems. A kamagarini disguised as a man appeared and said to the men who walk: “The one who really needs help is not the sun. But rather Kashiri, the moon, who is the father of the sun.” He gave them his reasons, which set them to thinking. Wasn't the sun so strong it made people's eyes water if they dared look at it directly without blinking? So what help did it need? The old story about its falling and then rising again was a trick. Kashiri, on the other hand, with his faint, gentle light was always fighting against the darkness, under difficult conditions. If the moon weren't there at night, watching in the sky, the darkness would be total, a thick blackness: men would fall down the precipice, would step on vipers, wouldn't be able to find their canoes or go out to plant cassava or hunt. They'd be prisoners in just one place, and the Mashcos could surround them, shoot them down with arrows, cut off their heads, and steal their souls. If the sun fell altogether, it would be night, perhaps. But as long as there was the moon it would never be entirely night, just half darkness, and life would go on, perhaps. So shouldn't men help Kashiri instead? Wasn't this to their advantage? If they did, the light of the moon would be brighter and night would be less dark, a half light, good to walk by.

The one who said those things appeared to be a man but he was a kamagarini. One of the ones that Kientibakori breathed out to go about this world sowing misfortune. The ones before did not recognize him. Even though he arrived in the midst of a great storm, the way little devils always arrive in the villages. The ones before didn't understand that, perhaps. If someone appears as the lord of thunder is roaring and rain is falling in torrents, it's not a man, it's a kamagarini. We know now. They hadn't learned that yet. They allowed themselves to be persuaded. And, changing their habits, they started doing by night what they had done by day before and by day what they had done by night. Thinking that Kashiri, the moon, would be brighter that way.

Once the eye of the sun appeared in the sky, they took refuge beneath their roofs, saying to each other: “It's time to rest.” “It's time to light the fires.” “It's time to sit and listen to the one who talks.” That's what they did: they rested while the sun shone, or they gathered around to listen to the storyteller till darkness began to fall. Then, shaking off their drowsiness, they said: “The time has come to live.” They traveled by night, they hunted by night, they built their dwellings by night, they cleared the forest and cleaned the weeds and the underbrush from the cassava fields by night. They got used to this new way of life. To the point that they could no longer bear being out of doors in the daylight. The heat of the sun burned their skin and the fire of its eye blinded them. Rubbing themselves, they said: “We cannot see. How terrible this light is. We hate it.” On the other hand, their eyes had grown used to the dark and they could see in the night the way you and I can see in the daytime. They said: “It's quite true. Kashiri, the moon, is grateful to us for the help we give him.” They started calling themselves not men of the earth, as before, or men who walk, or men who talk. But men of darkness.

Everything was going very well, perhaps. They seemed happy, perhaps. Life went on without anything happening. They felt at peace. Those who went came back, and one way or another, there was always enough food. “We were wise to do what we did,” they said. But they were mistaken, it seems. They had lost wisdom. They were all turning into kamagarinis, but they didn't know it. Until certain things started happening to them. One fine day Tasurinchi woke up covered with fish scales, with a tail where his feet had been. He looked like an enormous carachama. Yes, the fish that lives in water and on land, the fish that swims and walks. Dragging himself painfully along, he took refuge in the pond, muttering mournfully that he couldn't bear life on land because he missed the water. A few moons later, when he woke up, wings had sprouted where Tasurinchi's arms used to be. He gave a little hop, and they saw him take off and disappear above the trees, beating his wings like a hummingbird. A snout and tusks grew on Tasurinchi, and his sons, not recognizing him, shouted excitedly: “A sajino! Let's eat it!” When he tried to tell them who he was, all he could do was snort and grunt. He had to make his escape trotting clumsily on his four stumpy legs he hardly knew how to use, pursued by a hungry horde aiming arrows and stones at him. “Let's catch it, let's chase it down!” they said.

The earth was running short of men. Some had turned into birds, some into fish, others into tortoises or spiders, and went to live the life of little kamagarini devils. “What is happening to us? What misfortunes are these?” the ones who survived asked themselves, bewildered. They were helpless with fear and blind, but they didn't know it. Once again, wisdom had been lost. “We are about to disappear,” they moaned. They were sad, perhaps. And then, amid all the confusion, the Mashcos fell upon them and there was a great massacre. They cut off the heads of many and carried off their women. It seemed that there would be no end to the catastrophes. And then it all of a sudden occurred to one of them, in his despair: “Let's go visit Tasurinchi.”

He was a seripigari, old by then, who lived by the river Timpía, behind a waterfall. He listened to them but said nothing. He went with them to the place where they lived. His eyes gummy with sleep, he contemplated the hopelessness and disorder that reigned in the world. He fasted for several moons, silent, concentrating, meditating. He prepared the brews for the trance. He pounded green tobacco in a mortar, pressed the leaves through a sieve, poured water on them, and put the pot on to boil till the brew thickened and bubbled. He pounded the roots of ayahuasca, pressed out the dark juice, boiled it, and let it cool. They put out the fire and covered the hut all around with plantain leaves so it would be totally dark inside. The seripigari breathed smoke on them one by one, all of them; he chanted and they answered him, chanting. Then he swallowed his brews, still chanting. They waited, breathless. He went on waving his bundle of leaves and chanting. They didn't understand what he was saying. At last, when he'd become a spirit, they saw his shadow climb up the center pole of the hut and disappear through the roof, out the very same place the devil goes when carrying off souls. Not long after, he came back. He had the same body as before, but it was no longer him; it was a saankarite. He scolded them furiously. He reminded them of what they had been, of what they had done, all the many sacrifices since they had started walking. How could they have allowed themselves to be taken in by the tricks of their immemorial enemy? How could they have betrayed the sun for Kashiri, the moon? By changing their way of life they had upset the order of the world, disoriented the souls of those who had gone. In the darkness they were living in, the souls were unable to recognize them, didn't know whether or not they were the right ones. That's why the misfortunes occurred, perhaps. The spirits of those who went and came back, confused by the change, went away again. They wandered in the forest, orphaned, moaning in the wind. The kamagarini got inside bodies that had been abandoned, that had lost the support of their souls, and corrupted them; that was why they sprouted feathers, scales, claws, snouts, spurs. But there was still time. Degeneration and impurity had been brought upon them by a devil living among them, dressed as a man. They went out to hunt him down, determined to kill him. But the kamagarini had fled to the depths of the forest. At last they understood. Ashamed, they went back to doing as they had done before, until the world, life, became what they really were and should be. Sorrowful, repenting, they started walking. Shouldn't each one do what he was meant to do? Was it not their task to walk, helping the sun to rise? They fulfilled their obligation, perhaps. Are we fulfilling ours? Are we walking? Are we living?

Among all the many different kamagarinis that Kientibakori breathed out, the worst little devil is the kasibarenini, it seems. Small as a child, if he turns up somewhere in his earth-colored cushma, it's because there's somebody sick there. He's out to take possession of his soul so as to make him do cruel things. That's why sick people should never be left alone, not for a single moment. The slightest inattention and the kasibarenini has things his way. Tasurinchi says that's what happened to him. The one who's living by the river Camisea now. Tasurinchi. According to him, a kasibarenini was to blame for what happened over there in Shivankoreni, where everybody's still furious, remembering. I went to see him on the little beach along the Camisea where he'd put up his hut. He was alarmed when he caught sight of me. He grabbed his shotgun. “Have you come to kill me?” he said. “Watch out, look here at what I have in my hand.” He wasn't angry, just sad. “I've just come to visit you,” I soothed him. “And to talk to you if you care to listen. If you'd rather I went away, I'll go.” “How could I not want you to talk to me?” he replied, unrolling two straw mats. “Come, come. Eat all my food, take all my cassavas. Everything is yours.” He complained bitterly because they wouldn't let him go back to Shivankoreni. If he even goes near the place, his former kinfolk come out to meet him with stones and arrows, screaming at him: “Devil, cursed devil!”

Worse still, they've asked a bad sorcerer, a machikanari, to bring evil on him. Tasurinchi caught him trying to hide in his house to steal a lock of his hair or something belonging to him, so as to be able to make him fall sick and die a horrible death. He could have killed the machikanari, but all he did was make him run away by shooting his gun off in the air. According to him, this proves his soul is pure again. “It's not right that they should hate me so,” he says. He told me he'd gone to visit Tasurinchi, upriver, to bring him food and presents. Offering to clear a new field for him in the forest, he asked him to give him any one of his daughters as a wife. Tasurinchi insulted him: “Nit, shit, traitor, how dare you come round here? I'm going to kill you right now.” And he'd gone after him with a machete.

Tearfully, he lamented his fate. He said it wasn't true that he was a kasibarenini devil disguised as a man. He'd been one for a time, perhaps, before. But now he's just the same as any of the Machiguengas of Shivankoreni who won't let him come near. His misfortune began that time when he had the evil. He was so thin and so weak he couldn't get up from his mat. Nor could he speak. He opened his mouth and his voice didn't come out. I must be turning into a fish, he thought. But he could see and hear what was happening around him, in the other huts of Shivankoreni. He was deeply alarmed when he saw that everyone was taking off the bracelets and the ornaments they were wearing on their wrists, arms, and ankles. He could hear them saying: “He's going to die soon, but his spirit will pull out his veins, and while we're asleep he'll tie us down with them at the places on our bodies where we wore ornaments.” He tried to reassure them, to tell them that he'd never do that to them, and, what was more, that he wasn't dying. But his voice wouldn't come out. And that was when he spied him, out in the pouring rain. He roamed all about the village, harmless enough, or so he made it appear. A youngster in an earth-colored cushma, amusing himself playing with datura seeds and imitating the hovering wings of a hummingbird with his hands. It never occurred to Tasurinchi that he could be a little devil, so he wasn't worried when his family set out for the lake to fish. Then, once he saw he was alone, the kasibarenini changed himself into an ant and entered Tasurinchi's body by way of the little opening inside the nose through which tobacco juice is sniffed. There and then he felt cured of the evil, there and then his strength came back, and the flesh on his bones. Yet at the same time he felt an irresistible urge to do what he did next. Just like that, running, howling, beating his chest like a monkey, he started burning down the huts of Shivankoreni. He says it wasn't him but the little devil who set fire to the straw and ran from one place to the other with burning candles, roaring and leaping for joy. Tasurinchi remembers how the parrots squawked and how he choked in the clouds of smoke as before him, behind him, to the right, to the left, everything went up in flames. If the others hadn't arrived on the scene, Shivankoreni would no longer exist. He says that as soon as he saw people come running he regretted what he had done. He had to run away in terror, saying to himself: “What's happening to me?” They wanted to kill him, chasing after him screaming: “Devil, devil!”

But, according to Tasurinchi, all this is an old story. The little devil that made him set fire to Shivankoreni was sucked out of him by a seripigari of Koribeni: he drew it out through his armpit, and then he vomited it up. Tasurinchi saw it: it had the form of a little white bone. He says that since then he's become just like me, or any of you, again. “Why do you think they won't let me live in Shivankoreni?” he asked me. “Because they don't trust you,” I explained to him. “They all remember that day you cured yourself and then went and burned down their houses. And what's more, they know you've been living over there on the other side of the Gran Pongo, among the Viracochas.” Because Tasurinchi doesn't wear a cushma, but a shirt and trousers. “There among them, I felt like an orphan,” he told me. “I dreamed of returning to Shivankoreni. And now that I'm here, my kinfolk make me feel like an orphan, too. Will I always live alone like this, without a family? The one thing I want is a woman to roast cassavas and bear children.”

I stayed with him for three moons. He's a close-mouthed, moody man who sometimes talks to himself. Someone who's lived with a kasibarenini devil inside his body can't ever be the same as he was before, perhaps. “Your coming to visit me is the beginning of a change, perhaps,” he said to me. “Do you think the men who walk will let me walk with them soon?” “Who knows?” I answered. “There's nothing sadder than to feel that one is somebody who's no longer a man,” he said as we parted. As I walked along the Camisea I spied him in the distance. He had climbed up a hillock and his eyes were following me. I could remember his surly, forlorn face, though I could no longer see it.