The Storyteller (9 page)

That long conversation with Matos Mar under the mosquito net, watching the dark pouches hanging from the palm-leaf roof sway back and forth—by daybreak they had mysteriously disappeared, and turned out to be balls of hundreds of spiders that curled up together in the huts at night, by the warmth of the fire—is one of the undying memories of that journey. Another: a prisoner of an enemy tribe whom the Shapras of Lake Morona allowed to wander peacefully around the village. His dog, however, was shut up in a cage and was watched very closely. Captors and captive were evidently in agreement as to the symbolic import of this; in the minds of both parries the caged animal kept the prisoner from running away and bound him to his captors more securely—the force of ritual, of belief, of magic—than any iron chain could have. And yet another: the gossip and fantastic tales we heard all during the journey concerning a Japanese adventurer, rogue, and feudal lord called Tushía, who was said to live on an island in the Pastaza River with a harem of girls he'd abducted from all over Amazonia.

But, in the long run, the most haunting memory of that trip—one that on this Florentine afternoon is almost as searing as the summer sun of Tuscany—is doubtless the story I heard a couple of linguists, Mr. and Mrs. Schneil, tell in Yarinacocha. At first I had the impression that I had never heard the name of that tribe before. But suddenly I realized that it was the same one that Saúl had told me so many stories about, the one he had come in contact with on his first trip to Quillabamba: the Machiguengas. Yet, except for the name, the two didn't seem to have much in common.

Little by little I began to understand the reason for the discrepancy. Though it was the same tribe—numbering between four and five thousand—the Machiguengas were a people split apart. This explained the differences between the two groups and their different relationships with the rest of Peru. A dividing line, whose chief topographical feature was the Pongo de Mainique, separated the Machiguengas scattered about in the ceja de montaña—a wooded region below the high sierra where whites and mestizos were numerous—from the Machiguengas of the eastern region, on the far side of the Pongo, where the Amazonian plain begins. A geographical accident, the narrow gorge between mountains where the Urubamba becomes a raging torrent, filled with foam, whirlpools, and deafening tumult, separated the Machiguengas above, who were in contact with the white and mestizo world and had begun the process of acculturation, from the others, scattered through the forests of the plain, living in near-total isolation and preserving their traditional way of life more or less unchanged. The Dominicans had established missions—such as Chirumbia, Koribeni, and Panticollo—among the former, and in that region there were also Viracocha farms, where a few Machiguengas worked as hired hands. This was the domain of the famous Fidel Pereira and the Machiguenga world described in Saúl's stories: the one most Westernized and most exposed to the outside.

The other part of the community (but, under such conditions, could one speak of a community?), scattered over the enormous area of the Urubamba and Madre de Dios basins, kept itself jealously isolated, even at the end of the fifties, and resisted any form of contact with the whites. The Dominican missionaries had not reached them, and, for the moment at least, there was nothing in that region to attract the Viracochas. But even this sector was not homogeneous. Among these primitive Machiguengas there was an even more archaic small group or fraction, hostile to the others, known by the name of Kogapakori. Centered on the region bathed by two tributaries of the Urubamba, the Timpía and the Tikompinía, the Kogapakori went about stark-naked, though some of the men wore phallic sheaths made of bamboo, and attacked anyone who entered their territory, even those who were ethnically related. Their case was exceptional, for, compared with other tribes, the Machiguengas were traditionally peaceful. Their gentle and docile nature had made them choice victims of the rubber boom, during the great manhunts to provide Indian labor for the rubber camps, at which time the tribe had been literally decimated and on the point of disappearing. For the same reason they had always come off the losers in skirmishes with their age-old enemies the Yaminahuas and the Mashcos, especially the latter, famous for their bellicosity. These were the Machiguengas the Schneils told us about. For two years and a half they had been working to make themselves accepted by the groups with which they had succeeded in making contact, yet they still encountered distrust and even hostility on their part.

Yarinacocha at dusk, when the red mouth of the sun begins to sink behind the treetops and the greenish lake glows beneath the indigo sky where the first stars are beginning to twinkle, is one of the most beautiful sights I have ever seen. We were sitting on the porch of a wooden house contemplating, over the Schneils' shoulders, the horizon line of the darkening forest. It was a magnificent sight. But I think we all felt uncomfortable and depressed. For the story they told us—they were young, with that healthy, candid, puritanical, hardworking air about them that all the linguists wore like a uniform—was a dismal one. Even the two anthropologists of the group, Matos Mar and the Mexican, Juan Comas, were surprised at the depths of prostration and pessimism to which, according to the Schneils, the broken-spirited Machiguenga people had been reduced. From what we heard, the tribe seemed to be virtually falling apart.

These Machiguengas had hardly been studied. Except for a slim volume published in 1943 by a Dominican, Father Vicente de Cenitagoya, and a few articles by other missionaries on their customs and their language, which had appeared in the journals of the Order, no serious ethnographic study of them existed. They belonged to the Arawak family and there was some confusion between them and the Campas of the Ene, Perené, and Gran Pajonal Rivers, since their languages had common roots. Their origin was a total mystery; their identity, blurred. Vaguely referred to as Antis by the Incas, who expelled them from the eastern part of the Cusco region but were never able to invade their jungle territory or subjugate them, they appear in the Chronicles and Relations of the Colony under such arbitrarily assigned designations as Manarfes, Opataris, Pilconzones, until nineteenth-century travelers at last started calling them by their name. One of the first to refer to them in this way was a Frenchman, Charles Wiener, who in 1880 came across “two Machiguenga corpses, ritually abandoned in the river,” which he decapitated and added to his collection of curiosities collected in the Peruvian jungle. They had been on the move since time immemorial and it was unlikely that they had ever lived together in settled communities. The fact that they had been displaced at frequent intervals by more warlike tribes and by whites—during the various booms: the rubber, gold, rosewood, and agricultural colonization “fevers”—toward ever more unhealthy and infertile regions, where the survival of a large group was impossible, had accentuated their fragmentation and brought on the development among them of an individualism bordering on anarchy. Not one Machiguenga village existed. They did not have caciques and did not appear to acknowledge any authority other than that of each father in his own family. They lived in tiny units of ten people or so at most, scattered over the enormous region that included all the jungle zone of Cusco and Madre de Dios. The poverty of the area forced these human units to keep continually on the move, maintaining a considerable distance between each other so as not to exhaust the game. Due to the erosion and impoverishment of the soil, they had to shift the location of their cassava patches at the end of every two years of cultivation at most.

What the Schneils had been able to discover of their mythology, beliefs, and customs suggested that they had always led a very hard life and afforded a few glimpses of their history. They had been breathed out by the god Tasurinchi, creator of everything that existed, and did not have personal names. Their names were always temporary, related to a passing phenomenon and subject to change: the one who arrives, or the one who leaves, the husband of the woman who just died, or the one who is climbing out of his canoe, the one just born, or the one who shot the arrow. Their language had expressions only for the quantities one, two, three, and four. All the others were covered by the adjective “many.” Their notion of paradise was modest: a place where the rivers had fish and the woods had game. They associated their nomad life with the movement of the stars through the firmament. There was a high incidence of self-inflicted death among them. The Schneils told us of several cases they had witnessed: Machiguenga men and women—mostly the latter—who took their own lives by plunging chambira thorns into their hearts or into their temples, or by swallowing potions of deadly poison, for pointless reasons: an argument, an arrow that had missed, a reprimand by one of their kin. The most trivial frustration could lead a Machiguenga to kill himself. It was as though their will to live, their instinct for survival, had been reduced to a minimum.

The slightest illness brought on death. They were terrified of head colds, as were many of the tribes of Amazonia—sneezing in front of them always meant frightening them—but, and in this they differed from the other tribes, they refused to take care of themselves once they fell ill. At the least headache, bleeding, or accident, they prepared themselves for death. They would not take medicine or let themselves be looked after. “What's the use, if we must go in one way or another?” they would say. Their witch doctors or medicine men—the seripigaris—were consulted and called upon to exorcize bad spirits and evils of the soul; but as soon as these manifested themselves as bodily ills, they regarded them as more or less incurable. A sick person making his way to the riverbank to lie down and await death was a frequent sight.

Their wariness and mistrust of strangers were extreme, as were their fatalism and timidity. The sufferings the community had endured during the rubber boom, when they were hunted by the “suppliers” of the camps or by Indians of other tribes who could thereby pay their debts to the bosses, had left a mark of terror in their myths and legends of that period, which they referred to as the tree-bleeding. Perhaps it was true, as a Dominican missionary, Father José Pío Aza—the first to study their language—maintained, that they were the last vestiges of a Pan-Amazonian civilization (attested, so he claimed, by the mysterious petroglyphs scattered throughout the Alto Urubamba) which had suffered defeat after defeat since its encounters with the Incas and was gradually dying out.

Making the first contacts had been very difficult for the Schneils. A full year after these first attempts had gone by before he, and only he, had succeeded in being received by a Machiguenga family. He told us what a touch-and-go experience it had been, how anxious and hopeful he had been that morning, at one of the headwaters of the Timpía river, as, stark-naked, he had approached the solitary hut, made of strips of bark and roofed with straw, which he had already visited on three occasions, leaving presents—without meeting anybody, but feeling behind his back the eyes of Machiguengas watching him from the forest—and seen that this time the half dozen people who lived there did not run away.

From then on, the Schneils had spent brief periods—either one of them at a time or the two of them together—with that family of Machiguengas or others living along the Alto Urubamba and its tributaries. They had accompanied groups of them when they went fishing or hunting in the dry season, and had made recordings that they played for us. An odd crackling sound with sudden sharp notes and, now and again, a guttural outpouring that they informed us were songs. They had a transcription and translation of one of these songs, made by a Dominican missionary in the thirties; the Schneils had heard it again, a quarter of a century later, in a ravine of the Sepahua River. The text admirably illustrated the state of mind of the community as it had been described to us. So much so that I copied it out. Since then I have always carried it with me, folded in four in a corner of my billfold, as a charm. It can still be deciphered:

Though they had a working knowledge of the Machiguenga language, the Schneils were still a long way from mastering the secrets of its structure. It was an archaic tongue, vibrantly resonant and agglutinative, in which a single word made up of many others could express a great overarching thought.

Mrs. Schneil was pregnant, which was the reason the two of them had returned to the base at Yarinacocha. As soon as their first child was born, the couple would return to the Urubamba. Their son or daughter, they said, would be brought up there and would master Machiguenga more thoroughly, and perhaps sooner, than they would.