Over the last two months, everything has gradually been closing: the shops, the laundries, the uncomfortable Bibliotèca Nazionale alongside the river, the movie theaters that were my refuge at night, and, finally, the cafés where I went to read Dante and Machiavelli and think about Mascarita and the Machiguengas of the headwaters of the Alto Urubamba and the Madre de Dios. The first to close was the charming Caffè Strozzi, with its Art Deco furniture and interior, and air-conditioning besides, making it a marvelous oasis on scorching afternoons; then the next to close was the Caffè Paszkowski, where, though drenched with sweat, one could be by oneself, on its time-hallowed, démodé upstairs floor, with its leather easy chairs and blood-red velvet drapes; then after that the Caffè Gillio; and last of all, the one that was in all the guidebooks and always jammed, the Caffè Rivoire, in the Piazza della Signoria, where a Caffè macchiato cost me as much as an entire meal in a neighborhood trattoria. Since it is not even remotely possible to read or write in a gelateria or a pizzeria (the few hospitable enclaves still open), I have had to resign myself to reading in my pensione in the Borgo dei Santi Apostoli, sweating profusely in the sickly light of a lamp seemingly designed to make reading arduous or to condemn the stubborn reader to premature blindness. These are inconveniences which, as the terrible little monk of San Marcos would have said (the unexpected consequence of my stay in Firenze has been the discovery, thanks to his biographer Rodolfo Ridolfi, that the much maligned Savonarola was, all in all, an interesting figure, one better, perhaps, than those who burned him at the stake), favorably predispose the spirit toward understanding better, to the point of virtually experiencing them personally, the Dantesque tortures of the infernal pilgrimage; or to reflecting, with due calm, upon the terrifying conclusions concerning the cities of men and the government of their affairs drawn by Machiavelli, the icy analyst of the history of this republic, from his experiences as one of its functionaries.
The little gallery in the Via Santa Margherita, between an optician’s shop and a grocery store and directly opposite the so-called Church of Dante, where Gabriele Malfatti’s Machiguenga photographs were being shown, has also shut, of course. But I managed to see them several times more before its chiusura estivale. The third time she saw me come in, the thin girl in glasses who was in charge of the gallery informed me that she had a fidanzato. I was obliged to assure her in my bad Italian that my interest in the exhibition had no ulterior personal motives, that it was more or less patriotic; it had nothing to do with her beauty, only with Malfatti’s photographs. She never quite believed that I spent such a long time peering at them out of sheer homesickness for my native land. And why especially the one of the group of Indians sitting in a sort of lotus position, listening, enthralled, to that gesticulating man? I am sure she never took my assertions seriously when I declared that the photograph was a consummate masterpiece, something to be savored slowly, the way one contemplates The Allegory of Spring or The Battle of San Remo in the Uffizi. But at last, after seeing me four or five times in the deserted gallery, she was a little less mistrustful of me, and one day she even permitted herself a friendly overture, informing me that an “Inca combo” played Peruvian music on traditional instruments every night in front of the Church of San Lorenzo: why didn’t I go see them; they would bring back memories of my homeland. (I obeyed, I went, and I discovered that the Incas were two Bolivians and two Portuguese from Rome who were trying out an incompatible synthesis of Portuguese fados and Santa Cruz carnival music.) The Santa Margherita gallery closed a week ago and the thin girl in glasses is now spending her vacation in Ancona, with her parents.
No matter: I don’t need to see that photograph again. I know it by heart, millimeter by millimeter. And I’ve thought about it so much that, curiously enough, I know that the naked seated figures with their long locks of straight hair, the silhouette of the storyteller, the background of thick tree trunks, tangled branches, and feathery fronds outlined against the horizon beneath a mass of great potbellied gray clouds will be the most lasting memory of this Florentine summer. More enduring and more moving, perhaps, than the artistic and architectonic marvels of the Renaissance, the harmonious murmur of Dante’s terza rima, or the rustic ritornellos (in his case unfailingly compatible with diabolical intelligence) of Machiavelli’s prose.
I am certain that the photograph shows a Machiguenga storyteller. It is the only thing about which I have no doubts. Who could that man, declaiming before that enraptured audience, be, except that figure ancestrally entrusted with the task of arousing the curiosity, the fantasy, the memory, the appetite for dreams and fabrication of the Machiguenga people? How did Gabriele Malfatti manage to be present on that occasion, to be allowed to take photographs? Perhaps the reason for the secrecy that surrounded the storyteller of recent years—the stranger who had turned into a Machiguenga—no longer existed when the Italian visited that region. Or perhaps in these last years the situation in the Alto Urubamba had evolved so rapidly that the storytellers no longer fulfill their age-old function, have lost their authenticity and become a pantomime put on for tourists, like the ceremonies with annatto or the healings by shamans of other tribes.
But I don’t think that’s the case. Life has admittedly changed in that region, but not in any way likely to increase tourism. First came the oil wells, and with them, camps for those who were taken on as workers: many Campas, Yaminahuas, Piros, and, surely, Machiguengas. Later on, or at the same time, the drug traffic began and, like a biblical plague, spread its network of coca plantations, laboratories, and secret landing strips, with—as a logical consequence—periodic killings and vendettas between rival gangs of Colombians and Peruvians; the burning of coca crops, the police searches and wholesale roundups. And finally—or perhaps at the same time, closing the triangle of horror—terrorism and counterterrorism. Detachments of the revolutionary Sendero Luminoso movement, severely repressed in the Andes, have come down to the jungle and operate in this part of Amazonia, now periodically reconnoitered by the Army and even, it is said, bombarded by the Air Force.
What effect has all this had on the Machiguenga people? Has it hastened its dismemberment and disintegration? Do the villages that had begun to bring them together some five or six years ago still exist? These villages will, of course, have been exposed to the irreversible disruptive mechanism of this contradictory civilization, represented by the high wages paid by Shell and Petro Perú, the coffers stuffed full of dollars from the drug trade, and the risks of being drawn into the bloody wars of smugglers, guerrilleros, police, and soldiers, without having the faintest idea of what the deadly game is all about. As happened when they were invaded by the Inca armies, the explorers, the Spanish conquistadors and missionaries, the rubber and wood traders in the days of the Republic, the gold prospectors and the twentieth-century immigrants. For the Machiguengas, history marches neither forward nor backward: it goes around and around in circles, repeats itself. But even though the damage to the community has been considerable because of all this, it is likely that many of them, faced with the upheavals of the last few years, will have opted for the traditional response ensuring their survival: diaspora. Start walking. Once again. As in the most persistent of their myths.
Does my ex-friend, ex-Jew, ex-white man, and ex-Westerner, Saúl Zuratas, walk with them, taking those short steps with the whole foot planted flat on the ground, like palmipeds, so typical of all the Amazonian tribes? I have decided that it is he who is the storyteller in Malfatti’s photograph. A personal decision, since objectively I have no way of knowing. It’s true that the face of the figure standing is the most heavily shadowed—on the right side, where his birthmark was. This might be a key to identifying him. But at that distance the impression could be misleading; it might be no more than the sun’s shadow (his face is tilted in such a way that the dying light, falling from the opposite side, casts a shadow over the entire right side of men, trees, and clouds as the sun begins to set). Perhaps the most reliable clue is the shape o
f the silhouette. Even though he is far off, there is no doubt: that is not the build of a typical jungle Indian, who is usually squat, with short, bowed legs and a broad chest. The one who is talking has an elongated body and I would swear that his skin—he is naked from the waist up—is much lighter than that of his listeners. His hair, however, has that circular cut, like a medieval monk’s, of the Machiguengas. I have also decided that the hump on the left shoulder of the storyteller in the photograph is a parrot. Wouldn’t it be the most natural thing in the world for a storyteller to travel through the forest with a totemic parrot, companion or acolyte?
After turning the pieces of the puzzle around and around many times and shuffling them this way and that, I see they fit. They outline a more or less coherent story, as long as one sticks strictly to anecdote and does not begin pondering what Fray Luis de León called “the inherent and hidden principle of things.”
From that first journey to Quillabamba, where the farmer who was related to his mother lived, Mascarita came into contact with a world that intrigued and attracted him. What must in the beginning have been a feeling of intellectual curiosity and sympathy for the customs and conditions of life of the Machiguengas became, with time, as he got to know them better, learned their language, studied their history, and began to share their existence for longer and longer periods, a conversion, in both the cultural and the religious meaning of the word, an identification with their ways and their traditions, in which, for reasons I can intuit but not entirely understand, Saúl found spiritual sustenance, an incentive and a justification for his life, a commitment that he had not found in those other Peruvian tribes—Jewish, Christian, Marxist, etc.—among which he had lived.
This transformation must have been a very gradual one, taking place unconsciously during the years he spent studying ethnology at San Marcos. That he should have become disillusioned with his studies, that he should consider the scientific outlook of ethnologists a threat to that primitive and archaic culture (adjectives that even that early on he would not have accepted), an intrusion of destructive modern concepts, a form of corruption, is something that I can understand. The idea of an equilibrium between man and the earth, the awareness of the rape of the environment by industrial culture and today’s technology, the reevaluation of the wisdom of primitive peoples, forced either to respect their habitat or face extinction, was something that, during those years, although not yet an intellectual fashion, had already begun to take root everywhere, even in Peru. Mascarita must have lived all this with particular intensity, seeing with his own eyes the havoc wreaked by civilized peoples in the jungle, as compared with the way the Machiguengas lived in harmony with the natural world.
The decisive factor that led him to take the final step was, undoubtedly, Don Salomón’s death; he was the only person to whom Saúl was attached and to whom he felt obliged to render an account of his life. It is probable, considering how Saúl’s conduct changed in his second or third year at the university, that he had already decided that after his father’s death he would abandon everything and go to the Alto Urubamba. Up to that point, however, there is nothing extraordinary about his story. In the sixties and seventies—the years of student revolt against a consumer society—many middle-class young people left Lima, motivated partly by adventure-seeking and partly by disgust at life in the capital, and went to the jungle or the mountains, where they lived in conditions that were frequently precarious. One of the Tower of Babel programs—unfortunately ruined, for the most part, by the chronic aberrations of Alejandro Pérez’s camera—was, in fact, concerned with a group of kids from Lima who had gone off to the department of Cusco, where they survived by taking up picturesque occupations. That, like them, Mascarita should have decided to turn his back on a bourgeois future and go to Amazonia in search of adventure—a return to fundamentals, to the source—was not particularly remarkable.
But Saúl had not gone off in the same way they had. He erased all trace of his departure and of his intentions, leading those who knew him to believe that he was emigrating to Israel. What else could the alibi of the Jew making the Return mean, except that, on leaving Lima, Saúl Zuratas had irrevocably decided that he was going to change his life, his name, his habits, his traditions, his god, everything he had been up until then? It is evident that he left Lima with the intention of never coming back, of being another person forever.
I am able to follow him this far, though not without difficulty. I believe that his identification with this small, marginal, nomadic community had—as his father conjectured—something to do with the fact that he was Jewish, a member of another community which had also been a wandering, marginal one throughout its history, a pariah among the world’s societies, like the Machiguengas in Peru, grafted onto them, yet not assimilated and never entirely accepted. And, surely, his fellow feeling for the Machiguengas was influenced, as I used to tease him, by that enormous birthmark that made of him a marginal among marginals, a man whose destiny would always bear the stigma of ugliness. I can accept that among the worshippers of the spirits of trees and thunder, the ritual users of tobacco and ayahuasca brews, Mascarita would feel more at home—dissolved in a collective being—than among the Jews or the Christians of his country. In a very subtle and personal way, by going to the Alto Urubamba to be born again, Saúl made his Alyah.
Where I find it impossible to follow him—an insuperable difficulty that pains and frustrates me—is in the next stage: the transformation of the convert into the storyteller. It is this facet of Saúl’s story, naturally, that moves me most; it is what makes me think of it continually and weave and unweave it a thousand times; it is what has impelled me to put it into writing in the hope that if I do so, it will cease to haunt me.
Becoming a storyteller was adding what appeared impossible to what was merely improbable. Going back in time from trousers and tie to a loincloth and tattoos, from Spanish to the agglutinative crackling of Machiguenga, from reason to magic and from a monotheistic religion or Western agnosticism to pagan animism, is a feat hard to swallow, though still possible, with a certain effort of imagination. The rest of the story, however, confronts me only with darkness, and the harder I try to see through it, the more impenetrable it becomes.
Talking the way a storyteller talks means being able to feel and live in the very heart of that culture, means having penetrated its essence, reached the marrow of its history and mythology, given body to its taboos, images, ancestral desires, and terrors. It means being, in the most profound way possible, a rooted Machiguenga, one of that ancient lineage who—in the period in which this Firenze, where I am writing, produced its dazzling effervescence of ideas, paintings, buildings, crimes, and intrigues—roamed the forests of my country, bringing and bearing away those tales, lies, fictions, gossip, and jokes that make a community of that people of scattered beings, keeping alive among them the feeling of oneness, of constituting something fraternal and solid. That my friend Saúl gave up being all that he was and might have become so as to roam through the Amazonian jungle, for more than twenty years now, perpetuating against wind and tide—and, above all, against the very concepts of modernity and progress—the tradition of that invisible line of wandering storytellers, is something that memory now and again brings back to me, and, as on that day when I first heard of it, in the starlit darkness of the village of New Light, it opens my heart more forcefully than fear or love has ever done.
Darkness has fallen and there are stars in the Florentine night, though not as bright as those in the jungle. I have a feeling that at any moment I’ll run out of ink (the shops in this city where I might get a refill for my pen are also locked up tight for their chiusura estivale, naturally). The heat is unbearable, and my room in the Pensione Alejandra is alive with mosquitoes buzzing and circling around my head. I could take a shower and go out for a stroll in search of diversion. There might be a breath of a breeze on the Lungarno, and if I walk along it, the spectacle of the floodlit embankments, bridges,
and palaces, always beautiful, will lead to another, fiercer, spectacle: the one on the Cascine, by day the respectable promenade of ladies and children, but at this time of night the hangout of whores, gays, and drug dealers. I could mingle with the young people, high on music and marijuana in the Piazza del Santo Spirito or the Piazza della Signoria, become at this hour a motley Cour des Miracles where four, five, even ten different impromptu shows are simultaneously staged: Caribbean maraca players and acrobats, Turkish ropewalkers, Moroccan fire-eaters, Spanish student serenaders, French mimes, American jazz musicians, gypsy fortune-tellers, German guitarists, Hungarian flutists. Sometimes it is enjoyable to lose oneself in this colorful, youthful multitude. But tonight I know that wherever I might wander—on the ocher stone bridges over the Arno, or beneath the trees of the Cascine, each with its waiting prostitute, or the straining muscles of the Neptune fountain, or Cellini’s bronze statue of Perseus stained with pigeon droppings—wherever I might try to find refuge from the heat, the mosquitoes, the rapture of my spirit, I would still hear, close by, unceasing, crackling, immemorial, that Machiguenga storyteller.
Firenze, July 1985
London, May 13, 1987
Also by Mario Vargas Llosa
The Feast of the Goat
Death in the Andes
In Praise of the Stepmother
Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter
The War of the End of the World
Conversation in the Cathedral
The Green House
A Fish in the Water (memoir)