Would we be able to interview any Machiguengas in Spanish? Yes, a few, though not many. The cacique or governor of New Light, for example, spoke Spanish fluently. What? Did the Machiguengas have caciques now? Hadn’t one of the distinctive features of the tribe been the absence of any sort of hierarchic political organization, with leaders and subordinates? Yes, certainly. Before. But that anarchic system typical of them was explained by their dispersion: now that they were gathered together in villages, they needed authorities. The administrator or chief of New Light was a young man and a splendid community leader, a graduate of the Mazamari Bible School. A Protestant pastor, in other words? Well, yes, you might call him that. Had the Bible been translated into Machiguenga yet? Of course, and they had been the translators. In New World and New Light we would be able to film copies of the New Testament in Machiguenga.
I remembered Mascarita and our last conversation in the seedy café on the Avenida España. I heard once again his prophecies and his fulminations. From what the Schneils told us, Saúl’s fears, that evening, were becoming a reality. Like other tribes, the Machiguengas were in the very midst of the process of acculturation: the Bible, bilingual schools, an evangelical leader, private property, the value of money, trade, Western clothes, no doubt…Was all this a good thing? Had it brought them real advantages as individuals, as people, as the Schneils so emphatically maintained? Or were they, rather, from the free and sovereign “savages” they had been, beginning to turn into “zombies,” caricatures of Westerners, as Mascarita had put it? Would a visit of just a couple of days be long enough for me to find out? No, of course it wouldn’t.
In the Yarinacocha bungalow that night, I lay awake for a long time thinking. Through the fly screen on the window, I could see a stretch of lake traversed by a golden wake, but the moon, which I imagined as being full and bright, was hidden from me by a clump of trees. Was it a good or a bad omen that Kashiri, that male astral body, sometimes malevolent, sometimes benevolent, of Machiguenga mythology, was concealing his stained face from me? Twenty-three years had passed since I had first slept in one of these bungalows. In all those years it was not only I who had changed, lived through a thousand experiences, grown older. Those Machiguengas, whom I knew, if at all, from only two brief accounts by this American couple, a conversation in Madrid with a Dominican, and a few ethnological studies, had also undergone great changes. Quite evidently, they no longer fitted the images of them that my imagination had invented. They were no longer that handful of tragic, indomitable beings, that society broken up into tiny families, fleeing, always fleeing, from the whites, from the mestizos, from the mountain people, and from other tribes, awaiting and stoically accepting their inevitable extinction as individuals and as a group, yet never giving up their language, their gods, their customs. An irrepressible sadness came over me at the thought that this society scattered in the depths of the damp and boundless forests, for whom a few tellers of tales acted as circulating sap, was doomed to disappear.
How many times in those twenty-three years had I thought of the Machiguengas? How many times had I tried to understand them, intuitively, to write about them; how many plans had I made to journey to their lands? Because of them, all the people or institutions everywhere in the world that might resemble or in any way be associated with the Machiguenga storytellers had held an immediate fascination for me. The wandering troubadours of the Bahia pampas, for instance, who, to the basso continuo of their guitars, weave together medieval romances of chivalry and local gossip in the dusty villages of northeastern Brazil. Seeing one of them that afternoon, in the market square of Uaúa, was enough for me to glimpse, superimposed on the figure of the caboclo, in a leather vest and hat, recounting and singing, to an amused audience, the story of Princess Magalona and the twelve peers of France, the greenish-yellow skin, decorated with symmetrical red stripes and dark spots, of the half-naked storyteller who, far, far from there, on a little beach hidden beneath the jungle foliage of Madre de Dios, was telling an attentive family squatting on their heels about the breathing contest between Tasurinchi and Kientibakori that was the origin of all the good and bad beings in the world.
But even more than the Bahian troubadour, it was the Irish seanchaí who had reminded me, so forcefully, of the Machiguenga storytellers. Seanchaí: “teller of ancient stories,” “the one who knows things,” as someone in a Dublin bar had offhandedly translated the word into English. How to explain, if it was not because of the Machiguengas, the rush of emotion, the sudden quickening of my heartbeat that impelled me to intrude, to ask questions, and later on to pester and infuriate Irish friends and acquaintances until they finally sat me down in front of a seanchaí? A living relic of the ancient bards of Hibernia, like those ancestors of his whose faint outline blends, in the night of time, with the Celtic myths and legends that are the intellectual foundations of Ireland, the seanchaí still recounts, in our own day, old legends, epic deeds, terrible loves, and disturbing miracles, in the smoky warmth of pubs; at festive gatherings where the magic of his words calls forth a sudden silence; in friendly houses, next to the hearth, as outside the rain falls or the storm rages. He can be a tavernkeeper, a truck driver, a parson, a beggar, someone mysteriously touched by the magic wand of wisdom and the art of reciting, of remembering, of reinventing and enriching tales told and retold down through the centuries; a messenger from the times of myth and magic, older than history, to whom Irishmen of today listen spellbound for hours on end. I always knew that the intense emotion I felt on that trip to Ireland, thanks to the seanchaí, was metaphorical, a way of hearing, through him, the storyteller, and of living the illusion that, sitting there squeezed in among his listeners, I was part of a Machiguenga audience.
And at last, tomorrow, in this unexpected way, guided by the Schneils themselves, I was going to meet the Machiguengas. So life has its novelistic side, does it? Indeed it does! “I’ve already told you I want to end with a zoom shot, Alejandro you cunt,” Lucho Llosa raved in the next bed, tossing and turning under the mosquito net.
We left at dawn in two of the Institute’s single-engine Cessnas, carrying three passengers each. Despite his adolescent face, the pilot of the little plane I was in had already spent several years with the linguist-missionaries, and before piloting planes for them in Amazonia, he had done the same thing in the jungles of Central America and Borneo. The morning was bright and clear and from the air we could easily make out all the meanders of the Ucayali and then of the Urubamba—the little islands, the spluttering launches with outboard motors or pequepeques, the canoes, the channels, the rapids and tributaries—and the tiny villages that at rare intervals showed up as a clearing of huts and reddish earth in the endless green plain. We flew over the penal colony of Sepa, and over the Dominican mission of Sepahua, then left the Alto Urubamba to follow the winding course of the Mipaya, a muddy snake on whose banks, around ten in the morning, we spotted our first destination: New World.
The name Mipaya has historical echoes. Beneath the tangle of vegetation, rubber camps proliferated a century ago. After the terrible death toll that the tribe suffered in the years of the tree-bleeding, the ruined rubber tappers, once the boom was over, tried to clear plantations in the region during the twenties, recruiting their labor by the old system of hunting Indians. It was then that there occurred, here on the shores of the Mipaya, the only instance of Machiguenga resistance known to history. When a planter of the region came to carry off the young men and women of the tribe, the Machiguengas received him with a rain of arrows and killed or wounded several Viracochas before being exterminated. The jungle had covered over the scene of the violence with its thick undergrowth of tree trunks, branches, and dead leaves, and not a trace remained of that infamy. Before landing, the pilot circled around the twenty or so conical-roofed huts several times, so that the Machiguengas of New World would remove their children from the one street of the settlement, which served as the landing strip. The Schneils had flown in the same Cessna as I,
and the minute they climbed out of the plane, a hundred or so villagers surrounded them, showing signs of great excitement and joy, jostling each other to touch and pat them, all talking at the same time in a rhythmic tongue full of harsh sounds and extreme tonal shifts. Save for the schoolmistress dressed in a skirt and blouse and wearing sandals, all the Machiguengas were barefoot, the men in skimpy loincloths or cushmas, the women in yellow or gray cotton tunics of the sort worn by many tribes. Only a few old women wore pampanillas, a thin shawl tucked in at the waist, leaving their breasts bare. Nearly all of them, men and women, had red or black tattoos.
So there they were. Those were the Machiguengas.
I had no time to be carried away by emotion. To make the most of the light, we started work immediately, and fortunately no catastrophe kept us from filming the huts—all of them exactly the same: a simple platform of tree trunks supported on pilings, with thin walls of cane that reached only halfway up on each side, and a tuft of palm leaves for a roof; the interiors were austere, no more than a place for storing rolled-up mats, baskets, fishing nets, bows and arrows, small quantities of cassava and maize, and a few hollow gourds containing liquids—or from interviewing the schoolmistress, the only one who could express herself in Spanish, though with difficulty. She also looked after the village store, to which a motor launch brought provisions twice a month. My attempts to get any information about storytellers out of her were of no avail. Could she understand who it was I was asking her about? Apparently not. She looked at me with a surprised, slightly anxious expression, as though begging me to express myself in an intelligible way again.
Although we could not talk with them directly but only through the Schneils, the other Machiguengas were obliging enough and we were able to record some dances and songs and film an old woman delicately painting geometric designs on her face with annatto dye. We took shots of the crops sprouting in the fields, the poultry runs, the school, where the teacher insisted that we listen to the national anthem in Machiguenga. The face of one of the children was eaten away by a form of leprosy known as uta, which the Machiguengas attribute to the sting of a pink firefly whose abdomen is speckled with gleaming little dots of light. From the natural, uninhibited way in which the boy acted, running about among the other children, he did not seem, at first sight, to be the object of either discrimination or mockery because of his disfigurement.
As evening set in and we were loading our equipment for the flight to the village—New Light—where we were to spend the night, we learned that New World would probably have to change its location soon. What had happened? One of those chance geographical occurrences that are the daily bread of life in the jungle. During the last rainy season the Mipaya had radically changed its course because of heavy floods and was now so far distant from New World that when the waters were down to their winter level the inhabitants had to go a very long way to reach its shores. So they were looking for another spot, less subject to unforeseeable mischances, in order to resettle. That would not be difficult for people who had spent their lives on the move—their settlements were evidently born under an atavistic sign of eternal wandering, of a peripatetic destiny—and besides, their huts of tree trunks, cane, and palm leaves were far easier to take down and put up again than were the little houses of civilization.
They explained to us that the twenty-minute flight from New World to New Light was misleading, since it took at least a week to go from one to the other on foot through the jungle, or a couple of days by canoe.
New Light was the oldest of the Machiguenga villages—it had just celebrated its second birthday—and had a little more than twice the number of huts and inhabitants as in New World. Here too, only Martín, the village chief and head administrator, who was the teacher of the bilingual school, was dressed in a shirt, trousers, and shoes, and wore his hair cut in Western style. He was quite young, short, deadly serious, and spoke fast, fluent, syncopated Spanish, dropping a good many word endings. The welcome the Machiguengas of New Light gave the Schneils was as exuberant and noisy as the one in the previous village; all the rest of the day and during a good part of the night we saw groups and individuals patiently waiting for others to take their leave of them so that they could approach and start a crackling conversation full of gestures and grimaces.
In New Light, too, we recorded dances, songs, drum solos, the school, the shop, seed-sowing, looms, tattoos, and an interview with the head of the village, who had been through Bible school at Mazamari; he was young and very thin, with hair cropped almost to his skull, and ceremonious gestures. He was a disciple well versed in the teachings of his masters, for he preferred talking about the Word of God, the Bible, and the Holy Spirit to talking about the Machiguengas. He had a sullen way of beating about the bush and resorting to endless vague biblical verbiage whenever he didn’t care to answer a question. I tried twice to draw him out on the subject of storytellers, and each time, looking at me without understanding, he explained all over again that the book he had on his knee was the word of God and of his apostles in the Machiguenga language.
Our work finished, we went to swim in a gorge of the Mipaya, some fifteen minutes’ walk from the village, guided by the two Institute pilots. Twilight was coming on, the most mysterious and most beautiful hour of the day in Amazonia, as long as there isn’t a cloudburst. The place was a real find, a branch of the Mipaya deflected by a natural barrier of rocks, forming a sort of cove where one could swim in warm, quiet waters, or, if one preferred, expose oneself to the full force of the current, protected by the portcullis of rocks. Even silent Alejandro started splashing and laughing, madly happy in this Amazonian Jacuzzi.
When we got back to New Light, young Martín (his manners were exquisite and his gestures genuinely elegant) invited me to drink lemon verbena tea with him in his hut next to the school and the village store. He had a radio transmitter, his means of communication with the headquarters of the Institute at Yarinacocha. There were just the two of us in the room, which was as meticulously neat and clean as Martín himself. Lucho Llosa and Alejandro Pérez had gone to help the pilots unload the hammocks and mosquito nets we were to sleep in. The light was failing fast and the dark shadows were deepening around us. The entire jungle had set up a rhythmical chirring, as always at this hour, reminding me that, beneath its green tangle, myriads of insects dominated the world. Soon the sky would be full of stars.
Did the Machiguengas really believe that the stars were the beams of light from the crowns of spirits? Martín nodded impassively. That shooting stars were the fiery arrows of those little child-gods, the ananeriites, and the morning dew their urine? This time Martín laughed. Yes, that was their belief. And now that the Machiguengas had stopped walking, so as to put down roots in villages, would the sun fall? Surely not: God would take care of keeping it in place. He looked at me for a moment with an amused expression: how had I found out about these beliefs? I told him that I’d been interested in the Machiguengas for nearly a quarter of a century and that from the first I’d made a point of reading everything that was written about them. I told him why. As I spoke, his face, friendly and smiling to begin with, grew stern and distrustful. He listened to me grimly, not a muscle of his face moving.
“So, you see, my questions about storytellers aren’t just vulgar curiosity but something much more serious. They’re very important to me. Perhaps as important as to the Machiguengas, Martín.” He remained silent and motionless, with a watchful gleam in the depth of his eyes. “Why didn’t you want to tell me anything about them? The schoolmistress at New World wouldn’t tell me anything about them, either. Why all this mystery about the habladores, Martín?”
He assured me he didn’t understand what I was talking about. What was all this business about “habladores”? He’d never heard a word about them, either in this village or in any other of the community. There might be habladores in other tribes perhaps, but not among the Machiguengas. He was telling me this when the Schneils came in. We hadn’
t drunk up all that lemon verbena, the most fragrant in all Amazonia, had we? Martín changed the subject, and I thought it best not to pursue the matter.
But an hour later, after we’d taken our leave of Martín and I’d put up my hammock and mosquito net in the hut they’d loaned us, I went out with the Schneils to enjoy the cool evening air, and as we walked in the open surrounded by the dwellings of New Light, the subject came irresistibly to my lips once again.
“In the few hours I’ve been with the Machiguengas, there are many things I haven’t been able to figure out yet,” I said. “I have realized one thing, however. Something important.”
The sky was a forest of stars and a dark patch of clouds hid the moon, its presence visible only as a diffuse brightness. A fire had been made at one end of New Light, and fleeting silhouettes suddenly stole around it. All the huts were dark except for the one they’d lent to us, some fifty meters away, which was lit by the greenish light of a portable kerosene lamp. The Schneils waited for me to go on. We were walking slowly over soft ground where tall grass grew. Even though I was wearing boots, I had begun to feel mosquitoes biting my ankles and insteps.
“And what is that?” Mrs. Schneil finally asked.
“That all this is quite relative,” I went on impetuously. “I mean, baptizing this place New Light and calling the village chief Martín. The New Testament in Machiguenga; sending the Indians to Bible school and making pastors out of them; the violent transition from a nomadic life to a sedentary one; accelerated Westernization and Christianization. So-called modernization. I’ve realized that it’s just outward show. Even though they’ve started trading and using money, the weight of their own traditions exerts a much stronger pull on them than all that.”