The Storyteller by Mario Vargas Llosa Page A

civilization of Peru. Did we really believe that socialism would ensure the integrity of our magico-religious cultures? Wasn’t there already sufficient evidence that industrial development, whether capitalist or communist, inevitably meant the annihilation of those cultures? Was there one exception anywhere in the world to this terrible, inexorable law? Thinking it over—in the light of the years that have since gone by, and from the vantage point of this broiling—hot Firenze—we were as unrealistic and romantic as Mascarita with his archaic, anti—historical utopia.
    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