The Storyteller by Mario Vargas Llosa Page B

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