That, anyway, is what I have learned.
Tasurinchi, the one who lives at the bend in the river, the one who used to live by the lagoon where, at low water, in the dry season, so many turtles turn up half dead, is walking. I went and saw him. I blew my hunting horn from a long way off to let him know I was coming to visit him, and then when I was closer I let him know by shouting: “I’ve come! I’ve come!” My little parrot repeated: “I’ve come! I’ve come!” He didn’t turn up to greet me, so I thought he might have gone to live somewhere else and my journey there had been for nothing. No, his house was still there, alongside the bend in the river. I stood in front of it with my back turned, waiting for him to receive me. I had to wait a long time. He was down at the river, hollowing out a tree trunk to make himself a canoe.
While I waited for him I watched his wife. Seated at her loom close by, she was dyeing strands of wild cotton with pounded palillo roots. She didn’t get up or look at me. She went on working as though I hadn’t arrived or were invisible. She was wearing more necklaces than the last time. “Do you wear that many necklaces so as to keep the little kamagarini devils away, or so that the machikanari witch can’t cast spells on you?” I asked her. But she didn’t answer and went on dyeing the strands of cotton as though she hadn’t heard me. She was also wearing many ornaments on her arms and ankles and on the shoulders and the front of her cushma. Her headdress was a rainbow of macaw, toucan, parrot, cashew bird, and pavita kanari feathers.
At last Tasurinchi arrived. “I’m here,” I said to him. “Are you there?” “Here I am,” he answered, pleased to see me, and my parrot repeated: “I am, I am.” Then his wife rose to her feet and unrolled two mats for us to sit on. She brought a pot of freshly roasted cassava that she emptied out onto plantain leaves, and a little jar of masato. She, too, seemed pleased to see me. We went on talking till the next moon, without stopping.
His wife was heavy with child and this time it would be born at the right time and wouldn’t be lost. A little god had told the seripigari so, in a trance. And he had told him that this time, if the child died before it was born, like the other times, it would be the woman’s fault and not a kamagarini’s. In that trance the seripigari found out many things. The other times the children were born dead because she’d swallowed a brew to make them die inside her and push them out before it was time. “Is that so?” I asked his wife. And she answered: “I don’t remember. Perhaps so. Who knows?” “Yes, it’s true,” Tasurinchi assured me. “I’ve warned her that if the child is born dead this time, I’ll kill her.” “If it’s born dead he’ll thrust a poisoned dart in me and leave my body down by the riverside so the capybaras will eat me,” his wife confirmed. She laughed. She wasn’t afraid but, rather, seemed to be making mock of us.
I asked Tasurinchi why he so badly wanted his wife to bear a child. It wasn’t the child he cared about; he was worried about her. “Isn’t it strange that all her children are born dead?” he said. He asked her again in front of me: “You pushed them out dead because you drank a brew?” She repeated what she had said to me: “I don’t remember.” “Sometimes I think she’s not a woman but a she-devil, a sopai,” Tasurinchi confessed to me. It’s not just because of this business about children that he thinks she’s got a different sort of soul. It’s also all those bracelets, necklaces, headdresses, and ornaments she wears. And it’s true. I’ve never seen anyone with so many things on their body or on their cushma. Who knows how she can walk with all that weighing her down? “Look at what she’s got on now,” Tasurinchi said. He made the woman come close and pointed: seed bangles, rows of necklaces of partridge bones, capybara teeth, monkey femurs, majaz fangs, caterpillar skins, and many other things I can’t remember. “She says the necklaces protect her from the bad sorcerer, the machikanari,” Tasurinchi told me. “But sometimes, looking at her, it seems more likely she’s a machikanari herself, concocting a spell against someone.” She laughed and said she didn’t think she was a witch or a she-devil, but only a woman, just like the others.
Tasurinchi wouldn’t mind being by himself if he killed his wife. “Rather that than go on living with someone who can steal every last piece of my soul,” he explained. But I thought that wouldn’t happen, since according to what the seripigari found out in the trance, the child would be born walking this time. “Maybe that’s how it will be,” I heard his wife say, laughing uproariously without raising her eyes from the strands of cotton. They are well, both of them. Walking. Tasurinchi gave me this little net woven of wild cotton fibers. “To catch fish with,” he said. He also gave me some cassava and maize. “Aren’t you afraid to journey alone?” he asked me. “We Machiguengas always go through the forest in company, because of what we might meet on the way.” “I have company, too,” I said. “Can’t you see my little parrot?” “Parrot, parrot,” the little parrot repeated.
I told all this to Tasurinchi, the one who used to live by the Mitaya and now lives in the forest up the Yavero. Lost in thought, reflecting, he commented: “I don’t understand it. Is he afraid his wife is a sopai because she pushes out dead children? The women here must be she-devils too, then, because they give birth not only to dead babies but to toads and lizards as well sometimes. Who has taught that a woman is a bad witch because she wears many necklaces? It is a teaching unknown to me. The machikanari is an evil sorcerer because he serves the breather-out of demons, Kientibakori, and because the kamagarinis, who are his little devils, help him prepare spells, just as the seripigari, who is a good sorcerer, is helped by the little gods that Tasurinchi breathed out to cure evils, to undo spells, and to discover the truth. But both the machikanaris and the seripigaris wear necklaces, as far as I know.”
At that, the women burst out laughing. It couldn’t be true that they push out dead babies, for there was an ant-heap of little ones, there in that hut by the Yavero. “There are many mouths,” Tasurinchi complained. Before, by the Mitaya, fish always fell into the nets, even though the land wasn’t good for growing cassava. But where he’s settled now, far up one of the streams that empty into the Yavero, there are no fish. It’s a dark place, full of toads and armadillos. Damp earth that rots plants.