Worse still, they’ve asked a bad sorcerer, a machikanari, to bring evil on him. Tasurinchi caught him trying to hide in his house to steal a lock of his hair or something belonging to him, so as to be able to make him fall sick and die a horrible death. He could have killed the machikanari, but all he did was make him run away by shooting his gun off in the air. According to him, this proves his soul is pure again. “It’s not right that they should hate me so,” he says. He told me he’d gone to visit Tasurinchi, upriver, to bring him food and presents. Offering to clear a new field for him in the forest, he asked him to give him any one of his daughters as a wife. Tasurinchi insulted him: “Nit, shit, traitor, how dare you come round here? I’m going to kill you right now.” And he’d gone after him with a machete.
Tearfully, he lamented his fate. He said it wasn’t true that he was a kasibarenini devil disguised as a man. He’d been one for a time, perhaps, before. But now he’s just the same as any of the Machiguengas of Shivankoreni who won’t let him come near. His misfortune began that time when he had the evil. He was so thin and so weak he couldn’t get up from his mat. Nor could he speak. He opened his mouth and his voice didn’t come out. I must be turning into a fish, he thought. But he could see and hear what was happening around him, in the other huts of Shivankoreni. He was deeply alarmed when he saw that everyone was taking off the bracelets and the ornaments they were wearing on their wrists, arms, and ankles. He could hear them saying: “He’s going to die soon, but his spirit will pull out his veins, and while we’re asleep he’ll tie us down with them at the places on our bodies where we wore ornaments.” He tried to reassure them, to tell them that he’d never do that to them, and, what was more, that he wasn’t dying. But his voice wouldn’t come out. And that was when he spied him, out in the pouring rain. He roamed all about the village, harmless enough, or so he made it appear. A youngster in an earth-colored cushma, amusing himself playing with datura seeds and imitating the hovering wings of a hummingbird with his hands. It never occurred to Tasurinchi that he could be a little devil, so he wasn’t worried when his family set out for the lake to fish. Then, once he saw he was alone, the kasibarenini changed himself into an ant and entered Tasurinchi’s body by way of the little opening inside the nose through which tobacco juice is sniffed. There and then he felt cured of the evil, there and then his strength came back, and the flesh on his bones. Yet at the same time he felt an irresistible urge to do what he did next. Just like that, running, howling, beating his chest like a monkey, he started burning down the huts of Shivankoreni. He says it wasn’t him but the little devil who set fire to the straw and ran from one place to the other with burning candles, roaring and leaping for joy. Tasurinchi remembers how the parrots squawked and how he choked in the clouds of smoke as before him, behind him, to the right, to the left, everything went up in flames. If the others hadn’t arrived on the scene, Shivankoreni would no longer exist. He says that as soon as he saw people come running he regretted what he had done. He had to run away in terror, saying to himself: “What’s happening to me?” They wanted to kill him, chasing after him screaming: “Devil, devil!”
But, according to Tasurinchi, all this is an old story. The little devil that made him set fire to Shivankoreni was sucked out of him by a seripigari of Koribeni: he drew it out through his armpit, and then he vomited it up. Tasurinchi saw it: it had the form of a little white bone. He says that since then he’s become just like me, or any of you, again. “Why do you think they won’t let me live in Shivankoreni?” he asked me. “Because they don’t trust you,” I explained to him. “They all remember that day you cured yourself and then went and burned down their houses. And what’s more, they know you’ve been living over there on the other side of the Gran Pongo, among the Viracochas.” Because Tasurinchi doesn’t wear a cushma, but a shirt and trousers. “There among them, I felt like an orphan,” he told me. “I dreamed of returning to Shivankoreni. And now that I’m here, my kinfolk make me feel like an orphan, too. Will I always live alone like this, without a family? The one thing I want is a woman to roast cassavas and bear children.”
I stayed with him for three moons. He’s a close-mouthed, moody man who sometimes talks to himself. Someone who’s lived with a kasibarenini devil inside his body can’t ever be the same as he was before, perhaps. “Your coming to visit me is the beginning of a change, perhaps,” he said to me. “Do you think the men who walk will let me walk with them soon?” “Who knows?” I answered. “There’s nothing sadder than to feel that one is somebody who’s no longer a man,” he said as we parted. As I walked along the Camisea I spied him in the distance. He had climbed up a hillock and his eyes were following me. I could remember his surly, forlorn face, though I could no longer see it.
That, anyway, is what I have learned.
I first became acquainted with the Amazon jungle halfway through 1958, thanks to my friend Rosita Corpancho. Her function at the University of San Marcos was vague; her power unlimited. She prowled among the professors without being one of them, and they all did whatever she asked; thanks to her wiles, doors of officialdom stuck shut were opened and paths of bureaucracy smoothed.
“There’s a place available for someone on an expedition to the Alto Marañón that’s been organized by the Institute of Linguistics for a Mexican anthropologist,” she said to me one day when I ran into her on the campus of the Faculty of Letters. “Would you like to go?”
I had finally managed to obtain the fellowship to Europe I’d coveted and was to leave for Spain the following month. But I accepted without a moment’s hesitation.
Rosita is from Loreto, and if you listen carefully you can still catch in her voice an echo of the delightful singsong accent of eastern Peru. She protected and promoted — as no doubt she still does — the Summer Institute of Linguistics, an organization which, in the forty years of its existence in Peru, has been the object of virulent controversy. I understand that as I write these lines it is packing its bags to leave the country. Not because it has been expelled (though this was on the verge of happening during General Velasco’s dictatorship), but on its own initiative, since it considers that it has fulfilled the mission that brought it to Yarinacocha, its base of operations on the banks of the Ucayali, some ten kilometers from Pucallpa, from which it has spread into nearly all the remote folds and corners of Amazonia.
What exactly is the purpose of the Institute? According to its enemies, it is a tentacle of American imperialism which, under cover of doing scientific research, has been engaged in gathering intelligence and has taken the first steps toward a neocolonialist penetration of the cultures of the Amazonian Indians. These accusations stem, first and foremost, from the Left. But certain sectors of the Catholic Church — mainly the jungle missionaries — are also hostile to it and accuse it of being nothing more than a phalanx of Protestant evangelists passing themselves off as linguists. Among the anthropologists, there are those who criticize it for perverting the aboriginal cultures, attempting to Westernize them and draw them into a mercantile economy. A number of conservatives disapprove of the presence of the Institute in Peru for nationalist and Hispanist reasons. Among these latter was my professor and academic adviser back in those days, the historian Porras Barrenechea, who, when he heard that I was going on that expedition, solemnly cautioned me: “Be careful. Those gringos will try to buy you.” He couldn’t bear the thought that, because of the Institute, the jungle Indians would probably learn to speak English before they did Spanish.