“Eat me,” the annatto bush instructed him. “Your face will change and your mother won’t recognize you. You’re to go up to her and say to her: ‘I know a place where what’s imperfect becomes perfect, where monsters become men. There, your feet will be like those of other women.’ And then you’re to lead her to this place.” Sagely waving its leaves and branches and making its fruit dance gaily, Potsotiki gave him directions as to the path he must follow.
Inaenka, busy rending the last remains of her kill, watching the guts and the hearts appearing, took no notice of their plotting. Once she had hacked the bodies into pieces, she roasted them, flavored with the annatto she was so fond of. In the meantime, the boy had eaten Potsotiki. He’d changed into a red boy, clay-red, annatto-red. He went up to his mother and she did not recognize him. “Who are you?” she asked. “How can you come near me without trembling? Don’t you know who I am?”
“Of course I do,” said the annatto-boy. “I’ve come to get you, because I know a place where you can be happy. If anyone sets foot there and bathes in the rivers, it’s enough to straighten anything that’s crooked, and any limbs that anyone has lost grow back again. I’ll take you there. You’ll lose your limp. You’ll be happy, Inaenka. Follow me.”
Their journey was endless. They crossed forests, rivers, lakes, gorges; they went up and down wooded slopes and through more forests still. Rain poured down on them many times. Lightning flashed above their heads and tempests roared at them, deafening them. After crossing a steaming bog with whistling butterflies, they were there. The Oskiaje. There all the rivers of this world and the other worlds meet; the Meshiareni comes down from the starlit sky; the Kamabiría, whose waters carry the souls of the dead to the worlds of the deep, also runs through it. There were monsters of every shape and size, beckoning to Inaenka with their trunks and claws. “Come, come, you’re one of us,” they grunted at her.
“Why have you brought me here?” Inaenka whispered. Alarmed, enraged, smelling the trap at last. “I’ve trod this earth, and my feet are still crooked.”
“Potsotiki, the annatto bush, counseled me to bring you here,” her son revealed. “So you wouldn’t go on destroying the people who walk, that’s why. The sun mustn’t fall through your fault.”
“Very well,” Inaenka said, accepting her fate. “You’ve saved them, perhaps. But I’ll follow you day and night. Day and night, till I’ve sprinkled you with my fiery water. I’ll cover you with blisters. I’ll watch you peeling, kicking the ground. I’ll laugh at your suffering. You cannot free yourself of me.”
But he did free himself. To escape from Inaenka, his soul had to give up its human wrapping; that was what it had to do, and that is what it did. It left his body and started wandering, wandering in search of a refuge, it made its home in that little black bird with white legs. He is now a moritoni. He now lives by the river and sleeps nestled in the grass. Thanks to him and to Potsotiki, the men who walk were saved from the evil that makes the skin peel off, that burns and kills swiftly. That’s why we paint our skin with annatto dye, it seems. Seeking Potsotiki’s protection. Nobody steps on the moritoni he comes upon sleeping in the grass; instead, he walks away. When a moritoni gets caught on the twigs sticky with resin that the hunters set out in the drinking places, he frees it and breathes on it to take away the cold and the fear it feels; the women cradle it between their breasts until it can fly. And that must be the reason why.
Nothing that happens happens just because, said Tasurinchi, the seripigari of the Kompiroshiato. There’s a reason for everything; everything is a cause or a result of something. Perhaps that’s so. There are more little gods and little devils than drops of water in the biggest lake and the biggest river, he used to say. They’re involved with everything that exists. The sons of Kientibakori so as to perturb the world, the sons of Tasurinchi so as to preserve its order. One who knows causes and consequences has wisdom, perhaps. I haven’t attained it yet, he said, even though I’m fairly wise and can do certain things that others can’t. What can you do, Tasurinchi? Fly, talk with the souls of the dead, visit the worlds of below and above, enter the bodies of the living, foresee the future, understand the language of some of the animals. That’s a lot. But there are so many other things I don’t know.
That, anyway, is what I have learned.
It’s true; he guessed rightly: if I weren’t a storyteller I would have liked to be a seripigari. To be able to control trances through wisdom so that they’d always be good ones. Once, over there by the tapir-river, the Kimariato, I had a bad trance, and in it I lived through a story I’d rather not remember. Nonetheless, I still remember it.
Here is the story.
That was after, by the tapir-river.
I was people. I had a family. I was asleep. Then I woke up. I’d barely opened my eyes when I understood. Alas, poor Tasurinchi! I’d changed into an insect, that’s what. A buzz-buzz bug, perhaps. A Gregor-Tasurinchi. I was lying on my back. The world had grown bigger, it seemed to me. I was aware of everything. Those hairy, ringed legs were my legs. Those transparent mud-colored wings, which creaked when I moved and hurt me so much, had once been my arms. The stench that surrounded me: was that my odor? I saw the world differently: I could see the underside and the top, the back and the front, at the same time. Because now, being an insect, I had several eyes. What’s happened to you, Gregor-Tasurinchi? Did a bad witch eat a lock of your hair and change you? Did a little kamagarini devil get into you through your ass-eye and turn you into this? I was covered with shame at seeing myself the way I was. What would my family say? Because I had a family, like the other men who walk, it seemed. What would they think, seeing me changed into a repulsive insect? All you can do with buzz-buzz bugs is squash them. Can you eat them? Can you cure evil with them? You can’t even make filthy machikanari potions with them, perhaps.
But my family didn’t say anything. They pretended. They came and went in the hut or down by the river, as though they hadn’t noticed the misfortune that had befallen me. They must have felt ashamed, too. Saying: Look how he’s been changed! That might have been the reason they avoided mentioning me by name. Who knows? And in the meantime, I saw everything. The world seemed content, the same as before. I could see the children lifting stones off anthills and happily eating the soft-shelled ants, squabbling over them. The men, going to clear the weeds from the cassava patches or painting themselves with annatto and huito before going off to hunt. The women, cutting up the cassava, chewing it, spitting it out, leaving it to rest in the masato tubs; unraveling cotton to weave cushmas. When night fell, the old men got the fires ready, cutting two reeds and making a hole near the tip of the smaller one, planting it firmly in the dirt, holding it fast with their feet, placing the other reed in the hole and turning it, turning it, patiently, till a thread of smoke started rising. Then they’d collect the dust in a banana leaf, wrap the leaf in cotton, and shake it till the fire caught. Then they lighted the fires for the families to sleep around. The men and women came and went, getting on with life, content perhaps. Without mentioning the change I’d suffered, showing neither anger nor surprise. Who asked after the storyteller? Nobody. Did anybody take a sack of cassava and another of maize to the seripigari, saying: “Change him back into a man who walks?” Nobody. Many people bustled about, their eyes avoiding the corner where I was. Poor Gregor-Tasurinchi! Furiously fluttering my wings and wriggling my legs; trying to turn over, fighting to get up. Ay, ay!
How could I ask for help without talking? I didn’t know. That was the worst torment, perhaps. Bound to suffer, knowing that nobody would come and put me right side up. Would I never walk again? I remembered the tortoises. When I went to hunt them on the little beach where they come out of the water to bury their young; how I turned them over, catching hold of their shell. That’s the way I was now, frantically waving my legs in the air, unable to right myself, just like them. I was a buzz-buzz bug, and I felt like a tortoise. Like them, I would be thirsty and hungry, and then my soul would go. Does the soul of a buzz-buzz bug come back? Perhaps it does.