Or are mosquitoes the weapon that the absent Florentines resort to in an attempt to put their detested invaders to flight? In any case, it’s a hopeless battle. Neither insects nor heat nor anything else in this world would serve to stave off the invasion of the multitudes. Is it merely its paintings, its palaces, the stones of its labyrinthine old quarter that draw us myriads of foreigners to Firenze like a magnet, despite the discomforts of the summer season? Or is it the odd combination of fanaticism and license, piety and cruelty, spirituality and sensual refinement, political corruption and intellectual daring, of its past that holds us in its sway in this stifling city deserted by its inhabitants?
Over the last two months, everything has gradually been closing: the shops, the laundries, the uncomfortable Bibliotèca Nazionale alongside the river, the movie theaters that were my refuge at night, and, finally, the cafés where I went to read Dante and Machiavelli and think about Mascarita and the Machiguengas of the headwaters of the Alto Urubamba and the Madre de Dios. The first to close was the charming Caffè Strozzi, with its Art Deco furniture and interior, and air-conditioning besides, making it a marvelous oasis on scorching afternoons; then the next to close was the Caffè Paszkowski, where, though drenched with sweat, one could be by oneself, on its time-hallowed, démodé upstairs floor, with its leather easy chairs and blood-red velvet drapes; then after that the Caffè Gillio; and last of all, the one that was in all the guidebooks and always jammed, the Caffè Rivoire, in the Piazza della Signoria, where a Caffè macchiato cost me as much as an entire meal in a neighborhood trattoria. Since it is not even remotely possible to read or write in a gelateria or a pizzeria (the few hospitable enclaves still open), I have had to resign myself to reading in my pensione in the Borgo dei Santi Apostoli, sweating profusely in the sickly light of a lamp seemingly designed to make reading arduous or to condemn the stubborn reader to premature blindness. These are inconveniences which, as the terrible little monk of San Marcos would have said (the unexpected consequence of my stay in Firenze has been the discovery, thanks to his biographer Rodolfo Ridolfi, that the much maligned Savonarola was, all in all, an interesting figure, one better, perhaps, than those who burned him at the stake), favorably predispose the spirit toward understanding better, to the point of virtually experiencing them personally, the Dantesque tortures of the infernal pilgrimage; or to reflecting, with due calm, upon the terrifying conclusions concerning the cities of men and the government of their affairs drawn by Machiavelli, the icy analyst of the history of this republic, from his experiences as one of its functionaries.
The little gallery in the Via Santa Margherita, between an optician’s shop and a grocery store and directly opposite the so-called Church of Dante, where Gabriele Malfatti’s Machiguenga photographs were being shown, has also shut, of course. But I managed to see them several times more before its chiusura estivale. The third time she saw me come in, the thin girl in glasses who was in charge of the gallery informed me that she had a fidanzato. I was obliged to assure her in my bad Italian that my interest in the exhibition had no ulterior personal motives, that it was more or less patriotic; it had nothing to do with her beauty, only with Malfatti’s photographs. She never quite believed that I spent such a long time peering at them out of sheer homesickness for my native land. And why especially the one of the group of Indians sitting in a sort of lotus position, listening, enthralled, to that gesticulating man? I am sure she never took my assertions seriously when I declared that the photograph was a consummate masterpiece, something to be savored slowly, the way one contemplates The Allegory of Spring or The Battle of San Remo in the Uffizi. But at last, after seeing me four or five times in the deserted gallery, she was a little less mistrustful of me, and one day she even permitted herself a friendly overture, informing me that an “Inca combo” played Peruvian music on traditional instruments every night in front of the Church of San Lorenzo: why didn’t I go see them; they would bring back memories of my homeland. (I obeyed, I went, and I discovered that the Incas were two Bolivians and two Portuguese from Rome who were trying out an incompatible synthesis of Portuguese fados and Santa Cruz carnival music.) The Santa Margherita gallery closed a week ago and the thin girl in glasses is now spending her vacation in Ancona, with her parents.
No matter: I don’t need to see that photograph again. I know it by heart, millimeter by millimeter. And I’ve thought about it so much that, curiously enough, I know that the naked seated figures with their long locks of straight hair, the silhouette of the storyteller, the background of thick tree trunks, tangled branches, and feathery fronds outlined against the horizon beneath a mass of great potbellied gray clouds will be the most lasting memory of this Florentine summer. More enduring and more moving, perhaps, than the artistic and architectonic marvels of the Renaissance, the harmonious murmur of Dante’s terza rima, or the rustic ritornellos (in his case unfailingly compatible with diabolical intelligence) of Machiavelli’s prose.
I am certain that the photograph shows a Machiguenga storyteller. It is the only thing about which I have no doubts. Who could that man, declaiming before that enraptured audience, be, except that figure ancestrally entrusted with the task of arousing the curiosity, the fantasy, the memory, the appetite for dreams and fabrication of the Machiguenga people? How did Gabriele Malfatti manage to be present on that occasion, to be allowed to take photographs? Perhaps the reason for the secrecy that surrounded the storyteller of recent years — the stranger who had turned into a Machiguenga — no longer existed when the Italian visited that region. Or perhaps in these last years the situation in the Alto Urubamba had evolved so rapidly that the storytellers no longer fulfill their age-old function, have lost their authenticity and become a pantomime put on for tourists, like the ceremonies with annatto or the healings by shamans of other tribes.
But I don’t think that’s the case. Life has admittedly changed in that region, but not in any way likely to increase tourism. First came the oil wells, and with them, camps for those who were taken on as workers: many Campas, Yaminahuas, Piros, and, surely, Machiguengas. Later on, or at the same time, the drug traffic began and, like a biblical plague, spread its network of coca plantations, laboratories, and secret landing strips, with — as a logical consequence — periodic killings and vendettas between rival gangs of Colombians and Peruvians; the burning of coca crops, the police searches and wholesale roundups. And finally — or perhaps at the same time, closing the triangle of horror — terrorism and counterterrorism. Detachments of the revolutionary Sendero Luminoso movement, severely repressed in the Andes, have come down to the jungle and operate in this part of Amazonia, now periodically reconnoitered by the Army and even, it is said, bombarded by the Air Force.
What effect has all this had on the Machiguenga people? Has it hastened its dismemberment and disintegration? Do the villages that had begun to bring them together some five or six years ago still exist? These villages will, of course, have been exposed to the irreversible disruptive mechanism of this contradictory civilization, represented by the high wages paid by Shell and Petro Perú, the coffers stuffed full of dollars from the drug trade, and the risks of being drawn into the bloody wars of smugglers, guerrilleros, police, and soldiers, without having the faintest idea of what the deadly game is all about. As happened when they were invaded by the Inca armies, the explorers, the Spanish conquistadors and missionaries, the rubber and wood traders in the days of the Republic, the gold prospectors and the twentieth-century immigrants. For the Machiguengas, history marches neither forward nor backward: it goes around and around in circles, repeats itself. But even though the damage to the community has been considerable because of all this, it is likely that many of them, faced with the upheavals of the last few years, will have opted for the traditional response ensuring their survivaclass="underline" diaspora. Start walking. Once again. As in the most persistent of their myths.