Does my ex-friend, ex-Jew, ex-white man, and ex-Westerner, Saúl Zuratas, walk with them, taking those short steps with the whole foot planted flat on the ground, like palmipeds, so typical of all the Amazonian tribes? I have decided that it is he who is the storyteller in Malfatti’s photograph. A personal decision, since objectively I have no way of knowing. It’s true that the face of the figure standing is the most heavily shadowed — on the right side, where his birthmark was. This might be a key to identifying him. But at that distance the impression could be misleading; it might be no more than the sun’s shadow (his face is tilted in such a way that the dying light, falling from the opposite side, casts a shadow over the entire right side of men, trees, and clouds as the sun begins to set). Perhaps the most reliable clue is the shape of the silhouette. Even though he is far off, there is no doubt: that is not the build of a typical jungle Indian, who is usually squat, with short, bowed legs and a broad chest. The one who is talking has an elongated body and I would swear that his skin — he is naked from the waist up — is much lighter than that of his listeners. His hair, however, has that circular cut, like a medieval monk’s, of the Machiguengas. I have also decided that the hump on the left shoulder of the storyteller in the photograph is a parrot. Wouldn’t it be the most natural thing in the world for a storyteller to travel through the forest with a totemic parrot, companion or acolyte?
After turning the pieces of the puzzle around and around many times and shuffling them this way and that, I see they fit. They outline a more or less coherent story, as long as one sticks strictly to anecdote and does not begin pondering what Fray Luis de León called “the inherent and hidden principle of things.”
From that first journey to Quillabamba, where the farmer who was related to his mother lived, Mascarita came into contact with a world that intrigued and attracted him. What must in the beginning have been a feeling of intellectual curiosity and sympathy for the customs and conditions of life of the Machiguengas became, with time, as he got to know them better, learned their language, studied their history, and began to share their existence for longer and longer periods, a conversion, in both the cultural and the religious meaning of the word, an identification with their ways and their traditions, in which, for reasons I can intuit but not entirely understand, Saúl found spiritual sustenance, an incentive and a justification for his life, a commitment that he had not found in those other Peruvian tribes — Jewish, Christian, Marxist, etc. — among which he had lived.
This transformation must have been a very gradual one, taking place unconsciously during the years he spent studying ethnology at San Marcos. That he should have become disillusioned with his studies, that he should consider the scientific outlook of ethnologists a threat to that primitive and archaic culture (adjectives that even that early on he would not have accepted), an intrusion of destructive modern concepts, a form of corruption, is something that I can understand. The idea of an equilibrium between man and the earth, the awareness of the rape of the environment by industrial culture and today’s technology, the reevaluation of the wisdom of primitive peoples, forced either to respect their habitat or face extinction, was something that, during those years, although not yet an intellectual fashion, had already begun to take root everywhere, even in Peru. Mascarita must have lived all this with particular intensity, seeing with his own eyes the havoc wreaked by civilized peoples in the jungle, as compared with the way the Machiguengas lived in harmony with the natural world.
The decisive factor that led him to take the final step was, undoubtedly, Don Salomón’s death; he was the only person to whom Saúl was attached and to whom he felt obliged to render an account of his life. It is probable, considering how Saúl’s conduct changed in his second or third year at the university, that he had already decided that after his father’s death he would abandon everything and go to the Alto Urubamba. Up to that point, however, there is nothing extraordinary about his story. In the sixties and seventies — the years of student revolt against a consumer society — many middle-class young people left Lima, motivated partly by adventure-seeking and partly by disgust at life in the capital, and went to the jungle or the mountains, where they lived in conditions that were frequently precarious. One of the Tower of Babel programs — unfortunately ruined, for the most part, by the chronic aberrations of Alejandro Pérez’s camera — was, in fact, concerned with a group of kids from Lima who had gone off to the department of Cusco, where they survived by taking up picturesque occupations. That, like them, Mascarita should have decided to turn his back on a bourgeois future and go to Amazonia in search of adventure — a return to fundamentals, to the source — was not particularly remarkable.
But Saúl had not gone off in the same way they had. He erased all trace of his departure and of his intentions, leading those who knew him to believe that he was emigrating to Israel. What else could the alibi of the Jew making the Return mean, except that, on leaving Lima, Saúl Zuratas had irrevocably decided that he was going to change his life, his name, his habits, his traditions, his god, everything he had been up until then? It is evident that he left Lima with the intention of never coming back, of being another person forever.
I am able to follow him this far, though not without difficulty. I believe that his identification with this small, marginal, nomadic community had — as his father conjectured — something to do with the fact that he was Jewish, a member of another community which had also been a wandering, marginal one throughout its history, a pariah among the world’s societies, like the Machiguengas in Peru, grafted onto them, yet not assimilated and never entirely accepted. And, surely, his fellow feeling for the Machiguengas was influenced, as I used to tease him, by that enormous birthmark that made of him a marginal among marginals, a man whose destiny would always bear the stigma of ugliness. I can accept that among the worshippers of the spirits of trees and thunder, the ritual users of tobacco and ayahuasca brews, Mascarita would feel more at home — dissolved in a collective being — than among the Jews or the Christians of his country. In a very subtle and personal way, by going to the Alto Urubamba to be born again, Saúl made his Alyah.
Where I find it impossible to follow him — an insuperable difficulty that pains and frustrates me — is in the next stage: the transformation of the convert into the storyteller. It is this facet of Saúl’s story, naturally, that moves me most; it is what makes me think of it continually and weave and unweave it a thousand times; it is what has impelled me to put it into writing in the hope that if I do so, it will cease to haunt me.
Becoming a storyteller was adding what appeared impossible to what was merely improbable. Going back in time from trousers and tie to a loincloth and tattoos, from Spanish to the agglutinative crackling of Machiguenga, from reason to magic and from a monotheistic religion or Western agnosticism to pagan animism, is a feat hard to swallow, though still possible, with a certain effort of imagination. The rest of the story, however, confronts me only with darkness, and the harder I try to see through it, the more impenetrable it becomes.