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Talking the way a storyteller talks means being able to feel and live in the very heart of that culture, means having penetrated its essence, reached the marrow of its history and mythology, given body to its taboos, images, ancestral desires, and terrors. It means being, in the most profound way possible, a rooted Machiguenga, one of that ancient lineage who — in the period in which this Firenze, where I am writing, produced its dazzling effervescence of ideas, paintings, buildings, crimes, and intrigues — roamed the forests of my country, bringing and bearing away those tales, lies, fictions, gossip, and jokes that make a community of that people of scattered beings, keeping alive among them the feeling of oneness, of constituting something fraternal and solid. That my friend Saúl gave up being all that he was and might have become so as to roam through the Amazonian jungle, for more than twenty years now, perpetuating against wind and tide — and, above all, against the very concepts of modernity and progress — the tradition of that invisible line of wandering storytellers, is something that memory now and again brings back to me, and, as on that day when I first heard of it, in the starlit darkness of the village of New Light, it opens my heart more forcefully than fear or love has ever done.

Darkness has fallen and there are stars in the Florentine night, though not as bright as those in the jungle. I have a feeling that at any moment I’ll run out of ink (the shops in this city where I might get a refill for my pen are also locked up tight for their chiusura estivale, naturally). The heat is unbearable, and my room in the Pensione Alejandra is alive with mosquitoes buzzing and circling around my head. I could take a shower and go out for a stroll in search of diversion. There might be a breath of a breeze on the Lungarno, and if I walk along it, the spectacle of the floodlit embankments, bridges, and palaces, always beautiful, will lead to another, fiercer, spectacle: the one on the Cascine, by day the respectable promenade of ladies and children, but at this time of night the hangout of whores, gays, and drug dealers. I could mingle with the young people, high on music and marijuana in the Piazza del Santo Spirito or the Piazza della Signoria, become at this hour a motley Cour des Miracles where four, five, even ten different impromptu shows are simultaneously staged: Caribbean maraca players and acrobats, Turkish ropewalkers, Moroccan fire-eaters, Spanish student serenaders, French mimes, American jazz musicians, gypsy fortune-tellers, German guitarists, Hungarian flutists. Sometimes it is enjoyable to lose oneself in this colorful, youthful multitude. But tonight I know that wherever I might wander — on the ocher stone bridges over the Arno, or beneath the trees of the Cascine, each with its waiting prostitute, or the straining muscles of the Neptune fountain, or Cellini’s bronze statue of Perseus stained with pigeon droppings — wherever I might try to find refuge from the heat, the mosquitoes, the rapture of my spirit, I would still hear, close by, unceasing, crackling, immemorial, that Machiguenga storyteller.

Firenze, July 1985

London, May 13, 1987

Acknowledgments

Like all the novels I have written, this one owes much to the help, voluntary or involuntary, of a number of institutions and individuals. I should like to mention the Summer Institute of Linguistics, the Dominican Mission to the Urubamba, and the CIPA (Centro de Investigacidn y PromodSn Amazdnica), and thank them for the hospitality offered me in the jungle; Vicente de Szyszlo and Luis Román, my excellent traveling companions in Amazonia; and Father Joaquin Barriales, O.P., the collector and translator of many Machiguenga songs and myths that appear in my book.