I am certain, however, that memory does not fail me as far as his dress and his physical appearance are concerned. That bright red hair, with its wild, uncombed tuft on the crown of his head, flaming and unruly, dancing above his bipartite face, the untouched side of it pale and freckled. Bright, shining eyes, and shining teeth. He was tall and thin, and I am quite sure that, except on his graduation day, I never spotted him wearing a tie. He always wore cheap coarse cotton sport shirts, over which he threw some bright-colored sweater in winter, and faded, wrinkled jeans. His heavy shoes never saw a brush. I don’t think he confided in anyone or had any really intimate friends. His other friendships were most likely similar to the one between the two of us, very cordial but fairly superficial. Acquaintances, yes, many, at San Marcos, and also, doubtless, in the neighborhood where he lived. But I could swear that no one ever heard, from his own lips, what was happening to him and what he intended to do. If in fact he had planned it carefully, and it hadn’t just happened, gradually, imperceptibly, the product of chance circumstances rather than the result of personal choice. I have thought about it a lot these last years, and of course I’ll never know.
After, the men of earth started walking, straight toward the sun that was falling. Before, they too stayed in the same place without moving. The sun, their eye of the sky, was fixed. Wide awake, always open, looking at us, warming the world. Its light was very strong, but Tasurinchi could withstand it. There was no evil, there was no wind, there was no rain. The women bore pure children. If Tasurinchi wanted to eat, he dipped his hand into the river and brought out a shad flicking its tail; or he loosed an arrow without aiming, took a few steps into the jungle, and soon came across a little wild turkey, a partridge, or a trumpet-bird brought down by his arrow. There was never any lack of food. There was no war. The rivers were full of fish, the forests of animals. The Mashcos didn’t exist. The men of earth were strong, wise, serene and united. They were peaceable and without anger. Before the time afterwards.
Those who went came back, and entered the spirit of the best. That way, nobody used to die. “It’s time I departed,” Tasurinchi would say. He would go down to the riverbank and make his bed of leaves and dry branches, with a roof of ungurabi overhead. He would put up a fence of sharp-pointed canes all round to keep the capybaras prowling about on the shore of the river from eating his corpse. He would lie down, go away, and soon after come back, taking up his abode in the man who had hunted most, fought best, or faithfully followed the customs. The men of earth lived together. In peace and quiet. Death was not death. It was going away and coming back. Instead of weakening them, it made them stronger, adding to those who remained the wisdom and the strength of those who went. “We are and we shall be,” said Tasurinchi. “It seems that we are not going to die. Those who went have come back. They are here. They are us.”
Then why, if they were so pure, did the men of earth begin walking? Because one day the sun started falling. They walked so that it wouldn’t fall any farther, to help it to rise. So Tasurinchi says.
That, anyway, is what I have learned.
Had the sun yet fought its war with Kashiri, the moon? Perhaps. It began blinking, moving, its light dimmed, and you could hardly see it. People started rubbing their bodies, shivering. That was the cold. That’s how after began, it seems. Then, in the half darkness, confused, frightened, men fell into their own traps, they ate deer meat thinking it was tapir, they could not find the path from the cassava patch to their own house. Where am I? they said in despair, walking like blind men, stumbling. Where can my family be? What is happening to the world? The wind had begun to blow. Howling, buffeting, making off with the tops of the palm trees and pulling the lupunas up by the roots. The rain fell with a roar, causing floods. You could see herds of drowned huanganas, floating feet up in the current. Rivers changed course, rafts broke up on the dams, ponds turned into rivers. Souls lost their serenity. That was no longer going. It was dying. Something must be done, they said. Looking left and right, what? What shall we do? they said. “Start walking,” Tasurinchi ordered. They were in total darkness, surrounded by evil. The cassava was beginning to give out, the water stank. Those who went no longer came back, frightened away by the disasters, lost between the world of the clouds and our world. Beneath the ground they walked on, they could hear the slow-moving Kamabiría, the river of the dead, flowing. Seeming to come closer, seeming to call to them. Start walking? “Yes,” said the seripigari, falling into a tobacco trance. “Walk, keep walking. And remember this. The day you stop walking, you will disappear completely. Dragging the sun down with you.”
That’s how it started. Moving, walking. Keeping on, with or without rain, by land or by water, climbing up the mountain slopes or climbing down the ravines. Amid forests so dense that it was night in the daytime, and plains so bare they looked like pampas, without a single bush, like the head of a man that a little kamagarini devil has left completely bald. “The sun hasn’t fallen yet,” Tasurinchi encouraged them. “It trips and gets up again. Watch your step, it’s dozed off. We must wake it up, we must help it. We have suffered evil and death, but we keep on walking. Would all the sparks in the sky be enough to count the moons that have passed? No. We are alive. We are moving.”
So as to live walking, they had to travel light, stripping themselves of everything that was theirs. Dwellings, animals, seed, the abundance all round them. The little beach where they used to flip salty-fleshed turtles over on their backs, the forest bubbling with singing birds. They kept what was essential and started walking. Was their march through the forest a punishment? No, a celebration, rather, like going fishing or hunting in the dry season. They kept their bows and arrows, their horns full of poison, their hollow canes of annatto dye, their knives, their drums, the cushmas they were wearing, the pouches, and the strips of cloth to carry the children. The newborn were born walking, the old died walking. When the morning light dawned, the undergrowth was already rustling as they passed; they were already walking, walking, in single file, the men with their weapons at the ready, the women carrying the baskets and trays, the eyes of each and all fixed on the sun. We haven’t lost our way yet. Our determination must have kept us pure. The sun hasn’t fallen once and for all; it hasn’t stopped falling yet. It goes and it comes back, like the souls of the fortunate. It heats the world. The people of the earth haven’t fallen, either. Here we are. I in the middle, you all around me. I talking, you listening. We live, we walk. That is happiness, it seems.
But before, they had to sacrifice themselves for this world. Bear catastrophes, sufferings, evils that would have been the end of any other people.
That time, the men who walk halted to rest. In the night the jaguar roared and the lord of thunder rolled his hoarse thunder. There were bad omens. Butterflies invaded the huts and the women had to flap straw mats at them to chase them away from the trays of food. They heard the owl and the chícua screech. What is going to happen? they said, alarmed. During the night the river rose so high that at dawn they found themselves surrounded by roiling waters carrying along logs, small trees, weeds, and corpses being smashed to bits as they crashed against the banks. They hastily felled trees, improvised rafts and canoes before the flood swallowed the desolate island the earth had become. They had to shove their craft into the muddy waters and start paddling. They paddled and paddled, and while some pushed on the poles others cried out, signaling on the right a dam approaching, on the left the mouth of a whirlpool, and over there, over there, a flick of the tail of the cunning yacumama, lying very still beneath the water, waiting for the right moment to overturn the canoe and swallow the paddlers. Deep in the forest, the lord of demons, Kientibakori, crazy with joy, drank masato and danced in the middle of a crowd of kamagarinis. Many went, drowned in the flood when a tree trunk, invisible beneath the floodwaters, split open a raft and families were swept away.