The Storyteller Read Online Free PDF

without which we would end up withering like flowers without water.
    I listened to him and pretended to be taking an interest in what he was saying. But I was really thinking about his birthmark. Why had he suddenly alluded to it while explaining to me his feelings about the Amazonian Indians? Was this the key to Mascarita’s conversion? In the Peruvian social order those Shipibos, Huambisas, Aguarunas, Yaguas, Shapras, Campas, Mashcos represented something that he could understand better than anyone else: a picturesque horror, an aberration that other people ridiculed or pitied without granting it the respect and dignity deserved only by those whose physical appearance, customs, and beliefs were “normal.” Both he and they were anomalies in the eyes of other Peruvians. His birthmark aroused in them, in us, the same feelings, deep down, as those creatures living somewhere far away, half naked, eating each other’s lice and speaking incomprehensible dialects. Was this the origin of Mascarita’s love at first sight for the tribal Indians, the “chunchos”? Had he unconsciously identified with those marginal beings because of the birthmark that made him, too, a marginal being, every time he went out on the streets?
    I suggested this interpretation to him to see if it put him in a better mood, and in fact he burst out laughing.
    â€œI take it you passed Dr. Guerrita’s psych course?” he joked. “I’d have been more likely to flunk you, myself.”
    And still laughing, he told me that Don Salomón Zuratas, being sharper than I was, had suggested a Jewish interpretation.
    â€œThat I’m identifying the Amazonian Indians with the Jewish people, always a minority and always persecuted for their religion and their mores that are different from those of the rest of society. How does that strike you? A far nobler interpretation than yours, which might be called the Frankenstein syndrome. To each madman his own mania, pal.”
    I retorted that the two interpretations didn’t exclude each other. He wound up, highly amused, giving free play to his imagination.
    â€œOkay, supposing you’re right. Supposing being half Jewish and half monster has made me more sensitive to the fate of the jungle tribes than someone as appallingly normal as you.”
    â€œPoor jungle tribes! You’re using them for a crying towel. You’re taking advantage of them, too, you know.”
    â€œWell, let’s leave it at that. I’ve got a class.” He said goodbye as he got up from the table without a trace of the dark mood of a moment before. “But remind me next time to set you straight on those ‘poor jungle tribes.’ I’ll tell you a few things that’ll make your hair stand on end. What was done to them, for instance, in the days of the rubber boom. If they could live through that, they don’t deserve to be called ‘poor savages.’ Supermen, rather. Just wait—you’ll see.”
    Apparently he had spoken of his “mania” to Don Salomón. The old man must have come around to accepting the fact that, rather than in halls of justice, Saúl would bring prestige to the name Zuratas in university lecture halls and in the field of anthropological research. Was that what he had decided to be in life? A professor, a researcher? That he had the aptitude I heard confirmed by one of his professors, Dr. José Matos Mar, who was then head of the Department of Ethnology at San Marcos.
    â€œYoung Zuratas has turned out to be a first-rate student. He spent the three months of the year-end vacation in the Urubamba region, doing fieldwork with the Machiguengas, and the lad has brought back some excellent material.”
    He was talking to Raúl Porras Barrenechea, a historian with whom I worked in the afternoons, who had a holy horror of ethnology and anthropology, which he accused of replacing man by artifacts as the focal point of