The Storyteller Read Online Free PDF Page B

culture, and of butchering Spanish prose (which, let it be said in passing, he himself wrote beautifully).
    â€œWell then, let’s make a historian of the young man and not a classifier of bits of stone, Dr. Matos. Don’t be selfish. Hand him on to me in the History Department.”
    The work Saúl did in the summer of ’56 among the Machiguengas later became, in expanded form, his thesis for his bachelor’s degree. He defended it in our fifth year at San Marcos, and I can remember clearly the expression of pride and deep personal happiness on Don Salomón’s face. Dressed for the occasion in a starched shirt under his jacket, he watched the ceremony from the front row of the auditorium, and his little eyes shone as Saúl read out his conclusions, answered the questions of the jury, headed by Matos Mar, had his thesis accepted, and was draped in the academic sash he had thus earned.
    Don Salomón invited Saul and me to lunch, at the Raimondi in downtown Lima, to celebrate the event. But he himself didn’t touch a single mouthful, perhaps so as not to transgress the Jewish dietary laws inadvertently. (One of Saúl’s jokes when ordering cracklings or shellfish was: “And besides, the idea of committing a sin as I swallow them down gives them a very special taste, pal. A taste you’ll never know.”) Don Salomón was bursting with pleasure at his son’s brand-new degree.
    Halfway through lunch he turned to me and begged me, in earnest tones, in his guttural Central European accent: “Convince your friend he should accept the scholarship.” And noting the look of surprise on my face, he explained: “He doesn’t want to go to Europe, so as not to leave me alone—as though I weren’t old enough to know how to look after myself! I’ve told him that if he insists on being so foolish, he’s going to force me to die so that he can go off to France to specialize with his mind at rest.”
    That was how I found out that Matos Mar had gotten Saúl a fellowship to study for a doctorate at the University of Bordeaux. Not wanting to leave his father all by himself, Mascarita had refused it. Was that really the reason why he didn’t go off to Bordeaux? I believed it at the time; today I’m sure he was lying. I know now, though he confessed it to no one and kept his secret under lock and key, that his conversion had continued to work its way within him until it had taken on the lineaments of a mystical ecstasy, perhaps even of a seeking after martyrdom. I have no doubt, today, that he took the trouble to write a thesis and obtain a bachelor’s degree in ethnology just to please his father, knowing the while that he would never be an ethnologist. Though at the time I was wearing myself out trying to land some sort of fellowship that would get me to Europe, I attempted several times to persuade him not to waste such an opportunity. “It’s something that won’t come your way again, Mascarita. Europe! France! Don’t throw a chance like that away, man!” His mind was made up, once and for all: he couldn’t go, he was the only one Don Salomón had in the world and he wasn’t going to abandon him for two or three years, knowing what an elderly man his father was.
    Naturally I believed him. The one who didn’t believe him at all was the one who had secured him his fellowship and had such high academic hopes for him: his professor, Matos Mar. The latter appeared one afternoon, as was his habit, at Professor Porras Barrenechea’s to exchange ideas and have tea and biscuits, and told him the news:
    â€œYou win, Dr. Porras. The History Department can fill the Bordeaux fellowship this year. Our candidate has turned it down. What do you make of all this?”
    â€œAs far as I know, it’s the first time in the history of San Marcos that a student has refused a fellowship to France,” Porras said.