SAúL ZURATAS had a dark birthmark, the color of wine dregs, that covered the entire right side of his face, and unruly red hair as stiff as the bristles of a scrub brush. The birthmark spared neither his ears nor his lips nor his nose, also puffy and misshapen from swollen veins. He was the ugliest lad in the world; but he was also a likable and exceptionally good person. I have never met anyone who, from the very outset, seemed as open, as uncomplicated, as altruistic, and as well-intentioned as Saúl; anyone who showed such simplicity and heart, no matter what the circumstances. I met him when we took our university entrance examinations, and we were quite good friends—insofar as it is possible to be friends with an archangel—especially during the first two years that we were classmates in the Faculty of Letters. The day I met him he informed me, doubled over with laughter and pointing to his birthmark: "They call me Mascarita—Mask Face. Bet you can't guess why, pal."
That was the nickname we always knew him by at San Marcos.
He came from Talara and was on familiar terms with everybody. Slang words and popular catch phrases appeared in every sentence he uttered, making it seem as though he were clowning even in his most personal conversations. His problem, he said, was that his father had made too much money with his general store back home; so much that one fine day he'd decided to move to Lima. And since they'd come to the capital his father had taken up Judaism. He wasn't very religious back in the Piura port town as far as Saúl could remember. He'd occasionally seen him reading the Bible, that, yes, but he'd never bothered to drill it into Mascarita that he belonged to a race and a religion that were different from those of the other boys of the town. But here in Lima, what a change! A real drag! Ridiculous! Chicken pox in old age, that's what it was! Or rather, the religion of Abraham and Moses. Pucha! We Catholics were the lucky ones. The Catholic religion was a breeze, a measly half-hour Mass every Sunday and Communion every first Friday of the month that was over in no time. But he, on the other hand, had to sit out his Saturdays in the synagogue, hours and hours, swallowing his yawns and pretending to be interested in the rabbi's sermon—not understanding one word—so as not to disappoint his father, who after all was a very old and very good man. If Mascarita had told him that he'd long since given up believing in God, and that, to put it in a nutshell, he couldn't care less about belonging to the Chosen People, he'd have given poor Don Salomón a heart attack.
I met Don Salomón one Sunday shortly after meeting Saúl. Saúl had invited me to lunch. They lived in Bre?a, behind the Colegio La Salle, in a depressing side street off the Avenida Arica. The house was long and narrow, full of old furniture, and there was a talking parrot with a Kafkaesque name and surname who endlessly repeated Saúl's nickname: "Mascarita! Mascarita!" Father and son lived alone with a maid who had come from Talara with them and not only did the cooking but helped Don Salomón out in the grocery store he'd opened in Lima. "The one that's got a six-pointed star on the metal grill, pal. It's called La Estrella, for the Star of David. Can you beat that?"
I was impressed by the affection and kindness with which Mascarita treated his father, a stooped, unshaven old man who suffered from bunions and dragged about in big clumsy shoes that looked like Roman buskins. He spoke Spanish with a strong Russian or Polish accent, even though, as he told me, he had been in Peru for more than twenty years. He had a sharp-witted, likable way about him: "When I was a child I wanted to be a trapeze artist in a circus, but life made a grocer of me in the end. Imagine my disappointment." Was Saúl his only child? Yes, he was.
And Mascarita's mother? She had died two years after the family moved to Lima. How sad; judging from this photo, your mother must have been very young, Saúl. Yes, she was. On the one hand, of course, Mascarita had grieved over her death. But, on the other, maybe it was better for her, having a different life. His poor old lady had been very unhappy in Lima. He made signs at me to come closer and lowered his voice (an unnecessary precaution, as we had left Don Salomón fast asleep in a rocking chair in the dining room and were talking in Saúl's room) to tell me:
"My mother was a Creole from Talara; the old man took up with her soon after coming to this country as a refugee. Apparently, they just lived together until I was born. They got married only then. Can you imagine what it is for a Jew to marry a Christian, what we call a goy? No, you can't."
Back in Talara it hadn't mattered because the only two Jewish families there more or less blended in with the local population. But, on settling in Lima, Saúl's mother faced numerous problems. She missed home—everything from the nice warm weather and the cloudless sky and bright sun all year round to her family and friends. Moreover, the Jewish community of Lima never accepted her, even though to please Don Salomón she had gone through the ritual of the lustral bath and received instruction from the rabbi in order to fulfill all the rites necessary for conversion. In fact—and Saúl winked a shrewd eye at me—the community didn't accept her not so much because she was a goy as because she was a little Creole from Talara, a simple woman with no education, who could barely read. Because the Jews of Lima had all turned into a bunch of bourgeois, pal.
He told me all this without a vestige of rancor or dramatization, with a quiet acceptance of something that, apparently, could not have been otherwise. "My old lady and I were as close as fingernail and flesh. She, too, was as bored as an oyster in the synagogue, and without Don Salomón's catching on, we used to play Yan-Ken-Po on the sly to make those religious Sabbaths go by more quickly. At a distance: she would sit in the front row of the gallery, and I'd be downstairs, with the men. We'd move our hands at the same time and sometimes we'd fall into fits of laughter that horrified the holier-than-thous." She'd been carried off by galloping cancer, in just a few weeks. And since her death Don Salomón's world had come tumbling down on top of him.
"That little old man you saw there, taking his nap, was hale and hearty, full of energy and love of life a couple of years ago. The old lady's death left him a wreck."
Saúl had entered San Marcos University as a law student to please Don Salomón. As far as Saúl was concerned, he would rather have started giving his father a hand at La Estrella, which was often a headache to Don Salomón and took more out of him than was right at his age. But his father was categorical. Saúl would not set foot behind that counter. Saúl would never wait on a customer. Saúl would not be a shopkeeper like him.
"But why, papa? Are you afraid this face of mine will scare the customers away?" He recounted this to me amid peals of laughter. "The truth is that now that he's saved up a few shekels, Don Salomón wants the family to make its mark in the world. He can already see a Zuratas—me—in the diplomatic corps or the Chamber of Deputies. Can you imagine!"
Making the family name illustrious through the exercise of a liberal profession was something that didn't attract Saúl much either. What interested him in life? He himself didn't know yet, doubtless. He was finding out gradually during the months and years of our friendship, the fifties, in the Peru that, as Mascarita, myself, and our generation were reaching adulthood, was moving from the spurious peace of General Odría's dictatorship to the uncertainties and novelties of the return to democratic rule in 1956, when Saúl and I were third-year students at San Marcos.
By then he had discovered, without the slightest doubt, what it was that interested him in life. Not in a sudden flash, or with the same conviction as later; nonetheless, the extraordinary machinery had already been set in motion and little by little was pushing him one day here, another there, outlining the maze he eventually would enter, never to leave it again. In 1956 he was studying ethnology as well as law and had made several trips into the jungle. Did he already feel that spellbound fascination for the peoples of the jungle and for unsullied nature, for minute primitive cultures scattered throughout the wooded slopes of the ceja de monta?a and the plains of the Amazon below? Was that ardent fellow feeling, sprung from the darkest depths of his personality, already burning within him for those compatriots of ours who from time immemorial had lived there, harassed and grievously harmed, between the wide, slow rivers, dressed in loincloths and marked with tattoos, worshipping the spirits of trees, snakes, clouds, and lightning? Yes, all that had already begun. And I became aware of it just after the incident in the billiard parlor two or three years after our first meeting.
Every so often, between classes, we used to go over to a run-down billiard parlor, which was also a bar, on the Jirón Azángaro, to have ourselves a game. Walking through the streets with Saúl showed how painful a life he must have led at the hands of insolent, nasty people. They would turn around or block his path as he passed, to get a better look at him, staring wide-eyed and making no effort to conceal the amazement or disgust that his face aroused in them, and it was not a rare thing for someone, children mostly, to come out with some insulting remark. He didn't appear to mind, and always answered their abuse with a bit of cheerful repartee. The incident as we entered the billiard parlor didn't provoke him, but it did me, since by nature I'm a far cry from an archangel.
The drunk was bending his elbow at the bar. The moment he laid eyes on us, he came staggering over and stood in front of Saúl with arms akimbo. "Son of a bitch! What a monster! What zoo did you escape from?"
"Well, which one would you say, pal? The only one around here, the one in Barranco, of course," Mascarita replied. "If you dash right over, you'll find my cage still open."
And he tried to make his way past. But the drunk stretched out his hands, making hex signs with his fingers, the way children do when they're called bad names.
"You're not coming in here, monster." He was suddenly furious. "With a face like that, you should keep off the streets. You scare people."
"But if this is the only one I've got, what do you suggest I do?" Saúl said, smiling. "Come on, don't be a drag—let us by."
At that, I lost my patience. I grabbed the toper by the lapels and started shaking him. There was a show of fists, people milling round, some pushing and shoving, and Mascarita and I had to leave without having had our billiard game.
The next day I received a present from him. It was a small bone shaped like a diamond and engraved with a geometric design in a yellowish-brick color. The design represented two parallel mazes made up of bars of different sizes, separated by identical distances, the larger ones seemingly nestled inside the smaller ones. His brief accompanying letter, good-humored and enigmatic, went something like this:
Hi pal,
Let's see if this magic bone calms that impetuosity of yours and you stop punching poor lushes. The bone is from a tapir and the drawing is not the awkward scrawl it appears to be—just a few primitive strokes—but a symbolic inscription. Morenanchiite, the lord of thunder, dictated it to a jaguar, who dictated it to a witch-doctor friend of mine from the forests of the Alto Picha. If you think these symbols are whirlpools in the river or two coiled boa constrictors taking a nap, you may be right. But, above all, they represent the order that reigns in the world. Anyone who lets anger get the better of him distorts these lines, and when they're distorted they can no longer hold up the earth. You wouldn't want life, through your fault, to fall apart and men to return to the original chaos out of which Tasurinchi, the god of good, and Kientibakori, the god of evil, brought us by breathing us out, now would you, pal? So no more tantrums, and especially not because of me. Anyhow, thanks.
Ciao,
Saúl
I asked him to tell me more about the thunder and the tiger, the distorted lines, Tasurinchi and Kientibakori. He had me hanging on his words for an entire afternoon at his house in Bre?a as he talked to me of the beliefs and customs of a tribe scattered through the jungles of Cusco and Madre de Dios.
I was lying on his bed and he was sitting on a trunk with his parrot on his shoulder. The creature kept nibbling at his bright red hair and interrupting him with its peremptory squawks of "Mascarita!" "You be still now, Gregor Samsa," he soothed him.
The designs on their utensils and their cushmas, the tattoos on their faces and bodies, were neither fanciful nor decorative, pal. They were a coded writing that contained the secret names of people and magic formulas to protect things from damage and their owners from evil spells laid on them through such objects. The patterns were set by a noisy bearded deity, Morenanchiite, the lord of thunder, who in the middle of a storm passed on the key to a tiger from the heights of a mountain peak. The tiger passed it on to a medicine man, or shaman, in the course of a trance brought on by ayahuasca, the hallucinogenic plant, which, boiled into a brew, was drunk at all Indian ceremonies. That witch doctor of Alto Picha—"or, better put, a wise man, chum; I'm calling him a witch doctor so you'll understand what I'm talking about"—had explained to him the philosophy that had allowed the tribe to survive until now. The most important thing to them was serenity. Never to make mountains out of molehills or tempests in teapots. Any sort of emotional upheaval had to be controlled, for there is a fatal correspondence between the spirit of man and the spirits of Nature, and any violent disturbance in the former causes some catastrophe in the latter.
"A man throwing a fit can make a river overflow, and a murder make lightning burn down the village. Perhaps that bus crash on the Avenida Arequipa this morning was caused by your punching that drunk yesterday. Doesn't your conscience trouble you?"
I was amazed at how much he knew about the tribe. And even more so as I realized what a torrent of fellow feeling this knowledge aroused in him. He talked of those Indians, of their customs and myths, of their surroundings and their gods, with the respect and admiration that were mine when I brought up the names of Sartre, Malraux, and Faulkner, my favorite authors that year. I never heard him speak with such emotion even of Kafka, whom he revered, as he did of that tribe of Indians.
I must have suspected even then that Saúl would never be a lawyer, and I suspected also that his interest in the Amazonian Indians was something more than "ethnological." Not a professional, technical interest, but something much more personal, though hard to pin down. Surely more emotional than rational, an act of love rather than intellectual curiosity or the appetite for adventure that seemed to lurk in the choice of career made by so many of his fellow students in the Department of Ethnology. Saúl's attitude toward this new calling, the devotion he manifested for the world of the Amazon, were frequently the subject of conjecture on the campus of the San Marcos Faculty of Letters.
Was Don Salomón aware that Saúl was studying ethnology, or did he think he was concentrating on his law studies? The fact was that, even though Mascarita was still enrolled in the Faculty of Law, he never went to class. With the exception of Kafka, and The Metamorphosis in particular, which he had read countless times and virtually knew by heart, all his reading was now in the field of anthropology. I remember his consternation at how little had been written about the tribes and his complaints about how difficult it was to trace down material scattered in various monographs and journals that did not always reach San Marcos or the National Library.
It had all begun, he told me once, with a trip to Quillabamba during the national holidays. He had gone there at the invitation of a relative, a first cousin of his mother's and an uncle of his, who had emigrated from Piura to that region, had a small farm, and also dealt in timber. The man would go deep into the jungle in search of mahogany and rosewood, hiring Indians to clear trails and cut down trees. Mascarita had gotten on well with the Indians—most of them pretty well Westernized—and they had taken him with them on their expeditions and welcomed him in their camps up and down the vast region irrigated by the Alto Urubamba and the Alto Madre de Dios and their respective tributaries. He spent an entire night enthusiastically telling me what it was like to ride a raft hurtling through the Pongo de Mainique, where the Urubamba, squeezed between two foothills of the Cordillera, became a labyrinth of rapids and whirlpools.
"Some of the porters are so terrified they have to be tied to the rafts, the way they do with cows, to get them through the gorge. You can't imagine what it's like, pal!"
A Spanish missionary from the Dominican mission in Quillabamba had shown him mysterious petroglyphs scattered throughout the area; Saúl had eaten monkey, turtle, and grubs and gotten incredibly soused on cassava masato.
"The natives of the region believe the world began in the Pongo de Mainique. And I swear to you there's a sacred aura about the place, something indefinable that makes your hair stand on end. You can't imagine what it's like, pal. Really far out!"
This experience had consequences that no one could have envisaged. Not even Saúl himself, of that I'm sure.
He went back to Quillabamba for Christmas and spent the long year-end vacation there. He returned during the July vacation between terms and again the following December. Every time there was a break at San Marcos, even for only a few days, he'd head for the jungle in anything he could find: trucks, trains, jitneys, buses. He came back from these trips full of enthusiasm and eager to talk, his eyes bright with amazement at the treasures he'd discovered. Everything that came from there interested and excited him tremendously. Meeting the legendary Fidel Pereira, for instance. The son of a white man from Cusco and a Machiguenga woman, he was a mixture of feudal lord and aboriginal cacique. In the last third of the nineteenth century a man from a good Cusco family, fleeing from the law, went deep into those forests, where the Machiguengas had sheltered him. He had married a woman of the tribe. His son, Fidel, lived astride the two cultures, acting like a white when with whites and like a Machiguenga when with Machiguengas. He had several lawfully wedded wives, any number of concubines, and a constellation of sons and daughters, thanks to whom he ran all the coffee plantations and farms between Quillabamba and the Pongo de Mainique, putting the whole tribe to work and paying them next to nothing. But, in spite of that, Mascarita felt a certain liking for him:
"He uses them, of course. But at least he doesn't despise them. He knows all about their culture and is proud of it. And when other people try to trample on them, he protects them."
In the stories he told me, Saúl's enthusiasm made the most trivial happening—clearing a patch of forest or fishing for gamitana—take on heroic dimensions. But, above all, it was the world of the Indians with their primitive practices and their frugal life, their animism and their magic, that seemed to have bewitched him. I now know that those Indians, whose language he had begun to learn with the help of native pupils in the Dominican mission of Quillabamba—he once sang me a sad, repetitive, incomprehensible song, shaking a seed-filled gourd to mark the rhythm—were the Machiguengas. I now know that he had made the posters with their little drawings showing the dangers of fishing with dynamite that I had seen piled up in his house in Bre?a, to distribute to the whites and mestizos of the Alto Urubamba—the children, grandchildren, nephews, bastards, and stepsons of Fidel Pereira—in the hope of protecting the species of fish that fed those same Indians who, a quarter of a century later, would be photographed by the now deceased Gabriele Malfatti.
With hindsight, knowing what happened to him later—I have thought about this a lot—I can say that Saúl experienced a conversion. In a cultural sense and perhaps in a religious one also. It is the only concrete case I have had occasion to observe from close at hand that has seemed to give meaning to, to make real, what the priests at the school where I studied tried to convey to us during catechism through phrases such as "receiving grace," "being touched by grace," "falling into the snares of grace." From his first contact with the Amazon jungle, Mascarita was caught in a spiritual trap that made a different person of him. Not just because he lost all interest in law and began working for a degree in ethnology, or because of the new direction his reading took, leaving precisely one surviving literary character, Gregor Samsa, but because from that moment on he began to be preoccupied, obsessed, by two concerns which in the years to come would be his only subjects of conversation: the plight of Amazonian cultures and the death throes of the forests that sheltered them.
"You have a one-track mind these days, Mascarita. A person can't talk with you about anything else lately."
"Pucha! That's true, old buddy. I haven't let you get a word in edgewise. How about a little lecture, if you're so inclined, on Tolstoy, class war, novels of chivalry?"
"Aren't you exaggerating a little, Saúl?"
"No, pal. As a matter of fact, I'm understating. I swear. What's being done in the Amazon is a crime. There's no justification for it, whatever way you look at it. Believe me, man, it's no laughing matter. Put yourself in their place, if only for a second. Where do they have left to go? They've been driven out of their lands for centuries, pushed farther into the interior each time, farther and farther. The extraordinary thing is that, despite so many disasters, they haven't disappeared. They're still there, surviving. Makes you want to take your hat off to them. Damn it all, there I go again! Come on, let's talk about Sartre. What gets my back up is that nobody gives a hoot in hell about what's happening to them."
Why did it matter to him so much? It certainly wasn't for political reasons, at any rate. Politics to Mascarita was the most uninteresting thing in the world. When we talked about politics I was aware that he was making an effort to please me, since at that time I had revolutionary enthusiasms and had taken to reading Marx and talking about the social relations of production. Such subjects bored Saúl as much as the rabbi's sermons did. Nor would it be accurate to say that these subjects interested him on the broad ethical grounds that the plight of the Indians in the jungle mirrored the social iniquities of our country, inasmuch as Saúl did not react in the same way to other injustices closer to home, which he may not even have noticed. The situation of the Andean Indians, for instance—and there were several million of them, instead of the few thousand in the Amazon jungle—or the way middle-and upper-class Peruvians paid and treated their servants.
No, it was only that specific expression of human lack of conscience, irresponsibility, and cruelty, to which the men, the trees, the animals, and the rivers of the jungle had fallen prey, that—for reasons I found hard to understand at the time, as perhaps he did, too—transformed Saúl Zuratas, erasing all other concerns from his mind and turning him into a man with a fixation. With the result that, if he had not been such a good person, so generous and helpful, I would very likely have stopped seeing him. For there was no doubt that he'd become a bore on the subject.
Occasionally, to see how far his obsession might lead him, I would provoke him. What did he suggest, when all was said and done? That, in order not to change the way of life and the beliefs of a handful of tribes still living, many of them, in the Stone Age, the rest of Peru abstain from developing the Amazon region? Should sixteen million Peruvians renounce the natural resources of three-quarters of their national territory so that seventy or eighty thousand Indians could quietly go on shooting at each other with bows and arrows, shrinking heads and worshipping boa constrictors? Should we forgo the agricultural, cattle-raising, and commercial potential of the region so that the world's ethnologists could enjoy studying at first hand kinship ties, potlatches, the rites of puberty, marriage, and death that these human oddities had been practicing, virtually unchanged, for hundreds of years? No, Mascarita, the country had to move forward. Hadn't Marx said that progress would come dripping blood? Sad though it was, it had to be accepted. We had no alternative. If the price to be paid for development and industrialization for the sixteen million Peruvians meant that those few thousand naked Indians would have to cut their hair, wash off their tattoos, and become mestizos—or, to use the ethnologists' most detested word, become acculturated—well, there was no way round it.
Mascarita didn't get angry with me, because he never got angry with anyone about anything, nor did he put on a superior I-forgive-you-for-you-know-not-what-you-say air. But I could feel that when I provoked him in this way I was hurting him as much as if I'd run down Don Salomón Zuratas. He hid it perfectly, I admit. Perhaps he had already achieved the Machiguenga ideal of never feeling anger so that the parallel lines that uphold the earth would not give way. Moreover, he would never discuss this subject, or any other, in a general way, in ideological terms. He had a built-in resistance to any sort of abstract pronouncement. Problems always presented themselves to him in concrete form: what he'd seen with his own eyes, and the consequences that anyone with an ounce of brains in his head could infer from it.
"Fishing with explosives, for example. People assume it's forbidden. But go have a look, pal. There isn't a river or a stream where the mountain people and the Viracochas—that's what they call us white people—don't save time by fishing wholesale with dynamite. Save time! Can you imagine what that means? Charges of dynamite blowing up schools of fish day and night. Whole species are disappearing, old man."
We were talking at a table in the Bar Palermo in La Colmena, drinking beer. Outside, the sun was shining, people hurried past, jalopies honked aggressively, and inside we were surrounded by the smoky atmosphere, smelling of frying oil and urine, typical of all the little cafés in downtown Lima.
"How about fishing with poison, Mascarita? Wasn't that invented by the tribal Indians? That makes them despoilers of the Amazon basin, too."
I said that so he'd fire his heavy artillery at me. And he did, of course. It was untrue, totally untrue. They did fish with barbasco and cumo, but only in the side channels and backwaters of the rivers, or in water holes that remained on islands after the floodwaters had receded. And only at certain times of year. Never in the spawning season, the signs of which they knew by heart. At those times they fished with nets, harpoons, or traps, or with their bare hands. You'd be goggle-eyed if you saw them, pal. On the other hand, the Creoles used barbasco and cumo all year round, and everywhere. Water poisoned thousands of times, decade after decade. Did I realize? Not only did they kill off all the fry at spawning time, but they were rotting the roots of trees and plants along the riverbanks as well.
Did he idealize them? I'm sure he did. And also, perhaps without meaning to, he exaggerated the extent of the disasters so as to reinforce his arguments. But it was evident that for Mascarita all those shad and catfish poisoned by barbasco and cumo, all the paiche destroyed by the fishers of Loreto, Madre de Dios, San Martín, or Amazonas, hurt him neither more nor less than if the victim had been his talking parrot. And, of course, it was the same when he spoke of the extensive tree felling done by order of the timber men—"My uncle Hipólito is one of them, I'm sorry to say"—who were cutting down the most valuable trees. He spoke to me at length of the practices of the Viracochas and the mountain people who had come down from the Andes to conquer the jungle and clear the woods with fires that burn over enormous areas of land, which after one or two crops become barren because of the lack of humus and the erosion caused by rain. Not to mention, pal, the extermination of animals, the frantic greed for hides and skins which, for example, had made of jaguars, lizards, pumas, snakes, and dozens of other species biological rarities on the point of vanishing. It was a long speech that I remember very well on account of something that cropped up at the end of the conversation, after we had polished off several bottles of beer and some cracklings (which he was extremely fond of). From the trees and the fish his peroration always circled back to the main reason for his anxiety: the tribes. At this rate they, too, would die out.
"Seriously, Mascarita, do you think polygamy, animism, head shrinking, and witch doctoring with tobacco brews represent a superior form of culture?"
An Andean boy was throwing bucketfuls of sawdust on the spittle and other filth lying on the red tile floor of the Bar Palermo as a half-breed followed behind him, sweeping up. Saúl looked at me for a long while without answering.
At last he shook his head. "Superior, no. I've never said or thought so, little brother." He was very serious now. "Inferior, perhaps, if the question is posed in terms of infant mortality, the status of women, polygamy or monogamy, handcrafts or industry. Don't think I idealize them. Not in the least."
He fell silent, as though distracted by something, perhaps the quarrel at a neighboring table that had flared up and died down rhythmically since we first sat down. But it wasn't that. Memory had distracted him. Suddenly he seemed sad. "Among the men who walk and those of other tribes there are many things that would shock you very much, old man. I don't deny that."
The fact, for instance, that the Aguarunas and the Huambisas of the Alto Mara?ón tear out their daughters' hymen at her menarche and eat it, that slavery exists in many tribes, and in some communities they let the old people die at the first signs of weakness, on the pretext that their souls have been called away and their destiny fulfilled. But the worst thing of all, the hardest to accept, perhaps, from our point of view, is what, with a little black humor, could be called the perfectionism of the tribes of the Arawak family. Perfectionism, Saúl? Yes, something that from the outset would appear as cruel to me as it had to him, old buddy. That babies born with physical defects, lame, maimed, blind, with more or fewer fingers than usual, or a harelip, were killed by their own mothers, who threw them in the river or buried them alive. Anybody would naturally be shocked by such customs.
He looked at me for a good while, silent and thoughtful, as if searching for the right words for what he wanted to say to me.
Suddenly he touched his enormous birthmark. "I wouldn't have passed the test, pal. They'd have liquidated me," he whispered. "They say the Spartans did the same thing, right? That little monsters, Gregor Samsas, were hurled down from the top of Mount Taygetus, right?"
He laughed, I laughed, but we both knew that he wasn't joking and that there was no cause for laughter. He explained to me that, curiously enough, though they were pitiless when it came to babies born defective, they were very tolerant with all those, children or adults, who were victims of some accident or illness that damaged them physically. Saúl, at least, had noticed no hostility toward the disabled or the demented in the tribes. His hand was still on the deep purple scab of his half-face.
"But that's the way they are and we should respect them. Being that way has helped them to live in harmony with their forests for hundreds of years. Though we don't understand their beliefs and some of their customs offend us, we have no right to kill them off."
I believe that that morning in the Bar Palermo was the only time he ever alluded, not jokingly but seriously, even dramatically, to what was undoubtedly a tragedy in his life, even though he concealed it with such style and grace: the excrescence that made him a walking incitement to mockery and disgust, and must have affected all his relationships, especially with women. (He was extremely shy with them; I had noticed at San Marcos that he avoided them and only entered into conversation with one of our women classmates if she spoke to him first.) At last he removed his hand from his face with a gesture of annoyance, as though regretting that he had touched the birthmark, and launched into another lecture.
"Do our cars, guns, planes, and Coca-Colas give us the right to exterminate them because they don't have such things? Or do you believe in 'civilizing the savages,' pal? How? By making soldiers of them? By putting them to work on the farms as slaves to Creoles like Fidel Pereira? By forcing them to change their language, their religion, and their customs, the way the missionaries are trying to do? What's to be gained by that? Being able to exploit them more easily, that's all. Making them zombies and caricatures of men, like those semi-acculturated Indians you see in Lima."
The Andean boy throwing bucketfuls of sawdust on the floor in the Palermo had on the sort of sandals—a sole and two cross-strips cut from an old rubber tire—made and sold by peddlers, and a pair of patched pants held up with a length of rope round his waist. He was a child with the face of an old man, coarse hair, blackened nails, and a reddish scab on his nose. A zombie? A caricature? Would it have been better for him to have stayed in his Andean village, wearing a wool cap with earflaps, leather sandals, and a poncho, never learning Spanish? I didn't know, and I still don't. But Mascarita knew. He spoke without vehemence, without anger, with quiet determination. He explained to me at great length what counterbalanced their cruelty (the price they pay for survival, as he put it): a view of Nature that struck him as an admirable trait in those cultures. It was something that the tribes, despite the many differences between them, all had in common: their understanding of the world in which they were immersed, the wisdom born of long practice which had allowed them, through an elaborate system of rites, taboos, fears, and routines, perpetuated and passed on from father to son, to preserve that Nature, seemingly so superabundant, but actually so vulnerable, upon which they depended for subsistence. These tribes had survived because their habits and customs had docilely followed the rhythms and requirements of the natural world, without doing it violence or disturbing it deeply, just the minimum necessary so as not to be destroyed by it. The very opposite of what we civilized people were doing, wasting those elements 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.
"I 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.
"That 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.
"Okay, 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."
"Poor jungle tribes! You're using them for a crying towel. You're taking advantage of them, too, you know."
"Well, 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.
"Young 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 culture, and of butchering Spanish prose (which, let it be said in passing, he himself wrote beautifully).
"Well 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 Saúl 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:
"You 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?"
"As 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. "What in the world got into the boy?"
I was there in the room where they were talking, taking notes on the myths of El Dorado and the Seven Cities of Cibola as set down by the chroniclers of the Discovery and the Conquest, and I put my oar in to say that the reason for Saúl's refusal was Don Salomón and his not wanting to leave him all by himself.
"Yes, that's the reason Zuratas gives, and I wish it were true," Matos Mar said, with a skeptical wave of his hand. "But I'm afraid there's something far deeper than that. Saúl's starting to have doubts about research and fieldwork. Ethical doubts."
Porras Barrenechea thrust his chin out and his little eyes had the sly expression they always had when he was about to make a nasty remark.
"Well, if Zuratas has realized that ethnology is a pseudoscience invented by gringos to destroy the Humanities, he's more intelligent than one might have expected."
But this did not raise a smile from Matos Mar.
"I'm serious, Dr. Porras. It's a pity, because the boy has outstanding qualities. He's intelligent, perceptive, a fine researcher, a hard worker. And yet he's taken it into his head, can you believe it, that the work we're doing is immoral."
"Immoral? Well, when it comes right down to it, who can tell what you're up to there among the good old chunchos, under cover of prying into their customs?" Porras laughed. "I myself wouldn't swear to the virtue of ethnologists."
"He's convinced that we're attacking them, doing violence to their culture," Matos Mar went on, paying no attention to him. "That with our tape recorders and ball-point pens we're the worm that works its way into the fruit and rots it."
He then recounted how, a few days before, there had been a meeting in the Department of Ethnology, at which Saúl Zuratas had flabbergasted everyone, proclaiming that the consequences of the ethnologists' work were similar to those of the activities of the rubber tappers, the timber cutters, the army recruiters, and other mestizos and whites who were decimating the tribes.
"He maintained that we've taken up where the colonial missionaries left off. That we, in the name of science, like them in the name of evangelization, are the spearhead of the effort to wipe out the Indians."
"Is he reviving the fanatical Indigenista movement to save Indian cultures that swept over the campus of San Marcos in the thirties?" Porras sighed. "I wouldn't be surprised. It comes in waves, like flu epidemics. I can already see Zuratas penning pamphlets against Pizarro, the Spanish Conquest, and the crimes of the Inquisition. No, I don't want him in the History Department! Let him accept the fellowship, take out French citizenship, and make his name furthering the Black Legend!"
I didn't pay much attention to what I heard Matos Mar say that afternoon amid the dusty shelves covered with books and busts of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, in Porras Barrenechea's Miraflor house in the Calle Colina. And I don't think I mentioned it to Saúl. But today, here in Firenze, as I remember and jot down notes, this episode takes on considerable meaning in retrospect. That fellow feeling, that solidarity, that spell, or whatever it may have been, had by then reached a climax and assumed a different nature. In the eyes of the ethnologists—about whom the least that could be said was that, however shortsighted they might be, they were perfectly aware of the need to understand the jungle Indians' way of seeing in their own terms—what was it that Mascarita was defending? Was it something as chimerical as the recognition of their inalienable right to their lands, whereupon the rest of Peru would agree to place the jungle under quarantine? Must no one, ever, have the right to enter it, so as to keep those cultures from being contaminated by the miasmas of our own degenerated one? Had Saúl's purism concerning the Amazon reached such extremes?
The fact was that we saw very little of each other during our last months at San Marcos. I was all wrapped up in writing my thesis, and he had virtually given up his law studies. I met him very infrequently, on the rare occasions when he put in an appearance at the Department of Literature, in those days next door to the Department of Ethnology. We would have a cup of coffee, or smoke a cigarette together while talking under the yellowing palms outside the main building on campus. As we grew to adulthood and became involved in different activities and projects, our friendship, quite close in the first years, evolved into a sporadic and superficial relationship. I asked him questions about his travels, for he was always just back from or just about to set out for the jungle, and I associated this—until Matos Mar's remarks to Dr. Porras—with his work at the university or his increasing specialization in Amazonian cultures. But, except for our last conversation—that of our taking leave of each other, and his diatribe against the Institute of Linguistics and the Schneils—I think it is true to say that in those last months we never again had those endless dialogues, with both of us speaking our minds freely and frankly, that had been so frequent between 1953 and 1956.
If we had kept them up, would he have opened his heart to me and allowed me to glimpse what his intentions were? Most likely not. The sort of decision arrived at by saints and madmen is not revealed to others. It is forged little by little, in the folds of the spirit, tangential to reason, shielded from indiscreet eyes, not seeking the approval of others—who would never grant it—until it is at last put into practice. I imagine that in the process—the conceiving of a project and its ripening into action—the saint, the visionary, or the madman isolates himself more and more, walling himself up in solitude, safe from the intrusion of others. I for my part never even suspected that Mascarita, during the last months of our life at San Marcos—we were both adults by then—could be going through such an inner upheaval. That he was more withdrawn than other mortals or, more probably, became more reserved on leaving adolescence behind, I had indeed noticed. But I put it down entirely to his face, interposing its terrible ugliness between himself and the world, making his relationship with others difficult. Was he still the laughing, likable, easygoing person of previous years? He had become more serious and laconic, less open than before, it seems to me. But there I don't quite trust my memory. Perhaps he went on being the same smiling, talkative Mascarita whom I knew in 1953, and my imagination has changed him so as to make him conform more closely to the other one, the one of future years whom I did not know, whom I must invent, since I have given in to the cursed temptation of writing about him.
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.