The Storyteller by Mario Vargas Llosa

say. It wasn’t easy. You had to do more than run, you had to fly. Die, damn you! A bullet brought down the ones who tried to get away. One dead Machiguenga, damn you! “It’s no use trying to escape from the camps,” said Tasurinchi. “The Viracochas have their magic. Something is happening to us. We must have done something. The spirits protect them, and us they abandon. We are guilty of something. It’s better to stick a chambira thorn into yourself or drink cumo juice. Going like that, from a thorn or poison, of your own free will, there’s hope of coming back. Those who go from a rifle bullet don’t come back. They stay floating on the river Kamabiría, dead amid the dead, forever.” It seemed that men were going to disappear. But aren’t we fortunate? Here we are. Still walking, still happy. After that time they never went to collect salt on the Cerro again. It must still be there, very high up, its pure soul looking the sun in the face.
    That, anyway, is what I have learned.
    Tasurinchi, the one who lives at the bend in the river, the one who used to live by the lagoon where, at low water, in the dry season, so many turtles turn up half dead, is walking. I went and saw him. I blew my hunting horn from a long way off to let him know I was coming to visit him, and then when I was closer I let him know by shouting: “I’ve come! I’ve come!” My little parrot repeated: “I’ve come! I’ve come!” He didn’t turn up to greet me, so I thought he might have gone to live somewhere else and my journey there had been for nothing. No, his house was still there, alongside the bend in the river. I stood in front of it with my back turned, waiting for him to receive me. I had to wait a long time. He was down at the river, hollowing out a tree trunk to make himself a canoe.
    While I waited for him I watched his wife. Seated at her loom close by, she was dyeing strands of wild cotton with pounded palillo roots. She didn’t get up or look at me. She went on working as though I hadn’t arrived or were invisible. She was wearing more necklaces than the last time. “Do you wear that many necklaces so as to keep the little kamagarini devils away, or so that the machikanari witch can’t cast spells on you?” I asked her. But she didn’t answer and went on dyeing the strands of cotton as though she hadn’t heard me. She was also wearing many ornaments on her arms and ankles and on the shoulders and the front of her cushma. Her headdress was a rainbow of macaw, toucan, parrot, cashew bird, and pavita kanari feathers.
    At last Tasurinchi arrived. “I’m here,” I said to him. “Are you there?” “Here I am,” he answered, pleased to see me, and my parrot repeated: “I am, I am.” Then his wife rose to her feet and unrolled two mats for us to sit on. She brought a pot of freshly roasted cassava that she emptied out onto plantain leaves, and a little jar of masato. She, too, seemed pleased to see me. We went on talking till the next moon, without stopping.
    His wife was heavy with child and this time it would be born at the right time and wouldn’t be lost. A little god had told the seripigari so, in a trance. And he had told him that this time, if the child died before it was born, like the other times, it would be the woman’s fault and not a kamagarini’s. In that trance the seripigari found out many things. The other times the children were born dead because she’d swallowed a brew to make them die inside her and push them out before it was time. “Is that so?” I asked his wife. And she answered: “I don’t remember. Perhaps so. Who knows?” “Yes, it’s true,” Tasurinchi assured me. “I’ve warned her that if the child is born dead this time, I’ll kill her.” “If it’s born dead he’ll thrust a poisoned dart in me and