Read Online The Storyteller by Mario Vargas Llosa - Free Book Online Page A

Chirumbia, but they hadn’t come this way, downstream. The first one to cross the Gran Pongo went to the river Timpía, knowing that there were men who walk there. He’d learned how to speak. He spoke, it seems. You could understand what he meant. He asked lots of questions. He stayed on there. They helped him to burn off the land, put his house up, clear a field. He came and went. He brought food, fishhooks, machetes. The men who walk got on well with him. They seemed happy. The sun was in its place, peaceful. But on returning from one of his journeys the White Father had changed his soul, even though his face was the same. He’d become a kamagahni and brought evil. But nobody noticed, and because of that, nobody started walking. They’d lost wisdom, perhaps. That, anyway, is what I have learned.
    The White Father was lying on his straw mat and they could see him making faces. Achoo! Achoo! When they came to ask him “What’s the matter? Why are you puckering your face up like that? What’s that noise?” he answered, “It’s nothing, it’ll soon be over.” Evil had entered everyone’s soul. Children, women, old men. And also, so they say, macaws, cashew birds, little mountain pigs, partridges, all the animals they had. They, too: Achoo! Achoo! At first they laughed, thinking it was some sort of playful trance. They beat their chests and pushed each other in fun. And screwing up their faces: Achoo! Snot ran out their noses, spittle out their mouths. They spat and laughed. But they could no longer start walking. The time had passed. Their souls, broken in pieces, had begun leaving their bodies through the tops of their heads. All they could do was resign themselves to what was going to happen.
    They felt as though a fire had been lighted inside their bodies. They were burning up, they were aflame. They bathed in the river, but instead of putting out the fire, the water made it worse. Then they felt a terrible chill, as though they’d been in a downpour all night. Though the sun was there, looking with its yellow eye, they shivered, frightened, dizzy, as in a trance or a drunken stupor, not seeing what they saw, not recognizing what they knew. Raging, sensing that the evil was deep within them, like a chigger under the nail. They had not heeded the warning, they had not started walking at the first achoo! from the White Father. Even the lice died, it seems. The ants, the beetles, the spiders that went near there died, they say. Nobody, ever, has gone back to live in that place by the river Timpía. Though no one really knows where it is now, because the forest grew over it again. It’s best not to go anywhere near it, to go around it, avoiding it altogether. You can recognize it by a white mist that stinks and a piercing whistle. Do the souls of those who go like that come back? Who knows? Maybe they come back, or maybe they keep floating on the Kamabiría, the watery way of the dead.
    I am well, walking. Now I am well. The evil was in me a while ago and I thought the time had come for me to put up my shelter of branches on the riverbank. I had set out to visit Tasurinchi, the blind one who lives by the river Cashiriari. Suddenly everything started streaming out of me as I walked. I didn’t realize it till I saw my dirtied legs. What evil is this? What has entered my body? I went on walking, but I still had a long way to go to reach the Cashiriari. When I sat down to rest, the shivers came over me. I wondered what I could do, and casting my eyes all round, I finally saw a datura tree and tore off all the leaves I could reach. I made a brew and sprinkled it on my body. I warmed the water in the pot again. I heated the stone the seripigari had given me till it was red-hot and put it in. I breathed the steam from it till sleep came over me. I was like that for many moons, who knows how many, lying on my straw mat without the strength to walk, without even