Free The Storyteller by Mario Vargas Llosa

He’s managing things so his blindness bothers him and his family as little as possible. His youngest son, who was crawling last time I came to visit him, has gone. A viper bit him in the leg. When they noticed, Tasurinchi prepared a brew and did what he could to save him, but a long time had gone by. He changed color, turned as black as huito dye, and went.
    But his mother and father had the joy of seeing him once again.
    This is how it came about.
    They went to the seripigari and told him they were very unhappy because of the child’s going. They said to him: “Find out what’s become of him, which of the worlds he’s in. And ask him to come visit us, even if it’s just one time.” That’s what the seripigari did. In the trance, his soul, guided by a saankarite, traveled to the river of pure souls, the Meshiareni. There he found the child. The saankarites had bathed him, he had grown, he had a house, and soon he would have a wife as well. Telling him how sad his mother and father still were, the seripigari persuaded him to come back to this earth to visit them one last time. He promised he would, and he did.
    Tasurinchi, the blind one, said that a young man dressed in a new cushma suddenly appeared in the house by the Cashiriari. They all recognized him even though he was no longer a child but a young man. Tasurinchi, the blind one, knew it was his son because of the pleasant odor he gave off. He sat down among them and tasted a mouthful of cassava and a few drops of masato. He told them about his journey, from the time his soul escaped from his body through the top of his head. It was dark, but he recognized the entrance to the cavern leading down to the river of dead souls. He cast himself into the Kamabiría and floated on the dense waters without sinking. He didn’t have to move his hands or his feet. The current, silvery as a spiderweb, bore him slowly along. Around him, other souls were also journeying on the Kamabiría, that wide river along whose banks rise cliffs steeper than those of the Gran Pongo, perhaps. At last he arrived at the place where the waters divide, dragging over their precipice of rapids and whirlpools those who descend to the Gamaironi to suffer. The current itself sorted the souls out. With relief, the son of Tasurinchi the blind one felt the waters bearing him away from the falls; he was happy, knowing that he would continue journeying along the Kamabiría with those who were going to rise, by way of the river Meshiareni, to the world above, the world of the sun, Inkite. He still had a long way to go to reach it. He had to make his way past the end of this world, the Ostiake, into which all rivers flow. It is a swampy region, full of monsters. Kashiri, the moon, sometimes goes there to plot his mischief.
    They waited till the sky was free of clouds and the stars were reflected brightly in the water. Then Tasurinchi’s son and his traveling companions could ascend the Meshiareni, which is a stairway of bright stars, to Inkite. The saankarites received them with a feast. He ate a sweet-tasting fruit that made him grow and they showed him the house where he would live. And now, on his return, they would have a wife waiting for him. He was happy, it seems, in the world above. He didn’t remember being bitten by the viper.
    â€œDon’t you miss anything on this earth?” his kinfolk asked him. Yes. Something. The bliss he felt when his mother suckled him. The blind one from the Cashiriari told me that, asking permission to do so, the youth went to his mother, opened her cushma, and very gently sucked her breasts, the way he used to as a newborn babe. Did her milk come? Who knows? But he was filled with bliss, perhaps. He said goodbye to them, pleased and satisfied.
    The two younger sisters of Tasurinchi’s wife have also gone. Punarunas who appeared round about the Cashiriari carried her off and kept her for many moons, making her cook and