Free The Storyteller by Mario Vargas Llosa Page A

using her as a woman. It was the time when she ought to have been pure, with her hair cut short, not eating, not talking to anyone, her husband not touching her. Tasurinchi said he did not shame her for what had happened to her. But she was tormented by the fate that had befallen her. “I don’t deserve to be spoken to now,” she said. “I don’t even know whether I deserve to live.” She slowly walked down to the shore of the river just as night was falling, made her bed of branches, and plunged a chambira thorn into herself. “She was so sad I suspected she’d do that,” Tasurinchi, the blind one, told me. They wrapped her in two cushmas so the vultures wouldn’t peck at her, and instead of casting her adrift in a canoe on the river or burying her, they suspended her from a treetop. A wise thing to do, for her bones are licked by the sun’s rays morning and evening. Tasurinchi showed me where, and I was amazed. “That high! How did you get way up there?” “I may not be able to see, but you don’t need eyes to climb a tree, only legs and arms, and mine are still strong.”
    The other sister of the wife of Tasurinchi, the blind one by the Cashiriari, fell down a ravine coming back from the cassava patch. Tasurinchi had sent her to check the traps he puts around the farm, which the agoutis always fall into, he says. The morning went by and she didn’t come back. They went out to look for her and found her at the bottom of the ravine. She’d rolled down; perhaps she’d slipped, perhaps the ground gave way beneath her feet. But that surprised me. It’s not a deep ravine. Anyone could jump or roll to the bottom without killing himself. She died before, perhaps, and her empty body, without a soul, rolled down to the bottom of the ravine. Tasurinchi, the Cashiriari blind one, says: “We always thought that girl would go without any explanation.” She spent her life humming songs that nobody had ever heard. She had strange trances, she spoke of unknown places, and apparently animals would tell her secrets when there was nobody around to hear them. According to Tasurinchi, those are sure signs that someone will go soon. “Now that those two have gone, there’s more food to share around. Aren’t we lucky?” he joked.
    He has taught his littlest sons to hunt. He makes them practice all day long because of what might happen to him. He asked them to show me what they had learned. It’s quite true, they can already handle a bow and a knife, even the ones who are just beginning to walk. They’re good at making traps and fishing as well. “As you can see, they won’t run short of food,” Tasurinchi said to me. I like the spirit he shows. He’s a man who never loses heart. I stayed with him for several days, going with him to set out his fishhooks and lay his traps, and I helped him clear his field of weeds. He worked bent double, pulling them out as though his eyes could see. We also went to a lake where there are súngaro fish, but we didn’t catch anything. He never tired of listening to me. He made me repeat the same stories. “That way, once you’ve gone, I can tell myself all over again what you’re telling me now,” he said.
    â€œWhat a miserable life it must be for those who don’t have people who talk, as we do,” he mused. “Thanks to the things you tell us, it’s as though what happened before happens again, many times.” One of his daughters had fallen asleep as I spoke. He woke her with one shake, saying: “Listen, child! Don’t waste these stories. Know the wickedness of Kientibakori. Learn the evils his kamagarinis have done us and can still do us.”
    We now know many things about Kientibakori that those who came before didn’t know. We know he has many intestines, like inkiro the tadpole. We know he hates us Machiguengas. He has tried many