The Storyteller by Mario Vargas Llosa Page A

walking. How could they have allowed themselves to be taken in by the tricks of their immemorial enemy? How could they have betrayed the sun for Kashiri, the moon? By changing their way of life they had upset the order of the world, disoriented the souls of those who had gone. In the darkness they were living in, the souls were unable to recognize them, didn’t know whether or not they were the right ones. That’s why the misfortunes occurred, perhaps. The spirits of those who went and came back, confused by the change, went away again. They wandered in the forest, orphaned, moaning in the wind. The kamagarini got inside bodies that had been abandoned, that had lost the support of their souls, and corrupted them; that was why they sprouted feathers, scales, claws, snouts, spurs. But there was still time. Degeneration and impurity had been brought upon them by a devil living among them, dressed as a man. They went out to hunt him down, determined to kill him. But the kamagarini had fled to the depths of the forest. At last they understood. Ashamed, they went back to doing as they had done before, until the world, life, became what they really were and should be. Sorrowful, repenting, they started walking. Shouldn’t each one do what he was meant to do? Was it not their task to walk, helping the sun to rise? They fulfilled their obligation, perhaps. Are we fulfilling ours? Are we walking? Are we living?
    Among all the many different kamagarinis that Kientibakori breathed out, the worst little devil is the kasibarenini, it seems. Small as a child, if he turns up somewhere in his earth-colored cushma, it’s because there’s somebody sick there. He’s out to take possession of his soul so as to make him do cruel things. That’s why sick people should never be left alone, not for a single moment. The slightest inattention and the kasibarenini has things his way. Tasurinchi says that’s what happened to him. The one who’s living by the river Camisea now. Tasurinchi. According to him, a kasibarenini was to blame for what happened over there in Shivankoreni, where everybody’s still furious, remembering. I went to see him on the little beach along the Camisea where he’d put up his hut. He was alarmed when he caught sight of me. He grabbed his shotgun. “Have you come to kill me?” he said. “Watch out, look here at what I have in my hand.” He wasn’t angry, just sad. “I’ve just come to visit you,” I soothed him. “And to talk to you if you care to listen. If you’d rather I went away, I’ll go.” “How could I not want you to talk to me?” he replied, unrolling two straw mats. “Come, come. Eat all my food, take all my cassavas. Everything is yours.” He complained bitterly because they wouldn’t let him go back to Shivankoreni. If he even goes near the place, his former kinfolk come out to meet him with stones and arrows, screaming at him: “Devil, cursed devil!”
    Worse still, they’ve asked a bad sorcerer, a machikanari, to bring evil on him. Tasurinchi caught him trying to hide in his house to steal a lock of his hair or something belonging to him, so as to be able to make him fall sick and die a horrible death. He could have killed the machikanari, but all he did was make him run away by shooting his gun off in the air. According to him, this proves his soul is pure again. “It’s not right that they should hate me so,” he says. He told me he’d gone to visit Tasurinchi, upriver, to bring him food and presents. Offering to clear a new field for him in the forest, he asked him to give him any one of his daughters as a wife. Tasurinchi insulted him: “Nit, shit, traitor, how dare you come round here? I’m going to kill you right now.” And he’d gone after him with a machete.
    Tearfully, he lamented his fate. He said it wasn’t true that he was a kasibarenini devil