The Storyteller by Mario Vargas Llosa Page B

disguised as a man. He’d been one for a time, perhaps, before. But now he’s just the same as any of the Machiguengas of Shivankoreni who won’t let him come near. His misfortune began that time when he had the evil. He was so thin and so weak he couldn’t get up from his mat. Nor could he speak. He opened his mouth and his voice didn’t come out. I must be turning into a fish, he thought. But he could see and hear what was happening around him, in the other huts of Shivankoreni. He was deeply alarmed when he saw that everyone was taking off the bracelets and the ornaments they were wearing on their wrists, arms, and ankles. He could hear them saying: “He’s going to die soon, but his spirit will pull out his veins, and while we’re asleep he’ll tie us down with them at the places on our bodies where we wore ornaments.” He tried to reassure them, to tell them that he’d never do that to them, and, what was more, that he wasn’t dying. But his voice wouldn’t come out. And that was when he spied him, out in the pouring rain. He roamed all about the village, harmless enough, or so he made it appear. A youngster in an earth-colored cushma, amusing himself playing with datura seeds and imitating the hovering wings of a hummingbird with his hands. It never occurred to Tasurinchi that he could be a little devil, so he wasn’t worried when his family set out for the lake to fish. Then, once he saw he was alone, the kasibarenini changed himself into an ant and entered Tasurinchi’s body by way of the little opening inside the nose through which tobacco juice is sniffed. There and then he felt cured of the evil, there and then his strength came back, and the flesh on his bones. Yet at the same time he felt an irresistible urge to do what he did next. Just like that, running, howling, beating his chest like a monkey, he started burning down the huts of Shivankoreni. He says it wasn’t him but the little devil who set fire to the straw and ran from one place to the other with burning candles, roaring and leaping for joy. Tasurinchi remembers how the parrots squawked and how he choked in the clouds of smoke as before him, behind him, to the right, to the left, everything went up in flames. If the others hadn’t arrived on the scene, Shivankoreni would no longer exist. He says that as soon as he saw people come running he regretted what he had done. He had to run away in terror, saying to himself: “What’s happening to me?” They wanted to kill him, chasing after him screaming: “Devil, devil!”
    But, according to Tasurinchi, all this is an old story. The little devil that made him set fire to Shivankoreni was sucked out of him by a seripigari of Koribeni: he drew it out through his armpit, and then he vomited it up. Tasurinchi saw it: it had the form of a little white bone. He says that since then he’s become just like me, or any of you, again. “Why do you think they won’t let me live in Shivankoreni?” he asked me. “Because they don’t trust you,” I explained to him. “They all remember that day you cured yourself and then went and burned down their houses. And what’s more, they know you’ve been living over there on the other side of the Gran Pongo, among the Viracochas.” Because Tasurinchi doesn’t wear a cushma, but a shirt and trousers. “There among them, I felt like an orphan,” he told me. “I dreamed of returning to Shivankoreni. And now that I’m here, my kinfolk make me feel like an orphan, too. Will I always live alone like this, without a family? The one thing I want is a woman to roast cassavas and bear children.”
    I stayed with him for three moons. He’s a close-mouthed, moody man who sometimes talks to himself. Someone who’s lived with a kasibarenini devil inside his body can’t ever be the same as he was before, perhaps. “Your coming to