The Storyteller by Mario Vargas Llosa Read Free Book Online

dead, flowing. Seeming to come closer, seeming to call to them. Start walking? “Yes,” said the seripigari, falling into a tobacco trance. “Walk, keep walking. And remember this. The day you stop walking, you will disappear completely. Dragging the sun down with you.”
    That’s how it started. Moving, walking. Keeping on, with or without rain, by land or by water, climbing up the mountain slopes or climbing down the ravines. Amid forests so dense that it was night in the daytime, and plains so bare they looked like pampas, without a single bush, like the head of a man that a little kamagarini devil has left completely bald. “The sun hasn’t fallen yet,” Tasurinchi encouraged them. “It trips and gets up again. Watch your step, it’s dozed off. We must wake it up, we must help it. We have suffered evil and death, but we keep on walking. Would all the sparks in the sky be enough to count the moons that have passed? No. We are alive. We are moving.”
    So as to live walking, they had to travel light, stripping themselves of everything that was theirs. Dwellings, animals, seed, the abundance all round them. The little beach where they used to flip salty-fleshed turtles over on their backs, the forest bubbling with singing birds. They kept what was essential and started walking. Was their march through the forest a punishment? No, a celebration, rather, like going fishing or hunting in the dry season. They kept their bows and arrows, their horns full of poison, their hollow canes of annatto dye, their knives, their drums, the cushmas they were wearing, the pouches, and the strips of cloth to carry the children. The newborn were born walking, the old died walking. When the morning light dawned, the undergrowth was already rustling as they passed; they were already walking, walking, in single file, the men with their weapons at the ready, the women carrying the baskets and trays, the eyes of each and all fixed on the sun. We haven’t lost our way yet. Our determination must have kept us pure. The sun hasn’t fallen once and for all; it hasn’t stopped falling yet. It goes and it comes back, like the souls of the fortunate. It heats the world. The people of the earth haven’t fallen, either. Here we are. I in the middle, you all around me. I talking, you listening. We live, we walk. That is happiness, it seems.
    But before, they had to sacrifice themselves for this world. Bear catastrophes, sufferings, evils that would have been the end of any other people.
    That time, the men who walk halted to rest. In the night the jaguar roared and the lord of thunder rolled his hoarse thunder. There were bad omens. Butterflies invaded the huts and the women had to flap straw mats at them to chase them away from the trays of food. They heard the owl and the chícua screech. What is going to happen? they said, alarmed. During the night the river rose so high that at dawn they found themselves surrounded by roiling waters carrying along logs, small trees, weeds, and corpses being smashed to bits as they crashed against the banks. They hastily felled trees, improvised rafts and canoes before the flood swallowed the desolate island the earth had become. They had to shove their craft into the muddy waters and start paddling. They paddled and paddled, and while some pushed on the poles others cried out, signaling on the right a dam approaching, on the left the mouth of a whirlpool, and over there, over there, a flick of the tail of the cunning yacumama, lying very still beneath the water, waiting for the right moment to overturn the canoe and swallow the paddlers. Deep in the forest, the lord of demons, Kientibakori, crazy with joy, drank masato and danced in the middle of a crowd of kamagarinis. Many went, drowned in the flood when a tree trunk, invisible beneath the floodwaters, split open a raft and families were swept away.
    Those didn’t come back. Their bodies, bloated and