The Storyteller by Mario Vargas Llosa

visit me is the beginning of a change, perhaps,” he said to me. “Do you think the men who walk will let me walk with them soon?” “Who knows?” I answered. “There’s nothing sadder than to feel that one is somebody who’s no longer a man,” he said as we parted. As I walked along the Camisea I spied him in the distance. He had climbed up a hillock and his eyes were following me. I could remember his surly, forlorn face, though I could no longer see it.
    That, anyway, is what I have learned.

 
    I first became acquainted with the Amazon jungle halfway through 1958, thanks to my friend Rosita Corpancho. Her function at the University of San Marcos was vague; her power unlimited. She prowled among the professors without being one of them, and they all did whatever she asked; thanks to her wiles, doors of officialdom stuck shut were opened and paths of bureaucracy smoothed.
    â€œThere’s a place available for someone on an expedition to the Alto Marañón that’s been organized by the Institute of Linguistics for a Mexican anthropologist,” she said to me one day when I ran into her on the campus of the Faculty of Letters. “Would you like to go?”
    I had finally managed to obtain the fellowship to Europe I’d coveted and was to leave for Spain the following month. But I accepted without a moment’s hesitation.
    Rosita is from Loreto, and if you listen carefully you can still catch in her voice an echo of the delightful singsong accent of eastern Peru. She protected and promoted—as no doubt she still does—the Summer Institute of Linguistics, an organization which, in the forty years of its existence in Peru, has been the object of virulent controversy. I understand that as I write these lines it is packing its bags to leave the country. Not because it has been expelled (though this was on the verge of happening during General Velasco’s dictatorship), but on its own initiative, since it considers that it has fulfilled the mission that brought it to Yarinacocha, its base of operations on the banks of the Ucayali, some ten kilometers from Pucallpa, from which it has spread into nearly all the remote folds and corners of Amazonia.
    What exactly is the purpose of the Institute? According to its enemies, it is a tentacle of American imperialism which, under cover of doing scientific research, has been engaged in gathering intelligence and has taken the first steps toward a neocolonialist penetration of the cultures of the Amazonian Indians. These accusations stem, first and foremost, from the Left. But certain sectors of the Catholic Church—mainly the jungle missionaries—are also hostile to it and accuse it of being nothing more than a phalanx of Protestant evangelists passing themselves off as linguists. Among the anthropologists, there are those who criticize it for perverting the aboriginal cultures, attempting to Westernize them and draw them into a mercantile economy. A number of conservatives disapprove of the presence of the Institute in Peru for nationalist and Hispanist reasons. Among these latter was my professor and academic adviser back in those days, the historian Porras Barrenechea, who, when he heard that I was going on that expedition, solemnly cautioned me: “Be careful. Those gringos will try to buy you.” He couldn’t bear the thought that, because of the Institute, the jungle Indians would probably learn to speak English before they did Spanish.
    Friends of the Institute, such as Rosita Corpancho, defended it on pragmatic grounds. The work of the linguists—studying the languages and dialects of Amazonia, compiling lexicons and grammars of the various tribes—served the country, and besides, it was supervised, in theory at least, by the Ministry of Education, which had to approve of all its projects and received copies of all the material it collected. As long as that same Ministry or Peruvian