The Storyteller

What would have become of us if we were the sort of people who never move! We’d have disappeared who knows where.

Luckily we’re always moving from one place to another.

is forged little by little, in the folds of the spirit, tangential to reason, shielded from indiscreet eyes, not seeking the approval of others — who would never grant it — until it is at last put into practice. I imagine that in the process — the conceiving of a project and its ripening into action — the saint, the visionary, or the madman isolates himself more and more, walling himself up in solitude, safe from the intrusion of others

The sort of decision arrived at by saints and madmen is not revealed to others.

He maintained that we’ve taken up where the colonial missionaries left off. That we, in the name of science, like them in the name of evangelization, are the spearhead of the effort to wipe out the Indians.

“Well, if Zuratas has realized that ethnology is a pseudoscience invented by gringos to destroy the Humanities, he’s more intelligent than one might have expected.”

Being able to exploit them more easily, that’s all. Making them zombies and caricatures of men, like those semi-acculturated Indians you see in Lima.”

At last he shook his head. “Superior, no. I’ve never said or thought so, little brother.” He was very serious now. “Inferior, perhaps, if the question is posed in terms of infant mortality, the status of women, polygamy or monogamy, handcrafts or industry. Don’t think I idealize them. Not in the least.”

Mascarita didn’t get angry with me, because he never got angry with anyone about anything, nor did he put on a superior I-forgive-you-for-you-know-not-what-you-say air. But I could feel that when I provoked him in this way I was hurting him as much as if I’d run down Don Salomón Zuratas. He hid it perfectly, I admit. Perhaps he had already achieved the Machiguenga ideal of never feeling anger so that the parallel lines that uphold the earth would not give way.

Not a professional, technical interest, but something much more personal, though hard to pin down