Hunter of Stories Read online

  The reason was straightforward: the Indians were ignorant.

  A century before, the scribe Juan de Betanzos, principal advisor of conquistador Francisco Pizarro, had revealed another, more powerful reason: Satan dictated what the Indians believed; that was why they did not share one religion and why they confused Good with Evil and had so many conflicting ideas.

  “The Devil sends them thousands of illusions and ruses,” he decreed.

  Barbaric Customs

  The British conquerors were cross-eyed with astonishment.

  They came from a civilized nation, where women were the property of their husbands and owed them obedience, as the Bible insists, but in America the world was upside down.

  They suspected the Iroquois women were libertines. Women had their own opinions and their own possessions. They had the right to divorce and could vote in community decisions. Husbands did not even have the right to punish the women that belonged to them.

  The white invaders could no longer sleep in peace, for the customs of the pagan savages might prove contagious.

  Mute

  Indigenous divinities were the first victims of the conquest of America.

  “Extirpation of idolatry” is what the victors called the war that condemned the gods to silence.

  Blind

  How did Europe view us in the sixteenth century?

  Through the eyes of Theodor de Bry.

  An artist from Liège who never set foot in America was the first European to draw the inhabitants of the New World.

  His engravings were a graphic version of the chronicles of the conquistadors.

  The images depicted a favorite dish of American savages: the flesh of Europeans, roasted over coals.

  Seated in a circle around red-hot grills, they devoured arms, legs, ribs, and bellies and then licked their fingers.

  Pardon the bother, but were those people hungering for human flesh really Indians?

  In de Bry’s engravings, all of them are bald.

  In America, not a single Indian was bald.

  The Monster of Buenos Aires

  This is how the French priest Louis Feuillée saw it, or imagined it, and that is what he called it.

  The monster was but one of the fearsome images that illustrated the account of his journey through South American lands, “kingdoms of Satan,” from 1707 to 1711.

  Deaf

  A few natives came out to meet the Spanish conquistadors who first set foot on the sands of Yucatán.

  According to Fray Toribio de Benavente, the Spaniards asked, in the language of Castile, “Where are we? What is this place called?”

  The natives answered, “Tectetán.”

  The Spaniards understood them to say, “Yucatán.”

  And ever since, that is what the peninsula has been called.

  But what the natives had said in their language was, “I don’t understand you.”

  The Mighty Zero

  Nearly two thousand years ago, the symbol for zero was engraved on stone stelae at Uaxactún and other Maya ceremonial centers.

  The Mayans had gone farther than the Babylonians and the Chinese in developing the key that unlocked a new era in the history of science.

  Thanks to the zero, these children of time, astronomical and mathematical sages, created precise solar calendars, becoming prophets able to predict eclipses and other marvels of nature.

  Danger

  Chocolate, ancient drink of the Indians of Mexico, provoked mistrust and even panic among the foreigners from Europe.

  Physician Juan de Cárdenas proved that chocolate caused flatulence and melancholy, and the foam impeded digestion and provoked “terrible sorrows in the heart.”

  It was also suspected of abetting sin. Bishop Bernardo de Salazar excommunicated the ladies who drank chocolate during mass.

  They did not give up the vice.

  The Passion According to Cochabamba

  When the child kissed his mother’s nipple, a gush of milk and honey burst forth, but the breast ran dry when the father tried to suck.

  And when mosquitos bit the father on his bald pate, the child caressed it, and from his scalp sprouted a rather handsome white hat of woven straw.

  And when there was no work at the carpentry shop and they had nothing to eat, the child turned his body’s excretions into empanadas of cheese and spiced chicken.

  And when the family crossed the desert, suffering great thirst with not a drop to drink, the child kicked a pebble and from the earth flowed a spring of clear waters.

  And when they reached fertile ground, he allowed the land to devour him, and down he sank and disappeared.

  And on the third day, from the depths of the earth he reappeared, and he knew everything, absolutely everything that had occurred in his absence.

  Thus it was in olden times, according to what I was told by truth-speaking women and men in the valley of Cochabamba.

  The Explanation

  Dominican friar Antonio de la Huerte wrote in 1547, regarding the strangeness of America: “One could say that on the day of Creation, the Lord’s hand trembled a little.”

  Mother Nature Teaches

  In the Amazon, mother nature gives classes in diversity.

  The indigenous peoples identify ten soil types, eighty plant varieties, forty-three ant species, and three-hundred-ten species of birds, all within one square kilometer.

  We Were Walking Forests

  Every day the world loses a forest, murdered while only a few centuries old and still growing.

  Barren deserts and uniform plantations spread far and wide, burying the world of green. Only a few peoples have been wise enough to keep up the language of plants that allows them to communicate with the fortress of the oak and the melancholies of the willow.

  The Ceiba

  In Cuba and other parts of the Americas the ceiba is a sacred tree, a tree of mystery. Lightning dares not touch it. Neither do hurricanes.

  Inhabited by gods, it germinates at the center of the world and sends up the immense trunk that sustains the sky.

  To cure the sky of its arrogance, every day the ceiba asks: “What feet would you stand on, if it were not for me?”

  The Aruera

  Warning to travelers: in the South American countryside, watch out for a tree called the aruera, from the indigenous ahué, meaning “evil tree.”

  A very touchy fellow is the aruera, who neither forgets nor forgives an affront.

  One should not, one must not, cut a branch or sleep under its leafy crown without asking permission. Above all, it is forbidden to walk by it without offering a greeting.

  If it is nighttime, you say, “Good morning.”

  If it is daytime, you say, “Good night.”

  Whoever fails in these obligations will be condemned to prolonged swellings and savage fevers, which sometimes kill.

  Nobody Can Beat Grandpa

  Good news for old folks still alive in this world: those who believe young trees have more and better wood are mistaken.

  Giving testimony in California and other parts are sequoias, the largest trees in the world. These majestic grandfathers can live for three thousand years and still produce two billion leaves. They are the ones that best withstand lightning storms and six months of snow, and no disease can bring them down.

  The Skin of Books

  He gives us great pleasure, though he received little or none.

  Ts’ai Lun, eunuch and member of the Chinese imperial court, invented paper. It was in the year 105, after much experimentation with mulberry bark and other plants.

  Thanks to Ts’ai Lun, today we can read and write as we caress the skin of books and believe the words they speak belong to us.

  Symbols

  In 1961, while several international experts recommended outlawing the cultivation and consumption of coca leaves, there came to light in northeastern Peru the remnants of such leaves chewed thousands of years ago.

  Chewing coca has long been a healthful cu
stom in the high Andes. Coca calms nausea and dizziness and is the best remedy for exhaustion and certain diseases.

  Besides, and this is not the least of it, the coca leaf is a symbol of Andean identity that only ill will confuses with the sorry chemical manipulation called cocaine.

  Another chemical concoction, heroin, can be made from poppies. But to date, as far as we know, poppies remain a symbol of peace, remembrance, and patriotism in England.

  Labor

  In Tijuana, in the year 2000-something, the priest David Ungerleider heard confession from a hit man on the payroll of Mexico’s cocaine-trafficking drug lords.

  This professional, whose name was Jorge, was twenty years old and got paid $2,000 per killing.

  He explained it thus: “I prefer living five years like a king to living fifty like an ox.”

  Five years later, he was also marked for death.

  He knew too much.

  Here’s how the international division of labor in the cocaine trade works: so some can put it up their noses, others put up their bodies.

  Urraká’s Allies

  In Panama’s Veraguas Mountains, Urraká led the indigenous resistance.

  He received a lot of help from rain, thunder, and wind.

  Whenever the Spanish conquistadors advanced, rain ruined their powder and muskets; thunder roared and caused night to descend in the middle of day. The invaders lost their way and furious winds knocked them to the ground.

  The Slingshot Boy

  Juan Wallparrimachi Mayta, the warrior-poet, used neither a sword nor an arquebus.

  Bolivia was not yet independent and not yet called by that name when he led the slingshot brigade under the command of Juana Azurduy. They launched a whirlwind of spinning lassos and death-dealing stones against the Spanish invaders.

  The slingshot boys sang as they attacked. A chorus of voices intoned Juan’s Quechua poems to the women he loved or hoped to love.

  Loving you,

  dreaming of you,

  I shall die.

  On the battlefield a bullet brought him down. He was twenty-one.

  Túpac Amaru’s Forebears

  Near the middle of the eighteenth century, Ignacio Torote led a short-lived rebellion against the intruders who had come to the Peruvian jungle to steal souls and land.

  At about the same time, Juan Santos Atahualpa’s indigenous army was inflicting one crushing defeat after another on the Spanish troops, impeding their advance.

  And it was not long after Juan Santos lay dying far from his impenetrable jungle home that young José Gabriel Condorcanqui took the name Túpac Amaru and rallied the largest indigenous uprising in the history of the Americas.

  From rebellion to rebellion, defeat to defeat, history rolled on. When she says goodbye, she’s really saying see you later.

  Buenos Aires Was Born Twice

  The first birth happened in 1536.

  Still a newborn, the city died of hunger.

  Then in 1580, where the Plaza de Mayo now stands, Buenos Aires was born again.

  A densely populated part of today’s city got its name because the Indians did not welcome the intruders. From the very beginning it was war. La Matanza was named for a massacre: the dead were Querandíe Indians, every one of them.

  According to conquistador Juan de Garay, they were “angry natives.”

  The First Flute

  A hunter got lost, once upon a time, in one of the labyrinths of the Amazon jungle.

  After much wandering, he collapsed at the foot of a cigar-box cedar and fell asleep.

  He was awakened by the sun and by music entirely new to him.

  Then the lost hunter spied a woodpecker, red head, long neck, powerful beak, jabbing away at a branch.

  The music came from the wind blowing through the holes the bird had drilled.

  The hunter learned. Imitating wind and bird, he made the first American flute.

  The Drum

  From the coasts of Africa, in the hands and memory of slaves, it traveled to the plantations of America.

  There it was outlawed, for the beating of the drum unbound the shackled and gave voice to those condemned to silence. The owners of men and property were well aware that such dangerous music, music that called down the gods, foretold rebellion.

  That is why the sacred drum slept unseen.

  Old Folks’ Contest

  A few millennia ago, give or take a year or two, the jaguar, the dog, and the coyote held a competition. Which of them was the oldest of the old? As a prize, the winner would get to eat the first food they found.

  From a ramshackle cart bumping its way down a hill fell a bag filled with corn tortillas.

  Who deserved the treasure?

  Which of them was the oldest of the old? The jaguar said he had seen the world’s first dawn. The dog said he was the only survivor of the great flood.

  The coyote said nothing; his mouth was full.

  A Storyteller Told Me

  Once upon a time, somewhere in the jungle of Africa, lived a lion king, gluttonous and imperious.

  The king forbade his subjects from eating grapes. “Only I may eat grapes,” he decreed, and he signed a royal proclamation that his monopoly was the will of the gods.

  The rabbit, deep in the thicket, then kicked up a tremendous ruckus, breaking branches, swinging from vines, screaming: “Even elephants will fly! The wind is going crazy! There’s a hurricane coming!”

  The rabbit urged the animals to protect the monarch by tying him to the stoutest tree.

  Thus the lion king, tightly bound, was saved from the hurricane that never arrived, while the rabbit, scampering about the jungle, left not a single grape uneaten.

  Samuel Ruiz Was Born Twice

  In 1959, a new bishop arrived in Chiapas.

  Samuel Ruiz, the newcomer, was horrified by the threat Communism posed to freedom.

  In an interview, journalist Fernando Benítez suggested that the right to humiliate others did not deserve to be called freedom. The young bishop threw him out.

  Don Samuel spent his first years teaching Christian resignation to Indians already condemned to slavish obedience. But as the years went by, reality spoke and taught, and Don Samuel was wise enough to listen.

  After half a century as bishop, he became the religious arm of the Zapatista insurrection.

  The natives called him the Bishop of the Poor, a successor to Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas.

  Don Samuel said goodbye to Chiapas when he retired in 2000. But he took with him the embrace of the Maya. “Thank you,” people told him, “now we walk with our heads held high.”

  José Falcioni Died Twice

  In the year 1907, to break up an assembly of workers on strike, a double rank of riflemen from the Argentinian Navy fired their Mausers at the Community Hall in Puerto Ingeniero White.

  Commander Enrique Astorga had given the order to shoot to kill.

  José Falcioni, a worker who lived nearby but was not involved, had the bad fortune to be out and about, and a bullet pierced his lung.

  A silent multitude accompanied him to Bahía Blanca cemetery.

  They say the commander himself shoved his way through the crowd and put three more bullets into the body of the deceased.

  Just in case.

  Soil’s Journey

  The black soil of the Amazon is largely made up of “biochar,” thanks to an ancient yet scorned practice of indigenous farmers in the jungle.

  Biochar—charcoal made for fertilizer—never decomposes and draws additional sustenance from the thousand-and-one bits of earthenware that the farmers break apart and then bury, to return to the earth what from the earth has come.

  Thanks to this act of religious gratitude, the soil regenerates continuously, from season to season, from hand to hand.

  Indignant Earth

  In May of the year 2013, for the first time in the history of Guatemala, an exterminator of Indians was found guilty of racist genocide. A civil court sentenced him
to eighty years in prison.

  General Efraín Ríos Montt was the next to last in a series of military dictators who specialized in massacring Maya Indians.

  Shortly after the executioner received his sentence, the country’s highest judicial authorities postponed it, only for an earthquake to hit the country. The earth rose up in fury against the impunity such killers habitually enjoy.

  Homage

  On Santa Lucía Hill, in downtown Santiago de Chile, stands a statue of the indigenous leader Caupolicán.

  Caupolicán looks rather like a Hollywood Indian, which makes sense. The work was sculpted in the United States in 1869 for a competition to honor James Fenimore Cooper, author of The Last of the Mohicans.

  The statue lost the contest, and the Mohican had to change countries and pretend he was Chilean.

  Andresito

  José Artigas, author of the first agrarian reform in the Americas, refused to accept that the poorest sons and daughters of these lands should be ambushed by independence. He scandalized colonial society by naming an indigenous man, Andresito Guacurarí, as governor and promoting him to the rank of commander.

  Before Artigas was defeated by two slaveholding empires and three treasonous port cities, he learned of Andresito’s death in battle.