Differences in [climate] patterns from place to place, and changes in them from time to time, have inevitably exerted a powerful influence on human affairs. They define regions in which man must exert special efforts to avoid freezing or roasting to death. … Climate, along with soil (which is itself heavily influenced by climate), determines what plants can flourish and thus what animals—including man—can survive by eating the plants, or one another.

(Claiborne 26)

Robert Claiborne in Climate, Man, and History also differentiates among four basic types of climates: polar, cold and dry; stormy, warm or cold depending on the season, but quite humid at all times; desert, very hot and dry; and equatorial, very hot and wet. In this last group is the Amazon basin where we find the two primitive cultures presented by Alejo Carpentier and Mario Vargas Llosa in their respective novels: The Lost Steps (Los pasos perdidos, 1962) and The Storyteller (El hablador, 1987).

In the first novel, Carpentier describes a village of the Guahibo Indians located on a channel (caño) of the Orinoco system, and the Shirishana tribe who live along the upper Caura, a tributary of the same river. In the second novel, Vargas Llosa introduces the reader to the Machiguenga, a tribe scattered throughout the region of the Madre de Dios and upper Urubamba rivers in the Amazon system. Both novels are the result of trips into the jungle which left a strong impression upon these writers. A new world totally unknown to them had unfolded before their eyes.¹

Surprise, amazement, incredulity mark Carpentier's first encounter, in the remote jungle, with man living still in that second level that Claiborne calls barbarism. This is the stage where man already plants certain staples and raises some domestic animals, but still supplements his diet of meat by hunting. These groups live in this very hot and humid equatorial climate, in semi-permanent villages inhabited by just a few hundred souls.

Concerning groups classified as savages or barbarians, Claiborne observes that the Bushmen of Australia are less savage than almost any civilized nation and that they call themselves “the harmless people” (234). In The Lost Steps the narrator recalls the extermination of the Jews in the Nazi concentration camps during World War II and makes the same observation as Claiborne.

The primitive man of the Amazon basin, or rather, this man perfectly adapted to his surroundings, has survived in his isolation and the environment in which he lives has survived with him. Meggers says in Amazonia: “aboriginal man appears to have been no more destructive than his fellow organisms to the long-term stability of the tropical rain forest ecosystem” (150).

The jungle could not logically have been the cradle of civilization. Carpentier's narrator reinforces this theory when, penetrating into the heart of the jungle through a narrow channel (caño), he describes a setting that reminds the reader of the original chaos from which the world as we know it today sprang: “One felt the presence of rampant fauna, of the primeval slime, of the green fermentation beneath the dark waters, which gave off a sour reek like a mud of vinegar and carrion …” (160).²

Minute descriptions depict the “real” jungle as an asphyxiating place in constant state of decay: the asphyxiating climate of the equatorial regions. In the midst of such an environment, viewed as hostile by the narrator, the Guahibo Indians appear perfectly adapted to this milieu: “in their own surroundings … they were complete masters of their culture … The fact that they ignored many things that to me were basic and necessary was a far cry from putting them in the category of primitive beings” (173).³

Carpentier's narrator marvels at the precision with which one has caught a fish by putting an arrow through it; how another uses a blowgun; or the technique of a group covering the framework of a longhouse with palm fronds. They reveal themselves as “masters of the skills required on the stage of their existence” (173).⁴ But it is the climate that is ultimately responsible for the setting of the “stage.”

As the narrator pushes farther into the different climates of the South American continent, he also recedes in time. If the Guahibo culture had amazed him, his encounter with the Shirishana Indians of the upper Caura leads him to believe that he has arrived at the first stage of human life:

We had emerged from the Paleolithic … to enter a state that pushed the limits of human life back to the darkest murk of the night of ages. These beings I saw now with legs and arms that resembled mine … these people still without the primordial shame that leads to the concealment of the organs of generation, who were naked without knowing it … were nevertheless men.

(181-82)⁵

These people, who have not yet discovered seeds, do not stay in one place, but wander aimlessly, eating whatever they can find. They fight the monkeys for palm hearts, climbing high up in the trees (“colgándose de las techumbres de la selva,” 243). When isolated by floods for long periods, they have eaten “the larvae of wasps, munched ants, lice, dug into the earth for worms and maggots” (182) and eaten even the earth itself. Fire is almost unknown to them and their dogs resemble primitive pre-dogs (“perros anteriores a los perros”).

The narrator doubts that he can communicate with them, even by gestures. The infra-human appears when the Adelantado, a character who has made his home in the jungle where he has founded a city—like the early Conquistadores—points out to the narrator the prisoners of the Shirishanas in a muddy hole that looks like a dirty pigpen full of gnawed bones. “I saw before me the most horrible things my eyes had ever beheld” (182). He calls them “fetuses with white beards” and “wrinkled dwarfs” (182).

These “human larvae” were captives of the Shirishanas, who believed themselves to be the superior race, the only rightful owners of the jungle. Horrified at this vision, the narrator asks himself if there might be yet other lower groups that, in turn, might have prisoners of their own whom they might consider their inferiors.

The Machiguengas presented by Vargas Llosa in The Storyteller also consider themselves the sole owners of the jungle. They call themselves “the men.” It seems to be a human trait for each ethnic group, regardless of cultural level, to consider itself the chosen people.

While Carpentier's prose is exuberant like the jungle he describes, Vargas Llosa sketches with tight strokes and unique language structure a way of life. Alien to our Western culture, this life is, nonetheless, very real in the jungles of Peru where the oppressive climate allows no alternative:

… three of four photographs … suddenly brought back to me the flavor of the Peruvian jungle. The wide rivers, the enormous trees, the fragile canoes, the frail huts raised up on pilings, and the knots of men and women, naked to the waist and daubed with paint, looking at me unblinkingly from the glossy prints.⁶

(3)

For Carpentier life in the equatorial climate contrasts with life in the great city, New York, where Western culture prevails and from which the narrator turns in disgust. Traveling to the jungle in search of certain musical instruments, supposedly the first which man had invented, the narrator really seeks his own identity. He is a man trapped between two cultures: the European, representative of our Western world; and the Latin American, that, depending on the climate, will have retained the romantic flavor of the nineteenth century, or will have remained in the Middle Ages or some earlier time. Once in the jungle, he imagines he has found what he had lost in the civilized world. The simple life, love without complications and the absolute disregard of time bring incentive and inspiration back into his life and make it meaningful again.

The novelist's approach combines personal and cultural elements. Much of the story in The Lost Steps has an autobiographical basis. America, especially Cuba and the Caribbean region, became an obsession with Carpentier, occupying the settings of his novels and short stories. Yet culturally he was very French, very European in his point of view. He underlines this fact with a profusion of quotes and literary, philosophical, and historical intertextual references to Western culture.

Vargas Llosa, whose novel The Storyteller appeared twenty five years after The Lost Steps, was educated in the Latin American pattern, never traveling to Europe until after completing his studies at Lima's University of San Marcos. His preoccupation with America centers upon Peru and Peruvian social problems. Vargas Llosa's interest in his country's well-being led to his becoming a presidential candidate in the 1990 Peruvian elections, although he had never participated in politics before and was, instead, completely dedicated to literature. The very fact that he decided to enter the political arena speaks of his great concern for his country, a sentiment profoundly coloring The Storyteller.

The diversity of climates in Peru and other South American countries generally has resulted in a plurality of cultures, producing serious economic, political and even moral problems, besides the cultural ones.

In The Storyteller, Saúl Zuratas and Mario Vargas Llosa (speaking as another character), represent divergent opinions with respect to the problem of jungle cultures in Peru.

… those compatriots of ours who from time immemorial had lived there, harassed and grievously harmed, between the wide, slow rivers, dressed in loincloths and marked with tattoos, worshipping the spirits of trees, snakes, clouds, and lightning. …

(13)⁷

In A Writer's Reality (1991), Vargas Llosa has declared that if he were forced to choose between preserving the Indian jungle cultures or decreeing their complete assimilation, he would, with great sorrow opt for the modernization of those tribes as the greatest urgency is to combat “hunger and misery.” Concerning the Machiguenga tribe, he affirms that “their culture is alive in spite of the fact that it has been repressed and persecuted since Inca times” (36). They should perhaps be respected, but their fragile culture will not survive much longer. “… it is tragic to destroy what is still living, still a driving cultural possibility, even if it is archaic; but I am afraid we shall have to make a choice” (37).

Thus while Zuratas, alias Mascarita, defends the Machiguengas and their right to be respected in their jungle, the author speaks for those who believe in the need to sacrifice them in the name of progress.

Mascarita sees in the destruction of such cultures the destruction of the ecology. The white men (viracochas) and the Indians from the Andes mountains have come into the jungle at different times to clear the woods with fires burning large extensions of land; after planting one or two crops the soil has been rendered barren for lack of humus and because of the erosion caused by the rain. Animals have been exterminated because of the greed for hides; some species are disappearing rapidly. Not only is this happening in Peru, but in Brazil large portions of the rain forest have been pointlessly destroyed. The earth is now incapable of producing anything. In the equatorial climates the jungle thrives, but stripped of it the soil becomes barren.

Vargas Llosa first became aware of life in the jungle and its problems in 1957 during his first trip there, discovering a face of his country of which he had been totally ignorant. He, like Carpentier when speaking of Venezuela, comes to the conclusion that Peru is a country of many climates and many cultures: a country of the twentieth century, but also of the Middle Ages and of the Stone Age. His first impression of the Peruvian jungle recalls the reaction of Carpentier: “narrow river channels so choked with tangled vegetation overhead that in bright daylight it seemed dark as night” (72).

These Machiguengas that live around the Madre de Dios and upper Urubamba rivers are isolated, living in little groups of families and moving progressively deeper into the jungle, driven away by the viracochas and more warlike tribes. At different times there have been booms known as fevers, “fiebres.” Rubber, gold, rosewood and agricultural colonization have attracted those who have pushed them into more unhealthy and infertile regions where they live in tiny family nuclei without villages or chiefs.

By one of those remote rivers on the Amazon system, the Timpinía, the storyteller finds a Machiguenga family who have built their little camp in that isolated spot. When he arrives to spend a few days with the family, he is greeted with great joy, and they converse at length. The Machiguengas are noted for being great conversationalists. Tasurinchi-el de Timpinía, the head of the family, complains to Tasurinchi-hablador, the storyteller, that in those lands one can only plant a couple of times in the same place, no more. Sometimes only once. “It's land that tires quickly, it appears. It wants me to leave it in peace. … This earth here along the Timpinía is lazy” (221).⁸

A tremor occurs while the wife is alone in the camp. When the husband returns and she tells him, he beats her up because he thinks she is lying. And then, there is another tremor. Tasurinchi from Timpinía decides this needs much meditation. He goes off and sits on a rock all night and all morning. Toward midday he has found an explanation for that geophysical sign. He must move his family to another location. He tells the storyteller:

I remembered something I knew when I was born … Or perhaps I learned it in a trance. If an evil occurs on the earth, it's because people have stopped paying attention to the earth, because they don't look after it the way it ought to be looked after. Can it talk the way we do? To say what it wants to say, it has to do something. Shake, perhaps. To say: Don't forget me. To say: I'm alive, too. I don't want to be ill-treated.

(226)⁹

Saúl Zuratas considers the cultures of Amazonia well equipped to deal with their surroundings, possessing a subtle and profound knowledge of things we, the civilized people, have forgotten: the relation between man and nature and, also, between man and God. That harmony we have “shattered forever.”

While employing different perspectives, both writers coincide with Claiborne who believes that

The dinosaurs and every creature that ever lived, or now lives, on earth, had adapted to their environment—flourishing when the adaptation was adequate to the circumstances, disappearing when it was not. Only man, with the aid of his brain, can adapt the environment to himself. He is the only creature, for instance, that can manipulate climate, even on a small scale. He is also the only creature that can wonder about it or write books about it.

(78)

But Carpentier's narrator, after having retraced man's steps back to the Fourth Day of Creation, loses that paradise forever, by returning to our Western world. He will not find the way back. For him, the artist, the composer, it was impossible to rid himself of his cultural baggage.

By contrast, Vargas Llosa's character, Saúl Zuratas, alias Mascarita, voluntarily renounces his Western culture, erasing all traces of his previous life and emerging fully in the Machiguenga world as Tasurinchi—the storyteller. His absolute transformation, like a rebirth, renders him a true Machiguenga possessing the power of the word that transmits the group's beliefs, legends, and their history.

In both novels our world, that of the stormy climate where our Western civilization thrives, is conceived as a totally different world, apart from that of the equatorial climate. In order to integrate them one must be sacrificed: the more fragile, but in doing so, the climate might be altered, which may endanger gravely the ecological stability of our planet.

Notes

1. Carpentier visited the jungle twice during his long stay in Caracas. In July, 1947, he traveled in the direction of Guyana. In September, 1948, he made a second trip, this time up the Orinoco arriving at a village that he calls Santa Mónica de los Venados in the novel. It was on this last trip that he encountered the Guahibo and Shirishana tribes.

2. “Se adivinaba la cercanía de toda una fauna rampante, del lodo eterno, de la glauca fermentación, debajo de aquellas aguas oscuras que olían agriamente, como un fango que hubiera sido amasado con vinagre y carroña …” (223). All quotes appear in translation in the text and in the original in an endnote. Both are from the editions cited.

3. “Aquellos indios … me resultaban, en su ámbito, en su medio absolutamente dueños de su cultura. … La evidencia de que desconocían cosas que eran para mí esenciales y necesarias, estaba muy lejos de vestirlos de primitivismo” (234).

4. “… maestro[s] en la totalidad de oficios propiciados por el teatro de su existencia” (234).

5. Hemos salido del paleolítico … para entrar en un ámbito que [hace] retroceder los confines de la vida humana a lo más tenebroso de la noche de las edades. Esos individuos con piernas y brazos que veo ahora, tan semejantes a mí … esas gentes que aún no han cobrado el pudor primordial de ocultar los órganos de la generación, que están desnudos sin saberlo … son hombres, sin embargo (243).

6. … tres o cuatro fotografías … me devolvieron, de golpe, el sabor de la selva peruana. Los anchos ríos, los corpulentos árboles, las frágiles canoas, las endebles cabañas sobre pilotes, y los almácigos [?] de hombres y mujeres, semidesnudos y pintarrajeados, contemplándome fijamente desde sus cartulinas brillantes (7).

7. … esos compatriotas nuestros que desde tiempos inmemoriales vivían allá, acosados y lastimados, entre los anchos y lentos ríos, con taparrabos y tatuajes, adorando los espíritus del árbol, la serpiente, la nube y el relámpago … (15).

8. Es una tierra que se cansa pronto, parece. Está queriendo que la deje en paz … Tierras perezozas son éstas de Timpinía (223).

9. Me acordé de algo que nací sabiendo. … Si un daño ocurre en la tierra es porque la gente ya no le presta atención, porque no la cuida como hay que cuidarla. ¿Puede la tierra hablar, como nosotros? Para decir lo que quiere, algo tendrá que hacer. Temblar, quizás. No se olviden de mí, diciendo. Yo también vivo, … No quiero que me maltraten (217).

Works Cited

Carpentier, Alejo. Los pasos perdidos. Ed. Roberto González Echevarría. Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra, 1985.

———. The Lost Steps. Trans. by Harriet Onís. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956.

Claiborne, Robert. Climate, Man, and History. New York: W. W. Norton, 1970.

Meggers, Betty Jane. Amazonia: Man and Culture in a Counterfeit Paradise. Chicago: Aldine-Atherton, 1971.

Vargas Llosa, Mario. El hablador. Barcelona: Editorial Seix Barral, 1987.

———. The Storyteller, translated by Helen Lane. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1989.

———. A Writer's Reality. Ed. Myron I. Lichtblau. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1991.