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“What in the world got into the boy?”
    I was there in the room where they were talking, taking notes on the myths of El Dorado and the Seven Cities of Cibola as set down by the chroniclers of the Discovery and the Conquest, and I put my oar in to say that the reason for Saúl’s refusal was Don Salomón and his not wanting to leave him all by himself.
    â€œYes, that’s the reason Zuratas gives, and I wish it were true,” Matos Mar said, with a skeptical wave of his hand. “But I’m afraid there’s something far deeper than that. Saúl’s starting to have doubts about research and fieldwork. Ethical doubts.”
    Porras Barrenechea thrust his chin out and his little eyes had the sly expression they always had when he was about to make a nasty remark.
    â€œWell, 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.”
    But this did not raise a smile from Matos Mar.
    â€œI’m serious, Dr. Porras. It’s a pity, because the boy has outstanding qualities. He’s intelligent, perceptive, a fine researcher, a hard worker. And yet he’s taken it into his head, can you believe it, that the work we’re doing is immoral.”
    â€œImmoral? Well, when it comes right down to it, who can tell what you’re up to there among the good old chunchos, under cover of prying into their customs?” Porras laughed. “I myself wouldn’t swear to the virtue of ethnologists.”
    â€œHe’s convinced that we’re attacking them, doing violence to their culture,” Matos Mar went on, paying no attention to him. “That with our tape recorders and ball-point pens we’re the worm that works its way into the fruit and rots it.”
    He then recounted how, a few days before, there had been a meeting in the Department of Ethnology, at which Saúl Zuratas had flabbergasted everyone, proclaiming that the consequences of the ethnologists’ work were similar to those of the activities of the rubber tappers, the timber cutters, the army recruiters, and other mestizos and whites who were decimating the tribes.
    â€œHe 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.”
    â€œIs he reviving the fanatical Indigenista movement to save Indian cultures that swept over the campus of San Marcos in the thirties?” Porras sighed. “I wouldn’t be surprised. It comes in waves, like flu epidemics. I can already see Zuratas penning pamphlets against Pizarro, the Spanish Conquest, and the crimes of the Inquisition. No, I don’t want him in the History Department! Let him accept the fellowship, take out French citizenship, and make his name furthering the Black Legend!”
    I didn’t pay much attention to what I heard Matos Mar say that afternoon amid the dusty shelves covered with books and busts of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, in Porras Barrenechea’s Miranor house in the Calle Colina. And I don’t think I mentioned it to Saúl. But today, here in Firenze, as I remember and jot down notes, this episode takes on considerable meaning in retrospect. That fellow feeling, that solidarity, that spell, or whatever it may have been, had by then reached a climax and assumed a different nature. In the eyes of the ethnologists—about whom the least that could be said was that, however shortsighted they might be, they were perfectly aware of the need to understand the jungle Indians’ way of seeing in their own terms—what was it that Mascarita was defending? Was it something as chimerical as the recognition of their inalienable right to their lands, whereupon the rest of Peru would agree to place the jungle under quarantine? Must no one, ever, have the right