The light sometimes prevents corroborating if we are masked. A reading of El hablador by Mario Vargas Llosa

Abstract

Two students from the University of San Marcos, Lima, enrolled in ethnology establish a friendship while doing their fieldwork with the Machiguengas Indians, inhabitants of the Peruvian Amazon. Both come from different backgrounds, physically Saul Zurata is a character with a large stain on one side of his face as if he had a natural mask that separates him from others.

In Florence, twenty-nine years later, the writer who has gone on vacation to read Dante and Machiavelli enters a gallery and discovers some photos showing the Machiguengas Indians. He is struck by one where a talker appears and the Indians around him listening to him. The image produces such a strong feeling in the writer that he decides that the one photographed is Mascarita, the fellow student, who had become talkative and posed with the parrot he always carried on his shoulder. The trip to Florence is over because the writer has mentally returned to his native country.

Is America part of the West or not? It is necessary to put aside the ideological interests that have prevented the integration of the countries and areas that make up the continent, relying on Spanish, which is the language that has consolidated the union as no other area of the world has done, without forgetting the local languages that also integrate being American.