In the Amazon God’s Name Is Everyone’s : THE STORYTELLER <i> by Mario Vargas Llosa translated by Helen Lane (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $17.95; 212 pp.) </i>

To the faintly-dandified Peruvian intellectual who narrates “The Storyteller,” Saul Zuratas is successively a puzzle, a mystery and a heart-rending revelation.

As with a Conrad narrator who starts us on a profound journey out of the premises of a stuffy London club, the brittleness of a Vargas Llosa first-person--this one is spending the summer in the Florence Pensione to re-read Dante and Machiavelli--has a purpose. It allows him to be our guide.

He is stiffer and starchier than we are; so we, the readers, let ourselves be conducted while thinking: Amusing fellow, but really rather slow. And before we know it, we are down the waterfall without a barrel.

Vargas Llosa’s waterfalls are powerful and diverting. In “The War at the End of the World” and “The Real Life of Alejandro Mayte,” he entangled the spirit of revolution with obdurate native myth. Out of the mist of Latin American underdevelopment, he brought figures as specific and recognizable as anyone in Trollope’s Barchester.

With “The Storyteller,” he goes one step further. Instead of a mestizo society, poor and prophetic in the hot back country, the thin uplands or the city slums, he deals with the world of the Amazonian Indians. In the most daring, difficult and in some ways the most moving of his books, he brings together the voices of a primeval culture and that of his sophisticated, Europeanized narrator. It is a wide gap to bridge. It takes Latin America’s irreconcilable distances and suggests, for a moment, that beginning of commonality that consists of recognizing the wound that distance makes. (The narrator is, for a while, the producer of a “60 Minutes”-style TV show that wanders chattily around the Americas and is entitled,appropriately, “The Tower of Babel.”) The bridge is Saul Zuratas. He is one of Vargas Llosa’s intoxicated space travelers, like Mayte or the backlands cult leader in “The War at the End of the World.” He is more extraordinary than either; his mission is not Andean revolution or the building of a prophetic community. It is to rescue the dying soul of a remote and frail Indian tribe.

The story spans 30 years. At the start, Saul and the narrator are university chums. Saul is a double outsider. He is a Jew, and he is disfigured by a purple birth mark that covers half his face. All of this he seems to overcome. He is a brilliant student of ethnology; and he is warm, funny and high-spirited.

The future promises brightly for both of them. The narrator will win a scholarship to Europe. So will Saul, who has begun to study and write about the Machiguengas, an Amazon tribe of which only a few members are in touch with backlands settlements; the rest live scattered deep in the jungle.

At first, to the narrator, Saul’s growing passion for Indian ways is simply a charming eccentricity. When the narrator gets into a bar fight with a patron who reviles Saul for his disfigurement, the latter sends him a small Indian-carved bone and a note saying that the lines on it stand for the order of the world: “Anyone who lets anger get the better of him distorts these lines, and when they’re distorted, they can no longer hold up the earth . . . so no more tantrums, and especially not because of me.”

But the passion grows harsh, and the two begin to lose touch. At their sporadic meetings, Saul denounces more and more angrily the despoliation of the jungle and the encroachment of the national culture upon the Indians. Then he turns against ethnology, claiming that the study and taping of the Indians is stripping something precious from them. He refuses his scholarship; soon he disappears.

The narrator goes to Europe, writes, makes a name for himself, returns to run the TV program, and becomes active in his country’s affairs. He is, of course, an alter-ego for the author, who is currently a candidate for the Peruvian presidency; may he be spared to go on writing.

But this we hear later. Abruptly we move to an entirely different narration. A dreamlike voice is telling a story, or rather, a chain of stories. It tells of an early time when the jungles were full of game and the rivers, clear; when men were as Tasurinchi, the God of Life, had breathed them out. When nobody left; when even the dead simply went away for a little while and came back in a different body.

Then the water rotted, storms and floods came, the jungle burned, hostile tribes attacked, white men took people away to work on the rubber plantations. What had produced all this, the voice says, was that the sun had begun to fall. So, to keep it up in the sky, men had to begin walking. They found places to settle in for awhile, but always disaster arrived, the sun began to fall again, and it was time to walk once more.

The voice, seemingly disjointed, seemingly passive, imposes no order and draws no conclusion. Its audience shifts; it tells each new audience about the previous ones. Everyone is named Tasurinchi; they all bear God’s name, and each other’s. The voice tells each group how the other groups are living, and what stories they have told. After each account, the voice relinquishes itself to its listeners. “That, anyway, is what I have learned,” it says over and over again. It is not a disclaimer; it is as if the voice and its stories belonged to everyone.

Three times we hear it, telling new stories and gradually filling in a picture. These sections of the book alternate with others told by the original narrator. It is not long, in fact, before we realize what has happened. Saul, for a quarter of a century, has been the wandering storyteller for the Machiguengas.

He has taken up an older storytelling tradition, dating back a century or more; from the time that the first white incursions confronted the Machiguengas with the choice of losing their rich but fragile culture, or moving deeper into the jungle.

How rich and how frail this culture is, we realize, in an artistic tour de force, through the voice that Vargas Llosa gives to Saul. Sweet, tentative, bawdy; it tells of births, deaths, hunting, wandering, the tricks played by gods and devils, the war between the sun and the moon; all in the same tones of calm acceptance.

The writing is extraordinary and the stories, which at first seem a jumble, become more and more captivating. We, the readers, are going through the same process of gradual discovery as the Vargas Llosa narrator.

The two voices are quite separate, but gradually they converge. The narrator’s piecing together of what his former companion has done--they never meet--and Saul’s floating voice makes clear the grandeur of his mission. Dispersed, living in groups of 10 or 20, isolated from each other, the Machiguengas risk losing their communal memory and their communal soul. The storyteller threads them together, recalling the old legends and, walking, walking, bringing to his walking people the new stories and the news.

Over 25 years, the narrator has gone through all the fashionable political sages: Marxist enthusiast, disillusioned artist, tentative liberal participant in the efforts of Peruvian democracy. Always, he’d assumed that the only hope for the Indians was education, economic assistance and some kind of integration: missionary work, that is, of one kind or other. Saul is an entirely different missionary. He gives the Indians not what he has to teach them but what they have taught him.

For the narrator, a writer, it gives new meaning to the art he has always lived by. For the narrator, a Peruvian, it imparts a deeper mystery to the questions he has tried to answer about his country’s destiny. Vargas Llosa is the artist of a nation; a thing we no longer know, though we did once, and called them Melville, Whitman and Thoreau.