The Lost Origin (10 page)

At the back of the large dining room, a waitress dressed in a ridiculous white and blue striped uniform wiped a damp towel over a Formica tabletop that had just been abandoned by one of so many old ladies. Carrying the tray on which wobbled the drinks we had just bought, we headed in that direction and took possession of the table under the waitress’s unfriendly gaze.

“Okay, let’s see. What terribly serious thing have you discovered?”

“No, not serious,” Proxi clarified. “More strange.”

Jabba opened the document case and took out a bundle of papers which he unloaded onto the center of the table.

“Here,” he said. “Take a look at this.”

“Come on,” I replied, returning the sheets to him. “We’re not in a work meeting. Tell me about it.”

He seemed not to know where to begin; he threw long looks at Proxi and tugged at his red hair.

“At first we didn’t find anything strange,” she began, more decided. “When Jabba explained what you wanted I thought you’d really gone crazy, but since I always think the same thing when you have one of your ideas, it wasn’t too much of an insult…. Anyway, your ears would really be burning.”

Jabba nodded repeatedly.

“Anyway,” she continued, “we went to the ‘100’ and got to work. It seemed like a convoluted business, but when we broke it down as if it were a programming strategy problem, it got a lot simpler. We had several key words: Aymara, Inca, language…. There was an abundance of information on the web about the subject. Aymara is a language that’s still spoken in a large part of southern Peru and in Bolivia, and its speakers, the Aymara, are a peaceful Andean people, with a little over a million and a half individuals, who used to form part of the Incan Empire. Apparently, although Aymara has existed alongside Quechua for centuries, they’re not sister tongues, that is to say, they do not belong to the same linguistic family.”

“Really, Aymara doesn’t….” Marc started to say, but Proxi stopped him.

“Hold on, we’re going to make him dizzy!”

“Fine.”

“Listen to me, Root.”

“I am, Proxi.”

“Aymara…. Okay, are you familiar with all that stuff about the origin of languages and all that?”

“Are you talking about the tower of Babel?”

They both looked at me strangely.

“Something like that. Linguists think that the five thousand languages that exist on the planet today probably had a common origin, a kind of original proto-language from which all the others are derived, including those which were lost forever. This proto-language would be the trunk of a tree with a lot of branches sprouting from it, and on each branch, another, and so on up to the five thousand languages of today, which are grouped in large linguistic families…Understand?”

“Perfectly. Now, tell me about Aymara, if you don’t mind.”

“Stop being an ass and listen to her!” Jabba demanded.

“This original proto-language…,”

“The language of Adam and Eve?” I joked, but Proxi ignored me.

“…is known as the Nostratic language, and it’s thought to have existed about thirteen thousand years ago. Great minds from the best universities of the world have been busting their brains for the last fifty years trying to reconstruct it.”

“Very interesting,” I said, bored.

“Well, you’re about to find out just how interesting it is, moron,” spit Jabba. “There’s a whole line within linguistics that works on the theory that Aymara could be that first mother tongue. The trunk…. You get it?”

I was shocked, and my face must have reflected it, because my friend’s bad mood disappeared.

“In fact,” Proxi said, reclaiming the narrative; her eyes gleamed in a strange way, “Aymara is very far from being just any language. We’re talking about the perfect language, a language whose logical structure is so extraordinary that it seems more the result of a preconceived design than that of a natural evolution. The Aymara called their language
Jaqui Aru
which means ‘human language’ and the word ‘Aymara’ means ‘people of ancient times.’”

“Listen to this…,” Jabba said, rifling desperately through the documents he had on the table; at last, after a lot of digging, he found what he wanted and looked at me triumphantly. “The guy who wrote
The name of the Rose
, Umberto Eco, is apparently one of the finest semiologists in the world, and he has a book called
The Search for the Perfect Language
, in which he says: ‘In 1603, the Jesuit Ludovico Bertonio published his
Arte de lengua Aymara
(which he supplemented in 1612 with a
Vocabulario de la lengua Aymara
). Aymara is a language still partially spoken by Indians living in Bolivia and Peru, and Bertonio discovered that it displayed an immense flexibility and capacity of accommodating neologisms, particularly adapted to the expression of abstract concepts, so much so as to raise a suspicion that it was an artificial invention. Two centuries later, Emeterio Villamil de Rada described it as the language of Adam, the expression of “an idea anterior to the formation of language”, founded upon “necessary and immutable ideas” and, therefore, a philosophic language if there ever were one (
La lengua de Adam, 1860
).
⁶
’” Jabba looked at me triumphantly. “What do you say to that, huh?”

“But it doesn’t end there,” Proxy swiftly pointed out.

“No, no, not in the least! Eco then continues to explain the characteristics that could allow Aymara to be classified as a perfect language, although without completely committing himself to the idea that it’s an artificial language.”

“But what do you mean, an artificial language!” I exploded. “That’s ridiculous!”

“To help you understand,” Proxi said patiently, “there are a bunch of scholars around the world who all agree that Aymara is a language that seems designed according to the same rules that are followed today in the writing of computer programming languages. It’s a language with two basic elements, roots and suffixes which by themselves have no meaning, but which, joined together in long chains, create all meanings…. Just like a mathematical language! What’s more,” she added hurriedly, when she saw I was opening my mouth to object again, “the Bolivian Professor Iván Guzmán de Rojas, a systems engineer who’s spent many years working on this subject, claims that combinations of Aymara suffixes obey a regularity with properties of algebraic structure, a kind of ring of polynomials with such a quantity of mathematic abstraction that it’s impossible to believe it’s a product of natural evolution.”

“Remembering, of course,” added Jabba, “that Aymara hasn’t evolved. Incredibly, that damned language has stayed almost intact for centuries or millennia…. About thirteen millennia, if it’s really the Nostratic language.”

“It hasn’t varied at all, it hasn’t changed?” I asked, surprised.

“Apparently not. It’s taken some words from Quechua and Spanish in the last few centuries, but not very many. The Aymara believe that their language is sacred, a kind of gift from the gods that belongs equally to everyone, and that it shouldn’t be modified under any condition. What do you think?”

“Viracocha gave them their language?” I asked, without letting my guard down.

“Viracocha?” asked Proxi, surprised. “No, no. Viracocha doesn’t appear anywhere in Aymara legends. At least not that we’ve read, right Jabba? The Aymara religion is based on nature: fertility, livestock, the wind, storms…. Living in harmony with nature means being in harmony with the gods, of which they have one for each natural phenomenon, although Pachamama, Mother Earth, is above all of them, and if I remember correctly, in ancient times they also had one called Thunupa, god of…of what, Jabba?”

“Of the rain or something like that?” he suggested, uncertain.

“That’s it. Of the rain and lightning. It could be that because of the Inca’s influence, they believe in Viracocha, I don’t know,” Proxi continued. “What they do claim is that they’re the direct descendants of the builders of Tiwanaku, a very important city next to Lake Tititcaca, which was already in ruins when the Spanish discovered it. Apparently, Tiwanaku was some kind of religious monastery, the most important sacred center of the Andes, and its governors, the Capacas, were astronomer-priests.”

“The problem is, no one knows anything,” Jabba pointed out. “Everything’s more or less unfounded theories, imaginings, and suspicions.”

“Well, it’s the same with the Inca,” I said, remembering my reading from the afternoon. “I can’t understand how we, in the twenty-first century, are still so incapable of explaining certain things.”

“The thing is, no one’s interested in this, Root,” Proxy sadly pointed out. “Only a few oddballs like your brother. Because all of this is for Daniel, right?”

I shifted in the chair, a little nervous, and took advantage of those few seconds to decide whether or not to tell them about my silly suspicions.

“Spit it out,” ordered my stout friend.

I stopped beating around the bush. I began to tell them everything I knew, without leaving out a single detail, offering them facts and not opinions, so that their judgment, more impartial than my own, might help me to get out of this confusing tangle of nonsense I’d gotten myself into. Their expressions, while I explained the story of the Miccinelli Documents, the
quipus
, and the curse written on the paper found on Daniel’s desk, made me uncomfortable. They knew me as someone with a good analytical mind, capable of devising the most complex project in a couple of seconds, and of finding a logical needle in a haystack of incoherencies, so, through their eyes, I was seeing myself as an authentic moron. When I at last closed my mouth, and grabbed my drink and pulled it closer for something to do, I was sure of having fallen forever into the darkest abyss of ridiculousness.

“You’re not yourself, Root,” Jabba told me.

“I know.”

“I was thinking the same,” added Proxi.

“I get it.”

“I would have expected much more from you. Much more.”

“Okay, Jabba, I get it.”

“No, Root. Jabba’s right. You’ve made the worst analysis of your life.”

“He’s afraid.”

“Obviously.”

“Okay, that’s enough!” I exclaimed, laughing nervously. “What in the hell is going on here?”

“You don’t want to see it, my friend. It’s right in front of your nose and you don’t want to see it.”

“What is it that’s right under my nose?”

“Daniel deciphered the quipu’s code and translated the curse. You’re losing your hacker sense.” He pushed back his red hair, which was paler under the white neon light, and observed me smugly.

“I told you already,” I protested, “the
quipus
were written in Quechua, and my brother only knew Aymara.”

“You’ve checked?”

“What would I have to check?”

“If the curse was in Aymara,” Proxi prompted.

“No, no I didn’t.”

“So why are we still talking?” argued Jabba, annoyed.

Proxi gave him a censuring look and then told me:

“Daniel had to have found something that made him change from Quechua to Aymara. You said he told Ona that the solution was in this last language. The question is…the solution to what? Probably to some
quipu
that wasn’t responding to the rules he’d found in Quechua. Did you look through everything in your brother’s office?”

“No. But I brought a lot of material home with me. I’ll take a look tomorrow.”

“See how you’re not yourself?” insisted Jabba, clicking his tongue in disapproval.

“Let’s also not forget two other little details,” continued Proxi. “First, Aymara is a strange language that may have something more that a simple likeness to programming languages. Aren’t you forgetting that witches, wizards, all those sorts of people used strange words to pronounce enchantments? Mary Poppins, for example….I’ll always remember:

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious
!” she shamelessly intoned in a voice like Julie Andrews.

“And more recently, Harry Potter,” Jabba put in.

“Oh, that’s great!” exclaimed Proxi dreamily. “
Alohomora! Obliviate! Relaxo!
”

This was my best mercenary, the fabulous expert engineer I paid a fortune to every year to find security flaws in our programs and holes in the competition’s programs?

“And also
Bedknobs and Broomsticks
.”

“Go on!” I shouted. “Go ahead, encourage this lunatic!”

“
Treguna, Mekoides, Trecorum Satis Dee…,
” she singsonged, without noticing that everyone in the cafeteria was watching her with a smile on their lips. “
Treguna, Mekoides, Trecorum Satis Dee….
”

“Enough already! I get the idea, seriously. The words. It’s perfectly clear.”

“But there’s something else,” Jabba continued. “Tell him, Proxi.”

“While we were looking for information on the Aymara and their language, we found a very strange document about some ancient doctors who cured people with herbs and words. Apparently, they had a secret magic language. We thought it was just one of many superstitions, and we didn’t pay any attention, but now….”

“Here’s the paper!” Jabba said, separating one sheet from the pile. “The Yatiri, direct descendants of Tiwanakan culture, were revered by the Inca, who considered them to be of noble stock. They were Aymara, of course, and among their own people they were honored as very knowledgeable sages or philosophers. ‘Many ethnolinguists claim,’” he read nervously, “‘that the language used by the Yatiri was none other than the secret language Orejona Incan nobles spoke amongst themselves, employing common Quechua with the rest of the population.’”

“Yatiri!” I blurted, alarmed.

“What is it?” Proxi asked.

“It’s what Daniel said yesterday! He said he was dead because the Yatiri had punished him! He kept repeating another word as well:
lawt’ata
.”

“What does it mean?” Jabba wanted to know.

“I have no idea. I’ll have to look it up.”

“Before you would have done that immediately.”

“Try to be understanding, Jabba,” Proxi interceded. “His brother is sick and has been hospitalized for two days.”

Marc snorted. “For that, he’s excused. But he’s turning into a computer without an operating system, a keyboard without a Return, a sad monochromatic green monitor, a….”