The Lost Origin (26 page)

Both of them, their faces seeming more dead than alive, looked at me at once.

“Daniel was working exclusively on material related to Tiwanaku, right?”

They both nodded.

“The curse comes from Tiwanaku! My brother knew about the chamber. He himself left us a drawing of the pedestal of the Staff God, indicating very clearly where the Yatiri’s gold holding all their knowledge was. And he knows, because he doesn’t stop repeating it in his delirium, that the secret power of words is kept in that chamber. He had discovered the real existence of the Pyramid of the Traveler: The chamber is in a pyramid, he says, and the pyramid has a door on top. Lakaqullu, friends, Lakaqullu! He knew how to get there, and when he discovered it, he ran into the damned curse, the curse that protects the chamber.”

Proxi blinked, trying to assimilate my words. “But…,” she hesitated, “why doesn’t it affect us?”

“Because we don’t know Aymara! If we don’t know the code, it can’t affect us.”

“But we have the transcription of the text in Aymara,” she insisted, “and we’ve read it.

“Yes, but I still say it doesn’t harm us because we don’t know Aymara! The code works with sounds, with those cursed natural sounds. We can read the text in Aymara, but we’ll never be able to pronounce it correctly. Daniel could, and did. That’s why it affected him.”

“Or rather,” Jabba stammered, with great effort, “the code really has some kind of virus.”

“Exactly! A sleeping virus that’s only activated under certain conditions, like those computer viruses that start to erase the hard drive on the anniversary of a terrorist attack or on the Fridays that fall on the thirteenth of the month. In this case, the condition that starts the program is sound, some kind of sound that we aren’t capable of reproducing.”

“So people who speak Aymara, or anyone who knows Aymara, would be affected,” Proxi ventured. “Marta Torrent, for example, right?”

I remained in suspense for a few seconds, unsure of my response.

“I don’t know…,” I said. “I imagine that, if she heard it or read it aloud, then yes.”

“It’s a matter of trying it out,” Jabba proposed. “Let’s call her.”

Proxi and I smiled.

“In any case,” I said. “What we have to do is go to Tiwanaku and go inside the chamber.”

“But…! You’re crazy!” Marc exclaimed, jumping in his seat and staring me down. “Have you stopped to think about the ridiculousness of what you just said?”

I gave him a look as cold as ice before responding.

“My brother isn’t going to get better if we don’t go inside that chamber and look for a solution; you know that as well as I.”

“And what will we do once we’re there?” he replied. “Grab a shovel and start digging? Oh, I’m sorry, mister Bolivian policeman, I didn’t know this was a protected archaeological area!”

“Perhaps you don’t remember what the Chronicle said about the Yatiri?” Proxi asked.

Jabba was so nervous that he looked at her without comprehending.

“After finishing the mountain that’s now Lakaqullu, those guys found themselves having to return to the chamber, and they did so, as I remember, through one of the passages that went to the pyramid from places that only they knew, adding, when they left, more defenses and armor.”

“The word wasn’t exactly armor,” I corrected her.

“Fine, whatever it was,” she growled. “I thought I was speaking with intelligent people.”

“And you want us to find those passages?” Jabba asked, incredulous. “I’ll remind you that it’s rained a lot since, and I don’t just mean figuratively.”

Proxi, who up to that point had remained seated, got up and went to the maps of Tiwanaku hanging on the wall.

“Do you know what?” she said, without looking at us. “My job consists of finding failures in computer systems, holes in the security of the most powerful programs on the market, including our own. I’m not saying that I’m the best, but I’m very good, and I know that in Tiwanaku there’s a breach that I can find. The Yatiri were magnificent programmers, but they didn’t hide their code so that it would be hidden forever. What sense would it have made to have written all those gold plates destined for an alleged humanity surviving from a second universal flood?” She put her hands on her hips and shook her head decisively. “No, the entrance to the chamber exists, I’m sure, it’s just hidden, disguised so as not to be discovered until its content is necessary. They left it protected against thieves, but not against human necessity. What’s more, I am certain that access to the chamber is open and available. I would even say that we have it right under our noses. The problem is that we don’t see it.”

“Maybe because we still haven’t analyzed the Gate of the Sun,” Jabba suggested.

“Maybe because we’ll only be able to find it by looking for it there, in Tiwanaku,” I retorted.

A glimmer of bright lucidity flashed in Proxi’s eyes when she turned toward us.

“Come on, let’s get to work!” she exclaimed. “You, Marc, search for all the photographs of the Gate of the Sun you can find and print high definition copies of them; you, Root, search for all the information on the Gate and commit it to memory. I will work on the Staff God.”

Without hiding his satisfaction, Jabba looked at me triumphantly. His choice had been the winner…for the time being, I thought.

Seconds later, my grandmother discreetly popped in to tell us goodbye, but this time we were a little more polite, and we responded with friendly, although distracted, smiles. If I had known at that moment how long it would be before I would see her again, I surely would have stood up to give her a kiss and tell her goodbye, but I didn’t know, so she left and I didn’t tell her anything. It was a little after six in the evening, and my body was starting to creak like an old chair.

“Why don’t we look for some document that mentions, even if it’s just in passing, whether the Gate of the Sun could have ever been in Lakaqullu?” Jabba asked suddenly.

Proxi looked him with surprise:

“That’s a good idea. I’ll do it.”

“Use filters to limit the search,” suggested Jabba, going over to her and bending to rest his elbows on the table.

“‘Tiwanaku,’ ‘Lakaqullu,’ and ‘Gate’?”

“And something else, woman! Add ‘Gate of the Sun’ and ‘move,’ for example, since the Yatiri moved it to a different location.”

“Ok. There.”

I kept working on my task, searching for everything related to the Gate, which was a lot.

“Only five documents?” I heard Jabba say. “Not a lot, right?”

But Proxi didn’t answer. So I turned and saw her move her hand and touch her finger to the screen, pointing at something. I remember that I thought she was going to leave a digital
fingerprint the size of a truck. Then, both leaned in unison toward the monitor without saying a word, and remained frozen for a long time, so long that, at last, I got tired of seeing Jabba’s bottom in front of my face and I stood up and went over to them.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

Now they were the ones who didn’t seem to want to speak.

“Hey, I’m here!” I said, going closer. Then Jabba moved back a little so I could see the screen, and I squeezed between them. The first thing I saw was a very benevolent picture of Dr. Torrent, in the foreground, in which she was wearing a slight smile. The page was from a Bolivian newspaper,
El Nuevo Dia
, and the title announced that the famous Spanish anthropologist had just arrived in La Paz to join the new excavations in Tiwanaku. The rest of the article, which was dated that very Tuesday, the 4
^th
of June, said that Marta Torrent, who had been so kind as to respond to the reporter upon disembarking from the plane despite being tired from the long journey, was going to join the archaeological team of Efraín Punku, with the intention of bringing the twin pyramid of Akapana, or at least part of it, into the light. This exceptional woman, anthropologist by profession but archaeologist by vocation, had managed to include Puma Punku’s pyramid in the financial structure of the Strategic Research Program of Bolivia (PIEB) thanks to her excellent contacts in the Bolivian government and her impressive influence on the cultural and economic sectors of the country. “We have an enormous job ahead of us that will take several months. Tons of soil will have to be moved,” she had said. The Spanish professor, who preferred working in the field to working in the office, came from a family of archaeologists with a long tradition of exploration in Tiwanaku, like her great uncle, Alfonso Torrent, close collaborator of Don Arturo Posnansky’s, and her father, Carlos Torrent, who had spent more than half of his life close to the ruins, trying to reconstruct the pre-Incan period and studying the Gate of the Sun. She had inherited the family passion, and her surname protected her from the many obstacles with which other researchers are so often confronted. Proof of that was the authorization to begin preliminary excavations in Lakaqullu, obtained just a few days previously, by telephone, from Spain. “No one pays attention to Lakaqullu because it’s a minor monument, but I’ve come prepared to demonstrate that everyone is wrong,” she said. The reporter finished by saying “She will succeed.”

“She’s…in Bolivia!” Proxi stammered, startled.

Jabba spit such a string of insults that the professor’s ears must have been burning on the other side of the Atlantic. I wasn’t far behind. I said them in Catalan and in Spanish, and even threw out all I knew in English. I felt the blood boil in my veins: The professor’s precipitous journey to Bolivia confirmed her intention of taking advantage of the discoveries made by my brother.

“She’s gone to look for the chamber,” I muttered, full of venom.

“She knows about Lakaqullu…,” Jabba said, perplexed.

“She knows everything, that old…!”

“Calm down, Proxi.”

“Calm? How can you tell me to be calm, Marc? Or can’t you see that she’s going to get into the chamber before us? She could leave us with no help for Daniel!”

“Beginning the excavation of Lakaqullu will take her some time,” I noted, putting my hands to my head, I don’t know whether it was to pull back my hair or to contain my murderous thoughts.

“That’s our window to get to Tiwanaku,” Proxi said firmly.

Jabba went suddenly very pale and looked shaken.

“Find Núria!” I shouted at the system.

The wall monitor showed several phone numbers as it dialed them simultaneously, until there was a response from one of them. Núria had been at home for two hours, and her voice showed the alarm my unexpected call had caused. I calmed her down, telling her that nothing bad was happening, that I just needed to ask a favor:

“I need you to get me three tickets on the next flight leaving for Bolivia.”

“Do you want me to go to the office?” she asked.

“No, there’s no need. Connect to the system and do it from home.”

“Do you want them for yesterday, or are you going to give me some time frame?”

“For yesterday.”

“I thought so. Okay, I’ll send you the reservations in a few minutes.”

Jabba and Proxi, with serious expressions, had stood and were watching me.

“How long does it take to get to Bolivia?” Jabba asked, with his brow furrowed.

“I don’t know,” I said, and it was true: I had never traveled to the American continent, “but it can’t be long. Just think, if Marta Torrent called me on Sunday afternoon, she must have left for there that very night, or no later than yesterday, Monday, in the morning, and she arrived on time to give an interview that came out in today’s paper. Or rather, some eight or ten hours, I guess.”

“How little you know about life, Root! You forget one small detail,” Jabba snapped at me, returning to his seat in front of the computer. “At best, there’s a time difference of six or seven hours with the American continent.”

“What Marc is trying to say,” Proxi explained, copying him, “is that, when in Spain it’s nine o’clock at night, in Bolivia the clocks read, approximately, three in the afternoon, and that if Marta Torrent left yesterday morning and arrived eight or ten hours later, you have to add the difference, so the real time of the flight could be some sixteen hours.”

But no, it didn’t take sixteen hours. When Núria called to inform me of the details, it turned out to be much worse. There was no direct flight to Bolivia from Spain. The best option was to go to Madrid in the morning and catch a plane from there to Santiago, Chile, where, if there were no delays, we could board a flight, with layovers, to La Paz. Estimated duration of the trip: twenty-two hours and twenty minutes. The other alternative was to leave from Barcelona to Amsterdam, and catch a flight from there to Lima, Peru, and then another to La Paz. Total: twenty-one hours and fifty-five minutes. Jabba’s face was like one of those Japanese masks that actors wear to represent the evil demon or spirit that comes to Earth looking for vengeance.

“When does the flight leave for Amsterdam?”

“At six forty in the morning. Ah! and you don’t need a visa. Given the good relations between the two countries,” Núria explained, “all you need is a passport, and you can stay there up to three months with only your national ID.”

“Make reservations for Marc, Lola, and me, and find us a good hotel in La Paz, please. And leave the date for the return trip open.”

“How long are you going to be away?”

“If we return…,” mumbled Jabba.

“I wish I knew,” I replied.

III

To describe that long journey with Marc as a nightmare would not do it justice. During the first leg, from Barcelona to Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, we didn’t get him to open his eyes even once, or relax the grip of his claws on the seat’s armrests, or, needless to say, utter a single word. He was a stiff lump with an expression of supreme anguish on his face. Proxi, who was already used to it, enjoyed the journey immensely and endlessly proposed new topics of conversation, uncaring of the drama unfolding at her side; but I, who had never in my life traveled on a plane with Jabba, couldn’t stop looking at him, astonished, because of the strength with which he furrowed his brow, squeezed his eyelids shut, pressed his lips together, and held on to the seat. I was fascinated by the spectacle. It didn’t matter to him whether you addressed him or offered him a glass of water: his muscles didn’t relax even for a second. When we arrived at the immense Schiphol Airport, around nine in the morning, he was exhausted from the tension, pale, sweaty, and he had a glassy gaze which looked like that of someone terminally ill. As we looked in some stores and had something to drink in one of the airport’s cafés (our next flight left at eleven), he brightened a little and again became the corrosive and acid Jabba that we knew so well. But it was just a mirage because when the loudspeakers called us to board the KLM flight with destinations to Aruba and Lima he turned back into a stocky salt statue that advanced with the movements of a robot. As bad luck would have it, halfway through the trip, we went through an area of turbulence that lasted at least forty-five minutes. Jabba’s teeth began to grind, his arms and his hands tightened even more, and he pushed so hard on the headrest that I thought he would wind up tearing it from its position. I had never seen anyone suffer so much, and I came to the conclusion that, if I were him, I wouldn’t get on a plane even if I were drunk, even if my whole life depended on it. Honestly, it wasn’t worth it. It was inhumane for someone to have to go through something like that, even more so a big, strong, tough guy like Jabba. There was no reason why everyone should have to enjoy flying.