The Lost Origin (28 page)

We managed to have dinner at last in the bar of an old hotel called París located on a corner of Murillo Plaza, and we stuffed ourselves with everything they served us, which was a lot, and very spicy: we started with a soup of corn (
maíz
), cassava, and quinoa, which couldn’t have been better, and we followed it with a dish called
paceño
, which had potatoes, fava beans, and cheese, and with a meat
jakhonta
that Proxi and I were barely able to try, and which a completely recovered Jabba, with three days’ worth of appetite, shamelessly polished off. The waitress who served us, and who introduced herself as Mayerlin, recommended that we visit a
peña
nearby, La Naira, on Jaén Street, where, before returning to the hotel, we could drink some mates and listen to Enriqueta Ulloa, a famous Aymara singer, and Llapaku, the best group when it came to Andean folkloric music.

In the street, still full of people, a tumult of voices in Spanish and Aymara could be heard, and over it, the cries of some kids working as ticket sellers, reciting the long routes of the transport vans, to whose rickety doors they clung, hanging dangerously on the outside, although no one seemed worried about their safety. The merchants of the street markets we had walked through before were going off now to their homes, their backs loaded with bundles that easily doubled or tripled their weight. It was a strange world, where people were not seen speaking endlessly on their cell phones, or running hurriedly from one place to another, or looking away if, by chance, their gazes crossed with ours. No, there they looked straight at you and smiled, leaving you shy and at a loss. Sometimes that which makes things surprising isn’t so much what’s seen, as different as that might be from one’s habitual landscape, as it is what is unconsciously perceived through the other four senses, and all the signals that we received indicated to us very clearly that we were in a different Universe and another dimension.

In the
peña
La Naira, full to bursting, we enjoyed, in a close atmosphere, the beautiful music that Llapaku played with traditional instruments from the heights of the Andes (the
charango
, the
siku
with its double row of reeds, the drums…) and the songs of Enriqueta Ulloa, who had a really monumental voice, vibrant and full of harmonies. Regretfully, we left after a short while because the next day we had to wake up early, but we arrived at the hotel very animated and full of energy to confront what was coming.

Following the directions of one of the hotel’s managers, we got up at six in the morning (it was still completely dark) so we could be ready around seven to catch a private taxi to Tiwanaku. The problem with taxis in La Paz is that they’re communal, meaning they act like small buses. To avoid it, you have to call some Radio-Taxi company and tell them right off that you’re willing to pay however many bolivianos they ask for so that they don’t load anyone into the spot next to you. Taking a taxi to the ruins also had its own explanation: the “buses” that made the forty-mile trip were in reality bulky old trucks where you traveled in the company of people, products from the market, and animals, all crammed into the same small space. But if we thought that by traveling in a private vehicle it would be like travelling in our own cars in Barcelona, we were completely wrong: The road was narrow and full of potholes, and our driver insisted on dangerously passing anyone who got in front of us, without caring that we were on the altiplano slopes or that the wheels ground against the very edge of the pavement on the curves. It took us almost two hours to get to Tiwanaku, and when we got out of the taxi, our muscles were stiff from panic and our brains were numb.

But we were there. In Tiwanaku. Or, better yet, in Taipikala, “the central stone,” a place we had researched so much we felt as if we knew it like our own homes. The snowy mountains were still surrounding us with their unbelievable peaks, among which stood out Illimani, a sacred mountain more than twenty thousand feet high. I wasn’t used to looking through such vast spaces since in the city the buildings pleasantly restrict the view, and at work the computer screens do the same, so so many white peaks in the distance and so much clear sky left me a little stunned. Our taxi driver, who boasted the pompous name of Yonson Ricardo, left us standing at the site’s main entrance and promised to return for us when it was time to eat; he would spend the morning in the nearby town of Tiahuanaco, built mostly with stones taken from the ruins.

Thankful for the warm heat of the sun on that frozen morning, we began the gentle ascent toward Taipikala. A barbed wire barrier protected the entire archaeological site as far as the eye could see. It was going to be difficult to slip inside that place outside of visiting hours. I took out my wallet to pay the admission, and then a small detail suddenly occurred to me:

“And if we come face to face with the professor?” I asked, turning toward Jabba and Proxi, who, under the attentive gaze of the two security guards keeping watch from their posts behind the fence, were trying to get together the coins to pay the fifteen bolivianos each for the tickets.

They looked disconcertedly at me for a couple of seconds, then Jabba shrugged, and Proxi, more pragmatic, took a panama hat hanging from a sales display and put it on my head. In that ticket cabin, as the lettering over the window said, they had all kinds of surprising articles available for tourists, from hats and sunglasses, to umbrellas and sticks that turned into folding chairs.

“Problem solved,” she said. “Gather up your mane and hide it under the hat. I don’t think she’ll recognize you if she’s around.”

“No, obviously,” I replied, irritated. “Especially if I cut off my legs to take a couple feet off my height.”

“But, Root, today is Saturday, and no one works on Saturday! Relax, she’ll be in La Paz.”

“But what if she’s here and I run into her?” I insisted.

“Well, then you’ll say hi if you feel like it, and if not, you won’t,” Jabba said.

“But she’ll realize we’ve come looking for the same thing she is,” I objected, stubborn. The ticket man started to get impatient.

“Stop being difficult and buy the ticket already!” Jabba said. “She only knows you, and since we’ve seen her in a picture, we’ll notice her before she sees you.”

More relaxed by this idea, I paid and crossed the threshold into Tiwanaku. I immediately forgot everything that could have gone through my head since birth. Taipikala was magnificent, immense, impressive…. No, really, it was much more than that: It was incredibly beautiful. The wind ran freely through those endless spaces covered in ruins. In front of us, a serpentine path led to the Semi-Subterranean Temple which looked like a square hole in the ground, to the right of which, with inconceivable dimensions, was the elevated platform of the Temple of Kalasasaya, on which we could make out, despite the distance, its more than sixteen foot high, hundred-ton blocks. Everything there was colossal and exuded magnitude and energy, and the wild vegetation that covered it didn’t take away even a speck of majesty.

“I’m suffering hallucinations,” murmured the mercenary, as we walked toward the Temple. “I think I'm seeing the Yatiri.”

“You’re not the only one,” I whispered.

Without speaking, we walked around the hollow of the Temple, about six feet deep, observing the strange tenon heads that stuck out of the wall. Jabba was the first to detect something strange:

“Look at this…,” he exclaimed at the top of his lungs. “Isn’t what I’m seeing there the head of a Chinese guy?”

“Yeah, right!” Proxi teased.

But I was looking in the direction Jabba was pointing in, and yes, that head was obviously that of an Asian, with unquestionably slanted eyes. Two or three heads up, there was another that had unquestionably African features: wide nose, thick lips…. After a time spent turning around, looking high and low, we no longer had any doubt that among the one hundred five heads that the little informational book we had bought said there were, all the races of the world were represented: projecting cheekbones, thick lips and thin lips, wide foreheads and narrow, bulging eyes, round ones, almond ones, sunken ones….

“What does the guide say about this?” I wanted to know.

“It gives several interpretations,” read Proxi, who had taken charge of the book. “It says that it was probably the custom of Tiwanakan warriors to exhibit here the heads severed from their enemies after battles, and that with the passage of time they had to make them in stone, so they would last. Also that this place could be some kind of college of medicine where they were taught to diagnose illnesses that are supposedly represented by these faces. But when it comes down to it, since there’s no proof one way or another, they end up saying that the most likely explanation is that it’s simply a sign of Tiwanaku’s contact with different cultures and races in the world.”

“With black and Chinese people?” Jabba asked, incredulous.

“It doesn’t even mention that.”

“My son…,” I said, putting a paternal hand on my friend’s shoulder, “about this mysterious city they haven’t the foggiest damned idea so the last one who gives his version of events is a rotten egg. Never mind. As for us, on with our business.”

It was a shame, I thought, that Bolivia didn’t have enough money available to launch a detailed excavation of Tiwanaku, and it was a shame that some international organization didn’t contribute the necessary funds to help the country in this task. Wasn’t anyone interested in
discovering what was hidden in that strange city?

“And this guy with a beard?” Jabba insisted, pointing at one of the three stone stelae that stood in the middle of the site. It was the highest, and it had the image of a man with enormous round eyes, a big mustache, and a beautiful goatee worked into the stone. He was dressed in a long cape, and on both sides were drawn the silhouettes of a couple of snakes that reached from the ground up to his shoulders.

“The guide says that it’s a king or a high-ranking priest.”

“The power of imagination! Can’t they change up their story? I’m starting to get bored.”

“It also says that he has those snakes because they’re a symbol of knowledge and wisdom in Tiwanakan culture.”

“So that’s what the horned reptile inside the chamber of Lakaqullu means.”

“Let’s get out of here,” I ordered, taking the first steps toward the stairs, heading toward Kalasasaya. We were almost the only ones walking around the ruins along with a group of school kids visiting Tiwanaku accompanied by their teachers who were making a tremendous racket a short distance from us. In the face of such human solitude, my fear of running into the professor sharpened: If that woman had so many political resources in Bolivia, a simple call to the police accusing us of stealing archaeological artifacts was more than enough to get rid of us, keeping us from getting to the chamber before her. And it would be her word against ours.

As we cautiously went up the large stairs of Kalasasaya, little by little there appeared before our eyes a familiar and majestic figure that turned out to be the Ponce Monolith, named for the archaeologist who discovered it, Carlos Ponce Sanjines. However, despite its imposing presence which seemed to rule over the immense terrace of Kalasasaya our gazes and steps went automatically and directly to the distant boundary of the temple, where, on the right, the unmistakable form of the Gate of the Sun could be made out. The whole story had begun there, in the reliefs of that gate, with Daniel’s hand-made copy of the three-floored pyramid that served as a base for the Staff God. At that moment, without halting my steps and without being able to help it, I felt a knot form in my throat. How my brother would have enjoyed seeing his ideas set in motion and his discoveries about to be confirmed! I could almost feel him at my side, silent, but with an ear-to-ear smile of satisfaction. He had worked like a slave to reveal the secret of the Yatiri, and when he was about to achieve it he had fallen prisoner to his own discoveries. Some day, when he was better, I would make the journey again with him.

We kept going forward until we got to the great Gate, and, as the distance that separated us from it got narrower, the three of us entered a kind of magnetic field that attracted us with the same force with which gravity stuck us to the ground. Upon seeing that silhouette outlined in the sky, my mind jumped back to the night before our trip, shortly after I had asked Núria to reserve the flights and the hotel.

That afternoon in Barcelona, since we still had time to work a little before we had to eat dinner and Jabba and Proxi had to go home and pack their bags, we resumed our search for information on the Gate which was the only thing left for us to research in Tiwanaku. Marc dedicated himself to looking for images and printing them, Lola to researching the mysterious Staff God, and I to recopying all existing information on the monument.

The professor had told me that the Gate weighed more than thirteen tons which appeared to be confirmed by the internet pages that dealt with the subject. The dimensions were more varied, although they generally rounded it to ten feet high by thirteen feet wide. On the depth, I found no arguments: one and a half feet, unanimously.

The Gate of the Sun opened from nowhere to nothing. Its location was completely made up and no one seemed to know its real origin: Some said, because of its distant likeness, that it was the fourth gate of Puma Punku, the missing one, some that it came from some vanished monument, and some that it came from the Akapana Pyramid…. No one was sure, but the real mystery was how a stone weighing thirteen tons had been moved from its place and left to rest, face down, on that Kalasasaya terrace on which it could be found today. The monument had a wide deep crack running from the upper right corner of the opening upward, on a diagonal, breaking the frieze in two. According to legend, a lightning bolt was the cause of that damage, but, although electrical storms were frequent on the Altiplano, it would have been difficult for such a phenomenon to have managed to cause such a fissure in a block of super-hard trachyte. Most likely, it had split by falling face down, but that wasn’t clear either.