The Lost Origin (32 page)

“That’s, that’s…,” Proxi chanted, fascinated. “As simple as that.”

“But we had to pray!” I exclaimed enthusiastically. “Only by kneeling before the god could we discover the message.”

“And it makes all the sense in the world,” Jabba agreed. “Like you said, Proxi, the Yatiri, when they left, hid the way to get into the chamber only until its contents became necessary. And necessity brings supplication. Besides, look at the position of those little characters in the bands on the sides: they look like they’re kneeling, begging. We should have noticed before.”

“You’re right,” I admitted, examining the false winged cherubs. “They were saying what had to be done. How did we not see it?”

“Because we didn’t pay attention to them. The Yatiri left everything in sight.”

“No, no…. Something doesn’t fit. This gate is much older,” Proxi objected, pensive, “thousands of years older than the arrival of the Inca and the Spanish.”

“It’s very possible that all this had been planned since the flood,” I said, standing and shaking off my pants, “and the sixteenth century Capacas and Yatiri were carrying out a plan thought up thousands of years before. Don’t forget that they possessed secrets and knowledge they transmitted from generation to generation, and this could very well be one of those secrets. They were special beings who knew what had happened ten thousand years before, and also knew what they had to do in case of a catastrophe or an invasion.”

“We’re speculating!” Jabba protested. “Really, we don’t even know if we’re going to be able to open the entrances, so why so many questions about things we’ll never be able to know?”

“Jabba’s right,” Proxi murmured, also standing. “The first thing is to see if we can embed a staff with a condor beak in the eye of the figure on the plaque.”

“As if that were so easy!” I exclaimed, taken aback. “Where the hell?” And suddenly, I remembered. “The staffs the Yatiri in the Witches’ Market in La Paz sell!”

“Cross your fingers that tomorrow, Sunday, the cursed market will be open,” Jabba grumbled.

“So let’s go,” I said. “Anyway, today we only came to examine the terrain. We’re not prepared to go inside.”

“Tomorrow, we have a lot to do,” Proxi confirmed, starting to cross the terrace of Kalasasaya in the direction of the exit, “so call Yonson Ricardo’s cellular phone and tell him to come find us.”

Sunday afternoon we got up late and had a relaxed breakfast before leaving for the market,
which, luckily, according to what they told us in the hotel, opened every day. So, walking and enjoying the sun, we headed toward Linares Street, close to the Church of San Francisco, ready to find the Yatiri of the twenty-first century, distanced, apparently, from their authentic origin and their ancestors. The market was so packed with people that we could barely do anything other than let ourselves be taken by the tide, a tide that to our impatience moved with the slowness of a glacier. Those Bolivians should see what a Saturday afternoon in Las Ramblas or Passeig de Gràcia in Barcelona was like.

“Do you want me to read your destiny in the coca leaves, señor?” a Yatiri with a round face and cheeks like apples asked me from her stall. I couldn’t stop fixating on the normality and joy with which coca circulated around there. I had to remind myself that, in that place, it was a product that had been consumed for thousands of years to prevent hunger, tiredness, and cold.

“No, thank you,” I answered. “But, do you have staffs of Viracocha?”

The woman looked at me in an indecipherable way.

“Those are nonsense, señor,” she replied; the human current was pulling me away, “souvenirs for tourists, and I’m an authentic
kallawaya
… a Yatiri,” she clarified, thinking my surprised face came from ignorance, when it was the complete opposite: I remembered very well how the Yatiri’s account of Taipikala explained that the Capacas who left for Cusco and maintained their role as doctors for the Orejona nobility came to be known as
kallawayas
. “I can offer you any kind of medicine that you need,” she continued. “I have herbs to cure all ills, even those of love. Amulets against evil spirits and offerings for the Pachamama.”

“No, thanks,” I repeated, “I only want staffs of Viracocha.”

“Go to Sagárnaga Street, then,” she said amiably. “You’ll find them there.”

“And what street is that?” I asked her, twisting my head to look at her, but she didn’t hear me, attentive to other possible clients passing in front of her stall.

The tables in the stands were loaded with a great variety of products, but all of them had an abundance of llama fetuses, which were quite repugnant in the sunlight. They were like mummified chickens, but with four legs and skin blackened from being dried or smoked. They were being exhibited like trophies, in groups, and the biggest, richest stands were those that had the most, hung up next to cellophane bags containing what appeared to be candy wrapped in bright colored paper, but wasn’t that at all; or next to bottles that imitated those of champagne, with a yellow or red aluminum cap hiding the stopper, and which turned out to be sparkling wine with strange mixes of herbs; or hanging from hooks above huge quantities of little envelopes that gave the impression of containing seeds to plant flowers, but they weren’t seeds, they hid concoctions for performing charms or for escaping them. Basically, you had to see it to believe it. And, in front of each stall was a Yatirikallawaya, happy in his or her knowledge and place in the world, aware of the sacred power of the products he or she sold.

Proxi was taking photographs left and right: first an Aymara boy who sold globes full of water, and then an old woman who was offering multicolored fabrics with designs very similar to, although not the same as, the
tocapus
that their ancestors had used in ancient times as written communication. Jabba, however, prepared to run every risk, put anything in his mouth he was offered to try, without caring about hygiene or possible side effects. It was not likely that he would get sick, because he had a bomb-proof stomach, but I did not, and just from seeing him suck little bones of an unknown origin and swallow questionably colored pastes, I was starting to feel ill. Luckily, upon turning a corner, we began to see stalls with different articles, more utilitarian objects than things to eat, such as wool hats, short-legged dolls, necklaces, cheap colognes, some very strange little feminine figures….

“Have you seen this?” Jabba asked me, pointing at the ten or fifteen little statues representing a pregnant woman with big ears and a conical head. “Oryana!”

“Do you want a Mother Orejona?” the vendor asked us quickly, noticing our interest.

“Mother Orejona?” I repeated.

“The goddess who protects the home, señor,” the Yatiri explained, raising one of those images in the air. “She takes care of home, family, and especially of pregnant women and mothers.”

“It’s incredible,” Jabba muttered in a lowered voice. “They still worship Oryana after thousands of years!”

“Yes, but they don’t know who she is, really,” I replied, gesturing for the vendor to show me some short-legged dolls; one of those monsters would be the perfect gift for Dani.

“Would the gentleman like an Ekeko, the god of good luck?”

Jabba and I looked at each other significantly, while the vendor put a plastic doll representing a little white man, with a mustache and legs as short as those of the Viracocha of Tiwanaku, in my hand. And it wasn’t surprising; after all, according to what we knew, the Staff God was none other than Thunupa, the god of rain and the flood, who had transversed the centuries transformed into Ekeko. The doll had the traditional Andean wool hat, cone-shaped and with ear flaps, and a frightful Spanish guitar in his hands.

“You’re not thinking of buying that, are you?” Jabba grimaced.

“I need a present for my nephew,” I explained, very serious, paying the vendor the twenty-five bolivianos he asked for.

“What you need is a psychiatrist. The poor kid’s going to have nightmares for years.”

Nightmares? It’s not as if Ekeko was very attractive, really, but I was sure Dani would know how to appreciate its worth, and would enjoy the beauty of destroying it.

“Over here!” Proxi called suddenly, pointing to a stand in which a bunch of staffs of Viracocha could be seen.

On the stall’s wooden table, dozens of staffs ending in condor heads were being displayed for sale, and to the great joy of the Yatiri, we bought five, which is to say, all those that measured between thirty and forty inches since those were, to the eye, the dimensions of the Thunupa on the Gate and of his original staffs.

We ate in a restaurant in the area and kept wandering like tourists for the rest of the afternoon until it was time to return to the hotel. We had a lot of work to do so we ordered dinner to be sent up to Jabba and Proxi’s room, which was bigger, and we concentrated on the practical aspects of the task we would undertake the next day. But first, I connected to the internet to download my email. I had twenty-eight messages, most of them from Núria, so I read all of them and summed up the replies to all of them in one long email. Meanwhile, Proxi had connected the digital camera to the other laptop and was loading the pictures she had taken in Tiwanaku. She made a life-sized enlargement of the plaque on the ground of Lakaqullu and printed it in fragments on the small travel printer.

If we turned out to be lucky, and it really did work to stab the groove in the warrior’s helm with the staff, what came next was a complete mystery, but even so, there were certain details we were clear on: we would go through passageways that no one had set foot in for five hundred years, we would be without light, we might possibly run into vermin or traps, and, most important of all, we would need to take “JoviLoom,” because if we made it inside the chamber of the traveler, it wouldn’t do us any good to be there if we weren’t capable of reading the gold sheets. So the translator was indispensable, and all of the laptop’s batteries (the original and the
backup ones) should be charged and ready.

We made a list with what we would have to buy the next day before leaving for Tiwanaku, very conscious of the fact that our supplies should take up as little space as possible, so as not to awaken the curiosity of the guards at the gate, those we had seen occasionally checking purses and backpacks. According to the guidebooks, it was common for some unscrupulous tourists to try to take stones with them as souvenirs. The idea of slipping in at night, outside of visiting hours, as we had planned to do at first, was discarded quickly, because after having been there the three of us agreed that it would be suicide to wander in the dark around that stony terrain, running the risk of getting hurt or bashing our heads in. So we would do it in the afternoon, with light, taking advantage of the solitude of Lakaqullu and the site’s scanty security.

The next morning, we crossed all of La Paz’s downtown, to the luxurious residential neighborhoods of Sopacachi and Obrajes, in the lower part of the city, where there were shopping centers, banks, art galleries, movie theaters…. There, in various stores, we acquired three Petzl LED headlights, another three Mini-Maglites (as slender as a pen and no longer than the palm of your hand), a couple of rolls of caving rope, anti-abrasion gloves, some small Bushnell binoculars, a Silva Eclipse-99 compass, and several Wenger multi-use pocketknives. It might seem counterintuitive that we would find such expensive brands in such a poor and debt-ridden country, but, apart from the fact that Bolivia was a common destination for alpinists, it turned out that because of its nearness to the United States, it had the best and most modern products, long before, even, they arrived in Spain, which we saw with our very own stunned eyes in the computer stores of Sopocachi. Another thing that was different was that they were available for most of the population to buy them—they couldn’t, obviously—but there they were, at the disposal of the people of that country who had money and of tourists with funds.

At noon, we returned to the hotel and called Yonson Ricardo to ask him if he could take us back to Tiwanaku that afternoon.

“No, I won’t be able to,” he told us, without a trace of regret, “because today is a holiday for my team of taxis and it could cause problems for me with the union, but I’ll leave you in good hands. My son Freddy will take you in his own car, and you can pay him the same amount you gave me the other day. What do you think?”

It didn’t seem very fair, because we had paid the father for a whole day of work and it was already almost halfway through that Monday, and besides, Freddy wasn’t a taxi driver, but it wasn’t worth making our lives difficult over trifles or for a quantity of bolivianos that, in euros, was negligible, so we accepted.

Freddy turned out to be a more reckless driver than his father, but we were so worried about what we had to do that we almost didn’t care if we crashed into some old vehicle carrying animals, or if we tumbled off the road and down the Altiplano. Fortunately, none of that happened, and we landed alive in Taipikala, with our staffs of Viracocha in our hands like silly souvenirs, like visitors who had arrived directly from the Witches’ Market. No one stopped us or searched our bags. We paid for the tickets and went in very relaxed, ready to take a look, first of all, at the excavation of Puma Punku to see if the professor was around. And yes, she was: I could see her clearly through the binoculars, sitting in front of a table, writing in a big notebook. So we walked toward Lakaqullu, giving the Semi-Subterranean Temple a wide berth so we wouldn’t be discovered.

When we had left Putuni Palace behind us we were alone in the vast extension of terrain that separated us from our objective. There was not a soul to be seen, and the cold wind got stronger when it found no buildings to impede its passage, buffeting the vegetation pitilessly this
way and that. We walked in silence, stunned by what was drawing near, by what we were going to do. Jabba and Proxi held hands; I withdrew more and more, and shrunk into myself like I always did when I felt afraid. It didn’t scare me to break some rule or another in Spain, or to leave my tag in the most protected and prohibited of places, or to slip into official systems with my computer to achieve whatever purpose I had proposed for myself, but never in my life would it have occurred to me to invade an archaeological monument at the risk of damaging it, and what’s more, in a foreign country as was the case now. I didn’t have any idea of what could happen, I felt I didn’t control the situation, and that made me nervous and scared, even if I didn’t show it at all, since my steps were still firm and my expression decided. Sarcastically, I thought that in this the professor and I were very similar: Both of us knew how to hide our true thoughts.