The Lost Origin (42 page)

We went down the stairs without wanting to acknowledge the small detail that we were burying ourselves even deeper underground instead of ascending, but it didn’t last long. After twenty-odd stairs, we found ourselves in a narrow rocky passage that stretched off in a straight line and continued in a straight line for an hour. And then, for two. And when we were finishing the third hour of straightness was when we noticed that we had left Tiwanaku-Taipikala behind long ago and that we must be several miles to the west, according to the compass.

At last, around four in the morning, and more dead than alive, we ran into another staircase that went up. But first, of course, there had to be a final surprise.

We had just set foot on the first stair—I went first—after making sure it was clean of black moss and slipperiness, when the rasping and limp voice of Jabba, who was behind me, pulled me from my lethargy.

“Root, you skipped something.”

I turned, more to look at him than to find out what the hell he was talking about—he looked like a lump, with circles under his eyes and a horrible ruddy shadow of beard on his transparent face—and I saw that, without moving, he was pointing at some kind of open niche halfway up the wall, located right where the staircase began.

I backed up a step and stood in front of the cavity, taking the small Maglite flashlight from my pocket, because I felt incapable even of tilting my head to illuminate the hollow. There, as on the lectern we had found after passing the first condor head, was another piece of stone that was saying “pick me up.” It was a simple ring, a round sheet about eight inches in diameter and one and a half or two inches thick with a hole in the middle, like a thick and heavy bracelet. The professor, who had been walking last, passed Proxi, who hadn’t said a word, and stood next to Jabba to look at the piece.

“Did you see that it has an arrow engraved on it?” she said in a tired voice.

It was true. The stone ring had a very simple arrow—two lines that converged at one end—carved at the top.

“Do we have to take this doughnut with us?” Jabba asked, disdainful. No question about it, he was hungry.

“I would say so,” I replied. “But this time it’s not my turn to carry it, since I carried the other template.”

“You have a lot of nerve,” he complained, but picked it up in his right hand, and when he picked it up, a sound like cogs and pulleys came from the upper part of the staircase. Without giving us time to react, a sudden breath of cool air brushed by us and slipped through our noses into our lungs.

“The exit!” I exclaimed happily, and without giving it any more thought, I shot up the stairs with my heart racing. I had to get out of that hole.

The first thing I saw was the sky, marvelously full of stars. I had never seen so many. And then, with a lot of completely black open country around me, I felt deathly chill, as if I had been stuck suddenly in a freezer. I began to sneeze from the sudden temperature change, and as the others were coming outside and recovering from the claustrophobia, I used up several tissues with that sudden fit. It must have been a few degrees below freezing and we only had the light clothes we had put on the day before. Immediately, Jabba and Proxi started sneezing as well, and it turned into a concert. Only Marta remained intact, almost immune to the freezing cold night of the Altiplano. I saw her look in one direction and then another, perfectly unconcerned, and finally decide on the second.

“The town of Tiahuanaco isn’t very far,” she said, beginning the march through that dark Siberian steppe.

We, with our tissues in hand, followed her like loyal lambs.

“How do you know?” I asked her between sneezes.

“Because that peak over there,” and she pointed to an immense and distant shadow, almost impossible to recognize in the blackness of the night, “is Illimani, the sacred mountain of the Aymara, and the town’s in that direction. I know this place well. I played here as a child.”

“In this wasteland?” Lola asked, surprised.

“Yes, in this wasteland,” she murmured, without stopping. “I came to Bolivia for the first time with my parents, when I was three years old. I only stayed in Barcelona during the school term, and that’s until I got married, had my children, and finished my studies. You could say I’m half Bolivian. My friends were the children from the town of Tiahuanaco and we were free to run all day around this land. Thirty-five years ago here, we didn’t even know what a tourist was.”

Marc, Lola, and I shivered and our teeth chattered as we followed with light steps after the professor. It took a little over half an hour for us to arrive at the outskirts of town, and we headed directly for Don Gastón’s hotel, who turned to a statue when, in long underwear and terry cloth shirt, he saw us show up at the door of his establishment. As soon as he recognized Marta, he quickly invited us inside and woke up the whole house. They brought us blankets and hot soup and lit the fire, throwing on wood as if they had to get a steamship moving. Marta gave Don Gastón a succinct explanation, which the man accepted without complaint. Then he took us to our rooms and promised that no one would bother us for any reason. Stumbling, I took a shower before getting into bed, and then, at last, I fell deeply asleep.

IV

I woke up around five in the afternoon, and when I went down to the dining room, Marc and Lola were already dressed and ready, waiting for me, calmly reading a Bolivian newspaper. According to what they told me as I ate breakfast, the professor had left after eating and had left a note for us with a telephone number, asking us to get in contact with her when we returned to La Paz.

Don Gastón, since we were friends of Marta’s, only charged us the minimum for one day, without extras or food, and got us one of the few taxis in the village to return to La Paz. We made the journey in the company of some
cholas
with black braids and bowler hats, who unloaded thick bundles of multicolored cloth into the trunk of the vehicle, and who didn’t open their mouths once in the whole trip, probably from lack of air, since Proxi and I also traveled in the backseat (Jabba wouldn’t have fit).

When we walked through the doors of our hotel, we felt at home. It was so strange to think about everything that had happened to us that we simply decided not to think about it. It was as if there were a hole in time; three months could have passed, or years, because the hours had dilated in an extraordinary way and it was unbelievable that only a day had gone by since we had left there. The hole was also in our minds. We got into the elevator in silence, and the three of us went up to my room. Marc seemed worried:

“What do I do with the doughnut?” he asked me immediately after closing the door. Lola threw herself onto the sofa, and without thinking twice, turned on the television. She needed to recover her sanity, and the idiot box supplied her with a certain feeling of normality.

“Let’s store it in the safe.”

Our rooms came with safes hidden inside the closets. It’s not that they were the paragon of security, but they provided minimum safety for the most valuable objects. Before leaving, I had stored my Captain Haddock watches inside.

“Should we put the laptop and Proxi’s digital camera in there too?”

“Do you want to hide the proof from sight or something?” I asked, as I took a seat in front of the desk and turned on the computer. “We have to download all the images that are still on the camera’s memory card and then burn all of them to a CD. That’s what we’ll store in the safe, along with the doughnut. The rest of the equipment stays out so we can keep working.”

“You still want to keep going with this?” Lola asked me from the sofa, in an aggressive tone.

“No, I assure you that the only thing I want is for us to go out for a walk, have dinner somewhere, go to one of those
peñas
where they have live music, and once I’m there, I want to drink all the beer in the place.”

“Half of the stock is mine,” Jabba warned me.

“Half,” I granted. “Only half.”

“But what the hell are you talking about?” Proxi asked, taken aback. “You guys don’t drink!”

“My dear Lola,” I told her. “I don’t care. I plan on getting drunk anyway.”

“Me too,” Jabba added.

Of course, we weren’t going to do it, because we didn’t like alcohol (except for on special occasions and important dates, when we, like everyone, knew how to enjoy a glass of good wine
or a little cava), but making such a claim out loud, in such a forceful way so typical of audacious and decided men, was a big interior comfort, a real reaffirmation of our virile spirit.

While I moved all the photographs, information, and documents to a compact disc, my colleague went off to his room to shower again and change his clothes. Lola’s only movement was that of her right thumb changing the channel with the remote. When I picked up the stone ring to put it in the safe, along with the newly burned CD, I saw that on the back it had a very strange hole, a cavity in the shape of a triangle with two equal sides and one shorter one, slightly curved outward, like a wedge of cheese. I thought about showing it to Lola, but I was sure that if I did, she would bite me, so I immediately put it away without any further consideration.

Right before leaving the hotel, Jabba proposed that we call Marta. Little by little, we were recovering and turning back into people, but we were still denying all that had happened in the catacombs of Taipikala.

“We won’t call her today,” I replied. “Tomorrow’s another day.”

“But she’s waiting. At least call her to tell her we’ll talk tomorrow.”

“Stop pestering me.”

“Who has her phone number?” he insisted, pig-headed.

“I have it,” Proxi said, “and I’m not going to give it to you. I agree with Root: Tomorrow is another day. Now we’re going to have dinner in the best restaurant in La Paz. I need polluted air, haute cuisine, and a lot of people and traffic around me.”

“I’m game,” I said, moving in the direction of the street when the doorman let us out.

But Jabba didn’t give up his effort. He hammered away at it while we wandered around, enjoying the modern part of La Paz, with its high buildings, its streets packed with cars, its traffic lights—which no one, by the way, paid attention to—its street lights that came on shortly after we started our walk, its people talking on cell phones, its luminous billboards sparkling from the roofs…. Basically, the wonders of civilization. But of course, my colleague couldn’t abide Marta Torrent waiting for our call without receiving it. For me, the mention of Marta not only transported me to the Pyramid of the Traveler, but also to the anger about the thing with Daniel, so my stomach twisted every time that pain in the neck brought up the subject. But, at last, desperate to make him shut up, I took out my phone, and between courses of the exquisite European food, I dialed the number on the note Lola passed to me over the table. It was answered by the voice of a man with a thick Bolivian accent, who, when I identified myself and asked for Marta, immediately gave the phone to her. It was very surreal. It was just a few hours ago that we had separated from that woman, and the situation was uncomfortable, because I had gone from abhorring her with all my heart to feeling guilty when I faced her, with the disagreeable addition that the experience we had lived together had created some strange bonds of familiarity that didn’t seem at all real to me at that moment. It was like calling an old girl friend you had just broken up with and suddenly having to meet with her for some urgent business.

“Where are you, Arnau?” was the first thing she said. Her voice unsettled my nerves.

“Having dinner in a restaurant,” I replied, taking the napkin from my lap and putting it momentarily on the table so I could sit more comfortably.

“Which one?”

“La Suisse.”

“Oh, then you’re close by, in Sopocachi!”

“Well, yes. Having dinner.”

“Would you feel like having a coffee in the house of some friends of mine when you
finish?”

I was tempted to rudely tell her no, but I controlled myself. I pushed the mute button, looked at my colleagues, and repeated the proposition to them:

“Marta Torrent is inviting us to have coffee after dinner. What do you think?”

“Where?” Marc asked; Proxi only made a pained face and shook her head repeatedly.

“In the house of some friends.”

“I say sure,” replied the worm, who was stuffing himself with swiss cheeses. “What do you say, Proxi?”

“I’ve been saying no for an hour. Didn’t you see me shake my head?”

“Okay, forget it then. Tell her no, Root, that we’ll talk to her tomorrow.”

I released the mute button and put the phone back to my ear.

“Is your friends’ house very far from here?” I asked.

“Not at all! It’s right by where you’re having dinner,” Marta replied.

Proxi looked at me with a very large question mark on her face.

“Give me the address and we’ll be there within an hour.” I looked at my watch. “At ten thirty on the dot.”

When I hung up, I had a knife in front of my nose.

“Didn’t we agree we wouldn’t do anything until tomorrow?” Proxi asked with a menacing gleam in her black eyes.

I nodded pathetically.

“So?” And the knife inched closer.

“I’m curious,” I justified, clumsily. “Marc wanted to go and I want to know why the professor was so interested in meeting tonight. I thought it might be important. Besides,” I said, looking down at my plate, “the sooner we finish this, the better. We can’t live in Bolivia forever, and my brother is still hospitalized.”

The mention of Daniel provoked an awkward silence at the table.

“If we manage…,” Proxi stammered after a few seconds. “If we manage….”

“To cure him?” I finished for her.

“Yes,” she muttered, looking me in the eye. “What will you do? How are you going to approach the situation?”

“I have no idea. I suppose that first I’ll have to talk with the professor and ask her what she’s going to do, if she’s going to open an administrative investigation or something like that. After that, we’ll see. For now,” I hesitated, “I don’t know, I can’t think about that.”