The Lost Origin (60 page)

Two days later, on Friday, August 16
^th
, we boarded the plane that would take us to Peru. This time since we would be traveling in the opposite direction as the sun, we would reach Spain two days later, on Sunday the 18
^th
, although the whole trip would take the same twenty-two hours. In El Alto, we said goodbye to Efraín and Gertrude with big hugs, and exchanged promises to see each other soon in one country or another. Marta would return to Bolivia at the beginning of December to continue the excavations in Lakaqullu over Christmas, and I carried with me Gertrude’s recording of the conversation with the Capacas.

“Tell me everything you do,” she told me for the umpteenth time, “and let me know as soon as you find anything.”

“Don’t be such a pain, please!” Efraín reproached her, shaking my hand enthusiastically.

“Don’t worry, Doctor,” I told her. “I’ll give you a blow-by-blow.”

Before taking off, Marc took some pills that Gertrude had given him, which left him dead to the world even before the plane took off. It was hard for us to wake him up when we landed in the Lima airport and also in all the subsequent airports where we landed and took off again. Gertrude’s pills (with which he was well provisioned) kept him in a comatose state until we got to Spain, and, as he later admitted, that trip was the most pleasant he had taken in all his life.

“What better way to die,” he mumbled sleepily in Schiphol airport, “than to do it without realizing.”

Before each of the planes we boarded started its engines and the pills took effect again, he bitterly said his goodbyes to Proxi, Marta, and me (especially to Proxi, of course) “in case we don’t see each other again.” It got to the point that I swore by what was most holy that I wouldn’t travel with him in an airplane ever again for what remained of my life. Lola could do nothing but put up with it, but I could easily save myself from those dramatic situations.

At last, during the last flight, the one that would take us from Holland to Barcelona, Marta and I sat three rows behind Marc and Lola. It was the moment I had been waiting for to be able to talk openly with her about the problem with Daniel:

“Have you come to some decision in regards to my brother?” I asked her shortly after they served us our lunch trays, just a half hour after take-off. Before that, we had been chatting about computers, and she had asked me with much interest to show her my “robotic house,” as she put it.

She didn’t immediately answer my question. She remained silent for a few long seconds, appearing to put all her attention on the plastic trays in front of us. I would have preferred, by far, a good piece of grilled toucan to that garbage. Marta cleared her throat.

“If he is cured,” she murmured, lifting a bit of dry salad to her mouth with her fork, “I would like to speak with him before doing anything.”

“I think you’re afraid that I’m going to ask you not to turn him in.”

“I’m sure that you wouldn’t do that.”

I smiled. “No, I wouldn’t,” I confessed, pushing the tray away and turning toward her as much as the narrow space allowed, so that I could look at her. “But I would like to know what options you’re considering.”

“The theft of research material from a department is something very serious, Arnau. Don’t think that it’s going to be easy for me to come to a decision. I still can’t believe Daniel capable
of taking documents from my files. I’ve asked myself a thousand times why he would do it. I can’t understand it.”

“Well, although it might be hard for you to believe, he did it because of me,” I explained. “No, not through any fault of mine, or to do me some favor. I have also been thinking a lot about it, and although we’re all blind when it comes to our own family, I think my brother has always felt a great rivalry with me. Jealousy, certainly, or envy. I couldn’t say exactly.”

“Longing to be the firstborn?” she suggested, half jokingly, half seriously.

“Longing for easy success, for fast money.”

“Is that what you have?” she asked, taken aback.

“No, not at all. But he always saw it like that. Or wanted to see it like that. Or he was wrong and he understood it like that. What difference does it make? What matters is that in order to achieve a great success by discovering the power of words, he stole your material on Taipikala.”

“Efraín and I weren’t that far ahead of him,” she admitted, also abandoning her food after a couple of fruitless attempts to swallow it.

“Daniel is very intelligent.”

“I know. Both brothers are. The resemblance isn’t only physical. Which is why I had so much trust in him and in his potential. But I can’t ignore what he did. You must understand, I am the head of the department and one of my professors committed an infraction that could happen again someday.”

“Maybe not,” I suggested.

She was silent again.

“Maybe not,” she admitted after a while, “but I’m suspicious by nature and what I can’t ignore is that part of Daniel’s brain that allowed him to enter into my office and steal the material from my files. He may not do it again, true, but isn’t there something in him that works wrong, something that always wishes for something outside of his reach and tells him, 'Go ahead, you know how to get it'?”

“He’ll need help,” I stated.

“Yes, he will. He has to learn again that there are rules and limits, that not all our desires are obtainable, and that there are no shortcuts or high speed trains to get where we want to go, that achieving things always takes effort.”

“We all make mistakes sometimes.”

“True. Which is why I need to know what’s in his head before making any decision. Maybe you should also sit with him and explain to him in detail how hard you’ve worked to have what you have.”

I considered her words. Of course I thought of talking to my brother, not to tell him my life story but to explain to him at length what I thought of the incredible stupidity of what he had done. Although perhaps Marta was right. Maybe it would be more effective to do what she had said, but how could I sit down with my brother and talk about things like that? I wasn’t sure I knew how to do it.

“On another subject…” she said, also turning as much as possible in her seat to face me. “Have you thought that it would be better for us to be alone with Daniel when I have to repeat the phrase the Yatiri taught me?”

“You remember it, right?” I asked, alarmed.

“Well of course I remember it, don’t be silly! How could I forget something so important? So, what do you say about being alone with him? I just think that it would be very awkward for
me to play tribal witch in front of your family.”

I burst into laughter.

“Don’t worry,” I told her at last, “my grandmother has already taken it upon herself to explain to everyone that I went to the Amazon jungle looking for some magical herbs. She also knows that she has to find a moment in which Daniel’s house is empty so that you and I can go. That matter is already taken care of.”

“How old is your grandmother?” she asked, surprised. “She must be rather long in the tooth.”

“Well, you’ll meet her soon!”

We landed in Barcelona at two in the afternoon. Lola’s mother was waiting for us at the airport. Neither Marta nor I accepted her offer to take us home in her car. Marc was really not well and needed to lie down as soon as possible. We would share a taxi.

“Will you tell us how Daniel responds to the Yatiri’s phrase?” Lola asked quietly as we said goodbye.

“I’ll call you when we’ve done it. No matter how it goes.”

“Don’t forget our agreement about Ker-Central,” Marc, his eyes glassy, pronounced laboriously.

“I’ll put the matter in the advisors’ hands tomorrow,” I replied. “Get some rest tonight; you look pathetic.”

“I know, I know…” he muttered as he followed Lola’s mother like a lamb, dragging the baggage cart.

“Call us, Root,” Proxi insisted with a worried expression. “When everything has been dealt with, the four of us will meet for dinner, okay?” she asked, looking at Marta.

“Of course,” the professor said, smiling. “Have you noticed that while we were in the jungle, you stopped calling each other by your internet nicknames?”

“What a shame you’re not a hacker!” Proxi replied, hugging her and then walking away slowly, following the invalid Jabba and her mother. “But when you visit Arnau’s house, you’ll probably become hooked.”

“And the ‘100’!” Marta said, her smile widening. “I also want to see the ‘100.’”

Proxi raised a hand by way of a goodbye.

“Okay,” I announced, “it’s time to get a taxi.”

I got home before Marta, who lived in Zona Alta, in Bonanova, so I watched as the taxi pulled away, turning on Passeig de Gràcia, taking her uptown.

“Call me when we have to go see Daniel,” she told me before we said goodbye, with the same calm and serious expression as always.

While I was getting into the elevator, I asked myself when I would call her, when the best time would be to do it. Well, I told myself, the answer was simple: As soon as I managed to disperse the family welcome that waited for me upstairs. I would invite her to dinner that night…. Or would that be too soon? Well, so what? I would call her. I wanted to know what she thought of my projects and what she would say about how to bring them off. At the moment, when the elevator door opened, I would have to confront the business of medicinal herbs.

To deal with that issue, on the day after I spoke with my grandmother on the phone from La Paz, I went to the Witches’ Market and bought a disgusting concoction that, according to the Yatiri who sold it inside some grimy glass vials, caused passion in a beloved woman. It didn’t matter to me, anything would have worked as long as it really looked like an ingenious formula prepared especially for my brother, and that thick brown liquid looked like just that. So, after
greeting Clifford and hugging my grandmother, and when my mother had finally finished her battery of noisy kisses, I solemnly gave her the dirty containers and told her that after having consulted with all the Amazon shamans registered in the Bolivian census, I was absolutely sure that a tea with some drops of that product in the morning and at night would return Daniel’s sanity. I didn’t want her to spread more fantasies than was necessary among her friends, so I kept the details to a minimum and limited myself to talking about the indigenous communities we had visited along the Beni River on our trip. Clifford, like a good Englishman, seemed resistant to the experiment, but he didn’t dare to open his mouth in front of my mother, who appeared enthusiastic about the exotic little vials. She immediately got on the telephone and started to tell Ona the whole adventure, and I, taking advantage of the situation, slipped away discreetly and went to my room, where I showered, changed my clothes, and shaved my beard, restoring the goatee. My grandmother had commented that I was thinner, handsomer, and dark for the first time in my life, which was true. My hair was still very short, and I still had my earring, which now stood out much more against skin tanned by the sun and wind. Little remained of that long, pale, and urban face I had had when I left.

But there were other changes. I discovered it when I opened my mouth to ask the system to connect me to Marta and noticed I didn’t know how to address it, because I no longer had any idea how to talk to a machine gifted with an intelligence perhaps as artificial as our own. I froze from that discovery. What Gertrude had told us about the brain and neurotransmitters, what we had learned about the power of sounds to program and deprogram the mind, and even the example of the shaman entering into a trance with the rhythmic thumps of the drum and maraca, had left me with a doubt that could be summarized in the typical question of the programming world: What difference is there between adding two and two, which is what people do, and seeming to add two and two, which is what computers do? The result is still the same, four, no matter what pathway one takes to get there, and in this case my surprise was that the pathway was basically the same: an infinite number of electrical connections, as fast as light, that traveled through neurons, in our case, or through silicon, in the case of computers.

Many things had changed inside me over those last two and a half months of strange lessons, and now, to my surprise and almost against my will, I gave the nameless system that controlled my house its own personality, which it never would have occurred to me it could have. And that, in fact, it did not have, I told myself angrily, shaking my head to rid my mind of absurd ideas. I knew that I should give it the orders in an unequivocal tone of voice so that it would interpret them as being directed at it and not at Magdalena, but from my mouth there only came a polite voice that wanted to ask for things with a completely uncalled for “please.” I had to make an effort and force myself to remember the programmed way to communicate with it, but after a couple of attempts, which it ignored, I began to get annoyed: Maybe it had become autonomous or had broken? Luckily, it occurred to me to look at the giant screen, and I saw its message there: “Blocked number. Unblock number and dial?” I laughed at myself and at my absentmindedness, and only after a few seconds did I notice that the system was trying to tell me something important. Marta’s number, blocked? How could it be blocked?

“But what the hell is wrong with me!” I exclaimed out loud. “I’m an idiot!”

I had suddenly remembered that on the afternoon of that distant Sunday that Marta had called to demand her material on Taipikala and the Aymara, I had ordered the system to reject all calls from that number and all that came from the owner of that number, and even those from her department at the university.

“Unblock!” I said.

Just a few seconds later, I heard Marta’s voice.

“Yes?”

“Marta, this is Arnau.”

“Hello, Arnau. What is it? Do we have to go to Daniel’s house already?”

“No, no…,” I laughed. “Would you like to have dinner with me tonight? I want to talk with you about a few things.”

There was a surprised silence on the other end.

“Of course,” she replied at last.