Authors: Matilde Asensi
We had a layover in Queen Beatrix Airport, in Aruba, in the Antilles around three in the afternoon, local time, although it was five hours earlier there than in Spain, and we took off again at four. For the time being, we were on our expected schedule, so, barring setbacks, we would arrive in Peru when the sky was still light. It was strange to travel in the same direction as the sun, having it always next to us, almost in the same position. The day went by, but for us, it was being continuously regenerated. Poor Jabba, who didn’t accept the food they offered him, was no more than a human rag doll when at last we stood in Jorge Chávez Airport, in Lima. Fifteen actual hours of flight time was much more than he could handle. His hair was the clay-colored from his sweat and stuck to his head like a helmet.
“But did something happen to him on an airplane that he hasn’t told me about?” I asked Proxi, while we got on the bus that would take us to the other terminal. It was cold in Peru, much more so than in Spain, so I pulled up the neck of my jacket and noticed that my breathing was a bit labored.
“No, nothing’s ever happened to him,” she explained. “Fear of flying doesn’t necessarily have a cause. It could have, of course, but really it’s an anxiety disorder. Jabba can’t control it. I think it’s better if you stop worrying about him, Root; you’re not going to cure him.”
“But… Look at him,” I whispered in her ear, so the man in question wouldn’t hear. “He looks like the walking dead. And he’s been like that since we left El Prat this morning!”
“Listen to me, Arnau,” she ordered. “Leave it. There’s nothing that can help him. He’s convinced that ‘airplane’ is synonymous with ‘death,’ and he constantly sees himself, and me, in those last minutes of panic as we fall vertically through the void before crashing into the ground. When we get to Bolivia, it will pass.”
“The crazy monkey,” I muttered.
“What did you say?”
“I once read that that’s what the ancient Greeks called the runaway imagination, that which makes us have fantasies that speed up our heart and destructively obsess us.”
“Yes, it’s a good definition. I like it. The crazy monkey,” she repeated, as she held onto one of the bus’s vertical bars, since it was already completely full. The vehicle started up and crossed the large open tarmac under a light that was already that of evening. We had a little longer than an hour before our next and last flight.
“I should call my grandmother,” I said pensively. “I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye, and I want to know how Daniel is.”
“In Spain it’s already past midnight, Root,” Proxi said, casting a glance at her watch.
“I know, that’s exactly why I’m going to call her. She must be in the hospital now, reading.”
“Or sleeping.”
“Or chatting in the hallway with someone from her generation, which is most likely.”
“I’m dizzy,” Jabba remarked at that moment, surprising us.
“It’s pure exhaustion,” Proxi told him, putting a hand on his face.
After sitting for an hour and a half in a bar without being called to board the flight to Bolivia, we went up to one of the information desks to ask what was going on. And it’s a good thing we did, because otherwise we wouldn’t have found out that the Taca Airlines plane that should be taking us to La Paz was delayed two hours, due to unspecified technical problems. I took advantage of the time to chat with my grandmother who told me that Daniel was the same as always, with no change for better or worse, and that they were going to change his treatment again. She was very interested in the state of my health, because my breathing sounded labored to her, and when I told her that Jabba was unwell because he suffered from a fear of flying and that he was very dizzy from the nervous tension, she was overly alarmed:
“My God, and you haven’t even arrived in La Paz yet!” she exclaimed, worried. “Go to any desk right away and ask for oxygen for both of you,” she ordered.
“What in the world are you talking about, Grandma?”
“Altitude sickness, Arnauet, altitude sickness, which is very bad! I’m telling you, because it’s happened to me several times. Do me a favor and breathe very slowly and take your time walking. And keep drinking water, two or three quarts each, at least!”
How could the damned altitude sickness not have occurred to us? Because of the rush! It was common sense to remember that when you travel to an Andean country, you get an uncomfortable altitude sickness due to the lack of oxygen in the air, which is very thin. The strange thing was, Jabba climbed ten-thousand-foot-high mountains almost every weekend, although, of course, he was a wreck from the airplane thing.
“If you’re embarrassed to ask for oxygen,” she concluded, “when you get to La Paz, drink an infusion of coca. Mate de coca, the call it, like the Argentines. You’ll feel much better right away, you’ll see.”
Even though I knew it wouldn’t bother her, I abstained from making any sarcastic comments, because I preferred not to imagine my sainted grandmother ingesting alkaloids.
At last, around midnight in Bolivia, we landed at El Alto Airport, in La Paz. The name was very appropriate because it had been built at an altitude of more than thirteen thousand feet, and consequently, the cold was much stronger than what we could stand, and our clothes were, without a doubt, grotesquely insufficient. It had been almost twenty-four hours since we had left Barcelona, and yet for us it was still the same day, Wednesday, the 5
th
of June. During the last flight, they had conscientiously informed us of the effects of altitude sickness and explained to us the remedies to combat it, which were the same that my grandmother had told me about. But as we traveled in a private Radio-Taxi to the hotel, located in the city’s downtown—oddly, on Tiahuanacu Street—, our state began to take an alarming turn: We felt dizzy, had cold sweats, headaches, a buzzing in our ears, and accelerated pulses. Fortunately, as soon as we were through the door of the hotel, they took charge of us with friendly smiles and expressions of understanding.
“The doctor will be up to see you right away,” the receptionist told me, “and room service will take you up some coca mates. You’ll see, you’ll feel much better. And if you’ll allow, I’ll give you a bit of advice we give all foreigners: ‘Eat sparingly, walk slowly, and sleep alone.’ Enjoy your visit to La Paz.”
Despite what one might expect, the Bolivians didn’t have an excessively thick accent. I was surprised, because I had expected a stronger one, but that was not the case. Of course, they spoke with slang, idioms, and the peculiar habit of pronouncing the “C” and “Z” sibilantly, as if they were an “S,” but it was not only not grating, but I can even say it was softer than the accent from the Canaries, for example, which we’re so used to. Before long, I didn’t even notice it, and oddly, we ourselves developed a special cadence, Catalan-Bolivian, that stayed with us for a long time.
It’s true that the harsh coca mate and the Sorochipil, the pills that hotel’s doctor prescribed to us, softened the disagreeable symptoms, but they didn’t manage to revitalize me enough for me to make myself leave the room until two days later. My body felt as heavy as if it were made of lead, and breathing was an exhausting effort. My grandmother called me frequently to find out how I was, but I could barely give her more than choked groans in response. Proxi, who recovered quickly, came to see me a lot, and told me that Jabba slept so deeply that she couldn’t manage to wake him, not even by throwing water on his face. The only thing I can say is that from my sickbed I had a very good understanding of my colleague with whom I felt united at a distance. At least those two days served to adapt us to the time change and to make Jabba forget the discomforts of the journey.
On Friday, we were at last able to go out for a walk in the afternoon. La Paz is a very calm city, with barely any crime other than small time pickpocketing from distracted tourists, so, with our documents and money safe in inner pockets, we strolled calmly through the streets of downtown, enjoying an environment so unlike our own and so full of different smells and colors. There, the general rhythm was slow (maybe because of the lack of oxygen, who knows?), and life transmitted a sensation of completely unfamiliar calm. From almost any street, you could see in the background the distant, tall, snow-covered mountains that surrounded the hollow in which La Paz had been constructed. According to what they had told us in the hotel, the population was mostly Indian; however, in the streets we walked through there was also an abundance of white people and
cholo
s (mestizos), but our surprise was great when we noticed that the ones they called Indians there were none other than full blooded Aymara, descendants of the ancient lords and masters of all those lands, possessors of an extraordinary language that, incredibly, was scorned as a sign of illiteracy and lack of culture. It was very difficult for us to assimilate these
absurd ideas, and we were absorbed looking at any street vendor with dark skin and blue-black hair, or at any
chola
dressed in her wide skirt and her English bowler hat, as if they were authentic Yatiri from Taipikala. I was so enthusiastic that I went up to one of those who sheltered behind a table of souvenirs for tourists and asked him to say some phrases in Aymara to us. The man seemed not to understand me well at first, but then, when he saw the bolivianos
12
, he launched into a recital of some kind of poetry, that, of course, we didn’t understand, but it didn’t matter, because
—
at last!
—
we were hearing Aymara spoken, the authentic Aymara, and it was the most devilishly harsh language that I had heard in my life: It sounded like the drums of Calanda, but with no rhythm, played irregularly; with strange aspirations and gurgles of air on some syllables, and tongue clicks and explosive emissions of sound from the throat or mouth. For a few seconds we didn’t react, incredulous before that cascade of unlikely acoustic effects, and when we reacted, it was to say goodbye to the vendor, who bid us farewell with a friendly “
Jikisinkama
!” (something like “See you later!”) and to continue our walk around the vicinity of the Church of San Francisco with the feeling of being under the effects of altitude sickness again. Around us, the storytellers told their fables in the centers of small circles of people who had stopped to listen to them, and the stalls selling fabrics, magical objects, necklaces, figurines, and alpaca hats attracted a growing number of local buyers and tourists like ourselves.
“Those were,” Proxi dared to comment at last, very taken aback, “the famous natural sounds?”
The three of us were well encased in our jackets and coats, because, while in Spain summer was taking its first steps into magnificent weather, there, in the Southern Hemisphere, it was the beginning of a harsh winter dry season.
“No doubt they were,” I murmured, stepping carefully on the cobbled ground. On the narrow street full of people, a few motorcycles moved at the speed of turtles. La Paz was a city of ocher and brown walls over which were superimposed the attractive colors of the ponchos, skirts, hats, and blankets of the Aymara. On all the streets, the low houses had little railed balconies, full of flowerpots and clothes hung out to dry.
“The original language,” Jabba grumbled, looking forward with determination. “The possible language of Adam and Eve, whose sounds are those of nature and are made up of the same elements as beings and things. Well, the hell with the raw material, if that’s the result!”
“It seems incredible that that guy could produce those whistles and bangs with his mouth and throat,” I added, impressed. “And, besides, they’re supposed to be words with meanings. Miserable gibberish!”
“Well, I’m sorry for you two,” the mercenary remarked, as she headed toward one of stalls, “but that gibberish is the most perfect language in the world, whether or not it’s Adam and Eve’s, and it’s the authentic programming code that contains the secrets of the Yatiri.”
The vender from the stall, who had heard what Proxi had said, brightened visibly and began to gesticulate enthusiastically:
“Listen, have you seen these beautiful products? I’m Yatiri and I can offer you the best llama fetuses and the most effective amulets. Look, look… Do you want medicinal herbs? Sticks of Viracocha? Coca leaves? I can assure you: There are none better in the whole market.”
“You are Yatiri?” Proxi asked, with an ingenuous expression.
“Of course, miss! This is the Witches’ Market, is it not? All of us here are Yatiri.”
“I think we should get a few tourist guide books on Bolivia,” Jabba whispered in my ear.
“Either we’re more lost than an octopus in a parking garage, or something here smells suspicious.”
“We’re not here as tourists,” I replied, rubbing my icy nose. “We’re here to go inside the secret chamber of Lakaqullu.”
While I spoke, I was considering buying a stick of Viracocha from the “Yatiri,” not so much from a desire for research as much as to have a present to take back to my nephew when we returned home. The sticks of Viracocha were sad wooden copies of the staffs the god on the Gate of the Sun held, painted in garish colors and with llama wool tassels hanging from one end. I didn’t do it, because I thought that Ona would throw me down the stairs headfirst if I gave her son the perfect weapon for destroying her house.
“Right. No tourism. But I warn you, we’re making fools of ourselves in the meantime.”
In a bus terminal, which is what they called the casual stops of the old
movilidades
, or vans for urban transportation, we found a tourist information stand and we got hold of a map of the city and some informative pamphlets, but it didn’t take long for us to realize that the map was quite useless if the streets didn’t have signs with their respective names, and that the pamphlets barely gave information about what we had in front of us, much less anything about something as necessary as a good restaurant to have dinner at. Despite this, in an overview, we found some facts about the Witches’ Market where we seemed to have been, in which the Yatiri, “Aymara name for healers,” according to the pamphlet, sold traditional products for health and luck. So, on the brink of depression, we decided to enjoy walking a little longer through the labyrinth of cobbled alleys with an unmistakable colonial air, packed with elegant buildings and numerous Andean baroque churches full of odd, very pagan, Incan motifs.