The Lost Origin (30 page)

After that, a little over half a mile away from Akapana, the path through the ruins took us to its supposed twin, Puma Punku, where, apart from proving that the ornamental motifs really were marine, and that, since it was so perfect, the stone without a doubt had to have been worked with whatever it was the Aymara used as a mechanical drill, we were met with a little more of the same: total chaos in a sea of gigantic stones. We only ran into something unexpected when we rounded a bend on the hill: a metal fence enclosing an area that was clearly in the process of being excavated. There were people inside the perimeter, all uniformed with panama or cowboy hats or baseball caps, tee-shirts, shorts, and sturdy boots with their socks sticking out the top. There might have been about a dozen people total, going up and down ladders and carrying boxes back and forth. In one end of the fenced area, a big canvas military tent was being erected (the general headquarters, probably) with the emblem of the UNAR, the National Archeology Union.

“What was that about people not working on Saturdays, huh?” I asked sarcastically.

“Shut up and back away,” Jabba muttered at my side, grabbing my arm.

“But what’s going on?”

“She’s there, don’t you see her?” Proxi murmured, turning her back to the camp and walking slowly in the other direction. “She’s the one in the red tee-shirt.”

Before turning to follow my friends, I had time to make out the woman Proxi was talking about, but it seemed impossible to me that she could be Marta Torrent.

“It’s not her,” I murmured, while we walked away with the air of distracted tourists. “That isn’t the professor.”

“I saw her face, so keep walking and don’t stop.”

“Can’t you guys stop being so pig-headed, please?” I exclaimed, once we had rounded the hill and were out of sight of the excavation. “That woman in the red tee-shirt didn’t have the body or the look of a snooty and vain fifty-year-old woman, okay? She was covered in dirt and she had great legs.”

“Didn’t you hear Jabba say we saw her face? Her white hair was even sticking out from under her hat!”

“I’d bet my neck that you two are wrong.”

I remembered an older woman, elegantly dressed in a suit with a suede jacket, shoes with very thin heels, pearl earrings and necklace, a wide silver bracelet, and, over her eyes, narrow glasses with blue frames and a metal cord. Her movements were distinguished, and her voice and manner of speaking a little Gothic. What the hell did all that have to do with that much younger woman, with a cowboy hat, dusty boots, dirty short-sleeved tee-shirt, and old military shorts, carrying boxes like a longshoreman? Please! Not even if she were Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

“Okay, we’re wrong, but let’s get out of here in case she decides to come over.” We
walked back toward Akapana as if the devil were behind us.

“Maybe we should leave,” Jabba muttered pensively.

“Yonson Ricardo will come for us after fourteen hundred hours,” Proxi remembered, repeating the expression the taxi driver had said to us and that had left us breathless, “and we still have a little over two hours.”

“But we have his cellular number,” I said, also imitating the Bolivian manner of speaking.

“No, we won’t leave,” she broke in, very decisive. “We’ll look for the entrances to the chamber of Lakaqullu, and we’ll figure out how to go about it, exactly as we were planning, though we’ll pay close attention to whoever comes near us.”

At the second intersection of dirt paths, we turned left, heading toward Putuni, the Palace of Tombs. According to the guidebook, that was where the priests of Tiwanaku had lived, in rooms with colored walls located next to the strange hollows in the floor. This information surprised us a great deal, because according to what we had read when we were in Barcelona, the supposed residence of the Capacas and the Yatiri had been Kerikala, the building we would visit next. Anyway, it turned out there wasn’t much left to see: That supposed impregnable door couldn’t even be seen anymore, the one that had confused the conquistadors, making them believe great treasures were hidden there.

Kerikala was the penultimate disappointment, although I shouldn’t call it that, because if we were going to pass judgment on the past, the Acropolis of Athens could be considered a contemptible remnant of what it had been in the height of its splendor. Nevertheless, what was undeniable was that, between the conquistadors and natives, a great job of systematic and tenacious destruction had been done. Maybe the nearby town of Tiahuanaco (especially its cathedral) and the Guaqui-La Paz Railroad had been a source of national pride, or maybe they had a really important social function, but nothing justified the devastation that had occurred in a place as important and irreplaceable as Taipikala.

And at last we arrived at Lakaqullu, situated to the north of Kerikala. We could hardly believe we were really there, although “there” could be summed up in few words: a mound of red earth with four stone stairs that ended in a green andesite doorway so simple and unadorned that it could very well have come from any modern brick factory. Around us, the country was covered in high scrub, right up to the barbed wire fence that surrounded Tiwanaku. Straining our vision a little, we could make out trucks and buses driving on the highway behind the enclosure.

“Is that all?” I asked grumpily. I don’t know what I had been expecting, maybe something more attractive, more beautiful, or the opposite, something so ugly that it attracted notice. Of everything we had inspected that morning in Taipikala, Lakaqullu was the meanest and most miserable. There was nothing there, and when I say nothing, I mean literally nothing.

We were alone facing the stairs. The rest of the tourists visiting the place didn’t even bother to get close: It was far away from the rest of the ruins, and really, there wasn’t much to see.

“Hey, Root,” Proxi said, defiant, “do you have your feet on the ground?”

“Of course. Do you want me to float?”

“Well, under your shoes is the secret that can return sanity to your brother.”

I didn’t react. Proxi was right: Under my feet, who knows how deep, there was a chamber sealed by the Yatiri before they left into exile, and in that place was hidden the secret of their strange programming language. If my brother had any hope of recovering his life it was, as the mercenary had said, under my shoes. That place was very sacred, the most important place in Taipikala. The Yatiri had left many valuable things there, in the hope of returning someday, or so
that they might be of use to a humanity in a time of hardship. And no one knew except us, and perhaps the professor, who had announced with much fanfare that she was ready to show the world that Lakaqullu was an important place.

“Fine,” I started to say, full of a new energy. “We’ll split up. The signs that will show us the entrance to the chimneys are supposed to be around here.”

“The Gate is in the middle,” Jabba pointed out, going up the stairs and positioning himself in front of it as he opened his arms and touched the jambs with his hands. “If the pyramid with three floors is square, as we read, and there are two chimneys, as is depicted on the pedestal of the god Thunupa, we should suppose that the orientation is marked by this gate. So, you, Root, go to the right,” and he pointed out the direction with his right hand, “and you, Proxi, go to the left.”

“Hey, tough guy,” she protested, putting her hands on her hips, “and what might we suppose you will be doing?”

“Watching to see if the professor’s coming. You don’t want her to catch us, right?”

“You have a lot of nerve…!” I exclaimed, laughing as I started to walk in a straight line from the right side of the Gate of the Moon, heading east.

“Don’t you know it!” Proxi yelled, moving away in the opposite direction.

I waded into the weeds, which came up to my knees, with an annoying feeling of apprehension. My natural habitat was the city, with its pollution, its cement, and its bustle, and my habitual ground, asphalt. The profound background silence and constant cicada song attacking my ears didn’t agree with me, neither did walking in the country, tramping through bushes in which the alarming presence of unknown creatures could be heard. I had never been a child who collected beetles, silk worms, or lizards. In my current house in Barcelona not even a fly or an ant got in, or any other kind of insect, in spite of the garden, because Sergi took great care to prevent it. I was an urbanite accustomed to breathing pollution and climate controlled air, to driving a nice car through crowded streets, and to communicating with the world through the most advanced technologies, so seeing nature live wasn’t healthy for my body. Give me a place to stand, and I shall move the world, said Archimedes; give me a bit of fiber optic cable and a computer, and I will take on the world or I’ll change it from top to bottom, but don’t make me walk in the country like Heidi, because I’ll feel sick.

Okay, so there I was, dragging myself through weeds, with my backbone bent over like a cotton-picking slave, and separating the bushes with my naked hands to examine the dirt ground in search of something that looked like a warrior’s helm, an extraterrestrial animal, or a space ship. What a mess.

“You’re getting off course, Arnau!” Jabba shouted. “Turn a little to the right!”

“You could be doing this, you ass…,” I grumbled through clenched teeth, doing what he said.

I advanced step by step, very slowly, dodging the edges of stones that dotted the land, hidden by the vegetation, trying to keep the huge ants from biting my fingers.

I must have only covered about a hundred feet when I heard an exclamation at my back and turned around to see Jabba rapidly descending the stairs and running in Proxi’s direction. I didn’t think twice before I also shot off in her direction like a lunatic with the hope that nothing had happened to her and that all that commotion was because we had found one of the entrances. When I got to them, Proxi was leaning down, with one knee on the ground, using her hand to clean what looked like a small commemorative plaque, one of those that have an ostentatious text engraved on the stone. Jabba also knelt on the ground, and I did the same, panting from the
effort of running. There in the middle of the plate was our warrior’s helm or space ship, the same drawing that appeared on the three-floored pyramid at the feet of Thunupa. If we hadn’t known that all that obeyed a purpose strategically conceived five or six hundred years ago, the plaque would have looked to us like one of so many fragments of stone with which Taipikala was carpeted. Nevertheless, despite barely sticking out of the ground and being hidden by the vegetation and covered in red earth and dead leaves, it was none other than the lock that would allow (or impede) our descent into the chamber of the Yatiri.

“Okay, and now what?” I asked, also cleaning the stone with the palm of my hand.

“Should we try to lift it?” Jabba proposed.

“And if someone sees us?”

“Proxi, keep watch.”

“Why me?” she objected, with a cross expression.

“Because lifting stones,” Jabba explained, with a paternal sounding tone, “is a job for men.”

She stood up slowly and, as she brushed her hands off on her pants, murmured:

“You know, you’re idiots.”

Jabba and I started to pull up on the plaque, each of us on one side, but that lump of stone obviously wasn’t coming up an inch.

“Idiots?” I muttered, stretching and preparing for another try. “Why idiots?”

The second attempt didn’t do anything either, so, together, we began to push the stone in one direction, to see if we could manage to move it, since it probably wasn’t very deep.

“Because a secret password can be found out using brute force, like we did with the password to Daniel’s computer, but a code can only be understood using the intellect. And I don’t need to remind you that the Yatiri worked with code, geniuses. It’s a language, and languages aren’t learned by memorizing millions of random words, thinking that the ones of the language we want to learn are among them, which is what, basically, you two are doing right now.”

A little worn out, I stood to look at her, clutching my lower back.

“What are you trying to say with that whole monologue?”

“That you should stop acting like asses, and start to use your brains.”

Okay, it made sense. The whole history we were dealing with was a play of light and shadow, so launching ourselves like animals at the plaque might not accomplish anything.

“And how do we open it?” I asked. Jabba had sat down on the ground with his legs crossed, like a fat Buddha.

“I don’t know,” Proxi murmured, furrowing her brow and photographing the plaque from various angles, “but everything’s on the Gate of the Sun, so it would be a good idea to go back and examine it. It has a lot of details that we still haven’t given any attention to.”

“The problem is, it’s almost fourteen hundred hours,” I said, looking at my watch.

The three of us remained in silence, thinking.

“And I’m starving,” Jabba announced, as if that were something new.

“Let’s go,” Proxi resolved. “We’ll tell Yonson Ricardo to take us to eat something somewhere nearby, and we’ll come back this afternoon.”

I leaned over to cover the plaque with the earth we had removed, to hide it, and Marc beat weeds to rearrange them. Then we set off down the path toward the exit.

“Have you noticed that everything we discovered in Barcelona is coming true?” Proxi asked in a tone of intimate satisfaction as we walked by the ticket booth.

We didn’t answer. She was right, and it was a fantastic feeling.

Yonson Ricardo was waiting for us right there, with a wide smile on his face, leaning against one of the doors of his Radio-Taxi. Of course he could be content, because without doing hardly anything that day, he was going to make a ton of money. So when we told him to take us to eat close by because we wanted to go back in the afternoon, his face lit up.

Driving like a lunatic for a change, he took us to the town of Tiahuanaco, just a few minutes from the ruins, and he covered the distance in a flash. The town was pretty, with low houses, and a clean, pleasant look. The Aymara vendors, with their voluminous multicolored skirts, their fringed blankets, and their long black braids trailing from under their bowler hats, flooded the streets, selling dried chiles, lemons, and purple potatoes. According to what Yonson Ricardo told us, if the Aymara women wore the bowler hat at an angle, it meant they were single, and if they wore it sitting evenly on their head, it meant they were married.