Authors: Matilde Asensi
The boss, commander, leader, chief, or whatever he was moved to stand facing me, since I was now in the first line of fire, having stayed behind the others, looking over their heads at how the piece fit in the triangle. He was a tall, thin man, much taller than the middling height I had seen among the indigenous people in Bolivia, and his skin was also a different color, between reddish and tan instead of the usual copper brown. He was barefoot, dressed in a long loincloth that hung down to his knees and a headdress of colorful bird feathers, and his face displayed a large black square tattoo—what I had taken to be a mask—that began below his lower eyelashes and ended at the horizontal line drawn by the by the corners of his mouth, extending to his ears. Of course it was not paint that could be removed with a little water: it was an actual tattoo, and his companions also exhibited them, although in dark blue. He had chiseled features, more like the straight fine angles of the Aymara than the rounded shapes common to Amazon tribes.
The guy stared at me for a long time without speaking. Maybe he had come to the erroneous conclusion that I was the leader of that group of whites because of my height, but there was no way to divest him of the idea, so I held his gaze, more out of fear than bravado. Then, when he tired of it, he walked with the same slow dignified step toward my companions and I lost him from sight. I didn’t dare turn around, but the silence continued, so I supposed what was going on must not be anything different from what had happened with me. Suddenly, the guy growled something. I froze in anticipation, imagining that now the spears would pierce us mercilessly, but they didn’t, and then he repeated the same words in a shout, in a more impatient tone. In the silence of the plaza, the echo of his deep voice rebounded from one side to the other. The howler monkeys resumed their screams from the crowns of the nearby trees. When he repeated his message for the third time, this time very rudely, I turned slowly and saw that Marc and Gertrude had also turned. The commander lifted his right arm, pointing with his left index finger at the stone doughnut in his other hand, and repeated for the forth time what seemed like a rude question.
It was Gertrude who, perhaps because of her previous experience in dealing with contacted and uncontacted Amazon tribes, answered him on behalf of us all:
“This piece,” she said in a very, very soft voice, as if she were a lion tamer addressing the worst of her animals—, “we took from Tiwanaku… from Taipikala.”
“Taipikala!” the feathered man exclaimed triumphantly, and to our surprise, his men, both those who accompanied him and those who remained on the roofs, chanted the word with the same enthusiasm. Then, since apparently it had not been enough, he waved the stone ring in the air again, and addressed Gertrude, rattling off another incomprehensible earful. She looked at him without blinking and didn’t answer. That seemed to bother him and he took a few steps in her direction, until he was a little less then three feet away from her, and again pointed at the doughnut and repeated the enigmatic question.
“Say something to him, honey,” Efraín begged with his voice lowered. “Tell him anything.”
The chief gave him a piercing look while one of his bodyguards lifted his lance and pointed it at the archaeologist. Gertrude got nervous. Her hands shook as she began to tell the complete story of the doughnut in the same measured tone as before:
“We found it in Taipikala, after leaving Lakaqullu, where we were shut in the chamber of the Traveler, the…
sariri
.”
But the leader didn’t seem impressed by any of the magic words Dr. Bigelow made herself pronounce.
“We were there,” Gertrude continued, “looking for the Yatiri, the builders of Tai…”
“Yatiri!” the guy said, again lifting the doughnut in the air with a gesture of satisfaction, and his troops copied him, breaking the jungle’s silence.
Apparently, that had been enough. The leader and his five men passed in front of us on their way back to the street they had appeared from, while the lines of lancers vanished from the roofs. In case one of us held on to the hope that it was the end and they were leaving, he or she was completely wrong: The lancers reappeared everywhere, filling the plaza, and the commander stopped halfway to the street and turned to look at us. He made a strange gesture with his hand and a group of demon-possessed figures came from among the ranks to throw themselves at us as if they were going to kill us; but they went right past us, stopping in front of the monolith, picked up our abused packs and the rest of the things we had lying around, and took them before the leader, who, with another gesture of his hand, ordered them to destroy everything. Before our unbelieving eyes, those vandals tore open the packs and spread their contents on the ground: they ripped the clothes, the tents, broke the toothbrushes, the electric razors, the maps, the packages of food…. They used rocks to smash everything metal (canteens, cups, cans, Gertrude’s medical kit and all of its contents, machetes, scissors, compasses…), pitilessly destroyed the cell phones, digital cameras, GPS, and my laptop, smashing them repeatedly on the ground; and in case they’d left something not completely ripped to shreds, while some of them kicked the remains of the disaster into a pile, another one, a very old man, took a couple of sticks from a small leather bag and spent a good while rubbing them together until smoke started to come from them. Then he managed to burn a fistful of straw-like plants, with which he set fire to the pyre of our possessions. There was absolutely nothing left when that whole savage ceremony was finished, except the hammocks, which had been carefully separated from the rest and set aside. But only they and the clothes we wore survived the brutality. If they decided to let us live after that, their kind gesture completely lacked significance because without food, compass, or machetes, we didn’t have the smallest chance of returning to civilization. I was sure the six of us were all thinking the same thing at that moment, and I was proven right when I heard muffled sobbing behind me that could only be coming from Lola.
Then, with the pyre still smoking, each of us was firmly grabbed by an Indian, and, following the steps of the commander, his entourage, and his army, we were taken toward the exit of the plaza. Only then did my neurons start to react, and the loose ends began to come together. Maybe it was because we took the street indicated by the arrow carved on the stone doughnut—the same one the leader had appeared from—but the truth was, two plus two equals four: The Indians had been spying on us since we had arrived at the ruins; I myself had glimpsed them moving surreptitiously around us, and then they had suddenly appeared at the exact moment in which we had put the stone ring on the pedestal of the monolith. Besides, the guy with feathers had taken the ring, and, holding it in his hand, he had visibly reacted when Gertrude had pronounced the magic words “Taipikala” and “Yatiri.” Now, after destroying any possibility of escape on our part, they were taking us with them, following the same direction the doughnut had pointed. All those facts led to two obvious conclusions: Those guys could be the Yatiri themselves, turned wild after having deteriorated to an undeveloped state, like what happened to the group of children in
Lord of the Flies
by William Golding, or they were taking us to the Yatiri, that is to say, exactly what we wanted, although not in that way or at that moment.
“Listen,” Efraín said, mustering bravery and trying, I suppose, to transmit it to us, “have you realized they haven’t hurt us and that they’re taking us in the right direction?”
The Indian holding him by the arm shook him pitilessly to make him shut up. It would have been different if it had been Jabba, who was taller and wider than his guard, but Efraín, larger than most Bolivians, barely reached his guard’s shoulder. Mine, also very willowy, came to my neck, but I had no intention of making him nervous especially now that I knew they weren’t going to kill us and that they were taking us where we wanted to go.
While we left the city, exiting through another door similar to the entrance gate, then going down some big uneven and broken steps, I silently deduced that we must not be very far from our destination, since they had ruined all the food we brought and they didn’t carry anything besides their lances. The fact that they had respected the hammocks could mean we’d have to spend the night in the jungle, or it could just as easily just mean they were keeping them for themselves so we would find the Yatiri before night fell.
But, naturally, when one made such a speculative deduction, one should be sure of having all the information, of possessing all the facts, because if that’s not the case, one’s conclusions might be as erroneous as mine ended up being: We didn’t find the Yatiri before nightfall, nor did we the next day, or the day after that, or in that week; and the hammocks really were our beds that night and the many that followed.
We walked all afternoon, following some narrow paths that were mysteriously open in the thick forest. The Indians didn’t have machetes or anything sharp to cut the vegetation, so it was difficult to guess the origin of those paths, but they were there, and they were full of strange bends and turns. Only days later, we learned they had been made by animals moving through the jungle in search of water or food and that the Indians knew how to find them by instinct and take advantage of them to travel from place to place. According to them, it was a waste of energy to clear trail with a machete, since there was another, much less tiring way.
Those paths or trails tended to start and end at small rivers, lakes, springs, waterfalls, or swampy areas—which also existed in the jungle, and which we crossed during those days—and that first afternoon we entered into a small canal with water somewhere between green and black in color, and we followed it until nightfall, in the opposite direction as its current. On both sides, fronds of bushes and weeds could be seen spiraling around the colonnades of the high trees that formed the barrier between the water and the earth, casting a dense shadow over our heads with their thick foliage, interlaced at an incredible height. The aerial roots of many of those giants hung like curtains, making our passage difficult, but instead of cutting them with a knife, as we had been doing up to that day, the Indians separated them with their hands, apparently without feeling the pricks from the thorns that abundantly covered them. The air was humid and sticky, and whenever, for some reason we didn’t know, the leader ordered a brief halt, the silence of that shadowy place was overwhelming, and voices echoed, as if we were inside some cave.
We passed through an area in which horseflies the size of elephants accosted us ceaselessly, and another with electric eels, whose big heads, whenever they brushed our legs through the rifts in our pants, gave us an electrical shock like an intense needle prick. Suddenly, in the dimmest part of that canal we’d spent all afternoon following, we heard some strident cries that sounded like the howls of suffering souls. I felt an unpleasant crawling sensation on my back, and goosebumps formed on my skin from pure terror; the Indians, however, reacted with great satisfaction, stopping and ordering us with gestures to stay still and silent while they craned their necks upward, looking for who knows what. The cries continued discordantly and with different notes. My guard took a small box and two sticks from a cord hanging from his
shoulder, deftly uniting the two sticks to form one; from the box he took a short arrow that had a small oval mass on one end, and stuck it in the wide part of what was doubtlessly the first real—or fake— blow-gun that I had seen in my life. He put the tube to his lips and kept intensely watching the lofty crowns of the trees forming the vault above us. My companions’ guards did the same, so we were temporarily free, although we dared only to exchange encouraging looks and forced smiles. The cries from of the suffering souls began to become more defined, and sounded something like “tocano, tocano.” At last, some of our indigenous guides discovered the hiding place of the group of singers, because we heard some quick dry sounds, like the shots from air guns, and a commotion in the foliage caused by the fall of objects from a great height. Unfortunately, one of the creatures landed a few inches from me, splashing an enormous quantity of water that soaked me completely. The animal was a beautiful toucan, very fat, with a formidable beak almost eight inches long and incredible saffron-toned plumage on its tail. It wasn’t quite dead (it had the arrow stuck between its chest and one of its wings), so when my guard tried to catch it, it defended itself vigorously and emitted some sonorous lamentations that completely alarmed the Indians, and they began to shout something desperately to my guard in an urgent tone. But before he had time to act, thousands of birds, invisible until that moment, came from nowhere and began to descend on us, completely furious, jumping from branch to branch with their enormous wings extended and emitting terrifying cries from their open beaks. I think the terror I felt was so great that I made an involuntary gesture of protection, crossing my arms over my face, but luckily, before those distant cousins of the protagonists in Alfred Hitchcock’s
The Birds
destroyed us, my guard managed to dominate the wounded bird and pitilessly wrung its neck. The end of its plaintive cries brought a sudden end to the attack, and the toucans disappeared into the thick leaves as if they had never existed.
Lola was pale; she leaned on Marta, who didn’t look any better, but who, nevertheless, was protecting Gertrude’s shoulders with her arm, drawing her close. Marc and Efraín were petrified, incapable of moving or making a sound, so when the Indians put the gigantic dead animals in their arms, as they did in mine, they kept staring blankly without realizing what they were carrying. The jungle we were experiencing didn’t have anything to do with the one we had known up till then. If, since we had snuck through the entrance into Madidi, I had thought I’d understood the expression “Green Hell” that Marta, Gertrude, and Efraín used so much, I was completely wrong. What we had seen until then was an almost civilized, almost domesticated jungle, in comparison with this wild and delirious world through which we were now moving. The feeling of danger, of frenzied panic, that I had when I thought those things was mitigated by a very strange idea: If the key to making things work in the virtual world of computers was in writing a good code, a clean and organized code, without absurd loops or superfluous instructions, in the real world of the authentic “Green Hell,” there also had to exist some similar rules, and those who knew the code and knew how to write it correctly to make everything work were the inhabitants of that place, the Indians who accompanied us. Perhaps they wouldn’t know what to do if faced with a computer, or faced with a simple traffic light, but they doubtlessly understood even the smallest elements of the environment around us. Just as they had foreseen the toucans’ attack when their wounded companion had emitted those laments, and they had known perfectly what to do (kill it to make it be quiet), where we, the technologically developed urbanites, saw only leaves, trunks, and water, they knew how to decipher the signals of the code used by the “Green Hell” and knew how to respond appropriately. I looked again at those tattooed, primitive-looking Indians, and I knew without question that we were the same, identical in every way; we just applied our like capacities to the distinct environments that chance had
given us. They weren’t stupider because they didn’t use electricity or work from eight to three; if anything, they were lucky to have such an abundance of resources at hand and to know how to use them with so little effort and so much intelligence. The respect I felt at that moment did nothing but grow as the days passed.