The Lost Origin (53 page)

“Is that true?” the archaeologist asked, very surprised. “You’re going to explain it to us right now, my friend.”

I put a contemptuous look on my face and pointed my chin at the fat redhead.

“Do you know why we call him Jabba?”

“You…!” Marc began, furious, but Lola silenced him with a hand over his mouth.

“I couldn’t care less why you call him that,” Efraín said. “Is that true about Chase Manhattan Bank? You’re not going to escape by selling out your best friend!”

The jungle had also made us lose our last shreds of civilized social behavior. We’d turned a bit
Lord of the Flies
by then.

“Yes, it’s true,” I admitted reluctantly, “but I spent it all building my house and starting my current company, Ker-Central.”

That was not completely true, of course, but talking about money had always seemed like a
faux pas to me.

“Then you must have an impressive house,” Marta murmured, opening her eyes very wide.

“He does, he does,” Lola whispered, insinuating that it was a dream house. “You’d have to see it to believe it, right, Marc?”

“Hey,” I protested, “what’s up with you guys tonight?”

“Is your business very big?” Gertrude inquired with much curiosity.

“They don’t know who you are in Bolivia!” Marc teased. I was tempted to get up and give him a couple of sharp pinches on his fat, irritated, and itchy cheeks. “The guy sitting before you is one of the few European internet geniuses. Everything having to do with artificial intelligence applied to the internet has passed through his hands.”

No one said anything, but I thought I could hear (virtually) a chorus of surprised exclamations come from their closed mouths.

“Okay, look,” I told Jabba in a warning tone, “since you’re being rude, I’ll tell you: I might put Ker-Central up for sale. I’m thinking about it.”

Marc and Lola turned white as paper.

“Don’t be stupid!” the redheaded worm managed to spit, making a great effort to recover from the fright. “Looks like you want to start something tonight!”

“Look at what I’ve become!” I exclaimed, turned toward him. “I’m almost thirty-six years old and I’m a boring businessman, someone who spends the day signing papers. I need to change, to do something I really like. And I’m not talking about that idiotic idea of being happy,” I added, very serious. “As Gertrude explained to us in La Paz, the brain doesn’t have one tiny corner dedicated to something so insignificant and commonplace. Really, I’m talking about doing something that I enjoy, something that’s part of the real world.”

“You need new challenges,” Marta affirmed.

“Yes, something like that,” I admitted reluctantly; I felt sick at seeing myself publicly exposed like that. “I don’t want to be the financial administrator of other people’s ideas. It doesn’t work for me.”

“Well, if you’re that tired of it, give me Ker-Central, but don’t sell it! I also helped create it, remember?”

“I already told you, I’m still thinking about it. Okay?”

“Watch your back!” he warned me before closing his mouth definitively for the night.

The subject didn’t come up again. It didn’t get the chance. The next day, after crossing a small valley between some very high mountains, thus saving ourselves from a dangerous pass, we found ourselves in the early afternoon in a jungle completely different from that which we had seen so far. The gloom was complete and the ground was muddy and cold and covered in some abnormally large and tall ferns, which had openings between them, showing some narrow paths through a forest that at the very least could be called shadowy. Walking through it, we felt like poor Gulliver in the giants’ country. The huge trees, only separated from each other the necessary distance to keep from devouring one another, or fallen on the ground brought down by old age, were around three hundred feet tall, almost as tall as any New York skyscraper, but the impressive thing about them was their trunks, which by looking at them seemed be some sixty or eighty feet around. I had heard of the famous African baobabs, so thick they had been used as houses, stables, jails, and bars, in which up to fifty people could enter at once. I had even seen in a book, when I was little, one of those baobabs in which a hole had been bored in the trunk to build a road through without knocking the tree down, making it the only living tunnel through which large trucks could easily pass. But those colossal monsters crowded into that lost corner of
the Amazon were much larger than the baobabs. Efraín remarked that they could be sequoias, the tallest trees in the world, but he corrected himself when he remembered that sequoias, which grew almost exclusively on the west coast of the United States, could indeed grow to much taller than three hundred feet, but their trunks never got as thick as those around us. Their gigantic roots sank into the soft mud (which exuded a light fog that reeked of rot) and their crowns were lost to sight in the sky, impossible to make out, also hidden by the foliage which was bent from its great weight; and there were places in which, between the tight carpet of ferns, the impressive trunks, barely separated from each other, and the long vines and creepers that hung from who knows where and tangled in authentic Gordian knots, it seemed impossible that anything not belonging to the vegetable kingdom could live. But there was at least one animal that we didn’t see, but we did hear.

When its song first reached my ears, I couldn’t help thinking there was a person nearby, humming a precise melody, but the pitch suddenly rose and it seemed to me I was listening to a flute, an instrument which inarguably required a person to extract sound from it. I scanned the cold vegetation around us because it sounded very close, almost right next to us, but I didn’t see anything at all. It was an incredibly beautiful music, and of course it came from a flute. The Indians smiled and remarked amongst themselves, and my companions showed the same stupefied expression that I did faced with the phenomenon of the close and invisible artist. Suddenly the languid sweet notes of that flute transformed into a kind of squeaking and then went silent. Shortly after, the human singing began again, and again turned into the flute and ended in that disagreeable sound. When the same composition sounded from different places at the same time, we had to accept reality: it was the song of a bird, of an extraordinarily gifted bird, but a bird.

That was a world of gods, not of people, and our group looked like a small line of ants drowning in the thick leaves. Finally the paths suddenly disappeared, overcome by the vegetation, and the Toromona stopped. The leader, who was at the front of our strange procession, lifted an arm in the air and uttered a cry that reverberated in the forest and caused a pandemonium in the foliage. And then, nothing. We stood there, still and waiting for who knows what. A few seconds later, a similar cry came from some distant place, and only then did the Toromona leader lower his arm and relax. But we didn’t move, and after a while Marta, very serene, stuck her hands in the pockets of her tattered pants and said out loud:

“I think we’ve arrived, my friends.”

“Arrived? Where?” asked Marc, the dimwit.

“In Osaka, Japan,” I told him, very serious.

“In Yatiri territory,” she clarified, giving me an admonishing look.

“I can’t see anyone,” Efraín murmured, worried.

“Well, I feel like they’re watching us,” Lola said, and shivered, drawing close to Marc. Without noticing, we had formed a small huddle as we waited for the walk to resume or for them to give us some indication as to what we should do.

“Yes, so do I,” Gertrude said, lifting her hand to her stomach and leaving it there.

“Well, it’s likely that they are,” Marta conceded, nodding. “The Yatiri must be curious to know who we are and why we’ve suddenly appeared here, accompanied by the Toromona.”

I stopped, changed the position of my feet because they were getting stiff.

“What was such a numerous army of Toromona doing hidden in the ruins of that abandoned city in the jungle?” I asked, looking for a clue. “Were they there by coincidence or was someone sent to look for us?”

“Come on, Arnau, you’re not going to tell me the Yatiri sent them to get us on exactly that day at exactly that time, are you?” Lola objected.

“I don’t know, but I do remember having read an account that said these guys, when they lived in Taipikala, predicted that the Inca were going to arrive, and also the Spanish, some foreigners who lived on the other side of the ocean, no less. They’re probably fantasies, but I wouldn’t swear to it.”

“They’re fantasies,” Marta repeated, nodding. “The most likely is that the Toromona’s settlement is close to those ruins and they keep guards posted in case someone shows up with the stone ring. It’s clear they’re allied with the Yatiri, but there’s a big difference between that and the idea that the Yatiri sent them to look for us because they knew we would be there.”

We suddenly went quiet, because we all noticed at the same time that the Toromona had started to move. But the strange thing was that they didn’t move forward; instead they surrounded us, even though the path between the giant trees wasn’t that wide. Little by little, they enclosed us in a narrow circle, and we, stupefied, watched them without knowing what was going on, although we all had a certain sense of alarm that showed in the worry on our faces. Something strange was going on. When we saw the leader come over to us with his body guards and the old shaman, we no longer had any doubt.

“What the hell is going on?” Marc asked, alarmed, wrapping an arm around Lola’s shoulders.

“That’s what I would like to know,” Marta replied with the same cold and deep voice she used when she was mad.

The leader faced our little group, looked at us inscrutably, and pointed at the path by which he had come. When we didn’t move, his arm stretched in that direction and he imperiously repeated the gesture. He was ordering us to walk in front of them and go down that passage between ferns.

“What do we do?” Jabba asked.

“Whatever they tell us to,” Efraín muttered, grabbing Gertrude’s hand and beginning to walk.

“I don’t like this at all,” Marc murmured.

“If you can think of a better alternative,” I told him, grabbing one of Marta’s arms and coaxing her to come with me. “I’ll give you Ker-Central. I give you my word.”

“How about running away like lunatics?” he asked with an ironic smile.

“No, not that.”

“I knew it,” he told Lola as he brought up the rear.

Since they hadn’t kept stride with me, I turned to look at the Toromona, in case they were aiming their lances at us or something, but the Indians stood motionless in the middle of the jungle, watching us unblinkingly. The leader maintained a dignified stance and the shaman smiled. It was the end of another phase of that incredible adventure. I wondered if we would see them again, since without their help it would be impossible for us to return to civilization. But who could know how that strange journey would end?

Thirty yards further, the path narrowed to a fine line and ended abruptly. We arrived at the end and stopped, without knowing what to do. Were we supposed to wait, or should we go back to the Toromona?

The ferns stirred a little on my right, and I turned my head quickly in that direction. A naked arm suddenly appeared, parting the leaves, and I found myself a couple of feet away from a guy as tall as I, somewhat older, and dressed in a kind of long sleeveless shirt tied at the
waste with a green sash. The guy, who had large gold discs inserted into his earlobes, looked at me for a long while, without changing his expression, and then he examined my companions, one by one. He had typically Aymaran features, with high cheekbones, a sharp nose, and vaguely feline eyes. His skin, however, was very light, so light that, although it was not white like ours, it wasn’t remotely like that of the Indians, either.

Of course, we were petrified. Petrified and struck dumb. So, when they motioned for us to follow them, the six of us startled in the most discourteous way.

He disappeared again into the ferns, which closed behind him, and we stayed there without moving, with idiotic expressions on our faces. After a few seconds, he reappeared and looked at us with a furrowed brow. It was odd, but his eyebrows went in opposite directions: both traced the sinuous line of a tilde, but while one angled downward, toward his nose, the other raised toward his forehead. And there he stood, looking at us from beneath those strange eyebrows and waiting for us to start moving and follow him. One by one, we crossed the green barrier and submerged ourselves in that sea of immense leaves without saying a word, overwhelmed by a situation we had been awaiting for a long time. I was the first to enter and Efraín came behind me. The Yatiri—since there was no doubt that’s what he was—walked straight toward one of the trees without stopping or changing direction, and I, astonished, watched him go in through an opening, through a very low door roughly carved in the trunk, which led us to a dark corridor in which I felt like the trucks must feel when they pass through the tunnel in the African baobab. The tree was alive and sap undoubtedly circulated in its wood, which gave off an intense fragrance, a scent similar to cedar. At the end of the corridor, a few yards away, there was a light, so I deduced that more Yatiri were waiting for us there, but I was wrong: Those guys had hollowed out the center of the tree, creating an enormous tubular room from which rose a ramp, carved into the very walls of the room, ascending in a spiral into the heights. Some oil-filled stone cups with wicks burning inside were placed at varying heights, phantasmagorically illuminating that strange vertical tunnel.

“
Jiwasanakax jutapxtan!
” our guide exclaimed in a severe tone, as if convinced we weren’t going to understand him.

“What did he say?” I asked Marta in a whisper.

“It’s Aymara,” she murmured, fascinated.

“Of course it is,” I replied. “What did you expect?”

“I don’t know…,” she whispered, without being able to hide her wide smile of happiness. I’d never seen such an agreeable expression on her face.

“Okay, but what did he say?” I insisted, also smiling.