The Lost Origin (56 page)

There was a stir both in the back of the room and the part we were in. We were caught off guard by the mercenary’s audacity.

“It’s that they were getting on my nerves with so many questions,” she quietly told us, by way of an explanation.

Arukutipa stood and looked at her.

“The principal Capacas ask the name of the woman of long nose and thin size.”

“Now they’re talking about you, Lola,” Gertrude teased again.

“Your turn will come, Doctor,” she replied, standing up and declaring her name as if she were on trial.

“Doña Lola,” Arukutipa began, “the Capacas say that Your Mercy ask what you like, that
they will respond truthfully what they know.”

“Hold on!” Efraín said hurriedly, grabbing Lola by the arm to make her turn toward us. “Let’s agree on what you’re going to ask. We may not get another chance.”

“It’s clear, isn’t it?” Marta replied, unruffled. “We have two big mysteries: one, the power of words, and the other, the story of the giants, one of whose remains we had the pleasure of seeing in Taipikala.”

“That’s two questions,” I argued.

“Well, we can try,” Efraín ventured. “Maybe they will answer two.”

“Please,” Gertrude murmured in a pleading voice, “first ask about Aymara and its power. That’s the most important.”

“Both things are, honey,” Efraín remarked.

“Listen to me, please. First, ask about Aymara.”

“Okay,” Lola said, turning back to the translator and the Capacas. “I want to know,” she told them, “how is it that you have the capacity to manage people, to change them, heal them, or make them ill using words?”

Poor Arukutipa must have been sweating blood as he translated Lola’s petition, because, despite the distance, the agony showed on his face and he kept squeezing his hands together and rubbing them as if he had to control their shaking.

His conversation with the Capacas was longer than normal. Until that moment we hadn’t seen them exchanging more than two or three phrases, even if the boy later uttered long paragraphs or questions, but this time the debate was drawn out for several minutes. My impression was that they didn’t argue about the convenience or inconvenience of telling us their secret, but more about how or how much or what to tell us exactly. They were going to tell us something, I didn’t have any doubt, but what? A part?

“The words have the power,” Arukutipa exclaimed suddenly, facing Lola, who remained standing, waiting. Then, he took a step back and retreated, leaving the space to the Capacas. The four elders stood, closed their fists, and rested them, crossed, over their shoulders. Then they began to softly drone a strange chant in Aymara. At first, Marta and Efraín were so impressed they didn’t even breathe, but they slowly calmed, without taking their gaze from the Capacas for a second. Marta, under the influence of the chant, began to translate for us, in a monotone, what the elders said, but it would have been all the same if she hadn’t, because somehow, inexplicably, we were understanding them. No, I’m not in any way saying that what happened to us was some kind of miracle like the gift of language the Apostles received from the Holy Ghost on Pentecost. On the contrary. The real reason we could understand what those old Capacas chanted was contained in the very story the little song narrated. In the end, I confused Marta’s voice with the one I
heard
in my head, and I wouldn’t have known how to differentiate one murmur from the other. They were different, but they said the same thing, and both had a hypnotic effect.

At first, the Earth didn’t have life, said the elders, and one day life arrived from the sky on some large smoking rocks that fell everywhere. Life knew what shapes it had to create, what animals and plants, because it had everything written within it with the secret language of the gods. And everything filled with living beings who occupied the earth, the sea, and the air, and human beings appeared, identical to how they are now except for their limited intelligence, barely superior to that of an ant. They didn’t have houses, or office, and they dressed in tattered animal skins and leaves of trees. In that first time, everything was very big, of colossal dimensions. Even men and women were big, much bigger than they are now, but their brains
were very small, as small as those of a reptile, because life had made a mistake and hadn’t correctly read the instructions. Then the gods saw that what they had made was good, but that not everything was well or going as it should go, so they sent Oryana.

Oryana was a goddess who came from the depths of the Universe. She was almost like one of the women who populated Earth, since life wrote the same everywhere, even if small differences appeared, but sometimes, as had happened with human beings, it made mistakes, and then the gods had to intervene, even though they didn’t like to. Oryana was different from us in only a couple of ways: She had very large ears and her head was conical. When she got to Earth, she mixed her life with that of some beings from here, and when she did, she rewrote the shape that human intelligence should have. She gave birth to seventy children, each of them with a very large brain, a perfect brain, identical to hers, capable of any feat or achievement, and she taught her sons and daughters to speak. She gave them a language,
her
language, and told them it was sacred and that with it they could rewrite life and manage that perfect mind they now possessed. She told them she had made them the same in every way as the gods, and that they should conserve that language,
Jaqui Aru
, without changing it or altering it, because it belonged to everyone equally and it had to be used by everyone to manage the great intelligence that was now available to them. As she taught these and many other things to her children, they built, in the place were they had been born, a city to live in, which they called Taipikala, decorating it as their mother told them the city she came from was decorated. They learned to make drinks from the fermentation of the new plants that Oryana had given them, such as corn; to produce honey from another animal that she also brought and that wasn’t there before, the bee; to work metals; to spin and weave; to study the sky; to calculate; to write…. And when everything was well channeled, two hundred years after her arrival, the goddess Oryana left.

The millennia passed, and the descendants of Oryana—or Orejona, as they had come to call her in memory of her large ears—populated the world, creating cities and cultures all over the planet. There were many eras, but they conserved
Jaqui Aru
without changing it, and everyone knew how to use the power it contained. However, despite the prohibition, variations appeared in different places anyway, which led to incomprehension between peoples and the loss of the old knowledge. Human beings, in general, stopped using the great powers of their perfect brains, powers that definitely had never been known in all their vastness. But in Taipikala, Oryana’s language was maintained, and out of respect, they continued to insert gold
orejeras
in their earlobes and to deform their skulls until they had a conical shape, like hers. For this reason, the city became a very important place and the Yatiri became the guardians of the old wisdom.

In that old world, the Capacas said, there was no ice and no desert, no cold or heat; there were no seasons and the climate was always temperate. A covering of water vapor enveloped the Earth completely, and the light came through tenuously and diffusely. The air was richer and the plants grew all year, so it wasn’t necessary to plant or to harvest, because there was always an abundance of everything. And all the animals existed, none was missing, and they were much bigger than they are now, as were the plants, which also were all there, following life’s plan. Until one day, seven rocks as large as mountains fell from the sky, hitting the Earth with so much force that they made it dance and made the stars change place in the heavens. Enormous clouds of powder jumped into the air, darkening the sun, the moon, and the stars, and enveloping the world in a bleak night. Volcanoes exploded all over the planet, tearing open the ground and expelling great quantities of smoke, ash, and lava, and there were terrible earthquakes that leveled the cities and left no human construction standing. A tornado of embers that burned the skin, causing ulcers that wouldn’t heal, colored the earth and water red, poisoning it. The fire
burned the trees and the grass, and some rivers evaporated, leaving their beds dry. Burning hurricanes stormed through, devastating everything, consuming entire forests in an instant. Men and animals, desperate, looked for refuge in the caves and rifts, running from death, but very few managed it. Then, just a few days later, an unfamiliar intense cold suddenly fell, followed by heavy rains and floods, which fortunately put out the fires that were still devastating the world. And the snows came. And all this happened so fast that many animals were encased in the ice as they ran, gave birth, or ate. Mud drowned everything. Preceded by a tremendous roar, giant waves from the seas, advancing like solid walls of water across the entire horizon, covered the earth, dragging the remains of dead sea animals all the way to the peaks of the mountains. That which the peoples of the world called “the flood” had started.

It rained for almost a year without stopping. Sometimes, when the cold was very intense, the rain turned to snow, and then it rained again, and the water kept soaking everything. Since the day the disaster had started, the sun had not been seen again. The catastrophe was global. Contact was lost with the other towns and cities. They were never heard from again, just as many species of animals and plants, which had been extraordinarily abundant before, were lost. They were extinguished forever during that time. All that remained was their memory in some reliefs of Taipikala, and in many cases, not even that. The few survivors who managed to see the end of that long and catastrophic night were sick and weak, full of terror. But they weren’t even afforded the comfort of recovering their world as it had been. The Earth had been completely destroyed and it would have to be created again.

One day, after much time, the dark cloud covering the world retreated and the soft covering of water vapor enveloping the Earth left with it. It stopped raining and the sun’s rays reached the surface in all their strength, causing terrible burns and consuming the soil until it was left dry. Slowly, the living beings adapted to that new situation, and life wrote again over what had remained, according to its eternal instructions. However, now the years were five days longer than before, because the Earth had tipped on its axis (as the new orientation of stars in the sky clearly showed), causing the yearly seasons, which made it necessary, if people wanted to eat, to plant and harvest at specific times. So many things had to be changed, among them the calendars and the way of life. The cities were also rebuilt, Taipikala among them, but human beings were very weak and the work was exhausting for them. The children who were born were born sick and with serious deformities, the majority dying before they could grow. Although the Earth was remade relatively easily and nature took little time to rebuild itself from its own remains, it took men and women, and even some animals, centuries to recover normality, and as those centuries passed, they noticed that their lives were becoming shorter and shorter and their children and grandchildren weren’t developing normally.

The Yatiri had to take control of the situation from the beginning, at least in their territory. Whatever happened outside their borders was something they couldn’t control. They took it upon themselves to recover their authority, to put an end to the chaos and terror, to the savagery into which humanity had fallen. They invented rites and new concepts, simple explanations to calm the people. In time, only they kept the memory of what had existed before and of what had happened. The world was populated again, there appeared new cultures and new peoples who had to start again with nothing and fight hard to survive. Many turned savage and dangerous. The Yatiri and their people became the Aymara, “the people of ancient times,” because they knew things that others didn’t understand and because they kept their sacred language and their power. Even the Incap Rúnam, when they arrived at Taipikala to unite it with Tiwantinsuyu, still had part of the memory of who those Yatiri were, and respected them.

The Capacas’ chant ended there. One of the old women pronounced a few words more, but I didn’t understand them anymore. The spell, or whatever the hell it was, had ended.

“The rest of the story,” Marta concluded, translating what the Capaca woman said, “you already know.”

I felt completely calm and serene, as if, instead of sitting on that stool listening to a story about the destruction of the world, I had been listening to music in my living room at home. Those guys had done something to my head while they talked to us about Oryana and everything else. Marc, Lola, and I had come to the erroneous conclusion that if one didn’t know Aymara, one was safe from those strange influences, but it wasn’t true: The power of the words transcended the barrier of language and slipped into your neurons, whatever language they spoke.

As Gertrude had supposed, Aymara was a vehicle for power, a perfect language, almost a programming language, which allowed the combination of sounds necessary to stir up your brain. Aymara—
Jaqui Aru
—was the keyboard that had allowed the perfect brains of those first children of Oryana to be programmed, giving them the necessary applications to live. Whatever those guys had done in my head, it was allowing me to make a series of connections that would not in a million years have occurred to me on my own. Tons of ideas crossed through my mind, and all of them were different, disconcerting, and, of course, impossible to share with the others in those minutes. Suddenly, I was enjoying an incredible mental clarity, and I felt as if those Capacas were still playing around in my head, drawing new paths of understanding.

My companions were living experiences similar to the one I was having, which is why, when the elders’ chant ended, the silence lasted for a long time. We weren’t capable of speaking because we were very busy trying to pin down our thoughts. The Capacas’ chant most likely contained tons of sounds capable of altering our brains, of awakening them. Maybe we had gone from using five percent to temporarily using six, or five and a half, and we were conscious of it. Then I also understood what Marta had said to me when I had accused her of having been manipulated by the Yatiri to make her agree never to speak of Qalamana: I also clearly understood that they had used the power of words with me, yet I didn’t feel as if I had been invaded by alien ideas or thoughts. I was, as she said, awake, clear, and very calm, and I knew that everything in my head was mine. It was I, and only I, who occupied my mind, and who, like Marta, now saw with clarity how unnecessary it was to bring everything to light, to bring lights and cameras to Qalamana, or even worse, to take that power from the Yatiri’s hands and put it in the hands of some scientists working in the service of armed governments or terrorist groups, of which the world was full, in a time when all ideologies and all systems had been corrupted.