Authors: Matilde Asensi
“We can’t believe that,” Marc murmured. “It goes against all of modern geology.”
“I’d give anything for a cigarette,” Marta murmured.
“You haven’t smoked since we left La Paz, huh?” Gertrude said, satisfied.
“Are you changing the subject?” Lola asked them suspiciously.
“Not at all,” Marta replied, sitting up a little and looking at her. “I knew that, sooner or later, we’d have to talk about all this. Which is exactly why I need a cigarette.”
“Well, I’m convinced there’s a lot of truth in the story they told us,” Gertrude declared suddenly.
“Even the part that said life came in smoking rocks from the sky?” Marc asked ironically.
“Don’t be so sure it’s that strange,” I objected, pulling a plant from the ground and starting
to wind it between my fingers. “That is exactly what the most recent theories on the appearance of life on Earth say. Since there’s no way to explain how in the hell it originated, now they say it came from outside; that DNA, the genetic code, came on the back of a meteorite.”
“You see?” Gertrude smiled. “And if we keep digging, we’ll find many more things like that.”
Lola cleared her throat.
“But, then…” she said, uncertain. “What about the part where life created all the animals and plants of the world at the same time? Do we do away with the theory of evolution, as well?”
There was my favorite subject, I told myself, quickly winding myself up. But Gertrude beat me to it:
“Well, there are already many people who don’t accept the theory of evolution. I know it sounds strange, but in the United States, it’s a subject that’s been researched for many years for religious reasons. You already know that in my country there’s a strong fundamentalist current, and those people made it their business a long time ago to show that science was wrong and that God created the world exactly as the Bible says.”
“Really?” Marc asked, surprised.
“Forgive me for saying so, Gertrude,” the mercenary remarked with her usual aplomb, “but you Yankees are really weird. Sometimes you do things that…. Well, you get what I’m saying.”
Gertrude nodded.
“I agree,” she admitted, smiling.
“Okay, but what were you getting at with the thing about the fundamentalists?” I asked.
“Well, it was relevant because, okay…. Really they call themselves creationists. And, yes, they found proof.”
“Proof that God created the world?” I snapped.
“No, not really,” she replied, amused. “Proof that the theory of evolution was incorrect, that Darwin was wrong.”
Efraín seemed to be familiar with the matter, because he nodded every now and then, but Marta was another matter; she squirmed as if a pucarara had bitten her.
“But, Gertrude,” she protested, “there can’t be proof against evolution! Please, it’s ridiculous!”
“What there isn’t, Marta,” I said, “is proof of evolution. If Darwin’s theory had already been proven,” and I remembered that I had said the same to my sister-in-law Ona not long ago, “it wouldn’t be a theory, it would be a law, Darwin’s Law, and it’s not.”
“Man…,” Marc murmured, chewing on a little plant, “I was never completely convinced of the idea that we come from monkeys, as logical as it may seem.”
“There’s no proof that shows we came from the monkey, Marc,” I told him. “None. Or what do you think the missing link is about? A story? If we listen to what the Capacas told us, the missing link will remain missing forever, because it never existed. Supposedly, mammals came from reptiles, but no fossil has been found of any of the innumerable intermediate and malformed beings that had to have existed over the course of millions of years to make the leap from one perfect creature to another also perfect creature. And the same is true with all other species on the planet.”
“I can’t believe what I’m hearing!” Lola reproached me. “Now it’s going to turn out that you, a rare rational and analytical mind, are an ignorant nitwit!”
“I don’t care what you say,” I replied. “Everyone has a right to think what they want and entertain whatever doubts they want, right? No one can prohibit me from asking for proof of
evolution. And, at the moment, they don’t give it to me. I’m tired of hearing them say on television that the Neanderthals are our ancestors, when, genetically, we have less to do with them than with monkeys.”
“But they were human beings, weren’t they?” Marc asked, taken aback.
“Yes, but another kind of human beings, very different from us,” I explained.
“And what proof did the fundamentalists of your country find, Gertrude?” Lola asked curiously.
“Oh, well, I don’t remember all of it right now. I’m sorry. What we’re talking about in regards to what the Yatiri told us has brought old lectures from the last few years to my mind. But, really, let’s see…,” And she pulled back her wavy dirty hair, gathering it on the top of her head. “One thing was that in many parts of the world they’ve found the remains of fossilized skeletons of mammals and dinosaurs in the same geological strata
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, which is impossible according to the theory of evolution, or dinosaur footprints and human footprints in the same place, like in the Paluxy riverbed, in Texas
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. And another thing I remember as well is that, according to scientific experiments, genetic mutations are always detrimental, if not lethal. It’s what Arnau was saying before about the millions of malformed beings that would be necessary to go from one well-adapted species to another. Most genetically mutated animals don’t stay alive long enough to transmit those alterations to their descendants; and besides, in evolution, it would be necessary for there to be two animals of different genders to have the same mutation in their genes by chance in order to assure the continuation of the change which is statistically impossible. They admit that microevolution exists, meaning that the small characteristics of any living thing can evolve: blue eyes in places with little light or black skin in areas of strong sunlight, or greater height because of better nutrition, etc. What they don’t at all accept is macroevolution, meaning that a fish can become a monkey or a bird a reptile, or that a plant can give way to an animal.”
We were all listening attentively to Gertrude, but I sneaked a look at Marta and saw that she had a terrible expression that threatened a storm with lightning and thunder:
“That’s enough!” she cut in brusquely. “There can be many explanations for what the Capacas told us. We are all free to adopt the one we like. It’s absurd to argue about this. I absolutely refuse to continue. What we should do is study the documents in the Pyramid of the Traveler in detail and fulfill our promise: Efraín and I will start publishing our discoveries, and after that the scientists, the creationists, and the pagans can research whatever they want to on their own.”
“But there’s something else, Marta,” Gertrude murmured enigmatically.
“Something else? What do you mean?” Marta asked, distracted.
Gertrude reached into the back pocket of her pants and took out the small digital recorder she had shown us the day we arrived at the city in ruins.
“There’s not much battery left, but…” and then she pushed a small button and, very distantly, we heard Arukutipa’s voice saying: “The words have the power.” She didn’t let us hear any more; she turned off the tiny machine and put it away again before the Toromonas could see it.
The rest of us were mute from astonishment. Gertrude had recorded the interview with the
Capacas! That opened a world of infinite possibilities.
“I will need your help,” she told Marc, Lola, and me. “I can’t share this recording with anyone to study it, but you have the computers to do a frequency analysis of the Capacas’ voices.”
That aligned perfectly with my new projects.
“You can count on me,” I agreed, smiling widely.
We held many conversations very similar to that one night after night during the weeks we spent getting to Qhispita. Every once in a while, saturated with that subject, we talked about ourselves and about our lives instead. Marc, Lola, and I told them about our “100 Series,” hidden on a forgotten platform under Barcelona, and we explained the use we made of it to them; so, for the first time, we shared our activities as hackers with other people. Marta, Efraín, and Gertrude listened to us without blinking, with astonishment and confusion on their faces because of the things they hadn’t even remotely imagined could be done with a simple computer. The difference of ten years, more or less, between them and us constituted a generational rift when it came to information technology, a rift widened by the rejection—incomprehensible from my point of view—that the scholars of the humanities like to exhibit as a mark of class. Marta and Efraín could manage email and some basic applications, but that was all.
The truth was we all got to know each other very well over those weeks. On another occasion, the secret of Marta’s marriage that had so intrigued Lola was at last revealed. The famous Joffre Viladomat, because of work, had gone to Southeast Asia five years before, ruining what little had remained of his marriage to Marta Torrent. Their two children, Alfons and Guillem, nineteen and twenty-two, respectively, lived in Barcelona during the school year, but whenever vacations started they ran off to the Philippines to be with their father and with Jovita Pangasinan (their father’s new companion). According to Marta, Jovita was a lovely woman who got along very well with Alfons and Guillem, so relations were cordial between everyone. Lola gave a long sigh of relief when she heard the end of the story, and didn’t try to hide her old interest in the matter.
Also on one of those nights, Marc, Lola, and I came to an agreement about the future of Ker-Central, which would become an anonymous partnership. I would keep half the stocks and the two of them would share the rest, financing the purchase with bank loans. From that moment on, I would be free and they would be the de facto directors of the company. The building would still be mine, Ker-Central would pay me rent for it, and, naturally, my house would stay on the roof.
Everyone wanted to know what I planned to do when I “retired,” but I kept my mouth closed and they didn’t succeed in getting a single word out of me. Like a good computer pirate, I was an expert at keeping my secrets until the moment I made my move (and even more so, afterwards). They asked with a great deal of insistence, and maybe, just maybe, I would have given some clue if it hadn’t been for the fact that even though I had a clear idea of what I wanted to do I needed some very concrete help to find the best way of doing it, and because, to complicate things more, I had been forming a plan for several weeks to hack into, while I obtained that help, the apparently impregnable and supposedly very well-protected place that contained it.
One afternoon, about two weeks after beginning our return, the Toromonas stopped in a clearing and gestured to us to stay there while they organized themselves in groups and disappeared into the jungle, going in different directions. We were alone for a couple of hours, a little surprised by that strange abandonment. It seemed that the Toromonas had something to do,
something important, but that they would return when they had finished. And so they did. A little before nightfall, they returned carrying strange objects in their arms: pieces of thick hollow trunks, some small round fruits that looked like pumpkins, branches, rocks, wood, and a little game for dinner. The shaman was the only one who had left alone and who reappeared just as he had gone, with only his bag of remedies hanging from his shoulder. Quickly, the men divided tasks, and while some lit the fires to prepare the food, others began to hollow out the fruits, throwing the pulp and seeds on the ground, and to clean and cut the branches in arm-sized pieces. They were organizing something, but we couldn’t imagine what.
At last night fell on the jungle and the natives were very animated as we ate. The shaman, on the contrary, stayed on the periphery, a little way away from our groups, at the edge of the vegetation and in the shadow so we could barely see him. He ate nothing and drank nothing and remained motionless in that corner without anyone addressing him, not even to offer him a little water.
When the last Toromona had finished eating, a kind of silence began to fall little by little over the camp. We were increasingly disconcerted. The leader suddenly gave a few orders and the men stood up and the fires were extinguished. Darkness enveloped us because the moonlight was barely a pale reflection on the sky; only a few branches, held up by the natives, were kept lit. Then the men lifted us up off the ground, grabbing us by one arm, and made us sit again, forming a wide circle in the middle of the clearing, with them all around us. We knew that they weren’t going to hurt us and that what they were doing obeyed some ceremony or show, but it was impossible not to feel a certain nervousness, because it seemed that whatever was going to happen was directly related to us. I was afraid that Marc would blurt out one of his atrocious commentaries at any moment, but he did not; he looked very calm the whole time, and I would even say he was enchanted by that new experience. Then the shaman appeared in the middle of the circle. He stuck a reed in the ground, and, with a sharpened anteater claw, he made two deep cuts in the shape of a cross on the upper end. Then he separated the four sides so that it could hold a cup in the middle, into which he dropped a fistful of stems and leaves that he took from his bag of remedies. With the claw, he went about cutting everything into very small pieces, as if he were going to prepare a julienne soup, and when he finished, he grabbed a fistful and squeezed hard. A liquid slid from his hand and fell into the cup. He repeated the operation many times until all that was left was a dry paste which he threw forcefully into the vegetation of the jungle. In that exact moment, a Toromona began to beat a stick against one of the hollow trunks they had brought from the jungle, producing a deep, regular sound.
The old shaman took the cup from between the pieces of reed and drank the content very slowly. Then, suddenly, the scene sped up: someone took the reed from the ground and made it disappear, while four of the leader’s five bodyguards surrounded the old man, who was sprawled on the ground, and firmly held his arms and legs. The rhythm of the drum sped up. The shaman started to become agitated, trying to stand, but the strongmen stopped him. The old man fought like a lion, screamed like a wounded animal, but all his efforts to free himself were useless. Then, he calmed down. He went completely still and the men let him go and moved away in silence. It seemed like the only thing in the world was that dead old man and the six of us surrounding him. The sound of the drum became slower and slower, like the beats of a calm heart.