Authors: Matilde Asensi
That situation lasted for a long time, until, slowly, the shaman got up. He seemed drugged and his eyes were very blank. Someone took him a small object and put it in his hand. It was one of those fruits they had emptied before dinner; it had apparently been turned into some kind of
maraca filled with pebbles or seeds. The shaman began to dance in front of us, shaking the maraca to the rhythm of the drum. He sang something unintelligible and jumped every once in a while as if he were a monkey. At one point he shook the maraca impishly in front of Gertrude’s face, making her jump backwards with a scared expression, and he froze like a statue. Then he knelt before her, and, with his free hand, traced some symbols in the dirt. He stood again, making the instrument rattle and made another complete round of the circle, jumping and singing, to stop in front of Marc, who also didn’t appreciate having that rattle shaken in front of his face. The scene of the pictures on the ground was repeated, just like with Gertrude, and the shaman continued, doing the same in front of each of us. When my turn came, the old man stared at me with his frightening blank eyes, shook the maraca again, and knelt down to scribble. But no, he wasn’t drawing random lines; instead, his entranced hand drew what was unmistakably a bird.
The ceremony ended when, with four sharp strikes of the drum, the shaman toppled onto the ground. The leader’s strongmen picked him up and took him inside the jungle, from which he did not emerge until the next morning, just in time to resume our walk to Qhispita. He seemed to be feeling better than ever and he smiled at us from afar when he saw us. By then, we already knew that what had happened the night before had been a gift the Toromonas had given us. We realized it when at last we could see all the drawings. For Efraín, the shaman had drawn a three-stepped Pyramid inside which was a snake. Marta had received the same pyramid, but over it, the shaman had drawn a bird identical to mine. Marc and Lola had gotten the same human head with several aureoles joined by spokes, which, more than saints’ halos, looked like incandescent light bulbs. Gertrude believed at first that her drawing was a lock, but then realized it was a bag of remedies like the shaman’s, because he had included a small decoration of feathers like the one that hung from his. Those were our futures, the things that interested us and that we planned to dedicate ourselves to: Efraín and Marta to Lakaqullu, the three-tiered pyramid with its treasure chamber; Marc and Lola to Ker-Central, a company promoting projects of artificial intelligence; Gertrude to practicing medicine among the Indians of the Amazon, but from a new approach, a little more like a
curandera
and shaman; and I…Well, what the hell did the bird that both Marta and I had gotten mean? I wouldn’t explain it. I pretended ignorance and kept silent. Deliberately, I let the others, Marta included, wrack their brains trying to figure it out.
At last, on Monday, August 5
th
, we arrived at Qhispita and we stopped before the same door through which we had left as prisoners. The Toromonas took their leave of us at that moment. The leader put his hands on our shoulders, one after the other, pronouncing some words we didn’t understand in a friendly voice, and then he and his men went back into the jungle and disappeared. They weren’t very expressive people. After a few seconds, we went into the city and slowly walked up toward the plaza. We moved in shock: in comparison with the six weeks spent in the jungle, those ruins seemed like the edge of civilization, with their cobbled streets and their houses with walls and roofs.
We reached the square, and we contemplated in silence the empty buildings and the solitary and enormous central monolith, the one that showed a giant bearded man with the features of the Traveler of Lakaqullu, very close to whose pedestal of black stone still lay the charred remains of what had been our possessions. Like hungry beggars, we rifled through the ashes in search of something that might have survived, but there was nothing left. All we had were our hammocks, a couple of blowguns, and some sharpened fangs. That and the large quantity of knowledge acquired alongside the Toromonas.
Over the last few nights, we had been discussing how we could return alone to Rurrenabaque. Remembering the burned maps, we knew that by walking always westward, we
would end up finding the great Beni River, and that from there all we would have to do would be to follow its course to its source, and sooner or later we would reach the twin towns of Rurrenabaque and San Buenaventura. When we had come, we had faithfully followed the path indicated by Sarmiento de Gamboa’s map and the map from the gold sheet, but now we would have to figure it out for ourselves.
When we had checked to see what direction the sun was setting, we began our journey through the jungle. We were no longer the same six people who had arrived at that abandoned city loaded with modern technology and designer food. Now we knew how to hunt, skin, make a fire, protect ourselves from dangers that ranged from pumas to army ants, from horseflies to toucans, just as we knew how to follow the paths opened by animals, pull up a vine and drink its watery content if we were thirsty, or cure an abscess with snake or lizard oil. No, we were no longer at all the same six people (three hackers, a doctor, an archaeologist, and an anthropologist) who had arrived at the ruins of Qhispita with their waterproof breathable backpacks.
It took us two and a half days to get to the Beni, and from there, two days more to find a small village called San Pablo, made up of only three or four indigenous families, who, of course, didn’t have telephones or know what they were; but they did have some magnificent canoes in which they offered to take us to another settlement called Puerto de Ixiamas, thirty miles upriver. We had predicted the reaction our ragged state and sudden appearance might cause in anyone who saw us, so we told a grisly story about a plane crash in which we had lost everything and a dramatic story of survival in the jungle. Those people, who looked even worse then we did, looked at us without understanding very well what we were telling them (they were simple people who knew little Spanish), but even so, they gave us dinner, let us sleep inside one of their wood cabins, and the next day, they took us to Puerto de Ixiamas, which turned out not to be much bigger than San Pablo, but which had a telephone, a telephone that only worked when it was connected to an old gasoline generator, and which even then offered little guarantee of making a connection. After a couple of hours of fruitless attempts through various local switchboards, Efraín was able to contact one of his brothers and tell him, more or less, what our situation was. His brother, who was a peaceful math professor little accustomed to such surprises, kept his cool and promised to wait for us in the last riverside town before Rurrenabaque, Puerto Brais, two days later, with food and money.
We were on the margins of the world, in some lost corner of the jungle where no one ever came and where they weren’t used to seeing white people or hearing Spanish spoken. We were still on the outskirts of Terra Incognita, but, on board the river people’s canoes, we arrived on the agreed upon date at Puerto Brais, about nine miles from our destination, where Efraín’s brother, Wilfredo, with confusion written all over his face, received us with big hugs and a suitcase. We couldn’t pass very unnoticed on that small quay, or in the little bar where we quickly cleaned up and changed our clothes, but when we boarded the last boat headed for Rurre we looked like calm tourists coming back from an agreeable excursion in the area.
Since we had lost the reservations we’d paid for when we came, Wilfredo had had to go to El Alto and purchase the six tickets for the return flight to La Paz that was leaving that very night (they kept adding special flights for tourists), so we spent the afternoon sitting first in a bar, and then in a park, trying not to call to much attention to ourselves. At the arranged hour, we walked calmly to the TAM offices where the bus left for the grass airfield.
We landed, at last, in El Alto at ten something at night, and we said goodbye to Wilfred before getting into two Radio-Taxis that took us to Efraín and Gertrude’s house. I had never felt
a shock like I suffered traveling inside a vehicle through the streets of La Paz. The speed surprised me. It was like returning to Earth after having spent a long time on another planet. Everything seemed new, strange, fast, and too noisy to me, and besides, there was a dry and wintry cold in the air that I was no longer used to.
Gertrude and Efraín stopped to see some neighbors who had a copy of the keys to their house in case something happened. They opened the door with the keys, and only once we were inside did we understand that we had really returned. We looked at each other and smiled without saying anything, as confused as a group of kids on their first day of school. Marc and Lola’s suitcases, and mine, were in the guest room, so we showered, put on our own clothes, sat in normal chairs around the dining room table, and with plates, silverware, and napkins, we ate a magnificent dinner that was delivered from a nearby restaurant. Then, still somewhat out of it from the change, we turned on the television and sat stunned, watching the images that moved on the screen and listening to the voices and the music. Everything was still very strange, but what surprised me the most was seeing the others well-coiffed, with clean hands and nails, and dressed in long pants, skirts, blouses, and sweaters, all clean and without tears. They looked different.
There was something, however, that I couldn’t postpone any longer. It had been almost two months since I had said goodbye to my grandmother with a promise to contact her when I could, thinking it would be a matter of a couple of weeks. So I called her. It was six in the afternoon in Spain. Like any grandmother in the world, mine hadn’t had a very good time of it while she hadn’t had any news of me; but despite her worry (which was almost enough to make her call the Bolivian police on a couple of occasions, she told me), she had managed to keep my mother under control by convincing her that I was fine and that I called often.
“And where did you tell her I am?” I asked her. “So I don’t put my foot in my mouth when I get back.”
“You know I never lie,” she replied firmly.
Please, no! I thought, horrified. What the hell had she told them?
“That you had gone to the Amazon jungle looking for some natural remedies to cure Daniel. Some herbs. You don’t want to know the face your mother made! Right away, she started to tell all her friends as if it were something very chic. You have half of Barcelona waiting for you, dying of curiosity.”
I would have felt like killing her if it hadn’t been for the fact that hearing her, and returning in some sense to normality, made me happy.
“Did you get them, Arnauet?”
“Did I get what?”
“The herbs…. Well, whatever it was. You know what I mean.” She let out a long sigh and I got the impression that what she was really doing was hiding the exhalation of smoke from a cigarette. “Your mother’s made me tell it so many times that I’ve almost come to believe it.”
“Possibly, Grandma. We’ll know when we return.”
“Well, your brother’s at home. We checked him out of the hospital a month and a half ago. He isn’t any better; the poor thing is exactly the same as when you left. Now he doesn’t even talk anymore. I hope whatever you’re bringing will do something. Do you want to tell me what it is?”
“I’m calling you from the house of some friends and it’s an international call, Grandma. I’ll tell you when I’m there, okay?”
“When are you coming back?” she wanted to know.
“As soon as we get the tickets for Spain. Ask Núria. I’m going to call her right now so she can take care of everything. She’ll keep you informed.”
“I want to see you so badly!”
“And I, you, Grandma,” I said, smiling. “Oh, by the way! There’s something I need you to do for me. Find a good moment for me to be alone with Daniel. I don’t want there to be anyone in the room watching, or even in the living room waiting, or in the kitchen making dinner. The house has to be empty. Also, I’ll be bringing someone with me.”
“Arnau!” she said, scandalized. “You’re not thinking of bringing an Indian shaman to your brother’s home, are you?”
“How do you expect me to bring a shaman!” I asked, irritated. “No. It’s Marta Torrent, Daniel’s boss.”
There was a long and meaningful silence on the other end of the line.
“Marta Torrent?” she said at last, with hesitation in her voice. “Isn’t she the witch that Ona talks about?”
“Yes, that’s the one,” I admitted, looking sideways at Marta and seeing how she and Lola laughed at something they saw on the television. “But she’s a great person, Grandma. I’ll introduce you. You’ll like her, you’ll see. She’s the one who’s going to cure Daniel.”
“I don’t know, Arnauet…,” she muttered. “I’m not sure it’s a good idea to bring Marta Torrent to your brother and Ona’s house. Ona might be offended. You know she considers Marta responsible for Daniel’s illness.”
“Look, Grandma, don’t make get into that right now.” I snapped; remembering the stupid things my brother and my sister-in-law said about Marta put me in a bad mood. “You just do what I tell you and leave the rest to me. Figure out how to empty the house so Marta and I can go in without anyone knowing about it.”
“You’re putting me in a tight spot, kid!”
“You’re clever enough to pull it off,” I teased.
“Of course I’m clever enough! If I weren’t, I don’t know what would have become of this family. But I’ll tell you again that you’re putting me in a very difficult situation with your sister-in-law.”
“You’ll do fine,” I reassured her, closing the discussion. “I’ll see you in a couple of days. Take care of yourself until I get back, okay?”
When I put down the phone after talking to my grandmother and to Núria, it was no longer civilization that seemed strange to me, but the memory of the jungle. As if by magic, I had recovered my normal way of behaving and I felt I was turning back into the same Arnau Queralt from before. But no, I told myself. Surely not entirely.