Authors: Matilde Asensi
I turned my head slowly to look at Ona and discovered that she, in turn, was looking at me with red, tear-filled eyes.
“You’re right, Arnau,” she whispered. “You’re completely right. It’s silly, I know, but it’s just that, for a moment, I thought that….”
I wrapped an arm around her shoulders and drew her to me. She weakly let herself be drawn in. She was broken.
“This isn’t easy for anyone, Ona. Our nerves are shot and we’re very afraid for Daniel. When someone is afraid, they hide in anything that gives a little bit of hope, and you believed that, possibly, if all of this was a product of some kind of curse, with another bit of magic he could be cured, right?”
She laughed quietly and brushed a hand across her forehead, trying to get those crazy ideas out of her head.
“Come on, let’s go to the hospital,” she muttered, smiling and freeing herself from my arm. “Clifford and your mother must be exhausted.”
While she got her things together and said goodbye to her parents and her son, I stayed there, in front of that damned paper that was needling my brain like a swarm of mosquitoes in summer.
We happened to be very close to La Custòdia and it wouldn’t have been worth the effort to take the car if not for that fact that, in the morning, when we would be tired and sleepless, those ten minutes of walking would have seemed an eternity to us.
“What was Daniel working on?” I asked Ona, without taking my eyes off the red light that had just stopped us on Ronda Guinardo.
My sister-in-law let out a long sigh. “On that odious research on Inca ethnolinguistics,” she declared. “Marta, the head of the department, offered him a collaboration around Christmas. ‘A very important study,’ she told him, ‘a publication that will make a real name for the department’…. Bullshit! All she wanted was for Daniel to do the dirty work so that later she could take all the credit, like always. You know how it works.”
My brother was a professor of linguistic anthropology at UAB, the Autonomous University of Barcelona, adjunct professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology. He had always been a magnificent student, a collector of academic successes, and, having just turned twenty-seven, he could not have gotten farther or done it more quickly. Curiously, despite all of this, he suffered from an inexplicable rivalry with me; nothing exaggerated, of course, but his frequent comments about my business and my money didn’t leave any room for doubt which was why (I thought), he pushed himself as he did in his work. He had had a brilliant future ahead of him before becoming ill.
“Have you called his department to let them know what happened?”
“Yes. I did it this morning before going to bed. They told me I have to drop off his medical leave papers so they can hire an intern to cover his classes.”
We went inside La Custòdia, passing through swarms of silent people. Returning there gave me a strange sensation: It was an alien and sad place that I’d only been in once in my life,
yet I felt it like an extension of myself, like familiar territory. Surely, the presence of Clifford and my mother contributed a great deal, but I was sure that it really had more to do with the emotional weight of the situation.
Daniel was exactly the same as he had been that morning when we left. He hadn’t improved at all, my mother explained, but he also hadn’t gotten worse and that was very positive.
“At noon the psychiatrist, Dr. Hernández, came to see him,” she continued to explain, without getting up from the chair. “By the way, what a delightful man! Right, Clifford? How nice and friendly! He made us feel much calmer, right, Clifford?”
Clifford, without paying her any notice, stayed where he stood next to his son’s bed. I supposed that he had hardly moved from there all day. I advanced a few steps towards him and positioned myself at his side, also gazing at my brother. Daniel had his eyes open, but they were still lifeless and he didn’t seem to hear anything that was being said around him.
“Dr. Hernández…Diego has assured us that Daniel will get well very soon, and he’s explained to us that the medications they’re giving him will begin to take effect in two or three days, right, Clifford? Next week we’ll have him with us at home again, you’ll see! Ona, darling, don’t leave your bag on the floor…. There’s a closet right there. Incidentally, this hospital is horrible! Why didn’t you take him to a private clinic? We can’t even all sit down!” She protested from the armchair. “Clifford, go on, go see if the nurses this shift are nicer than the others, and if they might bring us a chair. Can you believe they said there were no chairs left on the whole floor? Ridiculous! But you tell me how to say it to one of those…witches dressed in white. What unpleasant people! Right, Clifford? But, why don’t you go ask? Surely now they’ll bring us at least a stool, a bench, I don’t know, a footrest…. Any kind of seat would do!”
And yes, yes, they did bring us another seat, a green plastic chair like those in the waiting room, but only after my mother had walked out the door of the neurology floor, vowing not to return until the next day. The nurses must have taken it personally, and honestly, I was not the least bit surprised. I crossed my fingers that Clifford and my mother would remember the access codes to my house, because otherwise I could see myself rescuing them from the police station on Via Laietana.
Ona sat down in the armchair and engrossed herself in a book, and I pulled the chair up to the sort of counter-thing with a fold-out section that sometimes served as a night table and sometimes as a workbench for the staff of the department. I pushed aside the box of tissues, the bottle of water, Daniel’s glass, and the eye drops that we had to put in his eyes every so often to keep them from drying out from him not blinking enough. I took out my small computer from my backpack (a high-end ultralight laptop, weighing a little over two and a half pounds), opened it, and positioned it so I would be able to type more or less comfortably, and so there would be space left to set my phone down; I needed to connect to Ker-Central’s intranet, the company’s private network, to take a look at my email, review pending business and meetings, and study the documents that Núria had left prepared for me.
I worked for half an hour, withdrawing completely from reality, concentrating on resolving as well as I could the urgent matters of the company, and when I least expected it, I heard a very somber laugh come from Daniel’s bed. I looked up from the monitor, astonished, and saw my brother with a strange curve on his lips. Before I had time to react, Ona had jumped out of the chair and gone to his side, leaning nervously over Daniel, who kept smiling sadly and was moving his lips as if trying to say something.
“What’s wrong, Daniel?” She asked him, caressing his forehead and cheeks.
“
Lawt’ata
,” he responded, and laughed again with the same disconsolate sound as before.
“What did he say?” I demanded, disconcerted, drawing closer.
“I don’t know, I didn’t understand him!”
“I’m dead,” said Daniel in a hollow voice. “I’m dead because the
Yatiri
have punished me.”
“For the love of God, darling, stop talking nonsense!”
“What does ‘
lawt’ata
’ mean, Daniel?” I interrogated him, resting a hand on the pillow so I could lean in closer, but my brother turned his head the other way and didn’t utter another sound.
“Leave him alone, Arnau,” Ona replied, dejected, going back to her book and the chair. “He won’t say anything else. You know how pig-headed he is.”
But I kept asking myself why Daniel had laughed in such a strange way and uttered those very strange words. What language was that?
“Quechua or Aymara,” Ona explained when I asked her. “Probably Aymara. Quechua was the official language of the Inca, but in the southeast part of the empire they spoke Aymara. Daniel had to learn both to be able to work with Marta.”
“In just a few months?” I asked, surprised, going back to my chair and turning it to sit facing Ona. The energy administration program of the laptop had turned off the monitor and put it to sleep to save the battery. In a few minutes, if I didn’t move the mouse or push a key, it would also turn off the hard disk.
“Your brother has a great aptitude for languages, didn’t you know?”
“Even so,” I objected.
“Well…,” she murmured, pursing her lips and wrinkling her forehead, “the truth is he’s been working very hard since he started collaborating with Marta. I told you before that he was obsessed. He would come home from the University, eat, and shut himself in his office all evening. Anyway, he abandoned Quechua pretty quickly to dedicate himself completely to Aymara. I know because he told me.”
“That text, the one you showed me at your house, was it also written in Aymara?”
“I guess so.”
“And this project about…. Did you say Inca ethnolinguistics?”
“Yes.”
“What the hell is that?”
“Ethnolinguistics is a branch of anthropology that studies the relationship between the language and the culture of a people.” She explained patiently. “As you know, the Inca didn’t have a writing system, so all their traditions were handed down orally.”
The idea that I already knew was a big assumption on her part. All of that brought to my mind the discovery of America by Columbus, the three caravels, and the Catholic Kings. If I had had to locate the Inca, the Maya, and the Aztecs on a map, I would have made a terrible mess of it.
“Marta, the head of Daniel’s department, is an expert on the subject.” My sister-in-law continued to explain with a look of annoyance; there was no doubt at all that she liked that woman Marta as much as a kick in the stomach, and that she loathed Daniel’s collaboration with her. “She’s published a multitude of studies, she works with specialized magazines from all over the world, and she is invited to every conference on Latin American anthropology. She is a very important figure, as well as a stuck-up and arrogant old lady.” She crossed her legs with an air of self-satisfaction and looked at me. “Here in Catalonia, apart from heading the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at UAB, she directs the Centre d’Estudis Internacionals i
Interculturals d’Amèrica Llatina, and is the president of the Institut Català de Cooperació Iberoamericana. Now you can understand why Daniel had to force himself to work with her: Rejecting her offer would have meant the end of his career as a researcher.”
My brother shifted restlessly on the bed, turning his head from side to side and shaking his hands in the air as if he were flapping his wings. Every now and then he would again mutter the inexplicable word that he had uttered before:
lawt’ata
. He must be repeating it for some reason, but if such a reason existed, only he knew it. He said
lawt’ata
quietly and shook himself restlessly; he said it again and laughed; then he quieted for a while only to, later, start again.
“Okay,” I nodded, passing my hands over my rough cheeks. “But, setting aside this Marta woman, explain to me what exactly the work consisted of.”
My sister-in-law, who had left her book open over one of the chair’s armrests, picked it up lazily, put the bookmark between the pages, and closed it, letting it fall haphazardly into her lap.
“I don’t know if I should….” she declared, unsure.
“Ona, I’m not thinking of stealing Daniel’s and the department’s ideas for myself.”
She laughed and pulled down the sleeves of her sweater until she succeeded in hiding her hands inside them.
“I know, Arnau, I know! But Daniel warned me many times not to tell anyone anything.”
“But you must see…. I’m just trying to understand what’s happening to him.”
She remained absorbed in her thoughts for a few seconds and, at last, seemed to make a decision.
“You won’t say anything, right?” She wanted to know before revealing the big secret.
“Who do you think I’m going to talk to about Inca ethnolinguistics?” I laughed. “Do you really think that something so boring could interest any of my friends?”
She laughed as well, realizing what nonsense she had said.
“My God, no! They would have to be some very unusual friends!”
“Well you’ve answered your own question, and now explain to me what it was Daniel asked you not to tell anyone.”
“It’s a little bit of a complicated story,” She began, and crossed her arms over her chest without taking her hands out of her sleeves. “A friend of Marta’s, Professor Laura Laurencich-Minelli, full professor in the Department of Pre-Columbian Civilizations of the University of Bologna, Italy, had heard at the beginning of the nineties of some mysterious documents from the seventeenth century found by accident in a private archive in Naples, the so-called Miccinelli documents. From what Daniel told me, those documents contained a lot of strange and surprising information about the conquest of Peru, but the most extraordinary thing about it all, the reason why Professor Laurencich-Minelli immediately contacted her friend Marta Torrent, was that they contained the necessary key to interpret a forgotten system of Incan writing that would prove the Inca were not a backward civilization without an alphabet.”
What Ona had just told me must be something without a doubt extraordinary, because she was eying me, waiting for an enthusiastic reaction that I obviously didn’t have.
“Did you hear what I said, Arnau?” She inquired, perplexed. “The Miccinelli documents show the falseness of the accounts of the Spanish, affirming with unquestionable evidence the existence of a written language among the Inca!”
“Oh, wow, that’s...great!” I managed to say, without really understanding what she was talking about.
Fortunately, she noticed my ignorance and tried to throw me a line to rescue me from my confusion. It was evident that she was passionate on the subject; no wonder, I remembered, she
had started her degree in that major, and, from what she had confessed to me the day before, had intentions of finishing it.
“You see, Arnau, proving that the Inca had writing is like discovering that man didn’t descend from the apes….Something unthinkable, incredible, and awesome, do you understand?”