Authors: Matilde Asensi
My grandmother broke down when she heard the truth. She was the strongest woman I knew (well, Marta was just as strong, but I had seen my grandmother face very serious problems in her life and resolve them with absolute composure), nevertheless, when she heard that her grandson Daniel had stolen important documents from his boss’s office, she collapsed and started to cry. Never, until that day, had I seen her shed a single tear, so I was stunned and dispirited. Fortunately, I reacted and hugged her tightly. I told her that between the two of us we would do everything possible and impossible to help Daniel. At that moment, the doorbell rang and I left her for a minute and went to the entry phone to buzz open the downstairs door. Then, while Marta came up, I ran back to her side, but to my surprise I found her recovered, with her eyes totally dry.
“And this woman, the professor,” she asked me suspiciously, “is coming to help Daniel after everything he did to her?”
“Grandma!” I reprimanded her, running back to the entryway; the doorbell had just rung again. “Marta is a good person. You would do it too…. Anyone would do it.”
“I suppose so,” I heard her say as I opened the door. There, with a serious look on her face, was the woman for whom every member of my family felt something different and controversial.
Myself included.
“Come in, please,” I requested. My grandmother was already coming from the hall to receive her. “Grandma, this is Marta Torrent, Daniel’s boss. Marta, this is my grandmother, Eulàlia.”
“Thanks for coming,” my grandmother told her with a smile.
“Pleasure to meet you. I suppose Arnau already explained, more or less, the silly thing we’re planning on doing.”
“There’s nothing wrong with trying, right? I’m very grateful to you for being here. And please, address me informally. When one is more than eighty years old, formality doesn’t do.”
Marta smiled and the three of us walked slowly toward the back of the apartment. The door to my brother’s room, which was ajar, was right between the entrance to the living room and the near end of the sofa, facing the small round dining table.
“Do you want something to drink before…?” my grandmother started, without knowing how to finish.
“I don’t want anything,” I replied, nervous.
“I don’t either, thank you. I would prefer to see Daniel first. If…,” Marta hesitated. “If it doesn’t work then I will need a very strong coffee. And, of course, a cigarette.”
“I’m a smoker too!” my grandmother exclaimed with the joy of one society member who finds another.
“Ready, Marta?” I asked, opening the door and looking at her. She nodded.
The blinds were raised and the windows open, although partially covered by the curtains. The room was an oven at that hour of the afternoon. In front of us was the small closet that Daniel and Ona had built in a corner of the room. By taking a couple of steps to the left, we got to what remained of the room after the project, occupied almost completely by the enormous bed, in the center of which was my brother. The sight of him overwhelmed me.
Daniel looked like a dead man. He was uncovered and had on a tee shirt and some pajama shorts. He had lost at least thirty or forty pounds, and, as my mother had told me, he looked emaciated. At that moment, he had his eyes open, but he didn’t turn to look at us when we entered. He remained immobile, distant. His arms lay limply on the sheet. My grandmother went over to him, and picking up a dropper from the night table, put a couple of drops in each eye.
“They’re artificial tears,” she explained. “He doesn’t blink enough.”
“Let Marta stand where you are, okay?” I asked.
My grandmother looked at us with infinite sadness. I suppose what I had told her about the theft still pained her, but also, like the pragmatic woman she was, she was suffering from her own internal battle, trying not to foster any false hope about what could happen. She smoothed Daniel’s hair and also adjusted the pillow his head was resting on, and then, very serene, she came out from the corner and joined me where I was watching the scene from the foot of the bed. Marta took her place next to my brother and remained silent, looking at him. I would have liked to know what she was thinking. Really, those two had known each other for a long time and had worked together for several years. He disparaged and criticized her in front of Ona, but Marta? What did Marta think of Daniel, besides recognizing how intelligent he was? She had never told me.
“I hope, sincerely, that it works,” she murmured, suddenly raising her head to look at me. “Right now none of this makes any sense to me, Arnau. It seems terribly absurd.”
“Don’t worry,” I encouraged her. “It’s not going to hurt him and he can’t be any worse than he is, so go ahead.”
“Come on, girl, try it.”
Marta leaned toward Daniel and rubbed a hand over her forehead, trying to brush away the last doubts.
“
Jupaxusutaw ak munta jinchu chhiqhacha jichhat uksarux waliptaña
,” she said, very slowly and in a clear voice, without looking away from him.
My grandmother discreetly made me lower my head, and she asked me in my ear what those strange words meant.
“It’s a formula,” I explained. “The important thing isn’t what it says, but the sounds made by pronouncing the phrase.”
And Daniel moved his arm. He lifted it very slowly in the air and dropped it on his abdomen. Marta jumped back, startled, and my grandmother raised her hands to her mouth to choke an exclamation of the joy that poured from her eyes. Almost without interruption, Daniel turned his head on the pillow and stared at us. He blinked a couple of times, wrinkled his forehead, and moistened his dry lips just as if he were waking up from a long sleep, and then he tried to tell us something, but his voice wouldn’t leave his throat. Marta, still incapable of believing what she was seeing, left the corner to give the space to my grandmother, who walked over hurriedly as Daniel followed her with his gaze, turning his head again. This time he even tried to raise it, but he couldn’t. My grandmother sat on the edge of the bed and passed a hand over his forehead and hair.
“Can you hear me, Daniel?” she asked tenderly.
My brother cleared his throat. Then he coughed. He tried again to raise his head and managed to a little.
“What’s going on, grandma?” was the first thing he said. His voice sounded strange, as if he had a cold, with pharyngitis.
My grandmother hugged him, squeezing him tightly in her arms, but Daniel, with an effort, held her and pushed her away. She smiled. Before she could say anything, my brother turned toward Marta and me. The muscles of his face, still rigid from lack of use, attempted an unrecognizable grimace.
“Hello, Arnau,” he said with his rough voice. “Hello, Marta.”
“You’ve been very ill, son,” my grandmother explained, forcing him to let his head fall again. “Very ill.”
“Ill..?” he asked, surprised. “And Ona? And Dani?”
Marta stayed where she was while I rounded the bed and sat on the side opposite my grandmother.
“How do you feel?” I asked. Daniel, wincing in pain as if his whole body were stiff, planted his hands on the bed and sat up slowly, in order to be level with me, resting his back against the headboard.
“Well, I feel confused,” he said at last; his voice was getting clearer little by little. “Because a minute ago I was working in my office and now you say I’ve been ill. I don’t understand anything.”
“What were you working on, Daniel?” I asked.
He wrinkled his forehead, trying to remember, and suddenly a light went on in his head. His face expressed fear and his gaze jumped above my shoulder to land on his boss, on the professor.
“What are you doing here, Marta?” he asked her, cowed.
But before she could answer, I got her attention by putting a hand on her arm:
“You’ve been sick for three months, Daniel, because of an Aymara curse.” I told him very seriously, fixing him with my gaze; he jumped. “You know what I’m talking about; you don’t need any more explanation. Marta came to cure you. She woke you up. It’s taken a lot for us to find the cure you needed. In a couple of days, I’ll tell you everything. Now you need to rest and recuperate. We’ll talk when you’re better. Okay?”
My brother nodded slowly without erasing the alarmed expression from his face. I patted his arm reassuringly and got up, going toward Marta, who stood gravely and silently watching Daniel.
“We’re leaving now,” I announced. “In a little while, Mom, Ona, Dani, and your father will be here. They went out, but when Grandma calls to give them the good news of your recovery, they will return immediately. Oh, and another thing! Don’t tell the family anything about the curse or the Aymara. Okay?”
My brother lowered his gaze.
“Okay,” he murmured.
“Goodbye, Daniel,” Marta said. “We’ll see each other soon.”
“Whenever you like,” he replied.
It wasn’t a good idea for us to stay any longer. Our presence, now that he knew what had happened, wasn’t helping him at all. He looked agitated and nervous. The moment to talk would come when he was feeling better. I gave my grandmother a kiss, and she said goodbye to us with an understanding look, took Marta by the hand, and left the room with her.
“It worked,” she said, smiling and raising her eyebrows in confusion.
“It worked,” I repeated, absolutely satisfied.
Yes, it had worked, but starting then, my brother had a long series of medical tests waiting for him, and even worse, the solicitous attention of our mother. Everyone would be astonished by his recovery, just as they had been astonished by his sudden illness. But we knew the truth, and that truth touched on the strange power of words, that extraordinary capacity of sounds to program the mind. We had a lot of work ahead of us, but it was exciting work: the brain, the flood, the Yatiri, the old legends on the creation of the world and of human beings…. However, despite our new projects, the big changes, and the many jungles we still had left to explore, the most important thing was to have understood that some modern technologies and some recent scientific discoveries coupled inexplicably with the old magic of the past, with the myths of old cultures. Past, present, and future mysteriously interlaced.
“You weren’t very affectionate with Daniel,” Marta said as we went out.
“I was as I had to be. It would have been impossible for me to act differently.”
It was true. Things would never be the same as before, and that was okay, I thought, looking at Marta and remembering the day I showed up in her office at the college, and she, so serious and circumspect, had been unable to hold back a laugh at the horrified face I’d made upon discovering the dried out mummy and the hanging skulls. Had my hacker strategy worked? Would she come with me, or bury the matter?
“Okay, Marta,” I said, closing the apartment door. “We’ve cured Daniel. Now….”
“What do you want to do?” she interrupted in a teasing tone.
I smiled.
“Do you feel like seeing the ‘100’?”
1
Small software applications that install themselves in the operating system without the knowledge of the owner and monitor all the activities of the computer by sending this information through generally commercial servers.
2
Light Emitting Diode (L.E.D.).
3
Vain, in Catalan.
4
Part of chaos theory. The seemingly chaotic shapes of nature, like trees, clouds, mountains, coastlines, etc., can be described and reproduced with simple mathematical formulas.
5
HyperText Transfer Protocol.
6
Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, trans. James Fentress (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 346.
7
José Toribio Medina, “Historia del Tribunal de la Inquisición de Lima: 1569-1820. Tomo II, Apéndice Documental del Historiador Peruano Carlos A. Mackehenie” (Alicante: Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes, 2000).
8
American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII). The ASCII code combines all text characters and all punctuation symbols in a standard table, representing them as numbers.
9
R. Sagárnaga, “Tiwanaku. Historia del Asalto al Cielo,” Escape, La Razón Digital, (October 2, 2002).
10
According to Blas Valera, cited by Garcilaso de la Vega (Book I, chap. VI), “Vassals of the Inca,” citizens of Tihauntinsuyu, the Kingdom of the Four Regions.
11
The name given to the Spanish by the Inca because of the likeness of their physical appearance to the god Viracocha.
12
National currency of Bolivia.
13
C. Ponce Sanjinés, Thunupa y Ekeko: Estudio Arqueológico Acerca de las Efigies Precolombinas de Dorso Adunco (La Paz: The National Academy of Sciences of Bolivia, 1969).
14
Gregorio Iriarte, economist, cited in “Bolivia: The Social Consequences of Debt,” by Marie Dennis. NACLA, North American Congress on Latin America, 31, no. 3 (1997).
15
A Spanish adventurer from the sixteenth century, famous for his expedition along the length of the Amazon River in search of the legendary El Dorado, with the intention of establishing an independent kingdom in the middle of the jungle.
16
In Bolivia, recruit, national serviceman.
17
March, 2000, Spanish edition.
18
A biological Assessment of the Alto Madidi Region and Adjacent Areas of Northwest Bolivia, 1991.