Authors: Matilde Asensi
As if my brother were an application with millions of lines, my valuable sixth sense was warning me of the presence of dark areas related to the errors in his brain. The problem was that I had not written that supposed program that represented Daniel, so despite my suspicions of the existence of those incorrect data, I didn’t have a way to find out how to locate and repair them.
I spent the rest of that second night working and attending to my brother, but by the time light began to enter through the window and Ona had waked, I had already come to the decision that I would throw myself completely into the business of clarifying (if my sixth sense was right and if it was feasible) the possible correlation between Daniel’s agnosia and Cotard’s, on one side, and his strange research project, on the other. If I was fooling myself, and, as I had told Ona that afternoon, everything was a product of our nerves and the fear we felt, the only thing I had to lose was the time invested, and if, moreover, over the coming days Daniel responded to the treatment and was cured, would he be enough of an idiot to reproach me for chasing after a surely ridiculous hunch? Well, maybe he would, but it didn’t matter.
When we arrived on Xiprer Street I went up with my sister-in-law to her apartment to pick up the paper written by Daniel, because I wanted to study it that afternoon, but when I left, I left loaded with a mountain of books on the Inca and with the folders of research documents about the
quipus
.
I went to bed around nine-thirty in the morning, wiped out, with irritated eyes, and exhausted like never before in my life. Owing to the change in my sleep schedule and to having sat up all night, I suffered from jet-lag without having crossed the Atlantic, but even so, I told the system to wake me at three in the afternoon, because I had a lot to do and very little time to do it.
I was deeply asleep when Vivaldi, Allegro from Concerto for Mandolin, began to sound throughout the house. The central computer selected, from among my favorites, a different melody for every day, depending on the time of year, the time of day that I was waking up, and the weather outside. My entire house was constructed around my personality, and over the years a strange symbiosis had been produced between the artificial intelligence system that regulated it and myself. It had learned and perfected itself on its own, in such a way that it had become a kind of telepathic majordomo obsessed with serving me and attending to me like a mother.
The curtains of the wide French windows that looked out on the garden were softly opening, allowing a tenuous ocean green light to come in, while the screen that completely covered the back wall reproduced a visualization of Van Gogh’s L'église d'Auvers-sur-Oise. It was still daytime and I still felt terribly sleepy, so I squeezed my eyelids shut, put the pillow over my head, and bellowed: “Five more minutes!” causing the sudden death of the special effects. The bad thing was that Magdalena, the housekeeper, immune to the voice recognition system, was already coming through the door with the breakfast tray.
“Do you really want to keep sleeping?” she asked, taken aback, while she walked noisily over the wood, dragged chairs, opened and closed the closet doors, and started up the music again by pushing the button on my night table; if she didn’t dance on my head it was because she
was more than fifty years old, but she would have had she been able. “I thought maybe you didn’t like the dinner I prepared, so I’ve brought you the same breakfast as always: orange juice, tea with milk, and toast.”
“Thanks.” I mumbled from beneath the pillow.
“How was your brother last night?”
I didn’t know what the hell she was doing, but the squeaks, thumps, and various noises continued.
“The same.”
“I’m sorry,” she said in a pained voice. Magdalena was already working for me when Daniel was still living with me.
“Today we should start to see the results of the treatment.”
“Your mother already told me this morning.”
Bam! Garden doors opened wide and a draft of cool air entered like a hurricane into the room. Why the hell did I have a temperature control and air circulation system in the whole house? According the Magdalena, for no reason. Good thing the day was nice and it was almost the beginning of summer; even so, I began to sneeze over and over, which ended up waking me up completely when I found myself needing to retrieve a tissue from the box on the night table. Being a technologically evolved urbanite had its inconveniences, and one of them was the acquired incapacity to face nature bare-chested, as I was at that moment, since I was only wearing my pajama shorts.
I ate my breakfast quickly while looking over the selection of headlines that Núria sent to the screen in my room every morning, and just as I was, without even washing my face, I headed toward the study—ample concept that encompassed office as well as video game room—ready to give myself a crash course on Incan culture.
“Find Jabba,” I told the computer, as I walked down the hall. A second later, Jabba’s neutral voice greeted me when I entered the study. “Are you downstairs?” I asked, sitting in my chair and picking up a paper clip which I started to twist between my fingers.
“Where else would I be?” he retorted.
“I need your help and Proxi’s.”
“What’s going on?” he asked, alarmed. “How’s Daniel?”
“This morning he was the same. No change.” My loose, disheveled hair was bothering me, so I twisted it up on my head and contained it inside an old Barcelona Dragons cap. For a month, I’d had the tickets for the game that coming Saturday against the Rhen Fire of Düsseldorf, in the Olympic Stadium in Montjuïc, but the way things were going, I very much feared that I wouldn’t be able to attend. “I need a favor.”
“What is it?”
“I have a ton of books in front of me that I have to look through before going to the hospital.”
“I don’t suppose you’d want me to read them for you.”
“Don’t be dense. That’s not it.”
“So get to it, I have work to do.”
“I release you from it. You have the afternoon off, and Proxi too.”
“Great. Just so happens we’ve been needing to buy a sofa. Thanks, bye.”
“Wait, you ass!” I yelled, smiling. “You can’t go.”
“Oh, no? So why’d you give me the afternoon off?”
“So you can research something for me. I need you and Proxi to find everything there is on
the internet about an Incan language called Aymara.”
The profoundest of silences reigned in my study, so profound that it was almost a deep hole. I started to drum my fingers on the desk as an auditory signal of impatience, but even then he didn’t answer. At last, I lost my patience.
“You there, you idiot?”
“No,” he responded without hanging up.
“Come on! It’s not that hard!”
“Oh, no?” he exclaimed in his bellowing voice. “But I didn’t even understand what you said! How in the hell do you want me to research it?”
“Because you’re good. We all know that.”
“Come on, don’t try to flatter me.”
“I need you to research it, Marc, seriously.”
The silence of before returned, but I knew I was winning the battle. I heard a long sigh come through the loudspeakers.
“Explain to me again what it was you wanted us to look up?”
“The Inca, the inhabitants of the Incan Empire….”
“The Latin American Inca.”
“The same. Okay, so those guys spoke two languages. The official one of the empire was Quechua, most common among the populace, and the other, Aymara, was spoken in the Southeast.”
“What Southeast?”
“How should I know!” I snapped. Did Jabba think I was an expert on these matters? It was all gibberish to me! “The Southeast of the Incan Empire, I guess.”
“Okay, so you want to know everything about the Aymara language that was spoken in the Southeast of the Incan Empire.”
“Exactly.”
“Fine. Well, I hope you have a good reason for making Proxi and me spend our afternoon researching the Aymara language spoken in the Southeast of the Incan Empire, because otherwise I will sink your company and make them lock you in prison.”
The words of a hacker should never be taken in jest.
“I have a good reason.”
Did I?
“Ok. I’m going to find Proxi and we’ll get to work in the ‘100.’”
“All right. Call me when you finish.”
“By the way, you haven’t asked me about how the campaign against TraxSG turned out.”
I’d forgotten completely about it! I had my mental hard drive formatted from Monday.
“How has it been going?” I asked with a mischievous smile on my lips.
“Great. It’s in all of today’s papers. The TraxSG people are going to sweat blood to get out of this looking good. And they have no idea of the origin of the boycott.”
I laughed. “I’m glad. Let them look. All right, I’ll be waiting for your call.”
“Sure. Bye.”
I was alone again in my study, and in silence…. Well, not exactly alone, since I always had the discreet presence of the central computer with me. At first I had considered giving it an appropriate name, something along the lines of Hal, the crazy computer from Stanley Kubrick’s
2001: A Space Odyssey
, or Abulafia, the poor computer from
Foucault’s Pendulum
, by Eco, or even Johnny, for Johnny Mnemonic, but I never finished deciding, and I didn’t christen it in any
way. If it had been a dog, I would have called it simply “Dog,” but it was a powerful system of artificial intelligence. It was finally established that without saying any name at all, any order given in a loud voice that was not clearly meant for Magdalena would be directed at the system.
I threw a melancholy glance at my fantastic collection of DVDs and at my video game consoles, abandoned on the small rattan table, and reached for the pile of books that I’d brought home from my brother’s apartment. By my own choice, my study was as much like the cabin of a space ship as it could be (another concession to my playful spirit). Aside from the giant screen, which, like in the rest of the rooms of the living space, completely occupied one of the walls, I had a set-up similar to that of the “100,” although with only three monitors, a couple of keyboards, some stereos, two printers, a digital camera, a scanner, a DVD player, and my game consoles. Everything was the color of stainless steel or an impeccable white, with chairs, tables, and bookshelves made of aluminum, titanium, and chrome. The lights were halogen, with a light blue hue so cold that they lent the study the air of a cave carved out of ice. The long rows of books on the shelves and the small low rattan table were the only colorful exceptions in the interior of that apparent iceberg, but I was in no way going to give up having some of my books there, and, of course, the table, which was a keepsake from my old house, and which I was not prepared to get rid of.
With a snort of resignation, I opened the first of Daniel’s history tomes and began to read. After I good while, I opened another, and one hour later, another. The truth is, to begin with, I didn’t understand much and I wasn’t someone you could call stupid, exactly. The historians who had written those brainy works had insisted on not figuring time in the normal way, and talked of “Horizons” instead of ages—“Early Horizon,” “Middle Horizon,” “Late Horizon,” and their intermediate periods—with the result that, at least for a non-expert like myself, it was impossible to place what they were describing in a familiar moment in history. When, at last, I found a chart clarifying the dates it turned out that the Incan Empire, one of the most powerful empires of the world which had grown to have thirty million inhabitants and to occupy a territory that extended from Colombia to Argentina and Chile, covering Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia, had lasted less than one hundred years, and had fallen into the hands of a miserable Spanish army of barely two hundred men, under the command of Francisco Pizarro, a guy who, incredibly, didn’t know how to read or write, and had been a swineherd in his native Extremadura, which he had wasted no time in leaving in search of fortune.
Pizarro had left Panama in 1531, commanding an expedition of several ships that headed south from Central America down the Pacific coast, discovering lands on the way and founding cities on the islands and coasts of Colombia and Ecuador. No one who wasn’t an original inhabitant of those places—that is to say, no one who wasn’t an Indian—had crossed the Andes yet, nor would they until many years later, just as no one had crossed the Amazon jungle or seen Peru, Bolivia, or Tierra del Fuego. The conquest of the New World was achieved, basically, from the narrow waist of the continent (from Panama, then called Tierra Firme), extending up and down the coastline; so everything Pizarro saw from his ship in the sixteenth century as he made his way toward a mysterious Incan Empire resplendent with the gold he’d heard spoken of by the natives, was Terra Incognita, parts unknown.
Apparently the term “Inca” referred only to the king. In other words, calling the whole population of the Empire “Inca” had been a mistake on the part of the Spanish. Among its inhabitants, the state was known as Tihuantinsuyu, the Kingdom of the Four Regions, and began in the year 1438 under the rule of the Inca Pachacuti, the ninth of the merely twelve Inca that had existed before Pizarro arrived in 1532 and took it upon himself to vilely kill him who would be
the last of them, the Inca Atahualpa. Before the Inca Pachacuti, memory was confused and incomplete, since, according to the assertions of all historians, it was totally impossible to reconstruct what had occurred, given the lack of written documents in Andean cultures. Of course, archeology had revealed, and kept revealing, a large part of that obscure past, leaving very clear the millennia-long period that had passed since the first settlers crossed a frozen and passable Bering Strait and colonized the American continent…. Or hadn’t it been like that? Well, no, because the latest discoveries spoke of great migrations arriving by sea from Polynesia. Or hadn’t it been like that either? It was unclear, because Professor Anna C. Roosevelt, director of the Department of Anthropology of the Field Museum of Natural History of Chicago, had just discovered a site in the Amazon where there were items of human manufacture that had been there for a few thousand years more than they ought to have been, and that pretty much put an end to the previous theories. Anyway, the problem was that archaeological revelations also differed a great deal on the essentials, leaving things just as uncertain and fuzzy as they they had started out. One by one, researchers and scholars ended up recognizing at some point in their books that, really, nothing was certain and that the data mentioned up till that point could change with the next archaeological discovery.