Authors: Matilde Asensi
“Marc!” Proxi reprimanded him. “That’s enough.”
But Jabba was right. My brain wasn’t functioning with its usual clarity. Maybe it was true that I was afraid to go out on a limb and end up looking like an idiot. I was on a very slippery slope, still halfway between my world, rational and orderly, and my brother’s world, confusing and enigmatic. I had gone toward the future, while he had gone toward the past, and now, not only did I need to change my way of thinking and my set of values, but I also had to break with some basic preconceptions and follow a hunch that wasn’t based in reality, but in strange historical vagaries.
“Leave all this material with me. I’m going to study it tonight, and tomorrow I’ll examine what I picked up from my brother’s apartment very carefully. I’ll also go by there to look over what I left. If in a couple of days Daniel still hasn’t improved,” I declared, looking at them with determination, “I’ll go speak with the head of his department who gave him the job, and I’ll ask for her help. She has to know more than anyone about all this.”
To our despair and the doctors’, Daniel did not improve at all over the next two days. Diego and Miquel were so perplexed by the inefficacy of the drugs that they decided late on Friday to change his treatment despite what Miquel admitted in front of my mother, that since we hadn’t seen any progress at all by then, he harbored certain doubts about the rapid and complete recovery of my brother. We could still hope for a slight improvement around the end of next week or the beginning of the one after. Maybe he was getting better and Miquel was exaggerating just in case, preparing us for the worst, but whatever his reasons, he left us devastated, most of all Clifford, who aged ten years in just a few minutes.
My grandmother’s presence relieved much of the tension the family suffered since within a few hours of her arrival, she had organized the shifts in such a way that we could reconstruct our lives almost with normality except for a few small adjustments that didn’t bother anyone because they meant being with Daniel. My grandmother was a strong woman, sturdy as an oak, with a great administrative capacity and an infinitely better-furnished head than my mother’s, with whom my grandmother always stood firm when she got out of hand in her presence. She quickly took charge of the night’s vigil, sending Ona and me back home to sleep at the correct hour. I couldn’t help but suspect that there would shortly be a crowd of friends and acquaintances in the hospital cafeteria, and that the place would soon look like the plaza in Vic on a Sunday morning after mass.
I had an appointment at one o’clock with Marta Torrent in her office at the University. It was Saturday morning—the same Saturday, June 1
st
, on which the Barcelona Dragons played the Rhein Fire of Düsseldorf—and the weather was splendid, one of those bright mornings that invite you to go outside for a walk with the excuse to buy a good book or a good CD. While I navigated my car through the tunnels of Vallvidrera toward the Autonomous University with my sunglasses pushed close to my eyes, I kept trying to find the key that would make sense of the pieces of the mystery that I’d found among the papers and in my brother’s office. I hoped with all my heart that the professor would be able to help me solve it, because I was even more confused than I’d been the night I’d talked with Jabba and Proxi in the cafeteria.
On the day after that conversation, I had returned to the apartment on Xiprer with the books and the documents that I’d taken, ready to work as many hours as I had to until I understood what the hell Daniel had gotten himself into.
After searching drawers, shelves, folders, and all that fell into my hands in Daniel’s office, I made a new classification system, by piles, in which I separated everything Inca from everything Aymara, and within them, everything that had to do with history on one side, and with language and writing on the other. Then I made one more pile with everything that didn’t fit into those categories, and the material in that pile was so abundant that I also had to distinguish between written documents and graphics (there were diagrams, maps, photographs, photocopies of photographs, and sketches drawn by my brother). My distribution may not have been the most orthodox, academically speaking, but it was the only criterion that I could use at that moment.
The first thing that called my attention was an image of an elongated skull in whose eye-sockets remained dried parts of the eyes. Apart from the disagreeable impression given by that sinister gaze, the shape of the bones disconcerted me. Instead of the usual roundness beginning
in the forehead and ending at the nape of the neck, that skull was elongated upward like the pointed cap of a penitent, with a conical shape of excessive proportions. Next to this image, other similar ones indicated that the subject had preoccupied Daniel. In the same folder I also found the photograph of a stone wall with a multitude of heads sculpted in relief and very eroded with time, as well as the digitalized and blurry enlargement of a strange little man without a body, all head (from which sprouted skinny arms and legs like a frog’s), adorned with a thick black beard and an enormous red hat. Heads and more heads…another enigma without a place in the world. To finish off, I found the folded enlargement of a great face worked in stone, rectangular in shape and with big round black eyes, which I could have sworn I had seen a thousand times in my life, but which I was completely unable to place. It must be Inca, without a doubt, but since my brother hadn’t made any note about it, it could just as easily be the logo of some commercial brand as it could be a sun—which is what it reminded me of, since rays came out of its face—sculpted on some wall in Cusco, Machu Picchu, Tiwanaku, Vilcabamba or any of the innumerable ruins spread out around the territory of the old Empire that had started to become familiar to me.
I also found, among other equally useless things, a drawing made by hand (with a red marker) by Daniel himself, showing a schematically represented stepped pyramid with three levels, in whose interior was a kind of square urn, with four long necks with feline heads sticking out of it in front, and six that ended in birds’ heads sticking out on the sides and the base. Inside the urn stirred a small serpent with horns. My brother had noted on the bottom: “Chamber,” and had repeatedly underlined it.
Another subject that seemed to obsess Daniel was that of Incan fabrics. In another folder, he had dozens of pictures of exceptionally-colored cloths decorated with minute squares and rectangles. Each of these small geometrical shapes had a different design inside, and, seeing all of them together, one’s gaze was lost in those innumerable lines and columns of boxes. The cloths were very different from each other, despite being of the same style, a style that could also be seen in six or seven photographs of ceramics—vases and urns—that he kept in a separate folder. They didn’t have even the smallest written reference to what each thing could be, so I wasn’t any better off than before.
In all that sea of useless information, a couple of big photocopies, which showed up folded inside another unmarked folder, stood out. They were copies of ancient maps, very tattered, that were incomprehensible to me. On the first of them, after working at it a great deal, I recognized, on the right, the shape of the Iberian peninsula and the western coast of Africa, both filled with numerous little human and animal figures, nearly indistinguishable, over which ran (and crossed) lines coming from several compass roses of various sizes. Now that I was better situated in the geography of the image, I deduced that the shape on the left was the American coast, with its rivers and tributaries, many of which branched off from a mountainous spine, the Andes, which was where the design on that side ended, since the profile of the Pacific coast was missing, replaced by a long paragraph written in minute Arabic lettering. On the second of the maps, sketched over a kind of sheet of frayed edges, a large lake was depicted, surrounded by marks that looked like ant foot prints, and in an important position to the south of the lake, the coarse layout of a city beneath which could be read, with some difficulty because of the excessive elaborateness of the old spelling: “Pathe of the Yatiri Indians,” and underneath, “Two monthes by land,” and underneath that, in small lettering, “Seye I, Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, that it is truthe. In the City of Kings on the Twenty-Second of February of One Thousand Five Hundred and Seventy-Five.”
Things were beginning, at last, to get on the right track: Yatiri was a word that I knew and that my brother employed frequently in his delirium. I would have to study the Yatiri more, I told myself, because they seemed to enjoy a protagonists’ role in history, and furthermore, and this was the curious part, according to that old Spanish nobleman, Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, they had their own path, which, after two months of walking it, would take you God knows where.
The bulk of Daniel’s library was made up of books on anthropology, history, and various grammars. On the shelves closest to his desk, on both sides, he had comfortably arranged the volumes about the Inca and a bunch of dictionaries, among which was the one published in 1612 by the Jesuit Ludovico Bertonio,
Vocabulary of the Aymara Language
, and the one by Diego Torres Rubio,
Art of the Aymara Language
, from 1616. It was time to find out what the hell “
lawt’ata
” meant. After driving myself crazy for a while (because I had no idea how it was really spelled), I managed to locate the term by looking, one by one, at all the words that began with the letter “L,” and that’s how I found out it was an adjective and that it meant “locked with a key,” which brought me back to the message of the supposed curse, in the last line of which, I remembered, appeared those words. Of course that didn’t end up solving anything, but at least I felt I had cleared up a mystery. I had yet to take a look at the old Spanish chronicles because, for reasons other than an immense lack of interest, I had dedicated all my time to studying linguistics, and more specifically, Aymara linguistics, making the odd incursion onto the net in search of more precise information about the language.
Everything that Jabba and Proxi had told me came up short next to what Aymara really was. It was clear that I didn’t know as many languages as Daniel, and that if you took me out of Catalan, Spanish, and English, I would be as disoriented as a newborn, so I could make few comparisons with other natural languages. But what I did know were programming languages (Python, C/C++, Perl, LISP, Java, Fortran...), and they were more than enough for me to see that Aymara was not like any other language. In no way could it be, because it was an authentic programming language. It was as precise as an atomic clock, without ambiguity, without any uncertainties in its wording, without room for imprecision. Not even a pure diamond, superbly worked, would have been its equal in the properties of integrity, exactness, and rigor. In Aymara, there was no room for those silly phrases that made us laugh as children because of the incongruities they contained, like “the chicken is ready to eat,” for example. No, Aymara did not allow for this kind of linguistic absurdity, and it was also true that its syntactic rules seemed to be constructed based on an invariable series of mathematical formulas which, when applied, yielded a strange logic of three values as a solution: true, false, and neutral, unlike any natural language known, which only responded to true or false, according to the old familiar Aristotelian conception. Hence, in Aymara, things could be truly and unequivocally neither yes nor no, nor on the contrary, and apparently, there was no other language in the world that allowed such a thing; which, in a way, was to be missed, since part of the richness that languages acquired with centuries of evolution stemmed specifically from their literary capacity for confusion and ambiguities. So, while the Aymara people who still employed this language in South America felt proud of it, and they were marginalized as poor and backward natives without culture, their language proclaimed to the four winds that they came from a much more advanced civilization than our own, or at least one capable of creating a language based on high-level mathematical algorithms. It did not at all surprise me that Daniel had ended up fascinated with these discoveries, and that he had abandoned the study of Quechua to dedicate himself completely to Aymara; what did really impress me was that he hadn’t turned to me to help him understand those concepts, so abstract and so distant from the material that he knew and had studied. From
what I remembered, he had asked me on various occasions to write him some simple and very specific programs to save, classify, and recover information (bibliographies, statistical data, image files…), but even those small applications seemed complex and difficult to manage to him, so I very much doubted that he would have been able to recognize on his own the similarities of Aymara to modern and sophisticated programming languages.
Nor did I find any mention of the famous
quipu
in Aymara imagined by Jabba and Proxi. On one hand, as far as material on
quipus
went, I only located a thick file that contained the copies of the Miccinelli Documents, but it inspired the feeling, based on the place where it was found entombed and on the fine patina of dust that showed inside the covers, that Daniel hadn’t touched it in a long time; on the other hand, if that bunch of cords with knots, or even better, its graphical reproduction, could be found somewhere in that office, it could only be on my brother’s laptop, the shiny IBM that I had given him for Christmas and that still remained connected to the electrical grid, feeding an already sufficiently charged battery. I pushed the power button, and the small hard disc immediately came to life with a soft purr and the screen lit up from the center outwards, showing the short lines of system file instructions before exhibiting the blue Windows screen. I settled into the chair, waiting for the process to finish, and while I rubbed my tired eyes, an unexpected glitter of orange light warned me of some abnormal process starting up in the operating system. Blinking nervously to focus my eyes after the rubbing, I came face to face with a surprising request for a password. It didn’t mean the BIOS password, nor the useless Windows network password; it was a completely different program that I’d never seen before and that, based on its design, seemed to have been written by some astute programmer, who obviously had not been me. I was frozen. Why did my brother need such protection on his computer?