Authors: Matilde Asensi
“I hope I’m not bothering you too much, Dr. Torrent.” I said finally, crossing my legs.
“Not at all,” she murmured, relaxed. “How is Daniel?”
She also pronounced my brother’s name with the stress on the last syllable.
“Exactly the same as the day he got sick,” I explained. “He hasn’t improved.”
“I’m sorry.”
It was in that exact moment, not a second before or a second after, that I discovered that I was in the office of a lunatic and what was even worse, in her hazardous company. I don’t know why, but up until that moment I had been centering my attention exclusively on the professor without noticing that I had entered into the psychiatric cell of a dangerous crazy person. If my brother had hundreds of books and folders in his small office at home, that woman, enjoying double or triple the space, had the same literary congestion, but on top of that, in the spaces that remained, the most delirious objects that could be imagined were stuffed: flint-tipped spears, crudely painted ceramic jugs, broken pots with three feet, vases with bug-eyed human faces, strange granite sculptures of people and animals, fragments of crude textiles hung high on the walls as if they were refined tapestries, large blades of chipped knives, anthropomorphic idols with some curious little hats like shakers for playing dice, and, in case the room was missing something, on a pedestal in a corner, a small dried mummy huddled into itself, looking up at the ceiling with a distorted expression and an unfinished scream. If I had been able, I would have done the same as the mummy, because on top of everything, hanging from invisible nylon threads, halfway down from the ceiling there balanced a couple of beautiful skulls—with elongated craniums!—moved by gusts from the air conditioning.
I suppose I must have given a good start in the chair because the professor, by way of a laugh, expelled a puff of air through her nose and gave a slight grimace of a smile. Didn’t the Ministry of Health have a strict legislation regarding the obligatory burial of cadavers, or at least regarding their conservation in museums?
“What did you wish to discuss with me?” she asked, already having regained her
composure, as if there weren’t an entire cemetery around us.
I was almost incapable of uttering a single word, but I guessed that the strange decoration formed part of a private game in which only she had fun, and I controlled my expression and my voice in such a way that, at least in that instance, she didn’t get her trophy.
“It’s very simple,” I said. “I don’t know if you’re aware, but my brother is suffering from two pathologies, one called agnosia and one called Cotard delusion. The first doesn’t allow him to recognize anyone or anything and the second makes him believe he is dead.”
Her eyes opened wide, incapable of disguising her surprise, and I thought that the point went to me that time.
“My God!” she whispered, shaking her head as if she couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “No…, I didn’t know…. I didn’t know anything about all this.” The news had affected her a great deal, so I deduced that she must like my brother a little. “They informed me from the secretary’s office of the faculty that we already had the medical leave papers, but… they didn’t read the diagnostics to me, and Mariona didn’t give me many details either.”
When she spoke, the doctor showed a very white row of irregular teeth.
“He seems not to respond to the medications, although yesterday they started to administer a different treatment and we still don’t know what will happen. Today, of course, there haven’t been any changes.”
“I’m very sorry, Mr. Queralt.” And she seemed to really mean it.
“Yes, well…,” While I picked up the briefcase from the floor with my right hand, with my left hand I pushed my hair back out of my face. “The main thing is what Daniel says in his delirium. He spends all day and all night saying strange words and talking about weird things.”
She didn’t move a single muscle of her face. She didn’t even blink.
“The psychiatrist who’s in charge of his case, Dr. Diego Hernández, from La Custodia, and the neurologist, Miquel Llor, don’t explain the origin of these hallucinations very well, and they think they may have some relation to his work.”
“Mariona hasn’t told you?”
“Yes. My sister-in-law has explained to us, more or less, what the research Daniel was doing for you consisted of.”
She remained undaunted, glacially accepting that accusation. I continued:
“Nonetheless, the doctors think that it could be related to something more than just the pressure suffered from an excess of work. His delirious rants in a strange language…,”
“Quechua, certainly.”
“…seem to confirm it,” I continued. “Maybe there was something, a certain aspect of the research that worried him, some circumstance that, in a manner of speaking, ended up short circuiting his brain. Dr. Llor and Dr. Hernández have asked us to find out if he’d had problems, if he had run into some specific difficulty that could have had a strong effect on him.”
Since I had decided to arrange that interview, I had excluded the possibility of sharing my true (and, I kept thinking, ridiculous as well) fears with the professor, so I had put together a relatively plausible alibi in which I had no choice but to involve the doctors.
“I don’t know how I can help you with that,” she stated in a neutral tone. “I don’t know the details you’re asking me for. Your brother kept me informed only on a very occasional basis. I can tell you that during the last month he didn’t come to see me once. If you’d like, you can confirm as much by consulting my agenda.”
That small detail made Daniel’s extreme secrecy stand out even more.
“No, that’s not necessary,” I declined, opening my briefcase and extracting some of the
documents that I’d found in my brother’s office. “I only need you to inform me a little about this material I brought.”
An electrical current suddenly went through the room. Without lifting my head I could sense that the professor had stiffened in her chair and that a spark of aggression ran through her body.
“These papers are part of the research your brother was doing?” she asked in a sharp tone that twisted my stomach.
“Well, you see,” I declared, keeping my reaction in check and my pulse steady while I held those copies in front of her, “I’ve had to study Daniel’s work in detail all this week to try to answer the questions the doctors have asked us.”
The professor was as tense as a violin string, and I thought she wouldn’t hesitate to take one of those knives from the shelves and use it to cut out my heart and eat it while it was still warm. I think every suspicion and possible betrayal went through her head at the speed of lightning. That woman wore, very visibly, the stigma of unhappiness.
“Excuse me a moment, Mr. Queralt,” she said, standing and stepping out from behind her desk. “I will be back in a moment. By the way, what did you say your name was?”
“Arnau Queralt,” I replied, following her with my gaze.
“What do you do, Mr. Queralt?”
“I’m an entrepreneur.”
“And what does your business do? Manufacture something?” she asked, already at the door, about to leave me alone with all the dead in the room.
“You could say that. We sell technological security and develop artificial intelligence projects for internet search engines.”
She let out a very false “Oh, I see!” and left hurriedly, closing the door with a bang. I could almost hear her through the walls: “Who the hell is this guy? Does anyone know if Daniel really has some brother with a different last name who works with computers?” And I must not have been very wrong in my suspicions, because a murmur of voices and laughs came through the thin walls, and though I didn’t manage to understand the words, the tone of the conversation, together with the professor’s fears, and most of all, the way she kept looking at me when she returned (examining my features one by one to see if there was a resemblance), confirmed my suspicions. I couldn’t accuse her of being excessively suspicious: The papers that I’d brought in the briefcase formed part of her own research project, a project of huge academic repercussions, according to Ona, and when it came down to it, I was a complete stranger who had come asking questions about something that didn’t matter to me in the least.
“Pardon the interruption, Mr. Queralt,” she apologized, her aplomb recovered, as she returned to her seat without taking her eyes off my face.
“No problem,” I returned with a friendly smile. “As I was saying, I only need you to give me some instruction. But first, let me assure you: I wouldn’t want you to worry thinking that I’m going to use this material inappropriately. All I want is to help my brother. If all this can be of some use, then great; if not, at least I will have learned a couple of interesting things.”
“I wasn’t worried.”
Right! And my name isn’t Arnau.
“In that case, can I show you some images?”
“Of course.”
“First, could you explain to me why the skulls you’ve hung from the ceiling have that pointed shape?”
“Ah, you’ve noticed! Most people, after discovering them, don’t look up again and then endeavor to leave my office as soon as possible,” she smiled. “Just for that reason alone, they’re worth their weight in gold, although really, they’re part of the department’s educational material, like that mummy there,” and she indicated it with a look, “but for me they work as a perfect repellent for flies and mosquitoes.”
“Really?” I asked, astonished. She looked at me incredulously.
“No, man, no! It was a manner of speaking! By flies and mosquitoes I meant disagreeable visits and tiresome students.”
“Ah, like me!”
She smiled again without saying anything at all. She had made herself perfectly clear. I looked up again to examine the skulls and repeated my question. After a small sigh of resignation, she opened one of the drawers of her desk and took out a packet of cigarettes and a lighter. On the desk she had a small cardboard ash tray adorned with the logo of a well-known chain of cafés which showed that her smoking habit was clandestine, something whose traces must be made to disappear quickly. Besides the pitiful ash tray, her desk also held some folders and the papers she had been examining when I arrived. The only personal object was a silver frame of medium size whose photo only she could see. Where might she keep the computer? An office without one was no longer conceivable, especially the office of the top personage of a university department. That woman was as strange as a whistle with a coaxial cable.
“Do you smoke?”
“No. But the smoke doesn’t bother me.”
“Wonderful.” I was sure it would have been all the same to her if it had bothered me; we were in her office. “Does your interest in the skulls have something to do with what you have in the briefcase?”
“Yes.”
She nodded slightly, as if taking in my response, and then declared:
“Very well, let’s see…. The deformation of the cranium was a custom of certain ethnic groups of the Incan Empire who used it to distinguish the upper classes from the rest of society. The deformation was obtained by applying some splints to the heads of babies, holding them tightly in place with cords until the bones adopted the desired appearance.”
“What ethnic groups had these practices?”
“Oh, well, really, it was a custom that predated the Inca. The earliest of the deformed skulls that have been proven authentic were found in archaeological sites of Tiwanaku, Bolivia.” She paused for a second and looked at me, doubtful. “I’m sorry, I don’t know if you’ve heard of Tiwanaku….”
“I hadn’t heard of almost any of this until a few days ago,” I assured her, uncrossing and recrossing my legs again the other way, “but recently I don’t think I’ve spoken of or read about anything else.”
“I can imagine….” she exhaled the smoke from her cigarette and leaned back, reclining in the chair with her hands hanging from the edges of the armrests. “Well, Tiwanaku is the oldest culture of South America, and its political-religious center was the city of the same name, situated near Lake Titicaca, today divided in two by the border between Bolivia and Peru.”
From the waters of Lake Titicaca, I remembered, the god of the Inca, Viracocha, had arisen to create humanity, who had in turn built Tiwanaku. But I’d also seen another lake—another lake or the same lake—on the map drawn by Sarmiento de Gamboa, the one with “Pathe of the Yatiri Indians. Two monthes by land.” I would go back to that later. Now I wanted to finish with the
skulls and heads.
“You were telling me,” I prompted, wanting her to pick back up where she had left off, “that the inhabitants of Tiwanaku were the first to deform the heads of newborns to distinguish some social classes from others.”
“Right. Other cultures did it as well, but it was an imitation and never the same. The Wari, for example, would flatten the base of the skull, and on the eastern coast of Titicaca they would sink the forehead, making the temples stick out.”
“Wari? What’s Wari?” I asked.
I know she was about to tell me to get lost, since giving a class to children was beneath her and boring besides. I could understand her. It was as if someone had asked me how to close an application in Windows.
“The Wari Empire was the Tiwanaku Empire’s greatest enemy,” she repeated in a tone of having explained it a million times. “It’s thought that Tiwanaku began around the year 200 BC with some primitive settlements from a culture called Pukara, a people about whom we know almost nothing, including whether or not they really founded Tiwanaku, a hypothesis that, by the way, seems more and more improbable…. Anyway, nine centuries later, those settlements reached the level of empire. Wari appeared later, in the Ayachucho Valley in the north, and for unknown reasons, challenged Tiwanaku, which seems to have been an eminently religious culture, ruled by some kind of sacerdotal caste. What’s certain is that we know little of the Wari. The Inca never mentioned them. Incidentally, I don’t know whether you know that calling all the inhabitants of the empire ‘Inca’ is a mistake, the Inca were the kings and were considered to be the descendants of a divine lineage originating in Tiwanaku.”