Authors: Matilde Asensi
“Okay, fine! Let’s say it’s authentic! Explain to me how in the hell this Piri Reis managed to draw the Andes when they were still unexplored.”
I could accept, with reservations, that Aymara was an algorithmic and mathematical language, because we were still talking about something quantifiable and serious, but I had been
taught to consider any absurd myth, any erroneous concept with the slight scent of heterodoxy, worthy of contempt. If I had lived in the Middle Ages or the Renaissance, maybe Piri Reis’ map would have been enough for me to strike up a libertarian crusade against the official version put forth by a repressive church, like Giordano Bruno did, for example, with that theory of the infinite Universe that Daniel spoke of in his delirium. But I lived in the Age of Science, in the Era of Scientific Positivism, which was dedicated to clearly marking the limits of what was acceptable, through logic and verification. It had taken us too many centuries to free ourselves from the shackles of superstition and ignorance to give fuel to the fire of ridiculous fantasies now.
Jabba, nervous, stood up and began to pace around the kitchen. His jeans were as old and shabby as his blue shirt—bought at Bergdorf Goodman, Fifth Avenue, New York—was impeccable.
“Let’s take it one part at a time,” he proposed, mechanically adjusting the waist of the tattered pants. “Piri Reis’ map contains many secrets, not just the discrepancy of the dates. Maybe by analyzing all of them, we can find something that gives us some clue. Get out the crib sheet, Proxi…. The big-headed guy isn’t there by coincidence, and it wasn’t for nothing that Daniel was saving a copy of the world map.”
“And doesn’t it seem really strange to you that a Turk, and a pirate for that matter, would draw the American continents in 1513? Come on! Not even if Columbus had taken him along in his caravel!”
“You’re partly right about that,” Proxi agreed, using her palms to smooth a square of paper she’d extracted, folded, from the front pocket of her flannel shirt. “The area around the Antilles is copied, as he himself states, from a map by Christopher Columbus. In one of the inscriptions, he admits to having used four contemporary Portuguese maps, some older maps from the time of Alexander the Great, and some others based on mathematics.”
“There you have it!” I proclaimed triumphantly. “There’s nothing weird about Piri Reis’ world map!”
“Setting aside the question of what sources he used,” she continued, unperturbed, “which, if you notice, are not what you would call very concrete. The following aspects of the fragment recovered in Topkapi Palace should be highlighted, namely: The Malvinas appear on the map, and they were not officially discovered until 1592. The Andes are shown, although, as we know, Pizarro didn’t set foot on them until 1524, in his first and incomplete exploration southward. There is a drawing of a llama, a mammal undiscovered in 1513, and also the exact starting point and course of the Amazon river. At the equator, two large islands that don’t exist today rise from the sea; modern submarine soundings have proven the presence in those places of two mountain peaks belonging to the range that crosses the bottom of the Atlantic from north to south, and the same thing applies to a group of islands that were not discovered until 1958, beneath Antarctic ice.”
I was seized by a sensation of general rigidity. In that kitchen, not even the air was moving. I think that even the system, always listening, was paying special attention at that moment.
“But that’s not the best thing about Piri Reis’ map,” Proxi declared, lifting her eyes from the paper and looking at me expressionlessly. “I still haven’t gotten to the most surprising part. As you yourself noticed, Root, the extreme south of Tierra del Fuego doesn’t end to let the sea through, connecting the two oceans by way of the strait of Magellan. On Reis’ map, the extreme southern tip of the continent is elongated, and connects, by way of a land bridge, to a strange Antarctica without ice. Well, when the map was discovered in 1929, this bit of information was
considered to be just another of its imprecisions, a product of the ignorance of the era in which it was made. However….”
“However?” I prompted.
“However, acoustic soundings taken of the area by oceanographic ships have demonstrated that the land bridge uniting South America and Antarctica exists exactly as it is shown on Riri Reis’ map, although now it’s below sea level. Apparently, it was before the last Ice Age that it was uncovered by water and traversable. Setting aside the fact that the last Ice Age lasted, as they say, two and a half million years, with its variations and warm periods in the middle, the important thing is that it ended about ten or eleven thousand years ago. So, speaking figuratively… or maybe not,” she qualified, “Antarctica is a peninsula of the American Continent.”
I mumbled something nonsensical while I energetically rubbed my face with my hands and Jabba let out a sarcastic choked little laugh.
“But the surprise caused by the map reached its apex when, with the help of satellite technology, it was discovered that beneath the Arctic ice there was also solid land, a fact that was not known until 1957, and it turned out that the coastline, the mountains, the bays, and the rivers that appeared in infrared photographs taken from space coincided, exactly, with what you see here, drawn by the hand of our friend, the Turkish pirate. There are no mistakes. Piri Reis copied Antarctica from other maps, there’s no doubt, but from some maps that must have been astonishingly old, because they reflected this continent, not as it was ten thousand years ago, but as it was before being covered by ice.”
I pursed my lips, perplexed, and an eternity passed before I was able to put two words together.
“And of course,” I stammered finally, “since the map was discovered in Istanbul in 1929, that eliminates the possibility of a falsification made with the data obtained by satellite in 1957.”
“Yes, that’s eliminated,” Jabba confirmed without stopping his pacing. “Go on, Proxi, there’re still a couple things more.”
“More?” I exclaimed.
“Yes, but hold your horses…. I’m almost finished.” She brought the cup to her lips and drank, although her coffee must have been cold. “That damn world map uses a measuring system called ‘eight winds.’ Don’t ask me what it is, because I haven’t been able to understand it although I’ve tried. All I know is that it works by using a compass to center the different parts of the map in twenty-something degree angles or something like that. The thing is that he uses this apparently arcane system, as well as a Greek measurement called a stadium, which is equivalent to 607 feet. Once it has been adapted to modern geographical measurements, the world map is—pay attention,” and she touched the index finger of her right hand to the middle of my stunned forehead—“absolutely exact in all its proportions and distances. Although, at first glance, it may seem deformed and unrealistic to you, full of geographical inaccuracies, it turns out that it’s as precise as the best of our modern maps, and it reflects perfectly the latitude and longitude of all points on the globe. Latitude has been understood and used since time immemorial, because all it requires is the help of the sun, but longitude couldn’t be calculated until the eighteenth century, really, until…,” she looked at her notes, “until 1761, that is, because it requires knowledge of spherical trigonometry and geodesic instruments, things that didn’t exist until that date. However, Piri Reis, or the old maps he copied from, accurately portrayed the terrestrial meridians, and their calculations were absolutely correct, which clashes with what we know today.”
She carefully folded her little paper and put it back in the pocket of her shirt, ending her explanation.
My head was spinning, trying to find some sense to everything. We were flying through some very turbulent skies without a parachute, and we had very little time left before the plane went down and we were dashed to pieces on the ground. How in the hell had Daniel gotten into such a story? What had my brother, my sensible and rigid brother, been doing wandering through this wasteland?
“Do you know why we programmers are such bad lovers?” Jabba asked, sitting down again in front of his empty coffee cup.
“Maybe you’re a bad lover,” I disagreed, preparing myself to listen with resignation to a new and terrible joke about programmers. But Jabba was already into it.
“Because we’re always trying to do the work as fast as possible, and when we’re finished, we think we’ve improved on the previous version.”
“No, please, no!” I moaned, throwing myself over the table with a gesture of desperation, which made Proxi crack up.
We were decompressing. The accumulated tension, added to the bewilderment, brought us close to that state in which the unbearable pressure has to be let out by opening the valves. I looked distractedly at my watch and saw that it was a quarter till six in the evening.
“My grandma’s about to wake up,” I said, with my cheek against the wood.
“And?” Jabba snorted. “Does she bite now or something?”
Proxi kept laughing without reason, as if doing so cleared the fog in her brain.
“Don’t be an idiot. It’s just that I should already be at the hospital.”
“Go, then. We’ll keep working in your study.”
“What time will you be back?” Proxi asked, crossing her arms and settling into her chair.
“Soon. Really, it’s not necessary for me to be there. Ona, my mother, Clifford, and my grandmother are a compact and well-organized team. But I want to know how Daniel is doing.”
“Well, then,” crooned my grandmother’s voice from the door, making Jabba jump and me stand up suddenly, “come with me, and you can see him and then come back.”
We hadn’t heard her enter, and suddenly she was there, standing and looking at us, with her white hair perfectly coiffed, in her elegant colored robe and her matching slippers.
“Grandma! How did you manage to get up without the system noticing?”
Doña Eulàlia Monturiol went toward the coffee maker with the bearing of a queen.
“But, Arnauet,” my grandmother had called me Arnauet since I was small, “it’s just a common motion detector like I have in my house, for burglars. All you have to do is move slowly.”
Jabba and Proxi couldn’t contain their laughter.
“Well, you must have had to move very slowly!” I protested.
“Not at all, I have it very well figured out. You should increase the sensitivity.” And she smiled, satisfied, while she poured herself to a big cup of coffee with milk which she then put in the microwave. “Hello, Marc. Hello, Lola. Pardon me for not having wished you good afternoon.”
“Don’t worry about it, Eulàlia,” Proxi replied amiably. “You have a beautiful robe. I like it a lot.”
“Really? Well, if you knew how cheap it was!”
“Where did you buy it?”
“In Kuala Lumpur, two years ago.”
Proxi looked at me, enchanted, briefly arching one of her eyebrows.
“So, Grandma,” I broke in, to keep on topic, “you were saying that I should take you to the hospital, stay for a while, and come back.”
“Well, of course,” she agreed, with nod of her feathered curls. “I don’t know what you guys are up to, but, by the looks on your faces, it must be very interesting.”
Proxi opened her mouth, but she only exhaled a soundless puff of air, because the kick I gave her under the table—and that’s considering I was barefoot—cut off the words she was about to say.
“It’s work for the company, Grandma.”
She turned to me, carrying her napkin, her cup of coffee with milk, and her tin of cookies, and I began to shrink under her gaze as she neared the table.
“When will you learn, Arnauet,” she pronounced sharply, sitting down, “that you can’t lie to your grandma.”
“I’m not going to explain anything to you, Grandma!” I warned her, puffing up again.
“Have I asked you to? I’m only repeating what I’ve always told you: Your grandma has x-ray vision.”
“Ah…. You got that from some movie, right Eulàlia?” Jabba interrupted, as impulsive as always.
My grandmother laughed while she nibbled a cookie.
“Hey, come on, get out of the kitchen and let me have breakfast in peace!”
But she couldn’t contain her laughter, and we heard her cough, choking, while we went down the hall to the studio.
“When I’m with your grandma, Root,” Jabba commented, perplexed, “I feel like I’m ten years old again.”
“You’ve got to keep her on a short chain,” I concluded. “If you don’t keep her in check, she ends up making you dance to whatever beat she wants.”
“She’s a very dangerous sweet old lady!” Proxi laughed. “But you have her under control, right, Arnau?”
“Well, yes.” I acknowledged. “It’s been difficult, but yes.”
“Clearly…. Why don’t we go to the garden?”
“What for?” Jabba wanted to know.
“To get a little air, clear our heads.”
“We could go down to the game room of Ker-Central and use the simulator for a while. You interested, Root?”
“We’re not going to play with the simulator!” Proxi sharply refused. “We already play enough during the week. I need to breathe fresh air and see a little bit of sky. My brain is bogged down.”
“You guys go,” I said. “I, meanwhile, will shower and get dressed.”
“But you’re fine like that. I don’t see why….”
“Proxi…,” Jabba scolded.
“We’ll wait for you in the garden.”
I left them, smiling, ready to stand under the water for a long time. The monitor in the bathroom insisted on repeatedly showing me my grandmother searching each and every cupboard and drawer in the kitchen. I don’t know what in the hell she was doing, but it couldn’t be anything good. Jabba and Proxi, for their part, were walking calmly, holding hands, chatting as if nothing worthy of mention had happened in their lives in the past few days. Seeing them,
you wouldn’t know that they had faced two mysteries of the proportions of the Aymara language and Piri Reis’ map. At that moment, I stopped feeling the small darts of hot water, despite the fact that the water pressure was intense.
The whole thing was crazy. All of it. Could it be that we were becoming paranoid? A strange curse written in a language of mathematical design; a mysterious people, the Aymara, who spoke that language, and who seemed to have been the origin of the Incan Empire; a map whose existence should be impossible, drawn by a Turkish pirate, with an enormous and monstrous head over the Andes, which hadn’t been discovered yet; a lunatic professor who accused my brother of being a thief; two strange mental illnesses, with only superficial symptoms, which seemed related to the strange curse. Full circle. We were returning to the beginning, sidelining the
quipus
, the
tocapus
, the Yatiri, the cranial deformations, Tiwanaku, the Staff God of Tiwanaku, his head, his pedestal, Sarmiento de Gamboa…. That is to say, everything that came after
lawt’ata
. If only Daniel could tell me something! If only my brother could lend me a hand, show me a little light in that darkness! What had he said that first night when Ona and I had stayed with him in the hospital? He had spoken of a language, the original language, of that I was almost sure, but I couldn’t remember his words. At that moment, I had thought he was delirious, and I hadn’t paid attention. Resting my hands against the mosaic of the shower, I squeezed my eyes shut and wrinkled my forehead in a vain attempt to pull from my memory those few phrases that had come to seem so important to me, only six days later. It had something to do with the sounds of that language, but what?