Authors: Matilde Asensi
“He’s been very restless,” I explained, turning my seat until it was facing the sun. It was very pleasant to feel it like that, in the garden at home, without being in a hurry to go downstairs to the office. “But he hasn’t recovered his ability to move. But my grandmother told me some of the things he mumbles in his delirium, and it seems to me that my brother’s brain isn’t as lost as everyone thinks.”
“What things are those?” Proxi asked, interested.
“He talks about the original language.”
“What?!” Jabba shouted, pulling his chair over next to me. “About the original language, about Aymara?”
“No, he doesn’t mention Aymara. He only claims that there’s an original language made up of natural sounds. The first night he was in the hospital, he said something similar in front of Ona and me, but until now, I haven’t been able to remember his words. Daniel literally said that there was a primeval language whose sounds where inherent in nature and living beings and objects.”
“Aymara?” insisted the stout mafia worm.
“No, I told you he doesn’t say anything about Aymara!” I shouted, annoyed.
“Ok! But I’m sure he means Aymara.”
“And what else does he talk about?”
“Are you ready for this? Okay, well, my grandma says that Daniel keeps repeating that those sounds are hidden in a chamber, that the chamber is beneath a pyramid, and that the pyramid has a door on top.”
Such a silence fell in the garden that you could almost hear, despite the protecting screens, the hushed noise of the traffic coming up from the street. As if driven by a common impulse that materialized itself in significant looks, we stood at the same time, without saying a word, and went to my study. There was a picture drawn by my brother that we should take a look at, one which depicted a stepped pyramid with three levels, a horned serpent in the middle, and the word “Chamber” written beneath it. I already knew, because I had seen it in Dr. Torrent’s office, that that pyramid was none other than the pedestal on which stood the Staff God of the Gate of the Sun, in Tiwanaku, which meant that we already knew exactly where the chamber with the serpent inside the pyramid was; the only thing wrong was that the door wasn’t at the tip. Of course, it could be a symbolic drawing, something like a map; in which case, the aforementioned pyramid could be found beneath the Gate of the Sun.
“Well…,” Proxi murmured under her breath, after examining the sketch, “I think the pieces keep coming together. We should get through the business of the chronicles before noon.”
We obeyed like lambs. While I picked back up the three tomes of
The New Chronicle and Good Government
, Jabba took charge of the two impressive volumes of the
Royal Commentaries of Peru,
and Proxi of
The Chronicle of Peru
by Pedro de Cieza de León, and
Narrative of the Incas
, by Juan de Betanzos. They sat in a couple of ample armchairs and I in my usual place of work in front of the desk. At that moment, it might seem stupid to have connected so many computers, because even though they were on all they were doing was waving the logo of Ker-Central in unison, but what other recourse could have occurred to a bunch of computer programmers preparing themselves for hard work, facing outlandish and unfamiliar subjects? At times I thought that it was not blood that ran through my veins, but a stream of bits (smalls units of information similar to our neurons) and that my physical material was made up of lines of code. I always said jokingly that my body was the hardware, my mind the software, and my sensory organs the peripherals that let information in and out. Had there ever existed a world without computers? What were people like before being able to connect to each other through the internet? Did they survive in the Middle Ages without cell phones? Didn’t the Inca have cable or DVDs? How strange the past was! Especially because those people hadn’t been so different from us. Nevertheless, despite our technological advances, the world that luck had put us in was very absurd, and our era was so plagued by senselessness—terrorist attacks, wars, political lies, pollution, exploitation, religious fanatics, etc.—that people were no longer capable of believing that extraordinary things could happen to them. Well, there we were to demonstrate that yes, they really did happen, and what else could we do but let ourselves be pulled along by them?
I spent all morning looking at Guamán’s chronicle, page after page, and absorbing myself in the drawings, looking, with help from the index, for the smallest reference to the Colla, the Aymara, and Tiwanaku (which was written in that edition as Tiauanaco, a name which I added to the collection: Tiahuanaku, Tiahuanacu, Tihuanaku, Tiaguanacu y Tiahuanaco), but I didn’t find any more phrases underlined by my brother or any more significant information, although I did find many oddities that had nothing to do with our research: the detailed description of the tortures and punishments imposed on the Indians by the governors or by the Church were worthy of the best horror movie, and the precipitous social and racial division brought on by the appearance of all possible combinations of Spanish, Indians, and “Blacks from Guinea” was incredible.
But if I hadn’t found anything really useful, Proxi got through Juan de Betanzos empty handed in less than half an hour, and Jabba hardly had more luck with Garcilaso. The Inca de la
Vega seemed to be confusing the Aymara with another, very different people, located in a place called Apurímac, very far from the Collao, from Lake Titicaca, and from the Colla; he only mentioned them in reference to the defeats they suffered at the hands of the Inca or to express his pious shock at how very free their women were to do what they liked with their bodies before they married. The information he gave about Tiwanaku only dealt with the buildings and the design of the place; he limited himself to talking about the megalithic dimensions of the blocks of stone they used: “stones of an extraordinary bigness; and what is most wonderful to consider, is how or in what manner they were brought thither by force of Men, Who had not yet attained to the knowledge of Engines fit for such a work, and from what place they were brought, there being no Rocks or Quarries but such as are at a far distance from thence…and what is more strange, there are in diverse places great Portals of Stone, and many of them whole and perfect, made of one single and entire Stone…which pedestals, as well as the Arches of the Portals, were all of one single Stone: And then we may consider how great those Stones were before they were shaped, and what tools of Iron were requisite for such a labor.” Then, with all the nonchalance in the world, he admitted to having copied the information from Pedro de Cieza de León’s Chronicle, which Proxi was working on at that moment. The only odd fact—or illuminating, depending on how you looked at it—that Jabba found in Garcilaso was a phrase in parentheses that came up at the beginning of book VII in which the author, descendant of the
Orejones
on his mother’s side, explained that the Inca had ordered that all the inhabitants of the Empire be forced to learn the “general language”—in other words, Quechua—to which purpose they put teachers in every province. Then, just like that, he states: “(Besides which the
Incas
had a Court-language appropriated to themselves, which being esteemed the holy and divine Speech, was not to be profaned by vulgar Tongues.)”
“I could swear,” murmured Jabba, pensive, “that we’ve already read something about this.”
“Well, of course,” I agreed, and Proxi nodded. “You yourself told me that when you were looking for information on the Aymara and their language, you found a document that said the language the Yatiri used to cure illnesses was the secret language the
Orejones
spoke amongst themselves.”
“Ah, of course!” he said, hitting himself on the forehead with the palm of his hand. “I’m such an idiot! The Yatiri!”
“I’m dead because the Yatiri have punished me,” my brother’s voice repeated at that moment inside my head. And, all at once, without really understanding how, I made a shocking association of ideas at the speed of light: The Yatiri, those Aymara of noble lineage, direct descendants of the Tiwanakan culture, revered by the Inca and considered by their own people to be great sages and philosophers, were also, curiously, strange doctors who cured with words, like witches, since they apparently possessed a secret magic language that they shared with the
Orejones
, those of solar blood and all that. If they cured with words, why couldn’t they also cause illness with words? And if by chance the divine language that Garcilaso spoke of was none other than Aymara, the perfect mathematical language, the original language, whose sounds came from the very nature of beings and things? But why would the Yatiri punish Daniel?
“The pieces keep coming together one after another,” observed Proxi again, not having noticed my brief absence. “Do you know what I think? I think everything we’re finding points at only two things: Tiwanaku and the Yatiri. Let me tell you the gist of what Cieza de León says.”
But my brain kept on working in the background: Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa traveled around Peru from 1570 to 1575, writing his reports from the General Visit, and sometime during those five years, he met the Yatiri in Tiwanaku—although the city was already only a collection
of ruins—and drew a map which included a path that began in Tiwanaku and ended in the jungle, leading to some surely important place. And, just when he had finished the map, the Inquisition accused him of practicing witchcraft and locked him up in the secret jails of the Holy Office in Lima for formulating an ink that could provoke any kind of feeling in whoever read what was written with it.
“They named Cienza Official Chronicler of the Indies in 1548,” Proxi explained, by way of an introduction, resting the soles of her shoes on the edge of the old rattan table, “and after that, he dedicated himself to visiting the most important places in Peru and recording every last detail of everything he saw and heard.”
“Does he also tell how liberal Colla women were before marriage?” I asked sarcastically.
“That too,” Proxi admitted without enthusiasm. “And that’s even though he wasn’t a priest. Good thing I was born in this era!” she exclaimed loudly. “I think I’d die if I had to put up with so much macho reactionary BS.”
“Okay, and what else does he say about the Colla?” Jabba quickly broke in, before the curses turned in his direction.
“Well, that they deformed their heads, for example.”
“Really?” That subject interested me very much.
“Listen: ‘These people wear woolen caps called
chullos
on their heads. Their heads are very long, and flattened behind, without occiput, because they are pressed and forced into what shape they choose during childhood.’”
“The hat is called a
chullo
!” I exclaimed, beaming.
“What’s ‘occiput’?” Jabba wanted to know.
“The back part of the head,” Proxi explained.
“There’s something that doesn’t line up,” I said. “Why does he say that all the Colla shaped their heads starting at a young age? The professor told me that the cranial deformation was only used by the upper classes, as a sign of distinction.”
“Everyone says something different about that,” grumbled the mercenary. “Every archaeologist and every anthropologist has his or her own different version of the facts, and so, with all that hodgepodge, historians put together a kind of general theory that doesn’t address certain sorts of questions, to keep from getting boxed in.”
“And why don’t they agree?” Jabba protested. “Our life would be easier!”
“You can’t expect pears from an elm, Marc,” I declared. “If you want, I’ll tell you again about all the bad blood they’ve stirred up with the Miccinelli documents.”
“No, thanks,” he made himself answer, looking terrorized. “Proxi, quick, go on with what you were saying about Cieza.”
“Let’s see, where was I…. Here. Look, I’ll give you a summary, and then we can really delve into Tiwanaku, all right? Okay, the Colla told Cieza de León they were descended from a very ancient civilization, from before the flood, but that they didn’t know much about those ancestors. They assured him they had been a very large nation, who, before the Inca, had large temples and had really venerated their priests, but then they abandoned their old gods and worshiped Viracocha, who one day came out of the great Lake Titicaca to create the sun and end the darkness the world had been plunged into after the flood. Like the Egyptians, they venerated and mummified their dead, and they raised important stone edifices called
chullpas
.”
“And what does he say about Tiwanaku?” I asked, seeing that Proxi had finished her summary.
She lowered her eyes to the book, flipped a couple of pages back and forth, looking for something and when she found it, smoothed out the pages with the palm of her hand and began to read:
“‘There are other things to be said concerning Tiahuanaco, which I pass over, concluding with a statement of my belief that this ruin is the most ancient in all Peru. It is asserted that these edifices were commenced before the time of the Yncas, and I have heard some Indians affirm that the Yncas built their grand edifices at Cuzco on the plan which they had observed at the wall near these ruins.’”
“How he talks! I don’t understand a thing!”
“Shut up Jabba! Keep reading, Proxi, please.”
“‘I asked the natives, in presence of Juan de Varagas (who holds them in
encomienda
), whether these edifices were built in the time of the Yncas, and they laughed at the question, affirming that they were made before the Yncas ever reigned, but that they could not say who made them. They added that they had heard from their fathers that all we saw was done in one night.’”
“What in the world could he have meant?” roared Jabba, who shifted in his chair like a beast in its cage.
“That the Colla claimed Tiwanaku was constructed long before the arrival of the Inca and that, according to their ancestors, all the buildings were raised in one night.”
“Cieza,” Proxi, imperturbable, continued, “also gives a detailed description of the ruins exactly as he saw them on his visit.”