Authors: Matilde Asensi
“Stop thinking so hard, smart-ass!” Proxi ordered.
If we wanted, “JoviLoom” also offered a printed version of the result, but, given what we knew about Aymara, it was all the same to us.
“And if this absurd handful of consonants isn’t Aymara?” I asked, suddenly alarmed.
“And what the hell else would it be?” Jabba replied.
But after that, doubt fell on us in the form of a heavy silence. We were aware that we were trapped, because we didn’t have any way of confirming whether or not that gibberish without vowels corresponded with the language of the Colla. And at that inopportune moment, my grandmother had the idea of coming in to say goodbye before heading to the hospital, so the poor thing left without anyone bothering to acknowledge her in any way other than grunting at her.
Fortunately, a little while later, we found, in the files stored in one of the program folders, a bunch of alphabet soups already divided and, next to them in text files with the same name, their version in Latin characters, made up of words which had been reconstructed and completed by Daniel, and to our surprise, the resulting writing was indeed Aymara. Of course, these reconstructions were still pure gobbledygook to us, but at least now we could look up some terms in the dictionaries by Ludovico Bertonio and Diego Torres Rubio, and understand what they meant. Furthermore, some of those files were also translated by my brother, but, considering their content (for example, “
mayan marcapa hiuirinacan ucanpuni cuna huchasa camachisi,
” or the equivalent “from the dead man in his village the mortals in that always some sin is realized”), we decided that we were the ones who had arrived at an impasse that day, especially since night had fallen and Clifford and my mother had been waiting for an hour for us to get there so they could have dinner.
However, despite the fact that the day’s work had been extremely fruitful, we made the most spectacular discovery the day after, on Tuesday, shortly after beginning our work. Almost by coincidence, we came across a very large document entitled “Tiwanaku.doc” in Daniel’s computer, filed incomprehensibly in one of the packed subdirectories of images, and it did not surprise us to discover that it was a strange collection of translations of Aymara texts, the originals of which, we deduced, must be in the vast photographic collection of textiles and ceramics. The fragments were of different sizes, some very long and others small, only one or two lines long, but all of them spoke of a mystic and sacred place called Taipikala, so at first we
didn’t understand why in the world the file was named Tiwanaku. Taipikala, according to Daniel, meant “stone in the center” or “central stone,” and there, in Taipikala, the first human being had been born, the son of a goddess, Oryana, who had come from the sky and of some kind of earthly animal. After giving birth to seventy children thereby completely fulfilling her strange mission, the goddess left, returning to the depths of the Universe from which she had come. But her numerous descendants—apparently, giants who lived for hundreds of years—constructed Taipikala in her honor and continued to worship her there for millennia until a terrible cataclysm (so large it made the sky, the sun, and the stars disappear), and afterwards a flood that drowned the “central stone” and almost the entire population in water, ended forever the race of giants, whose sickly and weakened descendants began to grow less tall with each successive generation, and to die sooner. But since they preserved the teachings of Oryana, and knew how to use the sounds of nature and to speak the sacred language, they continued to be Yatiri.
I think it was at that point that we began to understand how it all connected. If we cut through the myth and kept certain significant facts, the legend collected in dispersed fragments of
tocapus
ended up confirming what we had discovered on our own. We also accepted that Taipikala had all the features necessary to be Tiwanaku, and we further corroborated that with the information that came next.
A long time after the flood, Willka, the sun, reappeared at last, coming out of the darkness from a point in the center of the great lake called Kotamama (Titicaca?) next to Taipikala. There he was seen for the first time, and the exhausted—and probably freezing—human beings, fearful that he could disappear again, worshiped him in all possible ways, offering him ceremonies and sacrifices of all kinds imaginable. The city of Taipikala was reborn slowly from its ashes, under the rule of the wisest Yatiri, called Capacas, who made the worship of the sun the central axis of their new and fearful religion. Willka couldn’t disappear again; the continuity of humanity depended on it. If Willka left again, they would die, and with them, as they had been about to find out, nature in its entirety. So the sun became a god and Taipikala his city-sanctuary. There, with much ceremony, they tied Willka to the stone of solstices, the so-called “stone to bind the sun,” with a long thick gold chain that fastened him to space-time. Despite all that, every once in a while the sun got loose from the chain and disappeared, and terror invaded the inhabitants of Taipikala. But the Capacas would again fasten him to the stone and prevent him from leaving. They didn’t forget Oryana, but she wasn’t there anymore, and Willka was, practically and immediately, much more important and necessary. To fill the role of important and necessary, they also had Thunupa, another new god, born of the fear that symbolized the power of water and of the lightning that announced a storm. Thunupa wasn’t as significant as Willka, but they complemented each other in the task of preventing a new disaster. Moreover, after the flood, the rainy seasons had changed in a strange way, and the past abundance of crops had not returned. Willka and Thunupa, the sun and the water, were the fundamental gods of the pantheon of Taipikala.
The Yatiri became the depositories and guardians of the ancient wisdom, and with that they soon found themselves at the summit of social and religious power. The world had changed a lot; even Lake Kotamama, which used to come up to the docks of Taipikala’s port, now was a considerable distance away; but they still had the capacity to heal illnesses and keep the sun in the sky day after day. Soon they made up a separate caste: They spoke their own language, studied the heavens in detail, had the power to predict events, and taught how to move water from the great lake to the distant crops in order to reap large harvests, despite the cold which had plagued the region since the flood. The most sacred place in Taipikala was the Pyramid of the
Traveler, a place separate from the other buildings, in which were kept some great plates of gold on whose smooth surfaces was written, so that it never would be forgotten, the memory of the creation of the world, the arrival of Oryana, the history of the giants, the flood, the rebirth of humanity after the return of the sun, and everything the Yatiri knew about the Universe and about life. The Pyramid of the Traveler also contained important drawings showing the heavens and the Earth before and after the cataclysm as well as the very body of the traveler and his supplies for traveling the worlds awaiting him in the great beyond until his return. All this was thought, apparently, to help a later Humanity in case another catastrophe were to occur.
Although reading all those Aymaran legends was very entertaining, we had to recognize that they were only fables for children and that they didn’t give us any really interesting information. Many fragments of text among those carefully collected by my brother praised the wisdom, the valor, and the extraordinary powers of the Yatiri and their Capacas; but, given that all the information came from textiles and ceramics dating from much later, it was obvious that it all had to have been colored by myth and by the beauty lent by nostalgia, so it wasn’t any help to us. True, the Yatiri did a lot of things, but so what? Good for them. Period.
But when Proxi was already beginning to mutter curses against Taipikala, and Jabba had gone off to the kitchen in search of something to eat, there appeared, at last, the first really useful fragment: The Yatiri, priests of Willka and direct descendants of the giant offspring of Oryana, possessed a sacred blood that could not be mixed and were therefore required to reproduce only amongst themselves.
“Damn, that’s good news!” Proxi exclaimed, filled with sudden satisfaction. “The Yatiri caste wasn’t only men!”
“Clearly there were women,” Jabba accepted, as he worked on devouring a bag of cookies. “But until now, no document has mentioned it.”
“That’s always your mistake!” And Proxi pointed her finger accusingly as both of us. “You take it for granted that words that aren’t gender-specific only refer to men.”
“That’s not true,” I snapped. “It’s because Daniel puts the plural masculine article in front of ‘Yatiri.’”
“And what’s Daniel?” she growled, scornful. “Another man! It never fails. Do you remember, Jabba, what we read about the use of gender when we were looking for information on the Aymara?”
Jabba nodded with his mouth full, without stopping his frenetic chewing. She continued:
“In this perfect tongue, there exists no grammatical difference for the gender of people. There is no ‘she’ or ‘he,’ nor ‘her’ or ‘him,’ nor ‘his’ or ‘hers.’”
“It’s…the same,” Jabba mumbled, spitting particles of mashed up cookie into the air.
“Adjectives don’t have gender either,” Proxi continued. “There’s no way of differentiating between ‘new’ or ‘pretty’ for a woman or a man.”
“It’s…the same word.”
“Exactly! So the word ‘Yatiri’ could refer to men, or it could just as well refer to women.”
“Even so,” I dared to comment, even at the risk of dying in the attempt, “it’s not what matters right now. Okay, there were women among the Yatiri, but what really is interesting to me is that business about sacred blood that couldn’t be mixed. Don’t you remember the
Orejones
?”
Jabba, who had his mouth full, almost choked when he tried to reply. After clearing his throat a few times, pounding his chest with his hand, and setting the bag of cookies on the table to distance himself from temptation, he said, frowning:
“But, haven’t you noticed that it’s the same story you told me about Viracocha, but without Viracocha? All that about the two human races, the one of giants, that he destroyed with columns of fire and with the flood, and the other, that the Inca were descended from. The legends coincide down to the thing about the sun. Didn’t you say that Viracocha made it come out of Lake Titicaca to illuminate the sky after the flood?”
I let out a curse, censuring my lack of reflexes. Jabba was right again and I was late arriving at the conclusion, but I hid it by looking at the laptop screen, as if it were surprise that had loosened my tongue.
While both of us continued our reading, Proxi went to work on another of the nearby computers. I saw her working with different search engines, while the story my brother had put together with his selection of texts written with
tocapus
moved forward. We didn’t ask her what she was doing, because when she found what she was looking for, she would tell us.
At some point in history, continued the chronicle woven by Daniel, there was a spectacular earthquake on the Altiplano, which took the lives of hundreds of people and destroyed the most important buildings of Taipikala, already weakened by time and by the ancient cataclysm and the flood following it. The destruction was complete. Given the magnitude of the disaster some important decisions had to be made which caused a great quarrel among the governing Capacas. The long poem or song recounting the event—almost two pages of verses, with apt and repetitive refrains—didn’t explain the reasons for the altercation but remembered how painful the clash had been and how worthy and honorable the factions that took part in it. The fight ended with the exodus from the city of a large group of Capacas, Yatiri, and peasants, who went north over the mountains. At last, after a long time, they arrived at a rich and sunny valley, and the Capacas decided that it was a the right place to found a second Taipikala, which they named Cusco, the “belly-button of the world,” to give it a similar meaning to “the central stone.” But things didn’t work out as they had predicted and the need to go to war constantly with neighboring villages ended up causing the rise of a military leader: the Yatiri Manco Capaca, also known as Manco Capac. None other than the first Inca.
Reality and legend again came together before our eyes as we got to know the Aymara version of history. But there was still more: Those Capacas of Cusco who kept their role as priests and healers came to call themselves, in time, Kamilis, and their origin was apparently lost during the formation of the great empire that came after. They fused with (or were confused with) some doctors called
kallawayas
who treated the Incan Orejona nobles and who were reputed to have their own language, a secret language that no one understood and that they used as proof of identity. Their trail went hopelessly cold, while the texts dealing with the Yatiri of Taipikala recorded their continued existence despite the great difficulties they had to face. The city was never again the same as before the earthquake. Its inhabitants and the peoples who had lived in its vicinity dispersed little by little, and small sovereign states popped up (Canchi, Cana, Lupaca, Pacaje, Caranga, Quillaca…) like Taifa kingdoms.
“I have it!” Proxi exclaimed. “Listen to what I found in a Bolivian journal: ‘The indigenous people called it Tiwanaku. They told that one day, a century before, the Inca Pachakutej was contemplating the ancient ruins, and, seeing a messenger arrive, said to him: Tiai Huanaku (sit down, guanaco). And the phrase coined the name. Possibly, no one wanted to tell the new conquerers that the name of the city lost in time was Taipikala (the stone in the middle). Let alone that it was said that is was there that the god Viracocha began creation, and that it was the
stone in the middle, but in the middle of the Universe
9
.”
“I think Garcilaso de la Vega also mentions that nonsense about ‘Sit down, guanaco.’” Jabba commented disdainfully.
“Okay, so we’ve confirmed,” I said, “that Taipikala was the original name of Tiwanaku, although that was pretty obvious.”