Authors: Matilde Asensi
“I only have to check one detail,” Proxi announced, returning to her computer. “I want to be sure that Taipikala-Tiwanaku had a port on Lake Titicaca.”
“It’s going to be hard to find something like that,” I observed. “Especially because of the change in the lake’s name.”
“Harder than any of what we’ve found up till now?” she asked with an ironic smile. Her beautiful dark eyes sparkled with intelligence. I could understand what Jabba had seen in her regardless of the strange curves and angles of her figure.
“No, not harder than that,” I replied.
“Well, come on, then, let me work in peace for a while.”
“But you’re missing everything on the Yatiri,” Jabba warned her, picking the abandoned bag of cookies back up.
“You can tell me later.”
The Yatiri who had stayed in Taipikala after the earthquake had to reorganize the life of the city, since it was no longer any more than a memory of what it had been. They fought to keep their old wisdom and adapted to life in the ruins. They repaired some temples enough to be fit for ceremonies and some estates enough to live in, but they could no longer move the large stones as easily as their ancestors, the giants, had done, so Taipikala no longer gleamed under the light of the sun, even though the plates of gold and silver remained on its doors and walls, and all the precious stones in its stelae, reliefs, and sculptures; neither did its floors or terraces, green and red in its time of splendor, gleam as they had before, because now the place was practically abandoned. The Yatiri took refuge in their studies of the heavens and continued with their research. They continued to practice healing with words and foretelling the future which let them know before anyone else that a great invading army was about to arrive and their world had ended. So they prepared for the event.
“If only all this were true, my friend!” Jabba murmured at my side.
“And if it were?”
“How many history books would have to change!” he said, and let out a laugh so loud that I was afraid he’d wake my grandmother.
“I’d be more worried about including the giants in course materials.”
“Okay, fine. It’s all lies. Is that better?”
I didn’t say anything, but I smiled. Deep down, and despite everything, I’d always been powerfully attracted to the idea of becoming a Zapatista, and it couldn’t be denied that I was a true hacker by nature; so changing all the history books and having school children study giants, Piri Reis’ map, and anything that made the established truth look ridiculous seemed like a great idea to me.
We were running out of the texts that Daniel had translated and organized (the file was some thirty pages long, and we were on page twenty-five), but as the end approached, things started to get more interesting. A long passage explained that in the face of a repeated warning in the stars that a large enemy army was approaching, the Yatiri of Taipikala decided to hide among
the populations of the nearest Colla kingdoms, passing themselves off as peasants and merchants. But before abandoning the walls of Taipikala for good, they had to do something very important that was explained in previous fragments. The crucial task was to hide the Traveler. They couldn’t go away without leaving him well protected
—
him and everything important in his tomb, which was a lot
—
because, to make matters worse, the pyramid and the sepulchral chamber appeared clearly depicted in the reliefs on the door of the building. So they removed said door, substituting an unadorned one, and they went to work for two years, raising a hill of earth and stones to hide the pyramid; but when they finished the task at last, two rains of stars fell one night from the sky—the second was much larger than the first—which left important sparkling stelae warning the Yatiri of the arrival of a second army that would defeat the first and change the world forever. Then they wrote all of this down on golden plates that also said where they would hide until the destruction passed. They accessed the chamber again via one of the two passages that opened into the pyramid from places that only the Yatiri knew and left the plates there and sealed everything again, adding more protections and defenses. They would try to keep Willca from disappearing again, but if he did, the surviving humans would be able to find their legacy.
And then, the Incap Rúnam arrived
10
….
“They must be the Inca, obviously.”
“They must.”
The Yatiri, mixed in with the people of the conquered populations and cities, saw their arrival. At their command was Pachacuti (or Pachakutej, as the Bolivian journal called him), the ninth Inca, very tall and round-faced, dressed in red clothing that had two long seams of
tocapus
running from neck to feet, and covered with a large green cape. Taipikala lost its name and began to be called Tiwanaku, for reasons unknown. That’s what the Incap Rúnam called it, and that’s how it stayed until the arrival of the Viracochas
11
, the white-bearded men who spoke a strange language that sounded like a stream falling on a bed of stones. The people felt a terrible fear of the Viracochas, ambitious beings who stole gold, silver, and precious stones, who enslaved and killed men and children, and raped women. Like the Incap Rúnam years before, who brought Viracocha, the Spanish also brought their own god, but they forced him on the people with the whip and club, destroying the old temples, and, using their stones, building churches everywhere.
“This magnificent period,” I commented, following the thread of my thoughts, “must have been when Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa ran into the Yatiri on the Collao, around Tiwanaku. So we’re talking about the year 1575.”
“Forty years after Pizarro killed the last Inca in Cajamarca and conquered the empire,” Proxi said.
“Exactly.”
But even worse than the slavery, the tortures, and the new religion were the infectious fevers that began to decimate the population after the arrival of the conquistadors. Wherever the Spanish went, the native people died by the thousands, attacked by mysterious illnesses the Yatiri had never seen before and could not cure. They also began to die, and then, before there was no one left who preserved the ancient wisdom, they decided to move forward with the purpose that had driven them to leave Taipikala, and one day, they simply left. No one knew
where, but a couple of short poems expressed the joy the Aymara felt because the Yatiri had managed to get to safety.
And that was all. Daniel hadn’t added anything else. We looked and looked again on the hard drive, in case there was more information stored there, but we found no other significant document. We didn’t even find the “JoviLoom” transcription of the curse which surprised us a great deal.
“Do you know what my mother explained to me when I was small?” Jabba asked Proxi (who was still doing her own thing) and me. “That we weren’t as savage with the Indians of South America as the English were with those of North America; that the only thing we did was have mestizo children, and that’s why, in the North, where they killed them there are only a few left in the reservations, while in the South they still live happily as good Christians in their own countries.”
Although Jabba’s mother was from Madrid, mine had also told me the same tale when I was small. That harebrained idea of our mothers’ was doubtlessly the result of the Spanish nationalist and Catholic propaganda from the Franco era. It must have been an argument repeated over and over for a long time to silence our consciences. If the English were worse than we were, then the Spanish weren’t so bad; we could even, by comparison, have been good and done a great job at it. Catalonia didn’t participate alongside Castile in the conquest of America—the king of Castile, logically, wanted all the riches, since he had discovered the continent—but from the beginning, since the second voyage of Columbus, the Catalans, Aragonese, and Valencians had traveled to the Indies and established themselves there.
“What do you think of this whole story about the Yatiri, Jabba?” I asked, smoothing my goatee with my hand.
“I don’t know…it’s….” He looked pensive for a moment, and then arched his eyebrows, trepidatious. “Wait a minute! We’re not going to have to go to Tiwanaku to look for the Pyramid of the Traveler, are we?”
It hadn’t even crossed my mind.
“Now that you mention it…,” I replied.
His face fell. The idea of getting on a plane paralyzed him. He flew, of course; he would travel to anywhere in the world without refusing or making excuses, but with the absolute certainty that he was going to die, that he would never again set foot on solid ground. For him, every airplane trip was a resigned acceptance of death.
“We should study Tiwanaku in detail,” I proposed, “and find the Pyramid of the Traveler. Maybe they opened it centuries ago, and now there’s nothing in it!”
“Maybe.”
Proxi cleared her throat noisily and forcefully. “How many maps of Tiwanaku do you want?” she said.
“How many do you have?” I asked her, leaning over the keyboard of my computer. Jabba did the same with another computer.
“Three or four very passable ones. The rest are worthless.”
“Send them to the printer.”
“Let me retouch them a little first. They’re really small and low resolution.”
“I’ll read everything there is on Tiwanaku,” I told Jabba. “You look for Tiahuanacu, Tiahuanaco, and all other possible variations.”
“I’ll help you,” put in the mercenary.
The laser printer was spitting out the pieces of the second map when Magdalena told us the
food was ready. We had been at it for couple of frenetic days, and we still had an impressive amount of work to do: The internet search for Tiwanaku had turned up more than three thousand three hundred documents to look through, and Jabba and Proxi hadn’t had any more luck. We would either have to start applying filters or grow old in the attempt. But, before doing anything else, we had to eat.
With coffee steaming in our cups, we returned to the study knowing that we had a long afternoon ahead of us. We went back to our school years, manually rebuilding the maps with glue and tape, and, once they were restored, we stuck them to the walls with tacks to get a better idea of what the archaeological complex looked like. Crammed together in the center, with north at the top and south at the bottom, there were three principal monuments: The most important of the site, the biggest and most majestic, was Akapana, a giant seven-stepped pyramid, with a base measuring more than six hundred and fifty feet long and slightly less wide, of which now almost nothing remained, only ten percent of the original stones. According to experts, it had served as a deposit for water and materials, and also to celebrate religious rites, although in other places we read that its principal function was that of astronomical observatory. Recently, archaeologists had discovered in its interior a complex network of strange zig-zagging canals which they identified as crude plumbing, although, of course, it was again just a hypothesis. At first we thought that Akapana could mean Traveler, but we were disappointed, because its literal translation could mean anything from “from here it is measured” to “here is a wild white duck.”
“I wish we had Daniel to lend us a hand!” Proxi sighed.
“If we had Daniel, we wouldn’t be doing all this,” Jabba replied, and I nodded.
Above Akapana, to the north, were two more structures: one, the very small one on the right, was the Semi-Subterranean Temple—the one with the walls covered in tenon heads—and the other, much larger, called Kalasasaya, was a ceremonial temple with an open roof, built of red sandstone and green andesite, measuring three hundred some feet long by three hundred some feet wide, built as a sort of platform on the ground and enclosed by a retaining wall, inside which was a large rectangular patio that was accessed by going down six steps hewn from one single rock. Apparently, this enormous temple was constructed of blocks more than sixteen feet high and weighing a hundred tons which, according to the official page of the Museum of Tiwanaku, had been transported from distances of up to one hundred ninety miles.
“Wow…! How could they? But they didn’t have the wheel!”
“Forget it, Proxi,” I told her. “We don’t have time to solve so many mysteries.”
“Well, all of this reminds me of the pyramids of Egypt,” Jabba remarked. “The same gigantic stones, the same mystery about how they were moved, the same kind of construction, the unfamiliarity with the wheel….”
“And sacred blood,” I said, teasing. “Don’t forget the sacred blood. The Egyptian Pharaohs married their siblings because they also had to preserve the purity of their blood, and they also believed themselves to be children of the sun. What were their names? Horus? Ra?”
“That’s right, laugh! But he who laughs last, laughs longest!”
“Well, listen to this…,” murmured Proxi, who was staring at her screen.
“Something else weird?” I asked.
“I’ve found information on a certain Arthur Posnansky, a naval engineer, cartographer and archaeologist, who wrote more than one hundred works on Tiwanaku during the first half of the twentieth century. This archaeologist studied the ruins over the course of his life and came to the conclusion that they were built by a civilization with technology and knowledge very advanced
compared to ours. After measuring, mapping, and analyzing the whole site, applying complex calculations and using the change in the position of the Earth in its orbit around the sun, he came to the conclusion that Tiwanaku had been built fourteen thousand years before, which would fit with the history told by the Yatiri.”
“I suppose that academic archeology completely rejects that theory,” I commented.
“Naturally! Academic archeology can’t accept the idea of a superior culture ten thousand years ago, when man is supposed to have dressed in furs and lived in caves to protect himself from the cold of the last ice age. But there’s a large group of archaeologists who not only accept the theory as a good one, but defend it come hell or high water. Apparently, this Posnansky, who died a long time ago, is still quite the celebrity in Bolivia.”