Authors: Matilde Asensi
“What the hell was that?” I blurted out.
“Relax, my friend,” Jabba, the provocateur, told me, “nothing bad can happen to us: We’re already shut inside here. In case you hadn’t noticed, if we can’t solve this new enigma, we’re going to be trapped in here until we rot.”
I stared at him without saying a word. That damned idea had passed through my head, but I hadn’t wanted to take it seriously. We weren’t going to die there, I was sure. A sixth sense told me that my time hadn’t come yet, and I refused to consider even the possibility that we wouldn’t be able to resolve any obstacle that might arise. However difficult, we would make it to the chamber.
The quietude and coldness of my look must have affected him. He lowered his eyes, ashamed, and turned back to the
tocapus
on the right. It wasn’t the moment to get angry or for bad moods, so I thought I should help him get out of the embarrassing situation he had gotten himself into.
“What did we always use to say in Barcelona?” I asked him; he didn’t turn. “The world is full of closed doors and we were born to open all of them.”
“I have that up on the wall of my office,” Proxi remarked happily, also throwing a line to Jabba.
“Alright,” he replied, turning around to look at us with a half smile on his lips. “You’ve succeeded in awakening the programming beast in me. I can’t be held responsible for what might happen.”
He grabbed the laptop and sat in front of the right-hand panel, the one with the winged figures with human heads, and began to copy the
tocapus
to “JoviLoom” while Proxi and I examined the wall and the little zoomorphic figures. The truth was, not even in the photographs we’d seen at home or on the Gate of the Sun itself had we been able to appreciate the odd details of those little men. They looked like they were running if you wanted to see them running, but you could also see them kneeling if you imagined their attitude to be supplicant. The artist who
had created them had confidently sought out that ambiguity in their pose so that the indication that you had to pray to Thunupa to find the way into Lakaqullu wouldn’t be too clear. All of them had wings, very large wings, although now that we could see them close up, they could also be taken as capes moved by the wind. Each of them also carried an inverted staff identical to the one in Thunupa’s right hand; it didn’t end in a condor’s head, however, but in the head of an animal that looked like a duck with an upturned beak, or a huge-mouthed fish. Those that had bird heads, on the right, gazed upward toward the sky, and their bodies were turned to the center, toward the stone condor; those with human heads, in front of which Jabba was sitting with the computer, had their bodies and gazes fixed on the big head on the wall.
“Okay,” Jabba said at last, “the translation is literal and it’s not very clear, but the text says something like ‘the people hold themselves to the ground, sink their knees in the earth, and put their eyes on the useless.’”
“Incredible!” I exclaimed, perplexed. “The world hasn’t changed at all in hundreds of years!”
Jabba stood and started on the second panel, burying himself again in his work. The change in his attitude was calming.
“The people hold themselves to the ground, sink their knees in the earth, and put their eyes on the useless?” Proxi asked me as if I had the answer to the problem. I limited myself to shrugging my shoulders in a gesture that said something like “I know as well as you do,” in other words, nothing. The little winged genies kept pulling at my attention. If their appearance was already strange in itself, stranger still were the pictures they had inside their bodies, like the long serpent inside the wing-capes or the little labyrinths on their chests, and the necks and heads that came out of their little legs, arms, and bellies, not to mention the inexplicable levers and buttons on their faces and the symbols on their headdresses. They were part men, part animal, and part machine. Of course, something indefinable and very outlandish.
“Here’s the second text,” Jabba informed us. “‘The birds lift up to fly, escape quick and fix their eyes on the sky.’”
“I don’t think any of that is of any use to us,” I remarked.
“I think it is,” Proxi countered. “We still don’t know how to use it, but I’m sure that they’re not just random phrases.”
“Some guys that control the power of words,” Jabba rebuked me, with the ardor of a new convert, “are going to put nonsense philosophical sentences on a closed door that we have to open? Come on, Root, use your head!”
“Okay, fine,” I admitted through gritted teeth. “They’re surely the key to opening this condor’s beak.”
“Well, come on, then, think,” he said, motioning to us with his hands to sit next to him.
“First I should tell you something I discovered,” Proxi announced, heading for the panel with birds’ heads. “All the
tocapus
are engraved on the wall, but the figures are buttons that can be pushed, like in the last test, in which the
tocapu
represented the number that could be pushed to make the mechanism work. Here, we clearly have to enter a digital combination, like in a cash machine.”
And as she spoke, she began to push the figures, one after another, to demonstrate that they could be depressed and really were like the buttons of a keypad.
“No!” yelled a desperate voice at our backs. “Stop! Hold still! Don’t keep going!”
In a matter of tenths of a second, and before we had time even to scream, the ground began to tremble and split as if an earthquake were shaking it. The stone blocks that were joined
together with that perfection that dazzled experts became uneven, and we barely had time to get off those that sank and jump and hang on like crazy to those that stayed in place. And suddenly, after a few nerve-wracking seconds—the earthquake didn’t last much longer—a total silence settled on the place, indicating that the disaster had ended. I couldn’t move a muscle, thrown face down as I was against the stone slab I had climbed onto when I realized the one beneath my feet was sinking into the depths.
“Are you alright?” The question came from the back of the passage, from the voice that had yelled before to warn us of the danger, which, now that I heard it again, was terribly familiar: That deep contralto timbre and that cadence couldn’t be anyone other than the professor, Marta Torrent. But there was no space in my mind for her, for being suspicious or asking myself what the hell she was doing there, because before anything else, I had to find out what had happened to Proxi and Jabba.
“Where are you?” I yelled, lifting my head. “Marc! Lola!”
“Help me, Arnau!” my friend cried from somewhere behind me. I stood hurriedly, and under a thin cloud of dust, I could make out Jabba’s bulk lying face down on a slab separated from mine by a yard-long leap. His head and his arms were dangling into the void. “Proxi’s falling! Help me!”
I jumped to him and threw myself on the ground at his side. I don’t think I’d ever felt so much distress as when I saw Lola’s frightened face looking up at both of us from an endless crevice, from whose bottom she was only separated by Marc’s hand holding hers. I dragged myself as close to the edge as I could, extended my arm to grasp her wrist, and pulled her with all my strength. Little by little, between the two of us, we began to lift her up, but it was very difficult, as if an invisible force pulled her down, multiplying her weight. Her eyes stared at us, begging for the help her mouth, closed by panic, didn’t ask for. I noticed that someone was standing next to me, because a foot grazed my side, and then I saw another arm reach down to Proxi and grab her hand to help us pull her up. With the strength of three people, we lifted Lola quickly, and she stood, at last, on the slab with the rest of us. Only then, clinging to Jabba, did she begin to sob silently, releasing the panic she still felt, and only then could I make out the professor who, with her hands on her hips, was breathing hard from the effort and watching my friends with her brow furrowed.
I put a hand on Lola’s shoulder, and she, turning her face to me, let go of Jabba to hug me, still crying. I returned her hug tightly, feeling my pulse slow. Although it seemed incredible, Proxi had been about to die before our very eyes. When she let go of me to go back to Jabba’s arms, I turned to the professor.
“Thank you,” I felt obliged to say. “Thank you for your help.”
“It was unwise what she did,” she said, as friendly as always.
“Possibly,” I replied. “Certainly, you have never been wrong, and that’s why you can’t understand other people’s mistakes.”
“I have been wrong many times, Mr. Queralt, but I’ve spent my whole life in archaeological excavations and I know what shouldn’t be done. None of you have any idea. You have to be very prudent and distrusting. You can’t ever let your guard down.”
I looked around me. The floor of the passage, as far as the beam of my headlight illuminated, had turned into a discontinuous handful of stone blocks, like islands, separated not by the sea, but by wide chasms. Fortunately, the path had not been cut off; in fact, you could jump from one stone to another without too much danger, but honestly, the situation had changed radically for me, not to mention for Marc and Lola: Now we knew there was danger, a real
mortal danger, in what we were doing.
“How far do the sunken stones go?” I asked the professor.
“About thirty feet,” she replied, coming over. “From there on, the floor is solid.”
“Can we return to the surface?”
“I don’t think so.” Her voice sounded calm, devoid of anxiety. “The first condor head and the wall behind it have sealed the exit in that direction.”
“Which is why we have to go on.”
She didn’t say anything.
“How did you find us?” I asked, without turning. “How did you get here?”
“I knew you would come,” she replied. “I knew what you were thinking of doing, so I was prepared.”
“But we saw you working on the excavation and there was no one close by when we found the entrance.”
“Yes, there was. One of the scholarship students was posted on the hill of Kerikala. I asked him to watch Lakaqullu with binoculars and to let me know when you appeared. Although the weeds hid the entrance, it wasn’t hard for me to find, because I had seen you go into it and disappear.”
Then I did turn to look at her. She was serene, and as always, seemed very sure of herself and of her decisions.
“And you went inside the shaft and the passage alone?”
“I was walking close behind you. In fact, I followed the light from your flashlights. I arrived in time to listen as you told your friends what I had explained to you in my office about the Tiwanakan culture’s ignorance of zero.”
Or rather, that we had served her the solution to how to open the first condor's head up on a silver platter.
“And when did you think of imparting the happy news of your presence?” I asked with poorly disguised anger.
“In the opportune moment,” she declared, unfazed.
“Naturally.”
We were in quite a bind. On the one hand, she remained obstinately determined to take advantage, until the end, of our discoveries and those of my brother; on the other, one word from her could land us in jail for having broken Bolivian laws by violating an archaeological monument that was unique, and a World Heritage Site, besides. The scale showed the pointer in the middle and the plates balanced; at least, until we got out of Bolivia. If we got out.
“Look, Professor,” my head ached a little, so I closed my eyes and massaged my forehead lightly, “let’s make a deal. I only want to find a solution for my brother’s illness. If you help us—” so as not to say, 'if you don’t turn us in and you let us go on—', “you can take credit for everything we discover, okay? I’m sure Daniel would prefer giving up academic success to staying like a vegetable for the rest of his life.”
The professor looked at me in an indefinable way for a few seconds, and, at last, smiled slightly. Who wouldn’t smile when given what she most desired?
“I accept your offer.”
“Okay, what do you know about this whole story?”
That cynical woman smiled enigmatically again and remained silent for a few seconds.
“A lot more than you might imagine, Mr. Queralt,” she said at last, “and without a doubt much more than you and your friends, so let’s stop wasting time and get to work. We have to
open an Aymaran lock, remember?”
Jabba and Proxi, arms around each other’s waists, watched us with astonished eyes. From the expressions on their faces, I guessed they agreed with my decision to peacefully integrate the professor into our team. It wasn’t the time for power struggles or for challenges in adverse conditions. That said, when we returned home, I planned to hire the best team of lawyers in Spain to hit her with the fattest lawsuit in the history of the world and get rid of her for good. The professor wasn’t expecting that, so for the moment, we could reduce the hostilities. Everything in good time.
The professor jumped carefully from stone to stone until she was standing as close as possible to the wall with the condor’s head. At my feet, she had left an old and deteriorated backpack.
“Let’s see…. What do we have here?” she murmured, examining the
tocapus
. “‘The people remain on the ground, they kneel and fix their eyes on the superfluous,’” she read with astonishing ease. “‘The birds take flight, they propel themselves quickly and fix their eyes on the heights.’”
We were perplexed. The professor read Aymara as if it were her own language, leaving the translation from Jovi’s Loom in the dust. But, perhaps out of a desire to show how thoroughly she knew the subject, she kept explaining her reasoning out loud:
“These phrases,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest, “are a word game whose purpose is to contrast the ideas of passivity and rootedness with those of movement and transformation: humans stay stable on the earth, while birds evolve by exchanging the earth for the sky. In short, we’re talking about using dynamic forces to achieve a change.”
I didn’t know if she expected us to say something, but since she was talking like she was giving a class, we remained silent.