Authors: Matilde Asensi
If I thought about it, he had really only wanted to accelerate a process that was laborious for him and to get closer to a future that seemed distant to him. That’s why he had taken advantage of the opportunity his boss had given him with that research on the
quipus
in Quechua. Somehow he had discovered Marta Torrent’s material about
tocapus
and Aymara and had noticed that he could get more quickly what destiny had reserved for him anyway for some years in his future. He was also a winner, a sharp guy who knew how to take advantage of luck
when it presented itself, like me, the smart-ass who had gotten rich without a university degree under his belt. I could almost imagine him talking with our mother, nurturing between them that legend in which I didn’t do anything really worthwhile, despite which, as I said, I had an enviable lucky star. How, otherwise, could the purchase of
Keralt.com
by Chase Manhattan Bank be explained? What was that, if not a chance stroke of luck which had nothing to do with the value of the business conceived, developed, and expanded by me working like a mule and missing sleep for years? Until that moment I hadn’t cared that my family saw it like that. It irritated me a little, of course, but I thought that all families had their hangups and that it wasn’t worth the effort to let it bother me or to fight against that false image. It was enough that my grandmother knew and recognized the truth. Not anymore. Now the story would take on its correct proportions, since it had caused a much greater problem: The unhappiness of my brother. It was Daniel who would have to face robbery charges whenever Marta Torrent decided to bring them against him; it was Daniel who would have to deal with the end of his career in education or research; it was Daniel who would have to deal with the embarrassment in front of our mother, our grandmother, Clifford, Ona, and in the future, if nothing was done about it, also in front of his son. That was without taking into consideration the possibility of him spending a substantial period in jail which would end up wrecking his life for good.
I looked at the little circle of light my headlight projected onto the floor of the passage and the wall in front of me, and became aware of where I was and why. I regained touch with reality after the onslaught of anger, and my first thought, of course, was to ask myself why the hell I had to go through that whole mess to help an imbecile like Daniel, but luckily, I reconsidered: Not even he deserved to spend the rest of his life as a vegetable. Despite everything, I had to try to save him. The moment would come soon enough to clarify things and negotiate with Marta whatever had to be negotiated. And I had thought of hitting her with a giant lawsuit when we got home! I was going to have to swallow my words, my intentions, and my thoughts. Now, when Daniel was up to it, he and I were going to have a long conversation that would leave marks that would last for the rest of his life.
With a sigh, I stood and lifted my heavy bag to my shoulder. At that moment, three lights came on a few yards away.
“Are you better?” Proxi’s voice asked.
“But, didn’t you leave?” I inquired.
“How could we go? You’re ridiculous!” Marc pointed out. “We pretended we were leaving, but we turned off our headlights and sat down to wait for you.”
“Well, come on, let’s go,” I said, walking over to them.
The black storm clouds didn’t completely clear from my head, nor did my mood improve, but we resumed the walk in silence, and somehow I knew it was still important to keep going.
Shortly after, we found the corner that ended the passage and that took us left by way of a new passage. When we ran into the first and giant puma head sticking out of the wall of the chamber, we knew that we were on the right path, and that, according to the map of the god Thunupa, that part of the tunnel had four of those heads, two of which (the central ones), flanked the entrance to the chamber of the horned serpent. Anyway, we stayed awhile, examining it just in case, but no, there were no
tocapus
, just an impressive and terrifying relief that from the ears and snout gave the impression of being a puma, but that really looked like a strange combination of round-nosed clown with a snake’s head as a mouth.
“Well I think,” Jabba observed, “that it’s a guy with a puma mask. Do you know what I mean?”
Of course, we all said no.
“There was an ancient god who put on a lion’s head as if it were a helmet and its skin hung down his back.”
“Hercules,” I noted. “And he wasn’t a god.”
“Fine, whatever. The point is the animal’s head only covered down to his nose and left his mouth and jaws exposed. Well, that’s what this thing looks like: a guy wearing a beast’s head that leaves half his face exposed. Like a mask.”
And yes, he was right. The truth was, all that Taipikalan art, or whatever you wanted to call it, was very strange. You could look at it from several different angles and find different interpretations, all of them equally valid. Proxi, pain in the neck that she was, flashed her camera over and over again, as if it had an unlimited capacity for storing images. In fact, it must have a bigger memory card than it came with, because otherwise, there was no explanation for how it could keep going.
After a few minutes, we resumed our Magellanic voyage around the chamber of the Traveler. Despite my mood, it didn’t escape my notice that Dr. Torrent was very quiet and lost in thought. It occurred to me that perhaps I could walk next to her and apologize for all the horrible things I had said to her since the day I showed up in her office at the university, but I quickly pushed the idea out of my head, because it wasn’t the time or place, and because I didn’t feel like it. I was already annoyed enough by my own problems, I didn’t need to load myself down with more.
At last, after about two hundred yards, we saw the second big puma head sticking out of the left wall.
“The entrance!” Proxi exclaimed, radiant.
When we got to the creature, we saw that past it was a gigantic door—or something that looked like a door, because it was an immense and regular polished stone slab, reaching from the ceiling to the ground, about thirteen feet high and six or seven feet wide.
“And there’s the other head,” Dr. Torrent pointed out.
The stone door indeed had a puma head on each side and they were exactly the same as the first we had examined.
“And the panel of
tocapus
?” Jabba asked.
“It’s probably under the heads,” Proxi remarked, “like with the first condor. Let’s get down on the floor.”
“Hey, you, wait!” Jabba stopped her, grabbing her arm quickly to keep her from escaping. “This time you’re going to behave yourself, okay? I’ll get down on the floor.”
“And why’s that?”
“Because I feel like it. I’m tired of having to rescue you from catastrophes. We’ve already been through two and they say the third one’s the charm, so stand aside and let me.”
Proxi stood next to Marta, muttering curses, and I saw the professor smile. Proxi must have been saying something funny, but I didn’t catch it. Nevertheless, the expression on her face changed at a dizzying speed and I turned my head back to the door, following her gaze and the beam from her headlight. In the very center of the door, there was a box with something inside it.
“Wait, Marc,” I exclaimed, going to him. “There’s something here. Look.”
The box was about four inches above my head, so I had to stand on tiptoes to be able to see it well. Marc, only a little shorter than I, could also appreciate the tiny
tocapus
on the engraving, but Proxi and Marta Torrent (especially the latter) wouldn’t have been able to see it even by jumping on a trampoline. It was a panel of
tocapus
, smaller than any we had found until then,
and located, furthermore, at a really uncomfortable height.
“Give me the binoculars, Jabba,” I heard Proxi say.
“They’re in your bag. But don’t try; it won’t work. They won’t let you zoom out that much. You’re too close.”
“It’s true.”
“Give me your camera, Proxi,” I said. “I’ll take a picture and we’ll look at it on the computer screen.”
“Good idea,” she exclaimed, handing me the tiny gadget.
I shot several pictures, focusing by intuition, then I began to load the content from the memory card onto the laptop. Proxi had taken exactly seventy-two photographs, and in high resolution, so we had to wait awhile until we could at last look at the content of the new panel on the monitor. Without remembering that Marta could read Aymara perfectly, I was thinking I would have to copy those
tocapus
one by one to “JoviLoom,” and there were a lot of them; then, when I was about to express my intention out loud, I heard her begin to translate the text:
“‘Can’t you hear, thief? You are dead because you tried to take the stick from the door. You will cry for the gravedigger to come this very night….’”
“Stop, Marta,” Proxi exclaimed, alarmed, closing the laptop suddenly.
The professor jumped.
“What’s going on?”
“Those words are the ones Daniel was translating right before he became ill,” I explained.
“Oh God….”
“I can tell you the rest, if you want,” I continued, “I have it translated here,” and I opened the laptop again to look for the copy of the document.
“So you also know about the secret of the Aymara, of the perfect language?” Jabba hastened to ask the professor, while I jumped from one subdirectory to another.
“Of course I know about it,” she replied, passing a hand over her forehead. “My father, Carles Torrent, discovered it. After many years of working with the Aymara on the excavations, they told him in secret that the ancient Yatiri possessed the power of curing or causing illness with words, of making people play musical instruments without having learned, or of making bad people good, or vice versa. According to the Indians, they could change any aspect of any person, from his mood to his character. Those were legends, of course, but when I discovered the system of writing with
tocapus
I found a lot of allusions to that power and I knew that what my father had taken for fantasy was real. The Capacas, the Tiwanakan priests, knew ancient
Jaqui Aru
, the ‘Human Language,’ which was, practically without alteration, the Aymara language spoken since the conquest of the Altiplano by the Inca and the Spanish, and it hadn’t changed, because it was sacred to Aymara speakers. Unfortunately, starting at that time, it began to be influenced in small ways by Quechua and Spanish. It’s not that it was altered or anything, but it adopted a few new words here and there.”
“Here it is,” I interrupted. “‘Can’t you hear, thief? You are dead, you tried to take the stick from the door. You will call the gravedigger this very night. The others all die everywhere for you. Oh, this world will cease to be visible to you! Law. Closed with a key.’”
“It’s not finished,” Proxi clarified for the professor. “Daniel couldn’t finish it.
When he got to that part, he developed the Cotard’s syndrome and the agnosia.”
“In other words, since getting to that part, he thinks he’s dead,” I added, “he cries out to be buried and he doesn’t recognize anyone or anything.”
“I see,” she said. “It’s like a curse for anyone who opens this door with intentions of
stealing. They already give an idea of its purpose with the first question: ‘Can’t you hear, thief?’ It’s a message for thieves, for those who know their intention is to appropriate what’s behind that door. The Indians of these lands never closed their houses or temples. It wasn’t because they didn’t have locks or keys; it was because they didn’t need them. They only used them to protect very important state documents or the city’s treasury. Nothing more. In fact, they were very surprised when they saw that the Spanish used bars and bolts, and thought it meant they were afraid of them. Still, today, when an Aymara leaves his house, he puts a stick at the entrance to indicate he’s not there and that the home is empty. No neighbor or friend would dare enter. If someone takes that stick, it’s because he’s going to steal, hence the expression used in the warning. I think this text is like a burglar alarm: If you come to take what isn’t yours, all these things will happen to you, but if your intention isn’t to steal, then the curse won’t have any effect, it won’t do anything to you. Notice that it’s written with
tocapus
, so they undoubtedly wanted to impede the entrance of their own Aymara-speaking thieves.”
“There’s no reason for that necessarily to be the case,” I objected; I was annoyed with the idea that the curse could affect only thieves, or rather, people like Daniel. “The other panels were also written in Aymara, with
tocapus
, and contained riddles or combinations to open the condor heads or make staircases come down.”
“We have another theory, Dr. Torrent,” explained Jabba, who had understood what was hiding behind my objection. “We believe it affects anyone who knows Aymara, like Daniel and you. It’s a kind of code that works with natural sounds, those infernal sounds of the perfect language we heard when we arrived in Bolivia, ranging from clicks of the tongue to gurgles to guttural explosions, sounds that Daniel and you can produce and understand, even if it’s only in your heads, reading silently, but we cannot; that’s why it doesn’t affect us.”
She seemed to consider for a few seconds.
“Look,” she said at last, “I think you’re wrong. I’ve been studying this subject much longer than you have. In fact, that’s why I gave Daniel the task of studying the knots, the
quipus
, in Quechua: I didn’t have time for it. For twenty years, I’ve dedicated myself to Aymara and the
tocapus
. I imagine you also know the story of the Miccinelli Documents, so I won’t go into detail. Suffice it to say that from my point of view as head of the department, Daniel was the researcher best qualified to work with Laura Laurencich, my colleague in Bologna; and on top of that, he was intelligent, bright, and ambitious. I gave him something that anyone would have wanted for his curriculum vitae, trusted him before any of the other more experienced and tenured professors, but I believed in him, in his great talent. What didn’t occur to me was that he would take advantage of his free access to my office and my files to steal material from me that had taken many years of work, and that, furthermore, was well protected. Or that’s what I thought…. I never would have expected something like that from Daniel; that’s why I froze when you, Mr. Queralt, appeared in front of me with documents that no one except for myself had ever seen.”