Authors: Matilde Asensi
“Maybe, if you make a sizable donation to the college…,” Jabba insinuated.
“Marta Torrent doesn’t seem like a person who can be bought,” Proxi cut him off.
No, she didn’t at all. We were quiet for a while longer, then we chatted about trivial things until we left the restaurant. We walked to Isabel la Católica Plaza and turned on Pedro Salazar Street and walked down it until we got to the San Francisco residential community, a complex of colonial style residences that had a certain Andalusian air, with white walls, grated windows, and plants everywhere.
When we rang the doorbell, the light of a closed circuit camera shone on us.
“Hello,” the professor said. “Follow the main street until it ends, then you will see the house on the right. It’s called “Los Jazmines.”
The development had the appearance of being inhabited by well-to-do people. The small avenue we walked along was clean and well-lit, and decorated with flower pots on both sides. The house called “Los Jazmines” was a small two story chalet with a red roof and a large
wooden double door, one side of which was already open, showing Marta with her face illuminated by a smile and a new image that made us forget the Indiana Jones from the excavations, with a white blouse covered in red embroidery and a red pencil skirt that turned her back into the department head of the Autonomous University.
“Come in,” she said cordially. “How are you? Have you rested?”
“Not enough,” Proxi replied with an affable (and hypocritical) smile. “And you?”
“Oh, I’m very well!” she remarked, stepping aside to let us pass. Behind her, a somewhat eccentric couple awaited us with their hands hanging at their sides. “I’ll introduce you. This is Dr. Gertrude Bigelow and her husband, the archaeologist Efraín Rolando Reyes, with whom I’ve been working in Tiwanaku for almost twenty years, right, Efraín?”
“Or more!” he joked. “Pleasure to meet you, friends,” he added. Efraín Rolando was the bald guy Marta had entered Don Gastón’s restaurant with the previous Saturday when we ran into her for the first time, the one with glasses and a grayish beard. His wife, Dr. Bigelow, was a tall, skinny, and ungainly American, with straw-colored wavy hair pulled back in a bun, covered (because you couldn’t say “dressed”) in a long and summery flowered smock. Both were wearing leather sandals.
“Gertrude,” Marta added, “is an actual physician, which is where she gets her ‘Dr.’ from. Not like Efraín and me, who are doctors of humanities.”
I was always uncomfortable meeting new people and having to be nice to strangers. It was a real mystery to me why what everyone in the world wanted was to go out and connect with this person and that, the more the better, and boast of having a lot of friends, as if it were a triumph—and as if the contrary were a failure, obviously. I made the normal effort and shook the hands of the archaeologist and the doctor as Marta finished the introductions. Then they invited us into the living room, an ample space crammed with strange and ugly pieces of Tiwanakan art. Over the long white sofa, a large framed black and white photograph of the ruins taken at sunset gave a clear idea of what made Efraín tick.
We sat around a low square table made of pale wood—like all the furniture in that living room—and Dr. Bigelow, gesturing to Marta to stay with us and not follow, disappeared discreetly through the door.
“I’ll catch you up,” the professor said quickly. “Efraín and Gertrude already know everything we discovered last night. For years, Efraín and I have shared the same interest in Tiwanakan culture and its great mysteries, and we’ve been associates in this research, whose documents, Arnau, your brother found in my office.”
“About that, Marta…,” I started, but she raised a hand in the air like a traffic guard and cut me off.
“We’re not going to talk about that matter right now, Arnau. There will be time for that. Right now, the only two important things are, one the one hand, to return Daniel to health, and on the other, to continue the research from our current vantage point. We’re going to start with a clean slate, and since we have common interests, we’re all going to work together. Is that okay with you?”
We nodded without saying a word, although, oddly, Jabba, Proxi, and I all took advantage of the occasion to shift in our chairs.
“Don’t feel bad about the matter with Daniel,” Efraín said. “Especially you, Arnau. What Marta and I would like is for everyone to work together, to set this matter aside. It’s very easy to form an opinion when one is not involved, as I am doing, I know, but I assure you that remembering this business can only muddle the project. It’s better if we focus on what’s
important, don’t you think?”
Again, we nodded and shifted in our chairs. At that moment, Dr. Bigelow returned carrying a heavy tray. Marta and Efraín leaned over to remove all the junk and journals from the table, and we spent the next few minutes passing out cups, napkins, tea spoons, coffee, milk, and sugar. When at last we were all served and comfortable, including the American, we returned to the conversation:
“This country,” the professor explained, “is riddled with legends about ancient civilizations that still live hidden in the jungle. The Amazon region occupies three million square miles, which means that Latin America is almost completely jungle, and only the coastal regions are inhabited, so the great majority of countries share these myths. The existence of great treasure, of millennia-old cultures, of prehistoric monsters, are a part of Latin American folklore in general. We shouldn’t forget the legend of El Dorado, or Paitití, for example, the famous city of gold, whose alleged location in relation to modern borders is here in Bolivia. Of course, no one really believes in these things, officially, but the truth is that every so often the governments that share the Amazon jungle send expeditions in search of gold mines and uncontacted tribes of Indians.”
“And are they successful?” I asked, with an ironic smile on my lips, a smile that fell immediately when I took my first sip of the coffee…. I’d never tasted any so strong and thick! Was that the wonderful coffee of Bolivia, or was it that they liked cyanide in that house?
“Well, yes,” Dr. Bigelow replied, surprising me because she hadn’t said a word up till then. “They are successful. I myself have been part of a medical team on a couple of them, and we’ve always returned with something very interesting. On both, we found small groups of unknown Indian tribes that ran away when they saw us, after shooting a couple of arrows. They don’t want contact with the white man.”
She spoke with a strong American accent, very nasal, with the “R”s much softened but without even a trace of the sweet musicality or turns of phrase of Bolivia. Maybe the two cadences were incompatible in her mouth, despite the fluency with which she spoke Spanish.
“It’s thought that there are still almost a hundred groups of uncontacted Indians in the jungle,” the archaeologist explained. “In fact, Brazil, as the country with the most jungle, has ample reserves of territory where seekers of gold, timber and petroleum companies, and hunters are prohibited entrance because casual aerial sightings of unknown tribes have been made. The current policy is to save them from contact with civilization in order to prevent their destruction, because, among other things, we would infect them with our illnesses and we could wipe them out.”
“Actually, Efraín,” his wife objected, setting her cup on the tray, “it’s not entirely true that the creation of reserves keeps away the undesirables.”
“I know, honey!” he replied, smiling. “But that’s the theory, right?”
The archeologist’s shiny bald head glinted as he moved it from one side to the other. I still tasted the bitterness of the horrible coffee in my throat and I still felt like my mouth was full of the grit from the grounds.
“Look,” Efraín continued, smoothing his beard, “everybody everywhere thinks that everything is already discovered, mapped, and placed, but there’s nothing more wrong or further from the truth. There are still places on Earth where satellites can’t see and where we don’t know what there is, and the Amazon jungle is one of those places. Geographical void, they call it.”
“It used to be called Terra Incognita,” Marta pointed out, taking a sip of her coffee. I kept expecting her to vomit or make some sign of disgust, but she seemed to love it.
“Just try to get a map of the jungle area of Bolivia,” challenged Efraín, who appeared to be
about fifty, more or less. “You won’t find it! Those maps don’t exist!”
“But I’ve never seen holes… geographical voids like the ones you were talking about, on any atlas or world map,” Jabba declared.
“Conventionally, they’re filled in with the color of the territory surrounding them,” the archaeologist clarified. “Have you heard of the long search for the source of the Nile in the nineteenth century?”
“Of course,” Marc replied. “I’ve seen tons of movies and I’ve played millions of old video games on the subject. Burton and Stanley and all those people, right?”
But the archaeologist didn’t answer his question.
“Did you know that today, in the twenty-first century, in the Amazon there are still tons of rivers whose sources are still unknown? Yes, don’t look so surprised. I’ve told you, satellites can’t see everything, and if the jungle is very thick, as it is, it is impossible to know what’s beneath the canopy. The Heath River itself, for instance! No one knows where it begins, yet it is such an important river that it marks the border between Peru and Bolivia.”
“Alright, but,” I objected, “what’s the point of all of this?”
“It supports the hypothesis that the Yatiri exist,” Marta declared, without showing any emotion, “that it is very possible that they have really survived all this time, so organizing our own expedition to look for them isn’t anything as crazy as Lope de Aguirre
15
.
“You forget one small detail, Marta,” I replied scornfully. “We don’t know where the Yatiri are, or rather, we don’t know if they’re even in the Amazon jungle. Doesn’t it seem a little risky to make such an assumption? Maybe they hid in some cave in the Andes, or among the inhabitants of some town. Why not?”
She looked at me expressionlessly for a few seconds, as if deciding whether to make me understand my ignorance and stupidity in a delicate way or not. Luckily, she controlled herself.
“What a bad memory you have, Arnau! Don’t you remember Sarmiento de Gamboa’s map?” she asked me with a small ironic smile on her lips. “You brought a copy to my office, so I imagine you must have studied it, correct? I found that map, drawn by Sarmiento, on a broken canvas in the archives of the Hydrographic Deposit in Madrid, about six years ago now. Remember the message? ‘‘Pathe of the Yatiri Indians. Two monthes by land. Seye I, Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, that it is truthe. In the City of Kings on the Twenty-Second of February of One Thousand Five Hundred and Seventy-Five.’” I was stunned. It was true; my inquiries about that map covered in marks that looked like ant footprints had led me to the Amazon, but at the time it hadn’t seemed like an important piece of information, because I didn’t understand its meaning. “All I had to do was superimpose the broken map over a map of Bolivia,” Marta added, settling herself comfortably on the sofa, “to discover that it represented Lake Titicaca, the ruins of Tiwanaku, and, leaving from there, a path that clearly entered the Amazon jungle. I’m convinced that it will be perfectly feasible to begin the search for the Yatiri.”
Lola, who had uncharacteristically remained even quieter than Dr. Bigelow, leaned forward and put her cup on the table without trying the brew, as she adopted an expression of pronounced tiredness:
“We already thought that when we were inside the chamber of the Traveler, Marta,” she pointed out, “but now, here, in the city, drinking coffee, things seem different. I remind you that the map we found on the gold sheet was only a drawing made of lines and dots on an empty background. I’m sorry, but I do think it’s crazy.”
“We still haven’t studied that map in detail, Lola,” she replied, very calm. “We still haven’t reviewed all the graphic material that you, aptly, collected in the pyramid. We, and I’m referring to Gertrude, Efraín, and myself, are prepared to try. Efraín and I, because we’ve been working on this our whole lives, and Gertrude, because, as she has told you, she is familiar with the uncontacted tribes and knows the jungle, and she’s convinced that we can find the Yatiri. If you don’t want to come, I would kindly ask you to give us all of your materials.”
She stared at me without blinking, waiting for a response.
“In exchange,” she added, in the face of my obstinate silence, “I will forget the business with Daniel, although within reason, naturally. But we could negotiate.”
Now I recognized her. She was again the Marta Torrent that I had gotten to know so well in her office at the university. When she showed that cynical side of herself, I felt well, calm, capable of talking to her on the same terms and equally matched. Even seeing her again dressed in a skirt and wearing the earrings and the wide silver bracelet that I had seen on her in Barcelona helped me to see her in the proper light.
“Wait, Marta,” Dr. Bigelow beat me to it. “It’s fine if you forget about the thing with Daniel if you like, but you haven’t let them tell us what they think about the expedition. Maybe no negotiation will be necessary. What do you say?” she asked the three of us.
Were they playing good cop bad cop to disconcert us? Or was that my mistrust of human beings in general talking again?
“What do you say, Arnau?” Lola asked me, but Marc, again, beat me to it:
“We only want to cure Daniel of the damned Aymara curse. If you want to go into the jungle, that’s your problem, but we could give you the documents in exchange for the cure, or rather, for you bringing us the remedy….”
“Let me, Marc,” I interrupted. My colleague was shooting off at the mouth, and deep down I wanted to avoid at all costs ending up in the middle of a strange journey through the Amazon jungle. I could understand him, but I did not share his opinion. “When we began this conversation, Efraín and you, Marta, offered to work as a team with us. You spoke of collaboration. Now I see that what you really wanted was to get the material and to get us out of the way.”