Authors: Matilde Asensi
“But what about the Aymara that’s still spoken today?” I asked, intrigued. “Why doesn’t it produce the same effects? Because of the small influences from Quechua and Spanish from the last five or six hundred years?”
“No, I don’t think so,” the doctor replied. “My theory, as I’ve told you, is that Aymara is the perfect vehicle to produce sounds that alter the brain, but what order or sequence do you have to make them in for them to cause the desired effect? Was a single sound from the curse that affected your brother what caused everything, or was it, rather, a certain combination of sounds? I think what the Yatiri do is pronounce specific words in the necessary order.”
“In a nutshell: your everyday magical formulas,” Lola smugly singsonged, like someone whose theory has been confirmed. “It’s nothing to be made light of, not by a long shot, but have you considered that the old expression from stories about witches, the famous abracadabra, could contain the principles of the theory of the activation of neurotransmitters?”
“It would be interesting to do a study on that,” I pointed out.
“Don’t start, I know how you are!” Marc exclaimed, worried. “And you’re capable of forgetting everything else to jump into this headfirst.”
“When have I done that?” I asked indignantly.
“Lots of times,” Lola confirmed indifferently. “The last time was the day you discovered the mysterious paper scribbled with some Aymara words that seemed to be related to your brother’s illness.”
Dr. Bigelow, Marta, and Efraín were listening to us, confused.
“My point is, it would be interesting,” I insisted, annoyed. I didn’t feel like having my arm twisted.
“I agree with you, Arnau,” said Dr. Bigelow, smiling. “That’s why I’m going to follow Efraín and Marta on this crazy adventure. Finding out if my theories are correct is my only price,” she finished.
Efraín smiled with satisfaction and looked at us, swelling with pride.
“So?” I asked. “Are we going to look for the Yatiri?”
Everyone nodded without hesitation, including Marc. We knew we were saying yes to the wildest scheme in history, but it was that quality of folly and madness that made it a challenge we couldn’t say no to.
“When will we go?” Proxi asked, lifting her cup of thick, bitter, and gritty Bolivian coffee in the air. I recognized that distinctive shine in her black eyes: It was the same one that appeared in her eyes whenever she had a challenge ahead. Honestly, I would have preferred that the challenge could be faced with a keyboard and monitor, but since that was impossible, it was better to let oneself be pulled by the tide of adrenalin in an adventure as extravagant as that one.
“If we manage to prepare supplies, study the area, hire transportation, and give you guys an accelerated course on jungle survival,” Efraín joked, “we can leave on Monday.”
Carrying a list longer than a day without bread (made by all of us the previous evening, after returning from the restaurant), Lola and I left the hotel on Thursday morning, prepared for a shopping trip. We also carried a catalog of locales where we could acquire the supplies which ranged from tents, hammocks, sleeping bags, and mosquito nets, to dishes, filters and purifying tablets for water, toilet paper, and insect repellent. We spent all day running around, making sure everything we bought was taken to our hotel, where we would depart from the following Monday, after leaving our things in Efraín and Gertrude’s house and paying the hotel bill to keep them from coming after us as debtors. We were terribly embarrassed when we had to ask for machetes for clearing paths in the jungle, but the salesman, completely calm, showed us various models, told us which was the sharpest, the biggest, the most dangerous, and recommended a German brand that, according to him, made the best steel blades. While we broke our backs and our wallets shopping, Marta headed for El Alto, the highest neighborhood in the city, where the airport was where we had landed upon our arrival in La Paz. It was also the location of the TAM (Military Aerial Transport) terminal, the only company that offered flights between La Paz and Rurrenabaque, the town that served as a departure point for visiting the Madidi National Park. The other alternative to get there was the sadly famous Yungas Highway, known more commonly as Death Highway, due to the numerous traffic accidents that occurred on its terrible slopes and curves; but apart from that obvious motivation not to use it, there was also the problem of time: it took fifteen or twenty hours to get to Rurrenabaque. And that was in the dry season, because in the rainy season, you never knew. Although we couldn’t be sure until the last minute, Marta got the six tickets for Monday the 17
th
of June and we were lucky, because they
had added extra flights to cover high demand, since we were in the middle of the tourist season. They cost us about seven hundred euros, plus a deposit to reserve the return tickets. We didn’t know the exact date, but we thought it would be toward the end of the month, so if we didn’t want to end up stuck in the middle of a bustling boarding area without a flight to La Paz, we had to leave the reservation agreed upon.
Gertrude didn’t have an easy job getting the medical supplies for her kit. Even her position as coordinator of Relief International in Bolivia turned out to be more a hindrance than a help. From the distributors that sold to her NGO, she got the most basic products, like saline, painkillers, bandages, antibiotics, syringes, and disposable needles, but she couldn’t find a way of acquiring the antidote for snake venom, the so-called polyvalent antivenom, or the special syringe necessary to inject it, without attracting unwanted attention. All of Thursday, Friday, and Saturday were spent on this and similar problems, while Efraín and Marc studied the Madidi region and how to enter the park without being discovered.
One of the first things they found on the park, searching the net, was an interview given by a guy named Álvaro Díaz Astete, an acquaintance of Efraín and Marta, who had been the director of the Museum of Ethnography of Bolivia, and who was the author of the only ethnographic map of the country. In it, Díaz Astete claimed to be sure of the existence of uncontacted tribes in the Madidi region, around the unknown source of the Heath River and in the Colorado River valley. But what was most surprising was that someone like him was certain that one of those unassimilated groups were the Toromona, a tribe that had mysteriously disappeared during the Caucho War in the nineteenth century, and who, according to legend, were great allies of the Inca whom they helped to disappear into the jungle with their great treasures after they were defeated by the Spanish. These historical facts, apparently true, had formed the basis for the legend of the lost city of El Dorado, or Paitití, hidden in the Amazon. However, the Toromona had disappeared more than a century ago, and they were officially recorded as exterminated; that’s why Díaz Astete’s observations on the possibility that they continue to survive among the uncontacted groups of the Madidi reinforced our conviction that the Yatiri could easily be in a similar situation. Really, no one knew what those geographical voids held; infamous were the unfortunate expeditions of the British colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett in 1911 (the man charged with drawing the borders of Bolivia with Peru, Brazil, and Paraguay), and of the Norwegian Lars Hafskjold in 1997, who had entered into the area and never been heard from since.
So the Madidi was a geographical black hole, classified by the National Geographic
17
and in a report by Conservation International
18
as the reserve with the most biodiversity in the world, in which could be found, for example, more bird species than in the whole of North America.
The information that Marc and Efraín were pulling from the web and telling us at night when we all got together to have dinner drew an increasingly broad and formidable view of the crazy expedition we were embarking upon. We all remained silent, but I, like everyone else, wondered if we might not be making a mistake, if we might not end up like that British colonel or that Norwegian explorer. My need not to cut my cord to civilization made me buy, on the last day at the last minute, a small setup consisting of a GPS to keep track of our location at any time, and a battery charger for my cell phone and laptop which I planned to take to the jungle no matter what. I didn’t want to die without sending the world a final message, indicating where
they could find our bodies to send them back to Spain.
On Sunday night, I called my grandmother and spent a long time talking with her. If there was anyone capable of understanding the madness we were about to commit, that person was my grandmother, who was not at all surprised by what I told her, and who even encouraged me enthusiastically. I could have sworn that she would have loved to trade places with me and risk her neck in the Green Hell, the only expression that Efraín, Marta, and Gertrude used to refer to the Amazon jungle. She asked me to be very cautious and not to take any unnecessary risks, but she didn’t once tell me not to do it. My grandmother was pure energy, and until her last breath she would continue to be the most alive person on all of planet Earth. We agreed that she would tell my mother nothing and I promised to get in touch when I could. She told me they were thinking of taking Daniel home, since continuing with his hospitalization wasn’t accomplishing anything, and I was about to confess to her the theft of the material from Marta’s office. I didn’t go through with it because of a selfish and absurd instinct: if something bad happened to us on the expedition, my brother’s crime would expire in that instant, so it wasn’t worth making my grandmother suffer from things which, if it came to that, I would tell her when I returned to Barcelona.
On Sunday, with all the supplies prepared and stored at the hotel, Marc and Efraín continued to compile information on the Madidi, which Gertrude, Marta, Lola, and I read over quickly, going through the pages one by one in the order they came off the printers. The park had been created by the Bolivian government on September 21
st
, 1995, its boundaries drawn to adjoin those of other national parks (the Manuripi Heath, the Apolobamba Integrated Management Natural Area, and the Pilón Lajas Biosphere Reserve). Its climate was tropical, warm with one hundred percent humidity, which made any physical effort a nightmare. Aerial exploration and satellite photographs showed that the southern part of it was characterized by deep valleys and high slopes, while the sub-Andean region had mountain ranges with altitudes that reached as high as sixty-five hundred feet. So, from the little we knew of our route, we would have to put those mountain ranges behind us to get into the flat region in the first place, following the course of the Beni River and then turning toward the valleys and slopes of the south.
“There’s something that doesn’t fit,” Lola remarked, getting up from the sofa and walking over with a worried look on her face to the military maps that were still unfolded on the table. “If, as we’ve calculated, the distance between Taipikala and the ending point of the line from the gold map is about two hundred eighty miles, and on a hike through the mountains, without hurrying too much, you can walk about nine or twelve miles a day, something’s not right, because it would take less than a month to get to the triangle, yet Sarmiento de Gamboa speaks of two.”
“Well, for our sake, I hope you’re wrong,” Marc told her, wary. “Remember we’ve only bought provisions for fifteen days.”
“We couldn’t carry any more either,” I argued.
Our food reserves had been estimated without counting the miles we would cover by airplane from La Paz to Rurrenabaque. Once there, the distance that separated us from the triangle on the map was about sixty miles, so, taking into account the inexperience of Lola, Marc, and me, possible accidents, and having to clear the trail with machetes, we had decided to be generous and divide among the six of us food provisions for a couple of weeks, that is to say, also counting the sixty miles back. We were convinced we wouldn’t need more and that we would even return with unopened cans in our backpacks, but we preferred being cautious to going hungry, since, once we were in the jungle, whatever we lacked we wouldn’t be able to buy
in any store, and it would be a very disagreeable experience to see my friend Marc gnawing on the tree trunks or taking a bite out of the first snake that crossed his path.
The night before the flight to Rurrenabaque, I couldn’t sleep. I remember that early morning caught me responding to Núria’s last emails about work matters, and that I sat dazed, staring at how the light of dawn filtered in through the cracks in the blinds. There are times when a person doesn’t know how he’s gotten to where he is, when he can’t explain how the events happened that brought him to a certain situation. I distantly remembered having organized a boycott against the TraxSG Foundation’s tax, and my sister-in-law calling me to tell me Daniel was sick. Until that day, my life had been a good life. Perhaps a solitary one (okay, I’ll admit, a very solitary one), but I thought I felt content with what I did and with what I had achieved. I didn’t use to allow myself much time to think, as I was doing at that moment, in that hotel room thousands of miles from my home. I had the sensation I had been existing in a bubble into which I didn’t know when or how I had entered. It occurred to me that perhaps I was born already inside it, and in the very moment I had that thought, I knew it was true. If, someday, everything returned to normal, I told myself, I would keep directing Ker-Central until I got tired of it, and then I would sell it to start something else, some other business or company that interested me more. I had always been like that: Whenever something became routine and ceased to take up all of the hours in my day, I left it and looked again for the heart of the bubble with a new activity that pushed me to overcome my limits, and that kept me from thinking, from being alone with myself with nothing to do but watch the sun rise through some half-closed windows, as I was doing at that moment.
Perhaps I wouldn’t return from the jungle, I thought, perhaps there were dangers awaiting us too great for three novices, two enthusiasts, and a pseudo-expert, but I felt better than I had ever felt in my life anyway. I was outside the bubble, looking at a real world, risking much more than getting a virus on my computer or losing a few million on a bad investment. I suddenly sensed there were things beyond my narrow virtual world, where my favorite music played, where my books were, and where I could look to my heart’s content at the paintings I liked. In the end, I told myself, I would have to thank Daniel when he got better—after wringing his neck, metaphorically-speaking—for having given me the opportunity to get out of my perfect and rigid life. That whole business about the Aymara had broken my ideologies and had made me face a part of myself I hadn’t known. Had I ever been more alive than when I was walking down that pathway formed by sheets of gold in the guts of a pre-Incan pyramid, or when I was working like a lunatic, sorting out the puzzle of the information left by Spanish chroniclers about the conquest of America in the sixteenth century? I didn’t know exactly how to define how I had felt in those moments, but I would have dared to claim it was something like passion, like a passion that made my blood race in my veins and made me open my eyes, fascinated.