Authors: Matilde Asensi
“Does it seem a little too soon?” I asked, as I finished putting my watch on. “Would you rather we meet tomorrow or the day after?”
“No, not at all. It’s great for me.”
“What time should I pick you up?”
That conversation was incredible. I had never before made such a blatant attempt to get close to another human being. On similar occasions, I had felt as if I had to leave my tranquil planet in order to relate with other beings whom I didn’t understand, and that’s why I didn’t do it and why I didn’t become close friends with anyone. But Marta was different. I had lived almost two months with her, day and night, and I was inviting her to dinner with absolute calm and confidence.
“Come whenever you like,” she replied. “Really, I’m not doing anything. I just sat down on the sofa, ready to light my first cigarette in two months.”
“Well, don’t do it,” I told her. “Why is it so important to you?”
“I like to smoke, so I’m not going to deprive myself of this small pleasure. Don’t lecture me, alright?”
“Alright. So, can I pick you up now?”
“Well, of course. You should be here already.”
I liked that. I also liked getting back in my car and punching the horn hard while I drove. It was a little after six thirty in the afternoon, and despite having spent twenty-four hours stuck inside airplanes, and having crossed the Atlantic, I felt like the king of the world. My mother had upbraided me for going out “with a friend” before going to see my brother and my nephew first, but I acted as if I didn’t hear her and I jumped into the elevator. Fortunately, if the “relief” the Capacas had given us worked, I was going to be free of all of them much sooner than they thought. Each in his own house and God in everyone’s, wasn’t that what popular wisdom said? I would visit my brother when it was time, and as far as my nephew went, I had just unpacked the little doll I had bought for him in the Witches’ Market in La Paz, so that as soon as I saw him I could give it to him and he could break it.
I was lucky enough to find a place to leave the car in an alley right by her house, one of those old houses with two floors and an attic, with a facade blackened by pollution and a small yard. Marta opened the door.
“This building has no microphones or sensors or cameras,” she warned me scornfully as I went inside. “I’m telling you in case you feel uncomfortable. If you yell, there’s no computer to answer you. I’m sorry.”
It was a very large house, with parquet floors, high ceilings, and antique furniture. There were books everywhere, even in the hallways, in great wooden bookshelves that completely obscured the walls. I wouldn’t have expected anything different: the house was to Marta as Marta was to the house.
“You don’t have a video game console, either? You know, a Playstation or a Gameboy,” I
asked her as we entered the living room, whose high windows opened onto the yard.
“I do have that,” she admitted, smiling, dropping onto the sofa. Although the surroundings were strange, she was again the same Marta from Bolivia, or so it seemed to me, with the difference that there she wore winter clothes and here she wore a simple summer dress. “The bedrooms are upstairs. In my sons’ rooms you can find one if you need it. Feel free.”
I sat on the chair in front of her, although without settling in. I was nervous, so I began to play with a plastic cigarette lighter I found next to a stone ashtray that held several butts.
“Didn’t you say you were going to smoke
one
cigarette?” I asked, surprised.
“Well, I needed nicotine to make up for the months I missed.”
I decided not to beat around the bush.
“I need your help, Marta. You have to explain to me…. Or rather, I want to work with you in Tiwanaku.”
She laughed. “Is that what you were hiding when we asked you what you wanted to do when you retire?”
“Sort of.”
“You’re a little vague. Tell me more.”
“I want to work with you, I want to be part of the team,” I was explaining myself like an open book. “The problem is that I don’t have any kind of academic background. I’m a businessman, an internet businessman. How can I work with you on an excavation, in what capacity? To begin with, I had thought of offering you and Efraín the applications and the computers you need to translate the gold sheets in the Pyramid of the Traveler. I would write them myself or improve the ones Joffre gave you. I would be a programmer again,” I smiled, “like I was when I was twenty. But I would like to participate in some other way, not just as a programmer.”
“Well…,” she hesitated, “I don’t know. I would have to think about it. Of course, if it only depended on me, there would be no problem. I think I would very much like to work with you. But the excavations are financed by the Bolivian government….”
“And by private companies,” I broke in.
“Yes, by private companies looking for tax deductions and trying to make a good image for themselves, not to become an integral part of the excavation.”
“Okay. So, what should I do?”
“If that’s all it is,” she teased, “then you disappoint me. I thought you were hiding some interesting secret.”
“Well, I may have some secret,” I admitted, leaning forward to get closer to her. “Or perhaps two. What do you think?”
“That’s better,” she smiled openly.
“My first secret is this: I would work with you only while you were in Bolivia. The time you spent here in Barcelona in the university I would travel the world. I’m going to become a hunter of legends on the origin of humanity.”
“But that’s what the creationists Gertrude was talking about do!” she said, taken aback.
“No. They collect proof against the theory of evolution. Let them handle that job, since they’ve been doing it for a long time. I will talk with people as strange as the Yatiri. I’ll go to Africa, Asia, North America, South America, Australia….”
“Now I understand the drawing the Toromonas’ shaman made for you,” she blurted, her eyes wide. “The bird, of course!”
Did she remember that he also drew her the same picture? We were about to find out.
“I’ll look everywhere,” I continued enthusiastically, “I’ll even look under stones to find all the legends that talk about the creation of the world and of human beings. I’m convinced I will be capable of doing a very serious study with everything I find, and that I will discover very important coincidences, and I will be able to establish interesting parallels. Don’t forget I’ve been a programmer for many years and I’ve learned to extract data from dispersed fragments of information. But my problem is that when I have all the material, when I return to Barcelona to work on it, I won’t know how to do it. We’re back where we started: I lack an academic background. It will be necessary to systematize, organize, write…. I know several programming languages and I can write millions of instructions in them, but I’m not capable of composing even a small historical or scientific essay.”
Marta looked at me, completely surprised. The moment had arrived:
“Why don’t you work with me, Marta? Why don’t you come with me?”
Now I’d spit it out. I felt the sweat running down the back of my neck.
Her mouth gaped. “Did you ask me to go with you?” she stammered at last.
“We would spend as much time as we need with Efraín and Gertrude in Bolivia to finish the excavation of Lakaqullu and deal with the material in the Pyramid of the Traveler. I could be in charge of the, shall we say, clandestine jobs,” I smiled, “like taking Dose Capaca’s body out and hiding it somewhere chosen by you and Efraín, some spot that you know of in the area,” I talked without breathing, without pause; I talked like my mother, “or removing from the chamber of the Traveler all reference to the flight of the Yatiri to the jungle, or also closing the exit tunnel where we found the stone doughnut that Efraín still has. Maybe it would be a good idea for you to ask for a leave of absence from the university, or one of those grants they give you for research. I don’t know, whatever you think is better. That way we could travel and visit the Dogon, the Hopi, the Navajos… all those peoples who have preserved old legends about the flood and the creation of the world. Half a year in Bolivia and half a year traveling, compiling information.”
“But….”
“Besides, that way I could also work with Gertrude on the recording of the voices of the Capacas of Qalamana. I’ve discovered that I’m very intrigued by how the brain works just as, at one time, I was intrigued by how computers worked. Again, of course, I lack the necessary tools. I’m not a doctor. But I didn’t know anything when I started programming with Spectrum, either, and look how I’ve ended up, so I think I can learn a lot with Gertrude, and if I’m in Bolivia, we would work better.”
“Arnau….”
“Another thing is that it occurred to me that we could spend the summer working in Taipikala and the winter in the other places, so between trips you could have a chance to come home and be with your sons. Or do they still need you, and you can’t leave them alone? Because that would change our plans a little, and….”
“Shut up!”
I went suddenly silent.
“Listen,” she told me, putting her head in her hands, “I think you’re crazy. I don’t know if I understand very well what you mean. You’re speaking in code and I’m confused.”
I remained silent, with my lips pressed together to show that I wasn’t thinking of saying another word. Really, I had already made my play. A real hacker never reveals his secrets, but when the moment comes to act, he acts decisively.
“How about we go eat,” she proposed, piercing me with her look, “and we can talk about it
calmly from the beginning while they serve us a ton of things that we haven’t eaten in a long time? There’s a very good restaurant close to here.”
“Okay,” I said. “But it’s a little early. It’s only a quarter till eight.”
“Not for us, we’re still on Bolivia time, and there it’s time to eat. Besides, remember this morning on the plane we didn’t touch the trays.”
That was true. But I wasn’t hungry. I had just done one of the most difficult things of my life, and apparently the hard part still wasn’t over. Did she want me to say it in Aymara, or what?
“The Toromonas’ shaman drew us both the same bird.”
“I’m going to get my things,” she said, walking hurriedly toward the door of the living room. “Wait for me.”
It was all going to be ruined.
“Listen,” I stopped her.
“No, not now,” she replied.
“Yes, now,” I insisted. “Come with me to look for old stories that may contain some truth. I’m sure it would work out. We would make a good team.”
She scrutinized me, with an expression of exaggerated distrust on her face.
“And if it doesn’t work out,” I continued, “then we’ll stop and go back to just being friends. I’ll keep traveling and you will help me when I get back.”
“You’re a raving lunatic, you know?” she said. “Besides, do you think you can show up at my house and tell me all this nonsense without warning? What manners! Listen, I’m nine years older than you and I can guarantee that you are the coldest and least clever person I’ve met in my life. Do you know how stupid what you just said is?”
Alright, I couldn’t pester her any more or she would throw me out on the street.
“Think about it, okay?” I replied. “And now, let’s go eat. Come on, go get your things. I’ll wait for you.”
We were completely alone in the restaurant for a couple of hours. The August tourists didn’t come to that area, and the natives had abandoned the city en masse. That was without taking into consideration that in summer no one in his right mind would go out so early, unless it was to die melted into the asphalt. I got home around one in the morning, tired from the long trip, from the time change, and from using all my resources and personal charm to trap Marta in the net I had slowly woven before her eyes, trying to keep her from noticing. No, I hadn’t insisted on telling her my life story or boring her with the basic details of my existence. All I did was listen to her, look at her and listen to her, and discover what mattered to her, because, to break the protections of a secure place one wants to hack, the first thing one must do is find the weak points in the system and try to figure out the access codes. When, at last, I returned home and dropped onto the bed, although I wanted to think about what we had been talking about to improve my strategy, I couldn’t: I fell asleep in a matter of seconds, and I didn’t wake up until twelve hours later. But when I opened my eyes the next day, I felt euphoric and satisfied: I was sure I had opened a breach, a small one, in the defensive wall. The world was full of closed doors, and I had been born to open all of them. And I didn’t have the least bit of doubt that Marta was a challenge that was worth the effort.
After breakfast, I lazed around the house and the garden and enjoyed the agreeable feeling of having returned. Although I didn’t feel tired, from pure laziness I walked dragging my feet like an old man and at about the same speed; but in spite of that, bad luck brought me at last to the study and forced me to sit in front of one on the computers to check my email. The work
messages didn’t interest me at all, so I only looked at the ones in my personal email account; and although I thought the inbox would be full, I only had ten miserable messages, five of which were from Proxi and all of them from that very morning. What got my attention was the odd detail that they were encoded, so I had to decrypt them before I could understand why she had gone to so much trouble: Proxi had extracted a selection of photographs of the best things from the Pyramid of the Traveler from the CD on which we had recorded all the material on Lakaqullu, and honestly, I felt a lump in my throat upon seeing again the warrior helms on the slabs that marked the entrances to the shafts, the big round eyes and sharp stone beaks of the condor heads, the reliefs with the panels of
tocapus
from the tests, the staircase that had dropped from the ceiling and hung from two thick gold chains, the puma heads that guarded the immense door leading to the chamber, the panel with the original copy of the curse that had affected Daniel and that I myself had photographed so we could see it on the computer screen, the interminable rows of gold sheets full of
tocapus
, the immense gold sarcophagus of Dose Capaca with his head pointed by occipital frontal deformation, the wall with the drawings that helped explain the invitation to go in search of the Yatiri, the sheet with the map that led to Qhispita….