The Lost Origin (18 page)

“Yes, you see, all of this is too much for you, Root. Too many things, too many books, too many documents…. Proxi and I have come to the conclusion that the matter requires the combined efforts of our three heads. So, assuming that you won’t decline, we’re going to take a week’s vacation from Ker-Central and come here every day to lend you a hand.”

“Will we really need that much time?” I interrupted. “Besides, don’t forget I have a house full of people.”

“Why do we work for this guy, Proxi?” grumbled Jabba, resentful.

“Because he pays us a fortune.”

“True,” he lamented, lifting the lid of the Italian espresso maker to see how it was coming along.

“And because we like him,” she continued, finishing pouring the hot water into the porcelain teapot, “because he likes the same things as we do, because he’s as crazy as you are, and because we’ve known each other for…. How long? Ten years? Twenty?

“He and I, our whole lives,” I pointed out, although that wasn’t exactly the case. “You just got here three years ago, when I started Ker-Central.”

“Right. Clearly, it’s been a very long three years.”

I had found Jabba on the net. Despite the fact he hadn’t lived that far away (he was from a small town in Girona), we had spent years programming and pirating together without meeting each other face to face, carrying out famous exploits, which we had kept secret, not like those second-rate hackers who always go around bragging about their small triumphs without remembering that loose-lips-sink-ships. We were both weird guys without the need or desire for much contact with flesh and blood people, maybe because of shyness, or, who knows, maybe because of a passion for technology and computers that made us feel different from others. I hadn’t known his real name until I hired him to work at Inter-Ker in 1993. I could have said without lying that the husky adolescent, big and red-headed, who had come into the bar where we had arranged to see each other that afternoon for the first time, was the best friend I’d ever had and I was without a doubt also his. But until that moment, we had never seen each other’s faces. We had spoken little. I told him about my plan for the business, and he told me that yes, he would work for me, as long as he could continue his studies. He was five years younger than I, and his parents, who were farmers, were stuck on the idea that he go to college, even if they had to drag him there by his ear. And so had begun the second stage of our friendship. When I sold Inter-Ker, he had followed me to
Keralt.com
, and after that to Ker-Central, at that point as a computer engineer, and it was then that we both had met Proxi who had come to work in the security department a few months after the business was started. What they had together was what you could call love at first sight. My old friend had gotten all silly, went nuts, had turned into a bit of an idiot for that scrawny and disconcerting computer technician who ran circles around us in resourcefulness. But she hadn’t been left behind. Although she hadn’t had to try very hard, she had pursued him shamelessly until the poor man hadn’t been able to take it anymore and had fallen defeated at her feet. They had found their perfect match in each other, and since then—three years ago—they hadn’t separated at all except to work in different offices at the company.

“Anyway…,” she was saying, bringing me the cup and the brimming teapot, “the thing is, Root, we’re going to give you a week of our limited and always short yearly vacations to find out what Daniel had gotten into, because, the more we find out, the stranger everything becomes.”

“I accept your offer,” I declared, watching as Jabba grabbed the coffee maker by the handle and pulled it roughly off the stovetop, “but, why here, at the house? Why not in the ‘100’? We would be more comfortable.”

“Comfortable, he says!” he joked, pouring a stream of the steaming and aromatic concoction into two small cups.

“When you called Jabba to ask him to research the Aymara language, you told him you had a ton of books to go through.”

“And we’ve already seen how you have the study. We can’t take all that to the ‘100’!”

“How much of the history have you read?”

“Little, very little,” I admitted, centering the cup on the saucer.

“We have to work here, because there’s no space in the ‘100’ for so many books, papers, and folders. There’s not a single free table. And so we don’t have to fight over computers, we’ve decided to bring a few from downstairs and connect them to the system.”

When Proxi finished speaking, the three of us were comfortably seated at last. Sliding it over the wood, I brought the cursed map with the compass roses and the Arabic lettering toward me.

“Fine, fine…,” I muttered, looking at the tiny Humpty Dumpty. “Tell me what you’ve found out.”

“That scrap of paper,” began Jabba, “is a reproduction of what’s left of a large world map drawn in 1513 by a famous Turkish pirate named Piri Reis.”

“How do you know?” I asked.

“How do I know?” he grumbled. “Well, because Proxi and I have gone to the trouble of visiting every page on ancient cartography on the web. Really, there aren’t as many old maps left as you might think. There are a lot from the last two or three centuries, but if you go further back, the number is so much smaller that you could count them on your fingers.”

“Once we knew that it was the map by Piri Reis, we started to search for everything there was about him.”

“And, as hard as you try,” Jabba announced, “you’ll never guess what we found.”

“At one of the URLs there was a list of the objects, people, and animals that appear on the world map, and a reference to your ‘egghead,’ described as a bearded monster without a body, demonic in nature.”

“In other words, you didn’t actually find him using a large magnifying glass.”

“We did too use the magnifying glass!” Jabba protested, quarrelsome, “although, I’ll admit, only after knowing he was there. But finding him on the map was like looking for a piece of a puzzle in a bag with another five thousand pieces.”

“Well, probably not that many,” Proxi put in, “but it was hard enough.”

“And now we’re going to tell you a story. The strangest story you’ve heard in your life. But, careful!” he warned, pointing both index fingers in the air, “in this story everything is true. Up to the last detail. We’re not talking about Hobbits or Elves. Okay?”

“Okay,” I agreed, on tenterhooks. But it was Proxi, not Jabba, who told me, after taking a small sip of coffee and setting the cup on the saucer.

“After the fall of the Ottoman Empire…,” she began.

“Look at her, it’s like she’s been doing this her whole life,” Jabba said, pretending great admiration.

I laughed and nodded firmly.

“Did you say Roman or Ottoman,” I demanded ingenuously.

“You’re a couple of imbeciles,” she declared, disgusted. “The most imbecile imbeciles in the world. Upon the fall of the Ottoman Empire, after the First World War, the governors of the new Republic of Turkey decided to rescue the valuable treasure that had remained hidden for centuries in the giant palace of Topkapi, the old residence of the sultan, in Istanbul. Making an inventory of the funds, in November of 1929, the director of the National Museum, Halil something, and a German theologist named Adolf Deissmann discovered an old incomplete map painted on gazelle leather.”

“As you can see, she’s spent the morning studying,” commented a person who, immediately after, got a good smack on his red head.

I kept my mouth closed, in case there were more of those to be given out.

“As this ignoramus has already told you,” she went on, impassive, “it was what remained of a large world map made by the admiral of the Turkish fleet, cartographer and famous pirate Piri Reis in 1513. The map represented Britain, Spain, Western Africa, the Atlantic ocean, part of North America, South America, and the Antarctic coast. That’s to say, exactly what you see in this reproduction.”

I squinted to focus my gaze and looked for all the places she had mentioned. Of course, the Atlantic, which amply occupied the center of the image with its pale blue color, was shown perfectly clearly, full of little ships, compass roses, lines, islands, etc. Britain, however, couldn’t be seen anywhere, but I refrained from mentioning it. On the right, Spain could be seen with no problem, and underneath it, the western coast and potbelly of Africa with what looked like an elephant surrounded by the three magi seated with crossed legs drawn in it interior. North America was a vague coastline stuck to the left edge of the supposed gazelle leather, as if it were leaning to that side and had been lost to sight because of the circumference of the Earth, but South America was perfectly recognizable, with its major rivers, its Andean mountain range (its little man with the hat and the red beard), its little animals…. Only the Southern tip of the continent seemed strange, because where the strait of Magellan should be, uniting the Atlantic with the Pacific, the land curved around without a break and went back toward the east, as if looking for the southern tip of Africa, from which I deduced that it must be the Antarctic coast, although incorrectly represented. But, okay, despite all that, I could say that Proxi was more or less right.

“See anything strange?”

“Well, yes,” I said, very convinced, putting my finger over the missing strait of Magellan, “this is wrong. Also, North America is crooked. Oh! And this African elephant is too skinny, it barely has a belly. It looks like a greyhound with a trunk.”

“That’s all true, Root,” Jabba encouraged me, united in the face of a common adversary, “but there’s much more. Remember everything you know about Pizarro and the Inca, everything about the discovery of Peru.”

“Don’t give him any more clues, Judas,” huffed Proxi.

“Give him a break, woman!” he implored.

While they continued their chatter, I looked again at the South America on that map by Piri Reis. What was strange about it? Of course, Humpty Dumpty wasn’t very normal, but the llama next to him was very well drawn, as were the rivers and the mountains. What was I missing? Let’s see…. Pizarro conquered the Inca in 1532, in Cajamarca, a thousand miles north of Cusco, possibly poisoning those noble
Orejones
and capturing the last of their monarchs, Atahualpa Inca, whom he killed shortly after. That marked the beginning of the Viceroyalty of Peru and the systematic destruction of the old empire, the establishment of Christianity and the Inquisition, the composition of the first chronicles…. What the hell wasn’t I seeing?

“Nothing occurs to you?” Proxi asked.

“Well, no, the truth is that it doesn’t,” I muttered, without pausing in my search, slowly stroking my goatee, while, like an applied student, I leaned over the large photocopy.

“Come on, Root!” Jabba encouraged, in my corner.

“I’ll repeat the crucial bit: The map was drawn in 1513.”

“And what about it?” I asked, annoyed; but it was more a protest than a real question. I didn’t want help, I wasn’t asking for a solution, and both of them knew it. Apparently, I had the necessary information in my head to resolve the enigma, so I should let my intuition guide me, as
if I were working on one of those dark areas of code where only hunches can take you to the right place. I was once again an intrepid Ulysses trying to guide my ship to Ithaca, a daring hacker struggling to open something that was
lawt’ata
, “closed with a key.”

Even if Proxi irritated me, thanks to her, I knew that I should start with the dates. I had two: 1513, the year of the map, and 1532, the year that Pizarro arrived at last at Cajamarca and began the conquest of the Incan Empire. Between 1513 and 1532, there was a difference of nineteen years… oddly, in favor of the map. According to what little I knew, when Pizarro left Panama in 1531, no one had seen Peru yet, or Bolivia, or Chile, or Tierra del Fuego. Which made it impossible in 1513 for them to know the shape and length of the ridge of the Andes and the courses of the big rivers, and, of course, it was equally impossible for anyone to have ever seen the region of Lake Titicaca and Tiwanaku, and, even more so, for them to have known of the Colla and their taste in hats.

But, even more strange, that map was drawn in 1513, by a Turk! It could be that Columbus wasn’t the original discoverer of the American continents—some doubts remained, with that story about the Vikings—but, the Turks? Come on!

“This map is fake,” I stated, convinced. “This map is chronologically incorrect. Therefore, even if it really is old, it can only be a moth-eaten falsification.”

My two attentive spectators laughed with satisfied pride. Proxi’s eyes narrowed to two thin lines of lashes.

“I knew you’d figure it out!” she exclaimed.

“So, is it really a fraud?” I asked, arching my eyebrows, surprised by how easy it had been.

“Fraud, indeed!” Jabba scoffed. “The map is authentic! Drawn in Gallipoli, near Istanbul, by the very same historic Piri Reis, in 1513.”

“No. It can’t be.”

“Didn’t I warn you that in this story, everything was true down to the last detail? I told you: ‘We’re not talking about Hobbits or Elves.’ Am I right?”

“But it doesn’t make sense!” I objected, beginning to get mad. “In 1513, no one knew what the terrain of the new world was like. I’d even swear they still thought they’d arrived in India-India, the one in the Orient.”

“You’re right! And there, exactly, is the crux of the matter. How could that map have been made? The fact that it’s not a fake is proven by how well-known and cataloged it is by specialized organizations not to mention the multiple historical investigations that have been done to corroborate everything that has to do with it, with its author, and with the large amount of information that Piri Reis himself provides in those plentiful notes you can see scattered all over the design, written in Ottoman Turkish, with Arabic letters.”

“Now this is turning into nonsense!” I exploded. “Again with the magic games? Please! This world map is false and there’s nothing else to say. It must have been drawn several years after what Piri Reis claims.”

“Years after, huh?” Proxi shot back, very pleased with herself. “So why has it been accepted as authentic by all the cartographic organizations in the world? Why have the experts, despite the inconvenience of its existence, been unable to show that it’s a falsification? Only you, Arnau Queralt, dare to make such a claim. Really smart!”