The Lost Origin (45 page)

We returned to Gertrude and Efraín’s house, and since it was already almost time to eat, we went to a nearby restaurant. When we were on to the second dish—a llama stew—I readdressed the problem that was pounding through my head:

“Have you thought about how we’re going to obtain the permits?”

Marta and the archaeologist looked sidelong at each other without answering.

“We’re not going to ask for them,” he said, leaving his silverware resting on his plate.

It was his wife, Gertrude, who jumped as if a scorpion had stung her:

“But…. My God, Efraín! What are you saying? You can’t get in without a permit!”

“I know, honey, I know.”

“So?” Dr. Bigelow’s tone was urgent.

“Hey, come on,” he responded, suddenly using a strangely respectful mode of speech, that in Bolivia was really the most intimate way to address someone close. “You know they won’t
give them to us.”

“What do you mean?” she objected, speaking in the same mode. “All you have to do is tell your friends in the Ministry of Research about the Yatiri.”

“And how long do you think it will take for the press to get ahold of it? You know as well as I do how things are here. Before we even get to the entrance of the park, there will already be a hundred archaeologists combing the area, and the story of the Yatiri will be printed in all the newspapers.”

“But listen to me, Efraín, we can’t go into the jungle without someone knowing. It’s crazy!”

“I agree with you, Gertrude,” Marta chimed in, intervening in the conversation, “and I already told Efraín the same thing. Besides, we would need indigenous guides who know the jungle, and those three,” she gestured with her chin at Marc, Lola, and me, “have never been there, they don’t know what the ‘Green Hell’ is. We could manage, but they could not. They would be vulnerable to everything.”

“If we don’t protect them well, my friend,” the archaeologist contradicted, leaning in to talk more quietly. “Listen, haven’t you realized how important this is? Any leak would put an end to our work, and not just that: Can you imagine if the Yatiri’s knowledge fell into unscrupulous hands? Haven’t you thought that if these sages are really in the jungle, their power could become an issue of national security, or worse still, a commodity for sale, like weapons of mass destruction?”

I liked the archaeologist. He was a guy that spoke clearly and didn’t beat around the bush. That same danger had occurred to me when we were in the Pyramid of the Traveler, when I thought that Marta had motives other than the academic in her search for the power of the Yatiri of Taipikala. Efraín had arrived at a cold but accurate conclusion: We were dealing with sensitive material, depleted uranium, and if we weren’t careful, we could cause a catastrophic situation that would be hopelessly out of our control.

“But that will be what happens when we find them,” Marta said, returning to the llama meat that was getting cold on her plate.

“No, because we will present the information with the greatest respect in the world, deactivating the fuse of the danger through internationally distributed scientific journals! If we let this matter out of our hands, the Yatiri could end up in some terrible place, like Guantanamo Bay, turned into guinea pigs, and we, the six of us, disappeared in some ‘mysterious accident.’” He made quotation marks in the air with his fingers. “Do you understand what I’m trying to tell you or not? The power of words, of language, the control of the human brain through sounds, is something very attractive for any government. And this is a historical and archaeological research project, which is why we have to take all possible precautions and not tell anyone.”

“I don’t know whether you’re exaggerating, Efraín,” Marta murmured, “or whether you’ve hit too close to the truth. In any case, caution seems like a good idea when and if it doesn’t endanger our lives.”

“The most dangerous thing is the jungle, my friend,” he told her affectionately, “as you know, and the only problem, if we do what I propose, will be in taking these three into the Green Hell. But I’ll repeat what I said before: We can protect them.”

I, however, was not so sure about that. More than anything, I wanted to help my brother, but if doing so meant becoming puma chow, neither he nor I would be gaining much.

“And why don’t we hire indigenous guides like Marta said?” I asked, taking a long sip from my glass of mineral water. My throat was dry.

“Because none of them would want to come with us without the official permits,” Efraín explained. “You must realize that the indigenous communities of the natural areas are the ones that supply park rangers to SERNAP, the National Service of Protected Areas. Who is going to know the jungle better than the Indians who have to protect it? Any guide we could hire would be the cousin, brother, uncle, or neighbor of a Madidi park ranger, so we wouldn’t get very far, there’s no doubt. Besides, they’re very small communities. Villages of just a few hundred inhabitants. When one of them is missing, they all know where he’s gone, with whom, and to what purpose.”

“Even if we bribe them with a bunch of money?” I insisted.

“In that case, we’d only get the least trustworthy guides,” Gertrude pointed out, speaking with much certainty, “those who would abandon us in the jungle when we least expected it, taking all the food and supplies they could carry. It’s not worth the effort to try.”

“But we can’t go without guides, right?” Marc asked, anxious. “It would be suicide.”

“But we have the best guide we could wish for!” Efraín exclaimed, very pleased with himself. “What do you think, Marta?”

The professor gave a nod of approval as she smiled at Dr. Bigelow, but it didn’t seem to me that she was completely convinced of what she was agreeing to.

“Can you think of anyone better?” the archaeologist insisted.

Marta shook her head quickly, but I still perceived a shadow of doubt behind her conservative gestures and smiles.

Dr. Bigelow, trying to justify her husband’s enthusiasm, turned toward us, and casually explained to us that she had spent the last fifteen years of her life working for Relief International, an American NGO that procured itinerant physicians for isolated indigenous communities of every country in the world. She, apart from coordinating the medical teams that worked with the rural communities of the Andean foothills, was part of one such team and had found herself required on numerous occasions to go into the tropical forests to get to some remote indigenous group. Which is why the National Secretary of Health of the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare had turned to her for the two official expeditions the Bolivian government had sent into Amazonia in search of uncontacted Indians within its borders.

“And, precisely because of my experience, I can guarantee,” she concluded, “that I alone am not sufficient as a guide to an expedition that’s going to enter into unknown territory with three people who have never in their lives set foot in the jungle.”

“Not even if we keep a constant eye on them?” asked a disappointed Efraín.

“We would have to do more than watch them constantly,” she said. “We wouldn’t be able to let them out of our sight even for an instant.”

“Each of us will be in charge of one of them,” her husband resolved, putting both hands firmly on the table. “We won’t take our eyes off them, and we’ll teach them all we know about the potential dangers of the jungle. I will commit to bringing them back safe and sound.”

The idea of them taking care of us like preschoolers, with personalized attention, seemed to me like a good reason to calm down. I saw the same relief in Marc and Lola’s faces.

“There’s another problem, Efraín,” the doctor objected. “It seems you haven’t stopped to think that if they catch us inside the park, we’ll pay for it dearly. It will be a very big scandal.”

“Well…,” I said, intervening, “if they catch us, it will be because they’ve decided to eliminate geographical voids, and I don’t think that’s going to happen at precisely the same time, right? And as far as the scandal goes, Dr. Bigelow, I think it’s already included in the price of admission. If we’re going to risk it to help my brother, then you guys also have your own and
important motivations to look for the Yatiri. Marta explained it very well yesterday: She and Efraín have spent their whole lives working on this, and you, Gertrude, maintain your faith in finding some Yatiri who have remained uncontacted by any human being for five hundred years. That is your price.”

The doctor smiled.

“You’re wrong, Arnau,” she said mysteriously. “That is only a small part of my price.”

Marta and Efraín exchanged looks and slight smiles.

“What are you talking about, Gertrude?” Lola asked her, very interested. Her mercenary instinct had been awakened.

“Since I was let in on the secret of the Yatiri,” the doctor began to explain, setting down her silverware on her plate and discreetly arranging her wavy hair, “I became obsessed with what you guys call the power of words, the capacity of the Aymara language to cause strange effects on human beings, through sound. As a doctor, I was very curious, and I’ve spent the last years reconciling my work in Relief with the scientific investigation on the influence of sound on the brain. I have my own theory about the matter, and my price, Lola, is to find out if I’m right.”

Silence fell around the table.

“And… what is that theory?” I dared to ask, intrigued. It sounded promising.

“It’s very boring,” she apologized, looking away.

“Oh, come on, honey!” her husband protested. “Can’t you see they’re dying to know? We have time.”

“Tell them, Gertrude,” Marta prompted. “They’ll understand perfectly.”

Dr. Bigelow started playing with some crumbs on the tablecloth.

“Alright,” she said. “If you don’t understand something, you can ask.”

In a quick gesture, she crossed her arms over the table and took a breath.

“You see,” she began, “over the last fifty years, great advances have been made in the study of the human brain. We hardly knew anything, and then suddenly everyone began to study the things this so perfect organ is capable of doing. It is still a great mystery today, and we still only use five percent of its immense capacity, but we’ve advanced a lot, and we’re capable of drawing a very complete map of its different areas and functions. We also know that the immense electrical activity of the brain, which emits an infinite number of different kinds of waves, causes individual neurons or groups of neurons to emit certain chemical substances that control our moods and feelings, and therefore the behaviors provoked by them. These substances, or neurotransmitters, even though they circulate everywhere, can operate in very specific places with very different results. More than fifty neurotransmitters are known, but seven are the most important: dopamine, serotonin, acetylcholine, norepinephrine, glutamate, and the opioids known as encephalins and endorphins.”

“Wait a minute!” Marc exclaimed, raising his hand in the air. “Did you say that those substances that circulate in our brains are what cause our feelings?”

“In effect, yes,” Gertrude confirmed.

“But that’s fantastic!” he said enthusiastically. “We’re programmable machines like computers.”

“And the code that operates us are those neurotransmitters,” I added.

“Exactly,” confirmed Jabba, whose engineer’s brain ran at quantum speeds. “If we wrote with neurotransmitters, we could program people.”

“Let me continue,” Dr. Bigelow asked, in a marked Yankee accent. “What I’m telling you is that it’s not a theory: it’s been scientifically proven for many years, and today we know even
more. What would you think, Marc, if I told you that by electrically stimulating an area in the temporal lobe of your brain, thereby activating certain neurotransmitters, I can cause you to have a profound mystical experience and convince you that you have seen God? Well, it’s true, it’s empirically proven, just as it’s proven that no area of the brain has been found where happiness resides, although there have been areas found for pain, physical as well as psychological, and for anxiety. If dopamine circulates in your brain, you feel pleasure, but only for the time the neurotransmitter is active. When it stops being active, the sensation or feeling will disappear. If you are very busy or very concentrated on some task, a part of your brain called the amygdala, which is responsible for generating negative emotions, will remain inhibited. That’s why they say staying busy cures all ills. Basically, the point is that fear, love, shyness, sexual desire, hunger, hate, serenity, etc., are born because there’s a chemical substance that is activated by a small electrical charge. To put it more concretely, there’s a special class of neurotransmitters, called peptide neurotransmitters, that work in a much more precise manner, and can make any of us hate the color yellow, want to listen to music or read a book, or feel an attraction to redheads,” and she looked at Lola with a smile as she finished.

“Or have a fear of flying,” Marc added.

“Yes, actually.”

“So basically, Aymara contains some kind of electromagnetic wave,” Proxi ventured, with a look of uncertainty, “that the Yatiri know how to use.”

“No, Lola,” Gertrude disagreed, shaking her straw colored hair when she moved her head. “If my theory is correct, and that’s what I want to find out with this trip, it’s something much simpler. I think that Aymara is by far the most perfect language in existence. Efraín and Marta have explained it to me many times, and although I barely understand it, I know they’re right. But what I think is that it’s actually a perfect vehicle to bombard the brain with sounds. Have you seen that typical movie scene in which a crystal glass shatters when a very loud or very high pitched sound is made nearby? Well, the brain responds in the same way when it’s bombarded with sound waves.”

“It shatters?” Jabba joked.

“No. It resonates. It responds to the vibration of the sound. I’m convinced that what Aymara does is allow a determined kind of wave to be produced by the speech organs, by the mouth and the throat, that travels through the ear to the brain, triggering the neurotransmitters that provoke a certain mood or a certain feeling. And if what it activates are the super-specialized peptide neurotransmitters, then almost anything can be achieved.”