The Lost Origin (55 page)

“You understand him perfectly,” Lola growled. “What’s going on is that you don’t want to, which is different. Make an effort. Would you prefer for Marta and Efraín to speak with them in Aymara and for the rest of us to get left out? Come on, man! With all we’ve had to do to get here!”

“The Capacas have account of the many letters of Your Mercies, but now they ask to know how Your Mercies had knowledge of this kingdom of Qalamana.”

“Qalamana!” Marta exclaimed. “This city in the jungle is called Qalamana?”

“Qalamana, señora.”

“‘That which never gives up,’” Efraín translated. “A very appropriate name.”

“The principal Capacas ask to know,” Aruku-whatever insisted, “how Your Mercies had knowledge of this kingdom.”

“Arukutipa,” Marta said, “I would like to know whether the Capacas understand us when we speak Spanish. I ask because it’s going to be a very long story, and if you have to translate it, we’ll never finish.”

Arukutipa changed his weight from one foot to the other several times, indecisive, and
turned his head to the elders a couple of times.

“The Capacas, señora, don’t understand you,” he muttered at last. “They are not ladino Indians.”

“Well, then, I will try to be brief…,” Marta said, taking the floor and launching into the story that had led to our knowledge of that kingdom, starting with when her great uncle, Alfonso Torrent, had begun to work with Don Arturo Posnansky in Tiwanaku at the beginning of the twentieth century. It was increasingly clear to me that the best way to get to know Marta, to really know her, was by listening to her extraordinary voice, by understanding the very music of which it was made. Only there, in the sounds that came from her throat, in the intonations that were imprinted on them, in the words she chose and the phrases she constructed, was the truth of that woman who hid and defended herself like a sea urchin. And just as I had thought that distant day in her office, her voice was really her Achilles heel, the weak point through which the truth came gushing out without her noticing.

Arukutipa was a simultaneous translator, because the elders, listening to him repeat what Marta told, nodded when it was appropriate, furrowed their brows at the right moments, and looked worried or complacent when it was called for, just as Marta finished explaining whatever would provoke said expressions. I didn’t hear him hesitate once. He didn’t ask her to repeat a single word, even though our Spanish and his were very different, and there were modern terms that would be difficult to explain for whoever didn’t have information about what had gone on between the seventeenth century and the twenty-first.

At last, Marta began to speak about Daniel. She mentioned that, like her, he was a professor in a Spanish university, and that, working under her, he had accidentally discovered the curse of the Pyramid of the Traveler. Unfortunately, she said, he had fallen under its influence, and then she turned to me, introduced me as Daniel’s brother, and let me speak, so that I could finish telling the story and express my petition.

Of course, I did it as eloquently as I could, without losing sight even for a moment of the fact that those guys had to know that the curse only worked on Daniel because he didn’t have a clean conscience, but, just like Marta, I skipped discreetly over that part and kindly asked for a solution to the problem. Then Efraín outlined our expedition through the jungle until we got to Qalamana with the Toromonas.

Arukutipa tirelessly repeated our words—or we had to suppose he did, because, although we didn’t exactly hear him, we saw him pay attention to us and ceaselessly move his lips—and when we finished, after almost an hour of speaking without pause, the kid gave such a big sigh of relief that we couldn’t help smiling.

After that, we stood, quiet and motionless, hanging on the murmurs that came to us from the back of the room. At last, Arukutipa turned to us:

“The principal Capacas ask for the name of the bizarre woman of white hair.”

“They’re talking about you, Marta,” Gertrude whispered with a smile.

She stood and said her name.

“Señora,” Arukutipa replied, “the Capacas delight from your visit and say that Your Mercy will hear the relief for the punishment of the sick man of the hospital, the brother of the gentleman of tall body, and that with this, his misery and trials will cease. But say the Capacas, señora, that so, after having heard the relief, Your Mercies must leave Qalamana for always and not speak ever of this city to the other Spanish.”

Marta made a sour face.

“That is impossible,” she announced in her gravest, most glacial voice. The poor kid was
left breathless and dumbfounded.

“Impossible?” he repeated, incredulous, and then translated it to Aymara. The Capacas remained impassive. Those people weren’t shaken by anything.

And then the first of the strange things we would see that afternoon happened. The Capaca woman sitting on the far right gave a short rant, and Marta opened her eyes very wide, disconcerted.

“The old woman said,” Efraín murmured, “that we should obey, because otherwise none of us will leave here alive.”

“Oh, shit!” Marc exclaimed with a scared expression.

Marta replied something in Aymara to the old woman.

“She told her,” Efraín translated for us, very surprised and wary, “that there’s no problem, that none of us will ever speak of Qalamana with anyone.”

“But…. It can’t be!” Gertrude blurted. “Has she gone crazy or something? Marta!” she called; Marta turned, and for some strange reason I guessed that she had suffered the same kind of manipulation as Daniel. I couldn’t explain why I knew, but there was something glassy in her look that I recognized at first glance. Gertrude motioned her closer with her hand and Marta squatted down in front of her. “You can’t accept this deal, Marta. Your life’s work and Efraín’s work will be lost. And we have to find out what the power of words is. Do you have any idea what you’ve said?”

“Of course I know, Gertrude,” she assented with her usual furrowed brow, the same expression that she got when someone or something made her uncomfortable. “But I had to accept. We can’t leave Daniel like he is forever, right?”

“Of course not!” Efraín blurted in a very aggressive tone. “Obviously we can’t! But you have to haggle like in the market, Marta, you can’t give in right away. These people have no idea what has happened in the world since the seventeenth century, and for them the Spanish are still the enemy they have to protect themselves from. Get up and negotiate, show your smarts. Come on, let’s go!”

The old Capaca man who was sitting next to the Capaca woman on the far right also said something out loud at that moment. Efraín’s face changed; his anger gave way to a great calmness.

“It’s okay, Marta,” he declared, looking for a more comfortable position on the stool, “leave it. It doesn’t matter. We’ll keep doing what we did before as if we’d never set foot in this city. We can’t hurt these people.”

“What’s going on here?” Lola asked, scared, looking at Marc and me.

“They’re reprogramming them,” I said, totally convinced. “They’re using the power of words.”

“How dare they?” Marc shouted, looking at us defiantly.

“Forget it, Arnau,” Marta told me. Her gaze was returning completely to normal, without that watery shine that I had noticed before and that now gleamed in Efraín’s eyes.

“But they’ve manipulated you, Marta!” I exclaimed, indignant. “You’re not the one making this decision. It’s them! Wake up, please!”

“I am awake, I assure you,” she categorically declared with her usual temper. “I’m completely awake, clear, and calm. I know they’ve used the power of words with me. I can see it plainly. I can see how the change of opinion is caused inside me. It was like a flash of light. But now the decision to put Daniel before any ambition is my own, as mine as the one not to be willing to let them kill us for refusing to give our word that we’ll never talk about this city. I’m
the one deciding, even if it’s hard for you to believe.”

“I say the same,” Efraín declared. “I agree completely with Marta. We can still ask them for answers to what we want to know, but it’s not necessary to make that information known and attract all the researchers in the world here to end up destroying this culture in a blink of an eye.”

“This is crazy!” I said angrily, and turning to the Capacas, I exclaimed: “Arukutipa, tell your bosses that the world has changed a lot in the last four hundred years, that the Spanish don’t dominate the world anymore, that we don’t have any kind of empire, and that we’re not a country of conquistadors or warriors! We’ve been living in peace for a long time! And also tell them that using the power of words to change people to suit your convenience isn’t the action of decent or honorable people!”

I had finished my rant on my feet, shaking my hands like an impassioned orator, and my companions looked at me as if I had lost my mind. Marc and Lola, who had known me longest, only looked frightened, although it was certainly from fear of the Capacas’ reaction; but Marta, Gertrude, and Efraín had their eyes wide open in surprise at my energetic tirade.

Arukutipa had hastily translated my words almost at the same time as I said them, so when I finished yelling, the elders had already heard all of my message. For the first time, I thought I detected a confused expression on their wrinkled faces. They again kept their mouths closed, but the kid with the red band transmitted their response to me:

“The Capacas ask to know if the battles and the spilling of blood and the loss of people of the kingdom of Piru are ended.”

“Of course they have!” I exclaimed. “All that ended hundreds of years ago. The Spanish no longer govern these lands. They kicked us out. There are many different countries with their own governments and the relations of all of them with Spain are good.”

Now the confusion really was clear on their faces. If you asked me, they understood Spanish perfectly, despite Arukutipa’s work.

“The Christian
Viracochas
don’t govern in Piru?” the translator asked with a voice that barely escaped from his throat.

“No!” I repeated, taking a few steps forward to reinforce my words. I did it at a bad moment, because, hidden behind the large tapestries, an army of Yatiri armed with bows and lances and protected with small rectangular shields had remained invisible until that moment, in which they quickly and noisily spread out like a defensive wall between the Capacas and us, at whom they pointed their weapons.

“Fuck, they’re going to kill us!” Mark roared, seeing that things were serious.

“Now what’s wrong?” I asked Arukutipa, even though I couldn’t see him.

“Your Mercies shouldn’t come near,” said the kid’s voice. “Death would be caused for the Spanish pestilences.”

“What pestilences?” I asked, exasperated.

“Measles, plague, influenza, the biological weapons of the Conquest,” Marta declared sorrowfully. “The most recent studies show that in the great epidemics that occurred in old Tiwantinsuyu, between 1525 and 1560, ninety percent of the population of the Incan Empire may have died, which means the extinction of millions and millions of people in less than forty years.

“In other words, according to that, only ten percent survived,” I remarked, and an idea crossed my mind. “What year did the Yatiri leave the Altiplano?”

“Around 1575,” Marta replied. “It’s the date on Sarmiento de Gamboa’s map.”

“They’re immunized!” I exclaimed. “The ones that survived and got here had produced antibodies against all those diseases, and so they transmitted the genetic immunity to their
descendants. They can’t get sick from us!”

“Sure, buddy. Now try explaining it to them,” Marc said. “Tell them that it’s a germ, a bacteria or a virus, and then you can tell them about the antibodies and how vaccines work, and when they understand that, explain the thing about genetic immunity to them.”

I sighed. Marc was right. But I couldn’t lose anything by trying.

“Listen, kid,” I told Arukutipa. “The Spanish pestilences don’t exist anymore. All that ended at the same time as the battles and the spilling of blood. I know it’s difficult to believe, but I’m telling you the truth. Besides, the guide you sent to pick us up when we arrived with the Toromonas and who brought us here was very close to us. You can check that nothing’s wrong with him, that he’s okay.”

“Luk’ana will die by his own will, señor,” the boy assured me calmly. We all jumped in surprise. “Now he is alone and waiting for Your Mercies, to take you from here. Then he will offer his life so as not to sicken us all. The city must have mercy on him for his service.”

“These guys are crazy, Root!” Marc exclaimed with all his heart. “Let’s get out of here right now!”

“It won’t be necessary for him to die, Arukutipa,” pronounced the “bizarre woman of white hair.” “Nothing will happen to him. As Arnau, the gentleman tall of body, said, the Spanish pestilences are over. Everything has changed, yet you still have the same fears from four hundred years ago.”

Silence fell on the other side of the wall of soldiers, until, suddenly, they dramatically retreated and returned to their hiding places behind the tapestries. Apparently, the situation had stabilized and the Capacas felt somewhat calmer.

“Verily the Viceroy does not rule, nor are there magistrates or mayors or sheriffs?” the young translator insisted, still incredulous in the face of such large and unexpected changes.

“No, there are no Viceroys or magistrates or Spanish
encomenderos
,” Marta replied.

“And the Sacred Inquisition?”

“It disappeared, fortunately. Even in Spain, it no longer exists.”

The kid remained silent for a few seconds, then he inclined his head toward the elders as if they were telling him something.

“The Capacas ask to know of whom Your Mercies are vassals.”

“Of no one!” I replied, annoyed. Vassals! Well, that’s all we needed.

“Castile has no king?” Arukutipa asked, surprised. “There is no Sacred Catholic Royal Majesty?”

“Yes, yes, there is a king in Spain,” Lola intervened unexpectedly, “but he doesn’t govern, he doesn’t have power like his ancestors. Anyway, you keep asking us questions without giving us any information in return. We can tell you all you want, but we also want to know things.”