The Lost Origin (15 page)

I began, obviously, with
The New Chronicle and Good Government
written by Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala at the beginning of the seventeenth century. I felt my heart sink upon facing the three volumes that formed the immense work of that Indian of the Peruvian nobility who thought he could touch the pious and Christian soul of King Philip III of Spain by telling him the truth about what had been going on in the old Incan Empire since the first years of the conquest. That, at least, was what the introduction related, as well as the hazardous journey of the manuscript until it was discovered in Copenhagen at the beginning of the twentieth century. I took a couple of disheartened sips from my bottle of water and took a quick look at some notes that my brother had left folded between the pages of the first book. Luckily, Daniel had written those drafts with the computer—printing them on the backside of used paper from the Division of Social Anthropology—saving me from one of the two main obstacles I had been afraid to face: deciphering his handwriting and understanding the content. As soon as I began to read, I lost track of everything around me, and in that very instant, without noticing, I stopped walking blindly and began to run, stepping in Daniel’s footprints, on the path that he had explored alone only a few months before.

Apparently, beginning in the precise moment in which Columbus discovered America in 1492, the Spanish kings had been faced with a surprising legal dilemma: They were obliged to
justify the necessity of the conquest and the subsequent colonization of America because otherwise the legislation of the era (like that of today) would not allow the State to destroy and usurp, with no rational, that which did not belong to it. There was something called Natural Law which protected the right of all peoples to sovereignty over their lands. So the most erudite Castilian lawyers of the sixteenth century had to wrack their brains to come up with lame excuses and unfounded motivations that would allow them to unquestionably claim that the West Indies didn’t belong to anyone when Columbus had landed on their coasts, because the indigenous found there were not legitimate nor did they have true kings who could certify that the territory was their natural property. To that effect, in 1570, the new viceroy of Peru, Don Francisco de Toledo, carrying out a mandate from Phillip II, ordered a General Visit to the entire territory of the Viceroyalty with the purpose of preparing reports that demonstrated that the Inca had stolen the land from some wretched, uncultured, and savage indigenous peoples, who, since then, had suffered under their tyranny, which “legally” justified the appropriation of the Incan Empire by the Spanish crown. This of course caused great outrage at the falsification of information and the distortion of the history that the visitors heard from the inhabitants of the Empire, who were really civilized, well-nourished, and for the most part happy, and who were strangers to money because they didn’t need it, had food reserves for more than six months in all towns, and who didn’t establish big social differences between men and women, even if each gender had distinct tasks.

My eyes stopped without warning at a curious phrase: “In the General Visit ordered by the Viceroy, Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa acted as historian and Lieutenant General. He spent five years traveling exhaustively throughout colonial Peru, gathering social, geographical, historical, and economic data from the oldest indigenous people of each place.” Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa? The same Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa of “Pathe of the Yatiri Indians. Two monthes by land...?” I felt so euphoric that I couldn’t help standing and moving my body a little to the beat of a non-existent and silent samba. I had a piece of the puzzle! Things were beginning to fall into place. It was a Pyrrhic satisfaction, but it was more than I had before.

Following my intuition, I did a quick internet search on said Pedro Sarmiento, and little to my surprise, I discovered that the guy had been someone very important in the sixteenth century, a prominent figure, who, in the content of the pages I went over, appeared as navigator, cosmographer, mathematician, soldier, historian, poet, and scholar of classical languages. Not only had he explored the Pacific and discovered more than thirty islands, among them the Solomon Islands, but he was also the first governor of the provinces of the Strait of Magellan; he took part in the wars against the Inca rebels; completed the General Visit for the Viceroy of Peru; invented a navigational instrument called Jacob’s staff, which was used to approximately calculate longitude (a measurement unheard of in his time); he wrote
History of the Incas
; and, moreover, was kidnapped by the pirate Richard Grenville and taken to England where he made friends with Sir Walter Raleigh and Queen Elizabeth with whom he communicated in perfect Latin. But, in case something was lacking for a character like this, on two occasions he had to face the Sacred Inquisition which was ready to burn him alive in any public square in Lima (then called City of the Kings) as a sorcerer and astrologer, or, a little more specifically, because of the fabrication of some gold rings that brought good luck. Accused of necromancy and of “magical practices with instruments,” he had to make a galloping escape and take refuge in Cusco; and ten years later, on exactly the same charges (with the difference that, this time, they were regarding an ink capable of causing love or any other sentiment in whoever read what was written with it), ended up in the secret prisons of the Holy Office.

Okay, so I had gotten to the point of being able to explain the map that Daniel had photocopied, or at least of being able to place it very precisely in history, since Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa finished the General Visit in 1575, five years after it began, and he traveled (or was taken) to the City of Kings, where, early that same year, he was judged by the inquisition and imprisoned in July. Sarmiento claimed to have completed the map of “Pathe of the Yatiri Indians” on the twenty-second of February, and, according to a document of the Tribunal of the Sacred Inquisition of Lima
⁷
, in the inventory of objects confiscated from Sarmiento on the thirtieth of July by the High Sheriff of the Holy Office, Don Alonso de Aliaga, appeared “three canvases painted with lands and Indian places.”

According to my brother’s cryptic notes, those canvases left for Spain many years later, along with other objects and documents belonging to Sarmiento de Gamboa, and remained in the Archive of the Indies in Seville for almost a century, reappearing briefly in the Contracting House of this same city before culminating their journey, God knows why, in the Hydrographic Deposit in Madrid, where they apparently were at that very moment, and where, I deduced, Daniel had found them.

All I had left to do was guess which was the lake where the “Pathe of the Yatiri Indians” started, but that was the easiest of everything that I had done that night, because all I had to do was find a map of the Bolivian high plains region on the internet to discover that the outline of Lake Titicaca corresponded exactly with that drawn by Sarmiento de Gamboa, and that the great city he had traced to the south fit like a key into the location of the ruins of Tiwanaku. What was no longer very clear was the path’s route which, leaving from there, descended some twelve thousand some feet from the altitude of the city and entered into the jungle, running parallel to the course of a nameless river that I couldn’t identify on the map on my screen due to the complexity of the tributaries which, like the circulatory system of the human body, wove, braided, and crossed each other until they formed a jumble of threads of water, impossible to separate. The drawing was crudely interrupted by the tear that I at first had taken for a sheet of frayed edges, so it also wasn’t really possible to know where that path of ant footprints buried in the Amazon led. In any case, it was all the same to me, because it wasn’t significant to my search; what was significant was what I had already found, and that was the fact that sometime in those five years that Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa was traveling Peru and writing the reports of the General Visit he met the Yatiri in Tiwanaku and drew a map that my brother had considered important, and immediately after he finished the map, the Inquisition locked him up for making a magic ink. Again I was running into the magic of words, the Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious that Proxi liked so much.

It was clear that my brother had left those notes inside the first volume of
The New Chronicle and Good Governmen
t because they were related to it in some way, apart from the fact that the Indian Felipe Guamán had felt the necessity to write almost twelve hundred pages to refute the lies in the reports from the General Visit, so I got up my nerve, looked at the clock—it was almost four in the morning—and faced the reading. I wasn’t sleepy, but even if I had been I would have woken up anyway just by looking at the prodigious illustrations of that book. Used to modern digital images, designed with a computer, with moving vectors and millions of colors, capable, even, of virtually recreating reality, the shock of Guamán Poma’s crude drawings in black ink was brutal, devastating, as if an electric shock had formatted the hard drive of my brain, leaving me defenseless in the face of those crude paintings—of which there were a total of
four hundred, interlaced with the text. It was like a comic, where action unfolds in the cartoon squares, the only difference being that Guamán Poma’s work was almost four hundred years old.

What first got my attention was a drawing in which Viracocha (in Guamán’s Quechua, Vari Vira Cocha Runa) was depicted, dressed in leaves, under a bright sun with a jovial face, like one of those smileys or emoticons on the internet to express moods or attitudes quickly and simply, using punctuation marks. From what I could see, all those suns that Guamán had painted had faces, and all of them manifested their impression of what was shown in the scene with emoticon expressions. But the most significant thing about the drawing was the little beard that had been given to Viracocha to indicate his divine rather than Indian origin: four hairs in the mustache and a goatee like mine. Another image that stood out was that of the shield with the first royal coat of arms of the Inca. It was clear that the shape was a copy of Spanish shields rather than that of a rectangular
walqnanqa
, but there was something clever in that mix of a quartered field with a cross, enclosed with decorations of baroque loops, with those ingenuous portraits of a bearded sun called Inti, a moon called Quya, a star with sixteen points, Willka, and an anthropomorphic idol placed on a hill.

Astonished by this iconographic excess in black and white where every scene was a world of details to lose oneself in, I was without peripheral vision, completely ignoring the phosphorescent yellow color of the parts highlighted by my brother just as I would have blithely ignored a red light had I been driving. There are images, or kinds of images, music, scents, flavors, or textures that have the powerful capacity to pull us out of the real world, so it was not until I had recovered from the shock that I discovered that Daniel had again shown me the path, highlighting the important words, phrases, or paragraphs in bright yellow.

The first mark I could find was located next to the drawing of another baroque coat of arms with the second royal symbols (a bird, some kind of palm, a tassel, and two serpents). A phrase stood out which said that “they,” the Inca, had come out of “the Lake of Titicaca and of Tiauanaco” and that, leaving the “Collau,” the eight original “Ynga” brothers and sisters had arrived in Cusco and founded the city. In the following paragraph, Guamán Poma, with the bilious collaboration of Daniel C., asserted no more and no less than that all those who had “ears” were called Inca and the rest were not. For a moment I was disconcerted by the idea that the some twenty-nine million inhabitants of Tihuantinsuyu who were not royalty could have been earless, but I immediately remembered the legend that said the direct descendants of the children of Viracocha made up the “Orejona” royalty, who distinguished themselves from those who did not have royal blood by inserting large gold discs in their earlobes. And that really was the case, because on the next page, skipping the page with the second coat of arms, appeared the first Inca, Manco Capac (“Capac” meant powerful), with a round piece on either side of his head like enormous ears. I suddenly remembered a curious detail. Hadn’t Proxi said the astronomer-priests that governed Tiwanaku were called “Capaca?” Could Capac be a derivation of Capaca? There was only one way to find out and that was by using the dictionary by Ludovico Bertonio that my brother had… at his apartment. The only thing I could do was look it up on the internet, but luck was with me and it didn’t take me long to find free access to the dictionary through the virtual library of the University of Lima, Peru, and a Bertonio transcribed to the language of webpages confirmed that “Capaca” really did mean King or Lord although he added that it was a very old word (a claim he made in 1612) and that it was no longer used. So perhaps the Incan legends had some truth to them and Manco Capac, or Capaca, and his sister-wife, Mama Ocllo, really did originate in Tiwanaku and go north from there to found Cusco and the Incan Empire.

Manco Capac was shown elegantly dressed. He wore a great cape over his clothes, a band
around his head with a decoration in front, open sandals with laces ending below his knees, and, in his hands, a curious sunshade and a lance. But what most got my attention were the decorations on his clothes: a band of three lines of small rectangles like those in Daniel’s photocopies of textiles, horizontally crossing the fabric at the waist. This time, however, I looked more closely and discovered that inside them were minute stars, small rectangles, elongated tildes, diamonds with dots in the middle…. The motifs were each repeated three times diagonally, and I wondered what was so incredible about these textile designs to inspire my brother to collect them.

I was startled by the light from the large wall screen which suddenly came on to inform me that my mother had just woken up. As I turned to see, the image divided in the middle, and in the right hand window, poorly illuminated, she could be seen jumping out of bed in her discreet green satin nightshirt. My house was obviously equipped with all sorts of motion sensors, but the identification system could also perfectly distinguish between each of my family members.