The Lost Origin (39 page)

She stopped for a few seconds, surprised by having, almost without noticing, indirectly addressed that subject, and looked at me with a certain guilt.

“But, returning to our business,” she proceeded, “because of my experience with the subject, obviously much greater than Daniel’s and yours, I’m convinced that the Yatiri wouldn’t produce universal curses, curses that could affect even the writer of the text. Do you understand?” She looked at us as if we were her students and she were imparting a lecture. “The panels next to the condor heads, Mr. Queralt, weren’t exactly Don Quixote, right? In the first, they were short texts of only five
tocapus
that were repeated, furthermore, in the next panel and
also in the one under the beak where you entered the solution. I don’t know whether you had time to observe them, but they were simple sets of figures that, even visually (analyzing their order and repetition), would lead to the correct response, even if the reader didn’t know Aymara. The same was true of the big panels by the second head: Visually, the enigma was solvable by carefully analyzing the positions of the figures in the two lines that formed the x. Here, on the contrary, we have a complete text that begins with a warning to thieves who can read Aymara. If, as you say, Marc, the content affects anyone who knows how to pronounce and understand the sounds of this language, the Yatiri themselves and their Capacas would have fallen under its effects. Believe me when I tell you this strange power doesn’t work like that. It is so complete that it can perfectly differentiate the specific receptor of a message from those at whom it’s not directed. That’s why I think that you should let me read the text. Obviously, it won’t explain how to open the door, but it’s possible that it says something interesting.” She sighed deeply and was lost in thought for an instant. “In any case, the worst thing that could happen is for you to be right and that, after reading it, I suffer the same symptoms as Daniel,” then she let out a surprising guffaw, “in which case, please, search hard for the remedy for your brother and for me, Mr. Queralt.”

We were overwhelmed from the long discourse. What could we say to change her mind? We exchanged looks of doubt and conformity, and after an affirmative gesture from Jabba, I brought the photograph of the panel on the door back up on the screen and gave the computer to the professor, who, without the least hesitation, picked up the translation where she had left off:

“Let’s see: ‘Everywhere, others die for you, and, oh! the world will also cease to be visible to you. This is the law, the one closed with a key, the one that is just. You must not disturb the Traveler. You don’t have the right to see him. You are no longer here, true? You already beg to be buried and you don’t recognize even your family or your friends. Let these words protect our lost origin and our destination.’”

Strong stuff! I thought, attentively examining the professor (and Jabba and Proxi were doing the same). But there she was, perfectly content. Nothing had happened to her, and she was looking at us triumphantly.

“Great, don’t you think?” she asked. “I’m still fine. The power has guessed that my intention is not to steal. Or perhaps it’s that I know I don’t have the intention of stealing and that’s why it didn’t affect me.”

And if she wasn’t going to steal, why was she there? We had all arrived at that door with the intention of appropriating something that was not ours and that wasn’t going to help any humanity in trouble but was only going to save one of those thieves against whom the curse protected. Despite my being used to follow the logic of any complicated development of text, so much ambiguity disconcerted me. Only one explanation fit: that it was the conscience itself that determined the effects of the words, and given that, the possible consequences didn’t matter without that key. What also seemed not to matter anymore was my old suspicion about the professor: that she was there, right as rain, indicated that her ambition was purely academic. All that about controlling the world like the bad guys in comic books wasn’t true. If that had been her intention (simple robbery to take advantage of the power), she would have ended up like Daniel, and unfortunately, Daniel had ended up like that because he knew he had stolen Marta’s material with that purpose; although he didn’t know that the real curse, which he had probably found on some textile (and who knows who had copied the design and where he had gotten it from without understanding it), was on the very door of the chamber of the Traveler. My brother’s uneasy conscience was what had played the bad trick on him.

“Basically…,” Jabba muttered, looking sidelong at the immense slab of polished stone, “the problem is we still don’t know how to open it.”

“I know,” Proxi declared, lifting both hands in the air and shaking them like pinwheels.

“You know?” I asked, openmouthed.

“Bah, don’t mind her!” Jabba exclaimed with a look of resignation. “She’s kidding us. Making it up.”

“Aren’t you the fool! When have you seen me make jokes about these things?”

Now it was Jabba you looked at her with surprise.

“You mean you really know how to open the door?”

“Well, obviously!” she said with satisfaction, but then she immediately pursed her lips, showing less conviction. “Well, at least I think I know.”

“Why don’t you explain it to us, Lola?” the professor asked, very interested.

But Proxi, instead of answering, fixed her eyes on me and narrowed them mysteriously. I was paralyzed.

“Arnau knows. Speak, oracle.”

“I know?” I stammered. “Are you sure?”

“Very sure,” she confirmed. “What do you have in that bag of yours that weighs so much?”

I arched my eyebrows, thinking, and immediately remembered.

“The stone tablet full of holes.” Marta Torrent made a questioning face.

“When we passed the first condor head,” Proxi explained, while I opened the bag to take the stone out, “we found a stone tablet the same size as that panel by the door, full of holes which also coincide, more or less, with the size of the
tocapus
on the panel. I have a feeling that if we put it over the panel, we’ll find out what we need to know.”

“Well thought out,” the professor agreed. “Can I see it?” she asked me, extending her hand. I would have had to be very rude not to give it to her. “I see. It is the same size as the panel and the holes are also more or less the same size as the
tocapus
.”

“So,” I said, “either it acts as a template that leaves exposed some
tocapus
that will tell us something, or we’ll have to press the
tocapus
that are left uncovered.”

“And how will we know what the correct orientation is?” Jabba asked.

“We won’t know until we put it on,” I said.

But it wasn’t that easy. I could put the stone template over the panel, but then no one could see the
tocapus
, and if it was Jabba who held the heavy tablet, then the little I saw wasn’t good for anything because I didn’t understand it. It was too risky to push the
tocapus
without first knowing whether they said something or not. Maybe it would be like the last test and the ground would start to sink, or perhaps the sky would collapse on our heads. So we decided to go back to the tried and true method of photography. Jabba drew a tiny point on the bottom part of the stone with a pen, to mark the orientation, and then put it over the panel while I held the camera in the air and took the picture. Then, we turned it around and repeated the operation. When we loaded the two images on the laptop, Marta went to work.

“The first photograph doesn’t make sense,” she remarked, thoroughly scrutinizing the monitor, “but in the second, the text can be seen clearly: ‘Take the stick from the door and what is closed with a key will be visible to you, the Traveler and the words, origin and destination.’”

“Fine,” I muttered with annoyance, “and how do we take the stick from the door? What kind of help is that! I don’t see any stick.”

“Relax,” Jabba told me, “we don’t need the stick. We’re going to press the
tocapus
.”

“And if the ground sinks?”

“There’s no reward without risk,” Proxi observed. “What do you say, Professor?”

“Let’s try. At the first sign of danger, we’ll run.”

“Or we’ll hold on to the puma heads,” Jabba suggested.

Because I was the tallest, the honor of pressing the uncovered Aymara symbols one by one, was mine. As soon as I had finished pressing the last of them, I heard, at waist-height, a click like compressed air suddenly released. I quickly lowered my head, startled, and I watched as a vertical ribbon of stone, as wide as a broom handle and so long it reached the floor, separated from the rest of the door and emerged toward me.

“That scared me!” I exclaimed, with my heart pounding. “I thought everything was coming down.”

“Move back, Arnau,” Jabba said. “Let us see.”

“More proof of the Tiwanakans’ skill,” Dr. Torrent murmured in admiration. “I’ve never seen such perfection in a stone joint. This piece was invisible until just a second ago.” The long bar seemed to be fixed in the center by a smaller bar, also of stone, that stuck out of the hollow.

“And now what?” Jabba asked. “Do we turn it, pull on it, or push it back in?”

“‘Take the stick from the door and what is closed with a key will be visible to you,’” the professor recited.

“Let me,” Proxi requested, placing herself in front of it and moving her fingers like a pianist, or rather, like a thief before trying to figure out the combination of a safe.

But to her consternation, she had barely grabbed the stone piece and pulled lightly on it when it came off of its joint into her arms, which wavered from the unexpected burden. She was still looking at it, perplexed, when the larger slab it had emerged from began to screech and groan as a mechanical force made it rise slowly upward. The chamber of the Traveler was opening for us.

Without noticing, we formed a compact line in front of the growing opening, side by side, silent, expectant, ready to face the most outrageous or strange thing we had seen in our lives. Dr. Torrent, who was the first to see the place, exhaled an exclamation of surprise. My face was still looking at stone, and although I could have bent down to look, I was paralyzed, and not just by the cold air that erupted from inside. When at last the beam from my headlight penetrated the chamber and was lost in the depth of the shadows, I also let out a grunt of surprise: a sea of gleaming gold stretched from just a few yards in front of our feet into the invisible back of that pre-Incan pantry of an industrial park. Sheets and more sheets of gold, measuring approximately three feet tall by more than five feet long, rested on each other, forming perfect rows that reached to the distant back, leaving a narrow path in the center. Is was impossible to know how many rows of them there were from left to right, because we also couldn’t make out the sides. We only saw that it was enormous, that translating all of it would take years of hard work and would require the collaboration of a lot of people to extract a complete history from it. How many sheets could we see, just see? Fifty thousand, a hundred thousand? Five hundred thousand? It was incredible! Where was the beginning? And the end? Could they be classified based on some unknown system, or by subject, by time period, by Capacas?

Dr. Torrent was also the first to go inside. She took a dubious step, then another, and stopped. Her face reflected the golden sparks the headlights pulled from that ocean of gold on which not a speck of dust appeared to have fallen in five hundred years. She was fascinated, excited. She reached out her right hand to touch the first sheet in front of her, but since it was still too far, she took another uncertain step and then continued walking like a boat in a typhoon until at last she rested her palm on the metal. We almost saw the blue flash of an electric shock
go through her, reaching to the ceiling, but it was only an impression. She bent her knees and squatted, brushing her hand over the
tocapus
engraved there, using the same delicacy with which she might caress the most fragile crystal in the world. For her, it was the culmination of a life of searching and study. What could that strange woman feel, I wondered, facing the most complete and ancient library of a lost culture that she’d been studying for so many years? It must be an incomparable feeling.

I was the next to enter the chamber, but unlike the professor, I didn’t stop to admire those texts written on gold. I kept walking in a straight line along the path, accompanied by Marc and Lola, who looked around them with fascination. The cold air of the place smelled like a mechanic’s shop, of an impossible mix of oil and gasoline.

“What does the one you’re examining say, Professor?” Jabba asked as he walked by her.

With that peculiar voice like a cello, Marta Torrent replied:

“It talks about the universal flood and of what happened after.”

I couldn’t help laughing. It was as if I had asked Núria, my secretary, how her weekend had been, and she had calmly confessed that she’d been to dinner in the International Space Station and visited the Great Wall of China. Which is why laughter rose in me, an uncontainable laughter, because of the disproportion between the question and the response, but what else could be expected from such a situation?

“What are you laughing at, Arnau?” Lola wanted to know, positioning herself next to me and shooting photographs left and right like the photojournalist she was.

“At the things that happen to us,” I replied, without being able to stop.

Then she laughed as well, and Marc copied her, and in the end even Dr. Torrent, who was now behind us, was infected with the silly laughter, and our guffaws resonated and were lost in the chamber of the horned serpent, which was naturally only a little smaller than the extremely long passages that surrounded it; consequently, it reminded me of an industrial warehouse of gigantic proportions. After a long time spent walking among those millions of gold sheets, an uncertainty shook me from within: Where, exactly, would be the remedy for thieves like Daniel? Which of those golden sheets would explain how to return sanity to someone who thought he was dead and who didn’t recognize anything around him? I told myself it was still very early to worry, since the professor might be able to find the sheets that dealt with the power of words; but intuition told me, at the sight of that panorama, that what I had thought would be simple after so much effort expended getting there was going to become an arduous work of many years, and without guarantee of success, besides. Where in the hell had we gotten the idea that the cure for Daniel was hidden in that damned chamber? At the moment, as far as we knew, there was only one person in the world—Dr. Torrent—who knew how to read Aymara, and not even in her wildest dreams would she be capable of completing a task of such magnitude; just the introduction of all that information into a mountain of computers running an improved version of the damned “JoviLoom” would require the entire population of Barcelona working their fingers to the bone for several decades. I felt my heart sinking slowly to my feet, so I resolved not to fall into a premature depression and to keep walking toward the end of that passage in case the Yatiri had decided to leave the pharmaceutical remedy a little closer at hand.