Heart of the World

by Linda Barnes

  God, I didn’t think I could move yet. I certainly didn’t want to move, not with Roldan on a talking jag.

  Quickly I said, “The others on your plane, did they survive?”

  “No. I cut my ties with my old life. I work with the campesinos here, the peasant farmers, not the colonos, the ones who come to carve the land into plots and plant the wrong crops.”

  “You didn’t cut all ties. Cabrera knew.”

  “For over a year, I was dead. Now, a small number know I’m alive. I have known Luisa’s family, her father, her uncle, for years. She has a good heart, but she is impatient for change. She thinks she can mold me to her will, make me do her bidding. Still, she brings money from my bankers. That I must have, to protect the Kogi, because when this land dies we will all die. You understand? Every climate, every—what do you say?—ecosystem on earth is represented here. The coastal beaches, the jungle, the savanna, the paramo, the mountaintop. The Kogi are the keepers of the heart of the world.”

  The heart of the world. I examined the craggy landscape, the piercing sky, the snowy peaks. This place might be the heart of the Kogi world. It might be the heart of Roldan’s world, but it was trees and rocks and blistered feet to me.

  Paolina was the heart of my world. My sister. A girl who pedaled down traffic-choked streets and chattered to friends on the phone, who couldn’t decide which cologne to wear Saturday night. Tough and smart, with the resilience that comes from learning to cope in a broken home. Old beyond her years. I admired that; I regretted it. I couldn’t imagine the course of my life without her.

  “You must walk,” Roldan said.

  “Your daughter,” I said. “She’s the survivor.”

  He lifted his head and looked straight into my eyes. “You said she is musical, no?”

  “A drummer. The best. You should hear her play.”

  “Drums are good,” he said. “Drums are an old skill.”

  “You should meet her.”

  “It’s too late.”

  “It doesn’t have to be.”

  “She was a beautiful baby, so tiny, with eyes as bright as stars.” His eyes gleamed and I thought, A trick of the mountain light; the sun so close.

  “What happened? With you and Marta?”

  “Marta, too, was beautiful. My father would have disinherited me if we’d wed, but I didn’t care; I wanted nothing of his money then. I wanted only to go to the hills to join the revolution.”

  “And Marta didn’t.”

  His eyes went cold. “There you have it. One wants something; the other doesn’t. Each makes a choice. Each lives with that choice.” As he spoke he wrapped my feet in leaves and carefully replaced my sandals.

  “Come,” he said. “Now you must truly climb.”

  CHAPTER 27

  I was afraid my legs would buckle when I stood, but I steeled myself and they held. I concentrated on breathing, on filtering the cool mist through my nostrils. I couldn’t seem to inhale enough of the thin air to expand my lungs.

  “Here. These will help.” I must have closed my eyes, because when I opened them, his brown hand was cupped near my face. It contained a quantity of leaves from the woven bag.

  “What?”

  “Coca leaves.”

  I shook my head. “I can make it.”

  He grunted, half amused, half exasperated. “It’s an honor I do you, to offer you leaves, gringa. Here, they are only for men.”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Very well, then. Your feet will hurt less when you walk on sacred ground.”

  Sure.

  “Come.”

  Not my sacred ground, I thought. I’m not a religious Jew, just half and half, uneducated in my mother’s faith, but as we climbed, as we kept climbing, as the terrain grew wilder and rougher, I kept imagining Abraham and Isaac, walking up the mountain. Surely it couldn’t have been this steep. Little Isaac would have died from the climb.

  “You’ll see,” Roldan said. “You’ll see what they have done.”

  This time his voice held no reverence for “they,” only revulsion. Two different groups, I thought, a holy they, a profane they.

  The rocks were craggy boulders now. Roldan had to show me where to place my hands and feet. He moved confidently, upright in places I had to crawl. It felt like I’d been climbing forever, like I’d be climbing forever. I made myself into a machine, right arm, left arm, right leg, left leg. I didn’t look down. Roldan scanned the terrain with hooded eyes like an eagle watching for prey.

  We came to the edge of a deep ravine. I closed my eyes and wondered whether this was it, whether this was what they’d done, whether this end-of-the-world cleft was what I’d crawled so far to admire. Retreat seemed the only option, but Roldan knelt at the side of the narrow path, his hands busy in the underbrush, tugging and shoving at a stand of seemingly rooted trees until they moved aside, all of a piece, as though they’d been mounted on a swing gate. Then we were on a primitive suspension bridge, a narrow span of knotted ropes over jagged rocks and empty air. A single length of rope served as a guardrail, and the structure shook with every step. It seemed impossible that it could handle my weight, let alone our combined weight, but Roldan showed no hesitation. I tried not to look down. I counted steps, ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty, and then we were on solid ground. He led me across a jagged ridge, past tangles of shrubbery, and the vista opened like a page in a storybook.

  Las Ciudades de Piedra. The Cities of Stone. Las Ciudades Perdidas. The Lost Cities.

  If the hut in which I’d woken was part of a village, this was its capital, a ceremonial city of stunning grandeur. No birds called out, no insects buzzed, sound itself seemed hushed by the majesty of the site. I understood why Roldan had used the word “sacred.” There was nothing savage about the place, none of the aura of human sacrifice that permeates even photographs of ancient Aztec sites. The holy shrines of the Navajo are natural formations, mountain peaks and high mesas, but this was shaped by humans with care and love and artistry. It was a ruin, yes, a shadow of what it had once been. The vines had taken command, and the moss and the shrubs, but the structure remained, the architecture, the steps, the circles, the areas for crowds to congregate. There were retaining walls, to stop erosion. The circles of ground were covered with emerald moss as perfect as putting greens. The river split before diving into a series of swift waterfalls on either side of the stone steps. The towering mountain peak was iced with immaculate snow.

  I turned to Roldan with questions on my lips. How did they do this, make this without machinery? The questions died. He was holding Paolina’s gold birdman in both hands like an offering. His eyes were closed and he spoke in a language that was neither Spanish nor English. It wasn’t the Latin I’d heard when my father dragged me to mass over my mother’s protests, but it had the gravity of words spoken in church.

  Behind him and to his right, What the hell was that? I closed my eyes and squeezed them shut, opened them again, thinking this must be what Roldan wants me to see, this is what he meant when he told me to “see what they have done.” Not a hundred yards away, a blackened hunk of twisted metal scarred the mountainside. It was more than an eyesore; it was a violation, an open wound.

  I didn’t feel my feet as I made my way toward the intrusive mound. At first it was simply metal, misplaced modern sculpture, but slowly, it took shape: the shattered cabin, the twisted rotor blades, the partially melted windscreen. At first I thought drug dealers, crashing in the fog, then I remembered the wounded man in the prison hut. I covered my nose and mouth with my hands, and hoped I wouldn’t vomit on Roldan’s holy soil. The closer I got, the worse it smelled, a mixture of gasoline and roasted meat and rotting flesh.

  How long had it been here? Not a day, not a week. The underlying smell of putrefaction reminded me of corpses discovered in rented rooms by lax building managers, by neighbors returning after lengthy vacations.

  A bird called, and I looked up.

  Out of the corner of my eye, out of th
e mist, as though they had taken shape within the clouds, figures materialized, four or five indistinct shrouded shapes. I blinked, and then the shapes were moving steadily toward the wreckage, growing more distinct, larger, becoming figures of little men. Less than five feet tall, each wore a white tunic and long baggy pants. Like Roldan. Pointed white caps covered their heads, and woven sacks hung from their shoulders.

  “You see?” Roldan’s voice made me start like a deer. “You see. They have come”

  CHAPTER 28

  Four of the tiny figures halted at a distance of thirty feet, then turned away and melted out of sight into the fog, their footsteps eerily silent on the rocky ground. One alone continued to approach, moving stiffly as a walking statue. In his right hand, he held a gourd-like object that he carried with the majesty of a scepter.

  Roldan bowed and spoke to the little man, using the same tongue in which he’d addressed the gold statuette, musical and gruff at the same time. I couldn’t decipher a single word. The language was like nothing I’d ever heard. It had strange clicking noises and odd gutturals. Since my ears were ineffective, I used my eyes.

  The top of the little man’s head reached no higher than my upper arm. Thick salt-and-pepper hair flowed from beneath his peaked hat to his shoulders. The backs of his hands were as wrinkled as tree bark, the skin on his face deeply lined mahogany, his feet bare. He could have been fifty or sixty, or twice that old. I’d never seen anyone like him. I couldn’t help but stare.

  Roldan turned to me and said, “You must understand this: They came for the gold.” His voice seemed to resonate oddly, almost to echo. Maybe it was the effect of the altitude, some hollow by-product of the mist.

  “Who came? Why? Who are you—”

  “I will translate for you what Mama Parello wishes you to know.”

  The little man had a name. “Mama?” I repeated. Roldan smiled. “It is a Kogi word, a Kogi concept. He is a priest, a shaman, a mama of the Kogi people.”

  “He lives here?” I motioned to encompass the stone city. Roldan shook his head no.

  “But you expected him to meet you here.” With no clocks, no phones, the little men might have waited for hours, days, in this timeless place.

  “Yes, because I spoke to him in the spirit, in Aluna. It doesn’t matter that you don’t understand, gringa. He is here; we are here. You have seen, but now, you must understand”

  “Understand what?”

  “Why I cannot help my daughter.”

  Before I could protest, the small man held up his hands and spoke. The words sounded like birdsong as much as they sounded like speech.

  Roldan smiled again. “He wishes to know if you are my woman.”

  “Tell him no.”

  The little man chirped and clacked, his lined face animated. Roldan answered in the strange clicking language, then translated the little man’s response.

  “Your reply makes him sad; he says I need a woman. He does not understand how a woman with red hair comes to walk the mountain, but he wishes you to know that this place, the heart of the world, is protected. He asks for your promise that you will never return.”

  “Consider it given.”

  “No,” Roldan said. “Do not take this lightly. You must truly promise. If I am to tell you, if we are to tell you, we must have your word of honor that you will say nothing to endanger these people. If you cannot give your word, I must do what Luisa says I must do.”

  Kill me.

  “If I can save Paolina without endangering these people, I will,” I said.

  Roldan spoke, perhaps translating what I’d said. Then he held up the stringed beads I’d found in the hut, and gave them to the little man, who beamed and nodded.

  I will return them to their owners, Roldan had told me when he’d appropriated them. So the small men had once lived in the gumdrop huts.

  Roldan said, “He does not understand the color of your hair, although it is not strange to him because he has seen it in the spirit world.”

  As he spoke, the little man dipped a stick into the gourd and sucked the end of it. The gourd looked like a relic from the Gold Museum, what was it called? A poporo. One of his cheeks was taut and rounded, as though it held a plug of chewing tobacco. The woven bag dangling at his side was stuffed with coca leaves, like Roldan’s.

  Spirit world, partially explained.

  I said, “What happened here?”

  “What do you see?”

  “A helicopter crash. When did it happen?” I found his reticence infuriating. What did a crashed copter on a remote mountaintop have to do with Paolina’s kidnapping?

  “Weeks ago, I cannot give you a date. Time is not measured here the way it is measured in cities. Here we have planting and sowing—”

  “Just tell me. What happened?”

  “You know your country has a military presence here.”

  “They train Colombian soldiers to wipe out coca fields and arrest drug dealers. They’ve done it for years. Big deal.”

  “There are secret troops,” he said, “U.S. Special Forces, stealing the last gold from the last tribe that protects the earth. Acting with the knowledge of my government.”

  “Is this Cabrera talking?” I bit my lip. The helicopter crash must be the journalist’s big story, her history-making revelation.

  “Your soldiers may say they come only to spray the coca bushes. Look around you. There are no fields of coca here.”

  The fuselage, burned as well as twisted, had once been painted black. The cockpit was so badly damaged that most of the equipment had melted into a lumpy mass.

  “Luisa wishes to document this travesty, to make a public outcry. She wants me to break my silence, to tell the people what my government, in connivance with yours, tried to do here.”

  Cabrera was right: The story was made for the news. Roldan, already a folk hero, returning from the dead to level charges against the government. A secret deal with the U.S. involving the theft of archeological treasures. The heritage of a country betrayed. The U.S. caught doing what it used to do best, interfering in Latin America. If it was true, it was headline news. If it was true, it could topple the Colombian government.

  I gazed at the wreckage. I thought the twin-rotor aircraft was a Chinook, a smaller version of the gunship the army was currently flying in the mountains of Afghanistan. I could see no insignia on the downed copter.

  I said, “Why are you so sure your government is involved?”

  “Do you understand anything of history? That this country is still a democracy is nothing less than a miracle. For fifty years, our candidates have been shot down like dogs, yet someone always rises to grab the standard and lead the charge. And now, betrayal again! There’s nothing the government will not sell the gringos, our oil, our gold, our heritage.”

  “When did you learn about this?”

  Roldan said, “Learn about it? I saw it. My people and I heard the helicopter. At first we thought it was hunting us, but then it disappeared behind the peak and reappeared too close to the ground. I thought the pilot was out of fuel and would crash. I took a party to search. It took us too long to get here.”

  Mama Parello bowed his head; it sounded like he was praying.

  “By the time we arrived, they’d found the gold. They seemed to know exactly where to dig, as though they had a map.”

  “Is that out of the question?”

  “Many of the guaqueros, the tomb robbers, have a spot they research, but never dig. They call it their ‘bank account.’ But I know of no one who’s come this far up the mountain.”

  “Go on.”

  “When we got here, the soldiers were loading bags into the copter. They gave us no time to ask questions. They began firing automatic weapons. We returned fire with the few rifles we had. They tried to lift off, but the downdrafts are tricky in these mountains. And gold is heavy”

  I imagined the desperation of the hurried departure, the crash.

  “Yes,” Roldan said. “It went up, up,
but only a few hundred meters. The front rotor hesitated, the chopper tilted. There was a moment when I thought they would simply land again, but they had no wish to continue the battle. They tried to rise. The copter crashed on its side. The fuel tank ruptured and ignited.”

  The mama spoke; his face solemn.

  “They killed a moro,” Roldan translated. “He is irreplaceable.”

  “What’s a moro?”

  “When a Kogi child is born, the mamas come, and if the Great Mother tells them, they take that special child for the priesthood, to be a mama someday. These children, the moros, are the greatest treasure of the tribe. To make a moro is an incalculable cost. The family loses the child’s labor forever. The moro, to be trained, lives in a cave for nine years without daylight. He must learn the secrets of Aluna, of the Great Mother, and for that he needs silence and introspection. He needs to learn to see beyond this world.”

  “How did the moro die?”

  “Before the soldiers tried to take off, they shot him like a dog. The mamas say his death caused the crash.”

  I shook my head. What did people like the mahogany man know about the mechanics of helicopters?

  Roldan said, “There is everything in Aluna. Before a thing can be, the Great Mother must think of it in Aluna. Everything is part of the Kogi World, even helicopters.”

  His way of answering my unspoken questions was getting on my nerves.

  “With the death of the moro, we thought this terrible thing had come to an end.” His eyes seemed to focus on something far beyond the misty mountain peak.

  It hadn’t come to an end. That’s what he’d brought me here to understand: This terrible thing was linked to Paolina’s kidnapping.

  I said, “Let me get this straight. It was two or three weeks after the crash that the kidnappers got in touch?”

  “Yes. Demanding the gold in exchange for my child. Gold they’d failed to steal here. Gold that is not mine to give.”

  “But how did they know? How did they know about Paolina? How did they know about you? Did Cabrera tell them?” The journalist might be trying to manipulate him, trying to grab a big story by the throat to make her name, nationally and internationally.