The Lost Origin by Matilde Asensi

Author:Matilde Asensi [Asensi, Matilde]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2013-08-13T05:00:00+00:00

IV

I woke up around five in the afternoon, and when I went down to the dining room, Marc and Lola were already dressed and ready, waiting for me, calmly reading a Bolivian newspaper. According to what they told me as I ate breakfast, the professor had left after eating and had left a note for us with a telephone number, asking us to get in contact with her when we returned to La Paz.

Don Gastón, since we were friends of Marta’s, only charged us the minimum for one day, without extras or food, and got us one of the few taxis in the village to return to La Paz. We made the journey in the company of some cholas with black braids and bowler hats, who unloaded thick bundles of multicolored cloth into the trunk of the vehicle, and who didn’t open their mouths once in the whole trip, probably from lack of air, since Proxi and I also traveled in the backseat (Jabba wouldn’t have fit).

When we walked through the doors of our hotel, we felt at home. It was so strange to think about everything that had happened to us that we simply decided not to think about it. It was as if there were a hole in time; three months could have passed, or years, because the hours had dilated in an extraordinary way and it was unbelievable that only a day had gone by since we had left there. The hole was also in our minds. We got into the elevator in silence, and the three of us went up to my room. Marc seemed worried:

“What do I do with the doughnut?” he asked me immediately after closing the door. Lola threw herself onto the sofa, and without thinking twice, turned on the television. She needed to recover her sanity, and the idiot box supplied her with a certain feeling of normality.

“Let’s store it in the safe.”

Our rooms came with safes hidden inside the closets. It’s not that they were the paragon of security, but they provided minimum safety for the most valuable objects. Before leaving, I had stored my Captain Haddock watches inside.

“Should we put the laptop and Proxi’s digital camera in there too?”

“Do you want to hide the proof from sight or something?” I asked, as I took a seat in front of the desk and turned on the computer. “We have to download all the images that are still on the camera’s memory card and then burn all of them to a CD. That’s what we’ll store in the safe, along with the doughnut. The rest of the equipment stays out so we can keep working.”

“You still want to keep going with this?” Lola asked me from the sofa, in an aggressive tone.

“No, I assure you that the only thing I want is for us to go out for a walk, have dinner somewhere, go to one of those peñas where they have live music, and once I’m there, I want to drink all the beer in the place.

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