I was told that most of the archive is online. And some of it is, but not the good parts, not the parts that an apostate priest would leave lying around, not the parts that tell what it was really like to sit there in the sand and try to convert the natives who didn’t know whether to kill you or eat you first.
No, those parts were filed away quietly, if they were filed away at all.
OK, so before they would give me this investigator’s license, I had to read the regulations in front of them, so that I could demonstrate to their satisfaction that I understood the rules, which I did. I am not allowed to bring a hat into the reading room, nor an overcoat, nor any beverages. I assured them that I would arrange to lodge my hat elsewhere.
I do not have clearance to look at original maps, I was reminded again and again, so I was not to request maps. And I could request only one book at a time, and could photocopy no more than 30% of any document. Once I agreed to these rules, my license was issued.
So I’m in, guys! One day down, and I’m in. I’d tell you more but it’s like 3:00 in the afternoon, and I’m still jet-lagged. I’m going to take a nap. Love you, Michelle. I’m glad you love me too, otherwise, we’d both be in for an uncomfortable few decades of stalking, and the attendant legal issues resulting thereof.
Before I sign off, I have to mention a strange thing that happened. As I was having lunch earlier, a gypsy women wandered over. I guess Roma is the more accurate term, not gypsy, but she had two little boys with her, twins, and she had her begging cup out making her way from table to table. I had already gotten a two euro coin out, figuring I could stand to burn off some karma. But when she got to my table, she dropped her cup on the ground, and all her coins rolled out. She just stared at me.
The little boys grabbed for the money, but she just kept staring. I was getting kind of creeped out, so finally I held out that two-euro coin, thinking it might make her go away, and she pulled back like she was horrified.
“Perdido,” she whispered as she grabbed the little boys. “Nunca descansara.” Then she ran. One of the waiters caught this exchange, and I figured I’d ask him, but he ran inside and I didn’t see him again. So here I am, day one in Spain, and I’m cursed, it would seem. Perdido means lost, and the rest of it – “you’ll never rest.”
June 11, 2011
Segovia, Peru
Leon Samples
Sorry to hear that you’re cursed, Bruce. That’s a tough break. But I want you to know that if anything happens to you, I’ll take good care of Michelle. Nights can be lonely when a loved one passes, but I’ll help her through them.
More to the point, your girlfriend has ordered me to do this blog thing, and she’s the boss, so here goes: My name is Leon Samples. I’m a grad student working on my Ph.D. in historical archaeology. I’m writing from this horrific little land reform town on the Peruvian coast, where Cyrus has brought me to toil like a slave.
Cyrus is my dissertation advisor and I have to do everything he says. Otherwise he’ll never sign off on my dissertation. He told me that himself. But before he can sign off on my dissertation, I have to write it. And before I can do that, I have to dig up some things to write about. Luckily, Michelle moves me from one excavation unit to another, driving me like a mule.
It’s close to midnight here, and I’m the only one still up. We archaeologists may play hard, drink copiously, and party mightily, but we go to bed early. I’d go to bed too, but I haven’t been sleeping well. And I’m pissed off, because I had to take the car into town this afternoon to get supplies. So instead of sitting around drinking beer and staring at Kim Castillo, which is my favorite thing to do, I had to buy thirty gallons of diesel for the generator, and four chickens for dinner. I’m a man of many talents, more than one woman has confided, but I’ll be damned if I’m a good judge of chickens. Dinner was tough, and I was blamed.
And if that isn’t bad enough, my eyes are killing me. We’ve been down here for four months already, and not a day goes by without another sandstorm. The wind blows so hard that the sand gets inside your eyes. Seriously, my eyeballs feel like those little snow globes that you shake up. If I stand up too fast, it looks like Kim Castillo is hiding behind a wall of snow.
And if that isn’t bad enough, there’s somebody walking around outside the gate, and it’s starting to creep me out. We’re living in this crazy mansion down here in the middle of nowhere. They built it as an archaeological research facility in the eighties but then it was abandoned until Cyrus trained his learned eye on it. Now we rent it.
It has three bedrooms and a giant living room, and a huge kitchen that is the province of our wonderful caretaker/cook/majordomo. I’ve forgotten his name, but presumably he has some living quarters back behind the kitchen. I’m not sure; I’ve never been back there.
The whole place is walled, and when that gate closes at dusk, Cyrus locks it tight with his giant key, and he won’t open it for anyone. I asked him about this when we first got here, and he says it has to do with local superstitions. Night visitors are not the kind of folks you want to entertain. Then I asked our caretaker, and he told me that the men who cut cane all day long get rowdy at night, and they drink. Peru is filled with retired and semi-retired guerillas, and some are not averse to the occasional temp job.
But I’m not buying it. I’ve been known to drink and get rowdy myself, but I don’t walk quietly outside people’s gates dragging my feet. I’m going to try a little experiment.
voice activation mode: enabled
indiv 1: OK, so I turned on the recorder. This is still me, Leon, or indiv 1 as my loved ones call me. I am carrying the laptop outside to see if you can hear what I’m talking about.
indiv 1: No, that was just the door opening. I’m now standing on the driveway and I’m walking towards the gate. The moon is full so I can see clearly but there’s no window or peephole on the gate, so I won’t be able to see out. And like I said, it’s locked with a key, but let’s see if we can hear something.
indiv 1: I can hear you out there. Can you hear me? Oiga, no me oigas? Quien es usted? I’m trying to get some response. I swear there are two guys standing right on the other side of the gate but they won’t say anything. There’s a little crack just above the hinge that I can kind of see through but I don’t see anyone.
indiv 1: Sorry. Holy shit. I just dropped the laptop. Sorry. Fucking guy just looked back at me. I’m looking out through the crack and a second later, this guy’s eye is right there looking back at me. I’m like completely shaking right now. OK, I’m going to take another peek.
indiv 2: No los atormenta.
indiv 1: That was just me jumping out of my skin. You want me to have a heart attack? Don’t sneak up on me. I was just trying to see who was out here. What do you mean, atormenta? I wasn’t tormenting anyone. I was just trying to see who it is.
indiv 1: For those of you out there in internet land, our caretaker just snuck up and scared the crap out of me. Seriously, he’s going to have some cleaning up to do out here in the morning. You’re going to need the big mop, my caretaking friend. What the hell? Who is out there? There are at least two of them. And don’t tell me they’re drunk cane cutters. They’re not.
indiv 1: OK, he’s pulling me back into the house, seriously. Come on, man, give me a break. Who are they? Hello? Great, now he’s not saying anything.
indiv 2: No los atormenta.
voice activation mode: disabled
I’m back in the house now. The door is locked, so I guess I’m in for the night. I’m a little concerned, I have to say. Tomorrow morning, I’m going to share some choice words with Cyrus. Then I’m going to sit back and stare at Kim Castillo until my heart rate returns to the other kind of elevated.
June 12, 2011
Segovia, Per
u
Michelle Cavalcante
I miss you, Bruce. I know this is a public document, so I won’t focus on my feelings, but damn, you’re so far away. It feels like Tordecillas, when the Pope cut the world in half, you over there and me here. I hope you will keep in mind that the axis of your young world revolves around Peru.
Peru is where your employer employs, where your studies evolve, where your dreams take you, and where your drop-dead gorgeous fiancée misses you. I’ve had two Pisco Sours tonight, and three Cuzqueña beers. They’re disgusting beverages, raw local toxins blended by demons of old. I can barely breathe after a swallow. But the Pisco Sours were nice. What can I say, Bruce? I’m trashed.
But damn if you didn’t leave just when it started to get interesting. We got ourselves out to the site at six this morning as usual, except Leon was hung over and yammering about some nightmare, and then he fell asleep as soon as we get there. Cyrus was in a huff because some of our artifact bags got moved around. You know how we leave them out at night if we’re in the middle of a unit? Yeah, well they weren’t where we left them. It doesn’t look like anything was taken, but someone was having a look at our stuff while we slept.
Anyway, Kim and I started digging, and we got down a meter and a half under the north wall of the sacristy, and then the soil went sterile. No pottery, no guinea pig bones, just nothing. And I’ll tell you something, Bruce, I was ready to call it. But Kim, bless her little graduate-student heart, started in on how it didn’t feel right. It was too clean. Then I saw what she meant. It was pristine, just sand for twenty centimeters, no garbage at all. There wasn’t so much as a twig or a strand of fabric. Just sand.
So I woke Leon up, and I had him come over to chop through it with the pickaxe. I use him like that. He might not be bright but he’s strong, and if you tell him something loud enough, and perhaps demonstrate, he often gets the idea. So he shoveled through another thirty centimeters, and it was more of the same. Fuck it, he said, in that rudimentary speech-like way he has of communicating. So Kim and I jumped back into the pit, and we weren’t there half a minute before Kim troweled down on this board, on this piece of frigging wood. I swear it is pine, actual pine.
So we traced the edges and dug a little deeper and we saw that we had a box. It has writing on it but it’s so faded we can’t read anything except the word “Extremadura” and it has a drawing of a bottle. Cyrus thinks it was from a sherry producer in Extremadura, so probably it would have held a couple of bottles of sherry back in the day.
As you can imagine, we were more than a little excited. We brought the box to the lab and watched as Cyrus and Leon pried open the top. Guess what was inside? A Minoan cup? Roman coins? Even better…paper. It looks part of a journal. It’s unbound, just a stack of pages wrapped in a larger page. There are wormholes everywhere, so it’s not in great shape. But it’s definitely some kind of coherent text we’re looking at. Cyrus has it in the study right now. He says there are twenty-three pages, but most of them you can’t read. It looks like five distinct dated entries. Kim is going to work on translating them.
So here’s what we have so far, sweetheart…stop all your work, get to the Archive, and see what you can do with this. The document is signed Fr. Sebastiano XXX. No last name, just three Xs, which is odd. Maybe the good priest didn’t want anyone to know he wrote it. Anyway, see if you can get any hits on that. Cyrus wants to get some UV lights to get a clearer look at the ink. And then, one word in bold cursive script – MALEUS – and what looks like part of an M. We don’t know what comes after that word because the paper has rotted away, but geez, you have to be impressed. Maleus even sounds evil. Cyrus thinks it might be part of an old European handbook for dealing with witches.
Cyrus is here but he doesn’t want to say anything. He’s showing me this one line, and his transcription. It looks pretty good. Here’s what it says, Bruce, “Padre, Padre, me persiguen.” Father, father, they’re following me. So there’s your work for tomorrow, my love. See if you can crosscheck some sixteenth century friars out of Extremadura to figure out what ol’ Sebastiano is afraid of. Maybe he knows where all that Inca gold is, and he’s afraid the conquistadors are coming for him!!!!
Cyrus Sanderson
age:
64
occupation:
professor of archaeology, Yale University; director of excavations, Segovia, Peru
education:
P.h.D. University of Chicago
personal:
twice divorced, maintains an apartment in New Haven, Connecticut with sociology graduate student Macy Newman, age 28
hometown:
Sheboygan, Wisconsin
hobbies:
watching college football
food/bev:
steak/Scotch
life goal:
retire with academic integrity intact
fav movie:
High Plains Drifter
obscurity:
disappeared for four months in 1992, suspected nervous breakdown, enjoys renovating old barns
June 12, 2011
Segovia, Peru
Cyrus Sanderson
http://www.CyrusSanderson.blogspace9.ex
Can all my personal archaeologists, historians, technicians, and other academics who I own, please focus on work. The blog is nice, I’ll admit, and in saying that, I’m lying. I think we should do our work first and then publish our findings later.
You all think differently, I understand. It’s a whole new world of information, of access, you tell me. And that may be the case, but I’m the only one of us not employed by me. And if any of you junior scholars ever want a real job, you’re going to need some publications. So let’s dig some dirt first and write some papers later.
Furthermore, as we are now unearthing some artifacts that can be deemed “sensitive” or “controversial” or “downright problematic,” we might be wise to clamp down on the information lid. There are people out there, folks, who might be paying attention. Are you sure we want that?
June 13, 2011
Seville, Spain
Bruce Wheeler
Guys, it’s about seven in the morning here and I’m terrified. I just got back to the apartment and I need to get all this down before I have a stroke. I apologize in advance; I haven’t gotten to any of your notes yet. I probably won’t get to it today either because I’m not leaving the apartment.
I spent yesterday morning wandering the old city. I walked around the cathedral and then visited the Alcazar, the giant fortress of the Moors. I spent about three hours meandering through all the palace rooms and gardens. And the whole time, I had this suspicion that someone was watching me. I didn’t see anybody, but I could feel it.
Anyway, it was really hot out, and I think I might have spent too much time in the sun, so I went back to the apartment and took a nap. Next thing I know, it’s 10:00 at night. I hadn’t had anything to eat, so I figured I’d head out. The old city is a maze of narrow streets and paths, too small to get a car through, you’d think, but people manage. And it’s easy to get lost because there are so many twists and turns. It took me about six minutes to lose my way. Everything looked just a little different at night. And it was also deserted, all closed up, being Sunday.
So I kept walking, trying to find my way to some main street that I recognized, when I heard laughter coming from up ahead. Good, I told myself, I’ll catch up and ask whoever is laughing how to get out of the maze. So I started walking faster, turning down one little lane after another, but the laughter seemed always to be up ahead. Finally, I started running, and when I turned the next corner, I nearly ran into those two little gypsy twins, the boys from the restaurant a couple of days ago. They pointed at me and then they bolted. I didn’t know what to make of it, but it was definitely creepy.
At that point, I was really lost. I was in a part of the old city I hadn’t been to before, and the paths were really narrow. So I figured I would turn back the way I came, but when I turned aro
und, I saw two guys standing behind me. They were gypsies, no question about it. Dingy looking guys in their fifties, they were smoking, and they were coming right at me.
“What do you want?” I shouted, but they didn’t answer. I tried it in Spanish too, but they kept coming. I ran. I followed the path as it turned, and I ran right into the side of a white Mercedes which was blocking the path. The back door opened and this old guy stepped out. He was a gypsy too, that much was clear by the beads and the pom-poms in the car, but he was dressed nice in a white suit and a cape. He was smoking too. Meanwhile, the other two were right behind me.
I was scared to death, certain that they were going to rob me or worse. “I’ll call for the police,” I told him. I should have said it in Spanish, being in Spain, but it didn’t occur to me. I spun around to face the others. “Don’t you touch me,” I yelled.
“They’re not going to touch you,” the man by the car said. “To them, you are mahrime, polluted, as are all non-Rom. It would take weeks to purify themselves, to remove your filth.”
“What do you want?” I kind of wedged myself up into a doorway so that I could keep an eye on all three of them. “Who are you? What do you mean ‘my filth?’”
“We’ll start with who you are,” he said. “There’s something special about you, isn’t there? My granddaughter smelled it on you. And you frightened my grandsons.” He leaned against the car.
The Mummies of Blogspace9 Page 2