Free The Lost Origin by Matilde Asensi Page A

aback, while she walked noisily over the wood, dragged chairs, opened and closed the closet doors, and started up the music again by pushing the button on my night table; if she didn’t dance on my head it was because shewas more than fifty years old, but she would have had she been able. “I thought maybe you didn’t like the dinner I prepared, so I’ve brought you the same breakfast as always: orange juice, tea with milk, and toast.”
    “Thanks.” I mumbled from beneath the pillow.
    “How was your brother last night?”
    I didn’t know what the hell she was doing, but the squeaks, thumps, and various noises continued.
    “The same.”
    “I’m sorry,” she said in a pained voice. Magdalena was already working for me when Daniel was still living with me.
    “Today we should start to see the results of the treatment.”
    “Your mother already told me this morning.”
    Bam! Garden doors opened wide and a draft of cool air entered like a hurricane into the room. Why the hell did I have a temperature control and air circulation system in the whole house? According the Magdalena, for no reason. Good thing the day was nice and it was almost the beginning of summer; even so, I began to sneeze over and over, which ended up waking me up completely when I found myself needing to retrieve a tissue from the box on the night table. Being a technologically evolved urbanite had its inconveniences, and one of them was the acquired incapacity to face nature bare-chested, as I was at that moment, since I was only wearing my pajama shorts.
    I ate my breakfast quickly while looking over the selection of headlines that Núria sent to the screen in my room every morning, and just as I was, without even washing my face, I headed toward the study—ample concept that encompassed office as well as video game room—ready to give myself a crash course on Incan culture.
    “Find Jabba,” I told the computer, as I walked down the hall. A second later, Jabba’s neutral voice greeted me when I entered the study. “Are you downstairs?” I asked, sitting in my chair and picking up a paper clip which I started to twist between my fingers.
    “Where else would I be?” he retorted.
    “I need your help and Proxi’s.”
    “What’s going on?” he asked, alarmed. “How’s Daniel?”
    “This morning he was the same. No change.” My loose, disheveled hair was bothering me, so I twisted it up on my head and contained it inside an old Barcelona Dragons cap. For a month, I’d had the tickets for the game that coming Saturday against the Rhen Fire of Düsseldorf, in the Olympic Stadium in Montjuïc, but the way things were going, I very much feared that I wouldn’t be able to attend. “I need a favor.”
    “What is it?”
    “I have a ton of books in front of me that I have to look through before going to the hospital.”
    “I don’t suppose you’d want me to read them for you.”
    “Don’t be dense. That’s not it.”
    “So get to it, I have work to do.”
    “I release you from it. You have the afternoon off, and Proxi too.”
    “Great. Just so happens we’ve been needing to buy a sofa. Thanks, bye.”
    “Wait, you ass!” I yelled, smiling. “You can’t go.”
    “Oh, no? So why’d you give me the afternoon off?”
    “So you can research something for me. I need you and Proxi to find everything there is onthe internet about an Incan language called Aymara.”
    The profoundest of silences reigned in my study, so profound that it was almost a deep hole. I started to drum my fingers on the desk as an auditory signal of impatience, but even then he didn’t answer. At last, I lost my patience.
    “You there, you idiot?”
    “No,” he responded without hanging up.
    “Come on! It’s not that hard!”
    “Oh, no?” he exclaimed in his bellowing voice. “But I didn’t even understand what you said! How in the hell do you want me to research it?”
    “Because you’re good. We all know that.”
    “Come on, don’t try to