A Luminous Republic Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Foreword

  A Luminous Republic

  About the Author

  Connect with HMH

  First U.S. edition

  Copyright © 2017 by Andrés Barba

  English translation copyright © 2020 by Lisa Dillman

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  hmhbooks.com

  Originally published in Spanish by Editorial Anagrama as República luminosa, 2017

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Barba, Andrés, 1975– author. | Dillman, Lisa, translator.

  Title: A luminous republic / Andrés Barba ; translated by Lisa Dillman.

  Other titles: República luminosa. English

  Description: First U.S. edition. | Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019. | “Originally published in Spanish by Editorial Anagrama as República luminosa, 2017”—Title page verso.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019024939 (print) | LCCN 2019024940 (ebook) | ISBN 9781328589347 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780358274254 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781328589118 (ebook) | ISBN 9780358311218 | ISBN 9780358307068

  Subjects: LCSH: Feral children—Fiction. | Argentina—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PQ6652.A654 R4613 2017 (print) | LCC PQ6652.A654 (ebook) | DDC 863/.64—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019024939

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019024940

  Cover illustration by Carly Miller

  Cover design by Mark R. Robinson

  Author photograph © Eduardo Cabrera

  v1.0320

  For Carmen,

  who is made of red earth

  I am two things which cannot be ridiculous: a child and a savage.

  —PAUL GAUGUIN

  Foreword

  Edmund White

  Andrés Barba’s A Luminous Republic is one of the best books I’ve ever read (and I’ve read lots of books, thousands and thousands in my eighty years). Straight men in the seventies would always begin an article “I, a heterosexual,” if they reviewed and liked one of my books. Let me just as comically say, “Barba, a platonic friend, a heterosexual married man,” since my name, if known at all, can be a curse in some circles. We live in such a barbarous age of identity politics one can’t be too explicit.

  I suppose a Hollywood hack pitching this novel would say: Lord of the Flies meets Heart of Darkness. That would give only the crudest suggestion of this miraculous book, which is at once so strong and delicate that music alone comes to mind as a correlative—in Marianne Moore’s line, “Like Gieseking playing Scarlatti,” or more like Michelangeli playing Debussy—powerful chords hammered out amidst the most feathery ornaments.

  What on earth am I talking about?

  This is a story that takes place in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, narrated by a youngish widower who arrived twenty years earlier, on April 13, 1993, as a civil servant with his wife and her daughter in San Cristóbal, a small mythical city in South America bordering the jungle. There is an air of magic, black and white, lingering around every page of this epic novel of 192 pages, like gun smoke after a shootout. I say “epic” because it feels as full, as dense with duration, as if it were 1,000 pages long but can be read in an evening.

  It is about a provincial city where “wild” children, speaking their own language and seemingly without a leader, children between the ages of seven and thirteen, appear to be given over to joy and freedom. Where do they live? No one knows. Are they peaceful? It seems so, until they stab to death two adults in a raid on a supermarket “because of some glut of euphoria and ineptitude.” They aren’t just hungry; they are anarchic. When the city gives baskets of food to the city’s poorest citizens on Christmas Eve, the children rip them open and scatter the treats.

  This is the world that most rebellious children fantasize about. They’re elusive, triumphant, opposed to the dull order that hangs over the city, erotic if not yet sexual.

  Early on, we the readers are warned that all thirty-two of these jungle boys and girls will die, though we don’t yet know why or how.

  If portraits are paintings where something is wrong with the mouth, novels are usually books where something is wrong with the end.

  Not this one! The ending is one of the most transcendent and beautiful I know of, a perfect dénouement but also as visually resplendent as Gozzoli’s Procession of the Magi in Florence.

  Most writers lose touch with childhood. Since I read Spanish badly, I can’t claim to be a Barba completist, but the books I’ve read in English deal with children as wise as they are cruel, even perverse. Andrés Barba was born in 1975. He studied philosophy in university and can write thoughtful observations: “The world of childhood was crushing us with its preconceived notions, which is why a large part of the irritation people felt for the thirty-two had less to do with whether it was natural for children to have perpetrated an act of violence than it did with the rage triggered by the fact those very children had not confirmed their sugar-coated stereotypes of childhood.”

  Barba has written many books, including poetry, and translated more, including Moby-Dick and Alice in Wonderland. He won the Premio Herralde for this novel, which will be translated into twenty languages. A Luminous Republic shows a childhood of freedom and anarchy. (How Nietzsche would have loved this novel!) This is a book at once heavy and light, Caliban and Ariel, somber and comic. It will open your eyes.

  EDMUND WHITE has written thirty books, including the forthcoming A Saint from Texas.

  A

  Luminous

  Republic

  When I’m asked about the thirty-two children who lost their lives in San Cristóbal, my response varies depending on the age of my interlocutor. If we’re the same age, I say that understanding is simply a matter of piecing together that which was previously seen as disjointed; if they’re younger, I ask if they believe in bad omens. Almost always they’ll say no, as if doing so would mean they had little regard for freedom. I ask no more questions and then tell them my version of events, because this is all I have and because it would be pointless to try to convince them that believing, or not, is less about their regard for freedom than their naïve faith in justice. If I were a little more forthright or a little less of a coward, I’d always begin my story the same way: Almost everyone gets what they deserve, and bad omens do exist. Oh, they most certainly do.

  The day I arrived in San Cristóbal, twenty years ago now, I was a young civil servant with the Department of Social Affairs in Estepí who’d just been promoted. In the space of a few years I’d gone from being a skinny kid with a law degree to a recently married man whose happiness gave him a slightly more attractive air than he no doubt would otherwise have had. Life struck me as a simple series of adversities, relatively easy to overcome, which led to a death that was perhaps not simple but was inevitable and thus didn’t merit thinking about. I didn’t realize, back then, that in fact that was what happiness was, what youth was and what death was. And although I wasn’t in essence mistaken about anything, I was making mistakes about everything. I’d fallen in love with a violin teacher from San Cristóbal who was three years my senior, mother of a nine-year-old girl. They were both named Maia and both had intense eyes, tiny noses and brown lips that I thought were the pinnacle of beauty. At times I felt they’d chosen me during some secret meet
ing, and I was so happy to have fallen for the pair of them that when I was offered the opportunity to transfer to San Cristóbal, I ran to Maia’s house to tell her and asked her to marry me then and there.

  I was offered the post because, two years earlier in Estepí, I had developed a social integration program for indigenous communities. The idea was simple and the program proved to be an effective model; it consisted of granting the indigenous exclusive rights to farm certain specific products. For that city we chose oranges and then tasked the indigenous community with supplying almost five thousand people. The program nearly descended into chaos when it came to distribution, but in the end the community rallied and after a period of readjustment created a small and very solvent cooperative which to this day is, to a large degree, self-financing.

  The program was so successful that the state government contacted me through the Commission of Indigenous Settlements, requesting that I reproduce it with San Cristóbal’s three thousand Ñeê inhabitants. They offered me housing and a managerial post in the Department of Social Affairs. In no time, Maia had started giving classes at the small music school in her hometown once more. She wouldn’t admit it, but I knew that she was eager to return as a prosperous woman to the city she’d been forced by necessity to leave. The post even covered the girl’s schooling (I always referred to her as “the girl,” and when speaking to her directly, simply “girl”) and offered a salary that would allow us to begin saving. What more could I have asked for? I struggled to contain my joy and asked Maia to tell me about the jungle, the river Eré, the streets of San Cristóbal . . . When she spoke, I felt as if I were heading deeper and deeper into thick, suffocating vegetation before abruptly coming upon a heavenly Eden. My imagination may not have been particularly creative, but no one can say I wasn’t optimistic.

  We arrived in San Cristóbal on April 13, 1993. The heat was muggy and intense and the sky completely clear. As we drove into town in our old station wagon, I saw in the distance for the first time the vast brown expanse of water that was the river Eré and San Cristóbal’s jungle, an impenetrable green monster. I was unaccustomed to the subtropical climate and my body had been covered in sweat from the moment we got off the highway and took the red sand road leading to the city. The drive from Estepí (nearly a thousand kilometers) had sunk my spirits into a deep state of melancholy. Arrival had, at first, been dreamlike, but then abruptly taken on the ever harsh contours of poverty. I’d been expecting the province to be poor, but true poverty resembles the imagined sort very little. At the time I didn’t yet know that in the jungle poverty is leveled, that the jungle normalizes and, in a sense, erases it. One of the city’s mayors said that the problem with San Cristóbal is that the sordid is always but a small step from the picturesque. This is quite literally true. Ñeê children’s features are very photogenic despite—or perhaps because of—the grime, and the subtropical climate encourages the magical thinking that their condition is somehow inevitable. To put it another way: a man can fight another man, but not a torrent or an electrical storm.

  But I’d also noticed something else from the station wagon window: that San Cristóbal’s poverty could be stripped to the bone. The colors were flat, vital and insanely bright: the jungle’s intense green, which ran up to the road like a wall of vegetation, the earth’s brilliant red, the blue sky so dazzling it forced you into a constant squint, the dense brown of the river Eré extending four kilometers shore to shore—all of it signaling so clearly that I had nothing in my mental repertoire with which to compare all that I was then seeing for the first time.

  When we reached San Cristóbal we went to city hall for the keys to our house, and a civil servant came along in the station wagon to show us the way. We were nearly there when suddenly I saw, less than two meters away, a huge German shepherd mix. The feeling I got—no doubt induced by exhaustion from the trip—was almost phantasmagorical; it was as though, rather than having crossed the street, the dog had simply materialized in the middle of it, out of nowhere. There was no time to brake. I gripped the wheel as tightly as I could, felt the impact in my hands and heard a sound that no one who has heard it could ever forget—that of a body slamming into the bumper. We jumped out of the car. It was a female dog, badly injured, panting and avoiding our eyes as if ashamed of something.

  Maia bent over her and stroked her back, and the dog responded with a slight wag of her tail. We decided to take her straight to a veterinarian, and on the way, in the same station wagon that had hit her, I got the feeling that this wild stray was two contradictory things at once: a benign presence and a terrible omen, a friend welcoming me to the city but also a messenger delivering alarming news. It struck me that even Maia’s face had changed since our arrival, and was now both more common—never had I seen so many women who looked like her—and more concentrated; her skin looked softer and at the same time tougher, her expression both harder and less rigid. Maia had put the dog on her lap and blood had begun to soak her pants. The girl was in the back seat, eyes glued to the wound. Every time the car drove over a pothole the dog turned and let out a musical whimper.

  They say either you have San Cristóbal in your blood or you don’t, a cliché used for hometowns all over the world, but here it has a less mundane and more extraordinary dimension. Because, of course, blood is exactly what has to acclimatize to San Cristóbal, what must change temperature and succumb to the force of the jungle, of the river. The Eré itself, all four kilometers wide, has often struck me as a vast river of blood, and there are trees in this part of the country whose sap is so dark it’s almost impossible to think of them as plants. Blood courses through everything, it fills everything. Beneath the green jungle, beneath the brown river, beneath the red earth there is always blood, a blood that flows and completes things.

  My baptism, therefore, was literal. When we got to the veterinarian, the dog had almost no chance and, as I carried her in my arms, I became soaked with a viscous liquid that turned black upon contact with my clothes and gave off a repulsive saline odor. Maia insisted on getting the wound on the dog’s hindquarters stitched up and having her leg put in a cast, and the animal closed her eyes as if to say she had no intention of putting up any more fight. Her closed eyes seemed to flit nervously beneath their lids, like humans when they dream. I tried to imagine what she might be seeing, what kind of wild jungle adventure she might be reproducing in her brain, and wished for her recovery and survival as if my own safety here were largely dependent on it. I approached her and put a hand on her hot snout in the belief, maybe even the conviction, that she would understand me and stay with us.

  Two hours later the dog was on the patio of our house, eyes watering, and the girl was making her a plate of rice and leftovers. We sat together and I told her to come up with a name. The girl scrunched up her nose—her natural expression when dramatizing indecision—and said, “Moira.” And that’s still her name as she dozes a few feet from me all these years later, an old dog lying in the corridor. Moira. Considering that, against all predictions, she has outlived half the family, perhaps it’s not so unlikely that she’ll outlive us all. Only now do I understand her message.

  Each time I try to recall how those first few years in San Cristóbal played out, what comes to mind is a piece Maia always struggled with on the violin: “The Last Rose of Summer,” by Heinrich Wilhelm Ernst, a sort of traditional Irish ditty that had also been set to music by Beethoven and Britten and in which, it would seem, two separate realities can be heard: one, a somewhat sentimental melody, and the other a staggering display of technique. The contrast between San Cristóbal and the jungle was akin to those two realities: the first, the utterly relentless, utterly inhuman reality of the jungle, and the other a simple truth, one that was perhaps less true but certainly more practical, one we managed to live with.

  It must be said that San Cristóbal was no great surprise: a provincial city of two hundred thousand, with its traditional families (known here as “old” families, as thoug
h some families were actually more aged than others), its political imbroglios and its subtropical torpor. I adapted to it better and more quickly that I had imagined. Within a few months, I was fighting like a local: battling staff absenteeism, the impunity of certain politicians and the type of provincial dilemmas that more often than not are inherited, convoluted and unsolvable. Maia, in addition to offering classes at the music school, was also teaching a few of San Cristóbal’s well-to-do young señoritas, arrogant and nearly always very attractive girls. She’d rekindled her friendship with two or three women who fell silent as tombs if ever I walked in but whose voices I could always hear, talking over one another, as I approached. Like Maia, they were classical music teachers of Ñeê origin, and together they had formed a string trio. They held recitals—in the city and nearby towns—whose resounding success had less to do with their being good performers, perhaps, than it did with the fact that they were the only ones giving them.

  What had for years struck me as an amusing contradiction in my wife’s character—that she should devote herself to classical music yet only consider “real” the kind she could dance to—became perfectly comprehensible to me then. Classical music did not possess (either for her or for anyone else attending their concerts) the quality of music so much as that of stagnation. It was composed according to criteria too distant and by minds too different for this to be any other way, but that didn’t make the audience unsusceptible to its influence. When Maia played those pieces, they wore the same concentrated expressions they’d have worn while listening to a foreign language, one that was particularly seductive and yet nonetheless incomprehensible. Ultimately, the reason Maia devoted herself so passionately to playing and teaching classical music was because she saw it as foreign, and she was incapable of any sentimental attachment to it. For Maia, classical music was something that took place only in the brain, while other types of music—cumbia, salsa, merengue—did so in the body, in the stomach.