A Luminous Republic Page 13
But if someone had written the word “whore,” then there had also been love: the enormity of one required the viciousness of the other, I thought, trying to breathe. I felt the need to cling to this idea as though to a raft. And if love had existed (it didn’t matter in what form), then something had remained intact. Physical love, the love of camaraderie, sexual love in all of its awkward and no doubt tentative primal expressions, had to have existed there; wasn’t the word “whore” undeniable proof of that? Now I didn’t know what to think. I was like someone who’s dropped something of great value—a ring, a diamond—on the beach, in a dune, and begins combing through it, parting the sand here and there with their fingers, so desperate to find it that they think the tiniest glimmer must be the ring, but no. As time passes and the object doesn’t appear, they reproach themselves for the search itself, because the search caused it to become lost; had their fingers not combed so insistently through the sand, it wouldn’t have gotten buried, wouldn’t now be irretrievable. The determined, melancholic existence of the word soiled the expression of love, making it self-absorbed and empty. The word “whore” made everything disappear, which is why I kept doggedly mining it. There had been a time—I knew this, knew it with a certainty that shocked me—when the children were there but that word was not yet written on the wall. The days must have been slow, but also contained, as they gazed up, cars driving back and forth (because cars drove over the manholes, making shadows spin throughout the chamber and giving it the quality of a blink), but the word “whore” made everything vanish—WHORE, in Spanish, in a child’s trembling hand, the W smaller than the H, the E sort of closed, its foot curving up and in.
People will think I’m fabricating. Above the word “whore” was what looked like a cot. And on it a shadow, the shadow of a presence slightly larger than the others, almost the length of a teenage girl. And white tennis shoes, or shoes that had once been white, and a thick green T-shirt with butterflies. (The whore’s T-shirt, I thought; the whore’s tennis shoes.) The word “whore” was the place where the children had gone wrong, gotten lost, the place their community had broken down. What had they thought, those children? That they couldn’t go wrong simply by virtue of being children? And there we were, the adults, walking through, engrossed, unspeaking, gazing up and down, crouching over piles of clothing and remnants of canned food, feeling the anguish that was now totally unavoidable, because they’d failed and there was nothing to be done about it.
Someone began to cry, weeping in that graceless way adults do when they feel all hope is lost. No one bothered to console them; we were all too engrossed. That was when I turned and found myself face-to-face with Antonio Lara. In his hand he was clutching a blue T-shirt so tightly that I knew it must have been his son’s.
“They’re not here,” he said.
But he wasn’t talking to me. He denied to avoid believing, in the hope that reality would come and say, That’s not true. He wasn’t the only parent. Pablo Flores was there too, and Matilda Serra and Luis Azaola, parents of the children who had disappeared during the Plaza Casado episode. They were easy to spot, because on reaching the pentagon they’d sought one another out and walked as a compact group, rummaging through the clothes and objects left behind on the niches.
“They’re not here,” he repeated. Then, still looking at me, he shouted: “Antonio!!”
He shouted “Antonio” as loud as he could, and there came a hollow silence that made our blood run cold. Then he crouched down and, leaning over a tiny hole, a hole barely large enough to fit a cat, he shouted again: “Antonio!!” Pablo Flores, who was next to him, shouted “Pablo!” and then a woman shouted “Teresa!” And at that point the three names being shouted blended together: Antonio, Pablo, Teresa, maybe some other names as well. I began shouting myself. I don’t think any of us truly believed this would make them appear, but our shouting produced a familiar, liberating effect—this was our language, our logic. Our cries were like cries of horror. Was it then that I understood, or was it later? There came an eerie pause. Perhaps only a few minutes went by. We got up and kept searching, walking back toward the corridors we’d emerged from and then turning back around. The shouting began again. Then the silence. A weary silence, detached, like what astronauts must feel in space, a silence unrelated to human life. All that could be heard was the electric clicking of some sort of meter and the oceanlike sound of the cars driving over our heads. I looked for Antonio Lara and found him sitting, covering his face with that T-shirt.
I was surprised when I looked at my watch; we’d been confined there nearly an hour and a half. When it seemed as though we would spend the rest of our lives underground, Amadeo Roque abruptly rose, leaned against one of the niches and shouted that we had to get out of there, that they’d radioed in to say there was a malfunction, something about pressure in the pipes, and it could be dangerous. Nobody was unwilling. In some interviews people say that a few of the parents had to be dragged out, but that is far from the truth. In fact, I’d dare say they were the first to leave. They did so with a slow and uncertain sadness, and I remember that when the four overhead manholes were opened, the bright light was so intense that each of us covered ourselves, as if an evil spirit had stolen our ability to tolerate the sun.
I was one of the last to leave. Nearly everybody was out by the time we heard the cracking sound. And after that crack came an anxious voice, and then a whistle, and after the whistle an unmistakable explosion, an explosion that made the floor tremble like a drum skin.
The Eré River’s water is not always brown. On particularly sunny days (and I imagine it also depends on other factors I couldn’t identify) it can be a beautiful emerald color. Many people choose to believe that the day the San Cristóbal children drowned, this was the color of the water, but I know full well that when we emerged from the underground sewer, hearts pounding out of our chests, convinced we were about to be electrocuted, what came rushing behind us was an enormous, dense brown regurgitation. The Eré’s water is like moving earth, and a beautiful Ñeê legend says that one day, tired of forever seeing the same landscape, the earth went for a walk and thus was born the river.
Many people claim to have heard the children screaming. I was there and cannot say the same. I know what everyone knows at this point: that they became trapped in the lower corridor, where they’d hidden to escape from us, and that it was them—their weight, specifically—that caused the sluice gate to crack, which triggered the flood. They’d slithered through a canal hardly more than a foot and a half tall and into an old repository where they could see us in their chamber. They’d seen us. It’s difficult to rid oneself of that notion, that the children were watching us the entire time without saying a word. It’s like feeling the pressure of someone’s hand on you long after they’ve removed it. Had we kept quiet for a few more seconds, perhaps we’d have heard them whispering, but we were too noisy in our exclamations of surprise, our cries of anguish. I know some of the parents—Pablo Flores among them—have claimed that at a certain point they “felt” the children’s eyes. I cannot say the same. I didn’t feel them at the time; it’s now that I do, although more than a judgment or a respite, I feel them as a secret. At first it frightened me, but later it changed and became more of a protective gaze, hazy and sentimental. At times I’m even overcome by the impossible feeling that I can see myself there, in that place, awed by the reflections of so many shards of colored glass, as if for a second I could see myself through their eyes.
But the image of all of those children drowning in that brown water is still hard to bear. After a weeklong investigation, experts concluded that the flood had been so quick that the children had no time to return to the upper level. They’d tried to go back the way they came, but the opening was so narrow and the water pressure so intense that they didn’t even get close. The forensics report states that it took eight to ten minutes for them to die by drowning. River water flooded their lungs first, and then, by osmosis, entered thei
r bloodstreams. In my ignorance I had always believed that this was the point at which any death by drowning occurred; I didn’t realize that what causes death is that once water enters the blood, it dilutes it, and this is in fact what causes the cells to burst. This image of bursting cells troubled me for some time, but in the end this too receded, like so many other things that have troubled me in life: the image of Maia, rigid and afraid, taking her last breath; the day I happened upon Antonio Lara with the girl, sitting in a café chatting; the first time after my wife’s death that a woman said she loved me.
Even where the most private of secrets are confided, there is always room to resist, something that goes unconfessed, some tiny sign or gesture that embodies whatever is withheld. I try now to think about what the city of San Cristóbal withheld from the thirty-two, despite the statue (which was inevitably hideous) erected in their honor in Plaza 16 de Diciembre; despite the newspaper tributes duly lavished on them every March 19 for the first five years and thereafter only every other; and despite the dozens of articles, documentaries and works of art infused with equal parts guilt, bad taste and a good dose of truth.
It doesn’t surprise me that Jerónimo Valdés would refuse to discuss the matter, or that after two or three stints in prison he decided, one fine day, to vanish forever and ended up who knows where. I’ve often thought that when I first came across him in the jungle he also was running away from the other children, and that running and violence were in his nature, just as it is in the nature of the river Eré to sweep away everything in its path. There is, however, one thing that remains, a kind of music. Sometimes it comes to me in the middle of the street, if I’m returning home very late, or when I go out for a stroll; I hear it as if it were coming up through the ground, through my feet, as though the whispered conversations and secrets of the thirty-two were still humming underfoot. But then even that recedes. It may be true that the dead betray us when they abandon us, but we too betray them in order to live.
About the Author
© Eduardo Cabrera
Andrés Barba is the award-winning author of numerous books, including Such Small Hands and The Right Intention. He was a Granta Best Young Spanish Novelist and received the Premio Herralde for A Luminous Republic, which will be translated into twenty languages.
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