A Luminous Republic Read online

  Thirty or so yards away, we saw a woman of about fifty crossing the park with shopping bags. For a second everything froze. I realized that in our minds, both Maia and I were trying to confront the sense that something inevitable was about to occur. The oldest girl stood. Despite her scruffiness, she possessed an almost feline limpidity and the kind of openness of body only seen prior to adolescence. She called the kids around her, and without a word they stood and approached the woman, walking quickly. The oldest girl stopped in front of her and said something. Her head barely reached the woman’s chest, so the woman bent slightly, resting one of her bags on the ground; immediately one of the smaller kids took advantage of this, grabbing the bag and running off.

  Complicity is not the way I’d characterize the situation. There was something too dark, too deep for that, a sort of tacit synchronization. The intuitiveness with which each of these children adopted their role in the choreographed robbery reflected something more than a practice run, a trial. One boy or girl would begin a sentence, another would finish it. When the woman realized they’d stolen one of her bags, she stopped speaking to the oldest girl and turned brusquely, a pause that the girl used to snatch the bag that was still in the woman’s hand. The girl jerked hard, but the woman was unpredictably defiant. Not only did she not let the girl grab her bag, she yanked back so hard that the girl actually fell. Then one of the twins jumped the woman and grabbed her purse, as the other gave a little leap and swung savagely from her hair.

  The poor woman cried out. A cry of pain, to be sure, but more of shock. The hair-yanking was so violent that it brought her to the ground, and the children took advantage of her fall to snatch everything and run off with their booty: the purse and two more grocery bags. When we reached the woman, her face still looked more disconcerted than humiliated. She stared at us, eyes wide as plates. “Did you see that? Did you?”

  From then on we all saw the children regularly—on the street, in the parks, by the river, even in the historic quarter. In general, they roamed in groups of three, four or five—never alone and never in large numbers. The groups were rarely set, though two or three were recognizable: the girl’s group was easy to identify because the other two boys, the ones who so resembled each other, were often with her. Another was comprised of four boys and two girls on the brink of puberty who wore skirts down to their ankles. A third group was made up exclusively of boys who were always accompanied by a dog, a white stray. In the videos that remain from those months, some of the groups are relatively easy to spot, in particular the one with the dog. And in certain pictures from the renowned Wasted Childhood exhibit by photographer Gerardo Cenzana (this being part of the cultural production that helped define the “official version” of the facts), one might get the sense that some of the children are actually “repeated,” faces we were all familiar with, but even this much is hard to claim with any conviction. It may be that the feeling that these particular children were more recognizable was nothing more than a strategy employed by our troubled minds, attempting to establish patterns where in fact none existed.

  But days went by and no one did much about it. I had already begun working on the Ñeê community program and was so busy that I hardly gave the issue any thought. In a sense, the thirty-two now formed part of our daily reality, and only from time to time and in unexpected situations were we struck by the realization that something had changed. For instance: I recall that at the time—I suppose because the book had turned up at home—I was reading the girl The Little Prince at night. As a child I had read it with some interest, but on rereading the book to my daughter I started to feel disgusted, which I found difficult to understand. At first I thought it was the affectedness that bothered me, the whole solitary existence of this boy and his world—the planet, the little scarf rippling in the wind, the fox, the rose—until I realized that this was a downright evil book, a wolf in three layers of sheepskin. The little prince lands on a planet where he meets a fox who says that he can’t play because he hasn’t yet been “tamed.” “What does that mean—tame?” asks the little prince, and after a couple of dodges the fox replies, “It means to establish ties.” “To establish ties?” the little prince asks, even more perplexed, and the fox responds with this extraordinary gem of bad faith: “To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you, I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other.” A few pages further on, standing before a field of roses, the little prince proves he’s learned the cynic’s lesson: “You are not at all like my rose,” he says. “As yet you are nothing. No one has tamed you, and you have tamed no one. You are like my fox when I first knew him. He was only a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But I have made him my friend, and now he is unique in all the world.”

  It still makes me shudder, the way our ingenuousness at the start of the altercations so resembled the ingenuousness that led Saint-Exupéry to write those things. Just like the little prince, we too thought that our individualized love for our children transformed them, that even blindfolded we’d recognize their voices from thousands of other children’s voices. And perhaps the inverse of that serves as confirmation: that the other children who slowly began occupying our streets were more or less indistinguishable versions of the same boy or girl, children who were “just like a hundred thousand other little boys” and girls. Who we didn’t need. Who didn’t need us. And who, of course, had to be tamed.

  But reality persists, and not even that made them cease to be children. How could we forget, given that it was there that the whole outrage began? Children. And one fine day it turned out that they stole. “They seemed so innocent!” exclaimed some, but after that outcry came the personal affront. “They seemed so innocent and they deceived us, the little hypocrites.” They were children, granted, but not like our children.

  On the afternoon of November 3, 1994, Mayor Juan Manuel Sosa called an emergency meeting, in the boardroom, with Amadeo Roque, San Cristóbal’s provincial chief of police; Patricia Galindo, the presiding juvenile court judge; and me. The mayor strode into the room and dropped onto the table a file folder that, judging by his expression of disappointment, made less noise than he’d hoped. Maia used to say that in San Cristóbal it takes only five minutes of power for a man to start looking like a cacique. Sosa may have been a good example of this phenomenon: he was neither smart enough to be dangerous nor harmless enough to be funny. He had what is often referred to as “the common man’s common sense,” and it was hard to know which was worse, his opportunism or the fact that he went about promising favors left and right.

  Still, the events laid out by the chief of police were far from invented: a couple of officers had approached a group of kids who’d been hanging out in Plaza 16 de Diciembre for several days and had robbed several pedestrians. According to one of the officers, the children replied to their questions in “an incomprehensible language” and attacked them when they tried to take the younger of the two—who was about twelve, he claimed—to the police station. In the first account the officer maintained that one of the kids had snatched his gun and “fired wildly,” but later the testimony of several witnesses forced him to admit that the struggle had in fact caused the officer himself to fire accidentally. The bullet had hit his partner, Officer Wilfredo Argaz, penetrating the man’s groin, and he’d died several minutes later, opposite the medical facility.

  The officer’s name was Camilo Ortiz. He was twenty-nine, had been on the force for two years and was in jail awaiting trial for involuntary manslaughter. The deceased Wilfredo Argaz was thirty-eight, the father of two girls and had a record considerably more questionable than his partner’s: two internal investigations for bribery and one charge of gross misconduct for abuse of authority while interrogating a detainee. He may not have been an angel exactly, but now, regardless, he was a dead
angel. Camilo Ortiz was going to be brought to trial for having drawn his weapon without just cause, and although it seemed likely that he would avoid prison, no judge on earth could (nor did) exonerate him from a hefty indemnity and dismissal from the police force.

  Thanks to the official statement we drew up at that meeting, the death of Wilfredo Argaz was passed off as a tragic and preventable accident occurring in the line of duty. Understandably, we strictly avoided any mention of the children and in the communiqué substituted “common criminals” in their place. By fateful coincidence, the famous singer Nina died that same afternoon, and her death garnered so much press that the demise of Wilfredo Argaz became little more than a footnote in the police report.

  Argaz’s wife, however, seemed disinclined to let things go so merrily. Two days after her husband’s death she planted herself at the door of city hall showing obvious signs of intoxication and holding her daughters’ hands, and stood at the mayor’s window screaming “Murderers!” for nearly twenty minutes.

  All my life, I have reacted poorly to public displays of sorrow. Every time I’ve been forced to confront them, I’ve gotten the uneasy sense that my brain was somehow obstructing all compassion, albeit against my will. I remember when my mother died, in the hospital, and my father threw himself on her lifeless body and began wailing. I knew he’d always truly loved her, and I had been so stunned by the pain that I could hardly speak a word, but still I couldn’t help but feel the entire scene was oddly fake, and this upset me almost more than her actual death. Suddenly I stopped feeling, the room seemed to have gotten larger and emptier, and in the middle of that open space, it was like we’d all frozen, turned to stone. All I could think, over and over, was “Good performance, papá, very good performance.”

  Watching this woman shouting in the plaza, I had a similar feeling. Her disheveled hair, her two pre-adolescent daughters, her clear signs of inebriation—there was something so obscene about it that I wasn’t even upset at my own lack of empathy. I looked down on her from the office window and it was as if the distance between us was cosmic. She screamed, and her screams made no sense. She alternated between insulting the mayor and Camilo Ortiz, who must have been able to hear the whole thing from his cell. I sat back down and continued working. The woman fell silent. There came an unexpected quiet, and then she started screaming again, but this time something quite different: “It was those kids! Those kids did this!”

  It was quite strange. The indifference I’d felt until that moment vanished instantly, turning to hate. I felt as if this woman were standing in the plaza blurting out a secret I’d been keeping, something shameful that I had never dared to confess, something I’d been hiding for weeks. I jumped up, ran to Amadeo Roque’s office and asked him how long he intended to let that whore keep screaming in front of city hall. The police chief stared at me in shock.

  That whore.

  It’s funny, the way certain words possess a viciousness that can linger for years, biding its time, before seeking us out again, as intense as when we first spoke them. Even now, nearly twenty years later, those words are like monks who’d been waiting patiently inside their monastery to mortify me. The vengeance of memory.

  Three days later, in his November 6 column in El Imparcial, Víctor Cobán proved himself one of the few people who saw what was going on: “Only someone as foolish as our mayor, Juan Manuel Sosa, could, at this stage, still doubt the catastrophe that will be upon us if a solution to the issue of the street children is not found. Perhaps the death of Wilfredo Argaz was nothing more than an isolated accident, but the entire episode serves as a metaphor. And metaphors are powerful: just as we don’t understand the words spoken by these children, who disappear each night as if they’d never been in our world and who seem to have no clear leader, it seems obvious that their presence belies some purpose we have yet to decipher.”

  It was true: they seemed to have no clear leader. Maybe a few of the groups were occasionally “captained” by specific children, but their movements didn’t appear to be orchestrated by any one single brain. Sometimes they met behind city hall and spent hours hurling themselves down a grassy embankment, laughing and getting up to do it again. When happy they were scarcely any different from our children. They gestured and clowned around to make one another laugh, or bounced up too quickly after rolling down the hill and fell on their behinds, to great revelry. I recall having smiled on many of those occasions myself, shocked that these were the same children we crossed the street to avoid whenever we saw them. Furthermore, it struck me that those children possessed a sort of joy and freedom that, in a way, our own “normal” children could never have attained, as if childhood were better expressed in their games than in our children’s games, which were so full of rules and prohibitions.

  Today it might seem a grave oversight, but in small cities like San Cristóbal, the police’s priorities revolved around criminality, and at the time there was no actual proof that the children were criminals. The few times an officer happened upon them with their hands in the cookie jar and tried to nab them, they scattered instantly and took off in all directions. Later they would meet back up. It wasn’t unusual, for instance, for two different groups to turn up at the same place accidentally, argue briefly and then one group would leave. Had they been obeying any sort of instructions, we should have seen two leaders coming to an agreement, but that’s never what happened: they would deliberate in a totally disorganized and random fashion, as though for a moment they’d forgotten why they were there to begin with, and then separate once more, sometimes in slightly reconfigured groups. I remember once hearing their behavior compared to an organism’s cells: they were individual, and yet their lives were completely subsumed by the republic, like bees in a honeycomb. But if in fact the children were truly a unified body, where was the brain? If they a hive, who the queen bee?

  The other thing Víctor Cobán mentioned in his column—the way they disappeared at nightfall—was no less unsettling. It proves that we still didn’t know that the thirty-two went into the jungle at nightfall. We now know that in those months they had settlements close to the Eré, less than a kilometer from the riverwalk, and that they shifted their encampment two or three times, all the way along that line, deeper into the jungle, but why they chose those places (aside from defending themselves from us, obviously) remains a mystery.

  Would it all have been simpler if we understood what they said? Or rather, if they’d allowed us to understand them? Hard to say. There’s an article by Dr. Pedro Barrientos, professor of philology at the Catholic University of San Cristóbal—impossible to read without smiling today—in which he claims that the children spoke a lesser version of Ñeê. Some also claimed, at the time, that they were using a new form of Esperanto, and there were still more idiotic assertions that, at the time, were made quite seriously, and with an air of authority.

  One of the greatest tragedies about the altercations is that there is so little remaining acoustic evidence. You can hear their voices on some videos of the attack on Dakota Supermarket. They sound like trilling birds, the sounds they make almost indistinguishable, like the buzz you hear deep in the jungle, but if you close your eyes, you get the sense that the musicality of their phrases could easily be the conversation of everyday children: the cadence of exclamation follows that of complaint; resolute affirmations come after acclamations; complicated questions are followed by replies. And there’s joy, as if those children had discovered the secret to joy that normal children struggled to find. Listening to them laugh, one gets the sense that the world has made good on something, simply by having been able to produce that sound. But we didn’t understand a word.

  In the months that the children roamed the streets, they almost never addressed us, and when speaking among themselves they did so in hushed tones, whispering into one another’s ears. If they asked us for “spare change,” for instance, those easily recognizable words somehow morphed, sounding as if they were swollen from within
. I’m no linguist, but I am astonished that such banal circumstances altered our subjective perception of language so radically. Sometimes I think the children could have been speaking perfect Spanish and still we wouldn’t have understood them; we’d have continued to believe that they were speaking another language.

  And yet every hieroglyph has its Rosetta stone. Ours had a first and last name. The San Cristóbal altercations would never have had any sort of objective dimension without a twelve-year-old girl named Teresa Otaño, from the Antártida neighborhood. Teresa, in a sense, was (and still is, although for very different reasons these days) a shining example of our city. Her mother was a housewife of Ñeê descent, her father a rural doctor from upcountry who, thanks to his reputation, had opened a popular practice in the center of town. She could easily have been one of the girls Maia gave violin lessons to: educated, perceptive and aloof despite her humble origins, Teresa Otaño was, at twelve, already given to a certain kind of classism that at the time, in our city, was in its infancy.

  San Cristóbal’s middle class, to provide a quick sketch, was like that old fable about the three frogs—the optimist, the pessimist and the realist—who fall into a bucket of milk. “There’s no way I could possibly drown in such a small place,” thinks the optimist frog, but its apathy is ultimately what makes it the first to sink and die. “The optimist has died!” thinks the pessimist frog. “So how could I possibly be saved?” and that desperation leads to the pessimist’s death. But the third one, the realist frog who has been kicking its little legs the whole time just to stay afloat, begins to flail more desperately at the death of its companions and suddenly feels something solid, firm enough to stand on and from there to jump. By beating its legs the frog has made butter, and thus its realism (or desperation) is what saves it. After decades of heroic effort and boundless tenacity, a good part of San Cristóbal’s middle class had become well-to-do: families who’d had serious problems paying the rent on a shack ten years earlier could now afford to buy relatively well-situated land and build their own homes. Teresa Otaño, whether she knew it or not, belonged to that class. She and her little friends were in the habit of walking from Antártida—at the time nothing more than the promise of an affluent, jungle-adjacent community—to Sagrada Concepción School and eyeing with disdain the Ñeê children whose mothers dragged them by the hand to sell orchids.