A Luminous Republic Read online

  Otaño published her childhood diary as a young woman, at the age of twenty-five, eleven years after the accident that killed the thirty-two. It became an instant bestseller, locally. A Machiavellian mind could not have more skillfully calculated its success: the altercations were still so fresh in our collective psyche that anything to do with the case guaranteed immediate sales. What’s more, the diary had a unique angle: the perspective of a girl. A girl who’d been watching the children that had so ruffled us. Parallels were drawn immediately, and in a sentence more twisted than a contortionist’s intestines, the foreword compared the book to The Diary of Anne Frank. I will grant that the Otaño girl had one talent: an uncommon measure of self-awareness accompanied the inevitable immaturity of her age. “Twenty years from now, when I read this, I’ll think: When I was a girl, I was terrible,” she writes on one of the first pages, reflecting on the idea of examining her diary with “total sincerity”—a phrase far beyond the cerebral capacity of the average twelve-year-old brain.

  But Teresa Otaño did something even more extraordinary than prove herself an insightful rich girl: she cracked the linguistic code used by the thirty-two. The whole thing came about through a lovely series of coincidences. Often, some of the thirty-two, on their nightly journey back to the jungle, congregated next to Teresa’s house, on one corner of Antártida Avenue. It was no more than a stop of sorts, a meeting place. At first Teresa, enthralled, simply makes notes, logging the days on which they appeared, whether there were three, four or five of them, what they were wearing, and so forth. She establishes patterns and identifies a few of the kids, and then one—whom she initially refers to as “Bangs” and by the end is calling “the Cat”—becomes the object of a pubescent crush.

  The Cat, like many of the thirty-two—according to Teresa Otaño’s diary—smoked constantly, with the kind of feverishness one sees in adult vices only when taken up by children. He must have been one of the older boys in the group, about thirteen. Teresa describes him multiple times, smoking as he leans against the wall by her front gate, looking like a lost outsider. At one point she describes a scene of budding sexual development that would delight any analyst: He walked to the gate and I heard the sound of his zipper, his pee hitting the wall and the sound of him spitting. Then he leaned over and rested his head on the railing. I think everyone knows full well that the success of Teresa Otaño’s diary was due in large part to passages like this one, which are especially prevalent in the first part of the book.

  Teresa, like many San Cristóbal children, was a precocious girl. She understood in some vague way that a yawning gulf lay between her way of enacting childhood and these other kids’, that it wasn’t simply a question of poverty or neglect but something deeper that she claims hit her in the gut (to use her words) and compromised her scale of values. Despite the naïveté of her words, she does articulate something that the society she lived in had yet to fully comprehend: I think a lot, but I don’t speak much. Could there be a more accurate assessment of what was going on inside all of us? And then, elsewhere in the book: When we see them on the street we pretend they’re not there, but they watch us and say nothing, like vultures.

  The walks from her house to Sagrada Concepción School with her girlfriends became little adventures for young Teresa. Today they ran right past us and I felt one of the girls brush my arm, felt the touch of her hair tickle me. So near, so far. And a few weeks later she claims that one of her friends was told she couldn’t walk to school alone anymore, that her parents were afraid—more evidence of the fact that even months before the attack on Dakota Supermarket, hostility toward the thirty-two was starting to have tangible effects throughout the city.

  It’s not always easy to ascertain which has more sway, something we find threatening or something we find alluring. At times the nature of these two is not so much opposed as it is nearly indistinguishable. In her diary, it becomes clear that Teresa is unable to resist temptation despite knowing that it might endanger her, and not only in a passive way: she saves half of her sandwich from lunch and then unwraps it later, as she passes the kids on her way home, pretending to be in her own world; she makes sure to be seen on the patio and play in the parts of her house that are visible from the street. So in the end, it’s not so strange that she ends up falling for one of them. The Cat is simply that invisible spirit, distilled.

  One of the most exciting parts of her diary comes in the entry from December 21, when she cracks their linguistic code. But to recount this, a bit of background information is required:

  A few days earlier, the street kids (as the thirty-two were sometimes called by this point) had been behind an incident that forever put an end to the city’s friendly or indifferent attitude toward them—if, in fact, such a thing had once existed. The Department of Social Affairs had decided, given the approaching Christmas holidays, that this year we would launch a solidarity campaign, and it was to have an “angelic” touch: the plan was for the basic necessities often distributed to help meet families’ needs over the holidays to appear anonymously on the doorsteps of the most underserved households. This lunatic plan was of the sort sometimes hatched halfway through a meeting out of sheer boredom. Perhaps it would have been enough for someone to kindly remind us that we did not in fact live in Copenhagen. But since nobody did, and since common sense is only lost when most needed, on the night of December 20—veiled in a secrecy that we were at the time proud of—more than three tons of foodstuffs were distributed (products bought with charitable donations and what remained of our annual budget) and left on the doorsteps of private homes, food pantries, shelters, and so on.

  Dawn the next day was horrific. When the city awoke at approximately six o’clock, nearly all of the gifts that had been so carefully deposited the night before were destroyed. The thirty-two had ripped open packets of rice and flour and scattered them everywhere, tins of oil and bottles of milk were broken, cans were open and crawling with insects. When I left home on my way to city hall and saw what had happened, the aftermath nearly reduced me to rage. By my door lay packets of candy and caramels that had been thrown willy-nilly. Tooth marks were visible on some of them—not those of wild animals but the familiar, recognizable imprints of children’s teeth, as well as tiny fingerprints. They’d drawn smiley faces in the flour and thrown rice all over the place. They hadn’t bothered to hide their crime. This had been done out of sheer joy; they were playing. The scene was a veritable celebration of scandal. Had they at least eaten the food, or stolen it to save for later, the charitable intent that prompted us to distribute these products might have served some purpose at least. But the gratuitousness of the destruction was too much.

  On the night of this watershed, a twelve-year-old girl listens from her bedroom as they discuss what happened while waiting for their companions so they can all return to their nocturnal hideout. There are, according to Teresa Otaño, six of them: two girls and four boys, the Cat among them. Perhaps due to their excitement, they speak a bit louder than usual and Teresa can hear them clearly. At first it’s nothing more than intuition, like a brain sensing that it’s about to solve a math problem, and then the feeling fades: I understand but I don’t understand, Teresa Otaño writes. And then: Are they speaking langidiguage?

  Like hundreds of thousands of kids all over the world, Teresa Otaño had invented a secret language to communicate with her friends without being understood by others. It was quite rudimentary and based on the repetition of “idig,” either between a word’s syllables or at the start or end of any monosyllabic word she wanted to conceal. The word “language,” thus, would be translated as “langidiguage,” for instance; the word “pen” could equally be rendered as “penidig” or “idigpen.” With this simple trick she and her friends had passed notes in class believing them to be encoded. The thirty-two had developed a similar system, albeit extraordinarily more sophisticated. Teresa Otaño finally manages to “understand” a few words and even simple sentences and realizes that t
hey’re talking about what happened that morning, when they destroyed our “angelic” deed. One of the older boys scolds the younger ones for not having saved something—food, no doubt—and the littler ones take turns blaming one another, until in the end one of them begins to cry. The Cat tells the crying boy to shut up already, and the boy replies, I won’t shut up, you’re not the boss, nobody is boss. More weeping and wailing, and finally (as per Teresa Otaño’s testimony) a fascinating question: So you always want us to tell the truth?

  Each time I reread this first semi-unintelligible conversation, “translated” by Teresa Otaño, I feel a sort of thrill, as though suddenly the barking of dogs or the squeaking of dolphins had been rendered into human words. The very idea that with a little more resourcefulness and common sense we’d have been able to understand what those children were saying to one another now strikes me as a loss greater than that of El Dorado or the secret of the pyramids. It’s obvious that Teresa Otaño was nowhere close to understanding the entirety of their conversations, and that she filled in the blanks with words and phrases of her own invention, but she’d made a breach.

  Much later, using the hours of chance recordings that had been recovered over time, sociolinguistics professor Margarita Cadenas produced a fascinating study called “The New Language,” largely, and unfairly, overlooked outside of academic circles. Cadenas’s thesis is bold and, albeit in part more imaginative than scientific, also tenable. According to her, the “need” for a new language for the thirty-two arose not out of the presence of any other group—that is, the children didn’t choose to speak this way just to avoid being understood by others, as the young Teresa Otaño and her classmates did—but out of a perfectly ludic and creative urge. Professor Cadenas believes that these children, given their new world and new life, had need of a new language: new words to name that which had yet to be named. She comes out against Ferdinand de Saussure’s theory of the arbitrariness of linguistic signs, which claims that the relationship between a word and the object it denotes is random—that there is no logical reason why a table should inevitably be called “table” rather than “tree” or “plaza,” which are equally random. The language that the children were “beginning to invent through codified games, employing Spanish as their base,” she claims, actually functioned in the opposite way, by trying to find a place where the link was not arbitrary but triggered, a magical language in which the names of things sprang spontaneously from their very nature.

  When a bird leaving the nest takes its first tremulous steps and jumps from a potentially fatal height, it is not making a philosophical statement on the art of flight, it’s simply flying: this behavior obeys countless years of genetic input; the combination of movements has been produced in its brain before the first flap of its wings. It’s clear that the thirty-two didn’t hold a linguistics conference before using the first words of their new language. Cadenas’s thesis is particularly firm on this point: their language was based on the concept of play. For them, the need for language stemmed less from the need to communicate than the need to play. They used Spanish as a foundation and then performed on it a syncretic act. They eliminated verb tenses, reducing everything to the present indicative. Temporal information was expressed at the end of the sentence using a generic marker. An utterance like “I went to your house” would, according to Professor Cadenas, be reformulated thus: “I go to your house yesterday.” And although from a structural perspective their language was syncretic—that is, tending toward simplification and assimilation—from a lexical perspective it was the opposite, tending toward creativity, chaos and multiplication.

  Cadenas claims that in order to create new words, the thirty-two would sometimes include—as Teresa Otaño did—the random repetition of certain syllables and sometimes alter the order of syllables, turning “time” into “mite,” and “simple” into “plemis,” but often would also invent and adopt new words out of the blue, which led to there being two or three words for the same thing, all in use simultaneously. Of the latter group—the “triggered” words—we know a few, thanks to Teresa Otaño’s diary and the tenacity of Professor Cadenas, including “bloda” for “darkness” (and “night”), “trum” for “community” (“family,” “group”) and others such as “har” (“plaza” or “meeting place”), “mol” (“sky”) and “galo” (“fight,” “confrontation”). There is no doubt that this language was in its very early stages, and not even the thirty-two knew where it was going. How a group of children who, at the time, had been together for only six months—insofar as we know—managed to learn the rules of a new language so quickly and efficiently is a mystery deserving of its own tome, but I can think of no one more ill suited to writing it than me.

  As for young Teresa Otaño, the girl spying at the window, it’s almost impossible not to picture her there, still and alert. Her diary contains something far more notable than adolescent obsession with a group of petits sauvages: the inevitable scorn she feels toward anything she can’t comprehend. Perhaps what’s truly dark about all this is that she represented a collective sentiment, one that began there, in the feeling that no matter how often we saw them on our streets, how much we wondered about the meaning of what they were saying or where they hid at night, how afraid we were of them and how little we dared to admit it, those children had started changing the names of everything.

  I once read that Hitler’s real discovery after World War I was not, as is often thought, his ability to channel the fury and resentment of a nation, enlisting its citizens in his crazed project, but something far more trivial and almost banal: that people don’t have private lives, men do not have lovers nor do they stay home to read books, in fact people are predisposed toward ceremonies, crowds and parades. Now that Maia is dead I’ve come to the conclusion that the true purpose of marriage is none other than talking, and this is not only precisely what distinguishes it from other types of personal relationships but also what is most missed: the trivial conversations about everything from the neighbor’s bad mood to how ugly a friend’s daughter is. Pointless and none too insightful observations are the essence of intimacy, what we mourn after the death of our wives, our fathers, our friends.

  A few months after Maia’s death I was tormented by the idea that I didn’t know my wife’s secret pleasures. What had been her small joys, her tiny compensations? The idea that Maia’s little secrets had died along with her produced in me such anguish that I felt as if her entire existence had been reduced to subatomic level. But there’s always a thread that can be tugged at, and quickly I thought of her hands and the shapes they took as she explained to her pupils the proper way to attack an instrument, according to either the Russian or the French school, depending on what they were attempting at a given moment: precision or emotion. Precision was in the arm, emotion in the hand, or better still, in the fingers, the digits. And then I saw her fingers and also recalled the concert at our house that Christmas of 1994, and the girls.

  Maia had established the custom long before she met me: every year as Christmas drew near, she organized a concert for all her pupils. Each would prepare a piece suited to their abilities, to be played for all the families. At the end she played too, with her string trio. I was always moved by my wife’s face when she played, the sense that she was falling through space, but at a gentle speed, one that required enormous concentration. She would stand very erect on those fine round legs, one slightly in front of the other, and rest her head on the violin in such a way that I thought it looked like she was leaning on a cushion. Her cheek pressed to the instrument made her lips look slightly fuller, and because she always closed her eyes, or opened them just long enough to cast a quick glance at the score, it was as though her music were something that could be produced only from within relative darkness.

  That day the recital was held on our patio, and in her habitual anti-Christmas spirit, Maia played Tartini’s Devil’s Trill, one of her favorite pieces, and one that she always performed well. Her s
tudents had played one by one in an unremarkable procession, and when it was Maia’s turn I realized that the faces of three little kids, two boys and a girl, had appeared from within the hedges separating our house from the street. They must have been between ten and twelve years old and had pulled themselves all the way beneath the shrubs. Their hair was covered in weeds as they hid under the branches. They looked like three versions of the same wild animal, but their features were so fine and precise that to this day I recall them clearly. One of the boys had a very large, expressive mouth, the other droopy eyelids, and the girl—the oldest of the three—a squarish head with protruding ears and an exceedingly wary look.

  The whole food donation fiasco had taken place shortly before, and at the time the press had taken their rage out on me. El Imparcial’s editorial cartoon had caricatured me as some sort of Pied Piper of Hamelin being followed by a swarm of ragged children. I was so upset that when I saw those three grimy faces peeking out from under the bushes, I took it as a personal affront and decided that I’d let Maia start playing and then catch at least one of them. How about a photo of me, firmly—not violently, but firmly—grabbing hold of the girl and escorting her to the San Cristóbal juvenile detention center? That wouldn’t be a bad way to put an end to the whole matter before the holidays.