A Luminous Republic Read online

  Maia began talking about the Tartini sonata. I’d heard her tell her pupils this story dozens of times. She explained that in 1713, as recounted to Jérôme Lalande, who later wrote of it in Voyage of a Frenchman in Italy, Tartini spent the night at an inn where he had a dream in which the devil appeared before him. After an unsettling conversation, he sold his soul in exchange for one wish: to become a famous composer. Anxious to put the devil to the test, he handed over his violin and requested that he compose something for him. The devil then played a baroque sonata so prodigious that Tartini had never heard anything like it in his life, and his awe caused him to wake in anguish. A moment later—not knowing whether he had in fact sold his soul to the devil for the piece or it had simply been a dream—Tartini transcribed what little he could recall of the melody by candlelight and titled it Devil’s Trill, a fantastical piece.

  Maia paused dramatically.

  “A sonata composed by a man who was asleep,” she added.

  I saw how the children knit their brows in their hiding place. Their faces expressed an element of incredulity, but also gave the impression that something in their spirits had been won over: the devil, the dream, perhaps Maia’s melodramatic storytelling, sprinkled with half-truths. The children’s palms were pressed to the ground, their gazes fixed on Maia. I got out of my chair and approached, attempting to attract as little attention as possible. Maia started to play, and I leaned casually against a tree. From there I could see the girl’s hand, poking out from the shrub like a mole’s nose, and I decided that when Maia began the allegro I’d pounce and grab it firmly.

  It all happened very quickly, and when I pounced my only thought was that I’d overstepped the mark. The first thing I noticed was that this girl’s hand was extraordinarily small, and too hot. It was hard as stone yet had the familiar feel of a child’s hand, and brought to mind the girl’s hand, which I’d taken a thousand times when we went for strolls. I pulled hard and got her out easily. Rather than her face, what I saw was her mouth, open like a tiny well. She kicked and screamed so vehemently that for a second I thought it wasn’t a human being I had in my arms but some sort of giant insect. I wasn’t sure what I was holding her by: parts that seemed they should have been soft were actually hard, and her joints bent in unpredictable places. The girl shrieked unbearably, and when I tried to cover her mouth, her two friends leaped on me and began scratching my face.

  Fear and thought have a strange relationship, as though the former were required to block the latter but also to instigate it. I didn’t let go of her immediately, instead holding her hand forcefully in one of mine while covering my face with the other to shield myself. More than being scratched, it felt as if I were being struck with twigs. For a moment I lost my sense of direction and fell. At this point I let go of the girl and a second later it was over. Maia rushed to my side.

  “Are you alright? Can you see me?” she asked.

  “Of course. Why?” I asked, touching my eyelids, but as I brought my fingertips to my eyes, I saw that they were covered in blood.

  The wound looked worse than it in fact was; once my face was washed, it turned out to be nothing but a few scratches. Still, the sense that those children had tried to poke my eyes out lingered into the night, first as a crazy idea and then as a dream. Like Tartini at his inn, I too was paid a visit: in my dream three girls like three little reapers approached and plucked my eyes out with their tiny hands. I didn’t feel any physical pain, didn’t react, the dream continued, and then suddenly I was blind and heard their voices. They sang and played all around me. The darkness, which had felt threatening, became pleasant. I felt inexplicably at peace, as though something inside them—or perhaps inside me—had finally abandoned the urge to solve a problem that had been troubling me. For some reason it was extraordinarily pleasurable to have freed myself of the need to see, and I curled up in my dream as if it were a warm, fluffy blanket. But then the girls approached and gently touched my head. A brief, childlike touch.

  “You have to look,” they said.

  And then I opened my eyes.

  Perhaps it was no coincidence that the attack on Dakota Supermarket took place after the holidays. The gulf separating the world of the happy from that of the sad is never so wide as it is during Christmas and New Year’s. San Cristóbal has no snowy cabins, no stuffed turkeys, no Father Christmases. The heat is at its most suffocating in December, the rainy season one long mesa that goes from torrential rain to sweltering heat and back to torrential rain. Sheet metal roofs bake in the sun, turning homes into saunas. The heat and humidity mean that office work and bureaucracy take longer, people sleep poorly and less, and the yawning chasm between this place and actual civilization is made manifest. Only the Eré still flows impassively, like a fable whose moral hangs in suspense.

  The attack on Dakota Supermarket happened precisely at this time of year, just one week after the holidays, on January 7, 1995. Press reports from January 8 are contradictory, but a rough picture can be sketched by piecing together all the news items published that day: a group of four children turns up at the supermarket entrance early in the morning, a relatively normal occurrence; they walk in, walk out, beg for food, leave the premises. At this point, January 7 is still, according to press reports, incident-free. But the children return at lunchtime. According to the Dakota manager’s testimony, returning later was something they never did, and on that day, when they did so, it was not to beg: “They sat in the parking lot outside the supermarket and started playing.” Some witnesses claim that these children were “a little older, twelve or thirteen”; others maintain they weren’t playing but “arguing.” All of the statements make baffled reference, at one point or another, to the same thing: the absence of a leader, a fact confirmed by all remaining video footage, images and documents of the children.

  At one o’clock, they attempt to steal soft drinks and are caught red-handed by the security guard. It’s shocking, even today, to watch the guard’s brutal reaction and the passive—if not downright acquiescent—way the shoppers in the supermarket look on, captured by the security cameras. No one makes any attempt to stop the guard from slapping one of the boys repeatedly; no one stammers even the mildest reproach. This footage alone would have been enough for an international juvenile tribunal to send the man to prison after a summary trial, but there in the middle of Dakota Supermarket, in broad daylight and the presence of some fifteen “respectable” adults, on January 7, 1995, his actions produced no response whatsoever. The supermarket manager offers this unforgettable excuse to the press: “It might look like he went a little too far, but tempers were hot. Those kids came in here every single day.”

  An attorney would have responded to this with the “rule of minimum quantity,” a basic law found in every penal system in the world and one which states that, given that crime is committed for the benefits it yields, in order for the punishment society metes out to produce the desired effect on the criminal, it must outweigh the benefits obtained by the commission of the crime. Put simply: a thief who steals two hens must repay three. It’s a comprehensible law, but it launches sentencing into the realm of one’s imagination, since it deems the efficacy of punishment to be grounded in its “unequal” condition. By forcing a thief to repay three hens for having stolen two, the law expresses faith not in redistributive justice or reintegrating the criminal into society, but in the disinclination other thieves will feel on seeing the punishment inflicted upon the first. Taking this to its logical extreme—and presuming there were some way to ensure that the criminal was incapable of reoffending—it wouldn’t be necessary to punish thieves at all; it would be enough to keep them in isolation and simply make others believe they’d been punished. Imagining the thief’s punishment would suffice. Over time, I’ve come to see that this is exactly what we should have done with the thirty-two: isolate one or two of them and then instill in the remainder the belief that we’d punished the missing children in some intolerable way. Perhaps picturin
g one of their number arrested and punished would have triggered indignation—or maybe a furious desire to rescue the missing—but in the long run it would have acted like a tumor in a young organism, the former feeding off the latter’s energy.

  But violence is not governed by predictable patterns. The January 7 camera footage is proof of that. The kids in the parking lot rebel, not right after the security guard episode but in a moment of calm. In the images we have (which include the victim assaulted by the guard), they go back outside and start playing as though nothing had happened. In the footage they can be seen out there for another thirty minutes. It’s an odd game they play, like cops and robbers, but with some sort of captive. They split into two teams and then chase one child, who wears a T-shirt tied around his head. One team protects him while the other tries to catch him. Whenever they do, everyone dives, laughing and piling onto the boy or girl in the T-shirt.

  The camera footage doesn’t span the entire parking lot and at times they’re out of the frame, but it’s clear that more and more children start turning up. It’s like a reverberation. What at first sounds strained becomes increasingly dialectical. The game comes to an end and they all lie down in the shade provided by a sign, an advertisement. There are twenty-three children present, the youngest no more than ten, the oldest probably about thirteen. They can be seen arguing in small groups, and it’s also clear that the arguing grows heated. This is observable in their body language: suddenly nearly all of them are standing, hands on hips, on tiptoe and craning their necks to hear what others are saying. A few girls run from group to group, still playing. They slap one boy on the back of the neck and run off, laughing. There is no authority figure present, no one appears to be organizing anything, the groups are not enacting any sort of conspiratorial plot; they don’t seem to be coming to any sort of agreement as far as strategy or elaborating a plan of attack. Quite the contrary: their anarchic movements are more suggestive of a game.

  So why do more children keep arriving? How did they contact one another? At 2:40 p.m., twenty-eight children can be counted in the Dakota Supermarket parking lot. Barring the sinister image of thirty-two corpses taken by Gerardo Cenzana a year later in the sports pavilion, this may have been the most complete “group photo” we had up until that point. Girls comprise a third of the group, though it is not always easy to distinguish the sex of each child. They are all dressed quite similarly: T-shirts and jeans, or shorts. They are all dirty, although on balance less so than one might have imagined, which makes me suspect that the cliché about their lack of hygiene should also be reexamined.

  When they enter the supermarket it is 3:02, as per the camera’s time stamp. The security guard intercepts them at the door, pushes the first children a few times but is immediately stampeded by the miniature mob. The white dog that’s always with one of the groups barks at an employee and bites the guard. Knives appear almost instantaneously, some snatched directly from the hardware section of the supermarket, others from behind the fish and meat counters. It’s been said many times that the killers comprised only a small number of the community, that there were only five or six who took lives and the rest behaved like children throughout, a notion easily borne out by the security camera footage. The oscillation between chaos and regrouping, disorder and order, might be compared to the initial stampede and subsequent regathering of any group of children after being told that, if they wanted, they could destroy anything around them. The kids themselves seem disconcerted by the sudden freedom and look around at one another. Their first outburst is one of joy: in the dairy section, three boys concentrate on setting milk cartons on the floor and jumping on top of them so they explode; another boy empties a bag of flour onto a girl’s head, and she begins to cry; one lone child rips into a packet of cereal, emptying it into his open mouth; two others knock wine bottles from the shelves with broomsticks. Had things ended there, it would have been impossible not to watch their shenanigans and smile; they’re enacting a child’s supreme dream: rising up and rebelling against adult organization. But at that precise moment, anyone’s smile would freeze on their face. The butchery begins.

  San Cristóbal police chief Amadeo Roque, the mayor, Presiding Juvenile Court Judge Patricia Galindo and I organized the camera images that very afternoon into three groups: group A were those images that under no circumstances should be in the public domain, given their criminal content; group B, those that could not be in the public domain because of the police investigation into events prior to the attack (namely, those from the parking lot); and group C, those that would be made public due to media pressure.

  It’s difficult to describe the nature of the first group of photos. On the one hand, they look like infantile chaos: the acts of violence (stabbings nearly all) are schematic, the victims fall as if, rather than actually having been stabbed, they were putting on a poor performance, or had been tripped. Many of the children remain grouped at the door, others even start crying and some bend over the victims while keeping a few feet of distance, as though drugged by the result of what they’d just done. The total duration of the attack is surprising, as are its clumsiness and the contrast between the various actions all happening simultaneously: during the almost ten minutes it lasted, some people leave and then come back in as if nothing were the matter, one woman takes advantage of the confusion to steal what looks to be a box of hair dye, while on the other side of the shelving a ten-year-old child has just sunk a knife into an adult’s stomach. The theory—the most believable one, to me—that the children had no criminal intent before entering, and that the murders came about because of some glut of euphoria and ineptitude, is especially confirmed by these two elements: the duration and the disorganization. Had the attack been planned—even if it were poorly planned—it would have had a more efficient and less hesitant air about it, would have pursued a clear objective.

  And the same way the violence sparks off, it seems to defuse. For four minutes, an impressive calm overcomes every person inside: the wounded drag themselves off, the kids regroup by the fish counter, some still with knives in their hands, others continuing to throw things on the floor, and one who stands frozen before a security camera, paralyzed, like a lonely pawn after a quick round of chess. What is the boy staring at so fixedly? It’s impossible to know for sure what happened in this place, to breathe the actual oxygen of the space. Not even the tragedy’s survivors could make sense of it, except with phrases ranging from the obvious to the incomprehensible: “It was a nightmare,” “There’s no explaining what happened . . .” Only after countless pages of platitudes come two statements that have the harsh and undeniable flavor of truth: one from a woman who swears that the kids had “insect faces” and another from one of the cashiers, who declares, “We all knew exactly what we had to do.” Of the two statements, the second robbed me of sleep for months.

  No less inexplicable is the outcome of the attack. The recordings show that when all of the children are congregated by the fish counter, something causes them to run pell-mell for the door. It’s not an escape but a stampede. As though something, some insurmountable terror, had all of a sudden shaken them from inside.

  At 3:17 it’s all over. A crowd has gathered around the supermarket and the children have disappeared into the jungle. The tally: three wounded and two dead, a man and a woman, by stabbing. But there’s something harder to count than the victims, something infinitely more palpable and definite, a feeling akin to terror: the conviction that this was but the first step of an irreversible process.

  People pay the same sort of attention when they’re afraid as they do when they’re in love. This might seem a minor discovery, but making it in the days following the attack gave me the sense of bridging two continents poles apart. At home I often sat in the hall helping my daughter with her homework, and I’d stare out at the shrub where the three children’s heads had emerged on the afternoon of the concert. I found it odd that, despite not really recalling their faces, the feeling they’d
evoked was still so precise: it was as if I could sense their height, their contours, even their weight. Then I would look at my daughter’s face and get the same feeling: as she bent over her notebook I’d watch the whites of her eyes and the lovely contrast they produced against her dark skin, her round forehead and the slant of her cheeks, her thick unruly hair.

  “It’s no wonder,” wrote Víctor Cobán in a January 15, 1995, column in El Imparcial, “that we now look on our children differently, as though we’ve become enemies.” And he was quite right. The desperate way we’d thrown ourselves into the search for those children and the anxiety we’d started to feel about our own had created common ground: the sentiment that began in the former inevitably ended in the latter, as though one were merely the inverse of the other.

  In the course of those first few days there emerged three contradictory yet complementary reactions: shock, a desire for revenge, and pity. The passion for others’ misfortunes was rekindled in the heat of the supermarket attack. The same pity masquerading as generosity and good intentions that many had shown for the children when they did no more than beg on the streets turned first to shock and then to malice. The victims’ families camped out in front of city hall, demanding heads (mine among them), and forced us to hold an absurd plenary session in which we agreed to what could have been called a hunt, plain and simple, but given that it was for children, we decided to call it a search.