by Andrés Barba
One sometimes thinks that for a voyage to the depths of the human soul one needs a powerful submarine, and in the end is surprised to find oneself in a wetsuit trying to sink into a standard household bathtub. The same is true of places. If there’s one thing that characterizes small cities, it’s that they’re as alike as tacks: it makes no difference which; they all use the same mechanisms to perpetuate power, the same circuits of legitimization and cronyism, the same dynamics. What’s also true is that every once in a while, they each produce their own little local heroes: an exceptional musician, a judge from a particularly revolutionary family or a Mother Courage, but even those little heroes seem built-in, part of a system that in fact requires their very rebellion in order to keep perpetuating itself. Life in small cities is as synchronized and predictable as a metronome, and at times it’s as difficult to imagine averting this fate as it is to believe that the sun rises in the west. But sometimes that’s exactly what happens: the sun rises in the west.
Everyone sees the attack on Dakota Supermarket as the beginning of the trouble, but the problem began much earlier. Where did the children come from? The best-known documentary on the subject, the biased if not outright spurious The Kids by Valeria Danas, opens with a pompous voice-over asking that very question while showing bloody images from the supermarket: Where did the children come from? And yet it’s true; this does continue to be the big question. Where? Anyone who’d never known a time when they weren’t around could almost have thought that the children had been running through our streets forever, grimy and yet strangely, diminutively dignified, with their wild frizzy hair and sunburned faces.
It’s hard to pinpoint the moment when our eyes started to become accustomed to them, or to know whether the first few times we saw them we were shocked. Of the many theories out there, perhaps the least absurd was the one proposed by Víctor Cobán, in one of his columns for El Imparcial, when he said that the kids “trickled in” to the city and at first blended in with the Ñeê children we were used to, the ones selling wild orchids and limes at traffic lights. Certain species of termite have the ability to change their appearance temporarily, taking on the characteristics of other species in order to penetrate a foreign environment and then reverting to their true appearance once they’ve become established. Perhaps the children, with the same pre-verbal intelligence as insects, adopted this strategy too, doing everything possible to resemble the Ñeê children we were already familiar with. But even if that were the case, the question would remain: Where did they come from? And, what’s more, why were they all between nine and thirteen years old?
The simplest, but also the least proven, line of reasoning is that they were from all over the province, kids who’d been kidnapped by a trafficking ring and held in the jungle someplace near the river Eré. It wouldn’t have been the first time. A few years earlier, in 1989, seven teenage girls about to be “distributed” to brothels all over the country had been rescued, and the photos the police took when they found them at a small ranch in the middle of the jungle just three kilometers from San Cristóbal were still fresh in the collective memory. Just as certain events preclude any naïveté, those images created a clear before and after in San Cristóbal’s consciousness. It wasn’t just that people were forced to recognize an undeniable social reality, it was that the shame this reality produced had been subsumed into San Cristóbal’s collective consciousness in the same way traumatic events leave their mark on families: silently.
That was why people assumed these children had escaped from a similar type of “barracks” and turned up in the city from one day to the next. The theory—I repeat, baseless—was grounded in the ignoble distinction of San Cristóbal as the top province for kidnapped children, but it also had the virtue of explaining the supposedly “incomprehensible” language spoken by the thirty-two, which at the time was taken to be a foreign language. Nobody back then seemed to realize one simple thing: that buying into this theory would have meant that child mendicancy had increased by 70 percent overnight without sounding any sort of alarm.
After reviewing minutes from the meetings held by the Department of Social Affairs (of which, as I’ve said, I was in charge over the course of those months), I see that the first time child mendicancy appears as an agenda item is October 15, 1994, which is twelve weeks prior to the attack on Dakota Supermarket. This means—considering how slowly real problems in San Cristóbal made their way onto institutional terrain—that the children’s presence in the city must have been noted two or three months earlier at least, which is to say in July or August of that year.
The theory that they escaped en masse from some jungle camp is so flawed that the “magical theory” that people had previously so derided, the one put forth by Ñeê community representative Itaete Cadogán, is almost more credible. He claimed that the children had “sprung” from the river. And if we don’t take “spring” literally, perhaps it’s not entirely implausible to imagine that something suddenly occurred in their consciousness, something that united them and led them to congregate in the city of San Cristóbal. Today we know that although over half of the children came from towns and cities near San Cristóbal (and that only a very small percentage of them had been kidnapped), others had inexplicably traveled over a thousand kilometers from cities like Masaya, Siuna and San Miguel del Sur. When their bodies were identified it was learned that two were from the capital, children whose disappearances had been reported to authorities months earlier and whose lives revealed nothing particularly suspicious until the moment they “ran away.”
Extraordinary situations require us to reason with a different logic. Someone once compared the children’s appearance to the fascinating synchronized flight of a starling murmuration: flocks of up to six thousand birds can form a dense cloud in the blink of an eye, swooping and turning up to 180 degrees in unison. I remember one occasion which, for some reason, has remained intact in my mind all this time. It took place during one of the months in which they must have arrived. I was in the car with Maia quite early, driving to my office at city hall. Work schedules in San Cristóbal are very rigid owing to the heat: people get up at six and life literally begins at dawn; official working hours are from seven to one o’clock, when the heat tends to be unbearable. During the harshest hours—from one to four thirty in the rainy season—a subtropical torpor engulfs the city, but in the morning San Cristóbalites are as energetic as can be, though that’s surely not saying much. Maia was with me that morning because she had to take care of some paperwork at the music school, and when we got to the traffic light on our way downtown we saw a group of ten- to twelve-year-olds, begging. They both were and were not like the usual kids. Unlike the regulars, simple and plaintive as they begged, these children had a distinct sort of haughtiness, almost aristocratic. Maia rummaged in the glove compartment for a few coins but didn’t find any. One of the boys simply stared at me. The whites of his eyes glinted, cold and intense, and his dirty face was such a contrast to the glint that for a moment I was speechless. The light turned green and I realized that I’d had my foot on the accelerator the entire time, as though I couldn’t drive off fast enough. Before doing so, I turned to him one last time. Out of nowhere, the boy gave me a wide smile.
What mystery causes our perception of an experience to be concentrated in some images and not others? It would be a comfort to admit that our memories are as arbitrary as our tastes, that they select what we remember as randomly as our palates decide that we like meat but not seafood, and yet something makes us sure that even this, or rather this above all, depends on some code that has to be deciphered and is in no way coincidental. The boy’s smile unsettled me because it confirmed that there had been a connection between us, that something that had begun in me ended in him.
Over the years I’ve come to find that my traffic light encounter was in fact a very common experience among San Cristóbalites. When asked, they all end up recounting similar if not outright identical episodes: childre
n turning their heads at precisely the moment the person looks at them or appearing when the person thinks of them, real or phantom apparitions that make their way into dreams and the next day are waiting at the same place they were dreamt of. Perhaps in the end it’s not so unfathomable that when someone looks at, speaks to or even thinks of a person, that person inevitably turns toward the source of attention. Those kids—whose numbers at the time were still modest enough not to draw attention—began acting as a sort of energy vector; without knowing it, we were alert to them.
On numerous occasions the Department of Social Affairs as a whole, and I in particular, have been accused of not having foreseen quickly enough what was no doubt the start of a problem. This is not the most appropriate place to dive into the national pastime of “predicting” Monday’s news in Wednesday’s papers, but it goes without saying that within two months of the altercations the city was filled with experts on childhood mendicancy and apostles of common sense. The very people who wanted police on the streets after the attack on Dakota Supermarket suddenly became pictures of moderation, Zen masters who accused us, with a vehemence only criminals deserve, of not having “acted swiftly enough.”
At another point in my life I might have defended myself. Today I admit there’s an element of truth to the assertion, but even so, what would “swiftly enough” have meant to those people at that time? Locking the children up in the orphanage? Making a public appeal? Fomenting animosity against a group of kids whose greatest display of antisocial behavior at the time was to be hungry and homeless?
Some things occur more quickly and easily than one might imagine: altercations, accidents, infatuations. Habits, too. At the time, I was walking the girl to school every day, and on the way, we’d play a little game. It was so simple and had begun so organically that I came to believe we’d be playing it forever, that even after she’d grown up we’d still be playing it, me seeing the strange curve of her neck before me, then hearing her footsteps behind. Perhaps what was most fun about the game was the feeling that we weren’t actually playing at all, that we were offering ourselves up to the other’s gaze. It consisted simply of passing each other without saying anything, first me, then her, then me again, until we got to school. Whoever was in front would, for a few seconds, be a short distance ahead and then slow down to let the other pass. From time to time one of us would pretend to be a different person—a man in a rush, late to work, casting ostentatious glances at his watch; a girl whistling as she skipped; a police officer pretending to give chase—but most of the time we were simply us, walking a bit faster.
It’s odd how important I came to find those moments, waiting for the girl to pass me with her little steps. It seemed my love for the girl—or my slight distrust and close attention, which so resemble love—was like the inverse of my relationship with Maia, which was also loving but contained no rituals or expectations. While what I loved about Maia was my inability to access her deepest thoughts, in the girl it was this that I most loved—this thing we repeated almost against our will, this space we had created together.
We were unlike other families at school in that I was not my daughter’s biological father, and this became clear every day when we arrived: not only did we not physically resemble each other, we also said goodbye without much fuss, slightly embarrassed. At the time, I did not yet know something I now do: resemblance is far from the atomic framework of a nuclear family. To an adult and a girl who want to be real father and real daughter, a lack of resemblance is not—as people often think—a tragic fate; the world is full of incompatible families with identical features, and happy families stitched together like patchwork.
Before Maia came along, I saw children as small beings with whom I had to invent a relationship. I distrusted people who claimed a wholesale like or dislike of them, because even I—despite always having struggled in my dealings with children—had often had the experience of meeting one specific child who triggered my instant affection. I was partial to the daydreamers and the awkward and averse to show-offs, flirts and chatterboxes (I’ve always hated childlike qualities in adults, and “adult” ones in children), but the long-held preconceptions one has about children evaporate the moment an actual child begins to form part of one’s life.
The girl shared with the children involved in the altercations one distinct quality: she didn’t feel entitled to the things around her. This may seem a minor detail, but it’s not. In general, children brought up in minimally stable environments feel themselves to be natural heirs to that which surrounds them: their parents’ car is their car; the house, their house, etc. Children don’t run off with forks from their parents’ kitchen; that would be absurd, as the fork already belongs to them. A girl doesn’t steal her parents’ clothes to play with them while they’re out. Possession, in a child’s mind, is pure fact, a category used to filter reality. The kids in the altercation, however—the boys and girls we were starting to see on the street every day, stationed at specific traffic lights or sleeping in small groups by the shore of the Eré, who then vanished from the city at nightfall—shared with my daughter the knowledge that unlike so-called normal kids, they were rightful heirs to nothing. And because they were not rightful heirs, they had to steal.
I italicize this word intentionally. Not long ago I overheard a female colleague at city hall say, “The thing about the altercations is that in those years we only allowed ourselves to think in hushed tones.” The word “steal,” the word “thief,” the word “murder.” We’re surrounded by words that until now we’ve spoken only in a whisper. To name is to bestow a fate, to listen is to comply.
So, on October 15, 1994, as per item 4 in the minutes of the biweekly Department of Social Affairs meeting, Deputy Isabel Plante raised for the first time the issue of child mendicancy. Noted therein (and it’s not difficult to recognize Madame Plante’s tortuously populist syntax) are three reports of “assaults” on residents in different parts of the city: the first on the manager of a cantina in Villa Toedo, where several kids made off with the day’s takings; the second on a middle-aged woman whose purse had been snatched right in Plaza 16 de Diciembre; and a third on the waiter at Café Solaire, who claimed to have been “harassed by a group of vandals approximately twelve years in age.” The deputy began by stating the facts, immediately thereafter demanded that funding for the orphanage be doubled so as to provide the necessary protection for the children, and then blamed me directly for the social ills the city was facing. A veritable master class in populist dialectics: call attention to an already out-of-control situation, offer an unattainable solution and accuse the political adversary of being responsible for it all. But leaving rhetoric aside, Madame Plante’s speech does shed light on the fact that the children’s world had started to make us all uncomfortable.
In an essay about the altercations, titled “Vigilance,” published on the first anniversary of the deaths of the thirty-two, Professor García Rivelles dedicates one long section to the myth of childhood innocence. “The myth of childhood innocence,” she writes, “is a bastardized, facile, hopeful take on the myth of Paradise Lost. Saints, intercessors and vestals of an ersatz religion, children are charged with representing the state of original grace for adults.” But these children, the ones who had silently begun overtaking the streets, bore little resemblance to the two versions of the state of “original grace” we’d known previously: our own children, and the Ñeê children. It’s true that the Ñeê were dirty and unschooled; yes, they were poor, and San Cristóbalites, in their shortsightedness, assumed that they were a lost cause, but the fact that they were indigenous not only took the edge off this state, in a way it also rendered it invisible. Regardless of how pitiful, filthy and often virus-ridden they looked, we’d become immune to their situation. We could buy an orchid or a small bag of limes from them without becoming distressed: the Ñeê were poor and illiterate in the same way the jungle was green, the earth red and the river Eré heaved with mud.
Apar
t from this, there simply wasn’t much to distinguish us. San Cristóbal, in the mid-nineties, was a city not very different from any other large provincial city. The lifeblood of the region’s economy, tea and citrus fruits, experienced a considerable boom, small farmers and landowners began farming for themselves, and this led to real upward mobility for the working middle class. In the space of five years the city was transformed: small businesses prospered, and with them, the people’s savings and general frivolity. The construction company that had built the hydroelectric dam bankrolled a makeover for the riverwalk, and this entirely changed the face of the city: the historic center ceased to be the only place for leisure, and San Cristóbal began to live, for the first time, “with eyes riverward,” as the mayor of the time took to saying so affectedly. In the new San Cristóbal, it became common to see young mothers taking their children for walks, couples out strolling, and sports cars that still didn’t quite fit with the landscape, scraping their undercarriages on the speed bumps that had been installed to control traffic. Children—our children—were not only additional props on this orchestrated stage, in a way they were also the blind spot of people’s arrogance. People were so taken by their own sense of prosperity that the appearance of the children, the other ones, was patently irksome. Comfort is something that sticks to one’s mind like a damp shirt, and only after making an unexpected move does it become clear that one is stuck.
And while rhetoric is one thing, there were also the facts. Two days later I myself witnessed the first of numerous assaults. Maia and I had gone out for a walk and came upon them while crossing the little park with the hill. There were six in total, the oldest a girl of about twelve. Beside her, on a bench, sat two remarkably similar-looking boys, twins perhaps, probably ten or eleven years old; two other girls sat on the ground and seemed to be making a game of killing ants. They had the same grubbiness one sometimes sees in destitute children in large cities. And the attitude. They appeared to be distracted, but in fact were on the alert. I remember the oldest wore a russet-colored dress with some design—trees or flowers—embroidered on the chest, and that she looked at me for a moment and dismissed me.
