A Luminous Republic

by Andrés Barba

  We were so sure we knew where their jungle encampment was that we didn’t mind wasting a few hours to ensure that upon finding the children we’d be able to catch the greatest number possible. After all, we thought—as though we hadn’t been mistaken on so many things thus far—they were only children and could not have gone far. Our aim was to make a single decisive entry, in a show of authority, and bring them back to be tried as juveniles. But the incident had such national impact that things got unexpectedly complicated. The camera images were so disturbing that they were circulated, shown on every television channel in the country. The city became a madhouse, overrun by journalists, and the locals’ versions and the statements they made to police contradicted one another, people swearing they’d seen the children at their houses that same afternoon, and the following day, peeking into windows in the middle of the night, rummaging through their garbage after dark. The streets filled with reporters and cameras, and a mysterious urge to be in the limelight overtook several of the actual witnesses, leading them to make statements so outrageous that, had two people not been killed the day before, they’d have been frankly comical. Maybe they were. Many years after the altercations, Maia remarked that people in San Cristóbal had never stopped laughing, even when the most dramatic events took place, and at the time I was shocked to see how true it was and how unaware I’d been of the fact. Even on the most fraught days—and perhaps more so on those days—I could always think of a moment when I’d laughed. It wasn’t simply a matter of our trying to lighten the mood by making nervous jokes; it was the seemingly improbable yet logical realization that it’s impossible for us to watch nonstop coverage of a crime without something eliciting a smile sooner or later. Yes, we let off steam with a chuckle or two from time to time, but that doesn’t mean we weren’t in up to our necks. The useless machinery of internal bureaucracy had fallen upon us like a net covered in glue, the Ministry of the Interior was demanding justification for every decision made, and because the incompetence of Minister Balmes’s cabinet was supreme, we couldn’t get the item approved so as to undertake the search as quickly as possible.

  At first light on January 11, a party of fifty police officers began to sweep the eastern shore of the river Eré. The children hadn’t been seen around town again, leading us to assume that there was no place else they could be. Chief Amadeo Roque used a circular search pattern; this way, the moment anyone caught sight of the group, the police could tighten the cordon until they had the children ensnared. But the officers made it seven kilometers into dense jungle and found no other trace of them than two abandoned camps, a few articles of clothing, the remains of some food and a couple of toys. Fifteen hours into the operation, one of the officers was bitten by a coral snake and had to be carried out along the river. When the search party reemerged with no children and one officer with a tongue swollen up like a sponge, despair began to set in.

  The jungle had swallowed up the San Cristóbal children, made them disappear. “If I was with them,” a lovelorn Teresa Otaño writes in her diary on January 17, “me and the Cat would climb a tree and they’d never find us.” Whether in the trees or the depths of the river, the children’s whereabouts for those almost four months remains unknown. We can now establish some of their movements with a degree of certainty and trace a partial map of the areas where they hid, based on brief appearances they made at an inland tenant farm and two Ñeê settlements, but knowing this doesn’t resolve much. We’re similarly uninformed as to the nature of those encounters. Both the children and the communities in question are united in a common resentment of San Cristóbal, which makes it not unlikely that their contact was friendlier than they later claimed. But friendly or not, the encounters must have been few and far between, or we would have discovered them.

  Human logic has a particular form of reasoning, and certain ideas don’t seem to conform. “That can’t be, it’s too absurd,” we might say. But that some ideas seem too absurd doesn’t preclude them from being true. The San Cristóbal children’s disappearance into the jungle was one of those, and the first thing this absurd conception did was leave us to our imagination. Something had hit us and then disappeared. The following week we were left questioning not only our senses but reality itself. We thought that at any minute the branches of a shrub would part and we’d see their childlike faces once again, and that when this happened everything would return to normal. But the children didn’t appear, the police sweeps returned every day concealing their frustration, and each time we looked out at the jungle it seemed that the whole of it had turned against us in defense of the children. If this was no morality tale, we had to concede, it certainly looked like one.

  Many years ago, reading a forgettable book, I came upon an image that entirely changed my understanding of reality. The author was describing a character who’s looking out to sea and suddenly realizes that the word “sea” has never, in his mind, corresponded to the actual sea, that every time he’s said “sea,” he was thinking only of some outlandish foam-covered blue-green surface and never what the sea really is: a vast expanse full of fish, hidden currents and—especially—darkness. The sea is the true kingdom of darkness. The day the children disappeared, San Cristóbal residents felt something like this with respect to the jungle. Suddenly it seemed we’d confused the surface with the substance. In fleeing to its hidden depths, the children had taken us with them as if in a bathyscaphe. We may no longer have seen them, but we were closer than ever, inside their way of seeing, at the center of their fear.

  Two months is a long time, and what happened in them remains a mystery to us. Anyone who finds it farfetched that the children survived with no help in such a hostile environment need only review the wild children of history—from the Hessian wolf children of the fourteenth century and the Bamberg boy who grew up among cattle in the late sixteenth century to Romulus and Remus, the mythical child patriarchs suckled by the Capitoline wolf. The hundreds of children who have survived, protected by Mother Nature or by animals, stand as undeniable human testaments. In 1923, in India, two girls were discovered—Amala and Kamala, aged six and four, raised by wolves in some part of Calcutta; in the mid-twentieth century Vicente Cuacua was raised in southern Chile by pumas; the Ukrainian girl Oxana Malaya was raised in the 1990s by dogs; and a community of green monkeys took in John Ssebunya in Uganda. Minimal research easily proves the existence of many similar, if not more astonishing, cases. There, in the lack of solemnity and the simplicity with which child and animal accept each other, begins the dialogue that the thirty-two undoubtedly had with the jungle, a dialogue that, it goes without saying, we were not party to.

  As people, we are fascinated by anything that excludes us, but there’s no guarantee that fascination yields logical thinking. The craziest ideas conceived and published about the thirty-two are, in point of fact, those dreamed up in those months. This is no coincidence: we start by projecting our own qualities onto anything we can’t make sense of and end up believing that tigers fall in love, God is a jealous avenger and trees are nostalgic. Humankind systematically personifies anything it does not understand, from planets to atoms.

  With regard to our great incomprehension of what happened in the jungle, we should reconcile ourselves to thinking more with scientific humility and less with authoritative arrogance. Why not contemplate the possibility—remote and fantastical as it might seem—that through those children nature was paving the way for a new civilization, a civilization unlike the one we defend with such unfathomable passion. Whenever I think like this, it transports me back to that time, to the way everything must have changed for those children deep in the jungle: light, time, who knows, perhaps even love.

  It sounds almost like a story dreamed up by the same mind that entertained the sultan each night, thousands of years ago, so as to postpone her death one more day: a community of children locked in the heart of the jungle, abandoned to their fate, trying to invent the world anew beneath a canopy of leaves so thick that alm
ost no light can penetrate. Jungle green is the true color of death. Not white, not black. The green that devours everything, an enormous, thirsty, mottled, stifling, powerful expanse in which the strong are sustained by the weak, the great steal the light from the small and only the microscopic and diminutive can stagger giants. The thirty-two survived in this jungle like a community of atavistic endurance. One day, as I hiked through one of the inland farms, I happened to rest my hand on a tree infested with a termite colony and had to snatch it back immediately. Hundreds of thousands of termites were devouring the inside of this fifteen-meter tree, giving off more heat than a furnace. The children’s sense of community was similar to that of the insects: they were guests but also parasites; they appeared weak but were capable of destroying what had been the patient work of centuries. I don’t want to fall into the very trap I’ve just condemned, but I could almost swear that this community of children abolished even love. Or a certain type of love. Ours.

  We now know that one of the dead girls, a thirteen-year-old, was pregnant. There had to have been, therefore, relations among them, including among the younger children. Those months in the jungle must have been defining in that sense. So how does love start from scratch? How does one love in a world with no points of reference? The famous Rochefoucauld maxim, that people would never have fallen in love had they not heard it talked about, carries special weight when applied to the thirty-two. Did they grunt, hold hands, caress one another in the dark? What were their declarations of love like, their longing glances? Where did the rust end and the new begin? Perhaps, just as they invented a new language based on Spanish, they took our timeworn gestures of love as a start and turned them into something else. At times I like to believe that we actually saw those gestures without comprehending them, that while they were in the city their bursts of humanity occurred right before our eyes. Something had been born at our expense, and in opposition to us. Childhood is stronger than fiction.

  In that first month the police continued conducting sweeps of the jungle, albeit with ever-diminishing zeal. San Cristóbal had any number of problems and could ill afford to have a third of the local police force searching for a handful of kids, even if they had killed two people in the supermarket attack. In the suburbs alone there was a murder a week—all that year—and on the outskirts of the jungle there were known spots for drug trafficking and assaults. If that weren’t enough, the supermarket episode led to an uptick in violence. That same weekend there were two holdups, one at a gas station and the other at the city’s largest bank. The local police couldn’t cope with it all, and the jungle was the closest thing imaginable to a prison of trees: the children were in there, they weren’t going anywhere, and in all likelihood would come out when they got sick or hunger compelled them to do so. They were not the dilemma. The dilemma had started suddenly, someplace unanticipated: in our own children.

  After the attack, parents began noting something strange about their kids. Bodies give off feelings, it’s simply a matter of being close enough to perceive them, though it’s not always easy to know what causes children’s moods to change: a look they got from someone on Friday—sufficiently stewed over in their minds—might produce a crisis a week later. Prolonged silences, lack of appetite, withdrawal from activities that once brought joy—any of these responses might result from something totally banal or quite serious, and this ambivalence often leaves parents in a state of high alert that only those who have children can comprehend.

  Had Teresa Otaño’s diary not existed, we might have ended up forgetting all about this brief period of concern, but the written word stays with us; like photography, it too possesses the somber, granular persistence of evidence. After the supermarket attack, Teresa Otaño refers in her diary to Franziska, one of the fables that blends Ñeê tradition and European folklore brought over by immigrants who settled here after World War II. Local anthropology seems to concur that the Ñeê version of Franziska is an amalgamation of the tale of Bicú, an old woman who steals other mothers’ children because she cannot have her own, and Franziska, a Bavarian folktale bearing a certain similarity to the story of Aladdin.

  The version told in San Cristóbal combines them like this: Franziska is born in a very humble home on the river Eré, everyone loves her so, and she has beautiful flaxen hair. After a number of rather trivial adventures, we learn of Franziska’s secret power, albeit only indirectly. Far, far away lives a wizard who has spent years hunting for a treasure, and he discovers through a spell that a certain girl holds the secret he needs to discover the tree under which it is buried. This is where the most interesting part of the story comes, in the way the wizard decides to find Franziska: he puts his ear to the ground and, of all the sounds in the world, hears that of her footsteps as she’s walking home through the jungle. I remember that in the early nineties in San Cristóbal, a famous storyteller, Margarita Matud, would tell this part of the story so well she left every child’s mouth hanging open. She would climb up onstage dressed as a wizard and, with great flair, press an ear to the wooden floor. At this point a recording would be turned on, and out came the sounds of cars, conversations in multiple languages, drilling, trains and subways, footsteps both fast and slow, until finally the one thing that could be heard distinctly was the voice of a little girl on her way home. Is this not the best depiction of infatuation anyone could possibly imagine? The wizard’s obsession with the girl renders all other sounds insignificant.

  At some point, almost like a game, our children began putting their ears to the ground to listen for the thirty-two. A simple act, based on a story they knew well—the tale of Franziska. If the wizard could hear Franziska’s footsteps from the other side of the world, why could they not hear the voices and footsteps of children only a few kilometers away? Whenever we walked out of the room, whenever they were left alone in the back garden, or between classes, or in their bedrooms, they crouched down, hearts pounding, and placed their ears to the ground, competing to see who’d be the first to hear the other children.

  One afternoon I happened to walk into the bathroom abruptly and find my daughter, ear to the floor under the sink. Having no idea what she was doing there, I asked what she’d lost.

  “Nothing,” she replied, immediately blushing, her shame in turn causing me to blush. Whenever something like that happened I felt as if she’d grown up in a second, right before my eyes. She was only eleven, but tiny breasts had recently appeared, embarrassingly, beneath her shirt, and her hips had rounded out a bit. She looked less and less like Maia. Her character had changed as well. She no longer wanted me to walk her to school and had become more aloof, though she still blushed quite easily.

  “Do you want me to help you?”

  “No!” she cried, pushing me out of the way as she ran past.

  Years later we—the adults—found a sort of explanation for these behaviors in Teresa Otaño’s diary. It comes in the entries from early March 1995, when the street kids had been gone for approximately two months. Teresa explains it thus:

  First you have to think of them. Hard. Try to imagine that their faces are really close to your face and you can almost smell their breath. With your eyes closed. Then you have to think about the things they think about and talk how they talk. In your mind. Because if you talk like them in your mind it’s easier for them to understand you, because then they’re doing the same as you, just someplace else. And you have to imagine you’re not you, because you’re not really in your body, you’re above it, flying through the air. It’s easy. Some people say there are magic words to say, but that’s a lie. All you have to do is think really hard. That’s what you do first. Oh, and you have to be alone, because they’re alone too and they know so many more things than we do.

  The first time I read the start of what is now referred to as “the invocation of the thirty-two” I felt my blood run cold. For a second it was as if I were witnessing a ritual invented by a twelve-year-old girl, and I thought of how afraid my daughter must ha
ve felt when I found her in the bathroom that day. People often remark on the self-assured quality of the invocation, its instruction-manual tone, but I’d say that its intensity actually stems from what it dispenses with: adult logic, a world that no longer serves. How could our children possibly have explained to us what they were doing? We weren’t prepared for their world or their logic. Somewhere out there, underground, that dissonant sound was being sent, in code: down below, chaos.

  If you open your eyes by mistake you have to close them again and start all over, or else it doesn’t work. Then you turn around three times until you’re a little dizzy and get down and put your ear to the ground, but first pull your hair back. It’s a little weird at first but then you get used to it. First you hear different sounds. Those are the sounds of the earth. The sound of ants and bugs. The sound of plants growing and people talking and breathing and cars driving past and the river going by and people walking. Then you start to think of something red. It’s easy because your eyes are full of blood and if you put your face up to the light with your eyes closed you can see the blood in your eyes. Then it gets redder and redder and you think about it.

  Seeing a child left to their own fear makes plain how terrible the mind’s attraction can be to whatever can destroy it. Whereas adults know that things will exist regardless of whether we take charge of them, children believe things will cease to exist if they don’t keep them alive in their thoughts. Teresa Otaño believes, without actually stating as much, that the Cat’s existence is dependent upon her thoughts, hence her sense of impotence and her need to “cheat” with the invocation. She’s distressed at the thought of her memory fading, of no longer being able to call to mind his features, his profile, the sound of his voice. She wants to become him and thus keep him in the world. There is, at this point in the invocation, a short digression. Teresa writes about the Cat for a couple of paragraphs, says that she wants the children to come back and mentions a trip to the river that her father has planned for that weekend, saying she “hopes to see them.” A moment later the invocation flies off in a wild direction.