A Luminous Republic

by Andrés Barba

  We were all exhausted, with a living-dead sort of air about us. Amadeo Roque had tried to mark the point on the map where the first group was to begin the next day, but his pencil lead broke and, rather than sharpen it or ask for another, he snapped the pencil in two and threw it in his assistant’s face. It was an odd moment, unexpected, particularly in a man like him, who worried neurotically about how his actions were perceived. More than a violent reaction, it was like a performance, or the rehearsal for a performance. Like he wanted to see himself doing something unpredictable. I now realize he was not the only one. Everyone at that meeting was treating each other with oblique detachment, not so much because we couldn’t predict one another’s reactions as because we were losing control of our own.

  Two hours later there was no one at city hall. We’d left almost without saying goodbye. It seemed paradoxical how calm a night it was, given everything that had transpired. The moon was nearly full and the trees cast shadows on the many sections of sidewalk where there were no streetlights. On the fifteen-minute walk home it struck me that a child could jump out at me at any moment. I pictured him with a hunched back and the face of Antonio Lara, in the photo his father had given me, which I carried with me always. In my imagination he looked like one of those mythical creatures from children’s fables—a goblin or an elf. For a few minutes, as in the fables, I thought his appearance depended solely on my wishing it so, and that if I wished hard enough the boy would eventually appear. But wish I did, and no one appeared. There was only the slightest of breezes, and everything was still when I got to the front door. There were no lights on in the living room or in the girl’s room, and only a faint one in the bedroom coming from Maia’s nightstand.

  Opening the front door, I was greeted by Moira, the dog I’d hit on the way to our new house the day we first moved to this city. We had not succeeded in turning her into a family pet. She would spend long stretches of time with us but then disappear for months, returning half starved or with her neck torn up from a fight. The dog had understood that our house, more than a home, was a center she returned to in the hope of a miracle. Each time she came we welcomed her joyfully, but also uneasily. Maia refused to touch her, out of superstition, and we’d forbidden the girl from playing with her, for fear of the germs she brought back each time she came. That last time she’d been even closer to death than the day she’d been hit: a tropical blowfly had inserted its larvae under her skin, and the maggots had been feeding off her flesh for so many months that by the time she came back to us she was almost a lost cause. I’d parted the fur on her neck with my fingers to discover, with inexpressible revulsion, a wriggling ball of maggots the size of a mandarin orange. This seething mass of blind larvae had gone still for a split second and then started writhing even more furiously. Now the dog was okay again. She panted energetically and stared at me in the darkness with an intensity that in a human would have been unbearable. Her wound had healed and all that remained was a bald patch under her collar.

  Everything fights death, I thought, from maggots to sequoias, from the river Eré to a termite. I will not die, I will not die, I will not die; this seems to be the one true cry on the planet, the one genuinely undeniable force. It was proven by Moira the dog, wagging her tail at me when I arrived, by the girl sleeping in her room, by the attention Maia paid to me as I recounted what had happened when I walked into the bedroom, by the intense flicker of intelligence in my wife’s eyes. And as I spoke, I experienced a fervent need for that primeval cry—I will not die, I will not die, I will not die—and got the feeling that something passed over us, over Maia and me, something like a magic spell. But not even its benevolent energy could quell the anxious cry.

  I described the Plaza Casado fight in detail.

  I told her that I’d bribed the editor of El Imparcial that night, and that at dawn the sweep would begin, and that we were determined to put an end to the whole matter once and for all.

  Maia told me to close my eyes and try to rest. I looked at her without saying anything. There in the darkness, the pupils of her black eyes were enormous, like those of a newborn. I felt that in some unspeakable way she was proud of me, but for reasons that were far from clear and which, as always, she had no intention of sharing with me. Suddenly I was overcome by the exhaustion of the day, but the more silent things around me became, the louder that implacable cry. Lying on her side next to me, Maia put a hand on my back. A simple gesture, something she did whenever she wanted to calm me. The same small, warm hand as always, fingertips rough from violin strings, but now it felt hot, as though rather than a hand it were something harsh, a poker someone was using to nudge me, little by little, toward a cliff. And all the while that cry could be heard again and again, sometimes with the harsh wheeze of a cackle and others mellifluous and unsettling. I will not die, I will not die, I will not die . . .

  I awoke covered in sweat.

  “You’ve been talking in your sleep this whole time,” Maia whispered.

  “What was I saying?”

  “I couldn’t quite understand.”

  “You don’t want to tell me?” I asked.

  My wife had an odd way of avoiding requests she didn’t like: she smiled and shot to kill.

  “If you don’t want to know, why ask?”

  Our conversations often ended in this way, like some Eastern fable. I told her that I might not be back that night; the idea was to continue the sweep until we’d found the children. She told me not to bear the weight of a situation that was beyond my control. She also said something troubling, something very Maia: not to be afraid.

  “Afraid of what?” I asked.

  “Of finding them.”

  At five o’clock in the morning the air had a crystalline quality, a few streetlights were still on, and not a single sound could be heard. I was so tired that until I’d gone two hundred meters toward the riverwalk, I didn’t realize that Moira was trotting along beside me. She was wearing her white parasite collar, which had a little bell that tinkled softly every time she moved. Again I found myself amazed, as I had the first time I saw her, by the elegance of her shepherd mix. I realized that she was trying to return some sort of favor and patted her head in appreciation.

  The group was comprised of more than two hundred people, including police and volunteers. Everyone had gathered at the tourist pier. I was surprised that there were so many people, that they were so willing. The pier at that time bore little resemblance to the one here today, and the boat that used to do river crossings back then was nothing like the brand-new white catamaran everyone in San Cristóbal is now so proud of; it was a blue tub that some joker had christened Mestizo. Amadeo Roque climbed on deck and shouted through a megaphone that he was the chief of police and was going to give instructions on how to carry out a sweep. He looked marginally less exhausted than he had the night before, but also more tense. He was gripping the taffrail so tightly it looked like he was taming a wild horse. Roque shouted that on this first day the sweep was to go almost six kilometers into the jungle, that it was impossible for the kids to have gotten any farther than that. The idea was to begin on the eastern side—the last place to have had several child sightings—and from there fan out to the west of the city, like a circular hunting group.

  The men (the party was made up almost entirely of men, the only exceptions being five or six women who at the time worked in law enforcement) were nervous. In general, they had followed the instructions we’d given them: to wear long pants and boots and light cotton clothing. They looked both stern and sleepy. For a second, the scene reminded me of the middle-of-the-night pilgrimages we went on when I was a boy, to commemorate the arrival of spring. A rite as ancient as humankind: celebrating the cycles of life, marking the change of seasons, asking the gods for prosperity. Compared to the bipolar jungle, which had only the dry and the rainy, the world of actual seasons seemed a galaxy away. Amadeo Roque shouted instructions from the rear, and in the dawn light his features, blurry until that m
oment, became distinct. One of the groups in the sweep, the one closest to the river, was being led by Pablo Flores. Giving him a degree of authority in the operation had definitely been the right choice. His anxiety seemed to have come slightly undone—no doubt due to exhaustion—though he still had the same crazed expression he’d worn when climbing onstage in Plaza Casado. Antonio Lara, however, I could not see. I knew for a fact that he was in the group, as I’d noticed his name on the list, but I couldn’t find him. Three whistles sounded. This was the signal to begin the sweep, and we got into position.

  We’d learned from the failure of our first sweep, after the Dakota Supermarket attack. This time every man carried a machete, a whistle and a flashlight, and for every ten people there was a snakebite kit—prepared by the health department the previous night—with antivenom for every kind of snake in the province. They’d drawn up a poster so people would know how to tell a python from a rattler or a coral snake, and the antivenom had been placed in colored vials with pictures of the corresponding snake’s head on each one. Almost as important as injecting the antivenom as fast as possible, one of the doctors on the sweep explained, is knowing what kind of snake bit you, and he gave a short demonstration of how to inject the antivenom, first pinching your skin up. A syringe of antihistamine was provided as well, in case of spider bites. The chief of police insisted on the importance of keeping a twenty-meter distance between people, and of never losing visual contact with the people on either side of you. If anyone saw a child, they were not to give chase but simply to use the whistle and keep approaching at the same speed, not breaking the cordon no matter what.

  A good part of people’s memories depends on the way feelings and impressions affect them over time. Was the air really such a milky white when we entered the jungle, or was that a mere distortion of my feelings? I was very familiar with the first stretch of the jungle, the part by the river. When I was new to the city there were popular picnic spots there, and I used to take Maia and the girl. Those areas were still there, albeit now derelict. The grills had been removed, but the remains of the brick tables still stood, like primitive ruins of an ancient civilization. It seemed a thousand years had gone by since then, and I longed for my old naïve self. But trees have no interest in good and evil, insects and plant roots have no interest in the reasons of man, much less his longing, and there is something comforting about that.

  It was almost like a game: a clear line of people disappearing into the dense foliage, forging a path with machetes but as stealthily as possible. The only sounds were those of our slow footsteps, avoiding—as we’d been told to do—branches and fallen trees, and from time to time a whistle in the distance. One whistle meant stop; two, resume the sweep; three, that one of the kids had been found. In the case of three whistles we were to head for wherever it had come from, maintaining the distance between the men on either side of us in order to loop around, surrounding the group. We were walking slowly, so slowly that after just a few minutes we’d almost lost sense of which direction to go. In addition to that, on crossing a small tributary of the Eré we had to regroup and then fan out all over again. We wasted nearly an hour and a half on this simple procedure before managing to reestablish our positions. People seemed absorbed, silent. Over two hours of trudging through deep jungle can bring on a state of glazed melancholia, and I’ve always thought that a good part of the Ñeê community’s solemnity stems from the inevitable slowness that vegetation imposes on people’s thoughts. But we were all sure of one thing: we were going to find those children. It might take a few hours or more than three days, but sooner or later we were going to find them. And as odd as it seems, Maia was right: that idea frightened us.

  The dog trotted easily beside me; she seemed very familiar with the area and only occasionally did she run a few meters off to sniff some tree trunk, always returning with a scowl. I thought she had no idea what I was looking for, but at one point she stopped short and growled purposefully. I looked in the direction Moira stared and saw nothing. A wall of vegetation, a mass of trees and bare red earth.

  Sunlight had begun to filter through the highest leaves of the tree canopy, flecking the ground with bright spots. The intuition wasn’t something I felt in any specific body part, but I knew that Moira had seen one of the children. I turned to her again, to calculate the direction of her eyes, correcting the angle of mine. On looking again, it was as though the wall of vegetation were beginning to blur, like looking at something when you’re very tired, and suddenly, with eerie definition, one object stands out.

  Then I saw him.

  In the middle of that green nothingness I saw a chin.

  A mouth.

  A pair of eyes like two sharp pins.

  About four years ago, at a wedding banquet for the son of some friends, I was seated at a table with a man wearing a ridiculous bow tie. This was in the last year of Maia’s life. My wife’s illness had me in a bad mood: all the conversations seemed banal, and 90 percent of the guests insufferably stupid. The girl was no longer a girl and had fallen in love with a physics professor. She’d just gone off to live with him, a fact that had both wounded and relieved me in equal measure, since in the previous months I’d become annoyed by the contrast between her lovestruck jitters and her mother’s disease. The idea of losing Maia, of facing the loneliness that would inevitably follow her death, made the world seem like a shambolic and pointless place. I was living in a state that I once heard, quite accurately, described as “the arrogance of the sufferer”—a chronic irritation that, after prolonged suffering, makes many people come to believe that their misfortune grants them a sort of moral superiority. Maia and I had very nearly not gone to the wedding, and when we sat at the table and I saw this man in his bow tie, I was on the verge of telling her we should leave. Two minutes later, it was me who didn’t want to leave. He turned out to be charming and funny, and also, for some reason, he treated my wife with extraordinary tenderness. I was touched by this. Illness, or contact with illness, creates strange bedfellows. At the end of the meal, and after a number of jokes about the newlyweds, he got a bit more serious and asked a curious question:

  “What would happen if we got a sign the first time we saw the person who was to be the most decisive in our lives?”

  “What kind of sign?” Maia asked.

  “Not necessarily anything physical. There’s no reason it would have to be a light or a sound, but something clear, something certain, something that let us know that this person would be part of each one of our decisions, forever.”

  One person at the table responded, saying that such a feeling, though perhaps not entirely certain, already existed in the form of intuition, of love at first sight. But the man in the bow tie shook his head.

  “I’m not talking about love, of course. I’m talking about a witness.”

  And then he put forth a theory as twisted as his bow tie: everyone has their own witness. Someone that we secretly want to convince, someone all of our actions are directed toward, someone we can’t stop secretly talking to. This witness, he added, is not the most obvious, is almost never your spouse or father or sister or lover, is often someone trivial, secondary to the normal course of life.

  I felt as though, of all those seated at the table, only I understood what he was trying to say.

  In the yawning silence that followed this monologue I saw the face of Jerónimo Valdés. Jerónimo Valdés had been my witness for the preceding fifteen years of my life (he was still alive then, locked up in the local prison, one of his many stints in jail). It struck me that, just as this man said, I’d felt something like a sign the first time I saw him, during that jungle sweep fifteen years earlier when the dog stared straight into the mass of foliage before me and Jerónimo’s features seemed to emerge from the leaves. Jerónimo Valdés was twelve years old at the time, but so short and skinny he could easily have passed for nine. He had an angular, squirrel-like face and eyes the same shade of brown as his hair, as though nature had pa
inted him three colors: the bright white of his teeth, the dark brown of his hair and the caramel of his skin and lips.

  He was twenty or so meters from me, totally immobile. His white T-shirt was covered in grime and he was staring straight at me. He looked nimble, like a little fawn, an animal that can jump ten times its own height. There was a sign, but I’m not sure what it was or why we remained silent for so long. I don’t know how much time actually passed or if it was simply the adrenaline that expanded my awareness of those seconds. I didn’t blow the whistle, despite holding it between my teeth. It was the shock that stopped me, that and the sense that the boy was silently begging me not to. For an instant it seemed that his lightness was somehow dependent on my weight, that I was the gravity keeping him rooted to the earth. I held the dog tightly to keep her from charging, but a second later it was me who began to chase the boy. Jerónimo turned and ran.

  My memory of the chase is that it was not long, which I also know by the signs it left on my body; I scratched my face and at some point must have banged my knee, because the next day it was swollen. When Moira got in my way I accidentally kicked her, and she howled plaintively in response. Three steps later I caught Jerónimo for the first time, grabbed him by the T-shirt, and we both nearly tripped; then he broke free and got away. We ran a few meters and finally I managed to grab an arm, but he started kicking, hard. It reminded me of the feeling I’d gotten a few months earlier on catching that girl listening to Maia play the violin in our back garden; more than a child, he seemed like some gigantic insect, a creature with eight or ten limbs flailing desperately in unthinkable directions, each tipped with a small hook, something that stung or scratched. He gave off a sour smell, like the homeless people in town but with a sweeter note, like long-expired yogurt.