A Luminous Republic

by Andrés Barba

  More than feeling uneasy, it was as though we were drugged. Ideas were notably lacking. Amadeo Roque suggested entering directly through city hall’s sewers, and one imbecile proposed smoking the kids out, asphyxiating them by starting a fire. It was Alberto Ávila—one of the district police chiefs—who suggested closing off every way out of Zone T (the quadrant where we presumed they were) and then entering the sewers at equidistant points a hundred meters apart, to comb the tunnels until we converged in a single enclosed area.

  Many years later I learned from Jerónimo Valdés that we’d got it right only by chance. During the first weeks the children lived in the sewers they weren’t in that quadrant but the northeastern one, which of course made sense: it was the one closest to the jungle. According to Jerónimo, they’d moved after one of the girls had died from a snakebite. He confessed that before moving to the sewers under the city they buried her by the derelict picnic area, using random bricks they found lying around. A week after the entire ordeal ended I went there with the head of Social Affairs and two medical examiners to recover and identify the body; it was just us. For six days, the media had done nothing but show the infamous photo of thirty-two corpses lined up along the riverwalk, which meant that nobody cared too much about one extra body, so out of place. We found it exactly where Jerónimo had said we would. And indeed it was a girl; she couldn’t have been more than ten years old. They’d entombed her in the fetal position to minimize the size of the structure required. She was covered with a blanket and surrounded by what looked to be scraps of food and small toys. Over the months she’d been there, given the jungle’s humidity, her body had decomposed unevenly and was partially covered in brown spots while other parts remained intact. In her left hand she held three Playmobil dolls, and when the pathologist took them from her to examine them, I got the unsettling sense that he’d committed a desecration. There was a large Z on her forehead, and death had given her an almost petulant expression. Her left ankle was shockingly black, and the swelling from the snakebite that had killed her was visible. Around the bite were drawings done with markers—a rainbow of sorts, and stars that ran up her leg to her stomach, where someone had drawn a large sun and written her name: Ana. The reality of this girl’s death, her body disinterred only a week after her companions had died, seemed to lead to a place we’d never have dared to explore even had we been able. This wasn’t simply the burial of one child carried out by other children, but something as incomprehensible and yet as tangible as proof of another civilization. Another world.

  We finally opted for Alberto Ávila’s plan.

  By ten in the morning on March 19, 1995, we’d clamped shut every channel out of San Cristóbal’s sewer system and stationed police at each manhole of the area where we assumed the children were. The belief was that realizing they were surrounded would naturally lead them to gather in the same underground location, where all channels met in a sort of vault that the map showed as being pentagonal.

  The operation began at eleven thirty on one of the hottest days I can recall having endured in San Cristóbal. The heat index was 100 degrees, with 87 percent humidity. It was a Thursday and the city was bustling, in full commercial swing. We descended into the sewers pretending to be city workers, without attracting anyone’s attention. As is often the case, something that would have aroused suspicion at night, when done in broad daylight, and in full view of everyone, did not. We split into seven groups. My party was to cover a kilometer and a half of the eastern canal and was comprised of four police officers, one Social Services health worker and me. Some of the groups included the children’s family members: Antonio Lara was one of them, and Pablo Flores was in charge of group 4, the one traversing the entire first channel up to the intersection where we assumed we would find the children, and where, if the plan worked, they would end up cornered. Above this spot, three patrol cars and two Department of Social Affairs vans waited.

  As I climbed down the ladder, grabbing hold of the metal bars, searing pain shot through the wound on my arm and I thought of Jerónimo Valdés with hatred. This was the first time I’d been in a sewer, and though the smell was not pleasant, it was far less intense than I’d imagined: the canals were dry and better ventilated than I had assumed, and the few rats we saw elicited more jubilation than disgust. We humans are strange creatures, enthusiastic at the sight of what we already know we’ll see.

  We carried flashlights and wore headlamps, but much of the time there was no need to turn them on: light filtered in from the manholes above, creating an eerie effect throughout the corridor, as though it were being lit by angled stage lights. The corridors branching off to the sides (which according to the map joined our canal to the others via a large spiderweb pattern) bore metal plates with the names of the corresponding streets aboveground. Under one of these plates we got our first sign of the children: an enormous chalk drawing of a bird, its wings spread. Multiple veins emerged from the bird’s heart and traveled up its wings.

  This may sound farfetched, but it was looking at that bird that made me wonder for the first time if the children hated us. If they hated us in the way that perhaps only children can hate. We know what children’s love is like, but our ideas about their hatred are rudimentary and often incorrect: we think that in children the feeling is mixed with fear, and therefore with fascination, and thus perhaps with love, or some type of love, as well; that children’s hatred is made up of channels that connect different sentiments to one another and something causes them to move toward it.

  I asked Jerónimo about this emotion for years, and in many different ways, always avoiding the word “hate.” Not once did he respond directly. It wasn’t simply his reticence about all things sentimental—the experience ended up providing me with ways to get him to talk about many other things, even when he didn’t want to—but something much darker that I learned to respect: succor. I realized that children’s privacy is like a cry for help. Someone stops before danger and asks for help. One is strong and the other weaker, but unlike with adults, in children the one who doesn’t move is the brave one, the real threat.

  And that’s where it all began.

  In that sentiment, that exact place.

  The only consequential part of the Valeria Danas documentary is the interviews with all twenty-six people who’d been inside that “secret city”—as some insisted on calling it—of which there are no remaining images aside from those in our memory. Would we have paid closer attention had we known we’d get to see it for only a few minutes? I have absolutely no doubt.

  My group wasn’t the first to arrive; when we arrived at least ten people were already there, awestruck. The room was a ninety-square-meter pentagon, three meters high, illuminated by the daylight filtering in from four manholes above. The first impression was marvelous. There were hundreds of small pieces of mirror and glass everywhere, affixed to the walls with no apparent logic. Bottle necks, cracked eyeglasses, broken lightbulbs caused the light to bounce off some walls onto others as if it were a huge party, with sparkling green, brown, blue and orange, but also some encoded meaning. Many of the pieces rested on what looked almost like built-in shelving, others had been affixed to the sewer walls, and a large blue pane of glass had somehow been attached to one of the manholes and projected blue light all along the ground. The light streaming in must have made objects glimmer in a different way at noon than they did at three. The luminous phrase must have changed over the course of the day, and it gave the impression that the entire patchwork of colored glass, shards of mirror, pieces of magnifying glass and small bottles had been designed to create specific shapes: one reflection looked like a face, while others clearly resembled a tree, a dog, a house . . .

  Why, when we’ve so admired cave paintings dating back to the dawn of human consciousness, would we not also admire the extraordinary luminous decor created by the thirty-two in the San Cristóbal sewers for the same reason? While our ancestors drew eight-legged horses in order to simulate movement
and used caves’ recesses to make bison, the thirty-two had decorated their walls with something far more intangible: light. The stillness of those glimmering objects enveloped us so totally that for a few minutes we hovered in silence. I remember how much I wanted to be alone in that place, which at the time struck me as sacred. In one of the interviews, a woman says something I’ll never forget: when the initial shock passed, she says, she was filled with the sense that all of that light had been constructed “with diligence and pleasure.” That’s it precisely. This luminous structure contained pleasure the way an egg contains its yolk. It would have been as impossible to claim the children had done this by accident as it would be to throw a pile of words into the air and expect them to land forming the opening of a story. And in that leap was joy, a radiant and touching childlike joy.

  Jerónimo would never talk about the glass. Only once did he confess that he personally had stuck some of the pieces to the wall and that at certain times of day, though not every day, the children played a game, but he refused to explain what the game was. A passing comment led me to believe that this cathedral of light had been designed in completely democratic fashion. There was no mastermind in the shadows, only a sort of collective and impartial love of play—“pleasure,” as the woman in the documentary says. The remaining witnesses’ comments are contradictory and at times slightly affected. Some people claim that the glass “tinkled.” I recall no such thing. What’s more, most of it wasn’t hanging from the walls but embedded into them, which supports Valeria Danas’s hypothesis that the sewer topography rather than the children’s creativity determined the shape of this work of luminous art, although we know how keen Valeria Danas can be to deny us even the most basic of magic. The first time I heard this opinion I disagreed, and now I disagree still more. Over the years, my memory of some things has grown hazy, but I feel that today I see more clearly a shape, something like a rectangle that led to a door, a simple shape not very different from the one Rothko painted over and over and which looked as though it had been made deliberately. Perhaps it was a mere accident of the topography, but I have a hard time believing that. The pentagonal chamber, covered in mirrors and glass and pieces of tin and broken eyeglasses, was the closest thing imaginable to a body. And it was inside this body, as if within its heart, that the thirty-two lived. The idea is so simple I’ve often felt as if it were burning me.

  Neither the layout nor the height of the place seemed to respond to any pragmatic need. True, many of the city’s gas pipelines and one of the biggest generators in the northern sector converged there, but this didn’t explain the pentagonal shape and certainly not the many shelf-like niches in the wall. For years people speculated over whether the place had been a storeroom built to warehouse supplies during the sewer’s construction, which would at least have explained the niches. Many of us were so bedazzled by the reflecting light that we didn’t notice, didn’t spot the niches. There were (or are, since they’re still there) more than thirty of them, each over a meter and a half long and one meter deep. The kids apparently slept on them in relatively random fashion.

  What a strange and careful republic all of those little beds made. The Valeria Danas documentary has a shot of the place, but one taken long after the altercations, and needless to say, it shows no sign of the lives of the thirty-two. A deceitful image, like every image of an empty home. The witnesses’ comments are more real: some describe it as an “asymmetrical colony,” others—more rightly—say it looked like a family pantheon. And while it did indeed resemble a columbarium, it also could have been bunk beds, or one of those boxes typesetters store text characters in. Even the sense that one child slept in each niche was misleading: clothes were all tangled together and sometimes seemed to belong to various children. Some of the niches were so hard to reach that I can’t imagine how they managed to climb up to them without breaking their necks, and there were little things, small treasures, scattered on all of them: bottle caps, pebbles, candy, a brooch, belt buckles . . . I remember very few of the things I saw; in my mind they’re all one big jumble. The only thing I’m sure of is that the objects were there, treasures slowly amassed, imbued with the children’s desires. Jerónimo once told me that they had stopped using money (our money) early on, but they never stopped bartering, small objects and favors. Maybe those seemingly random objects were actually their currency. The children had fled their city so quickly that they’d left their money behind.

  What were their lives like? The same way you sometimes walk into a person’s house and get a feeling, an accurate picture of the activities of those who live there, the rules and laws they live by, this place, too, seemed to contain the spirit of their movements. You could sense it in the simple way that being in one place (by the panel full of pipes, for instance) invited you to walk someplace else (under the blue light projected from the ceiling). For years, every time I thought of the huge space where the thirty-two lived, what instantly came to mind was a house where I spent part of my childhood, an old country house with a circular layout where—inexplicably—in order to get to the dining room you had to walk through one of the bedrooms. My mother always complained about how nonsensical the floor plan was, but for some reason she never did anything to change it. Now it occurs to me that she didn’t change it because that layout was the one most befitting the actual house, and therefore we ended up adapting ourselves to it. Some houses make their inhabitants live like reptiles, others like men, others like insects. Regardless of how unlikely it was that the architects who’d designed the sewer system had imagined that a community of thirty-two children would end up living in it, this place, too, was predetermined, and the children ended up adapting to the spirit it imposed on them. All you had to do was slowly close your eyes to get used to the darkness and see that the space worked as an enormous bedroom. Those of us there had come in by walking through openings in the corridors, and we’d instantly realized, without anyone explaining: the room was a giant, warm bedroom. A dilation. The body opened up to embrace its guests, and embracing its guests filled them with the illusory sense that the cement walls were in fact soft and yielding.

  Jerónimo spoke to me once about the sounds there. He’d just turned seventeen and was being transferred from the juvenile detention center to a trade school where, in theory, he would study carpentry. He’d refused his family’s visits and asked that I be named his legal guardian. I wasn’t expecting this and was so touched by the gesture that I was glad not to have been notified of it in his presence, since my eyes welled up. Jerónimo had turned into a relatively attractive young man, but he was so quiet that his silence inevitably generated hostility in those around him. He was sometimes violent, and I suspect that his life in the reformatory wasn’t exactly easy, but he never complained about anything. Being the only survivor, his karma weighed on him so heavily at first that he’d gotten used to being alone; four years after the death of the thirty-two, he was still cagey. I remember bringing him a gift that day, a penknife I’d found at a flea market, a sort of coarse antique in the shape of a girl. I knew that kids in the reformatory weren’t allowed to receive this kind of thing, but Jerónimo was not a normal kid, and nor, most definitely, was my relationship with him. He was fascinated by it and stared at the crude shape as though hypnotized by a miniature brass siren. I remember we sat on one of the benches at the detention center and he started jabbing the knife into the wood. This was the first time he talked about the sounds inside the sewer. It wasn’t me who asked (despite having done so and receiving no reply hundreds of times before), and he told me that some nights, as he and the other kids slept in the niches, he thought he heard a hoarse voice speaking to him, the voice of a monster. I don’t recall Jerónimo’s exact words, but I do recall his distress at listening to that voice: he said it was like a face with no precise shape, except for a very clear mouth and a long, thin mustache. A real mouth. He also said that other kids heard the voice too, and that everyone was afraid of it. “It would wake you up in t
he middle of a dream and tell you things.” I asked him what things, but he didn’t answer. I asked him what they did when they were afraid, and he said, Be together and tell stories. That was all.

  Learning about that fear totally sabotaged my memory of that day. In the same way people think back about someone they saw or interacted with, someone about to get divorced or to die without knowing it, and in retrospect they think the person’s face showed clear signs, I remembered what my transformation was like, the one that occurred when I saw the word “whore” written in chalk next to one of those niches. I remembered this while speaking to Jerónimo, four years later. I remembered that some of the beds still bore the shape of a child’s head and others seemed to have been rummaged through, in search of something. I remembered that the air had an intensely sour smell, like rotting food, like cigarettes, and that to avoid seeing the word again I looked back up at the light and tried to reconstruct the contours of a girl, a boy, lost in the light of those reflections, children awestruck at the beauty and the chaos and the darkness and the wonder. But the word was too persistent. For a second I seemed to perceive everything: I thought I saw them, their presence like a glow, and I saw the roaring freedom of this place that seemed to have been built just for them before the world was created. I saw how things had begun as a game, maybe in one of those corners where there were still a few toys, no doubt stolen from some patio, or perhaps brought from their own homes. This artificial world, filled with miracles, revelations and camaraderie. I put my hand on one of the niches and knew that two children had slept there, arms around each other. I could still see their curved outlines and the way one’s head was tilted, resting on the back or shoulder of the other. Two children had shared this niche and had fallen asleep with their eyes open, staring up at the glass as it cast reflections in the shape of a dog, a tree, a house.