Lost Children Archive

by Valeria Luiselli

  (THE FIFTH ELEGY)

  Long vines hung from low branches, brushed their cheeks and shoulders. Sitting or lying down, aboard the leprous roof of a gondola, they crossed acres of tropical jungle, where they had to be vigilant of men, but wary also of plants and beasts. Even the train crawled more slowly than usual here, as if it too were cautious not to stir the undergrowth awake. Mosquitoes covered the seven of them in pink welts that later turned bruise-purple, later brown, and then vanished but left behind all their dengue poison.

  The jungle was lightless and full of hidden horrors. It choked them with the longing to escape but offered them no foreseeable relief. Their heads filled with heavy air and fever. The colors of the jungle, its fetid vapors, ignited their open eyes with wild visions. Nightmares flowered in all their dreams, filled them with humid tongues and yellow teeth, and the big, dry hands of older men. One night, sleepless and shivering despite the heat, their bones rattling, they’d all seen it, the fleeting silhouette of a body hanging from a rope strung to a branch. The man in charge told them the hanging man was a man no longer, said they shouldn’t be concerned for him, shouldn’t pray for him either, for he was nothing now but meat for the insects and bones for the beasts. The man told the children that if they made any mistake, any false move, they would also be no more than meat and bones, corpses, severed heads. Then he did a head count. He shouted: “Lieutenant, a head count! Count all your corpses!” And he replied to himself: “Yes, sir!” and started counting, slapping each child across the head as he called out a number: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven.

  * * *

  —

  Here Ma quit reading and said maybe she should read something different to us. But you had already fallen asleep, and so I said, no, Ma, come on, look, she’s asleep. And I’m old enough. Even comic books are more violent than this. So she cleared her throat and continued:

  * * *

  —

  As they rode across the jungle on top of the train car, the seven, trying to sleep but also fearing to fall asleep, they heard stories and rumors. “Was full of thugs and murderers,” people said. “Everyone will have his heart out, set on a pike spike,” a woman atop a boxcar said. “One man had both his eyes torn out, and all his goods sequestered,” they said. And they also said, “Here stripped, here made to stand.” The words traveled across the train roof faster than the train itself, and reached the seven children, who tried to not listen but were unable. The words were like those mosquitoes, injected thoughts into their heads, filling them, creeping up everywhere inside them.

  One boy, boy number six, the boy whose feet had been cured by the bucket-girl, coiled into a fetal position every night, to wait for sleep. He tried to remember his grandfather, but the old man was not anywhere in his mind, and neither were his lobsters. Everything was becoming erased. He’d coil and then unwind to lie faceup toward the sky, shuffling and shifting and looking for sleep. Then he tried to remember the girl’s soft hands fixing his feet with her clippers, tried to summon her black eyes, and wished them there with him, her eyes and bare hands, inching around his body and into darker crevices. But hard as he tried, his mind forced him back to the larger metallic pincers of the beast now crawling rhythmically along the train tracks.

  The children dared not shut their eyes too long at night, and when they did, they were not able to dream of what lay ahead. Nothing beyond the jungle was imaginable while they were inside its grip. Except one night, when the eldest of the boys, number seven, offered to tell them a story.

  You want to hear a story? he asked.

  Yes, said some of the younger ones, yes please. The older ones said nothing, but also wanted to hear it.

  I’ll tell you a story, but after I tell it, you all have to shut your eyes and think about it, about what it really means, and not think about the train or the man in charge or the jungle or nothing.

  Okay, said one. Fine, said another. Okay, yes, they said.

  Promise?

  They all promised. Everyone agreed.

  Tell it, they said. Tell it.

  Okay, the story is this: “When he woke up, the dinosaur was still there.”

  That’s no story, said one of the older boys.

  Shhh, said one of the girls. We promised. We said we’d just keep quiet and think about the story.

  Can you tell it again? asked boy number three, his eyelids heavy, puffy.

  Okay, just once more, and then you’re quiet and go to sleep.

  And as boy three listened, trying to fall asleep, he gazed up at the sky through the dark leaves, the constant black-deep above him, and wondered, do gods float up there, and which gods do we worship where? He looked long and hard for them up there, but there were none.

  MOTHER TONGUES

  I asked Mama for just one more chapter. She said no, she had said only one, and that was that. She went back to her bed and turned off the lights. I forced myself to stay awake, pretending to sleep, and when I was sure she was finally asleep, I switched on the bedside lamp, took the book, and opened it.

  The picture I had taken earlier that day, of the airplane standing there, slipped out from the pages of the book. I looked at it, hard, like I was waiting for the children to appear in it, but of course they didn’t. There’s nothing in the picture, if you look at it, except that stupid plane, which makes me so frustrated. But as I tucked the picture back in between some pages toward the end of the book, I realized something important, which is this: that everything that happened after I took the picture was also inside it, even though no one could see it, except me when I looked at it, and maybe also you, in the future, when you look at it, even if you didn’t even see the original moment with your own eyes.

  Finally, being more careful this time and holding the sides of the book tighter so that the other pictures wouldn’t fall out, I opened it to the beginning. I read the first lines of the story, which I’d heard Mama read out loud once but which were harder to understand if I read them myself:

  (THE FIRST ELEGY)

  Mouths open to the sky, they sleep. Boys, girls: lips chapped, cheeks cracked, for the wind whips day and night. They occupy the entire space there, stiff but warm, lined up like new corpses along the metal roof of the train gondola. From behind the rim of his blue cap, the man in charge counts them—six children; seven minus one. The train advances slowly along tracks parallel to an iron wall. Beyond, on both sides of the wall, the desert stretches out, identical. Above, the swart night is still.

  TIME & TEETH

  I read those lines over and over, and tried to memorize them, until I thought I understood them. I was a level Z reader. You were not even level A because you confused the letters b and d, and also the letters g and p, and when I showed you a book and asked you what do you see here on this page? you said, I don’t know, and when I said what do you at least imagine? you said that you pictured all the little letters jumping and splashing like all the kids in our neighborhood when they finally opened the swimming pool and let us swim there. I read the first page of Ma’s red book over and over, until I heard Pa’s footsteps coming back from the street, stopping outside the room, and then the door handle turning, so I threw the book on the floor and pretended to be sleeping, opening my mouth a little.

  TONGUE TIES

  That night, I dreamed that I killed a cat and that afterward, I walked out into the desert all by myself and buried its parts: tail, feet, eyes, and some whiskers. Then a voice was asking me if the parts of the cat were the cat. But of course I didn’t actually do any of this, I only dreamed it, which was lucky and relieving, but which I only realized when I woke up and remembered that we were in a town, which was called Truth or Consequences.

  PROCEDURES

  The next day, we woke early and went out to play on a patio while Pa and Ma were still asleep, and the patio was full of cats sleeping on benches and chairs and unde
r tables, which made me feel a little guilty, as if I had really killed one of them, and not just dreamed it. So I made up a game about rescuing cats, and we played for a while, but you never got the rules right, so we ended up fighting.

  In the car we didn’t fight so much, but sometimes we got bored for real and sometimes we pretended to be bored. I knew they didn’t know the answer, but still I asked Ma and Pa, maybe just to annoy them:

  How much longer?

  And then you asked:

  When will we get there?

  To distract us, and keep us quiet, Pa and Ma would sometimes play news on the radio or play audiobooks. The news was usually bad. The audiobooks were either boring or too adult for us, and at first Pa and Ma kept on changing their minds about which one to listen to, jumping from one to another, until one day they found the Lord of the Flies audiobook and stuck with it. You said you hated it and complained you didn’t understand a word, but I noticed that you tried to pay attention to it anyway, whenever it played, and so I forced myself to pay attention, too, and pretended to understand everything, even though at times it was difficult to understand.

  JOINT FILING

  If we got lucky, they would turn the car’s sound system off and tell us stories and histories. Mama’s stories were always about lost children, like the news on the radio. We liked them, but they also made you feel strange or worried. Papa’s histories were about the old American southwest, back when it used to be part of Mexico. All of this was once Mexico, Ma always used to say when he started speaking about that, and moved her one arm across the entire space around the car. Pa told us about bluecoats, about Saint Patrick’s Battalion and Pancho Villa. Our favorite histories, though, were the ones he told about Geronimo, the Apache. And even though I knew his histories were all just a trick he did to distract us while we were in the car, whenever he started speaking about Geronimo, every time, I fell for it, and so did you, and we both forgot all about being in the car, and having to pee, and about time and how much time was left in front of us. And when we forgot about time, time passed much quicker, and we also felt happier, though this can’t be explained.

  You’d always fall asleep listening to those histories. I usually didn’t, but I was able at least to close my eyes and pretend to sleep. And when they thought we were both sleeping, they’d sometimes fight, or keep silent, or else Pa would play bits of his inventories, which he’d been recording along the way and wanted to discuss with Ma. He was making inventories for something he called his inventory of echoes. And if you’re wondering what inventories of echoes are, this is what they are. Inventories of echoes are things made of sounds, sounds that got lost but were found by someone, or that would get lost unless they were trapped by someone, someone like Pa, who would make an inventory with them. So they were like a collection, or like a museum of sounds that did not exist anymore but that people would still be able to hear thanks to people like Papa who made them into inventories.

  Sometimes his inventories were just wind blowing and rain falling and cars passing, and those were the most boring of all. Other times they were conversations with people, interviews, stories, histories, or just voices. Once he even recorded our voices talking in the backseat of the car, and then played them for Ma when they thought we were both sleeping and not listening. And it was strange to listen to our own voices around us, like we were there but also not there. I felt like we’d disappeared, thought, what if we are not actually sitting back here but only being remembered by them?

  ALONE TOGETHER

  We would ask Papa for more Apache stories. My favorite story, even though it was also the one that made me saddest and angriest, was the one about the surrender of the last Chiricahuas. For days, they walked, Pa told us: men, women, girls, boys, one behind another, sad faces, no bags, no words, no nothing. They walked in a single line, held as prisoners, like the lost children we saw in Roswell.

  The last Apaches walked from Skeleton Canyon toward the mountains to the north. There was a white-eye general and his men. They were head-counting the prisoners of war all the time to make sure none escaped. They counted one Geronimo plus twenty-seven more. They advanced slowly through the canyon under the terrible sun, he said. And he didn’t say it but I was thinking all the time that in their minds, those prisoners were probably scared and full of angry words, though in their mouths there was silence only.

  Ma kept silent most of the time when Pa was telling his histories, maybe thinking about her own lost children story and picturing them in her head being put on that airplane in Roswell, or maybe just listening to what Pa said and thinking nothing.

  Pa told us about how Geronimo and his band were the last people on the entire continent to surrender to the white-eyes. Fifteen men, nine women, three children, and Geronimo. Those were the last Indians who were free, he said, and told us we had to always remember that. Before they surrendered, they’d wandered the big mountains called Sierra Madre, broken out of reservations, raided settlements, killed many evil bluecoats and many evil Mexican soldiers.

  You listened and looked out the window. I listened and held on to the back of Pa’s pilot seat and sometimes pulled myself closer to him. He held on to the steering wheel with his two hands, and he was always looking straight at the highway. Before he fell off his horse and died, Pa said, Geronimo’s last words were: “I should have never surrendered. I should have fought until I was the last man alive.” That’s what Pa told us. And I think it’s probably true that Geronimo said that, though Pa also said no one could really ever know because there was no recording or anything to prove it. He said that after Geronimo’s surrender, the general and his men set forth on the godless desert in Skeleton Canyon and herded Geronimo’s band like they were herding sheep aboard death ships. And he said that after two days, they reached Bowie and there they were crammed into a train car and sent east, far from everything and everyone. I asked him what happened later, and I was thinking about Geronimo’s band, but also I was thinking about Mama’s lost children, who had also been riding on trains, not knowing where or why or what was going to happen to them.

  While Pa spoke, I was sometimes drawing a map of his history with my finger on the back of his driver’s seat, a map mostly full of arrows, arrows pointing everywhere, arrows shot, whoosh, from horseback, arrows crossing rivers, half arrows disappearing like ghosts, arrows shot from dark mountain caves, and some arrows dipped into rattlesnake poison pointing at the sky, and no one could see any of my finger-maps, except me and you.

  Finger-maps were something I’d invented and perfected way before our trip. In second grade, when I was sitting at my desk, working on number bonds or cursive letter practice, I liked to imagine where Ma and Pa were, maybe because I felt alone and missed them, but I’m not actually sure why. When I finished a section of number bonds or a line of a’s or h’s, I sometimes slid the tip of my pencil from the edge of the sheet of paper and drew with it on the desk. It was completely prohibited to draw on the desks. But I closed my eyes and imagined Ma and Pa getting on the subway, moving in a straight line for five stops uptown, then walking out, and walking three blocks east. And while I imagined all that, the tip of my pencil followed, five up, three to the right. I drew those imagined maps for weeks, and after a while, my desk was all full of beautiful routes that I knew exactly how to refollow, or kind of. Until one day the teacher told the principal I was drawing doodles all day on my desk instead of getting my work done, and then the principal told Ma and Pa that I had damaged school property. In the end, we had to pay a fine of fifty dollars, which Pa said I had to pay back with chores. After that, I still drew maps on my desk anyway, but I changed to using only my fingertip, so no one would see them now except me. And that is called finger-mapping.

  I knew you could see my finger-maps perfectly, because when I drew them on the back of Papa’s seat, you’d stare at them with your long, long way of looking at things when you were tryi
ng to understand them. And in understanding finger-maps, like in many other things, we were alone together.

  What happened a few years after, Papa told us, was that the Apaches were crammed back into a train car and sent to a place called Fort Sill, where most of them ended up dying, and were buried in the cemetery. I listened to that part of the story but didn’t draw it ’cause that part was undrawable. You won’t remember, Memphis, but we all went to that cemetery together, and I took pictures of Apache graves: Chief Loco, Chief Nana, Chief Chihuahua, Mangas Coloradas, Naiche, Juh, and of course Geronimo and Chief Cochise.

  Later, when I looked at the pictures again, I noticed that the names on the tombstones hadn’t come out at all. So when I showed Ma and Pa the photos, Pa said they were perfect because I’d documented the cemetery the way that it exists in recorded history, and at first I didn’t understand him, but then I did. He meant, I think, that my camera had erased the names of Apache chiefs the way they are also erased in history, which is something Pa was always reminding us of, and that’s why it was so important that we memorize all those names, because otherwise we would forget, like everyone else had already forgotten, that the Chiricahuas were the greatest warriors there were on the continent, and not some weird species that lived in the Museum of Natural History next to the petrified animals, and in cemeteries like that one, also alone together, as prisoners of war.

  ITEMIZATION & BOXES