Lost Children Archive

by Valeria Luiselli

  We sped out of Lordsburg, southbound, parallel to the New Mexico–Arizona border, across the Animas Valley, past a ghost town called Shakespeare, past a town called Portal. Why? I could not stop thinking.

  Why don’t you call the Lordsburg police and tell them we’re on our way to the Chiricahuas? my husband said.

  I called and was told they’d send someone over.

  We drove on in silence along a dirt road until we reached a town called Paradise—a few scattered houses—where the road ended abruptly. There we left the car. I took my phone out and searched for a signal, but there was none.

  The sun was still low when we began climbing up the eastern slope of the Chiricahua Mountains, looking for the trail toward Echo Canyon, the slopes and jagged cliffs of the desert multiplying around us like a question impossible to answer.

  HEART OF LIGHT

  (Last Elegies for the Lost Children)

  (THE ELEVENTH ELEGY)

  The desert opens out around them, wide and invariable, as the train advances westward, parallel to the long iron wall. The sun is rising far to the east, behind a mountain range, a grand mass of blue and purple, its contours jagged lines, like hesitant brushstrokes. They are silent, the six children, more silent than usual. Locked up in their terrors, the six.

  Some sit on the edge of the train gondola, facing the east, dangling their legs, spitting out saliva balls just to see whose gets farther, but mostly gazing down at the ground that sweeps beneath them, white, brown, speckled with thornbushes, rubbish, strange rocks. Some sit cross-legged, facing the front of the train, more alone than the others, letting the wind brush their cheeks and tangle their hair. And a couple more, the two littlest, remain lying down on their sides, their cheeks against the roof of the train gondola. With their eyes, they follow the monotonous line of the horizon, their minds threading thoughts and images into a long meaningless sentence. The desert is an enormous, motionless hourglass: sand passing by in time detained.

  Then, the sixth boy, who is now the eldest of the group, reaches into his jacket pocket and feels the cold, concise edges of a mobile telephone. He had found the phone tucked under a track in the last yard while he was practicing train jumping with the others and had hid it. He had also found a good black hat and was now wearing it. The man in charge had not objected to his wearing the hat he’d found, but the boy knew he’d confiscate the telephone if he caught him with it, even though it was broken and could not be used.

  He makes sure the man in charge is still sleeping, and he is. The man in charge is as if in a coma, far away, breathing deeply, huddled under a tarp. So the boy takes out the telephone. Its glass is smashed like a window hit by a bird or a bullet, and the battery is dead, but still he shows the object to the rest of the children as if he were showing them a treasure found after a shipwreck. They all respond with gestures, silent but acknowledging.

  Then he suggests a game, tells all of them to watch him and listen carefully. First he hands the dead phone to one of the girls, the older one, and says: “Here, call someone, call anyone.” It takes her a moment to understand what he’s suggesting. But when he repeats his words, she smiles, and nods, and looks around at all of them, one by one, her tired eyes suddenly looking enormous and ablaze. She stares back down at the phone in her hand, takes the collar of her shirt and stretches it outward, looking at something stitched in its inner folding. She pretends to dial a long number, and then holds the phone up tight to her ear.

  Yes? Hello? We’re on our way, Mama, don’t worry. We’ll be there soon. Yes, everything’s okay.

  The others observe, each understanding the rules of this new game at their own pace. The older girl quickly passes the telephone to her little sister and prompts her with a whisper to follow the game. The little one does. She dials a number—only three digits—noticing the embarrassing sand and soot deep under the nail of her index finger, knowing her grandmother would have scolded her if she saw her nails. She holds the phone up to her ear.

  What did you have for dinner?

  Others wait for her to say more, but this is the only sentence she delivers. The boy sitting next to her, one of the older ones, boy number five, takes the phone from her and also dials, but he places it to his mouth as if it were a walkie-talkie.

  Hello? Hello? I can’t hear you. Hello?

  Self-consciously, he looks around him, holds the phone to his mouth, and burps into it. Then he laughs with the awkward, uneven waves of puberty. Some of the others laugh with him, and he passes the phone down.

  Another boy, boy four, receives the phone now. It trembles in his hand, and he does nothing with it. He passes it to the next boy, the third boy, who pretends it is a bar of soap and cleans his body with it, silent.

  Some children laugh, some force themselves into laughter. Next to him, the youngest of the children, boy three, smiles, shyly, under his sucked thumb. He slowly unplugs his thumb from his mouth. It’s his turn to take the phone, and he does. He looks at it, cradled in the cup of his hands, and then looks up at the rest of the group. He knows by the eyes of the others, by the eyes they look at him with, that he has to say something, that he cannot just keep quiet like he always keeps quiet. So he takes a deep breath and, looking at the phone still cradled in his palms, starts whispering into it. He speaks for the first time, and speaks more than he’s ever done before:

  Mama, I haven’t been sucking my thumb at all, Mama, you’d be so proud, and proud to know we’ve rode on the back of many beasts for many days and weeks now, I’m not sure how long, but I’ve become a man, and a lot of time has passed, but I still can remember the stones you used to throw into the green lake, when we were there, some of them dark, some of them flat, others small and shiny, and I have one of the stones, the one I didn’t throw, in my pocket, and my train brothers and sisters are good people, Mama, and all of them are brave, and strong, and have all different faces, there’s a boy who’s always angry, he talks in a strange language in his sleep, and when he’s awake, he talks in our language but is still angry, and there’s another boy who’s almost always serious though sometimes does funny things, but when he is serious, he says we are ready for the desert, Mama, and I know he’s right, and there are two girls who are sisters and look almost the same, except one is bigger and the other is smaller, and the smaller one is missing some teeth, like I will soon, because I can feel one or two moving already in my mouth, the two girls never get scared, though, not even the smaller one, they are both gentle and brave, they never cry, and wear shirts that they keep clean no matter what, and on the collars of the shirts their grandmother sewed the telephone number of their mother, who’s waiting for them on the other side of the desert, they showed the numbers to me once and they looked just like the number you’d also sewn on my shirt so I can call my aunt when I cross to the other side of the desert, I promise I’ll be strong when we have to climb over the wall with the rest, and won’t be scared of jumping, won’t be afraid of any beasts either and won’t ask to stop for a rest or something to eat once we cross, I promise I will cross the desert and get all the way to the big city, and across the bridge in a beautiful new car, across the bridge to where there’ll be buildings made of glass rising up to meet me, which is what the seventh boy told me, because there used to be seven of us, and the seventh was the oldest boy, he was the only one who was not afraid of the man in charge, and kept us safe from him, the man in charge looked like he was a little scared when the boy was watching him, with his big dog eyes, always watching over us with dog eyes, still now he is, I know, although he’s gone now, not on the train with us anymore.

  He suddenly stops talking and plugs a thumb back into his mouth, the phone resting now in only one of his hands. The sixth boy takes his phone again, knows he has no words left to say.

  After a few moments, he tells the rest of the children that the phone is also a camera, and now they all have to huddle together for a portr
ait, and they do. They come together, but very carefully, without standing up. The train rocks constantly and sometimes jerks a little, and they have learned to listen to its movements with their entire bodies. They know when they can stand up and when they need to move across its surface without standing. Finally huddled together, some tilt their heads to one side or the other, some make peace signs or horn signs, smile or stick out their tongues, contort in grimaces. The boy says:

  When I count to three, we all say our names.

  He pretends to focus.

  They stare straight into the telephone’s eye with a strange, powerful gaze. Behind them, the sun is rising higher in the sky. The five of them look serious, mighty. The boy adjusts his black hat, then counts to three, and on three, they all shout out their names, including him:

  Marcela!

  Camila!

  Janos!

  Darío!

  Nicanor!

  Manu!

  (THE TWELFTH ELEGY)

  A ruffle of murmurs hovers in the sullen air and the train stands still on the tracks. Sitting up, the now eldest boy, boy six, looks around and notices that the man in charge is now awake, sitting cross-legged and looking not at him, not at the rest of the children, but into his empty smoking pipe.

  The boy scans the other travelers, grown-ups most of them, in groups of threes and fives or sixes, all huddled tightly together, maybe more tightly than usual. The sky is pale blue, and the sun is milky behind the screen of haze on the horizon. The older girl, sitting cross-legged, looks up toward the sky, braiding her hair. And the youngest one, boy three, lying sideways, sucks his thumb again, his right cheek and ear resting on the leprous surface of the train car. All around them, barrenlands stretch shadowless.

  The six children notice a man climbing up a side ladder and standing tall near the edge of their gondola. He does not look like a priest. Perhaps he is a soldier. He is bending over a group of men and women. They see a woman grapple with the possible soldier for her sack. They hear her dull, dry wail when the soldier snatches the sack away from her and flings something overboard. She lets out a second cry. Her voice rises from her chest, up her esophagus, like the cry of a caged animal. The children hear it and they all sit up now, alert. An electric discharge travels from some vague nerve inside the muscles of their hearts, which pump a message into their chests and down their spines, and as fear settles in the bowls of their bellies, their limbs tremble slightly. They confirm the man is, indeed, a soldier. In a nearby branch, a trio of vultures stands guard or perhaps simply sleeps.

  Between the soldier and the children, men and women huddled and squeezed against one another along the gondola murmur and whisper, but the ripples of their words do not reach the children, who are waiting for a cue, waiting for instructions from the man in charge, waiting. Even the older boys in the group are silent and look scared and don’t know what to tell the rest. The man in charge fidgets with his pipe, unengaged, far away somehow. As the soldier approaches the children, his heavy boots polished black over black thumping against the roof of the train car, they understand that he is not going to ask for passports, not for money, not for explanations. The youngest boy maybe doesn’t understand, but he shuts his eyes and wants to suck his thumb again and is about to but instead bends over his crossed legs and bites the strap of his backpack.

  They’d all brought with them a single backpack. The man that would lead them through forests and plains and now through deserts had told their parents before leaving:

  No unnecessary belongings.

  So they had packed mostly only basics. At night, atop the train, they used the backpacks as pillows. By day, they hugged them to their stomachs. Their stomachs were always sick with rocking and angry with hunger. Sometimes, when the train was about to cross near one of the police or military posts that mushroomed silently along the way, they were told to jump off, leaping off the ladder onto the ground, scratched and bruised by stones and branches, always holding on tight to the backpack. They’d walk in a single line amid thornbushes and pebbled dirt, always parallel but far enough from the tracks. They’d walk silently, sometimes whistling alone, sometimes together, their backpacks hanging. The older boys wore them on one shoulder like when walking to school, and the younger children thrust their small bodies forward to balance the heavy weight of toothbrushes, sweaters, toothpaste, Bibles, bags of nuts, bread buns smeared with butter, pocket calendars, spare change, and extra shoes. They walked like this until the man in charge signaled it was time, and then they cut through the bush, walking perpendicular and then parallel to the tracks, and caught up with the slow-moving train again some miles ahead.

  But this time they had received no warning and had slept through a stop at a military post, where the train had boarded soldiers.

  Now, on the roof, the silhouette of the soldier against the pale sky looms directly above them. He stretches an arm and knocks with his fist twice on the skull of the boy who is biting the strap of his backpack. The boy raises his head and opens his eyes, fixing them on the soldier’s good boots as he hands the backpack over to him. Slowly the soldier opens it and pulls out its contents, studying and naming each object before he throws it back over his shoulder. He collects all their backpacks, one by one, meeting no resistance from this group of six. No wails, no cries from any of them, no struggles as he takes the backpacks and reaches into each one, roams with his hand, and flings things high into the air, punctuating their names with question marks as they fly and crash or sometimes feather into the ground below: Toothbrush? Marbles? Sweater? Toothpaste? Bible? Underwear? A broken telephone?

  Before he can move on to the next group of backpacks, the train blows its whistle. He scans the children, and nods at the man in charge. The men exchange glances and a few words and numbers that the children cannot make sense of, then the soldier takes a large folded envelope from inside his jacket and hands it over to the man in charge. The train blares a second whistle, and the soldier, like the rest of the soldiers atop the beast, all performing a similar operation on contiguous train cars, slowly climbs down the side ladder of the train and hops onto the ground, dusting his thighs and shoulders as he strolls back to the post.

  The whistle blows for the third time and the beast jerks once, twice, and then resumes its forward course, all its screws and drawbars shrieking awake again. Some travelers look over the edge of the roof to the ground scattered with personal belongings, the desert sand like an ocean flowing backward after a shipwreck. Others prefer to look farther away into the northern horizon or up into the sky, thinking nothing. The train gains speed upon the tracks, almost lifting a little like a ship setting up mast and sailing forth. From his booth, a lieutenant watches the train disappear into the haze, thinking haze, thinking spray, thinking ships cutting through the waste of seaweed: the heaps, the broken, the beautiful rubbish, all the colors of stuff beaming now under the sun.

  (THE THIRTEENTH ELEGY)

  Under the desert sky, they wait. The train moves in perfect parallel to the long iron wall, forward yet somehow also in circles, and they do not know that the next morning, the train will come to a final halt. Caught in repetition, trapped in the circular rhythm of the train wheels, tucked under the umbrella of the invariable sky, none suspect that it will finally happen the next day: they will arrive somewhere, and get off the train at the first sign of dawn.

  They had heard stories about it for so long. For months or years, they formed pictures of places and imagined all the people they would finally see there again: mothers, fathers, siblings. For so long, their minds had been filled with dust, and ghosts, and questions:

  Will we make it safely across?

  Will we find anyone on the other side?

  What will happen on the way?

  And how will it all end?

  They had walked, and swam, and hidden, and run. They had boarded trains and spent ni
ghts sleepless atop gondolas, looking up at the barren, godless sky. The trains, like beasts, drilled and scratched their way across jungles, across cities, across places difficult to name. Then, aboard this last train, they had come to this desert, where the incandescent light bent the sky into a full arch, and time had also bent back on itself. Time, in the desert, was an ongoing present tense.

  They wake.

  They watch.

  They listen.

  They wait.

  And now they see, above them, an airplane flying across the sky. They follow it with fixed gazes but don’t suspect that the plane is full of boys and girls like them, looking down toward them, though none see each other. Inside the plane, a little boy peers out the oval window and plugs his thumb into his mouth. Far below him, a train advances on a railroad track. Sitting next to him is an older boy, his teenage, pimple-scarred cheeks similar to the almost lunar industrial landscapes over which they will fly. The little boy’s thumb, in his mouth, tucked between his tongue and his palate, makes his throat less hungry, his belly less empty with angst. A resilience will start settling in him, thoughts slowing and dissolving, body muscles yielding, respiration layering quietude over fright. The boy’s thumb, plugged, sucked, pumped, swollen, will slip out as he sinks into sleep, erased from his place in his seat, on this plane, erased from the fucked-up country below him, removed. Finally he shuts his eyes, dreams spaceships. The plane will sweep above vast stretches of land, over peopled cities, above the stones and the animals, over meandering rivers and ash-colored ridges, a long powdery white line trailing behind it, scarring the sky.

  (THE FOURTEENTH ELEGY)

  It starts at sunset, when storm clouds are gathering above and in front of them. The beast screeches through the continuous desert, always rocking and shaking on the tracks, threatening to fall apart, derail, suck them into its insides. The man in charge has drunk himself to sleep again, holding to his half-bare chest a plastic bottle of something he got in exchange for one of the boys’ empty backpacks. He is so deep inside his sleep, dreamless or full of dreams, no one knows, that when the younger of the girls shoves a bird feather she collected days earlier deep into his nose, he only grunts, shuffles, and continues to breathe like nothing. She giggles, toothless here and there, and looks up at the sky.