Lost Children Archive: A Novel

by Valeria Luiselli

  ELEGIES

  We all walk into the cemetery in silence, trailing behind my husband, who takes us directly to Geronimo’s tomb as if he knows his way around. The tomb stands out from all the rest—a kind of pyramid made of stones stuck together with cement, and crowned with a marble reproduction of an eagle, only slightly smaller than life size. At the feet of the eagle are cigarettes, a harmonica, two pocketknives; and hovering above it, tied to a branch, are handkerchiefs, belts, and other personal relics that people leave as offerings.

  My husband has taken out his recording instruments and stands, immobile, facing Geronimo’s grave. Though he doesn’t ask us for solitude or for silence, we all know that we have to give him some space now, so the three of us walk onward, among the graves, first together, then dispersing. The girl runs around, looking for flowers. She plucks them, then deposits them on graves, over and over. The boy zigzags around tombstones, concentrating on taking pictures of some of them. He is serious in his task. He gazes around, finds a tomb, raises the camera to frame it, focuses, shoots. Once the picture is spat out by the camera, he places it inside the little red book tucked under his arm. A short while later, summoned by his father, he brings the book and camera back to me and joins him under a row of trees bordering a slow stream that marks the northern limits of the cemetery. The boy helps him collect sounds. I finally find some good shade under an old cedar, and sit down. The girl is still running around, plucking and distributing flowers, so I open the little red book, Elegies for Lost Children, ready to read for a while in silence. A couple of pictures slip out from between its pages—the book has been getting fatter and fatter with the boy’s Polaroids. I pick them up and slide them between the pages toward the end, and then flip back carefully to the first pages of the book.

  The foreword explains that Elegies for Lost Children was originally written in Italian by Ella Camposanto, and translated into English by Aretha Cleare. It is the only work by Camposanto (1928–2014), who probably wrote it over a span of several decades, and is loosely based on the historical Children’s Crusade, which involved tens of thousands of children who traveled alone across, and possibly beyond, Europe, and which took place in the year 1212 (though historians disagree about most of this crusade’s fundamental details). In Camposanto’s version, the “crusade” takes place in what seems like a not-so-distant future in a region that can possibly be mapped back to North Africa, the Middle East, and southern Europe, or to Central and North America (the children ride atop “gondolas,” for example, a word used in Central America to refer to the wagons or cars of freight trains). Finally tired and perhaps bored, the girl comes to join me under the cedar, so I close the book and put it in my handbag. I try to take my mind off what I’ve been reading and concentrate on her. While the boy and his father finish up collecting sounds, the two of us practice cartwheels, handstands, and forward rolls.

  HORSES

  It’s already late afternoon when we leave the cemetery, so we decide to find a place to sleep somewhere nearby. The boy is out after a few minutes, before we even reach the military checkpoint on our way out of Fort Sill. The girl makes an effort to stay awake a bit longer:

  Mama, Papa?

  Yes, love? I say.

  Geronimo fell off his horse! Right?

  That’s right, my husband says.

  She fills the space in the car with the warmth of her cub breath, and talks to us from the backseat—long, incomprehensible stories that remind me of some of Bob Dylan’s later song lyrics, post Christian conversion. Then, quite suddenly, she maybe tires of being in the world, becomes quiet, looks out the window, and says nothing. Perhaps it is in those stretched-out moments in which they meet the world in silence that our children begin to grow apart from us and slowly become unfathomable. Don’t stop being a little girl, I think, but I don’t say it. She looks out the window and yawns. I don’t know what she’s thinking, what she knows and doesn’t know. I don’t know if she sees the same world we see. The sun is setting, and the brutalized, almost lunar Oklahoma landscape stretches on indefinitely. Always defend yourself from this empty, fucked-up world, I want to say to her; cover it with your thumb. But of course I don’t say any of this.

  She is silent. We pass the military checkpoint, and she scans the view outside the window, then scans us from who knows which long distance to make sure we’re not looking at her when she slips her thumb into her mouth. She sucks her thumb and, in the backseat, a different silence settles. Her thoughts are slowing down, her body’s muscles yielding, her respiration layering quietude over unrest. Slowly she is absent, erased from us, slipping back deep into herself. Her thumb, sucked, pumped, swells with saliva, then slowly slips out as she slides into sleep. She closes her eyes, dreams horses.

  ECHOES & GHOSTS

  As we drive on, heading north toward the Wichita Mountains, I close my eyes and try to join my children in their sleep. But my mind twists and spirals down into the thought of children lost, other children who are lost, and I remember the two girls, alone, imagine them walking across the desert, possibly not too far from here.

  It comes to me that I have to record the sound documentary about lost children using the Elegies. But how? I need to make some voice notes, I know. Perhaps, like my husband, I should also be collecting sounds in the spaces we pass through along this trip. Am I also chasing ghosts, like he is? All this time, I have not quite understood what my husband meant when he said his inventory of echoes was about the “ghosts” of Geronimo, Cochise, and the other Apaches. But seeing him earlier today, walking patiently around the cemetery holding up his boom, and the boy trailing after him carrying the Porta Brace, his shoulder slightly raised up against the weight of his father’s heavy gear, both of them wearing huge headphones, trying to catch the sounds of wind brushing past branches, insects buzzing, and, especially, birds emitting all their strange, varied sounds—I think I finally begin to understand. I think his plan is to record the sounds that now, in the present, travel through some of the same spaces where Geronimo and other Apaches, in the past, once moved, walked, spoke, sang. He’s somehow trying to capture their past presence in the world, and making it audible, despite their current absence, by sampling any echoes that still reverberate of them. When a bird sings or wind blows through the branches of cedars in the cemetery where Geronimo was buried, that bird and those branches illuminate an area of a map, a soundscape, in which Geronimo once was. The inventory of echoes was not a collection of sounds that have been lost—such a thing would in fact be impossible—but rather one of sounds that were present in the time of recording and that, when we listen to them, remind us of the ones that are lost.

  We finally arrive in Medicine Park, where we rent a spartan little cabin, with a pleasant porch overlooking a stream. It has a basic kitchen, a bathroom, and four army-like cots, on which we deposit the sleeping kids and then deposit ourselves, our bodies landing on them rather than getting into them, heavy and unresisting like felled trees, and fall sleep.

  ARCHIVE

  The next morning, I’m up before dawn, ready to work and record some voice notes. Everyone is asleep, so I pee and wash my face quietly, take my handbag, and walk outside. The air is cool against my face as I walk to the car, parked next to the garbage containers just in front of the cabin. From the glove box, I take out my recorder and the big map I use to guide us through our daily routes.

  I sit on the porch stoop, the light above the door to the cabin turned on because it’s still dark out. First, I study the map, locate where we are now. We’re much farther away from home than I thought—a vertigo swells slow in my stomach, like a crescent moon tide. I switch on my recorder and record a single voice note:

  We’re much closer to the end of the trip now than to the starting point.

  Then, from my handbag, I take out the Elegies, fat with the boy’s pictures tucked between its pages. One by one, I take the pictures out and place them in a little pile next to me. Some of them are good and even very good, a
nd I speak rough descriptions of some of them into my recorder. The last picture, of a tomb, is beautiful but brutal. I record:

  The arch of Chief Cochise’s tombstone can be made out perfectly, but the name engraved on it is erased somehow, impossible to make out.

  I flip through the pages of the book one last time, making sure there are no more pictures between them, and then I study it. I look at its spare cover once more, skim through the text on the back cover, and finally open it up to the first lines of the story:

  (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.

  ARCHIVE

  I read those first lines once, then twice—both times getting a little lost in the words and syntax. So I flip back a few pages, to the editor’s foreword, which I’d left unfinished. I read the rest of the foreword, rushing over some parts and zooming in on some details here and there: the book is written in a series of numbered fragments, sixteen in total; each fragment is called an “elegy,” and each elegy is partly composed using a series of quotes. Throughout the book, these quotes are borrowed from different writers. They are either “freely translated” by the author or “recombined” to the point that some are not traceable back to their original versions. In this first English edition (published in 2014), the translator has decided to translate all borrowed quotes directly from the author’s Italian and not from the original sources. Once I reach the end of the foreword, I reread the first elegy to myself again, and then begin reading the second one, out loud and into my recorder:

  (THE SECOND ELEGY)

  They had told them some things about the future, the relatives who saw the children off. “Don’t you go heavy with weeping,” said one boy’s mother when she kissed his hair outside the door of their house one dawn. And a grandmother warned her granddaughters to beware, to look out for the “winds from sternward.” And a widowed neighbor recommended: “Never cry in your sleep, for you’ll lose your lashes.”

  The children came from different places, the six who now sleep atop the train car. They all arrived from distant points on a map, other lives, their unconnected stories now locked by circumstance to one another in the firm line of the tracks. Before they boarded the train, they walked to school, strolled along in parks and on sidewalks, strayed within their city’s grids alone, and sometimes not alone. They had never crossed paths before; their lives never should have intersected, but did. Now, as they ride in the back of the beastly train, all clustered next to one another, their stories draw a single straight line moving up across the barrenlands. If someone were to map them, the six of them, but also the dozens like them and the hundreds and tens of thousands that have come and will follow on other trains like this one, the map would plot a single line—a thin crack, a long fissure slicing the wide continent in two. “Swartest story stretched over wretched lives there,” a woman said to her husband when the horn of a distant train blew through the open window of their kitchen.

  While the children travel, asleep or half sleeping, they do not know if they are alone or if they are together. The man in charge sits cross-legged next to them, taking puffs from a pipe and blowing smoke into the dark. The dry leaves nested in the bowl of his pipe hiss when he inhales, then kindle orange like a tangle of electric circuits in a sleeping city seen from far above. A boy lying next to him moans and swallows a gulp of thick saliva. The wheels of the train spit sparks, a dry branch snaps in the dark, the pipe pit crackles again, and from the metallic intestines of the train, a sound like a thousand souls shrieking can be heard all the while, as if to pass through the desert, it had to crush nightmares in clusters.

  HOLES

  My thinking was that if I recorded some fragments from this book, reading them out loud, I’d be able to work out how to put my sound project together, to understand the best way to tell the story of the other lost children, the ones arriving at the southern border. My eyes move along the ink lines of the page; my voice, low and steady, speaks the words: gulp, spit, snap, crackle, crush; my recorder registers each one of them in digital bytes; and my mind converts the sum of them into impressions, images, future borrowed memories. I take a pencil from my bag and make a note on the last page of the book: “Must record a document that registers the soundmarks, traces, and echoes that lost children leave behind.”

  Now I hear the voices and footsteps of my own children coming from inside the cabin. They’ve woken up, so I stop the recording, put the boy’s pictures back inside the book, and then put both the book and the recorder into my handbag. The boy and girl come out to the porch and ask:

  What are you doing out here?

  When is breakfast?

  What will happen today?

  Can we go swimming?

  They’ve discovered a brochure in the cabin, which invites guests to visit Medicine Park’s “gem,” a swimming hole called Bath Lake less than a mile from the cabin.

  It’s only two dollars each, the boy says, pointing with his finger at the information on the brochure.

  And it’s in walking distance, he adds.

  For breakfast there’s bread and ham. Then we hang towels around our necks, I hang my handbag on my shoulder, and we all walk down a narrow path to the public swimming hole. We pay our eight dollars, and we stretch our towels out on some rocks. I don’t feel like getting into cold water, so I say that I still have my period, tell them to go ahead without me. The three of them race to the water, and I sit in the sunlight, watching them from a distance, like a ghost of myself.

  ERASED

  What there was, between Arkansas and Oklahoma, was hours of tape and more hours of things not on tape.

  What there was, along highways and across thunderstorms, was my husband, drinking his coffee silently or talking to the children as we drove. Sometimes, my wish for all this to end, and to get as far away from him as possible. Other times, my desire, trailing after him, hoping he might suddenly change his mind, tell me that he’d drive back to New York with us at the end of the summer, or ask me to stay with him and the boy, say he could not let me and the girl go.

  What there was, between us, was silence. What there was, was Manuela’s phone call, about her two girls, who were not there with her yet and who knows where they were. Sometimes, when I shut my eyes to sleep, there was a telephone number sewed on the collars of the dresses that Manuela’s girls had worn on their journey north. And once I was asleep, there was a swarm of numbers, impossible to remember.

  What there was, between Memphis and Little Rock, was the story of Geronimo, falling from his horse, over and over again.

  What there was in Little Rock, Arkansas, was Hrabal leaning out of a hospital window, bread crumbs in his palm, the pigeons scattering as his body falls out and hits the ground.

  There was also Frank Stanford, falling into or out of his mind, three dry gunshots.

  In Broken Bow there was news of children falling from the sky—a deluge.

  What there was in Boswell was frightening.

  What there was in Geronimo was a Western.

  What there was in Fort Sill were names on tombstones, and names not there anymore, erased, in a photograph.

  There was also that book, Elegies for Lost Children, in which a group of children were riding atop a train, their lips chapped, their cheeks cracked.

  Everything that was there between Arkansas and Oklahoma was not there: Geronimo, Hrabal, Stanford, names on tombstones, our future, the lost children, the two missing girls.

  All I see in hindsight is the chaos of history repeated, over and over, reenacted, reinterpreted, the world, its fu
cked-up heart palpitating underneath us, failing, messing up again and again as it winds its way around a sun. And in the middle of it all, tribes, families, people, all beautiful things falling apart, debris, dust, erasure.

  But finally, there is something. There is this one certainty. It arrives like a blow to my face as we speed along an empty highway into Texas. The story I have to record is not the story of children who arrive, those who finally make it to their destinations and can tell their own story. The story I need to document is not that of the children in immigration courts, as I once thought. The media is doing that already, documenting the crisis as well as possible—some journalists leaning more toward sensationalism, their ratings escalating; others adamant about shaping public opinion, this way or that; and a few others simply committed to questioning and fathoming. I am still not sure how I’ll do it, but the story I need to tell is the one of the children who are missing, those whose voices can no longer be heard because they are, possibly forever, lost. Perhaps, like my husband, I’m also chasing ghosts and echoes. Except mine are not in history books, and not in cemeteries. Where are they—the lost children? And where are Manuela’s two girls? I don’t know, but this I do know: if I’m going to find anything, anyone, if I’m going to tell their story, I need to start looking somewhere else.

  § FOUR NOTEBOOKS (7¾″ X 5″)

  “On Mapping”

  “On History”

  “On Reenactment”

  “On Erasing”

  § EIGHT BOOKS

  The North American Indian, Edward S. Curtis

  From Cochise to Geronimo: The Chiricahua Apaches, 1874–1886, Edwin R. Sweeney

  Lt. Charles Gatewood & His Apache Wars Memoir, Charles Gatewood (Louis Kraft, ed.)