by Andrés Barba
The red is really red. Redder than the earth, as bright red as volcano lava. And the sounds are fighting against the red and everything is fighting because you can hear the bugs and the noise from the street but suddenly it’s like there’s a silence in the middle of all the red and that’s when the children in the jungle appear and they’re living in the trees. Then you have to think like them, and thinking like them is the hardest thing in the world. Because you’re here and they’re not. The red is what gets you there, like a car but with no sound. And then you think of all the things that you have and they don’t, and the things you can do and they can’t. Because they don’t have a house. Or food. Or a bed. And since they don’t have those things they sleep with their eyes open so they don’t get scared. And they get inside you. And you are them.
Given that half the children of San Cristóbal had their ears to the ground in the hope of hearing the “jungle children” and the press was bombarding us daily with articles by psychotherapists about childhood fears, the groundwork had already been done by the time the Zapata children appeared. The first to speak of “telepathy” was Víctor Cobán, in a piece he wrote for El Imparcial published on February 7, 1995. He makes reference to a feature that had aired on local television two days earlier, when we saw the Zapata siblings for the first time. Three boys and a girl, ages five to nine, from the Candel neighborhood, they claimed to “paint” what the thirty-two told them in their dreams.
We’ve started to believe that our children can communicate with the jungle children, that they can speak to them, share dreams with them, even have the same visions. Plenty of thus-far sensible people are asking themselves: What next? A question that is perhaps not entirely well articulated. When a society starts to question everything, what we need to ask ourselves is not “Does telepathy exist?” but rather “Where do we hurt?”
But since surely neither Víctor Cobán nor any of us would have been capable of answering that question, instead we pondered telepathy. Believing in magic is the same as love: those convinced of its existence, and of falling in love, end up doing so sincerely, and those who doubt their feelings thwart the very possibility of having them, a paradox that leaves us forlorn, wondering what we might have become if only we’d allowed ourselves to believe. On the one hand, the Zapata children’s drawings simply confirmed every stereotype that could be imagined about the thirty-two without knowing anything about them: huge gaping mouths inside of which were other, smaller mouths; children with swollen stomachs or dozing beneath a tree; blood; jungle foliage. On the other, they offered a new perspective, one as odd as it was plausible: things that seemed to be symbols, words with no apparent meaning that not even the Zapatas themselves could decipher, but which they swore they’d heard in their dreams; superimposed triangles, circles and suns with little planets around them. The Zapata children’s artistic talent may not have been stellar, but this didn’t mean they weren’t convincing. The drawings were a strange cocktail, one part childish fantasy, one part sinister fear and one part invoked expectation. What made them hard to look at was not that they were any one of these things but that they were all three simultaneously.
It’s been said many times that had the Zapata children been a little poorer or a little better-looking, had they been “too polished” or more eloquent, perhaps no one would have believed them, but these children possessed an extraordinary quality—that of normalcy. They were an assemblage of all things plausible. Born to a mother who taught high school and a father who worked in a bank, they looked like little fairy-tale elves. Friendly and well mannered, the boys and girl all responded to reporters’ questions with a peculiar directness and huge, startled-looking eyes, perfect in a photo. One lisped. The eldest cued each of his siblings, like a perfect master of ceremonies. And the girl never stopped smiling. Each of their upper lips protruded slightly over the lower, giving them the appearance of poultry. Even before the feature story they’d garnered a certain fame in the neighborhood, and nearby families had begun visiting their home as though it were a place of pilgrimage. But it was only after they were on the Maite Muñiz program that the whole matter took on a truly public angle.
The TV-7 story aired on February 5, 1995, on the popular At Home with Maite. Local celebrity and presenter Maite Muñiz was a woman of about fifty, with bleached-blond hair, who embodied both the best and the worst of San Cristóbal: she was sensitive and popular, but uncompromisingly shallow. Just as in all families there are members who are applauded and celebrated for the same reasons that others are dismissed, in a relatively conservative city like ours, Maite Muñiz’s fame was the exception to the rule. The three ex-husbands, the tax scandals, the racist comments she “didn’t mean anything by,” all were forgiven in her case, thanks to her genuine likeability and unquestionable influence over public opinion. Oftentimes our greatest defects are the direct result of our greatest virtues. Maite’s “cheek” and candor were poorly suited to the fundamental structure of a daily program that required at least minimal planning of its content. She had such self-confidence that she far overestimated her ability to improvise on live television, which on more than one occasion had led to cuts and personal grievances, some of which were quite infamous. Once, for instance, she confused a little boy’s name with that of his disease, and another time she accidentally called the ambassador to the Holy See “sweetheart” during his visit to the region. People may have had to forgive Muñiz for certain things, the way they did a brazen family member, but she remained one of television’s grandes dames.
The Zapata children’s appearance on At Home with Maite was unexpected and hadn’t been scripted, but when another story got dropped, an intern pitched the idea. Four hours later they were improvising a telecast from the family’s home. First the camera pans the house, the patio, the slightly tacky way the parents have the children’s drawings hanging from a sideboard in a sort of impromptu altar. Then the children emerge and Maite interviews them one by one, from the studio, asking simple, motherly questions. The children sometimes cut each other off and at other times finish one another’s sentences as though they had rehearsed. “They tell us things with their minds,” says the little girl. “At night,” adds the lispy brother. A scriptwriter couldn’t have come up with better lines.
“What do they say to you?”
“They say they’re hungry,” the eldest Zapata boy says unexpectedly.
The girl is the most affecting of the Zapatas. She holds her older brother’s hand the whole time and is the only one of the four who seems slightly mischievous. From time to time she turns to her brothers and laughs quietly before turning back to the camera with solemn theatricality.
Fifteen minutes later, and entirely unscripted, Maite Muñiz improvises a now-famous monologue in which she claims that she believes these children, that the Zapata children are a bridge, a connection that could help us “mend our ways,” and we must respond.
The episode has been ridiculed so often that people are reluctant to admit that the day it aired, we were all moved. It wasn’t simply Muñiz’s rather mawkish words (reproducing them here would do her no favors), but something we’d all been feeling inside and somehow resisted. Something still nameless, or something whose name was unpronounceable. And the program had enabled us to “feel” it. Perhaps expressing it this way sounds a bit ridiculous, but in truth what happened was scientific in its precision: Maite Muñiz acted as a conduit, channeling our desire for the children’s return. I watched the program the next day, when they aired a rerun. All day I’d been hearing comments from everyone who had already watched the show, so when I got home I made sure to turn on the television. I managed to more or less maintain my composure through most of it, but, unsurprisingly, welled up when the eldest Zapata boy said, “They say they’re hungry.” I turned. The girl was on the sofa, her head in Maia’s lap. We didn’t dare look at one another. All three of us were moved.
It’s also been said many times that the natural superstitious inclinations
of the San Cristóbalites took care of the rest, but outsiders cannot fathom just how apt this was, or the degree to which white magic constitutes an actual form of power throughout the region. A year before the altercations, the Department of Social Affairs conducted a statistical survey on white magic, and the results were astonishing: four out of every ten people between the ages of twenty and sixty claimed to have turned to it at least once in the space of the preceding twelve months: spells, fortune-tellers, runes, hexes. The evil eye is a San Cristóbalite’s greatest fear bar none, which says a lot about character. Often it’s enough for somebody to notice a person on the street looking at them for more than a few seconds to make them seize up in terror.
A few hours after At Home with Maite aired, dozens of curious locals had already gathered outside the Zapata house. Without intending to, Muñiz had articulated something in our conscience: They’re just children! Children who’d been forced to flee because of our animosity, children we’d treated like criminals, children we’d corralled and whose deaths we might be responsible for at that very instant. Special children! Beneath her layers of frivolity, she had said the magic word, but the magic word, in addition to raising our consciousness, also acted as a clarion call for every witch in a hundred-kilometer radius.
The following week, the Zapata house was a veritable hive of activity. Everybody wanted a taste of the honey. Everybody wanted to see the drawings, touch the children, speak to the parents. Each time the four siblings appeared, they looked increasingly compressed, as if they could no longer move an inch without touching. The Zapata kids were afraid, and their parents even more so. At one point, by popular demand, they opened the door to show people the children, and the throng stationed outside pounced so frantically they almost crushed the kids. People began bringing their sick to the house. City hall had to provide a police cordon to protect the home, a humble dwelling that clearly contained no valuables. But far from guaranteeing the family’s safety, what resulted from our efforts was in fact the opposite: the deranged assumption that they were hiding something. The children couldn’t go to school, and their parents were forced to take leave from work and hunker down for almost a week.
Twice the father came to the door to request respect for the family’s privacy. “We haven’t done anything to hurt anyone,” he said rather absurdly, and then came back looking somewhat intimidated, but with a theatrical dignity, as though he wanted his expression to stop every one of those journalists in their tracks. “They don’t know what they’re doing,” he declared.
On the eighth day the onlookers storm the house, forcing their way in. At two o’clock in the morning, fifteen people enter through a window and steal the children’s drawings. A woman manages to snip off a lock of one of the boys’ hair, no doubt for a magic spell, and on the way out some heartless bastard (who must already have known where the hiding place was) steals part of the family’s savings, apparently kept in a box in the boys’ room. The results of the incursion are broadcast on the local morning news. The father goes room to room, showing ransacked bedrooms, and says they’ve sent the children to stay with relatives for their own safety. Two hours later, it’s the mother who summons the press to the door. With a dignity quite unlike her husband’s, and as if it were the most normal thing in the world, she climbs onto a stool so as not to be steamrollered. Her breathing is agitated, but her tone is that of a teacher trying to calm a group of people she initially didn’t take seriously and now fears.
She requests silence.
For several seconds the woman does not speak, waiting until the journalists finally grow quiet and all that can be heard is the sound of cicadas.
Then she drops the bomb.
“It was all a lie,” she says. “I hope you understand, they were just being kids.”
Loss of trust is similar to heartbreak. Both lay bare some internal wound, both make us feel older than we are. After the revelation of the Zapata children’s lie, San Cristóbal became a tense place to live, a place where our children continued putting their ears to the ground, convinced that they would hear messages from the thirty-two, and we had begun to grow suspicious of what was quintessentially undeniable: their innocence. Of course, we’d have been incapable of expressing it in those words. We can only describe with any precision what we no longer feel, what we’ve somehow contained. The struggle to articulate feelings we’re still experiencing is possibly the most touching, and useless, of them all. Perhaps that’s why not even today, twenty years later, is it easy to communicate our loss.
The episodes that transpired over those months may have made us lose faith in the religion of childhood, but the children didn’t have it much easier, and they certainly weren’t waking up to a world any less hostile. For children, the world is a museum in which the adult guardians might be loving most of the time, but that doesn’t stop them from imposing rules: everything there is solid, everything has always already existed, long before them. In exchange for love, the children are required to uphold the myth of their innocence. Not only do they have to be innocent, they have to perform it.
The Zapata case amounted to the expulsion of the children from our official religion. We had to punish someone, and since we couldn’t punish our own kids, we decided to punish the thirty-two. Not only had they refused to act out the myth of Paradise Lost, they had begun to infect our own children. They were the black sheep, the slimy bruise that ends up rotting the fruit. Perhaps many people would find implausible such a blunt change in attitude: I would implore them to spend an afternoon in the archives, to verify the change in tone reflected in the newspapers after the Zapata mother made her declaration.
And not just the newspapers.
According to the San Cristóbal Municipal Plenary Session minutes, item 3, Appeals and Requests, on February 13, 1995, Deputy Isabel Plante proposed for the first time that the district’s age of criminal responsibility be lowered. The preliminary bill—drafted almost explicitly for the thirty-two—attempted to abolish the provision of the Comprehensive Minors Act that stated, in the case of misdemeanor or accessory to felony, any individual under the age of thirteen was exempt from imprisonment and would instead be sentenced to custody overseen by civil commission. According to Madame Plante, the case of the “jungle children,” as they were then being referred to, was so extraordinary as to require its own specific legislation. She proposed special detention centers for any child under thirteen with no known guardian who had taken part in the Dakota Supermarket attack, and conventional prison—the local penitentiary—for those over thirteen. In the event that this was not approved by absolute majority (which would have been required for the bill to be enacted), and knowing that the bureaucratic process alone was going to take at least three or four months, Madame Plante appealed to the urgency of the circumstances and proposed the provisional creation of a so-called Rehabilitation Board to reform the delinquent youth who had already caused so much harm to the community of San Cristóbal and were now “rearming” (literally, her word) in the jungle for another attack.
The most disturbing thing was not that a conservative deputy had proposed a draft bill that amounted to trampling the most basic rights of a minor, but that 70 percent of those present endorsed the proposal without so much as batting an eye. As liberal councilor Margarita Schneider said many years later, referring to that time, “It was unbearably odd . . . and yet it was bearable.” We’d learned to use our right hand to do things without the left finding out, which allowed us to see not only that it wasn’t so hard, but also that we didn’t actually feel so bad about it after all.
And yet our children kept on in their fantasies. Our clear change of attitude, far from dissuading them, had done the opposite: bolster their secret admiration. The thirty-two had become their private place, the room they’d decided we were not allowed to enter. I don’t mean the youngest children, who ultimately were as afraid as we were, but those their same age, the boys and girls who were nine to twelve years old. Something had d
ivided childhood into two.
In “Vigilance,” the aforementioned essay on the altercations, Professor García Rivelles makes an interesting observation: “The dilemma about the supposed influence that the thirty-two had over San Cristóbal’s children emerged in a way completely counter to what would have occurred in any traditional case of ‘bad influence.’ The thirty-two exerted their control from a non-place. Parents couldn’t tell their kids not to behave like children they couldn’t see, children who were not on the streets and who, to be fair, at that stage, none of us knew with any certainty were still alive. By not being anywhere in particular, the thirty-two had pulled off the unthinkable: they were everywhere. And thus, to any simple admonition that they not behave like those other children, the equally simple reply would have been: What children?”
That’s the way things were. By losing their “realness,” the thirty-two had morphed into the perfect monster, albeit one who exerted control more over the adults’ nightmares than the children’s. The thirty-two were the invulnerable void onto which the fascinating or the terrifying could be projected equally, a perfect screen. García Rivelles continues:
“The children of San Cristóbal intuitively saw that fantasy was the greatest virtue of the thirty-two. Was this an act of their own minds, or the adopting of an idea offered by the others? It makes no difference. In my view, it constitutes a true awakening. The power that the thirty-two had over the imagination of San Cristóbal’s children was a supreme privilege and the source of their entitlements.”