by Andrés Barba
When I managed to sit up slightly and looked at his free hand, I saw what had happened: Jerónimo’s palm was covered in blood, the knuckles white because he was tightly clenching a small knife, the size of a lollipop. He’d sunk it into my arm twice, and in the excitement I hadn’t realized. We both froze expectantly for a second, scandalized, he at having stuck his knife into me, and I at not having noticed anything but the sudden metallic taste in my mouth. After this moment of chaos, he tried again to stab me, this time in the chest, but I grabbed his hand forcefully, jerking his thumb back violently toward his wrist until he let out a yelp and dropped the knife. His face was specked with gravel, like the kind used to cover a patio, his hair stiffer than steel wool. On his upper lip a disconcertingly dark cold sore, or some sort of burn, glistened.
“You’re not going to move,” I said, unable to hold his stare. “Do you hear me?”
But Jerónimo said nothing.
People are never accepted as innocent the first time around; the greatest punishment is not having to prove yourself but having to do so over and over again. Perhaps that’s what I would have liked to have said to the bow-tied sage: that our witnesses are not to blame for the fact that something in us chose them as our unassailable interlocutor, that when it comes down to it, we are the ones who impose this pretense. No one can sustain authenticity forever, not even child witnesses.
Jerónimo had a kind of classic beauty about him. Like all Ñeê children, he had an undeniably photogenic face, in contrast to his actual character, which was austere and headstrong. He rarely smiled, but when he did, his smile was stunning, and although he liked jokes, he made the mistake of always taking them seriously, proving that in this, too, he was a true San Cristóbalite. He was the fourth child of a couple of local tea farmers and had been begging on the city’s streets since he learned to walk. His life was like the sounds you hear in a dream, very unusual, which is why I wasn’t surprised that he’d joined the thirty-two at the start. He appears in many of the classic images: with the kids running out after the Dakota Supermarket attack, in several undated stills reproduced for Valeria Danas’s documentary, and so on. In each of them he looks slightly detached, always at a short distance from the group, but despite this he shows no sign of being ostracized and in fact quite the opposite: he looks distinguished, as though the other children are admiring some quality in him.
Years later, on one of my visits to the local penitentiary (Jerónimo was twenty at the time and back in prison, this time for armed robbery), I asked him what he’d felt when I caught him that day in the jungle. He gave what for him was a detailed response, given that he was inclined to be elusive and monosyllabic when talking about those years, saying that he knew something was going to happen to him and that he’d been afraid the entire night. He couldn’t remember why he was alone or what he’d been doing there, so far from the other kids. And I really believe he couldn’t remember. Jerónimo Valdés would rather remain silent than have to lie, and whenever he talked about that period, the aggressive way he stared at me on those first few occasions came back. But his aggression never turned to hatred, and I certainly felt nothing like hatred for him.
Perhaps it’s impossible to understand and forgive others without having first forgiven and understood oneself. When I grabbed his hand, jamming his thumb back to his wrist hard enough to break it, and blew the whistle between my teeth as loud as possible, I was so aware that I was sentencing him that I couldn’t hold his gaze.
Whatever happened the rest of that day has remained in my memory a nebulous smattering of certainties. I know that at some point I lost consciousness and was taken out on a stretcher to the provincial hospital, where I arrived having lost a liter of blood. I know that when I regained consciousness Maia and the girl were by my side and that the girl was watching me with huge, frightened eyes. On seeing me injured, she stopped being almost a teenager for a moment and the girl reemerged. Her eyes filled with tears and she threw her arms around my neck to give me a kiss. Maia told me I’d been sleeping for twelve hours, because on arriving I’d had a breakdown (of which I have no memory) and the doctor had been forced to sedate me. She also told me that they’d finished the sweep and hadn’t found any children.
“What about the one I found?”
“Just the one,” she amended, “the one you found.”
“They really didn’t find any?”
Maia did not reply, as was her habit when I asked a redundant question. My zen little wife.
“Does it hurt?” she asked.
It was as if I really had to think about my replies, even to the most basic questions. I tried to recall the face that just a few hours earlier had been only centimeters from mine, but was unable to conjure an accurate picture. All I could remember was that Jerónimo’s lightness, his weightlessness, more than a physical characteristic, struck me as a state of being, like the first time you hold a bird in your hand and feel the nervous palpitations of its tiny beating heart. I saw where the knife had entered my right arm for the first time, one wound on the forearm and another larger, semicircular one on my biceps. It was the nagging pain of a broken bone, and Maia told me that according to the doctor I should consider myself a lucky man, that a few centimeters to the right and the knife would have sliced clear through the radial and medial arteries, which would have caused three times the blood loss—in other words, certain death.
Half an hour later Amadeo Roque turned up in my hospital room and told me that the boy I’d found was named Jerónimo Valdés, that he’d been identified by his family from a photo El Imparcial had published. It seemed the boy wanted nothing to do with them, and his parents (who had come in only because of all the publicity, and their fear of legal repercussions), on seeing there was no action being taken, didn’t want much to do with him either. They swore he’d always been a violent boy and had once tried to kill his younger brother. Since being put in a cell he’d been in a semi-feral state, wasn’t eating, had to be forcibly bathed and answered every question he was asked “in an unintelligible language.” Amadeo Roque himself looked awful too, as though he hadn’t slept in three days, and the heat had given his skin a cerulean hue, as if he were melting from the inside out. The city—he went on telling me—was on the verge of a clash like the one in Plaza Casado, but with added animosity over the search’s failure. There had been a break-in at a home appliance store and two armed robberies at a gas station. The national government was on the verge of sending reinforcements from police forces in other cities of the province. The jungle children had disappeared. Literally. Jerónimo Valdés was refusing to talk. We’d hit a dead end.
On March 13, 1995, two days after the sweep, I left the hospital with my arm in a sling and headed to the police station where Jerónimo Valdés was locked up. The wound on my arm was still intensely painful, and the mayor had phoned half an hour earlier to tell me he was holding the kid there.
“It doesn’t seem very easy to get him to talk.”
I asked the mayor to let me be on the interrogation team, led at the time by Amadeo Roque, and he gave me forty-eight hours; after that, the boy would be remanded, which meant he would be in isolation at the juvenile detention center until his Rehabilitation Board interview. By this point it seemed the mayor was largely indifferent to everything.
“I don’t think it’ll do much good,” he said, “but if you want to, have at it.”
I once read that a Hindu sage attributed every misfortune that befell him over the course of his life to having stoned a water snake for the fun of it as a boy, killing it. Who can say for sure that Maia’s disease, the distance with which my daughter now treats me, or my indifference to the world’s beauty don’t stem from having kept a boy named Jerónimo Valdés awake for forty hours?
The idea came to me almost inadvertently, after my phone conversation with the mayor, recalling how close I’d once come to the brink of insanity when, after two consecutive nights of insomnia, I had a seemingly endless plane trip. I
remembered that toward the end, when I’d gone nearly thirty-five hours straight with no sleep, after having blown up at a flight attendant, I felt my body surrender, felt it break. I don’t know exactly how to explain it, but I thought I heard a click, which made me think I was going to have a heart attack, and then something like anguish clutched at my throat. People around me began to stare, their faces dumbfounded, and the drone of the plane engines was so loud that the pain was almost physical. I remember truly believing that if I didn’t get to sleep in the next five minutes I was going to swallow my tongue, a nonsensical fear that made me sob disconsolately. Right then, the flight attendant I’d insulted did something very human, truly touching. She approached with a pillow and an extra blanket, asked me to come with her and led me to a couple of empty seats at the back of the plane. I followed like a zombie. She raised the armrest so I could get comfortable and told me to lie down. It might sound untrue, but I’ve never been so grateful. I nearly threw myself at her feet weeping; seeing how desperate I was, she stayed with me and even spread the blanket over me. When I saw this, a second before closing my eyes, I thought that I would do anything she asked of me, literally anything.
Walking to the police station, I worked out that Jerónimo Valdés must have been so tired that all I’d have to do was keep him up one night. Beyond that, my plan was not very original: good cop, bad cop. The bad cop would be Amadeo Roque, and he’d wake Jerónimo up again and again; the good cop, who would let him sleep, was me, and I would pretend to be a parent of one of the thirty-two. My idea was to convince him I was Antonio Lara’s father. We would both ask the same question over and over, whether letting him sleep or waking him up: Where are the others? It was important for there to be no variations, for the question to be identical each time: Where are the others? Where are the others? Where are the others? These days repeating it twice is enough for it to pound in my ears like the metallic sound of a trepan. Where are the others?
When we got to the cell I was surprised to see how small Jerónimo was. Could this really be the same boy who’d nearly killed me in the jungle? But after studying him at length, he regained that initial elegance. The boy had refused to eat almost anything for two days, and yet, far from looking vulnerable, his appearance was surprisingly dignified. I’d never seen a boy like him. He gave the impression he’d been born there, had always lived and thought right there, had never had a care beyond that of mere survival. His expressions were both touching and primal. I asked that we be left alone and sat down beside him. I asked if he remembered me, showed him my arm and the wound, and reminded him that he’d been the one to do that to me, to which he replied with a look of utter incredulity. He no longer smelled bad, instead gave off a faintly soapy smell, and his hair was carefully brushed, but with the cold sore on his lip, his face still had a sort of spiritual air, like a boy Lazarus brought back from the dead. I pulled the photo of Antonio Lara from my pocket and showed it to him. He took the photo in his hands to look at it up close. His head was bent over, so I couldn’t see his expression.
“That’s my son,” I lied.
He turned suddenly to me, as though Antonio Lara were some sort of demon. I couldn’t have said whether his expression was one of admiration or fear, but there’s no doubt that Jerónimo was surprised.
“Don’t you want to help me find him?”
He didn’t reply, and I lay my uninjured hand on his shoulder. I was moved that he let me leave it there without jerking away or objecting.
It wasn’t easy. After ten hours Jerónimo began to fall asleep. The first thing we did was take the cot from his cell and leave only a chair, but the boy took his shirt off, spread it out on the floor like a yogi and tried to go to sleep on top of it. Amadeo Roque let him doze off and then walked into the cell, slamming the door. Jerónimo jumped and dragged himself under the chair. I watched this unfold from behind the tinted glass on the cell door. It was all absurdly schematic: boy, chair, toilet, sink.
Whenever I’m tempted to feel superior to anyone, all I have to do is remember that I tortured a boy, for two days, to get him to give his friends away. It was sort of like the awkward silence that sometimes pervades unhappy families, silence that is far worse than fighting or openly arguing. Every time Jerónimo started falling asleep, Amadeo Roque would come in and shake him, and then I’d walk in and ask: Where are the others? Aren’t you going to help me find my son? I’d let him lie down on the floor, pretend I would allow him to sleep and even stroke his head as his eyes closed, only for Amadeo Roque to come back twenty minutes later and repeat the entire process.
I remember the dry feel of Jerónimo’s hair, I remember distance and proximity, the oil and water of feelings and conscience. Sometimes simply recollecting the scene makes me feel such disgust that my stomach turns, but generally I perceive it with a kind of bewilderment, unable to shake the feeling that the man who did those things was not me but someone else, someone different whose every feeling I somehow recognize and can recall. Jerónimo was a different boy, too, not the teenager he later became or the young child I visited in jail, perhaps not even the actual kid who’d lived with the other boys and girls but instead some force of nature that I attempted to subdue. But whereas the chief of police and I were using the logic of pragmatism and desperation, Jerónimo used that of instinct and loyalty.
Many years after the death of the thirty-two, I read about a biological experiment in which researchers took half a dozen flies and half a dozen bees, put them all in a glass bottle and lay it on its side with the bottom facing a window, to see which ones would escape first. The flies managed to get out by flying away from the window, but the bees died, colliding with one another over and over again at the bottom of the bottle: they could not shake the belief that the exit had to be where the light was shining from. Those bees made me think of the shame I felt back then at the fact that Jerónimo never stopped believing in me. I couldn’t understand him, of course. He spoke to me in that language that sounded like twittering, full of absurd sounds. He never stopped believing that I was the one protecting him, a conviction that filtered into his genetic makeup the way vice takes root in a strong-willed person. I was the light that his brain kept colliding with. Every time he saw me arrive, his face softened. If I’d walked into the cell and told him the sun had gone out, he would have believed me. I now understand (it turns out that understanding, more than a talent, is a discipline) that his belief was as monstrous as the torture we subjected him to over those nearly two days. Perhaps that belief was nature’s way of punishing me. Regardless of the name my imagination gives it, regardless of how many years have passed, it’s still just as painful to me.
And then finally he gave in.
It was only a matter of time, we knew this, and yet when it actually happened we were as amazed as if we’d seen a miracle. It was forty hours after our torture had begun, almost nightfall on the second day. I walked into the cell and knew immediately that something had changed. Jerónimo’s lip was quivering like jelly, and he started tracing one eyebrow with his fingertip, a gesture that struck me as both delicate and adult. He said a couple of things in that incomprehensible language and I responded the same as always, telling him that I didn’t understand what he was saying. He traced his eyebrow once more. The police doctor had told us that after a time the boy might begin hallucinating, and this would be an indisputable sign that his health was at risk. For a moment I was afraid he might do something rash. I went to him and placed a hand on his shoulder, but he shook it off instantly. Over the previous few hours he’d been scratching himself, and his leg jiggled anxiously like a boy taking an exam.
I asked if he was hungry and, though he made no reply, asked that he be brought a sandwich and a glass of water. For the first time he ate with real gusto, but every time he took a drink his expression became absent, like a person searching for words they’ve forgotten. There was a split second when I thought he was blushing. When Jerónimo finished eating he calmly stood, put his plate
on the floor and pulled the chair over to the cell window, which looked out onto the street. He wouldn’t let me help him climb onto it, but managed by himself, grabbing the window bars with both hands. Jerónimo beckoned me over. Then he spoke in that incomprehensible language again. It was almost a whisper.
“I can’t understand you, Jerónimo,” I said yet again, whispering as well.
Jerónimo turned to me. I felt afraid. The bags under his eyes were almost violet, and slightly glossy. He seemed surprised to see me, to see himself, to be up on that chair looking out through the window bars.
“Where are the others?” I repeated.
And he turned back to the window, pointed to the sewer and for the first time speaking perfect Spanish, he whispered:
“There. They’re in there.”
Like someone discovering a betrayal, I was overwhelmed by the feeling that there had to have been signs, that the past must have been rife with signs: the noise on the patio that I’d attributed to rats, the overturned trash bins outside the supermarket . . . There are certain things that people understand only when they’re ready to accept them, but at times I wonder if it wasn’t that our minds chose to ignore the clearest signs that the children were living in the sewers. I tell myself that there were (there must have been) people in the city who saw them and said nothing. Often we submit to the prevailing morality only because the truth seems less plausible than the beliefs we adopt. After all, can we really put so much faith in things we see—as is often said so dramatically—with our own eyes?
We avoided the temptation to charge headlong into the sewers because by that point the possibility of landing in jail if any of the children were hurt was too real. And there was also a real fear, a fear that pervaded everything and bordered on a dreamlike state. It was so pure it seemed to buzz in our ears. We convened a crisis cabinet and spread the sewer map out on Amadeo Roque’s desk. It was a star-shaped system and flowed east beneath the city: six canals converging in an enormous drainpipe over the river Eré. We didn’t know exactly where the children were, but deduced by the dimensions and height of the tunnels (in many places under half a meter) that there were only four spots where they could be, all of them close and all interconnected, coinciding with the riverwalk and the area surrounding Plaza 16 de Diciembre.