Lost Children Archive

by Valeria Luiselli

  At night, our children’s fear is the shadow that a moving curtain projects onto the wall, the deeper dark in the corner of the room, the sounds of wood expanding and water pipes shifting.

  But it is not that, even. It is much larger than that. It is behind all that. Too far out of their grasp to be faced, let alone dominated. Our children’s fear is a kind of entropy, forever destabilizing the very fragile equilibrium of the adult world.

  Long straight roads, empty and monotonous, led us from Oklahoma through the northern tip of Texas and brought us to a stretch of concrete right off Route 66. The town is Tucumcari, New Mexico, and here we found an inn that had once been a bathhouse. I am not sure if that means it was a bordello. The gas station owner described paradise when we asked him about nearby lodging: simple elegance, rocking chairs, family-friendly. What we found, instead, when we parked the car, was a cemetery of bathtubs and broken chairs on a sloped lawn leading up to a porch with webs of old hammocks hanging over empty flowerpots. We found cats in overwhelming numbers. The inn looked like a bad omen. The children were right to point out that the space was:

  Creepy.

  Dirty.

  Saying:

  Let’s go back home.

  What about ghosts, Ma?

  Why is there a scarecrow lady in the hallway, in a gown, on a rocking chair?

  What are the hats and masks and crosses in the rooms for?

  Motel nights are getting longer and more full of past and future ghosts, full of night fears. We have two adjacent rooms in this inn, and my husband has gone to sleep, early, in ours. As I tuck the children into bed, they ask:

  What’s gonna happen, Mama?

  Nothing will happen, I reassure them.

  But they insist. They cannot sleep. They’re scared.

  Can I chupe my thumb, Mama?

  Can you read us a story, please, before we go to sleep?

  We’ve read The Book with No Pictures too many times, and it doesn’t make us laugh anymore, only the girl. So we pick the illustrated edition of Lord of the Flies. The girl falls asleep almost immediately, sucking at her thumb. The boy listens attentively, his eyes wide and keen, and not at all prepared for the dreamless sleep that dark nights should confer on children. Some lines we read out loud linger in the room like shadows:

  “Maybe there is a beast…maybe it’s only us.”

  “We did everything adults would do. What went wrong?”

  “The world, that understandable and lawful world, was slipping away.”

  “What I mean is…maybe it’s only us…”

  My husband once told me that when the boy was small, still a baby, right after his biological mother had died, he would wake up almost every night from nightmares, crying inside the rickety crib where he slept. My husband would walk over to the boy, pick him up, and, holding him in his arms, sing him some lines from a poem he liked, by Galway Kinnell:

  When I sleepwalk

  into your room, and pick you up,

  and hold you up in the moonlight, you cling to me

  hard,

  as if clinging could save us. I think

  you think

  I will never die, I think I exude

  to you the permanence of smoke or stars,

  even as

  my broken arms heal themselves around you.

  The boy clings to my arm now as I try to turn the page of the book. It’s like a bedtime tug-of-war, except that the ropes are invisible, solely emotional. Before I can continue reading, he asks:

  But what if also we were left alone, without you and Papa?

  That would never happen.

  But it happened to Manuela’s two girls, he says. And now they’re lost, right?

  How do you know about that? I ask him, perhaps naively.

  I heard you talking to Pa about it. I wasn’t spying. You always talk about it.

  Well, that won’t happen to you.

  But just suppose.

  Suppose what?

  Suppose you and Pa were gone, and we were lost. Suppose we were inside Lord of the Flies. What would happen then?

  I wonder what my sister, who understands books better than life, would say if she were confronted with a question like this one. She’s so good at explaining books and their meanings, beyond the obvious. Maybe she’d say that all those books and stories devoted to adult-less children—books like Peter Pan, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, that short story by García Márquez, “Light Is Like Water,” and of course Lord of the Flies—are nothing but desperate attempts by adults to come to terms with childhood. That although they seem to be stories about children’s worlds—worlds without adults—they are in fact stories about an adult’s world when there are children in it, about the way that children’s imaginations destabilize our adult sense of reality and force us to question the very grounds of that reality. The more time one spends surrounded by children, disconnected from other adults, the more their imaginations leak through the cracks of our own fragile structures.

  The boy repeats the question, demanding an explanation of one sort or another:

  So what would happen, Ma?

  I know I have to reply from my vantage point as mother, my role as a voice that serves as a scaffolding to his world, which is still unfinished, still under construction. He doesn’t need to hear about my own fears or philosophical doubts. What he needs is to explore this frightening possibility—alone, no parents—in order to make it less frightening. And I need to help him enact it in his head so that he can maybe find the imaginary solution to his imaginary problem and feel a little more in control of whatever is frightening him.

  Well, that’s a good question, because that’s exactly what this book is about.

  What do you mean? Why? What’s it about?

  I think it’s about human nature, I say.

  I hate it when you say those kinds of things, Ma.

  Okay. So the author, William Golding, was writing this book after the Second World War, and he was disappointed with the way people were always quarreling and looking for more power without even understanding why. So he imagined a situation, like an imaginary scientific experiment, where a group of boys were stranded on an island and had to fend for themselves to survive. And in his imaginary experiment, he concluded that human nature would lead us to really bad things, like savagery and abuse, if we were deprived of the rule of law and a social contract.

  What does deprived mean?

  Just—without.

  So what is human nature deprived of the rule of law? I wish you wouldn’t talk like that, Ma.

  It just means the way we behave naturally, without the institutions and laws that make up something called the social contract. So the story of these boys is really just a fable of what happens among adults during times of war.

  I know what a fable is, Ma, and this book is not like a fable.

  It is. Because the boys are not really boys. They’re adults imagined as boys. Maybe it’s more like a metaphor.

  Okay, fine.

  But you get what I’m saying, right? You understand?

  Yes, I get it. You’re saying human nature is war.

  No, I’m saying that was Golding’s idea about human nature. But that’s not necessarily the only possible idea about human nature.

  Can’t you just get to the point?

  The main point, the point the book is trying to make, is simply that problems in society can be traced back to human nature. If A, then B. If humans are naturally selfish and violent, then they will always end up killing and abusing each other, unless they live under a social contract. And because the boys in Lord of the Flies are naturally selfish and violent, and are deprived of a social contract, they create a kind of nightmare that they can�
�t wake up from, and end up believing their own games and follies are true, and eventually start torturing and killing one another.

  So back to the human nature part. If you and Papa and every adult disappeared, what would happen with our social contract?

  What do you mean?

  I mean, would my sister and I end up doing what the Lord of the Flies boys did to each other?

  No!

  Why not?

  Because you are brother and sister, and you love each other.

  But I sometimes hate her, even if she is my sister. Even if she is little. I would also never let anything bad happen to her. But maybe I would let something a little bit bad happen. I don’t know what my human nature is. So what would happen to our social contract?

  I smell the top of his head. I can see his eyelashes moving up and down as his lids slowly begin to get heavier.

  I don’t know. What do you think would happen? I say.

  He just shrugs, and sighs, so I assure him that nothing bad would ever happen. But what I don’t say is that his question hangs as heavily on me as it does on him. What would happen, I wonder? What does happen if children are left completely alone?

  Tell me what’s happening in that other book you are reading, he says.

  You mean the red one, Elegies for Lost Children?

  Yes, the one about those other lost children.

  He listens attentively while I tell him about the freight trains, and the monotonous sound of thousands of footsteps, and the desert, inanimate and calcined by the sun, and a strange country, under a strange sky.

  Would you read some of it to me?

  Now? It’s really late, my love.

  Just one chapter.

  But just one, okay?

  Okay.

  (THE THIRD ELEGY)

  The children always wanted to ask:

  When will we get there?

  How much longer?

  When can we stop to rest?

  But the man in charge would not take questions. He had made that clear at the beginning of the journey, long before they boarded the train, long before they reached the desert, when there were still seven of them, not six. He had made it clear the day they crossed the angry brown river aboard the enormous tire tube, black and rubbery, which a tubeman oared. The tubeman, eyes hollow like exhausted stars, hands cracked, had helped the seven children sit around the edges of the tire tube, and then collected the fee from the man in charge. Standing on a plank of wood stretched out across the tire tube, he stuck the end of his oar against the muddy riverbank and pushed. The tube slid into the brown waters.

  The tire tube, before carrying the children across the river, had been the intestine of a tire, a tire that had belonged to a truck, a truck that had carried merchandise across countries and national borders, a truck that had traveled back and forth, many times, along many roads, many miles, until one day, on a sinuous mountain road, it crashed into another, similar truck in the bend of a sharp curve. Both trucks went tumbling down the cliff and hit the bottom with a loud, metallic blast that reverberated far into the quiet stillness of that night. The noise was heard by some in a nearby village, and the next morning, there were several villagers there, investigating the scene, looking for survivors, although there were none, and rescuing vestiges. From one truck, they rescued boxes of juice, music cassettes, a cross that had hung from a rearview mirror. From the other, bags and bags of powder. “Maybe it’s cement,” one villager said. “You foolish idiot,” another answered, “this is not cement.” The days passed and villagers came and went, and went and came, from their homes to the site of the accident, taking everything they could, everything that might be useful to them or sellable to another. And most things were; almost everything was useful, except the two bodies of the deceased drivers, still gripping their steering wheels, each day more decomposed, more unnamable, less human. No one knew what to do with them, and no one ever went to claim them, so one day, an elderly lady from the village came and gave them a final blessing, and two young men dug them graves and planted white crosses on the ground under which they could rest in peace. Before they left, the two young men looked around the site, to see if there was anything else for them to take, and there was almost nothing left, except the trucks’ tires, twenty each. From the tires they extracted all the tubes, deflated them, and then sold them to the village’s tricycle vendor, who pedaled four hours every day from the village to the side of the big brown river, where he sold his merchandise: cold water, sandwiches, sweet bread, buttons, shoelaces, and, for some profitable weeks, forty tire tubes that would be reinflated and used as rafts to carry people from one side of the river to the other.

  Now the tire tube slid across the brown river, and the seven children were sitting around its unsteady rim, leaning slightly forward to keep balanced, arms around their backpacks. They’d taken their shoes off and had them clamped between their fingers to keep them from getting wet in the current below. The mighty river flowed under their eyes like an unrestful dream. “There will be no joy in the brilliance of sunshine there,” the grandmother of the two girls had said when she described the long stretch of waterway they would have to cross. And indeed there was none, no joy in the rays that beamed down on their foreheads, no beauty in the glittering lights crowning the little waves and many river-folds.

  The elder of the two girls had dared to ask the man in charge, her question breaking up with hesitance:

  How much longer—long—how to the shore?

  She was looking away from the water, perhaps imagined sinking, being swallowed by it. It was the kind of river that looked back at you “vengefully, like a dying snake,” her grandmother had warned them both before they set off, following the man in charge. The man now looked at her from under his cap, the shadow long under its blue brim, darkening and lengthening his features. Before answering her question, he snatched one tennis shoe from her unsteady hands and let it drop into a spiraling current in the empty center of the tube. The tubeman continued to oar. The shoe spooned up some water but remained afloat, resisting the pull and shoring up against the inner rubber wall of the tube. Looking down at the shoe from his spot, and then toward the other shore, the man in charge spoke to her but also to everyone:

  You are this shoe, and you’ll reach the other side when it reaches the other side, if it reaches the other side before sinking to the bottom.

  He continued to talk this way and the girl looked at her sister, younger and perhaps less afraid than she was. She signaled to her to close her eyes while he continued to speak, and the older one closed her eyes but the younger one didn’t. She looked up at the sky instead and followed two eagles in flight, thinking they looked like gods floating above them, taking care of them, maybe, looking after them while they still had to be stuck to earth. The older one kept her eyes shut, trying to not hear him, trying to hear nothing but the splashing thump of the float against the waters, rising and falling. He uttered threats that filled all of them with terror, threats like “sink to the bottom” and “blue in the face” and “food for the little fish.” They all understood then, while they were slowly being ferried across the river, being cut off forever from everything they’d once known, that they were really going nowhere.

  HERE

  Finally, everyone is asleep: the children in their room and my husband in ours. I walk out to the porch of the old bathhouse. I’m tired but not sleepy, so I want to read for a little longer. Sitting myself down on a rocking chair—unraveled wicker and rickety chipped wood—surrounded by old bathtubs and sinks, I take my hand recorder and the little red book from my handbag. I press Record and read on:

  (THE FOURTH ELEGY)

  Once on the northern bank of the river, they’d all walked in a single line, and the man in charge tapped them on the head with the end of a stick and said: girl one, girl two, boy three, boy four, bo
y five, boy six, boy seven. They’d walked into the thick of the jungle, where they heard many other footsteps, heard leaves full of voices. Some, they were told, were the voices of others like them. Real voices like theirs, coming from all directions, bouncing off tree trunks and passing through thickets. Other voices, no one knew or would say where and what and how. These they had feared. They belonged to the long or recently extinguished, the man in charge told them. They belonged to souls perhaps rising from dark fossae, he said, dead but still stubbornly reverberating aboveground: few youths, the old, tender girls, many men and women. All the “impetuous, impotent dead,” he said. All of them “unburied, cast on the wide earth.” And though they did not understand his long words, they walked under their shadow the rest of the way.

  For ten suns, they traveled on foot. They marched the full stretch from the break of day to noon, when they stopped for a brief meal, and then took to the path again from the long-shadowed hours of the afternoon till the moon was high, or else till the littler ones with flatter feet could no longer take another step. Very often the little ones fell, or threw themselves to the ground, their legs and feet not yet ready, not strong enough, not accustomed. But even the older ones, with higher arches and thick-muscled insteps, could hardly make themselves walk firmly beyond the hour of sunset, so they were quietly thankful when others lagged, or fell, and forced the march to a halt.

  When midnight came, all of them fell to the ground, and were ordered by the man in charge to sit in a circle and make a fire. Only then, when the flames were burning high, were they finally allowed to take their shoes off. All unshod, they held their aching foot-soles tight in their hands, wondering how much longer before they reached the train yard. Some sat silent, some howled out their pain shamelessly, one vomited behind his shoulder in horror at the sight of his blood-drenched socks and peeling skin. But the next day at dawn, and the next, they always all stood up and walked some more.