Lost Children Archive: A Novel

by Valeria Luiselli

And while he explains the exact differences between those three things—song, piece, suite—I stop listening to him and focus on the very cracked screen of my irritating little telephone, where I type in “Copland Appalachian,” and find an official-enough-looking page that contradicts my husband’s whole story, or at least half of it. Yes, this Copland piece is about people getting married, reproducing, and so on. But it’s not at all a political piece about Indians and white-eyes, and the violins in the orchestra are certainly not Republicans. Copland’s Appalachian Spring is just a ballet about a marriage between two young and hopeful pioneers in the nineteenth century who might—eventually—grow old, and less hopeful. More than a political piece about the two of them fucking Indians over—as was, no doubt, a widespread practice in those times, carried over to today, though in different ways—it’s really just a ballet. It’s a ballet about two pioneers who (1) privately want to fuck each other, and (2) eventually, and who knows why, publicly want to fuck each other up.

  I find a video recording of the ballet, choreographed and danced by Martha Graham. Before it begins, a voice reads these words written by Isamu Noguchi, who designed and sculpted all the props for the choreography: “There is joy in seeing sculpture come to life on the stage in its own world of timeless time. Then the air becomes charged with meaning and emotion, and form plays its integral part in the reenactment of a ritual. Theater is a ceremonial; the performance is a rite.” I think of our children, and how they, in their backseat games, constantly reenact bits and pieces of stories they hear. And I wonder what kind of world and what kind of “timeless time” their private performances and rituals bring to life. What is clear to me, in any case, is that everything they reenact in the space of the back of the car indeed charges our world, if not with “meaning and emotion,” with a weird electricity.

  As her compact, perfect, square little body swiftly dances, Martha Graham narrates the interior lives of the characters using a precise body lexicon—contraction, release, spiral, fall, recovery—threading all her movements into clear phrases. Her phrases are so impeccably danced that they seem to spell out a clear meaning, even when if you try to translate them back into words, that meaning immediately fades away again—as usually happens when anyone tries to explain dance or music.

  Gradually, watching this video recording of the ballet and its reenactment of a ritual, I begin to understand one of the deeper layers of the story Copland tells in the piece—about how the failure of most marriages can be explained as a change from a regular transitive verb (to fuck the other person) to a phrasal transitive verb (to fuck the other person up). Graham contracts, tucking her pelvis into her torso and spiraling toward the right side of her body. Her shoulders follow the spiral, and she leaves her neck and head behind, in counterpoint to the rest of her mass. Once the body has reached a contortion limit, she lunges forward with her right leg, then pitch-kicks her left leg upward and falls to the ground in a sequence: her outer-step, the first to buffer the weight of the body; then the ankle; then the outer calf muscle; and finally the knee. Her entire torso reacts to the fall, feigning a kind of faint over the bent leg, arms stretched out to her front, body spread out on the brown wooden floor of the stage—a stage decorated sparingly by Noguchi. Her body, in fact, looks like one of Noguchi’s later abstractions: a rock that is also a liquid. Now she’s beaten, disjointed, entirely fucked up after reenacting the savage daily ritual of a marriage gone sour.

  Generosity in marriage, real and sustained generosity, is hard. If it implies accepting that our partner needs to move one step farther away from us, and maybe even thousands of miles away, it’s almost impossible. I know I have not been generous with my husband’s future project—this idea of his, the inventory of echoes. I have indeed been trying to fuck him up for it, all this time. The problem—my problem—is that I’m probably still in love with him, or at least cannot imagine life without witnessing the everyday choreography of his presence: his distracted, aloof, sometimes reckless but completely charming way of walking around a space when he’s collecting sounds and the grave expression on his face when he re-listens to sampled material; his beautiful, brown, bony long legs and slightly curved upper back; the little curly hairs on his nape; and the process, both meticulous and intuitive, by which he makes coffee in the mornings, makes sound pieces, and sometimes makes love to me.

  Toward the end of the sequence, Graham contracts to pull herself back to vertical, and just when she’s spiraling her right leg forward, using the flat platform of her strong, square foot to prop herself up again, I lose internet signal and can’t watch the rest.

  ALLEGORY

  We didn’t expect what we find when we drive into Asheville later that afternoon. We thought, ignorantly and a little condescendingly, that we were going to a godforsaken little town. Instead, there’s a small, buzzing, vibrant city. Walking along the main street, well groomed and lined with saplings, we see storefronts full of possibilities, though I’m not sure of what—possibilities, perhaps, of furnishing imaginary future lives. In the terrace cafés, we see pale young men with long beards, and lovely girls with feathered hair and freckled cleavages. We see them drinking beer from Mason jars, smoking rolled cigarettes, frowning philosophically. They all look like those actors in Éric Rohmer movies, pretending that it’s perfectly normal—despite being too beautiful and too young—to be deeply engaged in a discussion about mortality, atheism, mathematics, and possibly Blaise Pascal. Along the sidewalks, we also see languid, camel-faced junkies, holding up cardboard signs and cuddling their robust bulldogs. We see reformed Harleys, crosses hanging heavy on their graying chests. We see big Italian machines in cafés, brewing good coffee. I wonder what kind of rhapsody Thomas Wolfe would compose about Asheville now. Finally, we see a bookstore, and we walk in.

  We realize as we cross the threshold that there’s a book-club meeting in progress. The four of us assume the silent, respectful role of spectators who have walked into a theater in the play’s second act. The two children find small chairs to sit on in the children’s section, and my husband concentrates on the history section. I pace slowly around the bookshelves, inching my way toward the book-club meeting. They’re discussing a fat volume, placed vertically in the center of the table, like a totem. Stamped on a poster next to the book is the face of a handsome man, too handsome, maybe: tousled hair, a weather-scarred complexion, melancholy eyes, a cigarette tucked between his fingers.

  I don’t like to admit it, but faces like this one remind me abstractly of a face I once loved, a face of a man I was maybe not loved by in return, but with whom I at least had a beautiful daughter before he disappeared. This face perhaps also reminds me of future men whom I could love and might be loved by but won’t have enough lives to try. Past men are the same as possible future men, in any case. Men whose rooms are spartan, whose T-shirts are self-consciously threadbare around the neck, whose handwritten notes are full of small, crooked letters, like battalions of ants trying to line up into meaning, because they never learned good penmanship. Men whose conversation is not always intelligent but is alive. Men who arrive like a natural disaster, then leave. Men who produce a vacuum toward which I somehow tend to gravitate.

  Despite the quotidian repetition, says one book-club member, with an air of professorial authority, the author is able to hinge on the value of the real.

  Yes, says another book-club attendee, like in the marriage scene.

  I agree, says a young woman. It’s about carving out everyday detail and finding the kernel of the real in the very heart of boredom. She has hyperthyroidal eyes and bony hands that cling anxiously to her copy of the book.

  I think it’s more about the impossibility of fiction in the age of nonfiction, says a soft-spoken woman whose contribution passes unacknowledged.

  More than a book club, this sounds like a graduate seminar. I understand nothing of what they say. I take a book randomly from the shelf, Kafka’s Diaries. I open it and read: “October 18, 1917. Fear of night
. Fear of not night.” I think, instantly, I should buy this book, today. Now an older man speaks to the group, sounding as though he’s about to offer the conclusive exegesis:

  The book presents truth-telling as a commodity, and it questions the exchange value of truth presented as fiction, and conversely, the added value of fiction when it’s rooted in truth.

  I repeat his sentence in my mind, to maybe understand it better, but I get lost in the “conversely” part. I went to university, though only for a while, with professors who spoke like that. I had to bear their amphetamine-fueled, connect-the-dots, rhizomatic, and thoroughly self-satisfied language. I hated them. But when I peek between the shelves, I notice that the man who said this looks less like a professor and more like the young post-post-Marxist scholars-to-be whom I used to study and sleep with in my brief passage through university, and suddenly I feel a bit nostalgic, perhaps even find him endearing. Another club member continues:

  I read in a blog that he became addicted to heroin after he wrote this; is that true?

  Some nod. Some sip at their water bottles. Some leaf through their weatherworn copies of the book. The bewildering consensus among them seems to be that the value of the novel they are discussing is that it is not a novel. That it is fiction but also it is not.

  I open the Diaries again, at random: “My doubts stand in a circle around every word, I see them before I see the word.”

  I have never asked a bookseller for a book recommendation. Disclosing desires and expectations to a stranger whose only connection to me is, in abstract, the book, seems too much like Catholic confession, if only a more intellectualized version of it. Dear bookseller, I would like to read a novel about the banal pursuit of carnal desire, which ultimately brings unhappiness to the ones who pursue it, and to everyone else around them. A novel about a couple trying to rid themselves of each other, and at the same time trying desperately to save the little tribe they have so carefully, lovingly, and painstakingly created. They are desperate and confused, dear bookseller; don’t judge them. I need a novel about two people who simply stop understanding each other, because they have chosen to not understand each other anymore. There should be a man who knows how to untangle his woman’s hair but who decides not to one morning, perhaps because now other women’s hair has become interesting, perhaps because he has simply grown tired. There should be a woman who leaves, withdrawing either slowly or in a single sad and elegant coup de dés. A novel about a woman who leaves before she loses something, like the woman in Nathalie Léger’s novel I’m reading, or like Sontag in her twenties. A woman who begins to fall in love with strangers, possibly only because they are strangers. There is a couple who loses the ability to laugh together. A man and a woman who sometimes hate each other, and will, if they are not stopped short by a better part of themselves, block out the last ray of innocence left in the other. A novel with a couple whose only engaging conversations are about revisiting past misunderstandings, layers and layers of them, all merged into one enormous rock. Dear bookseller, do you know the myth of Sisyphus? Do you have any version of it? An antidote? A piece of advice? A spare bed?

  Do you have a good map of the southwestern United States? I finally ask the bookseller.

  We buy the map he recommends—detailed and enormous—though we really don’t need another map. My husband buys a book on the history of horses, the boy chooses an illustrated edition of Golding’s Lord of the Flies, as a companion to the audiobook we’ve been listening to, and the girl, a book called The Book with No Pictures. I don’t buy Kafka’s Diaries, but I buy a book of the collected photographs of Emmet Gowin, which I hardly looked through but which was on the last display table before the counter and seemed—suddenly—indispensable. It’s too big to store in any of our bankers boxes, so for now it will live under my feet in the passenger’s seat. I also buy Marguerite Duras’s The Lover, which I read when I was nineteen but have never read in English, as well as the screenplay of Hiroshima Mon Amour, annotated by Duras with stills from Resnais’s film.

  POINT OF VIEW

  The next day, finally, the boy learns the Polaroid’s mechanism. It’s almost noon—we overslept and had a big, slow breakfast—and we are in a gas station right outside Asheville. The boy and I are standing next to the car while his father fills up the tank and checks the wheels. From the top of my box, I’ve grabbed the small red book called Elegies for Lost Children. The boy aims, focuses, and shoots, and as soon as the picture slips out, he puts it in between the pages of the book, which I’m holding open for him. We jump back in the car, and for the next ten or fifteen minutes as we drive out of Asheville—taking Route 40 toward Knoxville—the boy sits completely still and silent with the book on his lap, as if he were guarding a sleeping puppy.

  As we wait, I flip through the pages of the Emmet Gowin book. A strange emptiness and boredom is why I like his documentation of people and landscapes. I read somewhere, probably in a wall text in a museum, that he used to say that in landscape photography, both the heart and the mind need time to find their proper place. Perhaps because of his strange name, Emmet, I always thought he was a woman, until I knew he was a man. I still liked him after that, though perhaps not as much. I still liked him more than Robert Frank, Kerouac, and everyone else who has attempted to understand this landscape—perhaps because he takes his time looking at things instead of imposing a point of view on them. He looks at people, forgotten and wild, lets them come forth into the camera with all their lust, frustration, and desperation, their crookedness and innocence. He also looks at landscapes, man-made and embellished but somehow also abandoned. The landscapes that he photographs become visible more slowly than his family portraits. They are less immediately compelling and much more subtle. They come into focus only after you have held your breath long enough in front of them, like when we’re driving through a tunnel and out of superstition everyone in the car holds their breath and then, when we reach the other side, the world opens up in front of us, immense and ungraspable, and there is a single moment of silence, mindful but without thoughts.

  The boy’s picture comes out perfectly this time. He hands it to me from the backseat, ecstatic:

  Look, Ma!

  A perfect little document, rectangular and in sepia: two unleaded gasoline dispensers and, in the background, a row of Appalachian pine trees, no kudzu. An index, not so much of the things photographed but of the instant the boy finally learned to photograph them.

  SYNTAX

  The peaks of the Great Smoky Mountains are only half visible, looming ghostlike in the distance, covered in a fog that seems to emanate from them. It’s early afternoon, and the children are asleep in the backseat. I tell my husband a story about my parents, a story I’ve heard several times in my life, though only from my mother’s viewpoint. The story has always fascinated me. In the early eighties, my parents traveled to India. They were young, they loved each other, they weren’t yet married. They had a twenty-four-hour layover in London on their way to Delhi and slept at a friend’s house. This friend worked in technology, and he owned a prototype of a compact disc player, which would be released, successfully, on the world market a few years later. The next morning, before they left again for the airport, their friend gave them the compact disc player, a set of headphones, and the single disc he owned. They would return everything on their way back from India—this was the deal.

  During the first part of the trip, they didn’t use the player, because it would not switch on. Then, in a smoky hotel by the Ganges, in Varanasi—which my parents always still called Benares—my father lay on the cot, fidgeting with the machine until he finally figured out how to make it work. He simply flipped the batteries, aligning pluses and minuses. On their way from Varanasi to Katmandu, on a sleeper bus in which they did not sleep at all, my parents took turns with the machine, listening to the music, ecstatic, looking out the dark window, humming, whistling, pointing, counting stars, maybe, talking extremely loud to the other when wearing the h
eadphones as the bus climbed and climbed. In Katmandu, they hardly used the player—there was too much around them to be listened to, too much to be absorbed, photographed, noted down.

  A few days later, they continued from Katmandu to a small town at the foothills of the Himalayas. They camped. They made love—although this is hard for me to picture. They took photos of each other, all of which are still in a chest in a basement somewhere. In front of the great misty mountains early one morning, they made a fire, prepared coffee, and took the compact disc player out of a backpack. They were sitting on a frosty lawn, their backs to the tent, the sun rising in front of them beyond the mountains. First my mother took a turn with the compact disc player, then my father. But then, in the middle of this almost sacred moment they were sharing but maybe not entirely sharing, my father, his eyes closed, uttered a name. It was not the name of my mother, nor of his mother, nor of anyone whose name sounded like anyone’s mother’s. It was the name of a stranger, the name of a woman, another woman. It was only a word, one small word. But it was so heavy and unexpected, a cold truth falling suddenly from the bright sky, hitting, opening a chasm, parting the earth between them. My mother then snatched the compact disc player from my father’s hands, the headphones from his ears, and walked toward some rocks. She threw all of it against those rocks. Wires, pieces, batteries—the compact disc player was destroyed, maimed, mangled, its blameless electronic heart broken to pieces against the Nepalese Himalayas. The disc inside the player survived, intact. I always wonder what they had been listening to at that moment.

  And then what happened? my husband asks me.

  Nothing. They flew back to London and returned the broken machine to their friend.

  But what did they say to him?