Lost Children Archive: A Novel

by Valeria Luiselli

  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 u
p 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, boy 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.

  Until one afternoon at the tenth setting sun, they’d finally come to the clearing in the jungle where the train yard was. The clearing was not a yard but also not a proper station. It was a waiting-place of some sort, more like hospital emergency rooms, because the people there were not waiting the way people usually wait for a train. With a little fear and a little relief, the children saw countless people lingering and loitering, men and women, either alone or in groups, some other children, a few elderly, all waiting for help, for answers, for anything they might be offered. There amid those strangers, they found a spot, stretched out tarp tatters and old blankets, reached into their backpacks for water, nuts, a Bible, a sack of green marbles.

  Once they were settled in, the man in charge told them not to move from their spot and drifted to a nearby town, strayed in and out of taverns, to and from sad whores and motel beds, snorting long white trails lined up on a pewter dish, short bumps on a credit card, flakes inside a crack in a wooden bar; he’d fallen into stubborn arguments and asked for another drink, dispensing bills and demanding services, hurling insults, then advice, then apologies at sudden foes and instant fellows until, finally, he fell asleep, openmouthed, on an aluminum table, a string of his saliva meandering like a lazy river between domino tiles and cigarette ash. Above him, an airplane passes, leaves a straight long scar on the palate of the cloudless sky.

  In the meantime, the children waited. They sat butt-flat on yard gravel among strangers, or ventured a little between tracks, and waited with the others. Though not everyone in the yard, they noticed, was waiting for a train. There were food vendors, who accepted as little as five cents in exchange for a reused water bottle and a loaf of buttered bread. There were garment traders, letter writers, lice pickers, and ear cleaners, but also priests with long black robes reading words from inside Bibles, fortune-tellers, entertainers, and penitents. With their eyes and ears, they followed a grim young man who warned them and anyone else willing to listen: “Alive enter you, exit you a mummy.” Waving a half-missing arm wrapped in soiled bandages, he repeated his deathly sentence like a curse on the children, but he delivered it with a wide-open smile while balancing on a track, heel-toe and heel-toe, looking a little like the circus funambulists in the children’s towns, before their towns had been abandoned and the circuses no longer passed through.

  Later, they saw a shamefaced penitent who long ago had planted a seed in a little mound of soil on the palm of his hand, and the seed had become a small tree, and its roots now clutched and twisted around his outstretched hand and forearm. One girl had almost paid the penitent five cents to let her touch the miracle tree, but the others had restrained her, said don’t be gullible, it’s all a trick.

  An old blind man had approached them near nightfall and sat with them in silence for a while. Before leaving, though, he’d stood in front of them like a retired schoolmaster and murmured instructions in the dark. They were complicated and confusing instructions, about the trains they’d ride during the journey ahead. He, like the rest of the yard people, knew that the safest train cars to ride were the gondolas. He told them the tank cars were round and slippery, the boxcars were almost always closed and locked, and the hopper cars were a deathtrap you’d climb into and rarely climb back out of. He said the train would come one day soon, and they should pick a gondola. Don’t think of home, don’t think of people, gods, or consequences, he’d told them. Don’t pray or talk or wish anything. And before bowing goodbye, the old blind man had pointed toward some distant star and said, “Thence outward and away,” and repeated, “Thence outward and away.” Then he’d vanished into the dark.

  At sunrise the next day, the man in charge had not come back. Those who came were the chanting men and women who flocked in opportunistic bands of threes or fives between the groups of waiting travelers, offering shoe repairs for cheap, and cloth-mending for almost nothing. They chanted, twenty-five cents for rubber soles, twenty-five cents for superglue on rubber soles, chanted, twenty, twenty for leather, twenty for hammer and nail service on leather soles, chanted, fifteen, fifteen for cosmetic repairs and needlework.

  One of the boys, boy four, paid a man fifteen cents to patch a hole on the flank of his boot with a
square piece of fabric cut out from the sleeve of his own canvas jacket. The rest of the children called him an idiot, called him retarded, called him a mule, said he should have sold the jacket or traded it for something better instead. Now he had a patched shoe and a torn jacket, they said, and what good were they? But he knew that the boots had been new while the jacket was an old hand-me-down, so he quietly swallowed their disapproval and looked the other way.

  The man in charge still had not returned when the morning had passed and the yellowing light of the afternoon was falling, almost pleasant, on the train yard. The children were playing with some marbles one had brought when a scrotum-faced woman, neck speckled with warts and stray hair, and eyes like a welcome mat on which too many shoes had been wiped, appeared out of the shadows before them and grabbed for their palms, foretelling demented bits of stories that they could not afford to hear complete:

  “I see a wine-red glow in the shallows, boy.”

  “By a rock-pool, you, young man, will grow logy with vine-must.”

  “They’ll buy you, little tiny one, for a little slave-money, while the rest go northward.”

  “And you, girl. You’ll glow like a dying firefly inside a glass cage.”

  She promised to tell them the rest of the stories for fifty cents each, which was double the cost of shoe repairs. And if they wished her to intercept fortune in their favor, it would cost seventy-five cents, which was many times more than a whole serving of water and bread. So though they’d wanted to hear more, they’d forced themselves to avoid the witch-woman’s eyes, had pretended not to believe all the ill omens uttered from between her leathery lips.

  When they’d finally managed to ushh her away, she’d cursed them all in a brutal foreign tongue, and before disappearing into the parallel lines of the tracks, she’d turned around once more toward them, whistled, and thrown a ripe orange in their direction. The orange hit one boy on the arm, boy seven, then landed in the gravel without rolling.