Lost Children Archive: A Novel

by Valeria Luiselli

  Then when we got bored and got hungry we went into the kitchen and found tomatoes and salt, and I showed you how to bite into tomatoes, salting them before each bite, and you loved it even though you usually hated tomatoes.

  ARCHIVE

  Later in the afternoon, you killed a dragonfly by mistake and started crying like a waterfall. I tried to convince you that you hadn’t killed it, that it just had died at exactly the same time you caught it inside the glass jar, which was possibly true because the dragonfly had just frozen in there, and it was still beautiful even though it was completely dead, its wings still spread like it was flying without moving. It didn’t look like it had been hurt. It was not missing any parts of its body or anything like that. Still, you cried like a madchild. So to stop you from crying, because Pa and Ma were still taking a nap inside the house and I knew if they heard you they would wake up and come blame me, I told you to be quiet and said, listen, let’s bury it, and then I’ll show you an Apache ritual so that its soul can get unstuck from its body and fly away, which I know is stupid, but I still felt inside me that the idea was good and also even true, though I’d just made it up. So we took spoons from the drawers in the kitchen and a glass full of water to wet the ground if needed, and we walked to a shady spot in front of the house under the shadow of a large red rock and got down on our knees.

  The ground was harder than I thought with all those roots clutching to the powdery sand, and even the water we poured on it did not make it much softer, and we hit and dug so hard that we bent the spoons till they were ruined and you were laughing so loud, saying the spoons looked like question marks, which you’d been practicing to draw in school when we were in school still. But in the end, we had a hole big and deep enough to bury the dragonfly, the two spoons, and even a penny, which you threw in for good luck, because you are superstitious like Ma. After that, I had to come up with the ritual because I hadn’t thought of that part yet.

  I told you, you go pick up pebbles, and I will go inside and steal a cigarette and matches from Pa’s jacket. And so we did that and then we met again in front of the little grave, where you were making a circle of pebbles around the covered hole. You were doing a good job, but anyway I told you to try to make it nicer, and when you finished, we sat crisscross applesauce in front of the grave and I lit the cigarette and blew some smoke into the grave and managed not to cough and then put the cigarette out with my shoe on the stony rubbish the way Pa and Ma do. To finish, I threw a handful of dust on the grave, and then I tried singing an ancient song I’d heard Pa playing once, maybe an Apache song, that went ly-o-lay ale loya, hey-o ly-o-lay ale, but you kept giggling instead of being serious. So then we tried singing something we both knew, like “Highwayman,” and we sang words like “sword and pistol by my side, sailed a scooter round the horn of Mexico, got killed but I am living still, and always be around, and round, and round.” But we had forgotten half the words and were just humming most of them, so finally we decided we needed to sing the only death song we knew by heart, which was in Spanish. Mama had taught it to us when we were both littler and it was called “La cama de piedra.” Finally, you got serious, and we both stood up like soldiers and began: “De piedra ha de ser la cama, de piedra la cabecera, la mujer que a mí me quiera, me ha de querer de a de veras, ay ay, ¿Corazón por qué no amas?” We sang, louder and louder, until we got to the last part, which we sang so loud and so well, I felt the mountains were standing up to listen: “Por caja quiero un sarape, por cruz mis dobles cananas, y escriban sobre mi tumba, mi último adiós con mil balas, ay ay, ¿Corazón por qué no amas?” When we finished, you said maybe we should kill more insects and bury them and create an entire cemetery.

  SAMPLES

  In the evening, Pa made dinner, and you fell asleep with your head on the table before we even finished. After dinner, he carried you to our bed, then said he was going on a night walk and left with his recording equipment. I helped Ma clear the table, and said I’d wash the dishes. She thanked me and said she’d be out on the porch in case I needed anything.

  When I’d finished washing up, I joined her outside on the porch, where she was reading her red book out loud, speaking into her sound recorder. There were many moths flying around the lightbulb above her, and when she saw me there, she switched off her recorder, looked a little embarrassed, like I’d caught her doing something.

  What you up to, Mama? I asked her. Just reading and recording some bits of this, she said. I asked her why. Why? she repeated, and thought a little before answering. Because it helps me think and imagine things, I suppose. And why do you read out loud into your recorder? I asked. She told me that it helped her concentrate better, and I made a face like a question mark. So she said, come here, sit down, try it out. She was pointing to the empty chair next to hers, where Pa had been sitting earlier that day. I sat down, and she handed me the book, opened to a page. Then she switched her recorder back on, and stretched her arm toward me so that the recorder was near my mouth. She said, go on, read this bit, I’ll record you. So I started reading:

  (THE SIXTH ELEGY)

  The yard where the children had boarded the first train, and the dark jungle after it, were long gone. Aboard that first train, they’d crossed the dark wet jungles of the south, making their way up toward the mountains. In a small village, they’d had to jump off and catch another train that came only a few hours later. On this new gondola, better somehow, less grim, painted brick red, they climbed to the cold cusps of the mountains in the northeast.

  The train rose high above the clouds there, almost floating, it seemed, above the thick milky blanket of clouds that stretched far toward the eastern sea. It carried them up along the winding mountain path above ravines and next to plantations laboriously crafted by many human hands into hostile rocky ridges.

  Far from towns and checkpoints, human and inhuman threats, but also somehow closer to death, the children were able to sleep unshaken by night terrors for the first time in many moons. They were all asleep and did not hear or see the woman who, also asleep, rolled off the side of the roof of their gondola. Tumbling awake as she went down the jagged ridge, she’d torn open her stomach on a broken branch, and kept on falling, until her body thumped flat, into abrupt emptiness. The first living thing to notice her, the next morning, was a porcupine, its spines erect and its tummy ballooned on larch and crab apples. It sniffed one of her feet, the one that was unshod, and then circled around her, uninterested, sniffing its way toward a bunch of drying poplar catkins.

  Only one of the two girls aboard the gondola, the younger one, realized that the woman was missing. The sun had risen, and the train was passing through a small town perched on the western edge of the range when all of a sudden a group of strong, stout women, with well-kept long hair and long skirts, had appeared next to the tracks. The train had slowed down a little, as it often did when crossing more populated areas. The people aboard the gondola were startled at first, but before they could say or do anything, from below, these women started to throw fruit and bags of food and water bottles up to them. Good fruit: apples, bananas, pears, small papayas, and oranges, which everyone peeled fast and almost swallowed whole but which the girl kept, tucked under her shirt. She had wanted to wake the woman up to share the news of the free food. But she was not aboard the train anymore, it seemed. She wondered where the woman had gone, and thought maybe she’d just jumped off at a stop to join her family in one of those misty towns while everyone was asleep. The woman had been kind to her. One night, when the girl, shaking with jungle tremors, had screamed and wailed and cursed for water, the woman had given her the last sips from her canteen.

  The girl remembered the missing woman again a few mornings later, when the train was passing through another town in the lower valleys. The tall mountains were now far on the eastern horizon, and the children saw some people standing beside the tracks in the distance. They gathered along the edge of the gondola’s roof—hands ready to catch flying food—but instea
d received rocks and insults. Whispering, as if she were praying to some fallen angel, the girl said: You were lucky, dear flying lady, to miss this part of the ride, because we almost got killed by stones, and I wish you had taken me with you, wherever you are, and good luck.

  The beast pierced and puffed smoke, in and out of dark tunnels long ago dynamited and carved into the layers of the black heart of the range. The children played in these tunnels—held their breath as the train sped into the darkness, only allowed to breathe again when their gondola had made it across the arched threshold back into the light, and the valley opened up again, like an abysmal, blinding flower, under their eyes.

  MAPS & GPS

  We play this game, too! I told Ma. And she nodded as she turned her sound recorder back off.

  We used to play it when we were riding inside the car, driving on mountain roads where there were tunnels. We all held our breath as soon as the car went into the tunnel, and were only allowed to breathe again when we reached the other side. I usually won. And you always, always cheated, even if the tunnel was short and the cheating not even worth it.

  Can we read a bit more? I asked Ma. She said no, that was it for today. We were going to wake up early the next morning and walk down to the creek, and maybe farther into the valley, so we better go to sleep. She handed me the car keys and asked me to put the book back in her box, Box V, so I did. And then the two of us went inside. She left the keys on top of the fridge, which is where she always left keys, and poured me a glass of milk. Then we went to the bathroom and brushed our teeth together, making monkey faces in the mirror at each other, and finally we each went into our bedrooms and said goodnight, goodnight. You were taking up all the space on our bed, so I pushed you as far as possible to your side. But as soon as I turned the light off, you inched right back to me and threw your arm around my back.

  NO U-TURN

  I had heard echoes before, but nothing like the ones we heard that next day when we all walked out into the Burro Mountains. Near where we used to live, back in the city, there was a steep street that went down to the big brown river, and the street had a tunnel above it because on top of that street, and on top of that tunnel, there was another street going across the other way. Cities are so complicated to explain because everything is on top of everything, with no divisions. On weekends when the weather was warm, we used to ride our bikes from our apartment on Edgecombe Avenue, first up and then downhill until we reached that steep street and went under that tunnel under the other street to reach the bike path that went along the river, the four of us, each on our own bikes except you, Memphis. You sat in a child’s seat at the back of Papa’s bike. Always when we reached the tunnel, I held my breath—partly because I knew it was good luck to hold my breath, partly because under the tunnel it smelled of wet dog fur and old cardboard and pee. So I kept silent and held my breath in the tunnel. But always, every time, Pa shouted the word echo as soon as we reached the tunnel, and then Ma I think smiled at him and also shouted echo, and then you copied them and shouted echo from behind, and I loved the sound of the three short echoes bouncing off the walls of the tunnel while we came out through the other side and I finally breathed again and only then I shouted echo though there was never any reply because it was too late.

  But the echoes we heard against the rocks that morning in the mountains were real echoes and nothing like the ones in our old tunnel in the city. That day Mama and Papa had woken us up before sunrise and given us mush, which I hate, and boiled apples, which I like, and we’d taken long walking sticks from a basket outside the house and walked down the path to the creek and slowly back up another mountain, and then halfway down the other side of the second mountain, until we’d found long flat rocks, where we lay for a while and then sat for a while, the sun getting higher and heavier on our hats. I took my camera out of my backpack and told Papa to stand up, which he did, and I took a picture of him with his hat on and smoking the way he smokes when he’s worried, his forehead all crumpled up and his eyes looking somewhere like they’re looking at something ugly, wishing I knew but not knowing what he was thinking or what he was always worried about. Later, I gave him that picture as a present, so I didn’t get to keep it for you to see and keep and I’m sorry for that.

  We sat down again and ate cucumber sandwiches on buttered bread that Ma had packed in her small sack, and she said we were allowed to take our heavy boots off while we ate. For a moment, I was happy knowing we were all like this together. But then, while we were eating, I realized Mama and Papa were not talking to each other, saying nothing, again not talking not at all, not even to say pass me the water bottle or pass another sandwich. When Papa Cochise got moody, you and I would tell him to go have a cigarette, and usually he’d go and have one. He smelled disgusting afterward, but I liked the sound of him blowing out smoke and the way he squinted when he did. Ma said he furrowed his brow like he was squeezing out thoughts from his eyes, and that he did it so often, one day there would be no thoughts left in there.

  Now they were not even looking at each other or nothing while we ate, so I thought hard and decided I should either tell a joke or start talking louder because although I liked some kinds of silence, I hated that sort of silence. But I couldn’t think of any jokes or funny words, or anything loud to say like that, just because. So I took off my hat and put it on my lap. I thought hard what to say and how and when. Then, looking at my hat on my lap, I got an idea. I looked around and made sure no one was watching, and then with one hand I flung the hat up high in the air, and it flew up and then down, falling and then rolling down the side of the mountain, bouncing off rocks, and finally getting caught in a bush. I took a deep breath and made a face and pretended to sound worried when I shouted very loud into the wind, shouted the word hat.

  That’s when it happened. I shouted the word hat, and you all looked at me, and then looked back at the mountain, because we all suddenly heard hat hat hat hat coming back at us from the mountain, my voice bouncing off all the mountain rocks around us, all the rocks repeating hat.

  It was like a spell, a good spell, because all of a sudden, the silence between us was filled with smiles, and I felt the same feeling growing in my stomach that I know we all used to feel each time we were riding our bikes so fast down that steep street downhill toward the tunnel toward the river, and suddenly now Papa shouted the word echo and Ma shouted echo and you shouted echo and all around us the echoes multiplied, echo, echo, echo, and even I shouted echo, and for the first time I heard my own echo coming back, bouncing back to me so loud and clear.

  Papa put his sandwich down and cried, Geronimo! And the echo said onimo, onimo, onimo.

  Mama shouted, you hear me? And the mountain bounced back ear me, ear me.

  So I shouted, I’m Swift Feather! And it came back eather, eather, eather.

  And you looked around kind of confused and said softly:

  But where are they?

  Then we stood up one by one, all of us barefoot on the surface of the long flat rock, and tried different words like Elvis, words like Memphis, like highway, and moon, and boots, hello, father, away, I’m ten, I’m five, I hate mush, mountain, river, fuck you, you, fuck you too, too, tooshie, ooshie, fart, airplanes, binoculars, alien, goodbye, I love you, me too, too. And then I shouted, auuuuu, and we all howled like a pack of wolves and then Pa tried clapping his hands against his mouth, saying, oooooooo, and we all followed him like an ancient family, and then Ma clapped her hands together and the claps came back to us clap clap clap, or maybe more like tap tap tap. And when we’d all run out of things to say and all run out of breath, we sat down again, the three of us except you, who cried one last cry.

  But where are you, are you, are you?

  And then you looked back at us and said, now whispering, I don’t see them, where are they, are they hiding from us? Pa and Ma looked at you looking confused and then back at me like wanting a translation. I understood your question perfectly, so I explained it to them. I
was always the one standing between you and them, or between us and them. I said, I think she thinks there’s someone on the other side of the mountain who is answering us. They both nodded and smiled at you and then at me and then even looked at each other still smiling. I explained, Memphis, there’s no one out there, Memphis, it’s just our own voices. Liar, you said. You called me a liar. So I said, I’m not lying, you idiot. And Mama scolded me with her eyes, and told you, it’s just an echo, baby. It’s just an echo, Papa also said. They didn’t know but I knew that that was no good as an explanation for you, so I said, remember, remember the bouncy balls we got from that round machine in the diner where you cried afterward? Yes, you said, I cried because you kept getting all the colorful balls and me, I kept getting only plastic bugs. That’s not the point, Memphis, the point is the balls, the point is, remember how we played with them outside the diner afterward, throwing them against the wall and catching them again? Now you were listening and said, yes, I remember that day. Our voices are like those bouncy balls, even if you can’t see them bouncing now, I said. Our voices bounce off this mountain when we throw our voices at it, and that’s called echo. Liar, you said again. I’m not lying, he’s not lying, it’s true, baby, that is echo, that’s what echo is, he’s not lying, I’m not lying, we all told you.

  You’re so proud and so arrogant sometimes, you still didn’t believe us. You stood upright very serious on the flat rock and straightened out your pink hat and then your T-shirt like you were about to pledge allegiance to a flag. You cleared your throat and cupped your hands around your mouth. You looked into the mountain rocks like you were giving someone an order and took a deep breath. And then, then you finally shouted hard, you shouted, people, shouted, hello, people, shouted, we’re here, up here, here, here, Jesus Fucking Christ, Christ.