Lost Children Archive

by Valeria Luiselli

we fell in love—completely, irrationally, predictably, and headfirst, like a rock might fall in love with a bird,

real beauty, always unintentional—I

My husband took note of the fact that we were witnessing one of the languages of the city soundscape, now put to use in the ultimately circular act of conversation: A mouth replying to a butthole.

suppressed the desire to laugh, for an instant, but then I noticed that my husband was holding his breath and closing his eyes in order to not laugh. Perhaps we were a little more stoned than we thought. I became undone, my vocal cords bursting into a sound more porcine than human. He followed, with a series of puffs and gasps, his nasal wings flapping, face wrinkling, eyes almost disappearing, his entire body rocking back and forth like a wounded piñata. Most people acquire a frightening appearance in mid-laughter. I’ve always feared those who click their teeth, and found those who laugh without emitting a single sound rather worrisome. In my paternal family, we have a genetic defect, I think, which manifests in snorts and grunts at the very end of the laughing cycle—a sound that, perhaps for its animality, unleashes another cycle of laughter. Until everyone has tears in their eyes, and a feeling of shame overcomes them.

New families, like young nations after violent wars of independence or social revolutions, perhaps need to anchor their beginnings in a symbolic moment and nail that instant in time. That night was our foundation, it was the night where our chaos became a cosmos.

In hallways and classrooms, I’d hold my recorder up close to each child’s mouth as they uttered sounds, responding to my prompts. I asked them to recall songs and sayings they heard in their homes. Their accents were often anglicized, domesticated, their parents’ languages now foreign to them. I remember their actual, physical tongues—pink, earnest, disciplined—trying to wrap themselves around the sounds of their more and more distant mother tongues: the difficult position of the tongue’s tip in the Hispanic erre, the quick tongue-slaps against the palate in all the polysyllabic Kichwa and Karif words, the soft and downward curved bed of the tongue in the aspirated Arabic h. The months passed, and we recorded voices, collected accents. We accumulated hours of tape of people speaking, telling stories, pausing, telling lies, praying, hesitating, confessing, breathing.

It’s never clear what turns a space into a home, and a life-project into a life. One day, our books didn’t fit in the bookshelves anymore, and the big empty room in our apartment had become our living room. It had become the place where we watched movies, read books, assembled puzzles, napped, helped the children with their homework. Then the place where we had friends over, held long conversations after they’d left, fucked, said beautiful and horrible things to each other, and cleaned up in silence afterward.

We have to remind ourselves to be patient. We know—I suppose even the boy knows—how confusing it must be to live in the timeless world of a five-year-old: a world not without time but with a surplus of it.

Our mothers teach us to speak, and the world teaches us to shut up.

The thing about living with someone is that even though you see them every day and can predict all their gestures in a conversation, even when you can read intentions behind their actions and calculate their responses to circumstances fairly accurately, even when you are sure there’s not a single crease in them left unexplored, even then, one day, the other can suddenly become a stranger.

I suppose my husband and I simply hadn’t prepared for the second part of our togetherness, the part where we just lived the life we’d been making. Without a future professional project together, we begun to drift apart in other ways. I guess we—or perhaps just I—had made the very common mistake of thinking that marriage was a mode of absolute commonality and a breaking down of all boundaries, instead of understanding it simply as a pact between two people willing to be the guardians of each other’s solitude, as Rilke or some other equanimous, philosophical soul had long ago prescribed. But can anyone really prepare? Can anyone tackle effects before detecting causes?

In any case, the question of how the final placement of all our pronouns would ultimately rearrange our lives became our center of gravity. It became the dark, silent core around which all our thoughts and questions circulated.

Conversations, in a family, become linguistic archaeology. They build the world we share, layer it in a palimpsest, give meaning to our present and future. The question is, when, in the future, we dig into our intimate archive, replay our family tape, will it amount to a story? A soundscape? Or will it all be sound rubble, noise, and debris?

After all that time sampling and recording, we had an archive full of fragments of strangers’ lives but had close to nothing of our own lives together. Now that we were leaving an entire world behind, a world we had built, there was almost no record, no soundscape of the four of us, changing over time: the radio in the early morning, and the last reverberations of our dreams merging with news of crises, discoveries, epidemics, inclement weather; the coffee grinder, hard beans becoming powder; the stove sparking and bursting into a ring of fire; the gurgling of the coffeemaker; the long showers the boy took and his father’s insistent “Come on, hurry up, we’ll be late”; the paused, almost philosophical conversations between us and the two children on their way to school; the slow, careful steps the boy takes down empty school corridors, cutting class; the metallic screech of subways halting to a stop, and the mostly silent ride on train cars during our daily commutes for field recordings, inside the grid or out into the boroughs; the hum of crowded streets where my husband fished for stray sounds with his boom while I approached strangers with my handheld recorder, and the stream of all their voices, their accents and stories; the strike of a match that lit my husband’s cigarette and the long inward hiss of his first inhalation, pulling in smoke through clenched teeth, then the slow relief of an exhalation; the strange white noise that large groups of children produce in pla...

but always those lines circled around, brought back and reunited in a single point at the end of day. That point was the apartment where we had lived together for four years. It was a small but luminous space where we had become a family. It was the center of gravity we had now, suddenly, lost. Inside the car, although we all sit at arm’s length from one another, we are four unconnected dots—each in our seat, with our private thoughts, each dealing silently with our varying moods and unspoken fears.

Sound and space are connected in a way much deeper than we usually acknowledge. Not only do we come to know, understand, and feel our way in space through its sounds, which is the more obvious connection between the two, but we also experience space through the sounds overlaid upon it.

also like the constant tension in those pictures, a tension between document and fabrication, between capturing a unique fleeting instant and staging an instant. She wrote somewhere that photographs create their own memories, and supplant the past. In her pictures there isn’t nostalgia for the fleeting moment, captured by chance with a camera. Rather, there’s a confession: this moment captured is not a moment stumbled upon and preserved but a moment stolen, plucked from the continuum of experience in order to be preserved.

When he speaks about Geronimo, his words perhaps bring time closer to us, containing it inside the car instead of letting it stretch out beyond us like an unattainable goal.

don’t know why—just to document it, I guess. That doesn’t even mean anything, Ma, document it. He’s right. What does it mean to document something, an object, our lives, a story? I suppose that documenting things—through the lens of a camera, on paper, or with a sound recording device—is really only a way of contributing one more layer, something like soot, to all the things already sedimented in a collective understanding of the world.

Standing in front of the seven bankers boxes, I wonder what any other mind might do with that same collection of bits and scraps, now temporarily archived in a given order inside those boxes. How many possible combinations of all those documents were there? And what completely different stories would be told by their varying permutations, shufflings, and reorderings?

I don’t keep a journal. My journals are the things I underline in books.

This last line is underlined in pencil, then circled in black ink, and also flagged in the margin with an exclamation mark. Was it me or him who underlined it? I don’t remember. I do remember, though, that when I read Sontag for the first time, just like the first time I read Hannah Arendt, Emily Dickinson, and Pascal, I kept having those sudden, subtle, and possibly microchemical raptures—little lights flickering deep inside the brain tissue—that some people experience when they finally find words for a very simple and yet till then utterly unspeakable feeling. When someone else’s words enter your consciousness like that, they become small conceptual light-marks. They’re not necessarily illuminating. A match struck alight in a dark hallway, the lit tip of a cigarette smoked in bed at midnight, embers in a dying chimney: none of these things has enough light of its own to reveal anything. Neither do anyone’s words. But sometimes a little light can make you aware of the dark, unknown space that surrounds it, of the enormous ignorance that envelops everything we think we know. And that recognition and coming to terms with darkness is more valuable than all the factual knowledge we may ever accumulate.

Then a much deeper feeling—maybe a blow of nostalgia for the future, or maybe the inner vacuum of melancholia, sucking up presentness and spreading absence—as

Beginnings, middles, and ends are only a matter of hindsight. If we are forced to produce a story in retrospect, our narrative wraps itself selectively around the elements that seem relevant, bypassing all the others.

a confederacy of cows grazes, looking quietly conspiratorial.

I sit on the porch, half reading my book, looking up at the three of them now and then. They look memorable from where I’m sitting; look like they should be photographed. I almost never take pictures of my own children. They hate being in pictures and always boycott the family’s photographic moments. If they are asked to pose for a portrait, they make sure their disdain is apparent, and fake a wide, cynical smile. If they are allowed to do as they please, they make porcine grimaces, stick out their tongues, contort themselves like Hollywood aliens in midseizure. They rehearse antisocial behaviors in general. Maybe it’s the same with all children. Adults, on the contrary, profess almost religious reverence toward the photographic ritual. They adopt solemn gestures, or calculate a smile; they look toward the horizon with patrician vanity, or into the lens of the camera with the solitary intensity of porn stars. Adults pose for eternity; children for the instant.

Why is it that looking through someone’s things is always somehow so sad and also endearing, as if the deep fragility of the person becomes exposed in their absence, through their belongings?

belongings often outlive their owners, so our minds can easily place those belongings in a future in which their owner is no longer present. We anticipate our loved ones’ future absence through the material presence of all their random stuff.

Whenever the boy and girl talk about child refugees, I realize now, they call them “the lost children.” I suppose the word “refugee” is more difficult to remember. And even if the term “lost” is not precise, in our intimate family lexicon, the refugees become known to us as “the lost children.” And in a way, I guess, they are lost children. They are children who have lost the right to a childhood.

instrumentalism, applied to any art form, is a way of guaranteeing really shitty results: light pedagogic material, moralistic young-adult novels, boring art in general.

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).

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 landscape changes so dramatically, it’s hard to believe we’re still in the same country, on the same planet. In less than an hour, we’ve gone from fog-clad peaks and a vast expanse of countless shades of green—hues nuanced toward blues into grays and purples—to a succession of monochrome parking lots, enormous and mostly empty, surrounding their respective motels, hotels, diners, supermarkets, and drugstores (the ratio of parking space to space for human bodies bewilderingly biased in favor of the former).

Not entirely disconnected from reality, though, we probably soon realized that our empathy toward one another, and therefore the possibility of a real conversation, was impaired by the radical solipsism that amorous disappointment brings.

Although a valuable archive of the lost children would need to be composed, fundamentally, of a series of testimonies or oral histories that register their own voices telling their stories, it doesn’t seem right to turn those children, their lives, into material for media consumption. Why? What for? So that others can listen to them and feel—pity? Feel—rage? And then do what? No one decides to not go to work and start a hunger strike after listening to the radio in the morning. Everyone continues with their normal lives, no matter the severity of the news they hear, unless the severity concerns weather.

try to talk myself back into sleep, to talk myself out of the feeling that a chasm is opening up underneath me, or maybe inside of me, swallowing me. How do you fill the emotional voids that appear when there are sudden, unexpected shifts? Which reasons, which narratives, will be the ones that save you from falling, from wanting to not fall? I turn around again, wishing myself back into sleep. I cover my head tighter with the pillow, reach deeper into my mind, looking for reasons, making lists of things, making plans, looking for answers, solutions, wishing for darkness, silence, emptiness, wishing.

Outside the window of the motel room, behind the blanket of clouds that hover close above this small portion of the world, the sun climbs its regular path, stirring up steam and humidity but failing to illuminate space, clarify thought, and incite bodies to spring into wakeful action. Once more, I turn heavily onto my side.

the sounds people make, in music or in language, were always echoes of the landscape that surrounded them,

In Papua New Guinea, Feld had first recorded funerary weeping and ceremonial songs of the Bosavi people in the late 1970s, and he later understood that the songs and weeping he had been sampling were actually vocalized maps of the surrounding landscapes, sung from the shifting, sweeping viewpoint of birds that flew over those spaces, so he started recording birds. After listening to them for some years, he realized that the Bosavi understood birds as echoes or “gone reverberations”—as absence turned into a presence; and, at the same time, as a presence that made an absence audible. The Bosavi emulated bird sounds during funeral rites because birds were the only materialization in the world that reflected absence. Bird sounds were, according to the Bosavi, and in Feld’s words, “the voice of memory and the resonance of ancestry.”

bringing into existence an entire layer of the world, previously ignored.

My apparent lack of greater aesthetic principles was not a blind obedience to funders and funding, as he often said. My work was simply full of patchwork solutions, like those old houses where everything is falling apart and you just have to solve things, urgently, no time for turning questions and their possible answers into aesthetic theories about sound and its reverberations.

We were both back to chasing our old ghosts—that, at least, we still shared. And now that we were each venturing out on our own again, and somehow also returning to the places we had each come from, our paths were dividing. It was a deeper chasm than we’d expected.

it seems right to let something of this moment, larger than the sum of us, leave the room and travel.

Perhaps I should say that documenting is when you add thing plus light, light minus thing, photograph after photograph; or when you add sound, plus silence, minus sound, minus silence. What you have, in the end, are all the moments that didn’t form part of the actual experience. A sequence of interruptions, holes, missing parts, cut out from the moment in which the experience took place. Because experience, plus a document of the experience, is experience minus one. The strange thing is this: if, in the future one day, you add all those documents together again, what you have, all over again, is the experience. Or at least a version of the experience that replaces the lived experience, even if what you originally documented were the moments cut out from it.

Not too long ago, it changed, and we know it. We don’t know how to explain it yet, but I think we all can feel it, somewhere deep in our gut or in our brain circuits. We feel time differently. No one has quite been able to capture what is happening or say why. Perhaps it’s just that we sense an absence of future, because the present has become too overwhelming, so the future has become unimaginable. And without future, time feels like only an accumulation.

Unhappiness grows slowly. It lingers inside you, silently, surreptitiously. You nourish it, feeding it scraps of yourself every day—it is the dog kept locked away in the back patio that will bite your hand off if you let it. Unhappiness takes time, but eventually it takes over completely. And then happiness—that word—arrives only sometimes, and always like a sudden change of weather.

In marriage, there are only two kinds of pacts: pacts that one person insists on having and pacts that the other insists on breaking.

Why is there always a little hum of hate running alongside love?

no, he’s not interesting, he’s just beautiful, and his beauty is of the most vulgar kind: indisputable.

suppose it’s always been like that. I suppose that the convenient narrative has always been to portray the nations that are systematically abused by more powerful nations as a no-man’s-land, as a barbaric periphery whose chaos and brownness threaten civilized white peace. Only such a narrative can justify decades of dirty war, interventionist policies, and the overall delusion of moral and cultural superiority of the world’s economic and military powers. Reading articles like this one, I find myself amused at their unflinching certitude about right and wrong, good and bad. Not amused, actually, but a little bit frightened. None of this is new, though I guess I am simply accustomed to dealing with more edulcorated versions of xenophobia. I don’t know which is worse.