And I ended up taking Pedro’s advice.
It’s the way of things down here, and I had learned well in my two years living with them. They accept as natural the oddest things, as if a carnivore materializing in the heart of a city of five million, and carrying off pieces of a shopkeeper, is well within the realm of possibilities. They believe in the kinds of magic that come sweeping down on warm winds from the grassy open pampas, or ooze in like fog from the jungles, or bubble up in the densest slums. They recognize miracles of both the light and the darkness, because they’ve lived them for so long, keeping spirits and hopes robust even while the occasional dictator has sought to crush protesting throats beneath his boot. It’s not that they’re apathetic to tragedy. They merely reserve their outrage for what truly matters. All else, when said and done, is life in all its richness, simply life.
It’s only in the youngest and dirtiest of the city’s wealth of life that I see no hope, in whom hope has died, if it has lived at all. The street kids are a breed unto themselves, roaming in packs for survival, and clinging tenaciously to one another for a sense of family.
The government said the problem is under control, that only 1500 or so actually sleep on the streets. It seems a whitewash to me, that there must be more, but even if that figure is correct, the government can’t deny that tens of thousands more get nothing out of their homes other than a place to sleep when exhausted. The streets may not be their bed, but are still the only way these kids can survive. Children as young as five shine shoes and sell candy, hire themselves out for odd jobs, steal, and prostitute their bodies. They get by, many of them, on fifty cents a day.
It gets them dead sometimes.
The street kids — grubby urchins whose dark eyes can be sad one moment, shining innocently the next, and turn vicious a moment later — are not just some exotic species to me that I watch from afar. I know many of them fairly well, give them money and bring them food, listen to them imagine their funerals as if fifteen is an impossibly old age they can never attain.
Many nights I’ve shared their company as they huddled in tiny cardboard cities erected in alleyways fetid with garbage and plunged into menace by primal shadows beyond their fire. A good night is when they can grill a dog, mouths watering at the sweet smoke. They stand careful watch for off-duty policías, of whom they live in constant fear.
They kill children here, remember.
The army no longer is in charge, but death squads haven’t faded into the past — they’ve merely been co-opted by private enterprise. Swift little beggars and thieves drive away tourists, shopkeepers complain. Bad for business. Some of them pool money and pay the most corrupt policías to roam the streets in their off-duty hours, and eradicate the menace. It’s gone on for twenty years, but they used to be discreet about it. No longer. Last year three of them used MAC-10s to gun down eleven kids one bright summer afternoon after a tour bus had been boarded by a gang and its passengers robbed. It was a broad retaliatory strike. The gunmen had no interest in making sure they had the same kids. The bodies were strewn along an entire block of a busy city street that had grown as deserted as a town in an American western movie. I wonder if the rogue policías saw themselves as avenging gunslingers.
Over this, the country screamed its outrage. To appease it, the three killers were arrested, tried, and convicted, are now doing thirty years. I have my doubts they’ll walk out alive. The world over, cops in prison make tempting targets. But they were only sacrificial scapegoats, nothing more. Shopkeepers and death squads alike took a lesson from them: no crowds of witnesses, no bodies strewn along the streets. Bad for public relations.
For the street kids, though, business went on just the same.
That, too, was life.
*
Three nights later I was awakened by pounding at my door, a pounding of steady desperation. I slipped on khaki pants and went stumbling for the door before the neighbors suffered, complained. I passed a hallway clock that read nearly 3:00 A.M. I opened the door, immediately had to look down.
I had expected my visitor to be taller.
“Miguel?” I said. “What the hell…?”
It was one of the kids, the lost, who slept on a bed of asphalt. Miguel believes he might be eleven years old, a skinny-limbed boy with a beautiful smile and long black hair that tumbles into his eyes. I’d once forcibly taken him to a doctor and paid for the penicillin that cured his gonorrhea.
“You come with me, okay?” He tugged urgently at my bare arm. “You have medicines, okay? You come now, find your shoes.”
I hurried, throwing things together while quizzing him and getting frustratingly incomplete answers. He could hardly quit dancing around my apartment, impatient to get me moving into the night. The most I could get out of him was that Rafael was hurt. I didn’t even know a Rafael, but I grabbed bandages, disinfectant, a bottle of antibiotics … things I’d scrounged in case the kids needed them. But I was hardly qualified to practice much more than first aid.
We descended into the streets, Miguel leading me along a dark path of alleys and airways, where soon I became aware of everything that might be lying just beyond my limits of vision. I could smell it, sense it, strata of decay and disease. Miguel traveled without hesitation or misstep, picking his way along with the assurance of a cougar on a ridgetop, and he never dropped his hand from my arm. I felt as long as he had hold of me, I would pass with impunity. Probably I’d not have been so lucky two years ago.
I had been robbed one night within a month of moving here, by a pair of twelve-year-olds with knives. They’d have used them if I’d resisted, I’m sure, but perhaps it was because, still in mourning, I assigned so little value to my own life that I could see how terrified they were, knives or not. They took me for maybe forty dollars and a watch I still haven’t replaced. As they were backing away, brandishing their knives to discourage any heroism, I knelt and took off a shoe and peeled out another bill.
“You missed one,” I said. They looked at me as if I’d lost my mind. They took the bill — it was, after all, offered freely — but never was I robbed again. It may only be coincidence … but even I am able to believe in a little magic.
Miguel hurried me along for half an hour, deep into twisting passages and hellish urban bowels, until we arrived at one of those transient settlements of cardboard and packing crates. The moon was a chilly scythe scraping behind the tall silhouette of a tenement, and as Miguel called out with a soft hooting cry of identification, I sensed a quick sinuous movement just beyond us. It flanked us, whipped over and around as if scampering across a mound of garbage, glided down into thicker darkness —
And was gone.
“Down,” Miguel said to me, and for a moment I thought he meant I should drop to hands and knees to enter one of these rude domains. And while I’d have to, it wasn’t what he meant. “Down, to me,” he said. All he wanted was to look me directly in the eye.
He raised his small hands, cupped my face as tenderly and urgently as a doting mother. An eleven-year-old with responsibilities I could never have imagined dealing with at that age.
“You help Rafael, right? Right, Monjito?” It was their name for me, Monjito, roughly meaning ‘Little Monk.’ It was their way of teasing me for living alone.
“I’ll try, Miguel,” I whispered, while from all around us I got the sense of being watched, of life unseen. Small eyes were surely peering from makeshift doorways. “But you haven’t even told me what’s happened to him.”