Lost Children Archive. Valeria Luiselli

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СКАЧАТЬ not knowing what would happen but always sure we’d find something new. We traveled in and out of the five boroughs, interviewing strangers, asking them to talk in and about their native tongues. He liked the days we spent in transitional spaces, like train stations, airports, and bus stops. I liked the days we spent in schools, sampling children. He’d walk around the crowded cafeterias, his Porta-Brace sound bag hanging from a strap around his right shoulder, his boom held up at an angle, recording the cluster of voices, cutlery, footsteps. 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.

      TIME

      We also accumulated things: plants, plates, books, chairs. We picked up objects from curbsides in affluent neighborhoods. Often, we realized later that we didn’t really need another chair, another bookshelf, and so we put it back outside, on the curbside of our less-affluent neighborhood, feeling that we were participants in the invisible left hand of wealth redistribution—the anti–Adam Smiths of sidewalks and curbsides. For a while, we continued to pick up objects from the streets, until we heard on the radio one day that there was a bedbug crisis in the city, so we stopped scavenging, quit redistributing wealth, and winter came, and then came spring.

      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.

      Who knows how, and who knows where the time had gone, but one day, the boy had turned eight, then nine, and the girl was five. They had started going to the same public school. All the little strangers they had met, they now called their friends. There were soccer teams, gymnastics, end-of-year performances, sleepovers, always too many birthday parties, and the marks we had made on the hallway wall of our apartment to register our children’s heights suddenly summed up to a vertical story. They had grown so much taller. My husband thought they grew tall too fast. Unnaturally fast, he said, because of that organic whole milk they consumed in those little cartons; he thought that the milk was chemically altered to produce premature tallness in children. Maybe, I thought. But possibly, also, it was just that time had passed.

      TEETH

      How much more?

      How much longer?

      I suppose it’s the same with all children: if they are awake inside a car, they ask for attention, ask for bathroom stops, ask for snacks. But mostly they ask:

      When will we get there?

      We usually tell the boy and girl it’ll be just a little while. Or else we say:

      Play with your toys.

      Count all the white cars that pass.

      Try to sleep.

      Now, as we halt at a tollbooth near Philadelphia, they suddenly wake up, as if their sleep were synchronized—both between the two of them and, more inexplicably, with the car’s varying accelerations. From the backseat, the girl calls out:

      How many more blocks?

      Just a little while till we make a stop in Baltimore, I say.

      But how many blocks till we get all the way to the end?

      All the way to the end is Arizona. The plan is to drive from New York to the southeastern corner of the state. As we drive, southwest-bound toward the borderlands, my husband and I will each be working on our new sound projects, doing field recordings and surveys. I’ll focus on interviews with people, catch fragments of conversations among strangers, record the sound of news on the radio or voices in diners. When we get to Arizona, I’ll record my last samples and start editing everything. I have four weeks to get it all done. Then I’ll probably have to fly back to New York with the girl, but I’m not sure of that yet. I’m not sure what my husband’s exact plan is either. I study his face in profile. He concentrates on the road ahead. He’ll be sampling things like the sound of wind blowing through plains or parking lots; footsteps walking on gravel, cement, or sand; maybe pennies falling into cash registers, teeth grinding peanuts, a child’s hand probing a jacket pocket full of pebbles. I don’t know how long his new sound project will take him, or what will happen next. The girl breaks our silence, insisting:

      I asked you a question, Mama, Papa: How many blocks till we get all the way there?

      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. My husband finally gives the girl an answer that seems to satisfy her:

      We’ll get all the way there when you lose your second bottom tooth.

      TONGUE TIES

      When the girl was four and had started going to public school, she prematurely lost a tooth. Immediately after, she started stuttering. We never knew if the events were in fact causally related: school, tooth, stutter. But in our familial narrative, at least, the three things got tied together in a confusing, emotionally charged knot.

      One morning during our last winter in New York, I had a conversation with the mother of one of my daughter’s classmates. We were in the auditorium, waiting to vote for new parent representatives. The two of us stood in line for a while, exchanging stories about our children’s linguistic and cultural stalemates. My daughter had stuttered for a year, I told her, sometimes to the point of non-communication. She’d begin every sentence like she was about to sneeze. But she had recently discovered that if she sang a sentence instead of speaking it, it would come out without a stutter. And so, slowly, she had been growing out of her stuttering. Her son, she told me, had not said a word in almost six months, not in any language.

      We asked each other about the places we were from, and the languages that we spoke at home. They were from Tlaxiaco, in the Mixteca, she told me. Her first language was Trique. I had never heard Trique, and the only thing I knew about it was that it is one of the most complex tonal languages, with more than eight tones. My grandmother was Hñähñu and spoke Otomí, a simpler tonal language than Trique, with only three tones. But my mother didn’t learn it, I said, and of course I didn’t learn it either. When I asked her if her son could speak Trique, she told me no, of course not, and said:

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

      After we voted, right before saying goodbye, we introduced ourselves, though it should have been the other way around. Her name was Manuela, the same as my grandmother’s name. She found the coincidence less amusing than I did. I asked her if she might be willing to let me record her one day, and told her about the sound documentary my husband СКАЧАТЬ