Foreword
Edmund White
Andrés Barba’s A Luminous Republic is one of the best books I’ve ever read (and I’ve read lots of books, thousands and thousands in my eighty years). Straight men in the seventies would always begin an article “I, a heterosexual,” if they reviewed and liked one of my books. Let me just as comically say, “Barba, a platonic friend, a heterosexual married man,” since my name, if known at all, can be a curse in some circles. We live in such a barbarous age of identity politics one can’t be too explicit.
I suppose a Hollywood hack pitching this novel would say: Lord of the Flies meets Heart of Darkness. That would give only the crudest suggestion of this miraculous book, which is at once so strong and delicate that music alone comes to mind as a correlative—in Marianne Moore’s line, “Like Gieseking playing Scarlatti,” or more like Michelangeli playing Debussy—powerful chords hammered out amidst the most feathery ornaments.
What on earth am I talking about?
This is a story that takes place in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, narrated by a youngish widower who arrived twenty years earlier, on April 13, 1993, as a civil servant with his wife and her daughter in San Cristóbal, a small mythical city in South America bordering the jungle. There is an air of magic, black and white, lingering around every page of this epic novel of 192 pages, like gun smoke after a shootout. I say “epic” because it feels as full, as dense with duration, as if it were 1,000 pages long but can be read in an evening.
It is about a provincial city where “wild” children, speaking their own language and seemingly without a leader, children between the ages of seven and thirteen, appear to be given over to joy and freedom. Where do they live? No one knows. Are they peaceful? It seems so, until they stab to death two adults in a raid on a supermarket “because of some glut of euphoria and ineptitude.” They aren’t just hungry; they are anarchic. When the city gives baskets of food to the city’s poorest citizens on Christmas Eve, the children rip them open and scatter the treats.
This is the world that most rebellious children fantasize about. They’re elusive, triumphant, opposed to the dull order that hangs over the city, erotic if not yet sexual.
Early on, we the readers are warned that all thirty-two of these jungle boys and girls will die, though we don’t yet know why or how.
If portraits are paintings where something is wrong with the mouth, novels are usually books where something is wrong with the end.
Not this one! The ending is one of the most transcendent and beautiful I know of, a perfect dénouement but also as visually resplendent as Gozzoli’s Procession of the Magi in Florence.
Most writers lose touch with childhood. Since I read Spanish badly, I can’t claim to be a Barba completist, but the books I’ve read in English deal with children as wise as they are cruel, even perverse. Andrés Barba was born in 1975. He studied philosophy in university and can write thoughtful observations: “The world of childhood was crushing us with its preconceived notions, which is why a large part of the irritation people felt for the thirty-two had less to do with whether it was natural for children to have perpetrated an act of violence than it did with the rage triggered by the fact those very children had not confirmed their sugar-coated stereotypes of childhood.”
Barba has written many books, including poetry, and translated more, including Moby-Dick and Alice in Wonderland. He won the Premio Herralde for this novel, which will be translated into twenty languages. A Luminous Republic shows a childhood of freedom and anarchy. (How Nietzsche would have loved this novel!) This is a book at once heavy and light, Caliban and Ariel, somber and comic. It will open your eyes.
EDMUND WHITE has written thirty books, including the forthcoming A Saint from Texas.
A
Luminous
Republic
When I’m asked about the thirty-two children who lost their lives in San Cristóbal, my response varies depending on the age of my interlocutor. If we’re the same age, I say that understanding is simply a matter of piecing together that which was previously seen as disjointed; if they’re younger, I ask if they believe in bad omens. Almost always they’ll say no, as if doing so would mean they had little regard for freedom. I ask no more questions and then tell them my version of events, because this is all I have and because it would be pointless to try to convince them that believing, or not, is less about their regard for freedom than their naïve faith in justice. If I were a little more forthright or a little less of a coward, I’d always begin my story the same way: Almost everyone gets what they deserve, and bad omens do exist. Oh, they most certainly do.
The day I arrived in San Cristóbal, twenty years ago now, I was a young civil servant with the Department of Social Affairs in Estepí who’d just been promoted. In the space of a few years I’d gone from being a skinny kid with a law degree to a recently married man whose happiness gave him a slightly more attractive air than he no doubt would otherwise have had. Life struck me as a simple series of adversities, relatively easy to overcome, which led to a death that was perhaps not simple but was inevitable and thus didn’t merit thinking about. I didn’t realize, back then, that in fact that was what happiness was, what youth was and what death was. And although I wasn’t in essence mistaken about anything, I was making mistakes about everything. I’d fallen in love with a violin teacher from San Cristóbal who was three years my senior, mother of a nine-year-old girl. They were both named Maia and both had intense eyes, tiny noses and brown lips that I thought were the pinnacle of beauty. At times I felt they’d chosen me during some secret meeting, and I was so happy to have fallen for the pair of them that when I was offered the opportunity to transfer to San Cristóbal, I ran to Maia’s house to tell her and asked her to marry me then and there.
I was offered the post because, two years earlier in Estepí, I had developed a social integration program for indigenous communities. The idea was simple and the program proved to be an effective model; it consisted of granting the indigenous exclusive rights to farm certain specific products. For that city we chose oranges and then tasked the indigenous community with supplying almost five thousand people. The program nearly descended into chaos when it came to distribution, but in the end the community rallied and after a period of readjustment created a small and very solvent cooperative which to this day is, to a large degree, self-financing.
The program was so successful that the state government contacted me through the Commission of Indigenous Settlements, requesting that I reproduce it with San Cristóbal’s three thousand Ñeê inhabitants. They offered me housing and a managerial post in the Department of Social Affairs. In no time, Maia had started giving classes at the small music school in her hometown once more. She wouldn’t admit it, but I knew that she was eager to return as a prosperous woman to the city she’d been forced by necessity to leave. The post even covered the girl’s schooling (I always referred to her as “the girl,” and when speaking to her directly, simply “girl”) and offered a salary that would allow us to begin saving. What more could I have asked for? I struggled to contain my joy and asked Maia to tell me about the jungle, the river Eré, the streets of San Cristóbal . . . When she spoke, I felt as if I were heading deeper and deeper into thick, suffocating vegetation before abruptly coming upon a heavenly Eden. My imagination may not have been particularly creative, but no one can say I wasn’t optimistic.