The Convulsion Factory

Extinctions In Paradise

They kill children here. Let me make that clear from the beginning.

In spite of that, I have for two years found this city an agreeable place to live. Still not a lot of friends, but those I have are genuine, and diverse. Their company cheers me on those days when I still miss my family so much the pain claws at me like a wounded jaguar.

It was Pedro Javier that I met first, or that’s the way I remember it, a little man with silvery hair above a brown old face wrinkled in the kindliest of ways. His shoulders are rounded with a perpetual stoop from all the years he’s spent hunkering down behind a camera so antiquated that no one’s interested in stealing it. Every day, for more than forty years, he’s come down to set up his camera in the Plaza del Oro, and take pictures of tourists and students, lovers and anybody else who’ll spare him a few minutes, against a backdrop of a fountain cascading with water that looks purer than it really is. Pedro hasn’t missed a day in four decades … except for some week many years ago, a week I’ve never been able to get him to talk about. I suspect it happened when the army was in charge, when the generales often rounded up anyone they thought might not fit their agenda. I suspect this. But I never press him on it. He’s a happy man, and God knows I realize how easily bad memories can tear your day to tatters.

“Roberto,” he greeted me one afternoon, same as he always did. I think he believed that adding the o might make me feel more like a native down here. It didn’t, but I never told him. I handed him a coffee I’d bought from a vendor across the Plaza. He always appreciates that. “Thank you, thank you.”

“What says the sun today?” I asked. As a photographer, he is deeply into the philosophy of light and shadow and the shadings between the two, their subtle nuances and how they speak of the world.

“El sol, today he is saddened by the change of seasons, and how he gets not so much time in the sky. He is weary, but he still fights. See the golden glow of the shadows today? Beautiful, isn’t it?”

Pedro was right, but this was something I’d not have noticed until someone with his eye pointed it out to me. The Plaza, full of those strolling along, taking time out to enjoy the day, seemed suffused with a warmly glowing luster, and whatever teardrops the day called its own pooled only in the thickest shadows.

I wasn’t the only norteamericano in the Plaza, but few would mistake me for a tourist. I’d long ago lost that scrubbed, pressed sheen, had effortlessly cultivated the rumpled, lived-in look of one who has forsaken a prior lifetime, to live the rest of it in a land that made the smallest daily acts seem new again.

We talked for a while, then when he’d finished his coffee, Pedro flicked a spindly finger at me. “Okay, over by the fountain with you. Today we will make a new picture. That time has come again.”

“Already?” But I was walking to where he wanted me.

“One each month, you know my plans for you, hee hee.” Pedro sank into his stance behind the camera, making adjustments on the boxy contraption, compensating for changes in the light that only he could see. “Someday you will thank me, you will be able to look at them in sequence and see how well you have aged. Or … how much you have healed. Now smile, lazy gringo.”

I pushed my graying ponytail off my shoulder and smiled for him. The camera resonated with a far more substantial clunk than did the Nikons and Canons I was familiar with. Pedro straightened — a little — and grinned broadly, a dotty old wizard whom I feared might be the last of his kind.

When I stood at his side again, he patted my mottled arm just below the rolled shirtsleeve, the skin of his hand like a smooth leather glove, dry and comforting. I felt that effortless acceptance that seems to emanate only from the very old, who never feel the need to say anything simply because there is silence. Back in the States we’ve forgotten how to appreciate that.

Pedro and I took seats on a stone bench where already we had passed so many hours, the impressions of our rumps might have been worn into it.

“I saw something strange last night, Pedro,” I said at last. “Down in the alley outside my bedroom window.”

“Ah,” he said, nodding steadily. Waiting.

“Do animals from the jungle ever come this far into the city? I think it was a big cat. Or something like that.”

“Why should it not happen, from time to time? Cunning beasts, they can survive easier in our world than most of us can survive in theirs. They are like the children who roam the streets and have no homes. They reduce life to its simplest term: survival.”

“I just saw it for a few seconds. It looked up at me in my window there. Then it ran.” I didn’t tell him it had been a bad night, that I’d spent two hours or more crying over a bottle of dark rum. “I swear it was holding a hand in its mouth. Severed right above the wrist.” I traced a line across my own to show him.

Pedro frowned. “Well, what can I say? Night can be a fearful time, still, even in the heart of the city. All the gold is gone from the sky, and the shadows have their way with all else. It is the way of night.”

“That wasn’t all. You know the way cat eyes glow green in a flash of light? These didn’t. These glowed red. Like…”

“Like a man’s? Ah, well.” Pedro shrugged, with the well-aged wisdom of those who have discovered that the longer they live, the less they’ve really seen. “For every law, something that breaks it. This is the way of the world.”

*

I came here an expatriate from the States. Never say never, they tell you. But I’m never going back.

You’d hardly recognize me these days from the tiny picture that used to accompany my column in the Chicago Tribune, which was syndicated to nearly 100 dailies. I’ve done a lot of living since that bland little picture was shot, much of it hard, and I see the world through eyes that aren’t necessarily different, just … wearier. I used to strike a comfortable balance between cynicism and idealism. But the balance has tilted out of whack since I wrote my last column three years ago.

Still, for nearly every day I do make an attempt to find something good in it. My wife would expect it of me.

Around the time of that last column, I had been enmeshed in an ongoing debate over sex and violence on TV. As one who earned his living from words, I was made nervous by the groups of self-appointed guardians of the public trust who were making noisy demands that they knew best for us all, and should be granted an advisory capacity to restrict what went out over the airwaves. They were armed with lots of zeal, and stats selectively compiled from cause-and-effect studies whose validity wasn’t even agreed upon. I spent a lot of ink trying to puncture holes in their self-righteousness and pseudo-science. Today an image, tomorrow a thought, that was my fear. It’s not without precedent.

I can’t imagine how much these people must have grown to hate me. The columnist always gets the last word. The columnist is the embodiment of smug and godless ruin, the Nero who fiddles while Rome burns.

Maybe I was.

I tried to tell myself that the team who showed up at my home one night wasn’t really trying to harm anyone. That their goal was to frighten. Doesn’t killing somebody undermine credibility, even that of extremists? They said they got the idea from a rerun of Miami Vice. Too much monitoring? Anything to prove a point, I suppose.

But I’ve given up trying to figure them out. Facts are easier to stick with. They lobbed three gasoline bombs into our home at three different locations. We’d been remodeling, and things were a mess, and the fires spread quickly, joining into one conflagration while the smoke billowed into a dense, caustic cloud.

A wife and two children, I lost them all, and gained a lot of blisters and baked skin that took months to heal. The people who did this, certainly they shut me up. It’s hard to type with your hands swathed in bandages, and I couldn’t keep my head clear long enough to dictate a column. It wasn’t for lack of trying. I’d get a paragraph in, maybe two on a lucid day, and then I’d think I smelled my children, or heard them crying out to me, in absolute faith that I would never fail them.

You haven’t truly known failure until the last thing you’ve taught your children is how fragile and human you really are.

I didn’t decide to leave the country until after the trials and convictions. I attended faithfully, like church, and before the day of the sentencing I schemed obsessively to smuggle a pistol into the courtroom so it was waiting for me. If the judge didn’t come down hard enough to suit me, I could at least rise like an avenger and bring them down in retribution for the three people I had failed most in this world.

I even had my hand on the grip before I began wondering what the experience had turned me into. I’d actually considered this? I’d thought I could go through with it?

Something’s wrong, I thought. Something is very wrong and it’s not just me.

South America, I later thought. It would be another world, someplace to stumble around and lose myself for years while I got my bearings. I could live cheaply down there. Between the insurance, and the money I’d earned from syndication, I might not have to work again for years. I might be human again by then.

Ultimately, though, it wasn’t the struggle with my own murderous impulses that drove me south. It was my neighbor from directly across the street.

The gasoline bombs immediately caught his eye, fires blooming in an upstairs bedroom, the dining room, family room. My neighbor was concerned just enough to make a run for his video camera. Not enough to try to help. He taped everything, even after I was long gone to the hospital in a scream of siren … right up to the moment when they brought out the bagged bodies of my family from the smoldering husk of the house.

He sold the tape to a tabloid show for more than I’d earned my first six years working for the newspapers.

I had a hard time dealing with that.

*

The next day I learned from Pedro that a shopkeeper had been savaged several blocks from my apartment the same night I’d seen whatever it was from my bedroom window. Not all of the body had been recovered. Because of the teeth- and clawmarks, the general assumption was that it never would be.

Everybody who lived in the area, and many beyond, knew about the victim. He operated a botanica, filled with fragrant herbs and pictures of saints, with incense and candles, standard trappings of the numerous religions to spring from an African commonality. Vodoun, santeria, candomblé, macumba … the same basic gods and beliefs, with variations among their rites. Most knew this man for the sham he was, with faith in nothing more than profit. His trade wasn’t with true believers, but mostly with dabbling kids who wanted something more primal than the Catholicism of their parents and didn’t know any better about him, and with tourists who got a cheap thrill out of burning a candle they could have bought for a fraction elsewhere, but felt sure the expensive one was blessed.

Of course nobody deserved to die in such a ghastly way, but on the streets, one got the feeling he wouldn’t be missed.

“Do you think I should report what I saw?” I asked Pedro that same afternoon. He was eating from a bag of pistachio nuts and his lips were comically red, a right jolly old elf.

“And what was that: an animal, you saw, for a moment in the dark. This much is known already.” Pedro shrugged. “The policía, what will they do? They will listen, and they will look very bored, and if feeling lively they will scratch their bellies and their balls.” He shrugged again. “Do as you must. But for me, life is too short to spend it watching hairy men scratch themselves.”

Pedro’s dismissal of the police was as practical as it was fatalistic. They’re no different here than they are throughout much of South America: poorly equipped, underpaid, notoriously corrupt. Paid the equivalent of $200 American per month, they are often the puppets of anyone who puts up enough money.

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.”

“You like Rafael. He’s my friend.” Still pressing his tough little hands to my face, Miguel glanced to either side, then leaned closer in. “You live here long enough now, you see strange things. Okay? Not like your old home. You see another strange thing now, maybe. Monjito? I trust you. You never show us to the policía, right? I trust you.”

I gripped his wrists, thin as broomsticks. “I’d never turn you in. Never worry about that.”

He released my face and dropped to all fours, scurrying into the mouth of one of the hovels they’d tacked together in half an hour’s time, if that. I followed, struck by the sudden reek of sweat and blood inside the six-foot crawlspace. Miguel pushed aside a scrap of burlap coffee bag used for a curtain and we crowded into a miserable little chamber in which one couldn’t even stand up, whose only decor was pictures I’d taken of the kids, over time. It was lit by half a dozen candles of various colors, and I tried not to think what would happen if one of them tipped against a wall, unnoticed.

“Rafael,” he said, pointing.

He was a curly-haired boy near Miguel’s age, maybe a year or two older. It’s so hard to tell sometimes. Rafael lay barechested and trembling along one rough-hewn wall, a pallet of rags for his mattress. He was covered to the waist by a thin blanket; the bloodstains atop the grime looked fresh.

Rafael opened his eyes, looked at me without emotion, with neither fear nor relief. I was simply there. He did not shut them until Miguel squatted closer and stroked the boy’s shoulder.

I quit praying three years ago, but for this I resurrected the act. I slowly drew down the blanket until I saw that his naked hip bore the swollen red pucker of a bullet wound. It was obvious that Rafael had shat himself, but not here. It was only a few smears.

Although he would have to be kept warm, I couldn’t leave that filthy blanket on him. Maybe Miguel could run back to my place for a clean one. I tugged the worn cloth off him, to toss it aside —

And I stared at what lay beneath the rest. Beyond acceptance, beyond rejection. What I saw? It simply was.

The boy’s feet and lower legs were not human, but some kind of canine or lupine form, bristling with dark fur and matted with his blood. As Rafael twitched, a claw extending crookedly from between a pair of toe-pads scratched incessantly at the wood. They bent strangely, these haunches, the underlying bone structure consistent with animal origins. The feral hide and muscle melded gradually into his skinny thighs.

“He looks some more normal than he did when I leave for you,” said Miguel. “Soon, he looks like same Rafael again, no different. You help him, okay?”

“He’s been shot,” I murmured. “He needs a doctor, he needs to go to a clinic.”

“No doctor, no clinic. They don’t fix him so good, maybe, they see him like this.” Miguel was very firm. “The bullet, out already. Don’t worry, Monjito. I did a good job.” He pointed at a bloody lump of misshapen lead and twiddled his thin fingers like pincers. He’d dug it out with his fingers.

I worked, trying not to think what I was working on, because it wasn’t the time for questions. All I could try was to keep uppermost in my mind that there was a young boy who’d been shot, and whatever else he may have been didn’t matter. I irrigated and cleaned out the wound, and while swelling had cut off most of the bleeding, I still had to attempt a crude job of stitching closed the hole. I packed it over with a thick bandage, fed him a dose of antibiotics, then resigned myself to the fact that it was the most I knew how to do.

After which I leaned trembling against the hovel’s frail wooden wall. Rafael had dropped into fitful slumber, while Miguel sat on his haunches and, in the warm glow of the candles, watched us with a strangely affectionate pride.

“You did a good job, I knew you would,” he said, smiling, and he must have seen all the questions in my eyes. It was one of the most awful moments of my life, the way he regarded me with not just understanding … but with pity.

Miguel squirmed slowly across the cramped room, lifted aside the clean blanket he’d come back with while I doctored. Rafael’s strange legs looked even more like a normal boy’s than they had earlier, mended by some creeping transformation. Miguel traced a slow finger through the thinning patches of fur.

“Happens now, to some of us,” he said dreamily, with neither sadness nor joy. “Few months, must be, maybe, that’s all. Was a long time before we could do it any time we want. I can do it now for you, but I think you don’t so much want to see me … so, no, right?”

I almost laughed, softly. “No. Not … not now.” I thought back to what I’d seen a few nights before in my alley, how it had seemed so out of place, and yet so right. It may even have been Miguel himself, thinking to come bring me a bloody gift the way a housecat will deliver a torn mouse. “Miguel? Do you … the rest of you … do you kill?”

“Some try killing us,” he said solemnly. “Some pay, and some, they look for us. Not wrong, fighting back, okay?”

“No,” I whispered. “You have to protect yourself. And the ones you love.” I closed my eyes against the threat of tears summoned by my failures. And I knew where these candles had come from, which shopkeeper no longer had need of them, had no need of anything, not even the policías he reportedly paid to rid himself of pests. Oh, I believed rumor. Pedro’s word was gospel.

From beyond the makeshift walls came the soft sounds of movement, of careful feet shifting with more stealth than tender years should be forced to acquire. I heard muttering throats and clicking teeth, and breath in hot feral sighs. For a moment I wondered if they’d come to silence me, a witness to their camp.

Miguel sat at rapt attention, head tilting up as he sharply sniffed the air, a movement so unchildlike it was like seeing the instinctive animal within ripple beneath his brown skin.

“They want in,” he said. “For Rafael they feel sad.”

I shrank against the wall as Miguel drew the burlap curtain aside. The smelly den could accommodate no more than two at a time, but they were patient, waiting their turn. I just watched them, saying nothing as ragged boys and girls and slinking beasts came in to nuzzle the sleeping Rafael. Among those I didn’t already know, their interest in me was minimal, some looking over me with flat eyes, some smiling shyly, others seemingly unaware of my presence. They curled next to Rafael, to warm him with their body heat. They tugged the bandages away to lick his wound. Rafael’s ribs rose and fell with a smooth new rhythm. Two by two they came, as if they all could give of themselves to restore the life that had almost been taken from him, taken because he was … what? A scavenger?

They must have numbered close to thirty.

After they left, drawing back to their own junkyard dens, and even Miguel fell prey to exhaustion, I cradled the wounded boy in my arms. In his adolescent body I tried to feel the bones a younger child might have grown into, a son I’d not held for three years, a son who, for me, would forever remain five. I wondered if he had a sister somewhere, and if she still loved him, or if she too lay buried somewhere, like that five-year-old’s big sister, nothing but unfulfilled potentials and precious memories.

They kill children here. But I suspect it’s the same all over.

I held Rafael until late the next morning, long after I had looked at his legs and saw that he was only a kid again, just a bruised and wounded kid who needed so many things, but of those things, had only time.

*

My hair is gray, but sometimes I want to be older still, very very old, so old that nothing new can surprise me, because I’ll recognize that it really isn’t new at all. If I live that long, I will welcome it, but until then I’ll have to content myself with friends like Pedro Javier.

I told him about Miguel and Rafael and the others, told him in a Plaza del Oro flooded with the light of a sun that struggled in and out of clouds. Pedro’s face was luminous one moment, mysterious and thoughtful the next. I told him not because I really expected him to believe, but because I had to tell someone, and he was the only one I knew who might not laugh at me.

“The world,” he said, “it forces children to become terrible things sometimes, so that they may live. Makes new things of their nature. For every loss, a gain, I think, but not every gain is worth its cost.”

He seemed very sad. Pedro has never married, never fathered children, and at times like this I wonder if he’s glad, or regrets it all the more. He’d have made a wonderful father.

I have him to thank for suggesting a way to get closer to the kids when I first began to notice them, take an interest in their plight — surrogates, I’m sure, for the ones I couldn’t save at home. Give them pictures of themselves and their friends, Pedro suggested. He has done so himself for many years. They like this not only because it makes them feel more like a family — see, they have proof — but because when one of them dies, or disappears after the shadow of the policía is seen, then the rest have something by which to remember the lost one. They have no marker and no grave, but at least they have images preserved for all time, and some believe that in pictures there lives a sprinkle of magic.

From my pocket I pulled one such picture. I’d done a terrible thing, taking this from the wall of Rafael’s shack, stealing from someone who has less than nothing, but I planned to give it back.

I showed it to Pedro, positive he would recognize it.

The picture showed the fountain in the center of the Plaza del Oro, from the same vantage point that Pedro must have photographed tens of thousands of times. The Plaza was deserted, glowing with soft light that can only come at dawn. A half-dozen gangly-limbed kids were crowded together, Rafael among them, and at their waists rose the hackled head of some lupine animal, at play, with happily lolling tongue. But at their side was someone of adult stature, a blur of gray lost to motion the moment the shutter had clicked, a sweep of dark hair covering most of her face. She knew what they were — I had convinced myself of this in the days since stealing the picture. Where might they have been in the hours before dawn?

“Do you know who she is, Pedro?”

He calmly looked at the picture with soft eyes that betrayed nothing more than, perhaps, what he wanted me to see. It compelled me to wonder how much Pedro, having spent nearly every day out here for forty years, had really seen.

“Some, they call her a bruja.” A witch. He handed the picture back. “But me, I think she is just lonely.”

*

Over the next weeks I paid special attention to the strange and brutal deaths one always hears about in a city of millions. People live, people die, and neither can always be peaceful. On a few I dwelled longer: another shopkeeper, with his throat torn out; a policía officer, disemboweled in an alley. A few more.

I recognize survival and I recognize vengeance, and sometimes the two exist like fist in glove. Whenever I encounter Miguel and his friends, or seek them out to make sure they’re well, I’m aware of these things inside their hearts, but we never speak of them.

I’m new to this city, still, but it wasn’t always this way down here. Even Pedro admits that. And I wonder what process has been wrought, what set it into motion. If it was a deliberate act, or something waiting to happen, inevitably, that finally came to pass.

The woman in the picture was known as Doña Mariana. After I’d summoned enough nerve I went to see her. She lived on a quiet street in one of those areas that most cities have, that reek of history rather than mere age, and seem further removed from the city’s chaos than the few blocks between would imply. Her apartment was on the third floor of a building steeped in subtle European flavors, bracketed top to bottom by balconies and lattices of dark wrought-iron.

Doña Mariana was about my age, but she wore it with more dignity. Her dark hair was gathered at the back of her neck, long wisps curling free, and the fine lines at her mouth and eyes were cut as if by a loving sculptor who had no choice but to season her with an air of tragedy that would make her beauty all the more poignant. She stood as tall as I and elegantly big-boned, with a robust underlying sensuality that immediately set me to wondering how she would feel lying with me — how powerful her body must be, and how exquisite her touch.

Bruja, some said, according to Pedro. Witch. It would’ve been easier to expect a hag.

I showed her a picture I’d recently taken of some of the kids, Miguel and Rafael and others. “I believe we have some young friends in common,” I said.

She stared at me, so bold, so direct, her eyes so deeply brown. “Monjito?” she said, and I nodded. “If they trust you, then so will I. You do not judge them?”

I knew what she meant, but judge seemed so inappropriate a term. Least of all it wasn’t my place to judge. They were children and they were something more, something bloody they’d been forced to become. They frightened me and they fascinated me, and I suppose that’s an accurate description of the beginnings of love.

“I just want to understand,” I told her.

Doña Mariana took me into her home, full of polished wood and crystal and lush green ferns. We spent hours drinking sangria and talking about children, and what a terrible place the world can be for them, how they can only heal from so much before something else sets in and takes them over. You have to wonder sometimes if the survivors are lucky after all.

We shared our losses, Mariana and I. I told her of the family I’d failed to bring through the fire, and as I did, I had to wonder if that’s why I’d not done anything more for the street kids beyond giving to the few needy ones I knew by name. Certainly I was in a position to help. Back in the States I knew editors all over the country who would run whatever I wrote, should I decide to emerge from retirement. Americans love a good cause, as long as it comes with plenty of pictures. So why hadn’t I done more? Could it be that I feared my best wouldn’t be enough?

And then where would I be, losing not two kids, but hundreds?

Mariana knew my heart, I think, knew it as only one can who has lost her own children after already losing a husband. All three of hers — a daughter and two sons, none older than fourteen — had been killed last year in the massacre that had left the eleven dead in the street. I didn’t ask if they were delinquents or had only been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Surprisingly, I didn’t even wonder until much later. Not that it mattered.

We grieved for ourselves, mourned for each other, long after the afternoon sun had gone to evening moon, long after Pedro would have packed up his camera and bid another day farewell. We held each other against the night, and soon she took me to her bed and we loved each other in the sad passion of tears, loved each other as only two who intimately share some mutual anguish can love. I knew the powerful rapture of her body, and it exhausted mine. I groped for her soul, and it left mine feeling less abandoned.

We slept some, but late in the night she awoke with a start, trembling, and when I tried to hold her, Mariana gently pushed my hands aside. Her beauty became ethereal by moonlight, a silvery flood that came through the open door to her balcony. Her hair was now unbound, a lush tangle across the pillow, deeply black with silver threads that glimmered under the moon.

“No touching,” she said, “not now. Please?”

“Do you want me to leave?”

“No, no,” and she shook her head. “You came to understand.”

I smiled, a moment’s self-derision in realizing how little time we’d actually spent talking about Miguel and the others. The smile faded when I realized that she sounded as if I now might be learning something new.

“I do not understand what gets into me some nights,” she said. “But I let it in anyway.”

From beneath the balcony came small sounds of scramble, of feet and hands bracing on wrought iron and pulling themselves up, up. Higher. Closer. Doña Mariana showed no fear, so I, naked and defenseless though I was, promised myself I’d feel none either.

Finally, she looked toward the balcony, where small shadows were beginning to fall. Kids. Just kids. Four of them, with bright feral eyes, climbing over the railing, clambering onto the balcony and hesitantly entering the bedroom. Even in the night I could see they needed baths.

“I dream them to me in the night, sometimes,” she said. “I wake, and here they are. Is it not a miracle? I choose to believe it is. I choose to let it work through me.”

Doña Mariana left my side, left the bed, and went to them. She displayed not the slightest shame in appearing to them naked, her body tall and proud and magnificent in the moonlight. Before them, she lowered to the floor, lying on her side with her heavy breasts exposed in subtle invitation. In permission.

The children knelt, crowding in with eager faces, and as I watched, no longer any part of this, they suckled. For a long time they suckled, taking turns, snapping irritably when one monopolized a thick brown nipple for too long.

When the first of them bounded away, leaping from the balcony in a blur of child-skin and fledgling fur, it became clear to me.

I thought of Argentina of the late 1970s, when the army was in charge and routinely rounded up innocents who were never seen again. The generals often took orphaned children, to raise them as their own, trying to poison their hearts and minds at tender ages. But the grandmothers and other women fought back the only way they could, a few at first, but more every day: marching with signs in Buenos Aires’ Plaza de Mayo, across from the seat of government, demanding the return of their missing loved ones. The Mothers of the Disappeared, they were called, and they won. They were the first true resisters, who took back their country.

A mother’s grief can be such a potent form of magic.

I sat on the bed of Doña Mariana, and thought of the policía, and tried not to believe the rumors I’d heard of pelts hung wet and dripping from alley walls, a new blow struck in the coming struggle. I tried to believe that the chorus of howls I heard late last night sounded something other than mournful.

Don’t let it happen, I prayed, again the resurrection of an act I couldn’t believe in any more. Don’t let it happen.

But I tried to have faith, faith that these children would not allow it, that they would fight until they need fight no more to keep themselves from becoming the worst of all possible things:

The last of a dying breed.