She took my hand as we crossed the street, and I felt the dampness of her palm.
“I want to play in the park for a while.”
“No. It’s too late. We have to get home; your mother is waiting for us. Look, there’s nobody else around. All the little children are home in bed.”
The streetlight changed. The cars moved forward. We ran across the street. The smell of exhaust dissolved into the freshness of grass and foliage. The last remnants of rain evaporated or were absorbed by the sprouts, leaves, roots, nervations.
“Are there going to be any mushrooms?”
“Yes, I guess so.”
“When?”
“Well, I guess by tomorrow there should be some.”
“Will you bring me here to see them?”
“Yes, but you’ll have to go to bed right away so you can get up early.”
I walked too quickly, and the child had to hurry to keep up with me. She stopped, lifted her eyes, looked at me to gain courage, and asked, slightly embarrassed, “Daddy, do dwarfs really exist?”
“And witches?”
“Yes, but also just in stories.”
“That’s not true.”
“Why?”
“I’ve seen witches on TV, and they scare me a lot.”
“They shouldn’t. Everything you see on television is also stories—with witches—made up to entertain children, not scare them.”
“Oh, so everything they show on TV is just stories?”
“No, not everything. I mean . . . how can I explain it to you? You wouldn’t understand.”
Night fell. A livid firmament fluted with grayish clouds. In the garbage cans, Sunday’s refuse began to decay: newspapers, beer cans, sandwich wrappers. Beyond the distant drone of traffic, raindrops could be heard falling from the leaves and tree trunks onto the grass. The path wound through a clearing between two groves of trees. At that moment, the shouts reached my ears: ten or twelve boys had surrounded another. With his back against the tree, he looked at them with fear but did not scream for help or mercy.
My daughter grabbed my hand again.
“What are they doing?”
“I don’t know. Fighting. Let’s go. Come on, hurry up.”
The fragile pressure of her fingers was like a reproach. She had figured it out: I was accountable to her. At the same time, my daughter represented an alibi, a defense against fear and excessive guilt.
We stood absolutely still. I managed to see the face—the dark skin reddened by white hands—of the boy who was being festively beaten by the others. I shouted at them to stop. Only one of them turned around to look at me, and he made a threatening, scornful gesture. The girl watched all of this without blinking. The boy fell, and they kicked him on the ground. Someone picked him up, and the others kept slugging him. I did not dare move. I wanted to believe that if I did not intervene, it was to protect my daughter, because I knew there was nothing I could do against all twelve of them.
“Daddy, tell them to stop. Scold them.”
“Don’t move. Wait here for me.”
Before I finished speaking, they were already running quickly away, dispersing in all directions. I felt obscenely liberated. I cherished the cowardly hope that my daughter would think they had run away from me. We approached. The boy rose with difficulty. He was bleeding from his nose and mouth.
“Let me help you. I’ll take you . . .”
He looked at me without answering. He wiped the blood off with the cuffs of his checkered shirt. I offered him a handkerchief. Not even a no: disgust in his eyes. Something—an undefinable horror—in the girl’s expression. Both of their faces were an aura of deceit, a pain of betrayal.
He turned his back on us. He walked away dragging his feet. For a moment I thought he would collapse. He continued until he disappeared among the trees. Silence.
“Let’s go. Let’s get out of here.”
“Why did they do that to him if he wasn’t doing anything to them?”
“I guess because they were fighting.”
“But there were lots of them.”
“I know. I know.”
“They’re bad because they hit him, right?”
“Of course. That’s the wrong thing to do.”
The park seemed to go on forever. We would never reach the bus. We would never return home. She would never stop asking me questions nor I giving her the same answers they undoubtedly gave me at her age.
“Who?”
“The boy the others made bleed?”
“Yes, I mean, I don’t know.”
“Or is he bad too?”
“No, no. The others are the bad ones because of what they did.”
Finally we found a policeman. I described to him what I had just witnessed.
“There’s nothing to be done. It happens every night. You did the right thing by not interfering. They are always armed and can be dangerous. They claim the park is only for whites and that any dirty nigger who steps foot in here will suffer the consequences.”
“But they don’t have the right, they can’t do that.”
“What are you talking about? That’s what the people in the neighborhood say. But when it comes down to it, they won’t let blacks come to their houses or sit in their bars.”
He gave the child an affectionate pat and continued on his way. I understood that clichés like “the world’s indifference” were not totally meaningless. Three human beings—the victim, my daughter, myself—had just been dramatically affected by something about which nobody else seemed to care.
I was cold, tired, and felt like closing my eyes. We reached the edge of the park. Three black boys crossed the street with us. No one had ever looked at me like that. I saw their switchblades and thought they were going to attack us. But they kept going and disappeared into the grove.
“Daddy, what are they going to do?”
“Not let happen to them what happened to the other one.”
“But why do they always have to fight?”
“I can’t explain it to you, it’s too difficult, you wouldn’t understand.”
I knelt down to button up her coat. I hugged her gently, with tenderness and fear. The dampness of the trees encircled us. The park was advancing upon the city and again—or overtly—everything would be jungle.