I nodded, and took advantage of the pause to ask the fat bartender for more beer. I ordered another for the old man, too. He accepted the beer, but didn’t seem to like the interruption. He stayed quiet, and went on only after the bartender had placed our new glasses in front of us and turned back to his work.
“The kids started to be interested only in the pit, nothing else could hold their attention. If they couldn’t be there digging, they would talk to one another about it, and if they were with adults, they practically didn’t talk at all. They obeyed their parents without arguing, without paying attention to what was said, and the only answers heard from them were ‘Yes,’ ‘No,’ ‘Doesn’t matter.’ They kept digging. They got more organized about how they worked, taking short shifts. Since the pit was deeper now, they raised the buckets with ropes. In the afternoon, before it got dark, they all pitched in and covered the mouth of the pit with boards. Some of the parents were enthusiastic about the idea of the pit, because they said it was a way for all the kids to play together, and that was good. Others didn’t care. There were surely some parents who didn’t even know about it. Probably some adult, intrigued, must have gone there at night while the children were asleep, and must have lifted up the boards. But what can you see at night, in an empty pit dug by children? I don’t think they found anything. They must have thought it was just a game; that’s what they must have thought, right up until the last day.”
The guy went back to staring at his glass, and didn’t say anything else. I sat there waiting. I wasn’t sure if he was finished or not. A few possible comments occurred to me, but none seemed appropriate. I looked for the fat man; he was waiting on the young couple, who were paying. I opened my wallet, counted out five more pesos, and put the money between us. The old man took it and put it in his pocket.
“They lost their children that night. It was starting to get dark. It was the moment of the day when the kids returned home, but there was no sign of them. The adults went out to look for them and they ran into other parents who were also worried, and by the time they started to suspect something had happened, almost all of them were out on the street. They searched haphazardly, individually. They went to the school, to the houses where the kids played. Some parents went as far out as the mine, combing the surroundings, even looking in places the kids couldn’t get to on their own. They searched for hours and didn’t find a single child. I guess every one of those parents had at some point thought that something bad could happen to their child someday. A kid could climb onto a high wall and fall and crack his skull open in a second. Or one could drown in the reservoir while they played at dunking one another, or get a cherry pit stuck in his throat, or a rock, anything, and die, just like that.
“But what disaster could wipe them all from the face of the earth? The parents argued. They fought. Maybe because they thought they could find some clue, they concentrated on the area around the pit, and then they lifted up the boards. They must have looked at one another in confusion, without understanding what was happening: there was no pit. The boards covered a protuberance, the kind of mound that’s left after the earth is disturbed, or when the dead are buried. One might think the pit had caved in, or that the kids had filled it in, but the pile of dirt they had excavated was still there, the adults could see it from where they stood. They went to get shovels and started to dig where the kids had dug before. One mother cried in desperation:
“‘Stop, please!’ she yelled. ‘Slowly, slowly . . . You’ll hit them in the head with the shovels.’ It took several people to calm her down.
“At first they dug carefully, then more feverishly. But under the ground there was nothing but ground, and some parents gave up and started to leave the pit, confused. Others kept working until the next night, now taking no care, worn out, and in the end they went back to their houses, more alone than ever.
“The governor traveled to the town. He brought supposed specialists to examine the pit. They made the parents repeat the story several times.
“‘But where exactly was the pit?’ asked the governor.
“‘Here, exactly here.’