HOW DID the younger children come to know it? That will never be explained. Besides, one would need to clarify what it was that they came to know, and whether the older ones already knew it. One assumes, nevertheless, that it was a real event and not a fantasy; only people who didn’t know them, their school, or their teachers could deny it without question.

At the hour when the bell was rung—uselessly, routinely, ritually—to announce the milk break, or later, during recess, when they ran to the back courtyard, they surely came to know it, slowly, unconsciously, without distinction of age or sex (I say “came” because various signs revealed that up to that moment they were waiting for something that would allow them to wait again, and once and for all, for something very important). We know for certain that from then on (from that moment I am referring to, now the subject of thousands of conjectures), when they lost the indifference (but not innocence) so characteristic of childhood, the children could think of nothing else.

After long reflection, one can only assume that the children discovered it simultaneously. In the dormitories, as they fell asleep; in the dining hall, as they ate; in the chapel, as they prayed; in the courtyards, as they played tag or hopscotch; at their desks, as they studied or were being punished; on the playground, as they played on the swings; or in the bathroom, as they devoted themselves to keeping clean (important moments when worries are forgotten), with the same sullen, withdrawn look on their faces, their minds, like little machines, were spinning the web of a single thought, a single desire, a single expectation.

People who saw them walking by in their Sunday best, neat and well-groomed, on national or religious holidays, or on a Sunday, would say, “Those children all belong to the same family or to the same mysterious society. They’re identical! Their poor parents! They must not be able to recognize their own children! These modern times, the same barber must cut all their hair (the little girls look like boys and the boys look like girls). Oh the cruel, unspiritual times.”

In fact, their faces did resemble one another to a certain degree; they were as lacking in expression as the escarapela they wore on their lapels or the portraits of the Virgin of Luján they wore on their breasts.

But in the beginning each child felt alone, as if enveloped by an iron carapace, stiffening their bodies in isolation. Each child’s pain was individual and terrible, as was their happiness, which made their happiness itself painful. Humiliated, they imagined themselves different from one another, like dogs of various breeds, or like prehistoric monsters in illustrations. They thought the secret, splitting at that very moment into forty secrets, wasn’t shared and could never be shared. But an angel arrived, the angel who sometimes attends to multitudes; he came with his shining mirror held high, like the image of the candidate or hero or tyrant that is carried aloft in demonstrations, and showed the children that their faces were identical. Forty faces were exactly the same face, forty minds the same mind, despite differences in age and lineage.

No matter how horrible a secret may be, when it is shared it can stop being horrible because the horror of it gives pleasure: the pleasure of perpetual communication.

But those who suppose it was horrible are jumping to conclusions. In reality, we don’t know whether it was horrible and then became beautiful, or whether it was beautiful and later became horrible.

When they felt surer of themselves, they wrote letters to one another on sheets of colored paper with lace borders and pasted pictures. At first the letters were laconic, then gradually grew longer and more confused. They chose strategic hiding places to serve as mailboxes, dropping off and picking up in secret.

Since they were now happy conspirators, the everyday difficulties of life no longer troubled them.

If one of them planned to do something, the others resolved immediately to do that very thing.

As if they wanted to become equal, the shorter ones walked on tiptoe so as to look taller; the taller ones stooped over to look shorter. The redheaded ones reduced the brilliance of their hair and others lightened the color of their warm bronze skin. Their eyes all shone with the same brownish-gray color characteristic of light-colored eyes. Now all at once none of them chewed nails or sucked thumbs.

They were also linked by the violence of their gestures, by their simultaneous laughter, by a boisterous and sudden feeling of sadness in solidarity hidden in their eyes, in their straight or slightly curly hair. So indissolubly united were they that they could defeat an army, a pack of hungry wolves, a plague, hunger, thirst, or the abrupt exhaustion that destroys civilizations.

At the top of a slide, out of excitement not wickedness, they almost killed a child who had slipped in among them. On the street, in the face of their admiring enthusiasm, a flower vendor almost perished, trampled with his merchandise.

In the dressing rooms at night, the navy-blue pleated skirts, the pants, the blouses, the rough white underwear, and the handkerchiefs were all crammed together in the darkness, along with the life their owners had given each item during the day. The shoes, gathered together, tightly together, forming a vigorous, organized army; the children walked as much barefoot during the night as they had wearing the shoes during the day. Unearthly dirt clung to their soles. Shoes seem lonely when they are not worn! The bar of soap passed from hand to hand, from face to face, chest to chest, acquiring the form of their souls. Bars of soap lost between the toothpaste and the hairbrushes and toothbrushes! All the same!

“One voice is dispersed among those who talk. Those who don’t talk transmit the voice’s force to the objects that surround them,” said Fabia Hernández, one of the teachers; but neither she nor her colleagues Lelia Isnaga and Albina Romarín could penetrate the closed world that sometimes dwells in the heart of solitary people (who defend themselves, opening up only to grief or joy). The closed world that dwelled in the heart of forty children! The teachers, who loved their work with utmost dedication, wanted to catch the secret by surprise. They knew that secrets can poison the soul. Mothers fear the effects they may have on their children—no matter how beautiful a secret may be, who knows what monsters it may conceal!

They wanted to catch the children by surprise. They would suddenly turn on the lights in the bedroom, pretending to inspect the ceiling where a pipe had burst or to chase the mice that had invaded the main office. With the pretext of imposing silence, they would interrupt recess, saying that the noise bothered a sick neighbor or the celebration of a wake. Assuming the duty of supervising the religious conduct of the children, they would disrupt them in the chapel, where the heightened mysticism allowed for raptures of love, disjointed, interwoven words uttered before the flames of the candles lighting up the children’s hermetic faces.

Fluttering like birds, the children would burst into movie theaters or concert halls, where they’d distract themselves with dazzling shows. Their heads turned at the same time right to left, left to right, revealing the fullness of their pretense.

Miss Fabia Hernández was the first to discover that the children not only dreamed the same dreams but made the same mistakes in their notebooks; when she scolded them for having no personality of their own, they smiled sweetly, a behavior they rarely practiced.

No child was troubled when punished for a classmate’s mischief. None were troubled when others were given credit for their own work.

On various occasions the teachers accused one or two students of completing the assignments for the rest of the class; otherwise, it was too difficult to explain why their handwriting and sentence composition were so similar. But the teachers later realized that they had been mistaken.

In art class, the teacher wanted to stimulate the children’s imaginations and asked them to draw any object they felt moved to draw. Each child, for an alarmingly long time, drew wings, of various forms and dimensions, though the differences did not reduce what she termed the monotony of the whole. When the children were scolded, they grumbled and finally one wrote on the blackboard, “We feel the wings, miss.”

Is it wrong to think they were happy? To the extent that children can be happy—given life’s limitations—there is no reason to think that they were sad, except in the summer. The heat of the city weighed down on the teachers. At the hour when the children liked to run, climb trees, roll around on the lawn, or somersault down a hill, all of these amusements were replaced by the siesta, the dreaded custom of the siesta. The cicadas sang but the children didn’t hear that song which makes the heat even more intense. The radios blared, but the children didn’t hear that racket which makes the summer, and its sticky asphalt, unbearable.

They wasted hours sitting behind the teachers, who held parasols as they waited for the sun to drop and the heat to subside. When they were alone they played seemingly innocent pranks, like calling a dog from a balcony, and when the dog saw so many possible owners at once, it would leap madly into the air to reach them. Or, a child would whistle at a lady walking along the street, and the lady would angrily ring the bell to complain of their insolence.

An unexpected donation provided a vacation by the sea. The little girls made themselves modest swimsuits; the boys bought theirs at a discount store, the material smelling of castor oil, but the style was modern, making the suit look good on anyone.

To heighten the significance of their first vacation, the teachers, using a pointer, showed them the blue dot on the map, by the Atlantic, where they would be staying.

They dreamed of the Atlantic and the sand: the same dream.

When the train left the station, the handkerchiefs waved back and forth out of the train windows like a flock of doves—this image captured in a photograph published in the newspaper.

When the children arrived at the sea they hardly looked at it; they only saw the sea that they had imagined instead of the real one. When they adapted to the new landscape, it was difficult to control them. They ran after the foam, which formed drifts similar to those formed by snow. But joy didn’t let them forget their secret, and they would return gravely to their rooms, where communication was easier for them. If what they felt wasn’t love, then something very similar to love linked and gladdened them. The older ones, influenced by the younger ones, blushed when the teachers asked them trick questions, and answered with a quick nod. The younger ones, all very serious, looked like adults whom nothing could disturb. The majority of them were named after flowers, like Jacinto, Dahlia, Daisy, Jasmine, Violet, Rose, Narcissus, Hortense, Camila—affectionate names chosen by their parents. They carved their names in the trunks of trees with their fingernails, which were as hard as a tiger’s claws; they wrote their names on the walls with gnawed-on pencils, and in the sand with their fingers.

They set off on the trip back to the city, hearts bursting with joy, since they would travel by plane. A film festival was to begin that day, and they caught glimpses of furtive stars at the airport. Their throats hurt from so much laughing. Their eyes turned bright red from so much gazing.

The news in the papers appeared like this: Forty children from a school for the deaf were flying back from their first vacation by the sea when their plane suffered a terrible accident. A door mysteriously opened during the flight and caused the disaster. Only the teachers, the pilot, and the crew were saved. When interviewed, Miss Fabia Hernández said, with conviction, that when the children threw themselves into the void they had wings. She tried to hold back the last child, who escaped from her arms to follow the others as if an angel. She said the intense beauty of the scene convinced her that it wasn’t a disaster but rather some kind of celestial vision she will never forget. She still doesn’t believe in the children’s disappearance.

“God would be playing a mean trick on us if he showed us heaven while casting us into hell,” declares Miss Lelia Isnaga. “I don’t believe in the disaster.”

Albina Romarín says, “It was all a dream the children had, hoping to astonish us, just as they did on the swings in the yard. Nobody can convince me they have vanished.”

Neither the red sign announcing that the school building is for rent nor the closed blinds dishearten Fabia Hernández. With her colleagues, to whom she is linked as the children were linked among themselves, she often visits the old building. There she contemplates the students’ names written on the walls (inscriptions they were punished for), and some wings drawn with childish skill, bearing witness to the miracle.