Fiona’s Reviews > A Luminous Republic > Status Update

Believing in magic is the same as love: those convinced of its existence, and of falling in love, end up doing so sincerely, and those who doubt their feelings thwart the very possibility of having them, a paradox that leaves us forlorn, wondering what we might have become if only we’d allowed ourselves to believe.

People pay the same sort of attention when they’re afraid as they do when they’re in love. This might seem a minor discovery, but making it in the days following the attack gave me the sense of bridging two continents poles apart. At home I often sat in the hall helping my daughter with her homework, and I’d stare out at the shrub where the three children’s heads had emerged on the afternoon of the concert.

Perhaps it was no coincidence that the attack on Dakota Supermarket took place after the holidays. The gulf separating the world of the happy from that of the sad is never so wide as it is during Christmas and New Year’s. San Cristóbal has no snowy cabins, no stuffed turkeys, no Father Christmases. The heat is at its most suffocating in December, the rainy season one long mesa that goes from torrential rain

San Cristóbal, in the mid-nineties, was a city not very different from any other large provincial city. The lifeblood of the region’s economy, tea and citrus fruits, experienced a considerable boom, small farmers and landowners began farming for themselves, and this led to real upward mobility for the working middle class. In the space of five years the city was transformed: small businesses prospered,