Infinite Country

by Patricia Engel

  Mauro took the morning off to bring Elena and Nando home from the hospital. He was about to leave them to try to make the afternoon shift when he got a call that the moving company’s office had been raided. Mauro was sure the police would arrive at their door—having found his address in the company’s files—and arrest and send them back to Colombia. Elena wanted to think him paranoid but in her exhaustion didn’t argue, even as she worried that the baby was too small to be on the move and the stress could be dangerous for him. She watched Mauro pack everything they could carry, confused about why being returned to their country now felt like such an abysmal fate. They’d made the decision to stay in the United States together, prolonging their departure for the birth of their son, but they never said for how long. In her mind, it was only as long as the conditions were bearable. Now they were on a bus to another strange place, where another man, whom they knew only by name, a friend of one of their Houston neighbors, was willing to give them a place to stay.

  Elena watched airplanes hit the World Trade Center from a Spartanburg motel room. The man who was to meet them at the bus station never appeared. Mauro took to the phone to call everyone he knew on the east coast to see if they had any idea where he and Elena might go, where they could live with their two babies, make a life, at least for a while.

  She waved at Mauro, motioning to the TV screen. “It’s not a movie. It’s happening right now.”

  But his eyes were fixed on the paper in his lap, scribbled with names, places, and phone numbers.

  As the second plane hit, Karina was tucked among bed pillows, and Nando, asleep in his mother’s arms. Elena wondered if she was hallucinating.

  Soon both towers collapsed in a ruffle of smoke. She thought of the water tumbling over the falls at Tequendama or Iguazú. For a moment she forgot she was not looking at one of the world’s natural wonders but at a catastrophe of human design.

  SIX

  Talia was born on the coldest day of the year, Mauro and Elena’s third winter in the new country though their equatorial blood was still not accustomed. They lived then on the edges of Hookford, a small and unfriendly Delaware town, after a year spent in South Carolina, where Mauro found work at a pet-food plant and saved enough to buy an old minivan from another worker. There, the family occupied a room in a barn converted to employee housing, its slats and roofing pocked and sagged by punishing summer rains. On the communal TV, they watched the United States shower bombs over Afghanistan. Mauro and Elena were born of domestic war but felt uneasy in a newly injured America, mourning its three thousand dead, so full of angst and vengeance.

  In South Carolina they became used to stares, absorbing hisses from locals of Go back to where you came from while Mauro and Elena pretended not to understand. Sometimes when Mauro was out alone, someone would mutter terrorist at him, as if he were one of the hijackers whose faces plastered the news.

  At a gas station, Mauro went inside to buy his Saturday Powerball ticket. Two starchy men followed him out to his car, walling him between their bodies and truck.

  “Where you from?” one said, more accusation than question.

  Mauro didn’t respond, and the man grabbed him by the neck while the other punched him again and again. Mauro hit the ground, nose bloody, a tooth lost in the gravel. There were witnesses, though nobody said anything as the men sped off in their truck or made a move to help Mauro stand.

  When the pet-food plant announced layoffs, there was an exodus to Georgia and Florida, where other workers said there were more factory and farming jobs. Mauro insisted the family go north instead. Elena wondered if even with their homegrown war, Colombia wouldn’t be safer for them. But then Perla would remind her the latest peace negotiations with the guerrilla commanders had been a fiasco, and of the day of the new president’s inauguration when an explosion killed fifteen near the presidential palace despite the high level of security; and the massacre in Bojayá, where hundreds of townspeople were murdered and wounded in a church beside a school, including dozens of children. Even the crucifix was left dismembered. It happened far away from the capital, all the way on the Pacific coast, but it was still our country, our dead, Elena thought. Tragic, almost, that she never felt more patriotic than when grieving her country’s victims. The turn of the millennium showed no end to the violence. Elena knew in every war it was the innocents who paid, but in this American offensive, all foreigners could be perceived as the enemy.

  Mauro spent most evenings in the common room with other workers, drinking beer they took turns buying for the group. Elena wanted to wait to talk to him when he was at least only half-drunk, but those moments were becoming rarer. She called him into their room. The children were asleep on the bed. Mauro and Elena sat shoulder to shoulder on the floor. Through the window, the misty phosphorescence of the factory lights. They’d already been given notice to be gone by the weekend.

  “I’m tired of moving, always being strangers, having people look at us like we’re a plague,” Elena said. “We didn’t come here for this kind of life. Let’s go home.”

  She felt his beer breath warm on her face as he sighed. “We’re young and healthy. If we don’t spend these years trying to make a better future for our family, when will we? I’m not ready to give up.”

  “I miss my mother.”

  “Do you want to end up like her, spending your life in a house breaking down all around you? If we stay we can keep sending her money until she decides to join us here.”

  “We can sell the house and find another,” Elena said. But they both knew Perla would never allow it, stubborn as she was. Even with her chemical asthma from decades of working in the laundry she refused to close.

  “Please trust me, Elena. It’s not yet time to go back.”

  * * *

  In Delaware, on the drive to the hospital through streets cottoned with snow, Elena tried to find the seam between earth and sky, but there was none. Talia started pushing her way out hours before, but Elena wanted to wait until the baby was absolutely sure it was her moment. There was no time left for an epidural. She didn’t have one when delivering her other children. Elena had only one ultrasound in the last nine months, early on at a clinic across the river in Blades that didn’t require insurance and where she had to pay cash. They couldn’t afford another, and she had no medical care beyond her instincts, but she didn’t worry. In Texas she’d had plenty of scans and checkups, and the doctors were always telling her something was wrong with her baby, that she would be wise to terminate or he might be born dead or close to it. She didn’t listen, and Nando was born small but perfect. Later she heard from other women who’d been told similar things and given birth to healthy babies too. She didn’t know she would have a daughter until the baby was in the doctor’s hands. With her previous births she’d bled like a slaughtered calf but not this time. The ease of Talia’s arrival stunned everyone.

  * * *

  On the day of her birth, their home was a small bedroom in an apartment above a pizzeria whose ovens below kept them warm on days the radiator blew out, the scent of dough and cheese filling their walls. The apartment’s true tenants were a couple from Pakistan. Mauro knew the husband from his janitor job at a local motel. He and his wife slept in the other bedroom and told Elena and Mauro to call them Mister and Madame. Mister worked as a front-desk attendant and Madame as a seamstress. Their teenage son died of leukemia years before, so his bedroom was empty and they sublet it to the family for one hundred dollars a week. Elena could only communicate with them in scrambled words and gestures. Mauro mostly took over with the English he’d learned at his jobs.

  Nights were cold. The family wore their coats even to sleep, the children released from their blanket cocoons only for changing or to be fed. Karina was three. Nando, two. Madame looked after them so Mauro could stay in the hospital and hold the baby as Elena slept. She shared a room with another woman. The new mother of a boy. Elena noticed nobody came to visit them. She didn’t speak Spanish, but when t
hey were alone she brought the baby to Elena’s bedside and they held each other’s children until her boy cried and they traded back.

  According to an American nurse who spoke Spanish, the woman and her son left the next morning in a taxi. Before the hospital discharged Elena, the same nurse came to speak to her. She stood by the bed and asked if her husband was around. When Elena said he’d gone home to check on the other babies, the nurse looked pleased. “Now that you’ve got three little ones, you should think about not having more children,” she said as Elena fed the baby from her breast. “There is a procedure you can have done here in the hospital to prevent you from finding yourself in the same situation again. You don’t need your husband’s consent.”

  The hospital people in Houston told Elena the same thing after Nando was born. For a time, she thought they might have sterilized her. She’d heard stories like that back in Colombia. Foreign-aid workers, Peace Corps, and NGOs. How they lured women to clinics offering free gynecological services and the women came out unaware they could no longer have children. When she discovered she was pregnant a third time, she felt a surge of relief that the Texas doctors had left her intact.

  The nurse seemed frustrated when Elena said nothing in response. “I know your family is already struggling. How are you going to care for three children with just your husband’s income when you don’t have any other support?”

  Elena was uneasy with how the nurse spoke of her babies as burdens. She never thought of them that way. In Colombia people said a baby arrives with a loaf of bread under its arm. Where four eat, so can five. Even Madame told her every baby brings luck to its family. She informed the nurse they lived with a nice couple who helped watch the children on nights when the pizzeria downstairs needed extra hands in the kitchen. The nurse nodded, and Elena assumed she understood they would manage.

  When she and her baby were alone again, Elena held her and watched her sleep. This fat glowing child, pale from not having yet met the sun. They’d had many conversations in the months before her arrival. Elena promised she would protect her from harm and felt nudges from within letting her know the baby had heard. She’d made the same vows to her other children, and they lived shelled in happiness, playing in the back seats of the minivan, laughing even while hungry, making up songs for each other those nights they spent at highway rest stops before they found a new place to live, which she hoped would not be etched into memory.

  The baby was named Talia for the actress who played the wife of Rocky. Mauro loved those movies, and Elena always thought the wife much tougher than the boxer. Only women knew the strength it took to love men through their evolution to who they thought they were supposed to be.

  Mauro was never much of a fighter though. At least not with his fists. He found his corner in liquor when he came up against stronger, unbeatable opponents: a supervisor, a landlord, rent to be paid. The winter of Talia’s birth, he drank as if it nourished his cells. When they were teenagers, Mauro and Elena went to parties where they gulped aguardiente and danced cumbia, shared beers and sipped wiskisitos at nightclubs and festivals when famous rockeros and salseros came to town. Mauro was the one who bragged he could drink more than anyone they knew and walk a straight line along the edge of a building. She saw him do it many times on the roof of her house in Chapinero. But now he was belly-bloated and clumsy. He bought cheaper alcohol every time because it was all he could afford without Elena noticing.

  He drank at work sometimes, which got him fired more than once. At meals, even when Elena asked him to help by feeding one child so she could feed the other. But at the hospital after Talia was born, he promised, his head resting beside Elena’s deflated abdomen, the child swaddled and asleep in the plastic basinet next to the bed, that he would never drink again. He’d found a church and knelt before an altar to Saint Jude, patron of the impossible, and begged for assistance in giving up the bottle.

  “I want to be better,” he told her. “The kind of father people remember for honorable reasons. The kind of father neither of us had.”

  He was the only man she’d ever been with, ever kissed. She knew Mauro had always seen her as a kind of seraph. It didn’t bother her. Perla said it was normal for men to exalt the women they love. That’s why so many had mistresses and why brothels were always busy. But Elena had the same desires as anyone else. When she met Mauro at Paloquemao—lean and long-haired, brows downturned in fatigue, in the moth-eaten ruana he wore till he saved enough to buy a flea market leather jacket—though he wasn’t like the more educated or family-bred boys she knew, he had an elegance she could not explain. She remembered how she thought of him after their initial market encounters, the tide of love beginning to roll over her as she worked at the lavandería, hoping with every jangle of the door chain that the next customer would be him.

  Since they came to the north, there were moments when Elena considered taking the children and leaving him. But she convinced herself every woman experiences the same temptation. Real love, her mother once told her, was proven only by endurance. Elena’s impulse was always to stay, to remain a complete family. No matter where or how they lived, she was certain their chances of survival were better together than apart.

  SEVEN

  The landlord arrived unannounced. Weeks after Talia’s birth someone anonymously reported seven people living in the apartment above the pizzeria when only two were on the lease. Mister and Madame tried to keep the landlord in the living room, but he made his way to the second bedroom and found Elena and the three children asleep on the pullout couch by the window overlooking the alley. Mauro was in the shower. There was only one bathroom for them all, and Mister and Madame asked the family to bathe within certain hours of the morning or night so as not to disrupt their routines. When Mauro emerged, dressed with hair damp, he found Karina and Nando crying. The baby, however, was silent, eyes following as her father and Mister and Madame tried to reason with the landlord, as if she knew before anyone how all this would turn out.

  The landlord called it unlawful occupancy, because of the number of tenants and because three out of the family of five did not have permission to be in the country. He said he could not risk being fined by the city, that harboring “illegals” was some kind of crime, he suspected, though Mister and Madame insisted that wasn’t true. He warned the couple that if they tried to hide the family in their home, he would change the lock on the door and have them evicted.

  “You are good people,” he told them. “Don’t let yourselves be taken advantage of.”

  Elena didn’t understand most of the conversation as it was being said. Mauro explained it later. How the landlord agreed to give them one week to find somewhere else to live before penalizing Mister and Madame. This was a special consideration, the landlord emphasized, because they had a newborn.

  On his day off Mauro went to search for a place for the family to stay. He’d already asked his coworkers at the motel if they knew of anyone renting out an efficiency or a room or a trailer and came up with nothing. Next, he’d try the crew at the paper warehouse he used to sweep and then the factory where he once packed boxes of scented candles. They couldn’t go back to spending nights in the car. Not in this cold. They’d coped before, in spring and summer months when they made their way up the coast from South Carolina looking for a place to settle, washing in gas station bathrooms. Elena spent hours in parks or shopping malls with the children while Mauro hunted for work.

  Before leaving that morning, he kissed Elena and each of the children. The new baby was on her chest, Karina and Nando curled at her sides, still sleeping. Since Talia’s birth, Mauro had kept his word. Not one finger of alcohol. Radiant with sobriety, he’d hold the baby, singing songs from their childhoods already fading from memory.

  “I’ve had a premonition,” he whispered, wreathed in muted light. “Better things are coming for our family. I feel it as certain as the sunrise.”

  In the bedroom long after he’d gone, Elena remembered the days whe
n their love was new, taking hold like wildfire though safely contained by the mountains skirting their natal city; before they became infected by that dream more like a sickness, that their life in Colombia was no longer good enough for them. That somehow, they deserved more.

  If there was a time to return home, Elena thought, it was now, but in the past two weeks alone, a car bomb ignited at an elite social club frequented by government officials just blocks from the house in Chapinero, killing thirty-six, the deadliest attack the country had seen in years, and another bomb in Neiva targeting the president took sixteen lives. No country was safer than any other.

  A woman was found dead in the dumpster in the lot behind the motel where Mauro and Mister worked. It happened the previous night as they slept. Elena watched the Spanish TV news after everyone left the apartment for the day. As with the bathroom, the family could only use the kitchen when Mister and Madame were not, which wasn’t easy, since Madame spent her evenings cooking. Elena sat Karina and Nando at the kitchen table to eat canned noodles and held the baby close. The reporter said the victim was a motel guest, though the room wasn’t registered in her name. She might have been a prostitute. It was known that many passed through. Businesspeople stayed at the nicer chain hotels up the highway. This motel was nobody’s first choice. Mauro mopped the lobby and halls and bedroom messes too filthy for the motel maids to handle on their own. One of his coworkers must have found the woman’s body. Elena thought about the dead woman all day as she waited for Mauro to return. She wondered about her family, those who loved her, if they lived in the United States or elsewhere. How sad, Elena thought, that her life’s end had been discovered frozen among trash.