Infinite Country

by Patricia Engel

  Then Talia came down with an unrelenting fever. Perla, too, began vomiting for days. On a night of rain, Perla ran around the house to make sure all the windows were closed and saw the immense crucifix she’d inherited from an aunt hanging on the foyer wall tremble and crash to the floor. The head of Christ broken off its neck, rolling to meet Perla at her feet.

  Mauro laughed, saying that it sounded like a scene from a gringo horror film. The kind he and Elena sometimes watched in the United States, when they had a TV. Elena would cover her eyes with Mauro’s shirtsleeve while he pointed out the ridiculousness of the movie. “Now I see where your daughter gets her sense of terror.” But he knew with her story Perla meant that if he were to stay in the house with Talia after she was gone, he would have to understand the ways she’d cared for it and for her granddaughter. In this case, it involved a sort of exorcism, though Perla insisted they weren’t supposed to call it that but a despojo of the highest order because the person who did the cleansing was not clergy but the famous former bruja from Antioquia who’d once advised politicians, casting hechizos that won elections and beauty pageants until she herself was exorcised and began working for God and the righteous instead.

  The details, Perla said, were to remain private among those who were there. She could only tell Mauro that as Talia slept on the top floor, she watched as the ex-bruja moved about the living room, making the floor shake under a violent gust that unfurled through the house, coiling like a tornado, its pressure against their faces, until she instructed Perla to open a window and a vane of airstream pushed past them to the night sky.

  The next morning, Talia was no longer hot with fever. She was calm and nuzzled into her grandmother in a way she never had before. But Perla remained vigilant. The dark spirits relinquished her house, but she wondered why they’d come to lay claim in the first place; if it was the ill will of someone she knew, as presented in the basket of razors, or simply bad luck, the sins of an ancestor for which they needed to repent.

  Perla ran out of breath. It was more talking than she did most nights. Mauro helped her take up her oxygen again, and they sat in silence a while longer before she left for her bedroom. He never told Perla there were times when he wondered if he was the source of her family’s misfortune. He was the one, after all, who’d taken her daughter from her home to that new, strange country and left her there. Maybe he’d brought the darkness with him when he was returned to Bogotá. Or maybe, he wondered, baby Talia brought it with her when she was sent to Colombia too.

  * * *

  A woman from the school in Santander called. “There’s been an incident,” she began, and Mauro imagined the worst things. He knew there were girls far more feral than Talia in that place. “Several of our pupils overpowered one of the guardians and managed to leave the property. Police are searching the area, but so far we have been able to recover only four of the missing twelve. Your daughter is not one of them.”

  She asked if Mauro had any idea of her whereabouts. He assured her he did not. But before hanging up, the woman said if he were to hear from Talia, he was required by law to inform the police and turn her over so she could complete her sentence, which would likely be extended due to her escape, along with possible additional charges since the recovered girls claimed the initial plan had been Talia’s and she was the one who restrained the night guardian in order to flee. He couldn’t help feeling proud of Talia’s leadership and ingenuity but said yes, of course. If Talia appeared he’d call the authorities right away.

  The woman on the phone must have known he was lying—what kind of parent would turn in a child?—because the next thing she said was, “If you don’t, I must advise you that you, too, can be prosecuted in a court of law.”

  That night, the story of the breakout hit the news, a segment of less than a minute since there were more pressing concerns in the capital, like the hooded men who held up traffic for hours in protest of the guerrilla disarmament for the peace accord. The reporter spoke over aerial images of Talia’s school and the land around it. Mauro pictured her running, running, as she’d never been able to do on Bogotá’s congested streets. He said a prayer for her safety and watched the telephone all night waiting for her call.

  The one who called instead was Elena. In the month or so since Talia had been sent away, she’d phoned many times, and he met her with different lies to keep his promise to Talia of protecting her mother’s ignorance of her crime. Elena told him she’d called Talia’s phone directly but it was turned off. Mauro couldn’t say her cell was right there in a kitchen drawer, since she was forbidden from taking it to the prison school.

  “You know reception is not very good around here,” Mauro said, and started charging the phone so at least Elena would hear it ring and ring when she called, and leave messages. But then she would try Mauro again, asking why Talia was avoiding her calls, and he’d lie that she was out with friends, trying to spend as much time with them as possible before she left for the United States.

  “Don’t worry. I’ll remind her she needs to call you back.”

  He couldn’t help enjoying that Elena’s frustration in not being able to reach Talia led them to speak more in the past few weeks than they had in years. He heard her voice and wanted to pretend she was only blocks away, calling to make plans to meet at one of the park benches they used to sit on as teenagers, so enthralled in each other’s faces and touch that they didn’t notice the first vapors of rain.

  “How are you, Elena?” he asked one day after covering for Talia. “How are Karina and Nando?”

  “Karina is doing excellent in school. Nando has a harder time but he’s a good boy. They both help me with Lance.”

  “Who is Lance?”

  “The boy I take care of.”

  How could the kid’s name slip his mind? He heard Elena sigh and knew he’d disappointed her again. When they spoke, he felt she suffered through their dialogue. He almost wanted to hear her weep just to know she still felt something more. The last time he heard her voice wet with tears was when he was sent back to Colombia. When, after weeks of evasion, he called her and it was decided, though he no longer remembered exactly how, that Elena and the children would remain on the other side of the sea.

  He’d like to be able to say he’d found absolution in the years he spent in the house helping care for Perla and Talia; when he managed to quit drinking and swore he’d throw himself off the roof if he ever let down his family again. Elena couldn’t return to see her mother as her breath and memory left her. He knew that when Perla looked at Talia in her final days, she saw her own daughter. Talia knew it too. She was a compassionate girl who let her face become a window to the life Perla and Elena knew before anyone else came along. Each day that Mauro worked in the lavandería after Perla no longer could, he thought of Elena, hoping she’d see how far he’d come in his atonement and think him worthy of being hers again.

  He wished he could tell Talia the things she never knew, things she was too young to remember, in case, once she left him, she never returned.

  Before departing for Texas, Mauro took Elena and Karina, who was just a baby, on a day trip. Elena had seldom been beyond the city periphery. Mauro told her he wanted to show her a piece of their history before they left for who knew how long. For years, he’d wanted to see the sacred lake that Tiberio had told him about during his years digging graves, the place the Muisca believed the birthplace of human life. They had no car, so they took a bus. Karina cried and cried. He took the baby from Elena so she could look out the window, watch buildings turn to lush grassland pitted with cows. Karina went quiet, her small form against her father’s chest. Her hair was growing in black and wavy. Her cheeks pinked, bundled so warmly she splayed like a star. Mauro had been the one to name her Karina. Neither Elena nor his first daughter knew it was a tribute to the mother who did not want him.

  The bus left them at the base of Guatavita, where tourists and backpackers gathered. From there they made the hard climb up
the hill path, Karina in his arms, to the mossy ridge where the shimmering lagoon came into view. He still remembered a calm unlike any he’d known before, not even in the sabana. Silence interrupted only by the conversation of birds. It was cold. Mist fell over them. He told Elena it was no wonder the Muisca venerated not only the water but the elusive sun, believing it to be much cleverer than the moon, more deserving of praise than even the Creator, Chiminigagua.

  Elena had only heard the stories of the gold offerings the ancestors made to a lake long before Bolívar crossed the Andes. How, for centuries, greedy, thieving nations sent explorers and divers to Guatavita and to the Siecha Lakes to scavenge for gold, even attempting to drain them. She’d seen the treasures of El Dorado on a school excursion to the gold museum in the capital. Knowledge seized, converted to what they call legend, and made so famous it was like it didn’t even belong to Colombia anymore. It made her sad they weren’t able to keep their most beautiful things secret in order to protect them from the rest of the world.

  The real reason Mauro brought his family to the supposed holy place: Tiberio had said the Muisca believed gold to be the sun’s warmth and power incarnate; if a person harnessed it, one could make their own magic.

  He told Elena they should turn their backs to the lake, holding in their hands an imaginary ball of sunlight, conjure their deepest desire, face the lake again, and blow their golden wishes to the water below.

  His wish, to make a life for their family in the north with no need ever to return to what he believed was a forsaken land.

  He suspects Elena wished for the opposite.

  ELEVEN

  Elena thought of destinies she and Mauro might have fulfilled if not for all the wrong turns. If he hadn’t argued with Dante, had let him keep those extra dollars, considering it part of their rent for the basement that was a haven for their family.

  Fifty dollars. A fortune to them then, but for Mauro, it was also a question of principle and pride. But was it really? Not when Elena considered what it cost them. Maybe Dante hadn’t taken it. Maybe it was Mauro who had miscounted or misplaced it.

  One of the alternate lives she imagined was if they’d never left Colombia. If their pull toward new frontiers had taken them only as far as another city. And seeing it was not as they hoped they could have returned to her mother’s house, which Elena grew up believing was meant for her and the family she would one day have.

  Would they have stayed together if Mauro had not been forced to leave?

  Would he have stopped drinking for good and kept the family afloat?

  All five of them. And maybe Talia wouldn’t be the last child but an older sister to one more.

  They could have lived in the house with Yamira and Dante a while longer until, with both their incomes, they would have saved enough for their own place. A small house with a yard for the children to play in. They were starting to build a community, and in that house of strangers found something like extended family. But from the day Mauro fought with Dante, even though the police would make him pay for the crime, Elena and the children were no longer welcome. If ICE showed up at the house to take Elena as a collateral arrest, Dante said it could endanger the other undocumented residents, who could then be taken too. It would be safer for everyone if she moved away. Yamira came down to the basement to tell Elena she’d tried everything to convince her husband otherwise, but he was so hardheaded, there was no point insisting. Especially because what Dante said was true. But she knew of shared houses that turned over tenants regularly up the parkway in Passaic County. She’d make a few calls and see if she could find a room for Elena and the children.

  A few hours later Yamira reported that her sister knew of an available room in Sandy Hill. For now, they’d have to share it with another family until a space of their own opened up. It wouldn’t be so bad, Yamira said. She and Dante had lived in a house like that when they first arrived in New Jersey from Arizona. There would be plenty of food and people to help look after the children until Mauro was released from detention and they were able to find something better.

  * * *

  Talia was still the quiet one who watched her mother as if she understood everything. At night, after her brother and sister fell asleep, Elena whispered her fears as she fed her. She’d stopped writing letters, but she and Perla spoke twice a month. She didn’t say she was on her own, that she and the children shared a room with a Moldovan man, his Peruvian wife, and their infant daughter, deaf from birth. The two families slept on mattresses along opposite sides of the narrow cellar, the only clear space away from the boilers and loose wires, separated by a curtain of sheets. They could hear everything from the other side, but at least the material suggested privacy, even if a breeze of movement revealed the man slept naked, the child between her mother and the wall.

  A summer night, after they’d all gone to bed, the Moldovan man pulled the sheet from where he lay on his family’s mattress and stared at Elena, his wife and daughter rolled to their wall. Elena’s children were asleep. She hardly slept though, and noticed the man didn’t either, stirring and groaning through the night, often rising to pace the room. He watched her. Elena wondered why until he slid his free hand under his blanket and she detected the motions of masturbation. She hid herself with her blanket, turning to her own wall, sheltering her children with her body. Even as he moaned beside his wife and daughter, Elena did not scream at him for his obscenity, reasoning, however foolishly, that she didn’t want to be responsible for causing hurt to another family.

  Each night that followed, she made sure to cover up and face the wall, though she still sometimes heard his stifled gasps, and once, when his wife woke up and asked what was happening, Elena heard him tell her, “You’re dreaming. Go back to sleep.”

  * * *

  Elena’s nightmares returned. They started when she was six years old but left her consciousness when she met Mauro. Since the eruption of the Nevado del Ruiz volcano, Elena had visions of her street and home flooded in mud and ash just as happened to Armero and the surrounding villages even though scientists said nothing like that could happen on the fault line of Bogotá. The tragedy happened only one week after the M-19 attacked the Palace of Justice, leaving more than a hundred dead or missing. Elena remembered the news images of the mudflow killing thousands upon thousands, turning the landscape into a sea of cadavers and torn limbs.

  The socorristas saw a hand reaching from the debris, and discovered a girl plunged to her neck in earthen sludge. Divers went under and saw her legs locked beneath the roof of her house, held in place by the grip of her dead aunt. Survivors kept vigil as rescuers tried to figure out how to save her from the hardening mud without amputating her lower half. The girl, named Omayra Sánchez, spoke to journalists who filmed the brown water trickling into her mouth, her eyes blackening with each passing day, asking people to pray for her, telling her mother and brother through the TV cameras that she loved them. She was hopeful even as the country watched her dying on their screens.

  In Elena’s dreams, she, too, tried to pull Omayra to safety, but the girl felt heavy and only sank deeper into the mud, telling Elena to let her go. Other times, Elena became Omayra, feeling the weight of her aunt’s clutches, her body tearing, her lower half sinking into what used to be her family home while rescuers pulled her arms and torso free, though she knew she wouldn’t survive without the part of herself she left below.

  People blamed the government for letting the girl die just like they’d let the people of Armero be suffocated by the lahars without warning they were in danger with enough time to flee. They said the military took too long to arrive with proper medical supplies, and they made the decision to let Omayra sink into the mud rather than bring equipment to amputate her legs. Others argued it was an impossible task. She would never have survived either way. Many said Omayra was an angel or a prophet sent to remind us of the ways we commit treason against our country and one another. That there had been signs if only people had b
een willing to see them. The night before the eruption, the haloed moon smoldered red as an open sore, a divine alarm some would call it, Creation’s indicator of an impending temblor. But others made excuses, said the moon fire was just pollution, urban fumes painting the sky.

  In her dreams now, Elena was no longer the girl trying to save another girl, or the dying girl herself, but a bird or a cloud watching from above. The drowning towns, citizens reduced to parts floating on the carbon tide. Parents and children crying out for one another, so many of whom never found each other again, and some of the recovered children adopted to foreign families in other countries and given new languages and new names. The impossible and unforgiving Andean volcanic chain. Elena could see it all from this distance.

  TWELVE

  Mauro was permitted visitors but only if they were “lawfully present” in the country. Elena couldn’t even bring him a bag with clothes to take back with him on deportation day. If she did, the immigration officers might see she was undocumented and lock her up, too, leaving their children orphaned to the United States.

  On their few calls during his months of detention, Mauro’s voice changed. He became broken-breathed, throat gruff as if he’d spent the night screaming. But when Elena asked how they were treating him, he assured her it wasn’t so bad in there; he met men who were doctors and lawyers and engineers in their countries, others who came to North America and built highways and roads and schools. Several were in detention for over a year already, hoping to be granted a “voluntary departure” instead of being branded with deportation. If so, they could apply to come back without having to wait five or ten years like Mauro would due to his arrests.