Infinite Country

by Patricia Engel

  Some of the Puerto Rican guards spoke Spanish to the detainees, reporting news of the world like the August blackout that knocked out power across the northeast, paralyzing traffic and airports, though the detention center had a generator, so they only experienced a slash of darkness and a few flickers, a brief respite from the ceaseless fluorescence inside those walls.

  Elena spent the day of the blackout on a folding chair out on the sidewalk with the other neighborhood mothers, while the kids twirled in the spray of an open hydrant. The men had already pulled meats from the freezer, and were grilling over coals out back. By nightfall, the power was restored, but the residents of the house acted as if it were a holiday, with music and dancing in the grassless yard. Elena sat with her children and watched, quietly celebrating that the Moldovan man and his family had recently moved out.

  During the years Elena and Mauro contemplated staying in the country and the threat of being caught and sent back, they thought only of their lives lived here or lived there, not a fractured in-between. It never occurred to them their family could be split as if by an ax.

  Elena knew Mauro wanted a life for his family in the United States, but they never discussed the possibility of that life continuing without him. He told her once through the buzzing detention center phone line, “You should stay. No matter what happens to me or what I say later. Stay.” She pretended not to hear him. Instead, she told Mauro how fast the kids were growing. Karina was speaking in long, complicated sentences, making up stories for Nando as they sat by the window watching the street, telling her hermanito the pedestrians were magic people who at night ascended to the sky, danced across the stars, and trampolined off the moon. Nando listened, mesmerized, and Elena was grateful Karina somehow knew, at not even four years old, to entertain her brother so her mother could look after the baby.

  Elena waited to hear Mauro’s response but, as happened several times before without warning, the line went dead.

  * * *

  One night Elena dreamed they were back on the roof of Perla’s house. She stood with Mauro and the three children under the aluminum sky, gossamer clouds pushed to the mountain crests, the church of Monserrate like a merengue atop its peak. In her dream, they’d never left their land. North America remained an unknown distant place. Mauro toed the roof’s edge the way he did when they were younger, then took baby Talia in his arms. Elena told him to give her back, but he wouldn’t, and instead held the child to the sky as Elena cried that he was going to let her fall. The next morning, she called the detention center and begged to speak with Mauro, but the woman on the other end told her he was already on a plane home.

  * * *

  Elena was not selfish enough to think her pain unique. The Sandy Hill house had several women tenants on their own—husbands and novios in other countries or held by the system. The neighborhood was full of mixed-status families. Sometimes they heard about Immigration raids in the area—sidewalk roundups or weekend sweeps at playgrounds and backyard parties—and people would try to avoid leaving their homes for weeks. With the apparent logic that removing fathers is the most efficient method for undoing a family, the officers targeted men more often than women.

  Elena sat around the kitchen table with two other Colombianas, Carla and Norma, as the children played on the living room floor, with baby Talia lying on a play mat beside them. For weeks after Mauro left, Elena managed to work a handful of days helping other women who cleaned or at a bakery on Market Street. It wasn’t hard to find someone to watch Karina or Nando, but even Toya, the Dominicana who ran a small day care out of her apartment, required that children left with her be out of diapers. Carla and Norma, with three children each, said there was only one way to manage. Send the baby to be cared for by her grandmother.

  “She’s American,” Carla said. “You can bring her back later when you’re more established. If you keep her with you now, you’ll never get on your feet.”

  Going home was never an option for these women. When Elena brought up the possibility of packing up, taking the children to Colombia to be with their father and grandmother, Norma warned, “This is a chance you won’t get again. Every woman who has ever gone back for the sake of keeping her family together regrets it. You are already here. So are your children. It’s better to invest in this new life, because if you return to the old one, in the future your children may never forgive you.”

  What was it about this country that kept everyone hostage to its fantasy? The previous month, on its own soil, an American man went to his job at a plant and gunned down fourteen coworkers, and last spring alone there were four different school shootings. A nation at war with itself, yet people still spoke of it as some kind of paradise.

  On certain autumnal days in the north, Elena could close her eyes and see the crystal sky over Bogotá, a blue that only existed at that altitude, the afternoon mountain cloud cascade when twilight swept the city in gold. She still struggled with the inertia of the North American lowlands, the feeling that she was always sinking.

  She would have been happy living all her life in her country. There was an alegría inherent to Colombians, optimism even through tears, but never the kind of self-interrogation of “happiness” she observed in the north, the way people constantly asked themselves if they were content as if it were their main occupation in life. And what was happiness? Not selfish fulfillment, of this she was certain. That seemed like a recipe for the opposite. Joy was in the loving and caring of others. Carla and Norma understood this too. For them, happiness was a bet on the jackpot of a better future, a dream life that would justify every sacrifice. For them, there was no going back to the life before.

  It had been Mauro’s idea to leave. Elena only followed.

  How odd that in the end it was he who returned home and she who stayed.

  * * *

  Mauro called Elena from Perla’s house. He’d been living there since his repatriation, though Perla said he drank through most days and only left the room he once shared with Elena and Karina to go buy more liquor. Elena expected him to tell her to come home. Beg for it. She waited for his pleas, but they never came. Instead, he wept, “I failed you, I failed our family.”

  It was easy to keep silent through the erratic phone connection. Echoed voices and delays that regularly splintered the conversation. She couldn’t tell if he wanted her to assure him, to forgive him, or to announce that she’d already booked a return to Bogotá for the whole family. Something in her hardened. She wasn’t sure she wanted to go back anymore. She pictured Mauro in the house the way her mother described him, a ghost of a man, and wondered if she could do better for her children in the north until they figured out what came next, if there was a way to reunite.

  * * *

  She would look back on those months for years, trying to understand how she came to the decision. Was it a slow negotiation, or did it occur in a blaze of clarity or capriciousness? Was it the pressure of the women of the Sandy Hill house, who, in the isolation of motherhood, became something like sisters, or at least how she imagined sisters would be if she’d ever had one. She would recall how the homesickness that tortured her through her first years in the United States dulled and toughened her to the idea of going home. What followed was an accumulation of days that bridged one life in one country to a second life in another one. What Elena did not realize was the bridge had dissolved behind her.

  She wonders even now, if somewhere in Talia’s memory there is the hidden picture of the day her mother let her go.

  Newark airport on a drizzly morning. The baby would travel with Gema, who Elena knew from the panadería on Market, and who, for two hundred dollars and with a letter of parental authorization, agreed to carry the baby on her lap for the flight to Bogotá and deliver her upon landing to Perla before going to stay with her own parents.

  Elena packed a bag with clothes, diapers, and food. She’d stopped breastfeeding in preparation for the day. Since Mauro was sent away she’d worried the stre
ss would make her lose her milk, but she never did. She found a bench near the window and sat with the baby alone, whispering in her ear that she was her love and her heart and they would say goodbye for now but the heavens would bring them back together soon. She used the same voice she used every day, one that soothed and anchored the baby’s gaze to her own. But today it was as if the baby understood every word, because Elena had forced herself to be truthful, and the child cried as she never cried before, screams that turned the heads of passersby, and Elena cried with her.

  She doubted her decision every day since, telling herself she never should have sent her baby away, even if Perla and Mauro both agreed it was the wisest thing. The price of being able to work to provide for the rest of the family was their estrangement. She wasn’t foolish enough to believe that memories formed in infancy of being in her mother’s arms could be enough to comfort her daughter through the years. She knew Talia must have felt the loss as Elena had or even more.

  Some mornings Elena woke and pretended it was morning in Bogotá and their entire family would meet in the kitchen of the Chapinero house for breakfast before they went about their day. Other times, she woke and expected to see Talia sitting in front of the television with her brother and sister. When people assumed she had only two children because those were the only ones they saw, she always clarified that she had three. Her youngest, she said, was coming soon. And then she would have all her babies together again even if they were no longer babies but almost grown, and Elena wondered if it was wrong to pray as she did each night that her own children would never do as she did to Perla, leaving their mother behind.

  THIRTEEN

  When he lived out in the sabana, Tiberio told Mauro that in Chocó, Traditional Knowledge maintained that the first race of humans was extinguished by the gods because of their cannibalism. A second generation of humans transformed into the animals that now inhabit the earth. The third race of humans was created anew by the gods, formed from clay. We are only soil and water baked in the sun to dry, Tiberio had said. Is it any wonder we are so fragile and destined to break?

  In his meetings, Mauro referred to them as his lost years. They began when the officers escorted him onto a flight in the early-morning darkness. He watched New York’s rivers and light grid dying below. He thought of the candles with white dancing flames his mother would place in the apartment windows during the fiestas navideñas, the only time of year she did not seem to despise him.

  When he found himself back among his mountains and stepped out of El Dorado airport, a free man for the first time in months, he saw the sky jawed with clouds and decided the first person he should look for was his old friend Jairo, the closest thing he’d ever had to a brother, at his usual posts on the streets near the Hotel Tequendama. When he didn’t find him, he went back to Ciudad Bolívar, but Jairo’s family had moved and the new tenants didn’t know to where. Mauro then went to one of their old cliff hangouts, where a group of young men spotted him climbing the cerro and surrounded him, guns pointed.

  Mauro held his up his hands and told them he was there for Jairo the mugger. The group stepped back, lowering their weapons.

  “Jairo has been dead for a long time,” one guy said.

  “Who got him?”

  “Police. Who else?”

  By the time Mauro arrived at Perla’s house, he was already drunk on stolen aguardiente and it wasn’t long before he vanished to the streets with his shame.

  During his years with Elena, Mauro went from a boy who slept among crates in a cold warehouse to a man who slept with his prometida in a soft bed under a roof, a baby between them, to a father who took his family across the sea to uncertainty. He never imagined he’d once again sleep in parks and plazas until poked awake by police, taking cover from rain under flattened cardboard and chased out of alleys.

  Every few weeks he would return to Perla’s door. She fed him. Gave him a place to rest and wait out the rain, or money so he could go to one of those places in El Centro where they rented bunks by the night. Perla let him see the baby and hold her if he washed his hands many times and cleaned under his nails. Sometimes Perla convinced Mauro to lower to his knees so they could pray together before the Christ in the foyer and ask for mercy. He begged Perla not to let Elena know the state he was in, that he had destroyed their life together and was destroying it still.

  Was it the disease or guilt that kept him on the streets, sometimes sleeping on the pavement across from Perla’s house so he could watch the closed door knowing the baby was safe inside and that he hadn’t returned to his country alone? He’d become unrecognizable to himself when he caught his reflection in shop windows, invisible to those he passed on the sidewalk with their averted eyes, shifting to avoid grazing his dirty clothes. He thinned from days spent walking, wandering, searching for places to sit, to rest, hunting in trash cans for food, engaging the charity of street vendors who sometimes offered a free meal. He remembered how Elena hated the northern winters. How they shivered and warmed each other, their children in their arms. How much colder he felt with nothing but fabric and skin to comfort him, wind knifing his joints and webbing his face.

  As the baby grew, Mauro stayed close. Those were years when he and Elena rarely spoke. When she must have wondered if he’d died or at least found another woman. But he was close enough to watch the baby leave the house nested in the stroller every morning before Perla opened the lavandería and in the evenings after she closed. So delicate in how she rolled the child along, sidestepping bumps in the concrete that she never noticed Mauro huddled on the ground, draped in a blanket, shadowed in soot.

  One day the child emerged walking, guided by her grandmother’s hand in a pink coat, black curls peeking from her hood, wearing white booties smaller than his fists. He wanted to call after Perla, tell her the vagabundo they’d shuffled past had been him, but it’d been so long since he’d spoken, heard his own voice. He forgot his words.

  He knew Talia didn’t deserve a father like him. Pathetic. Contorted like some hooved creature. He thought of going to the Salto del Tequendama and launching himself over the waterfall like the Muiscas who, with all hope lost of being saved by Bochica, chose suicide over colonial enslavement. But the sight of this daughter growing each day beside her grandmother kept him alive.

  Until one day when a woman found Mauro on the street and invited him to a shelter where she said they helped people like him. He insisted he was a man with a family, not some lonesome crow moving through the world like a wraith. Or was he?

  “You’ve lost your way,” she said, as if it were so simple. “We can help you find it.” Her name was Ximena. She was a few years out of university and killed by a drunk driver soon after they met.

  Mauro decided if nothing else could make him quit alcohol, it would be Ximena’s sudden death. But before she was taken from her living body, before Mauro arrived at his day of true surrender, he sat with her in an otherwise empty conference room at her organization’s headquarters in the south of the city that reminded him of the stark detention center back in New Jersey where he’d met with court-appointed lawyers who proved useless.

  “What do you feel when you drink?” she asked him.

  “I feel her. I feel she’s with me. I feel her love.”

  “Elena?”

  By this time, Ximena knew all the names that mattered to him, how he and Elena left their land naive enough to think they’d never be separated, and that he watched his baby with the dedication of a kidnapper.

  “No. Karina.”

  “Your eldest daughter.”

  “My mother.”

  In the shelter, he felt a corpse among corpses. Lizard-skinned. Dead as wood. They gave him a bed, a place to shower. Fresh clothes and new shoes. Potions to make him shit out his worms. He remembers the first weeks without the salve of alcohol, his bones rigid as irons. When he felt ready, he went to the market at Paloquemao to ask for his old job, but Eliseo was gone and there was nothing else availabl
e. The warehouse manager gave him a broom. Told him to start sweeping until something else opened up. Again he slept on wooden pallets, showering with the hose they used to rinse floors the way he did when he and Elena met. It was better than in the shelter, where he was surrounded by men who talked to themselves and who sometimes attacked one another in the darkness.

  He began to visit Perla some evenings when he knew Talia was sleeping. Perla told him news of Elena, like that she’d found a good apartment for herself and the children, a job at an Italian restaurant. Mauro was jealous. He imagined men falling in love with her. How could they not when she was so beautiful, tender, and kind? In Texas, she’d mentioned the possibility of marrying another man so she could get her papers. The idea still made him feel ill. In his absence, he knew it was an even more attractive solution. Mauro feared Elena would replace him and that Karina and Nando could soon call another man their father.

  FOURTEEN

  Elena found a job mopping and cleaning bathrooms in a restaurant a few towns over. The owner was young, spoke Spanish learned while surfing in Nicaragua, and was pleasant except that he didn’t pay Elena for her first month on the job, saying it was customary to work for free during the “trial period.” She asked the guys in the kitchen if this was true, but they wouldn’t say. One month without income indebted her to many others. With a loan from Carla she was able to pay for the basement in the Sandy Hill house and Lety, who cooked meals for residents who contributed to the grocery bills, let Elena and the kids eat on credit.

  That night: white-breath cold, shop windows scalloped in frost, the town tinseled for the holidays. The restaurant closed to the public for a private party. At the end of the shift, after Elena did her final wiping-downs and pushed her buckets into the supply closet, she gathered her things from her locker and heard the boss call her from his office. She held her coat and handbag against her stomach and followed his voice. Before she could ask if something was wrong he shut the door behind her, closed the space between them, swishing his tongue in her mouth. She tasted alcohol, moved back, but he swept the coat and bag from her hands and pushed her against the wall. He spoke in English she didn’t understand, lifting her shirt, tugging her bra so the strap carved into her shoulder and her breasts fell out. He pinched and bit as she pushed him away, sailed her shirt over her head blinding her, angled her to the desk, pants at her knees, and tore into her from behind. Elena. Small, birdlike, as Mauro used to say, who brought three children into the world, shocked into pain far beyond the flesh.