Infinite Country

by Patricia Engel

  “No, señora. Never.”

  A few weeks later, the woman accused Elena of stealing and fired her. The missing object in question was a necklace her husband had given her for an anniversary. Elena said she hadn’t seen it, but the woman insisted on searching her pockets and bag, fingering the lining as a customs officer might do. She found nothing because Elena had taken nothing. But the woman kept her last paycheck as compensation anyway.

  * * *

  Elena worried something might happen to her before she made it home from work each day. A police interception or an accident. Something that would separate her from her kids. If she could cut her commute and avoid buses, she would be safer. She rented an apartment above a liquor store in the town where she cleaned houses, across the hall from an Irish couple with a daughter Karina’s age. She enrolled the children in school and paid the Irish woman to pick them up each afternoon and look after them until she came home.

  The church down the street had a food pantry and donated a sofa bed and coats for the winter. The children weren’t even baptized, but the priest didn’t mind and told Elena to come back if she ever needed him. One day she went to his office in the Rectory and told him her children’s father had been taken long ago and she and Karina were still vulnerable. If they came for them, she feared what would happen to Nando. She’d heard of parents deported and their citizen kids left behind, sent to foster care, trafficked, or left homeless.

  The priest told Elena that whenever she felt a threat, she could come to the church for sanctuary. The deporters couldn’t touch them there, and they would be safe. He gave her his private number and told her the children should memorize it. But, he warned, sanctuary was not secret. By law the church would have to inform officials they were there. It wasn’t a decision to take lightly, he said, because once you enter, you can’t leave until your miracle comes. It’s another kind of limbo. One without daylight or fresh air.

  Karina and Nando already knew to fear police. To them, regular cops and ICE were one and the same. They understood they were not as free as other people walking on the street and could be flagged for their complexions. Elena had received advice early on from the residents of the Sandy Hill house and made it the family protocol: See a police officer on the street, find a way to dip into a store or turn onto another corner and out of sight. Police are not your friend. Even the cordial ones. Yes, they are there to help people in danger just like you’re taught in school, she’d tried to explain to her children, but in this country some people think the ones they need protection from are us.

  SEVENTEEN

  At the prison on the mountain, the staff brought in a woman who took a few girls into a room where they sat cross-legged on floor cushions. The lady was rich enough that she wore diamonds and told the girls she’d traveled to India and the Far East, studying different techniques for altering one’s consciousness. A girl asked what that was supposed to mean, but the lady said never mind, she’d show them if they were willing to close their eyes and listen. She spoke in a soft voice, told the girls to picture themselves far from the prison walls, letting their imaginations take them somewhere they felt completely free. She suggested the beach, described the white foam and lapping waves, soft sand under their feet, until a girl called out that most of them had never been anywhere near an ocean.

  Then the lady told the girls to pretend they were birds flying over their mountains and valleys on a day with no clouds so they could see every grassy pleat, indigo lake, and river twine. The towns below were pastel and bone-colored formations squaring churches and plazas. Cattle-freckled pastures, the plastic-sheeted nurseries where orchids and roses are grown for export; cars and buses taking people from their jobs to their families.

  “A busy world, a peaceful world,” the woman said. “You are a part of that world.”

  She instructed the girls to imagine themselves light, almost weightless, carried by their long feathers, hollow avian bones.

  “Now return to your lives in the present.”

  She had them note the hard ground beneath their cushions, discomfort and tension in their hips and knees. The stiffness of their spines from cold seeping into the old unheated prison-school building so they existed in a permanent low-grade shiver.

  “Remember where you are right now,” she said, as if they could forget. “Take in your heaviness, your loneliness, how far you are from everyone who cares about you. Think about what brought you to serve your time. It is your crime and the decisions that led to it that will keep you shackled to toxic soil and prevent you from soaring as you are meant to do.”

  Some of the girls sighed, bored by another obvious tactic to get them to feel regret. Talia wondered why the staff cared so much about contrition when they were already being punished. She asked to use the bathroom. The meditation lady gave her a disappointed stare but nodded.

  “I have to go too,” said Lorena, who was there for setting her bedroom on fire after her mother wouldn’t let her go to a party.

  Soon everyone was saying they had to piss. A group effort to reclaim what little power they had on that mountain, or just to make their day more interesting. Later, Sister Susana called Talia to her office. She’d heard Talia initiated the bathroom revolt during the meditation workshop.

  “You want me to be sorry for having to do what is only natural?”

  “I’ve been reviewing your file. It’s time for you to write a letter of apology to the man you hurt. I think it will be healing for both of you.”

  “I don’t need to be healed, and I don’t need to be forgiven.”

  “Write it anyway.”

  “He’s the one who killed a defenseless animal for fun. I did what was fair.”

  “It’s not up to you to decide who deserves retribution.”

  “Then why is it up to a judge and now you how to discipline me?”

  Talia remembered that meeting when she trapped Sister Susana with the pillowcase the night the girls fled. The old nun who thought she knew it all.

  She never wrote the letter, but Horacio’s face started coming to Talia’s mind more often. She’d look out the dormitory window, worrying how she was going to get out of there and make it back to Bogotá in time for her flight, and suddenly his face would obscure her vision; skin raw, eyes swollen shut, and she’d try to will him out of her head, wondering if the others were right: she was as much of a beast as he was.

  * * *

  The road signs for Barbosa became more frequent. Aguja pulled into a gas station and as he fueled up, they listened to a pair of viejos at another pump arguing about the peace accord recently ratified by Congress. One man in a sombrero vueltiao, face shriveled as old fruit, said the guerrillas would never abandon the monte or their criminal activity, that they were made only for battle. The other man, wishbone-legged, insisted that if only to end the massacres of the last decades, a meager treaty was better than none at all. “Talking about the past, the violence, is like digging up the dead,” he said. “The pursuit of peace is the only way to give those who died a proper funeral.”

  Aguja returned the gas nozzle to its cradle. “You hear that, niña? You’re leaving our country when things are starting to get good.”

  “Just because I’m leaving doesn’t mean I won’t come back.”

  “Sure you’ll come back, but you’ll be different.”

  In the gas station bathroom, she found a urine-coated floor, shit-lined toilet rim. A stench like death. At the facility, Talia was often made to clean lavatories. It was supposedly old-fashioned to assign labor as castigation, but the nuns must have been nostalgic. If a girl was caught cursing or breaking some rule, off to the toilets she was sent to scrub caked menstrual blood and stains from the graying bowls. Talia never cared though. She was used to cleaning. She’d grown up in Perla’s lavandería until it went out of business and Mauro rented it to a dog groomer that went out of business too.

  When her grandmother lost control of her body, forgetting how to speak, to eat, and
everything else, Talia was the one who changed the liners of her underpants and washed her clothes when she soiled them. It didn’t bother Talia. Her father said it was a gift to care for someone who once took care of you, and love can cure what medicine can’t.

  Together, they nursed Perla. Talia tried to wake her sleeping mind with the stories she’d raised her on, like the one about the boy Perla knew in childhood who ate seeds and grew watermelons in his belly that a farmer cut out of him every spring and then sewed him back up for the next harvest. Or about Eutémia, the distant cousin who brushed her hair so much that vanity turned it blue and she had to cut it all off.

  Talia’s favorite story was of Don Ismael, who lived on the banks of the Río Magdalena and could wave his hands in the air to make rain start or stop in order to control the river swells and floods. Talia longed for his powers, wishing he could restore her grandmother’s memory, resurrect her dying body the same way he could draw water from the sky.

  * * *

  When she returned to the motorcycle, she found Aguja waiting, hands at his sides, and got the feeling this might be goodbye. He’d already taken her as far as he agreed. She pulled the French guy’s wallet out of her pocket and handed it to him.

  “I was thinking we could go a bit farther together,” he said. “Chiquinquirá is only about fifty kilometers south. My mother will kill me if she finds out I was so close and didn’t stop to light a candle in her name. You can come with me if you want. I mean, it’s still on your way. From there I’m sure you can find a bus to take you to the capital.”

  Soon it would be dark. Night in the mountains was nothing like in the city, forever aglow with eight million lives, car beams, apartment windows, and streetlights.

  “I’ll go with you, but I can’t pay any more than what I’ve already offered you.”

  “I know.”

  He mounted the motorcycle, and Talia arranged herself around him once again. When they returned to the road, silenced by the engine throb and rumble, she rested her cheek against his shoulder blade, shutting her eyes to the wind.

  EIGHTEEN

  Someone recommended Elena for a cleaning job in a town flanking the Hudson. It was a big house down a forested road, up a winding path behind an iron gate. Ivory-shingled with coned roofs, somehow inspired by château architecture without being completely tacky. The bosses were a married couple with generations of money behind them and a son who seemed to hate everyone except Elena. Soon the couple asked her to swap cleaning to be his nanny instead. It went so well that they asked Elena to move in and outfitted the cottage at the back of their property for her family. It was bigger and had more bedrooms than any basement or apartment she and the children had ever lived in. Residing in the bosses’ town also meant a better school system for her kids.

  Her charge, Lance, is now twelve. Every morning, Elena helps him get ready to take the bus to a school for children like him, and waits for him by the gate every afternoon when he gets dropped off. He doesn’t speak much, but when he does there is a lot of yelling. He doesn’t like to be touched by anyone, even his parents, but he will hold Elena’s hand.

  Karina and Nando treat him like another sibling since he doesn’t have any of his own. No friends either. He likes when Nando walks with him around the yard or sits in the grass, sketchpad in hand, and shows him how to draw flowers and birds. With Karina, he likes to observe the fish and turtles in the pond, listening to her give each a name and imagine a family story in which all species are kin.

  Sundays are family days, but sometimes Elena’s employers call on the intercom, asking for help with their son, frustrated the books they’ve read and experts they’ve consulted provide no code with which to decipher the enigma of their son, his rages that only subside in Elena’s presence. Once, Señora Tracy told Elena she wonders if the universe gave her a son like Lance because her husband was married to another woman when she met him. She asked Elena if she thought life collected debts as it went along. She thought of her son as a half-bloomed flower and tried fertility treatments for many years, like her husband wanted, as if her body were a catalog and they were placing an order for a new, improved child. Sometimes Tracy weeps for hours in her room, and other days she asks Elena to take photos of her cooking or posed on the sofa reading, and then she posts these photos on the internet for strangers to admire. Elena hears her employers tell people that Elena loves Lance as if he were her own son. It’s true. She does love the boy. But her love for her own children is different, marrowed beyond bloodlines, picked from their terrain, dusted off their mountains. In their dark eyes and amber skin she sees her cloud-cast city; her ancestors, her mother, everything her family has ever been and ever will be.

  Elena sent Talia back to live with Perla with the idea that she would raise the baby for a little while until Elena could send for her return. When you leave one country for another, nobody tells you years will bleed together like rain on newsprint. One year becomes five and five years become ten. Ten years become fifteen.

  She never thought that when she left on the plane with Mauro it would be the last time she saw her mother in the flesh.

  When Perla started forgetting her words, Mauro asked if he could take her to a doctor. But Perla thought every ailment could be solved with polvos from a curandero or pills from a creative pharmacist. One saw a doctor only when giving birth or near death. Mauro found a doctor who agreed to come to the house. Perla protested through the examination, but when the doctor asked her to name her grandchildren, not even Talia’s name came to memory. That night she collapsed as she walked from her bedroom to the bathroom. When Mauro found her on the floor of the hall, he said she looked not shaken or hurt but bewildered, and as he and Talia knelt by her side it was clear she’d forgotten where she was and who they were.

  Elena felt guilty for sending Talia to be looked after by Perla. Then Talia became her grandmother’s caretaker. Mauro said Talia acquired Perla’s best traits, tending to her gently, washing her so she wouldn’t be subject to the indignity of being bathed by Mauro. Talia dressed her. Combed her hair. Fed her, making sure Perla chewed and swallowed each bite so she wouldn’t choke, because the doctor warned that she would lose the reflexes needed for eating. She was like a baby, the doctor said, and like an infant, they’d have to keep her from harming herself.

  The doctor told Mauro there was no hope for improvement. She would only decline, though Mauro never shared that with Talia. He didn’t want his daughter to see her grandmother’s condition as a death sentence. He didn’t want her to fear the body’s natural process as it was shutting down, preparing for its exit from life. He wanted her to see that as long as Perla took breaths and had a heartbeat, even if her own home and family felt unfamiliar to her, she was loved and valued and still so alive, and though they could no longer reach or understand her, and her expression became a blank, secretive mask, she would know through their touch and voices that she was safe and belonged there.

  Mauro told Elena the official diagnosis was progressive supranuclear palsy and Karina went to the library and found as much information as she could. She brought home books they spread on the kitchen table in the cottage, looking at the diagrams of halved human brains while Karina read and explained their meaning. The disease, she said, was degenerative, with no cure. A slow erasure of everything that was recognizable about Perla to them and to her.

  When she said goodbye to Perla and to her country, Elena had been left with the feeling that she’d deceived her mother. The feeling grew heavier when she chose to stay in the United States with Karina and Nando after Mauro was sent home. The fissure of not being present for the end of her mother’s days was one from which she knew she would not recover. She considered scenarios in which they could all be reunited. She could return to Bogotá to live in the house in Chapinero and care for her mother, but then she might never be allowed back in the United States. She would have to leave Karina and Nando behind, potentially with Toya or other friends from Sandy Hill. Or
she would bring them back home with her so they could know there was a land where they truly belonged, and even if they’d never had the relationship Talia had with Perla, they would know what it was to have an abuela who loved them, and could get to know their father again too.

  But then practicalities came to mind. Karina, like Elena, would have to wait years for a chance at permission to return to the only country she knew. If Nando and Talia were to return to the country of their births, they would have to leave their mother, father, and sister, and endure the same sentence of separation Elena lived. Every way she could imagine it, the family would be split. And so, Elena chose to stay.

  On the computers her employers gifted each of her children, she sometimes opened the screen to a program Karina taught her to use, sliding the cursor over the earth until she found Colombia from above, narrowing in on the capital in the leathered altiplano, sweeping her finger over the roping mountains as if she were a bird coasting across the plateau, drawing in closer until she found her street, her house. She adjusted the image till it was as if she stood on the sidewalk outside the lavandería door, a dream she reenacted many times through technology, but when she showed her kids the picture of her home, they met her with puzzled expressions at how the decrepit building on the screen could be the place she so missed and loved.

  Mauro said Perla died in her sleep. Elena knew it before he called. She felt an icy draft spread over her as she slept in Lance’s room with him curled into her the way her own children used to do. Her heart roused. She lost her breath and knew her mother was gone.

  When Mauro found Perla in the morning, she looked peaceful, as if she’d just closed her eyes seconds before. She was cold and hard to the touch, but he couldn’t stop Talia from running into the room and throwing herself over her grandmother’s body.