Infinite Country

by Patricia Engel

  In the other country, she would have a sister and a brother. No longer a lone child caring for her grandmother’s health and her father’s heart.

  In the other country, there would be no boy like Aguja sleeping beside her, who felt familiar the first time she saw his face, who knew hers too.

  He was right. In the other country there would only be strangers and she would be a stranger, too, even to her own family. Her father would wait in Colombia, perhaps forever, for a daughter and a family who had learned to live without him.

  What would have happened if she’d not gone to meet Claudia at the restaurant by El Campín that day, if there had been no kitten, if she hadn’t been in the alley when the cooks took their break, or if the man had shown mercy or indifference, left the creature alone rather than make the decision to kill, and if Talia, instead of reacting in fury had hung back in horror? His small yet barbaric act had showed Talia her own darkness, and she would never be the same. What if she’d never escaped her prison school and instead completed her sentence of just a few more months? At eighteen, after demonstrating reformation, they said her crime would be erased from her record. It would be something she could forget if she tried. But Talia was impatient as thunder. She wanted to believe her mother’s love unconditional but was afraid if Elena discovered what she’d done, what she was capable of and where her crime took her, she’d change her mind about having her long-distance child live with her. Sometimes Talia was grateful Perla died when she did. If she’d lived to see her beloved granddaughter sent to prison, it would have killed her.

  Talia stood up and went to the stream, shallow and clear unlike the curdled arteries of the Río Bogotá. She squatted by the downed reeds, running her fingers through the waterline, skimming pebbles settled into the embankment. Her father once told her that river stones are good luck for journeys because waterways are peopled with spirits traveling between worlds, grazing those stones, leaving them as talismans for the living.

  TWENTY-TWO

  A flock of buses brought pilgrims to the basilica the next morning. Talia and Aguja watched the crowd thicken. He asked Talia one last time if she was sure she didn’t want to come instead of waiting on a bench. She was sure, she said, and watched him make his way to join the faithful. Perla had never been to the basilica but always lit candles and went to Mass on the Virgin’s feast days. She kept a statue of the blue-caped Santa María in her white veil on a table next to her bed. When she was small, Talia pretended it was a statue of Elena and her even if the baby in her ceramic arms was a boy. After Perla died, when Mauro sold the house and they prepared to move into an apartment, he packed the statue in newspaper, but the movers lost it and they never saw it again. Talia cried because she felt the statue, despite the Virgin’s chipped hand and missing nose, carried a piece of her grandmother, and without the house or the dust of her remains, which they’d sent to Elena, there was nothing of Perla left.

  It was as if she’d never existed. As if Talia had imagined her entire childhood in her abuela’s care. No proof of her voice, and now Talia could only hear it in memory. They’d given away her clothes and even the repaired crucifix in the foyer she’d loved as if it were another husband was donated to a church near Paloquemao. When Talia left, she would be able to take even less with her. Just a suitcase of clothes and a few things to remind her of home. Her father said the death of a loved one was like a house on fire. Even with everything intact, it still felt like mere ashes.

  Soon he’d be left in their small apartment without Talia sleeping in the next room. She wondered if for him his daughter’s absence would be another house on fire.

  When he returned from the basilica, Aguja handed Talia a paper pouch. She opened it and pulled out a mess of string attached to a plastic scapular with the face of the Virgin on it.

  “For protection.” He pulled down the collar of his shirt to show an identical string around his neck. “I lit a candle for you too. So you’ll make it back to your mother with no problems.”

  She thanked him and slipped the scapular over her head, felt it dangle against her chest.

  “I should get back to Barichara. My girlfriend must be having a heart attack. I haven’t even called her. What’s your plan for the rest of the way?”

  “I’m going to try to get on one of those buses.”

  “They’re charters. They’ll never let you on. It’s only two or three hours’ drive from here to the city. Why don’t you just ask your father to pick you up?”

  “He doesn’t have a car.”

  “You don’t have any other friend to do you the favor?”

  “I’m afraid anyone I call would turn me in.”

  After a moment he said, “I guess I could take you. I’ll feel better if I know you made it back safe. I don’t want to wonder about you, you know?”

  “Your girlfriend is going to think you got kidnapped.”

  “I kind of did.”

  Before leaving Chiquinquirá for the capital, Aguja called home. He stepped away for privacy, but Talia could hear him tell his girl he got caught up visiting a friend in another town and would be back soon, assuring her, no, he wasn’t with another girl, that she was the only one for him and didn’t he prove it every day when he asked her to marry him and she was the one who insisted they were still too young and should wait? He told her he loved her. Called her sweet names. Preciosa, muñequita, mi angelito de la guarda. His voice was liquid, a different register from the one he used with Talia. Even his posture changed, holding the phone against his cheek as if it were his girl’s hand. Talia tried to picture her, considering how some girls became special to boys while others were forgettable.

  Before they went on their way again, Talia asked if she could use his phone. She thought it was time to call her father, let him know she’d made it this far and that she’d be home in a matter of hours. Aguja’s phone was down to its last drops of charge, but he handed it over. She dialed and let it ring and ring, but there was no answer.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Mauro saw a missed call on his phone from a number he didn’t recognize. No message was left. He hoped it was Talia calling to say she was safe, then panicked that it was the police or a hospital reporting that she’d been arrested or hurt. He was at one of the apartments at his job, fixing a light fixture for some residents. As he worked on wires, he took in the sight of the family seated at their dining room table eating breakfast. The parents, a son, two daughters. Just like his family except not like them at all, so comfortable in their routine they mostly ignored one another. The father read the morning paper. The mother gave instructions to the housekeeper as she refreshed their coffees. The children mute with boredom. Mauro could not fathom the luxury of such familial indifference.

  The father, wearing a pressed shirt and trousers, a suit jacket slung over the back of another chair, started talking about the peace treaty, calling it a farce, speculating which side would be the first to cheat the other. One of the daughters said the rebel forces had already demobilized and surrendered their arms, and the father said they weren’t fools enough to give up every weapon in their arsenal; they surely had hidden stockpiles. He predicted the official peace would bring dissension from revolutionary fringes, smaller factions would gain power, and insurgents already legitimized by the treaty would turn Colombia into a formalized guerrilla nation.

  He spoke loudly in a way typical of the Latin American man of a certain class, presumed authority, each an aspiring president of their own miniature republic. The father told his children they were too young to remember the massacres of the Awá in Nariño or the mass killings in Dabeiba and Chocó; an era when more parents buried their children than the other way around. Everybody wanted a peace parade, a Nobel Prize, and a new national holiday so badly they’d forgotten the hundreds of thousands dead and still missing.

  As Mauro worked to restore light to the family’s hallway, he felt imperceptible. The kids had passed him in the lobby many times. They’d been raised to
know some people merit polite greetings and others can go without. The father asked his name after Mauro helped him jump-start his car one day. After that, whenever he saw Mauro he would say, “How’s the family, Mauricio?” even though Mauro never told him anything about Elena or his children. The wife had visits from women friends most afternoons. Once, he was called when the kitchen sink flooded during a gathering. The wife was frantic as the housekeeper mopped the froth. A few days later the wife found Mauro in the lobby and asked if he knew anyone she could hire because her current housekeeper was leaving.

  Mauro closed his eyes for a few seconds to try to trick himself, then opened them. For one suspended moment, he succeeded. There was his own family seated at the table: Mauro and Elena, each distracted by the details of the day, a life where ominous news headlines only infiltrated their nonviolent world as mealtime conversation. The children. His son, angular and slouched, an expression still hopeful, unmarked by the rejection Mauro had known as a boy, and not a hint of the desertion Mauro had imposed on his own kids. His first daughter. A face like her mother’s, serene but withholding. Talia was there, too, the one he worried had been so protected she’d become too fearless. He blinked again and they disappeared.

  * * *

  With the lavandería closed and no more prospective tenants for the shop below, the upkeep of Perla’s house became too expensive for Mauro to afford, even with Elena’s contributions from abroad. Mauro suggested renting out rooms, but Elena didn’t want her childhood home converted into a hostel or boardinghouse. The surrounding blocks were filling with cafés, galleries, bars, and trendy shops, though theirs was still untouched. Compared to the newer buildings coming up in the area, Perla’s house only looked more decayed. Every potential tenant remarked the same thing. The structure would need a complete remodel. It might be worth more torn down.

  “Just sell it,” Elena said. She’d sign whatever papers were needed to give him the authority to do so on her behalf.

  He wondered if time bleached her memories of the house so they were mere scratches on a pale canvas. No longer an inheritance but a gorge of debt, a place she didn’t expect ever to return to much less to live. But Mauro feared losing the house would make the family even more rootless; without it and with her mother already gone, once Talia joined Elena in the United States, there would be nothing left for her in Colombia.

  Before turning the keys over to the new owners, Spaniards who planned to convert the building into a language school, Mauro and Talia went to the roof, the first place he’d kissed her mother, and sat on the ledge facing the crown of Monserrate. Lightning scissored in the distance. Talia said the city was so ugly and the weather so bad, she didn’t understand why the capital hadn’t been founded in a better climate. Mauro reminded her it was the land of their ancestors and their connection to it ran deeper than Bogotá being designated the nation’s principal city. In the time before colonization and extermination, before their language was outlawed and they were given a new god and new names, they were a potent and powerful civilization of millions.

  He wanted to convey to his daughter the price of leaving, though he had difficulty finding the words. What he wanted to say was that something is always lost; even when we are the ones migrating, we end up being occupied. But Talia wasn’t listening, already tiring of her father’s stories. He felt her detaching from him, from their city. She saw their new apartment as a temporary place, counting down until she could leave it. What she didn’t know, Mauro thought, was that after the enchantment of life in a new country dwindles, a particular pain awaits. Emigration was a peeling away of the skin. An undoing. You wake each morning and forget where you are, who you are, and when the world outside shows you your reflection, it’s ugly and distorted; you’ve become a scorned, unwanted creature.

  He knew Talia believed her journey to be a renewal, and it would be. He hoped the love of her mother and siblings would be enough to soothe her when she met the other side of the experience, when she would learn what everyone who crosses over learns: Leaving is a kind of death. You may find yourself with much less than you had before.

  It seemed to Mauro that in choosing to emigrate, we are the ones trafficking ourselves. Perhaps it was the fate of man to remain in motion and seek distance, determined by the will of Chiminigagua, because humankind’s first migration was from the subterranean world beneath the sacred lake, driven out by the great water snake, to the land of the jaguars and the kingdom of the condors above.

  * * *

  Elena called to ask Mauro to pack Perla’s statue of the Virgen de Chiquinquirá for Talia to take on her trip north. He said it was lost in the move. They’d looked everywhere for it. He was very sorry he hadn’t told her before. He worried that to Elena it was just another Mauro apology. He wanted to say he regretted not only losing the statue but all the ways he’d disappointed her, and because he hadn’t yet found a way to restore their family to what they once were. But after a pause Elena only asked about Talia, why she wouldn’t return her mother’s calls. Mauro was relieved to change the subject but not that he’d have to lie again.

  “She’s just busy getting ready to leave. She can barely sleep from excitement to see you. After Saturday, you two will have all the time in the world to catch up.” He wasn’t sure she believed him. In fact, he was fairly certain she did not. But she didn’t insist or probe anymore.

  That afternoon, at a religious store on Calle 64, Mauro bought Elena a new statue, shorter and not as detailed as the one Perla had so loved, but he took it to a nearby church and asked the priest to bless it. He hoped Talia would tell Elena this much when she delivered it to her.

  * * *

  Mauro studied the map of Santander trying to imagine routes Talia might have taken to get home. What were the odds that a fifteen-year-old runaway girl could cross several provinces and navigate the mountains alone and unharmed? He refused to picture her hitchhiking, rain-soaked and hungry, tried not to think of where she’d been sleeping. He wondered if she’d paired up with one of the other girls as travel companions and prayed she was safe, reciting mantras that she’d soon be home, trying to conjure such a reality by preparing her luggage for her departure, her paper ticket tucked safely in a dresser drawer. Clothes folded and arranged in neat piles, packed in a suitcase he bought at El Centro Andino, its shell pink as a passiflora, her favorite flower.

  He’d bought gifts for Karina and Nando. Candies, discs of Colombian music. A necklace for Karina and a leather belt for Nando. Not much but it was what he could afford, even if he was sure they were used to nicer, less folkloric things in the north. He’d taken Perla’s photos out of their frames and packed them in an envelope along with a letter for Elena. He was embarrassed of his handwriting, how he hadn’t stayed long enough in school for it to be shaped into something more presentable, ruining many sheets of paper trying to keep his sentences in straight lines, wanting to communicate that she was still his only love and asking her forgiveness for every way he’d fallen short.

  When she returned, Talia would see her father had a gift for her too. During the years when they were getting to know each other as father and daughter, when she was still in only Perla’s care, she glimpsed the ink on his forearm. She asked Mauro what it said because she couldn’t yet read.

  “Karina.”

  “Like my sister?”

  He told her yes and watched her curiosity melt to hurt. Talia didn’t say so, but he knew she must have wondered why Karina’s was the only name written on his body. He could not explain there was no money to spend on tattoos. Karina’s name had been a whim, in the euphoria of the days after her birth, when he ran to the tattoo shop that had existed then around the corner and had his arm branded with his daughter’s and mother’s name. He remembered when he came home to show Elena. Skin tender and bloody, covered in ointment and a clear film. She brought his arm to her lips and kissed their baby’s name. The following year, when the three of them were in the United States, she would trace thos
e same lines with her finger as if they held a kind of promise.

  Now when Talia looked at her father’s arms, above the calloused hands she’d rub with her perfumed lotions every night when he came home from work as had been their ritual for years, she would see her brother’s name etched above her sister’s, and above Nando’s name, Talia’s own name in filigree script.

  On his other arm, otherwise unmarked except for scars from his years working in the campo and those that followed in Ciudad Bolívar and Paloquemao and the United States, on the papery flesh over the veins of his wrist, was the name he should have imprinted himself with long ago. Elena. Though he would ask Talia not to tell her mother about it. He hoped one day to be able to show her himself.

  Talia was not a sentimental girl. Not like Mauro, who the world might still consider young and vibrant but to his daughter was a melancholy old man. She might think his gestures soppy and insignificant rather than seeing, as he did, that once she got on that plane, he’d have little more than his family’s names carved into his arms.

  The apartment, though small, would be too big for only him. The sight of his daughter’s empty room, those posters of gringo singers and bands she taped to the walls, would sting. He would return to his silence, something he’d gotten a dose of during her confinement, and the thought of the unending solitude that awaited him with her returned to North America was more than he would be able to bear. Some nights he even longed for the chaos he knew when he slept on the streets because, Mauro realized, it was a distraction from the echoes of his interior. He went to his meetings nearly every evening and hoped they would be enough to keep him from his former vices during the wilderness of time he’d be sentenced to after Talia’s departure.