Infinite Country

by Patricia Engel

  TWENTY-FOUR

  It was my idea to go to the Palisades like when we were kids, Sundays when almost everyone in the Sandy Hill house had the day off and we’d caravan north for a picnic on Hook Mountain. I’m the only one with a driver’s license in our house, and Mom’s bosses are cool about letting me take out their Jeep since they hardly use it and—you don’t know this—I go up there on my own sometimes just to draw the view, those swirly candy colors, especially the hour before the sun slides out of sight. That day you and I walked our favorite trail up to the rocky shelf on the mountainside, took in the drop into the bruised Hudson. It looked and felt like it did when I was a kid, like the end of the earth and the end of time.

  People die on that mountain. Mostly hikers who wander off the marked paths and slip from the precipice. People fall while photographing the highlands and waterway. Dogs air-bound for a Frisbee. We sat facing Sing Sing across the river. As kids we thought it was a castle where the King of America lived until someone told us it was a prison where they locked up murderers and lunatics. It was years before I understood that our father’s detainment and deportation, which I don’t remember at all, meant he’d spent time in jail. Maybe one like Sing Sing, with its spindly watchtowers and wire scaffolds.

  Our mom tells me stories about how much he loved me. First son, only boy, how it’s supposed to be special for a man and how, before I was born, he told her about the ancient ruler of his mother’s hometown whose virgin daughter became pregnant by the sun and she gave birth to an emerald that she guarded until it grew into a man who became this warrior king named Goranchacha, son of the sun. But when I see our dad through video calls, I can’t help thinking of him like some distant relative. Somebody I know I’m supposed to care about even if it feels like an act. I know it’s different for you, Karina. You’ve perfected your I-don’t-give-a-fuck look, but then you hang up from one of those calls with our father and rush to your room, and I hear you pillow-cry through the walls. Then you go quiet, and I know you’re writing.

  That’s what you do when you’re not at the library or reading the books you bring home. And you write in English even though Mom acts like it’s kind of a tragedy you can’t write in Spanish, but I know you’d rather not worry about her reading what you write and you probably think I don’t care enough to snoop. That one time I asked what was in your notebooks, you told me the government says you don’t have the right papers so you’re writing your own. And when things finally get fair and safe enough for people like you to come to the light, they’ll have to listen to everything you’ve been waiting to say.

  I’ve only ever seen our mother on her own. I know there was a time when it was different, but I can’t remember our parents together. Don’t know their faces in love. I didn’t witness them as a couple long enough to see them fight or start to hate each other like everyone else’s parents till they decide they’d rather love other people instead.

  What were they like? Was it one of those couplings by circumstance, the fact of her pregnancy, or were they seriously knocked out the way everyone wants to be in love, the way you can only be when you’re young and just hope it lasts and doesn’t leak out of your hands or accidentally die by your touch like a newborn bird.

  I only know our parents’ faces as they talk to each other through digital screens. Their weird politeness, like they’re business associates and didn’t once fuck enough to make three babies together. It’s always the same. Mom ends those calls looking disoriented and a little pained. Tell your father you love him, she mouths to us before we hang up. We love you, we say in English. Los adoro, he answers back.

  I remember the time you asked our mom why she’s never had a boyfriend since our dad left our family in this country. Why do you even bother being faithful, you said, I guarantee he’s not living like some monk in Colombia.

  It was clear your words burned. I thought she was going to tell you to stop talking like some rude gringa, one of those sitcom brats in dire need of a chancletazo, but she only sighed and said, You don’t know what you’re talking about, corazón.

  I hope when Talia arrives she’ll tell us about our father. Our mom’s stories are limited to fifteen years ago and the bits she caught from her mother before she died about his life in Bogotá, and then what he reveals over the phone, which isn’t much. You say your single wish is to be able to vote in this country and made me swear to register as soon as I turn eighteen so I can cast ballots in every election since you and Mom can’t. But I know your even bigger wish is to have our dad in front of us, included in all our corny family photos. Learning his habits as well as we know our mother’s. How she stirs her coffee with her finger instead of a spoon so she can tell how hot the water is before it touches her tongue, she says, how the sight of rain makes her release a long, whistly breath, or how on chilly days she’ll always say it feels just like Bogotá. I guess what I’m trying to say is that having Talia return to us feels like a piece of our father is coming too.

  * * *

  You pointed across the river in the direction of Sleepy Hollow. You were talking about ghosts haunting that land, souls at unrest beneath the water, the dead buried in the mountain, sacrificed to history. I hadn’t heard you talk so much in a while, so I let you go on uninterrupted. In a couple of weeks, you’d graduate high school. Second in your class, though everyone knows you tied for first but the administrators had to decide which girl got to make the big speech at graduation and they picked the other one. You told Mom that in our town, with taxes so high the school may as well be prep, they couldn’t have a valedictorian who’s only planning to take a class or two at the local junior college when that other girl is on her way to the Ivy League. All year long there was talk of admissions tests, college tours. Seniors chose their schools by sports teams, family legacies, weather and lifestyle. Not you. You don’t get to be a part of that.

  You earn your money babysitting and dog walking since none of the shops in town will hire you. You were too scared to apply for DACA when you were eligible. You said it was another trick to sniff you out in exchange for a work permit and two years of a semi-documented existence. And maybe you were right, now that the government froze the program, knows where everyone is, and can do whatever they want with that information. I know you’ve been thinking of ways to bring in more cash to pay for your classes since Mom forbids you to work off the books for a restaurant. But I didn’t expect to see your computer left open to a site with ads looking for webcam girls. No experience necessary. Must feel comfortable showing face and total nudity for paid subscribers. Work in studio or in comfort of your own home. After dinner, when our mom went back to the main house to put Lance to bed, I asked what you were looking up such crazy shit for.

  It’s just research. I want to know what job opportunities are out there for someone like me, you said, like it was the most normal thing. Like I caught you bookmarking scholarships or financial aid funds instead.

  I wanted to come down on you like you came down on me last summer when I started talking to those recruiters prowling the mall about joining the military, when you said our mom would fall into a grief coma because she didn’t bring me into this world to kill or be killed, that they would use me as a bait dog and I was totally fucking expendable. The government knew it, you all knew it, the only one who didn’t know it was me. You’re a talented artist, you said. You need to go to art school, use what you have and become excellent, not waste your gift on learning to murder instead. I wasn’t sure I believed you. I still don’t know if I do. But I didn’t argue, because you’re the one who made the library your second home, who says if you can’t go to college you can read every book there, memorize this country’s narratives and myths, study history even the most educated people never learned or have forgotten, about laws written and unwritten and rewritten for people who come here looking for a better life than the one they left and people who were brought as babies, so nobody can say you’re ignorant about your status, no matter how arbitr
ary it is, this undocumented condition they talk about like it’s some disease.

  All these years we’ve been watching out for the government and you’re ready to hand yourself right over, you told me. I let you think you won the argument, but the truth is I didn’t really want to go anywhere. I wanted to be convinced to stay.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  At the Palisades with my brother, I noticed crows swarming the river basin. I read somewhere that crows aren’t usually found in estuaries and are more inland prone. People marvel at the miracle of animal instincts for migration to ensure their survival. Hippos, zebras, and lions were imported to Colombia by drug lords for private menageries, then abandoned when the arrests and extraditions began. Some animals starved, others were given refuge, and still others found ways to roam free and populate hills and valleys with their offspring. They’ve adapted and thrive in terrain for which they have no genetic memory. Unless you believe, as our father told our mother long ago, that the first beings traveled every inch of this earth, claiming it as home for all creatures.

  Our mother was captivated lately by the news story of a Colombian woman lost in the Amazon jungle for nearly forty days with her three children. The fruits they found had already been eaten by animals, so they dug for seeds and worms. By day, monkeys threw their shit at them. At night they covered in sticks and leaves, though rain still drenched them, sometimes flooding to their necks, and insects burrowed in their ears, noses, and eyes. The woman held her children close while creatures approached—owls, armadillos, snakes, maybe tapirs or animals whose names she didn’t even know. In the black jungle night, she couldn’t be sure. Once she heard an undeniable jaguar call and knew it could be their end. She prayed it wouldn’t track their scent and never heard it again. She believed the forest duende, said to be fond of mestizo children, made them get so lost they couldn’t find their own footprints and protected them now, though not from the ticks and maggots fattening on their blood that they pulled from their raw feet and open wounds. She told her story from a hospital in Putumayo, where she and her children were treated for hunger, dehydration, and parasites after an Indigenous fisherman saw them drinking water from a riverbank, thin as spirits, almost too weak to stand, as if the gentlest wave might sweep them away. Our mother seemed most affected that this woman had no idea hundreds of volunteers, police, and army helicopters upturned the jungle looking for them with no luck, that she and her children had traveled so far searching for a way out that they’d left the Colombian Amazonas and entered territory claimed by Peru, and once rescued, her husband confessed that with his family lost to the selva he’d already planned his suicide.

  For months now, we’ve also seen news stories of other divided families, children separated from their parents at the southern border. I haven’t told anyone I dream of these children in particular, hear their cries, the eventual silence of capitulation, feel their ache of lost faith and unknowing. In my sleep, I am one of them. Our family didn’t cross any desert or river to get here. We came by plane with the right documents, now worthless. My life, like my sister’s and my brother’s, is a mishap, a side effect of our parents’ botched geographical experiment. I often wonder if we are living the wrong life in the wrong country. If the reason I have felt so out of place is because I, like the narco animals, have no biological or ancestral memory of this strange North American landscape or its furious seasons. These mountains and rivers are not mine. I haven’t yet figured out if by the place of my birth I was betrayed or I am the betrayer, or why this particular nation and not some other should be our family pendulum.

  I looked over the bluff at the tidal ponds below and thought of lives lost to the crags and current. I clawed the rock I was sitting on, closed my eyes, felt wind scarf my neck, and imagined the feeling of hurling myself over.

  “What do you think it will be like when she gets here?” my brother asked.

  “We’ll have to look after her. Explain things. It might take a while for us to get used to each other.”

  “What do you think will happen to us?”

  “With Talia?”

  “With everything.”

  When he turns twenty-one, my brother can request to have our mother’s status adjusted. In applying, he will have to tell them where we are. The stakes are brutal. They could deny the request and instead come for her and for me. I wasn’t sure if this is what he meant with his question, so I said what I always say about our future.

  “I don’t know.”

  Then I asked myself more questions without answers: If I vaulted off this mountain what would the headline say? An undocumented girl fell to her death. Would they print my name, describe my life as a loss or as a waste? If the fall didn’t kill me, would anyone care to record the story of my survival? I pictured being saved by some gravitational reversal, sprouting wings that would carry me from this place until I found myself among other migratory beings, bound for somewhere that feels more like home.

  TWENTY-SIX

  As a child, Elena’s mother told her about the condor that lived deep in the cordillera, so lonely that he flew down to the valley in search of a wife. He found a girl tending to goats in her garden and asked if she would be his wife. The girl said she loved her home too much, she never wanted to leave it, and for this reason she knew she would never marry, but she didn’t mind because she couldn’t stand the thought of leaving her parents behind. The condor said he understood because he’d once had parents he loved until they left him alone in their nest and flew away. The next day, the condor returned and again asked the girl to be his wife. Again, she refused. This time the condor said he would leave but asked the girl if she would please first scratch a painful itch for him. He lowered himself so the girl could reach his shoulders to scratch beneath his feathers, but as she did so, he took flight with the girl still holding his back and flew to his cave in the mountains. Once there, he pulled out some of his own feathers, decorating the girl to make her his bride. At home, the girl’s parents cried with worry over their missing child. A green parrot that lived nearby heard their wails, approached, and told them: “If I am able to bring your daughter home, do you promise you will always let me eat fruit from your trees and take shelter in your garden?” The parents agreed, so the parrot left to search for the girl. He found her atop a sharp peak living with the condor. By now, she’d grown her own feathers and birthed half-avian chicks that died. She was no longer human but something else. As the condor slept, the parrot took the girl back to her family. Upon her return, her feathers fell out and soon she was the girl she’d once been, happy and at peace in her home. The condor was furious and came looking for her. But the parrot was waiting in the garden where he’d been permitted to live, and when the condor tried to eat him, the parrot gathered all his might and pushed straight through the other end of the condor’s body. The condor tried to eat the parrot again and again, but the parrot escaped each time out the other end, until the condor decided to tear the parrot apart with the force of its beak and crescent talons, swallowing the meaty bits, but each morsel swept through the condor’s body, emerging in the form of smaller, brightly colored birds. And this was how the land came to be populated by parrots from the scarlet macaws to the tiny golden parakeets people like to keep in cages in their homes.

  * * *

  When they lived together in Perla’s house, Mauro sometimes crept out of bed, careful not to wake Elena, and went to the roof to smoke cigarettes. He thought she never noticed, but Elena always woke to the void he left in their bed. When she followed, she’d find him staring past the veined mountain lights. Sometimes she watched and let him think he was still alone. When she did say his name, he met her with an indecipherable expression.

  One night when Mauro left the bed, Karina sleeping in a crib at its foot, Elena lay still in the room thinking of her own father, a man she never knew beyond photographs Perla removed from their frames and placed in a chest that was never to be opened. In the same chest, she kept the deed to the house
, bank papers, and a letter from a woman who claimed to be her husband’s new wife. Elena discovered it in a closet one day, though she never told her mother. When she had her own children, Elena understood a mother is entitled to her secrets.

  She heard Mauro’s footsteps flat and rushed. Not his usual nocturnal choreography to avoid waking her and the baby. He came to her side and found her already awake. “Elena, I saw it. With these eyes. I saw it!”

  “Saw what?” She expected he’d witnessed a car wreck or robbery on the street below. It wouldn’t be the first time. Or even that he’d spotted a UFO, since the news had reported more sightings of orbs like fireballs above the Nazca lines.

  “A condor flying over our barrio, and when it came to our house the wind held it above me and—” He lost his breath, dropping his face in his palms. When he pulled them away, Elena saw his eyes glossed with tears and asked him to show her.

  They ran together to the roof, but there was no great bird. Not even stars. Only clouds blotting the sky.

  “There are no condors in the city, Mauro.”

  “I saw one. I need you to believe me.”

  She wanted to offer some logic to make the apparition more plausible, said it might have escaped from the zoo or been blown off course from the páramo of Chingaza. Mauro had spoken before about condors. He once told Elena he’d gone with a friend up to Ciudad Bolívar and saw boys shooting a condor as it glided over the escarpment but the bird had escaped their bullets. Elena didn’t believe his story, even if as a child she’d pretended Bogotá was not a city but a jungle thick as the manigua of Caquetá, the brick skins of buildings were tree bark, and police sirens were the calls of monkeys and birds.

  In school, she’d learned condors preferred open tundra where they could feed easily and soar for miles without a flap of their wings. They were scarce because, besides being the national symbol of freedom and sovereignty and the largest flying creature on earth, they were believed sacred and immortal, guardians of the upper world. Their population diminished by poisonings and hunters after their bones, feathers, and organs, which were said to have healing properties.