Infinite Country

by Patricia Engel

  That night, reading Elena’s skepticism, Mauro asked why it was so hard to believe the condor could have returned to the city. “This was its territory before man occupied it, after all. Maybe it came to remind us what we’ve stolen.”

  Years later, when Mauro was down to his final days before deportation, he called Elena from the detention center and asked if she remembered the night he saw the condor fly over him on their roof. She told him she did.

  “Do you know that when a condor is old or sick, or if its mate dies, it will push itself to fly higher than ever before, then drop out of the sky to end its own life?”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  She remembered that when they returned to their bedroom after searching for signs of the condor, they’d stood by Karina’s crib, watching as she slept. Her parents’ absence hadn’t pulled her awake. Mauro whispered then that a condor, which could live as long as a human, was faithful to one partner for life. Together they nested on impenetrable cliffs, sharing the duties of incubation, making a home for their family only they were able to reach.

  * * *

  Friends told Elena that when a child and a parent are reunited after so many years apart, the distance and time can be more difficult to breech than either anticipated. They warned her not to have unrealistic expectations for her daughter’s attachment to her or for her family’s bonding once she arrived. She tried to prepare herself for possible outcomes. She knew that when Talia landed she might feel so overwhelmed with the deluge of English, the vacillating weather, so far from her city and mountains she might eventually beg for a return ticket home, so Elena budgeted some money in case. She would not deny her daughter the right to go back to Colombia the way she’d denied it to herself. She knew Mauro’s arms would be hard for her daughter to leave and accepted that after so many years apart she likely loved her father far more.

  She blamed herself for displacing her own children, especially her girls. Karina and Talia, binational, each born in one country and raised in another like repotted flowers, creatures forced to live in the wrong habitat. She’d watched the child who came to her that winter in Delaware grow through photographs and phone lines. Her voice was always new when they spoke. Her other children had lost much of their Spanish and sometimes Elena imagined it was Talia, the daughter she did not raise yet who had grown up in the same home as her mother, who knew her best.

  When Karina and Nando were small, living in those cramped basements, they asked Elena why they didn’t have a house of their own like the families on TV. “We have a house,” she told them. “We just don’t live in it because it’s far away.”

  “But why?” they asked over and over.

  “Because we live here,” she would say, wishing there was a way they could comprehend what even she couldn’t. She was never sure if she’d made the right decision in staying. Eventually she’d understand that in matters of migration, even accidental, no option is more moral than another. There is only the path you make. Any other would be just as wrong or right.

  Lately when they spoke on the phone, Mauro told Elena the news abroad showed a United States scorching with civilian massacres as bad or worse than Colombia’s ghastliest days of warfare, where ordinary American citizens were more heavily armed than any guerrilla or paramilitary fighter ever was. And was it true—he asked—the stories of cities contaminated by the water supply, children killed by police with impunity, communities left to fend for themselves against natural disasters as bad as the earthquakes and mudslides their land endured? How could people still think of gringolandia as some promised land knowing those things happened there?

  She rarely remembered any danger when she thought of her homeland. Lies often accompany longing. But it was worth something that she’d never been hurt or had to hide from anyone the way she’d had to do in the United States. Her birthplace had its own bigotry, inequality, terrorism, oil spills, water contaminations, and poverty just like in the north. But every nation in the Americas had a hidden history of internal violence. It just wore different masks, carried different weapons, and justified itself with different stories. She couldn’t guarantee to Mauro or to anyone that this country was safer than any other, or even that it offered more advantages or opportunity. Not anymore. She could only meet Talia with the love she’d been guarding for fifteen years. Her daughter had two countries to call home. Where she made hers would be her choice. If she ever decided to leave, Elena made a silent promise to let her daughter go.

  She’d sustained herself on reverie of her family reunited in the north. Now that her youngest was due to arrive in a few days, a new dream took shape: that of returning with her children to Colombia, possibly on the day they’d spent years wishing for, when they were each granted permission to travel freely, to navigate the routes between their nations without fear of detention or exile. There, she saw Mauro waiting for them at the airport, ready to fold them into his wings.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Across the sabana, Talia’s city came into view. The unexpected harmony of russet buildings, avenues the color of shrapnel shining with recent rain. She guided Aguja from her place behind him, lips close to his ear. They passed the old house, barricaded and papered with construction permits. An announcement of imminent demolition. She led him to her and Mauro’s current address, the third-floor apartment opposite the widow who shared her stews with neighbors. Aguja parked his motorcycle along the sidewalk. Talia had no key, so she rang the building bell, but there was no response. She could only wait until her father came home from work and hope that in the meantime nobody recognized her.

  They went to a park a few corners away. An elderly couple on a nearby bench fed crumbs to pigeons at their feet. Across the plaza, a young woman strollered a child. Talia didn’t know any of these people but somehow felt acutely connected, tethered to the wooden bench, the concrete beneath her feet. A sense of her life’s incompletion had led her this far, but now she wondered if she wasn’t meant to live anywhere but Bogotá.

  “I’m seeing our capital for the first time because of you,” Aguja said.

  “So what do you think?”

  “With this traffic and pollution I have a better idea why you want to leave.”

  “That was never what bothered me about this place.”

  They returned to the apartment building after dusk, a light in the living room window bright as fire. She rang the bell again, and this time her father’s voice came quick over the intercom. Papá was all she needed to say. In seconds the door opened and he was pulling his daughter to his chest, separating only so he could touch her face, hold her shoulders, study her eyes and know she was safe, unchanged, the child he knew. In trying to hug him with the force of her life, she realized how weak she was, exhausted, hungry. She turned from her father to introduce Aguja. Her father looked concerned but took her cue, shook Aguja’s hand, thanked him for helping Talia, and invited him inside. Aguja responded that he knew Talia’s and Mauro’s time together was limited. He didn’t want to intrude. He needed to get back to Barichara anyway.

  Talia had already paid him what she promised but was grateful her father pulled out his wallet and handed over all the bills inside so Aguja could buy gas and food for the journey. She left Mauro to walk Aguja to his motorcycle. He slid onto the seat. She resisted the impulse to climb on too. Touching the string around her neck, she thanked him for bringing her home.

  “If you ever find yourself back in Barichara, ask for me.” He offered his hand to shake, but she stepped in to kiss his cheek, rough, unshaven, sticky with sweat. She wouldn’t forget his smell. “You’ll be okay, niña. It’s like driving these mountain roads. You can’t see what’s ahead if you keep looking in the rearview mirror.”

  * * *

  There was a new feeling. A coming to the end of something while knowing it was the beginning of something else. Her last night at home with her father. The only home that had been truly theirs, not her grandmother’s house, which had been left to her moth
er. This was the apartment Mauro rented with two small bedrooms, a sitting area and kitchen with space for a small table. They’d lived there almost a year, but it still felt like a wrong fit, something they outgrew even before they arrived, a place of no memories, at least until tonight, and suddenly it felt like the only home she’d ever need.

  He cooked one of his simple meals for her. The warmth of the stove reached every corner of the apartment. She showered away days of filth, sat on her bed in fresh clothes, the suitcase her father prepared resting beside the door. She thought of places she’d slept in order to arrive at this night, remembering the prison school, the nuns her father said called many times asking if she’d found her way back to him. Her homecoming was a secret they’d both have to keep. He didn’t ask for details of her escape. He wouldn’t know the things she’d done, the lies she’d told, what she’d stolen. Memories she hoped to drop from the sky the minute her plane left their mountains and crossed the ocean.

  As they ate, she watched her father, this man who was both young and old. He’d lost weight in her absence. His skin darkened in its hollows. After she left, he would continue to transform even more with age and time. She wanted to memorize him as he was now.

  Her father would not let them be downhearted on this, their final night before she was due to leave. He played music and lifted her from the sofa to dance with him the way he taught her when he first came to live at Perla’s house, carrying her small feet on his toes until her body discovered its instinct for rhythm.

  She was so tired, but she didn’t want to sleep, wishing they could still go up to the roof of Perla’s house for a farewell to the city lights. In the new apartment of no sunrises or sunsets, all they had was their small windows with a view to the street.

  When she woke, it was still dark. She went to her father’s room, saw him sleeping atop his blanket, hands folded over his heart like a man at his own funeral. She wanted to wake him so he could tell her one more time about Chía, the guardian of night. She wanted to ask if the goddess would still watch over her when she was so far away from their land, but instead she let her father sleep.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  They were just another parent and child in an airport terminal full of goodbyes. They entered as conspirators, calm, trying not to show their fear that she could be arrested. Police patrolled. Working dogs sniffed baggage. She knew from TV programs there were hidden cameras all around. They approached the counter. When it was her turn, she slid over her blue passport. At fifteen she was old enough not to have to travel as an unaccompanied minor. The airline attendant looked over the top of her glasses at Mauro and asked their relation.

  “I’m her father.” He handed over his ID so the woman could compare their last names.

  “Who will meet you at the airport when you arrive?” she asked Talia.

  “My mother.”

  In her handbag, an envelope of cash her father withdrew from the bank. Her heart quivered as the airline employee studied her passport picture, then scanned the bar code. Talia had seen enough movies to write her own scene of a police stampede surrounding and removing her in handcuffs. But nothing like that happened. The woman returned Talia’s passport with a boarding pass tucked inside and wished her a good trip.

  Relief, but only temporarily, because she still had to get through customs and security. Her first time flying since her arrival as a baby. She felt dispirited. The composure she’d practiced in the taxi all the way to the airport, clutching her father’s hand on the vinyl upholstery between them, was gone. Mauro must have sensed this because he led her to a column along the corridor, held her close, and whispered that she was safe, nobody would take her away. She would get on that plane, and in a few hours she would be in her mother’s arms.

  “What if I want to come back?”

  “You can. You have two places to call home.”

  A goodbye is always too brief, or maybe she’d been saying goodbye since she came to Colombia, aware for as long as she’d collected memories that her place there was only provisional.

  “What if I don’t love my mother the way I love you?”

  “You will. You do. When you see her you will remember.”

  “And my brother and sister?”

  “They are a part of you too.”

  “I don’t want to go.” This came from some unknowable place but now felt truer than anything. “Don’t make me leave you.”

  Her father was quiet. He knew that if she stayed the authorities would come for her and send her back to the school on the mountain or another one like it. And even after she completed her sentence, restlessness would never leave her until she returned to her point of origin. She could not leave, but she could not stay.

  His eyes were dry, but she knew it was because he’d learned to cry without tears. They said all the things a father and daughter say to each other when they are not sure when or how they will ever see each other again.

  How many years would pass between this moment and that one?

  How would they be changed by a life apart?

  She already felt aged by the day. No longer fifteen but as if she’d lived a decade more and understood, though she didn’t yet know how, that this would be the morning she would dream of, guard in her palms like a loose pearl during her future loneliness.

  How stupid she was to think leaving would be as easy as handing over her ticket and finding her seat on the plane. She did not yet know she would mourn this morning like a death.

  Mauro watched her as far as the airport perimeters would allow. When she reached the front of the line and gave her passport to the customs agent, she turned and saw him peering from the corner along the last visible stretch of airport tunnel. She had to go on without him. He would stay at the airport until her plane was in the clouds, he’d said. Her phone was programmed to dial him with a single touch should she be detained. They’d prepared in every way for the worst possible outcome, but everything was happening faster than expected. The agent waved her on. At the security checkpoint, while others were asked to step aside to have their bags individually examined, she passed through with ease. Her father was out of sight, but she knew he was still close.

  * * *

  From her window seat the city unspooled, dissolving like salt in water. The exquisite madness of the cordilleras, bottle-green valleys devoured by doughy clouds until there was nothing to see but white and more white. When the pilot announced they’d left Colombian airspace, a man a few rows back started singing the national anthem but only made it through the first verse about goodness coming from pain, not to the parts about battles and bloodshed. Over the blue ribbons of the Caribbean she managed to sleep. When she woke, the plane was shaking in descent over another gray city. No mountains. Only flatness winged by obsidian rivers scabbed in concrete and steel.

  * * *

  The night before, she’d told her father she was afraid she and her family wouldn’t recognize one another at the airport.

  “You will know them when you see them, and they will know you.”

  She drifted through immigration and out of the baggage claim area, past another agent who took the paper form from her hand without any questions and through to a hall packed with excited faces, many holding signs, balloons, flower bouquets.

  “How will they know me?” she’d asked her father, when they’d only ever seen her face crammed into the inches of a photograph or screen.

  How will they know me?

  * * *

  In the end that was also a beginning, there was recognition beyond features and gestures. A love born before any of the siblings, that delivered her from her father back to her mother.

  The mother held her child, both wanting to express everything with their embrace. Her mother’s arms were sinewy around her ribcage. She was shorter than Talia had believed. Her scent—powder, violets, something else—familiar yet new. Her earrings pressed hard against her daughter’s cheek, as she hummed, mi hija, mi hija, like a song.

>   Her brother and sister cloaked them with their bodies.

  Her mother’s employers sent them to receive Talia in a big chauffeured car that waited for them outside the airport. Her sister and brother muttered to each other in English in the back seat. Her mother sat at her side, held her hand, reached for her face to kiss her cheek. Talia stiffened, remembering she was in a car full of strangers who were also her family. They told her that the next day there would be a party for her at the home of some friends in the town where they’d lived for many years. Everyone was excited to meet her.

  She took in New Jersey, level and highwayed. So many lanes and cars, square buildings and a hazy horizon. Far from Colombia with its equatorial pulse and steepled mountains. She tried to restrain her tears, but they fell fast.

  Her mother stroked her hair. “It’s too much,” she said. “I’m sorry. I should have known. We will take it slow. Tranquila, mi amor. No llores.”

  * * *

  Their home was a small house behind a larger one. A swimming pool sat in between. A boy watched from a window as the car pulled into the driveway. They showed her the bedroom she’d share with her sister, painted alabaster, windows overlooking rosebushes, no brick panorama like the one she left that morning. How would she sleep there, one night, a dozen nights, the hundreds or thousands of nights that would spread before her in an endless calendar of days waiting for something, she didn’t know what. Another departure? Another arrival? She was no longer sure where her journey began or where it should end.