Infinite Country

by Patricia Engel

  TWENTY-NINE

  Mauro waited in the airport for almost twelve hours, long after Talia’s plane left their soil and landed in that foreign space. She called when she arrived at her new house, her voice laden with uncertainty though she kept saying, “It’s beautiful here, Papá. So beautiful.” She thought her father was back at their apartment, but he was still by the checkpoint where he’d left her, watching other families in their last seconds together before parting. For the first hours after her takeoff, despite the solace of knowing that she hadn’t been detained, he worried there would be some malfunction or even a bomb threat; a reason for her plane to have to loop around in the sky and return home. Even after the airline employees told him her flight had landed safely in the United States he waited on a plastic bench with a shameful wish that she’d decided, instead of going home with her family, to take the next flight back to him.

  They were thoughts that came with the heartsickness of separation. He knew such fantasies well, from their earliest incarnations when he was sent to the campo by his mother to when he found himself in the detention center and when the Americans dispatched him back to his country alone. His daughter had left him, but she still came to him in his sleep, asking him to tell her stories about the lake, about Chiminigagua, about the ancestors, begging him to bring them with him when he arrived to meet her in the north.

  At first, her calls were frequent. Daily. Sometimes twice, in the morning and before she went to sleep. She reported everything about her new life, gossiping affectionately about her mother and her siblings. She suspected her mother was a little frightened of her. Not because she might be dangerous, but as if she were some breakable object, like a centuries-old museum artifact on loan between nations.

  Her brother and sister, she said, took her on outings to Manhattan, where she felt choked by crowds and buildings taller than their highest mountains, where the subway vibrations reminded her of the tremors she felt underfoot back home, Chibchacum adjusting his load; and to the beach, wide as a field and full of people, sand coarse and mottled with cigarette butts, the Atlantic water inky and cold.

  Her English improved beyond television and movie dialogue. Her sister became her teacher, instructing her to read pages of novels aloud for an hour each night. On weekends, her family took her to the other town where their good friends lived and the adults, too, treated her as if she were a special thing, precious and symbolic as an emerald ensconced in gold. She worried they hadn’t yet figured out that she was ordinary, she told her father, exceptional only in her ability to do harm and to run away, and was terrified that someone would learn of her crime and time at the prison school and tell her mother.

  The funny thing, she said, was that back home she felt she had so much to say, but in her new country everyone kept commenting how quiet she was. She even heard her mother describe her as shy. She worried she’d left her real self with her father and the girl who flew to the United States in her place, though she wore the same face, was someone else.

  * * *

  A few weeks after her departure, Mauro received a call from the police. They learned Talia had left the country. They knew the day and the hour, and he prayed they hadn’t searched security camera footage showing them together at the airport as he prepared to send her off. He was able to fake shock, which the police seemed to believe, since Elena had been the one to purchase the plane ticket. They asked if he’d heard from her. He said he hadn’t. They asked if he knew how to reach Elena, and he lied that they hadn’t spoken in years. And so the call turned to one of sympathy.

  “I am sorry to have to give you this bad news,” the officer said. “Now that your daughter has fled the country to be with her mother, you may never see either of them again.”

  * * *

  Elena called to thank Mauro for the Virgin statue he’d sent, for the photographs and for the letter he’d tucked into the envelope with them. He waited for her to say more, but she was quiet. Then she thanked him for the years he’d cared for Talia. Said every day was a revelation of who she was as a young woman. Despite the distance and years apart, she’d somehow convinced herself she knew their daughter well. Now she understood that child was fiction. The daughter Elena was getting to know was smarter, wiser, as lovely and self-governing as a wildflower.

  Without Talia between them now, Mauro worried the threads that bound him and Elena would fray to nothing. He felt a dam of urgency break in him.

  “I’ll find a way back.” He didn’t know if she understood or if she would even believe him. He only hoped that when he made it to the other side, she would be waiting.

  * * *

  The apartment was packed and ready for its next occupancy. The boxes with the few things that mattered to them held in a storage unit where he’d paid the year in advance. After Talia left, Mauro did months of research. Enough time had passed since his deportation that he could apply for legal reentry. He submitted the paperwork and was approved for an appointment at the US embassy, which gave him hope that his past offenses might be pardoned. He took the day off and wore his best clothes, brought a file of photos of his family and copies of Nando’s and Talia’s birth certificates. He told the consular officer he had two US-born children and his deportation had caused substantial hardship on their mother. He’d read about another deported father in Nicaragua with a similar family situation who was granted a special waiver with the help of some advocacy group. But Mauro still had no sponsor waiting for him on the other side and now had nothing in Colombia proving any incentive to return. His request was refused. He could reapply, the officer said, or wait until his American children were old enough to petition for a parent visa, but the arrests on Mauro’s record made it unlikely he’d ever be granted entry again.

  He considered other potential routes. First to the United States by way of Canada, but ruled it out when he learned the two countries share immigration information. A flight to Jamaica or the Bahamas since neither required visas of Colombians. Or by boat to Panama through the Darién Gap and San Blas Islands, by bus and train the rest of the way north. The more he stared at those borders on maps, the more absurd it seemed that outsiders succeeded in declaring possession of these lands with national lines, as if Creation could ever be divided and owned.

  The best and most reliable route, he concluded, was through Mexico. He knew a man from his meetings, which he attended every night since Talia’s departure, who’d made the trip through the Chihuahuan desert successfully only to return to Colombia because he missed the wife and child he left behind too much. The journey was hard on the body, he warned Mauro. If you go that way, rest for many days before crossing. When you’re ready, dress like a gentleman on his way to church and pray one thousand rosaries. When you finish, you will be on the other side.

  For months, he cut meals to save pesos. Sold his ruanas and trinkets leftover from Perla’s house to tourists at the flea market and took extra shifts at his job whenever he could. He turned the apartment back over to the landlord. Bought two plane tickets. One to Panama and from there, another to Mexico. The man who’d taken the desert route told him that from the capital he needed to head to the frontera and wait in a town named, of all things, Colombia. A man he knew there would help Mauro cross over. Entering the United States again without inspection or admission, as they say, could get him barred from the country forever.

  It was worth wagering, Mauro decided, even if just to see his family one more time.

  * * *

  A dewy morning back in the same airport where he’d held his daughter before she left for her new life. He waited to board his own flight alone, this time as a free man and not as the prisoner he was when last returned to his country. Talia did not yet know that he was coming. He hadn’t wanted to share his plans, fearing his trip would be interrupted and he’d be forced back to Bogotá to begin the journey all over again.

  He was not viewed as a criminal in any country but the one where his family lived. He would be safe until he a
rrived at the national line, and then he’d see how far his luck would travel. Until then, he guarded a new picture in his mind: Nochebuena. Their first as a complete family. Parents preparing a meal together for their three children, singing songs they used to sing, dancing the way they used to dance. Falling asleep with love in their hearts. The next morning, one of thousands with which they’d mend the years torn from their family pages, creating new stories in place of elisions. No more anguish of time lost. Nothing would matter but each new day and the ones to come.

  THIRTY

  I started writing the chronicle of our lives because it’s important to leave a record. For us, if for nobody else, because everyone has a secret self truer than the parts you see.

  One day in early September, just before she was to start at her new high school, I saw my sister sitting with our mother in the garden near the creek knoll. I could tell by the way they faced each other, the way our mother’s gaze never moved while Talia’s searched around, often fixing on the blades of grass she held between her fingers, that she was confessing what she’d already shared with me, the crime she committed back home, how they’d sent her to a prison for girls on the edge of irredeemable, how she’d wanted to hide this secret forever because she thought we couldn’t love her in spite of it, even when I told her I understood; we all have breaking points, we all have regrets and maybe more instances we don’t regret that society tells us we should. I told her I understood what it was to want to create justice to fix an injustice even if my justice could be considered a crime. I know what it is to hurt and to feel hurt on behalf of others. I tried to say this in my best Spanish and asked if she understood, if she believed me, and she said she did.

  I didn’t let myself watch their entire exchange. I went to our living room, where my brother was sketching faces, and watched him until our mother and sister returned to the cottage.

  I want to say that our family entered a new era, not just of reunification, but of truth-telling that began with our mother, who told me a few days before our sister’s arrival what happened to her years before when she worked at a restaurant, at the hands of the man who hired and paid her. Maybe I sensed something like this had happened to her because I didn’t react with tears. I only listened, and when she was through, her face slack as a sheet hanging in the rain, I held her and told her I was sorry for being too small to protect her, but she said it was the very reason she was telling me now, to protect me from something similar happening, and most of all, to defend me from silence. In time, she would tell my brother and sister, she said, and our father too.

  That night I thought about how love comes paired with failures, apologies for deficiencies. The only remedy is compassion. I thought about this again when my sister told me of her crime and how she’d run away from her school on the mountain in order to catch her flight to this country, because she thought if we knew or if she asked to postpone the flight we’d change our minds about wanting her to live with us; how she hitched rides across the departments of Santander, Boyacá, and Cundinamarca, and slept beside strangers until she made her way back to our father, and before she left that final morning for the airport, she wrote a letter to Horacio, the man she burned, saying she was very sorry she hurt him and wished him a good life though she did not expect to be forgiven, and she asked our father to mail it for her, though the mail in Colombia was notoriously unreliable and there was no way to know if the envelope, which she’d addressed to the restaurant where he once worked, made it to his hands.

  * * *

  By this time, we knew our father was on his way to us. He made it to Laredo, a border city we’d heard about on the news due to all the deportations of people who arrived seeking asylum from danger in their homelands, the separated families, parents and children torn from one another and placed in detention. But he was safe, only hours from where he began his first journey in this country with our mother and me. He called to say he’d made it to a migrant shelter run by some nuns where they let him rest. Someone there connected him with a volunteer group that told him buses and trains were too risky. Through their network they arranged a series of car rides and safe houses so he could cross the country. Till then, we waited. Our mother didn’t sleep much those nights, and sometimes I left the room I shared with my sister to sit with her on her bed and listen as she told me it was a scary thing to have all your prayers answered.

  * * *

  They delivered him to our mother’s employers’ gate. I saw him walking up the driveway. My brother and sister were at school, and our mother was in the main house. I went to him, but my last steps shrinking our gap were slow and heavy. He said my name. I could see he was nervous that I would reject him. I went to him and reached around his body for a hug. I am almost as tall as he is now, but I was small again and his scent came back to me; we were no longer in the driveway but in some apartment I hadn’t thought about in years yet no time had passed at all.

  I led him to the main house and saw his eyes take in the proportions of everything, the softness and beigeness of the walls and upholstery, every rug and painting and decorative detail as he trailed me from room to room in the otherwise empty house and I called for my mother. Then she was in front of us, a laundry basket in her hands. She dropped it when she saw him, her face rumpling with a dry cry as he ran to her and held her and she made kittenish whimpers in the fabric of his shirt. In my waking memory, I’d never seen them like this, had no recollection of them touching or even speaking face-to-face, but an intimate familiarity came over us; I felt a river current, a serpentine wind, an artery of lightning pass through my parents and through me. I didn’t know how long they’d be like this, but it didn’t matter; I already felt the moment become eternal.

  * * *

  For now we still live in the cottage until we can save for a bigger place. You may have noticed I haven’t told you the name of the town. That’s because as long as we’re here, we’re vulnerable. Until something changes in the laws and the climate so that people understand we are not the enemy. Our family is whole now, but there is no day that passes without anxiousness that I may come home to find my mother or father have been taken into custody. Or that the one taken could be me.

  Our father is doing handiwork and repairs for a friend of our mother’s bosses. When he’s not at his new job, just as my mother and sister have done, and my brother with the pages he handed over, our father has begun to tell me the story of him, of how our family came to be, which I’ve tried to write here, though the stories keep coming, so I know the book of our lives will continue to grow with truth and time.

  It’s not that the sum of these pages can tell everything about us. There are things we will never share with one another, that will remain unnamed or unspoken. Things I save for private journals, like how I wonder if I will ever find the kind of love I want, a love that at least at its inception resembles what our parents felt when they discovered each other and trusted each other enough to travel to a new world together. There are innumerable joys left out of these pages. Sorrows too. A life rendered will always be incomplete.

  Soon after our father arrived we went to a party in our old neighborhood and introduced him to our friends from the basement days. When a cumbia came on, he asked our mother to dance, and we watched our parents sway, finding each other’s rhythm as if they’d never fallen out of step, as if the past fifteen years were only a dance interrupted waiting for the next song to play. I wondered about the matrix of separation and dislocation, our years bound to the phantom pain of a lost homeland, because now that we are together again that particular hurt and sensation that something is missing has faded. And maybe there is no nation or citizenry; they’re just territories mapped in place of family, in place of love, the infinite country.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  To the families who see aspects of their experiences reflected in these pages: You are my heroes. I wrote this book for you.

  To victims and survivors of every kind of violence, and to the
displaced and the disappeared: I carry you in my heart.

  My thanks to Ayesha Pande, agent extraordinaire, and the Pande Literary team; to the always visionary Lauren Wein; Amy Guay, Meredith Vilarello, Alexandra Primiani, Morgan Hoit, Jessica Chin, Alison Forner, and everyone at Avid Reader Press and Simon & Schuster for your work on this book and for such a warm welcome.

  My thanks to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for their generous support of my research and writing of this novel; to Viet Thanh Nguyen and Ploughshares for publishing an early excerpt; to my colleagues and students at the University of Miami, especially M. Evelina Galang and Chantel Acevedo; and to the dear friends who’ve encouraged me along the way.

  My gratitude to my family in the United States and Colombia; to my nieces, the youngest Engel writers; to my husband, John Henry, for so much love and laughter; to S, G, and M, my adored companions.

  Above all, I thank my mother and father for their love, their stories, and for holding on to each other no matter what.

  Infinite Country

  Patricia Engel

  This reading group guide for Infinite Country includes an introduction, discussion questions, ideas for enhancing your book club, and a Q&A with author Patricia Engel. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.