Infinite Country

by Patricia Engel

  It was late. The children asleep. Mauro called from the police station. They got him, he said. He was in the minivan when two cops started knuckling the window.

  Elena’s first thought was of the dead woman at the motel. Maybe after finding out he worked there, they’d try to pin something on him. The hours in solitude before he called made her feel anything was possible.

  “Were you drunk?”

  “No. I promised you no more. I was thinking what to do about our situation, and I fell asleep. Just a nap. The car was parked. I wasn’t in danger of hurting anyone.”

  Since they’d bought the car, they’d known there was increased exposure. But Mauro had never even been pulled over. He’d learned to drive from Tiberio with military precision and obeyed every traffic law as if he’d written it himself.

  “How can they arrest you for sleeping?”

  “They can do anything they want.”

  “Just tell me when you’re getting out.”

  He said he’d passed the breath test but they arrested him for not having a valid license or insurance. There would be a hearing later. For now he needed her to ask Mister and Madame to lend them five hundred dollars so the police would let him go home.

  * * *

  Mauro reached out to a friend of a friend in New Jersey who said the family could stay with him for a while, and there were plenty of businesses hiring in the area. The police had impounded the car, so Mauro and Elena left the few pieces of furniture they owned to repay Mister and Madame their debt and took a bus to Newark. In those days there weren’t border control agents patrolling bus stations like there are now. They sat the five of them in a row meant for two. Mauro held Nando and Karina, a child on each knee, while Elena held the baby. Dante met them at the station and took them to his home in East Orange. He was from Buenaventura and lived in a big house with his Honduran wife, Yamira, her son, and nine others; a mix of relatives, friends, and people like Mauro and Elena who had nowhere else to go. They let the family have the basement since the previous occupants had just left for jobs at a meat factory in New Paltz.

  Yamira had a degree in economics but showed Elena how to clean houses. Elena asked what was so complicated about cleaning that it needed to be taught. She grew up working in a lavandería, and Perla kept their house as impeccable as a surgical ward. Elena couldn’t leave her bedroom each morning without her bed made, clothes folded, floor swept, everything in its place. Yamira insisted cleaning for Americans was different and if Elena wanted to get jobs that could earn her a hundred dollars a day in the right neighborhood, she would have to learn to use their chemical products, operate an American-style iron and vacuum cleaner. She’d have to learn to clean fast, too, unless she was being paid by the hour, in which case she could draw some tasks out.

  Elena accompanied Yamira on several jobs, watched how she made the beds, buried under mounds of thick comforters, and arranged the decorative pillows. Elena thought gringo households were full of unnecessary objects. Children had more toys than fit on their shelves. The wives’ and daughters’ closets overflowing with clothes and shoes. Husbands and sons with more cables and gadgets than a laboratory.

  Yamira cleaned in towns with smooth, wide roads and neatly flowered hills, nothing like the twisty uneven roads in Bogotá. Her clients lived behind gates or in houses wrapped with porches like a ballerina’s tutu. Sometimes clients were home as they cleaned, watching television, looking at the computer, or even napping as the women worked. Sometimes Elena and Yamira overheard conversations and arguments, babies crying with nobody to console them. Elena wanted to pick up those children, hold them close, but Yamira warned that employers preferred they remain invisible. Getting personal could get them fired.

  When Mauro and Elena went to work, a woman who lived with her husband and two others in one of the upstairs bedrooms of Dante and Yamira’s house looked after the children for twenty dollars. They managed this way for months, content in that windowless basement with the portable heater Yamira lent the family to keep by the bed where they slept in a nest of heartbeats.

  Some evenings, Mauro and Dante went to a bar a few blocks away, where other guys from the neighborhood gathered. Mauro had started drinking again but much less than before, so Elena didn’t bother him about it. He’d found a job in another factory. This one bottled hair spray in metal cans. It was under-the-table work, as usual, so sometimes the checks were smaller than expected, but they couldn’t complain. They didn’t have bank accounts. Every surplus dollar was wired home to Perla. When they were paid, if not in bills, they went to a check-cashing place on Central Avenue. That day, Mauro gave Dante his paycheck to cash while he ran another errand. When Dante later met him at the bar with the money, Mauro noticed bills missing.

  Elena later heard from witnesses that Mauro tried to reason with him, but Dante denied taking any. How dare you accuse me of being a thief when I’ve given your family a place to live? If it weren’t for me, you’d be on the streets! They said Dante pushed Mauro first. Petrified of being in trouble with the police again, Mauro stepped back, but Dante came at him with a punch, then a second and a third, until Mauro was on the floor. Some cops patrolling around the way heard about a fight and came to look. Dante was a citizen, so the police let him go without charges. But they looked up Mauro in the system and discovered his previous misdemeanor in Delaware, the hearing he skipped, his undocumented status, and took him away.

  Elena was told only that Mauro was kept on an “immigration hold,” then handed over to ICE, what used to be INS, who put him in detention. She believed he’d have to complete some penance, then be released to her. He might have to report to Immigration once a year like some people they knew, then they would be free to go about their lives undisturbed. She did not yet understand that Mauro would never be returned to them and was already marked for deportation.

  EIGHT

  At a café in Barichara, Talia watched tourists at tables hunched over guidebooks, staring into their phones, wearing leather and string necklaces, mochilas at their sides. They drank coffee and juice, connected to the Wi-Fi. The only Spanish Talia heard came from the television hanging above the bar counter. Among the hour’s top stories: a dozen girls escaped from a reform school in the mountains of Santander. They didn’t show pictures or give names, only reporting that four girls had already been located but another eight were still missing. Cut to Sister Susana standing in front of the guard gate, a microphone held to her face: “We are concerned for the girls’ safety and hope anyone with information will do the right thing and contact us or the police. Their families have been notified and are very worried about them.”

  Talia was glad she’d swapped her prison sweatshirt for a T-shirt she’d seen hanging on a clothesline after the old man left her on the town fringe, but she still wore her school sweatpants, grubby from running and wear. She finished the soda she’d paid for with money he gave her before parting along with a bendición across the forehead as if he were a relative. She went to the café bathroom to wash her face, topknot her hair. When she came out, she saw a man had just sat at a table alone—maybe her father’s age or a little younger, definitely not a local—and decided to approach.

  “May I sit?”

  He motioned with his hand to the empty chair opposite him. She’d learned a little English in school and from movies and TV programs that weren’t already dubbed. When her mother put Karina and Nando on the phone, she was able to understand some of what they said, even if she could tell they spoke extra slow for her benefit.

  “My name is Elena.”

  He studied her as if she might pick his pocket in plain view. None of the typical blitzed tourist expressions of dazed joy and overstimulation. She could tell in the past ten seconds he’d already determined he was much smarter than she was.

  “What can I do for you?”

  She understood he was waiting for lies so she opted for a version of the truth. “I ran away from my boarding school. I need to get back to Bogot�
�. My father is waiting for me. I have no money. Can you help me?”

  He may not have believed her but was intrigued enough not to shoo her off as tourists do to children begging outside restaurants for change. His Spanish was good, though he gargled his r’s rather than let them rest on his tongue and extended his vowels like some trench-coated villain. He said he was French. His name was Charles but he went by Carlos, since he’d been in Colombia for years already, obsessed with the country since he first heard about Ingrid Betancourt, held captive in the jungle, and kind of fell in love with her. He studied philosophy, worked a government job that was a slow eradication of his essence until he heeded his heart’s call to South America.

  Talia acted fascinated though she was already sick of the other café people eyeing her as if she were some baby puta looking to pick up.

  “Do you mind if we go somewhere else to talk?”

  The guy looked uncertain but followed her out of the café to the cobblestone road. He wore jeans and a T-shirt under a denim jacket. On his wrist, a macramé bracelet in the national colors, the kind Colombian girls give their foreign boyfriends.

  “Where is your girlfriend?”

  A look now as if this Elena girl had come to entertain him. “I left her in Caldas.”

  They settled onto a bench in front of a church on the plaza. He lit a cigarette and offered her one, which she took. Silence, until he slid his hand over hers. She was a virgin but had kissed four different boys since she turned thirteen. His hand was heavy and rough, but she didn’t push it away.

  “Tell me, Elena. What do you want from me?”

  “I need to get back to Bogotá. My father is waiting for me.”

  “You just want bus fare?” He sounded disappointed.

  She sensed he was a man yearning for purpose. If not for his whole life at least for that day. The sun was a buttery smear behind the mountainfold. In a few minutes, there would be no light.

  “Do you have a car?”

  “I do.”

  “You could drive me yourself. It would be safer than taking the bus alone. You wouldn’t hurt me.”

  He hesitated, maybe expecting her to beg or offer something in exchange. “I don’t like going on these roads at night. I rented an apartment here for the week. If your story is true I imagine you have nowhere else to stay. You can come with me, and I’ll take you home in the morning.”

  She smiled thinly. “Can you also buy me some new clothes so I can change out of these dirty ones? I saw a store earlier. We can still make it before they close.”

  * * *

  His apartment was one room of stucco walls under wooden beams. They sat on the sofa, a picnic of empanadas and chorizo between them. She wore the new jeans, blouse, and sweater he bought her. They couldn’t find socks for sale, so he gave her a pair of his to wear with her prison sneakers, with their crusted canvas and gnashed soles. He’d wanted to take her to a restaurant for dinner. She explained that even though the news wouldn’t show her face, her picture had probably been circulated among the police stations of the region. She didn’t want to be spotted and turned over to the law when she was just trying to get home.

  “Could I get in trouble for helping you hide?”

  “They never do anything to foreigners. Besides, being charitable is not a crime.”

  He liked this answer and poured her more wine, which she’d barely been sipping.

  “I can’t believe you’re only fifteen. I thought you were much older. Your face. Something… I don’t know.”

  He was thirty-eight. He came to Colombia to teach French. His students were mostly rich Medellín housewives, since people looking for practicality usually chose to learn English. “So many people want to leave this country,” he said. “I can’t understand it. Why would anyone want to leave the most beautiful place on earth?”

  Talia’s father said people don’t leave Colombia looking for money so much as looking for peace of mind. She told the Frenchman people left this country for the same reason he left his. It wasn’t giving him what he needed. To that, he agreed, adding he always had the impression he’d been born in the wrong place. She wondered about that, if by birth one could already be out of step with destiny, but only replied that she was very tired and ready to sleep.

  He told her to take the bed and he’d stay on the sofa. She approached the mattress, removing only her sneakers before slipping under the blanket, closing her eyes though the lights were still on. In the prison school, Talia lay on her bunk at night running films across her inner lids: images of her mother’s face, scenes from her life in the north, a life that would soon be hers too. She knew Elena from photos, though she probably wouldn’t have been able to pick her mother out of a crowd until recent years, when phone calls came with video—that is until the signal weakened and the picture froze or went black. On those video chats, Talia saw her mother’s bedroom behind her. Watched as she walked around with the phone to show Talia their house, her brother’s and sister’s rooms. Elena said Talia would share a room with Karina when she arrived. They’d already gotten a bed for her. She took Talia on a tour of the surrounding land. Silken grass, trees with leaves that brightened and shed with the mystery of seasons, unlike in Bogotá where the only weather shifts were from wet to wetter. In her mother’s winter, Talia saw tendrils of snow on their windows. In their summer, she saw her siblings sun-blushed, hair slick from swimming in the pool. Some days the Bogotá sun was naked enough for Talia to taste life beyond the elevated confines of the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, smashing the climatic monotony, but then the sun would cover in clouds again and she’d remember those minutes of summer were a lie. The best her measure of the Andes could offer was a cycle of seasons in a single day.

  Some nights the story of Talia’s family in North America crackled and faded as if she’d worn out the reel. On came memories of Perla; the years when the soapy scent of the lavandería filled her lungs, washing her mind and memories away with the rinse.

  Talia first noticed her grandmother started calling her Elena. I’m Talia, Abuela, she would remind her gently, because Perla was a prideful woman. Perla also began to call Mauro the name of her absent husband, Joaquín, who was rumored to have been murdered in Cúcuta on his way back to Bogotá a few years after he left for Venezuela, but Perla never forgave him enough for it to feel true. She was only in her fifties when her joints swelled—aging, it appeared to Talia, at warp speed. Elena had wanted to bring Talia to live with her many times over the years. When she was the age to start kindergarten, and each summer thereafter, to begin the new school year. But Talia begged to be left with her grandmother, whose own visa applications were repeatedly denied. Young as she was, Talia understood Perla would not survive without her. Being alone in her country with her family abroad would kill her quicker than the lavandería miasma or the thin mountain air.

  Those were years when Mauro was lost to drinking. Years when Talia saw her father only through the doorway because he was too drunk to be let inside. Years when, unwashed and disheveled, he cried at the sight of his baby girl and only turned away after Perla told him it wasn’t right for his daughter to see him in that state. When Perla became ill, Mauro returned for good. He announced he was a new man. He’d seen God or the gods, had conversations with angels and the ancestors. He’d been liberated of his vices and had cast away all his torments. Talia was only eight, but she remembered the vows he offered Elena over the phone as if in ceremony, to care for both her mother and their youngest girl.

  She heard the Frenchman’s sudden movements. Felt his footsteps approaching the way she felt the nun’s steps down the hall before she opened the dormitory door and Talia snared her with the pillowcase. Now he was sitting on the mattress beside her. He asked if it was okay if he touched her hair.

  There were girls at the prison school who’d slept with many boys and even grown men. They knew how to do all the things they liked: maneuvers they said made men lose their capacity for reason, bragging about it
when out of the nuns’ earshot.

  She heard him say she was beautiful, though not in the usual way; she had something, an attractive quality, he said, and the jeans he bought looked good on her. He eased the elastic from her hair so it spread over the pillow, thumbing a loose strand from her cheek to her lips.

  She thought of the girls on the mountain. People assumed her tough because she’d ended up among them. There were girls who were much stronger. They could have hurt her if they’d wanted. Her only defense was to behave as their equal, unafraid. What would one of those girls do in her place right now? She tried to summon their voices, but the best she could find was her own, faint but firm. “That’s enough.” Her eyes had yet to open, but her tone made him retract his hand, rise from the bed, and return to the sofa.

  At some point in the night he came back to the bed as she slept. She woke to his bare groin next to her. Her clothing was unprobed and nothing hurt, so she was fairly certain he hadn’t touched her. She pulled herself from the blanket and tried to step gently over the wooden floorboards so he wouldn’t stir. She picked up the wallet he’d left on the table, examining its contents. A few plastic cards and some cash. His phone required a pass code. She wanted to call her father but had seen too many detective programs where police traced a number in seconds.

  In the facility, the therapist pushed the girls to consider past decisions, how a single choice could have irreparable consequences. Talia understood this, but when she thought of the day in the alley by El Campín, she couldn’t remember the moment when she decided she’d go to the kitchen and reach for a bowl of hot oil. The act took hold of her, as unconscious as breathing. Here in the Frenchman’s apartment, however, she experienced at least a few seconds of deliberation before putting on her sneakers, grabbing his wallet and phone, edging out the door and down to the street.