Infinite Country

by Patricia Engel

  NINE

  Talia’s first ride on a motorcycle. Its owner smelled of cigarettes with a touch of cheap cologne. He had smooth arms and a long scar above his beltline that disappeared beneath his shirt. Her thighs spread around his. Her arms circled his waist, and she knew he must have felt her breasts against his back. A peculiar closeness despite the noise of the motor, the heat of exhaust under her feet, wind burning her eyes so she had no choice but to shield her face with his shoulder.

  She’d found him by the side of a narrow street back in Barichara after she left the French guy’s apartment. The streets were quiet. She didn’t want to take a chance waiting for a bus, especially when he might come looking for her after waking and realizing he’d been robbed. This guy was straddled over his bike, putting on his helmet, when Talia ran up to him and offered the Frenchman’s phone and everything in his wallet if he could get her out of town.

  He inspected the phone and counted all the cards in the wallet slits as if he received such propositions daily. She’d already removed the cash and stuffed it into the crotch of her underwear. He pointed to a government ID. “Can I have this too?”

  “Everything.”

  “You shouldn’t pick tourists’ pockets. It will give the town a bad name. We depend on their money around here.”

  “It’s not what you think. Take me out of here right now and I’ll tell you more later.”

  He looked to be a few years older than Talia and not particularly dangerous. Unless he had a gun, but from her position as his passenger, she could feel every crease of his clothing, see down the seat of his jeans, and was pretty sure he wasn’t armed.

  The girls in the facility said if you are ever attacked or need to kill a guy but have no weapon, shove your fingers into his eye sockets and twist them like corkscrews. Don’t be shaken if you take out an eyeball. Those things are not as well attached as one might think. Doing this will disable the guy so you can get in a kick to his scrotum. Once he’s doubled over, grab his penis and pull, and when you have him on the ground like a dying roach you can reach for a rock or some other weighty object to drop on his head. This is assuming you don’t have a knife. But if you do, it’s best to try to gash the throat instead of aiming for the body because between ribs and fat and muscle, wounding to kill with a blade is a gamble you’d better not take. It’s much more effective to bash his skull.

  None of the girls were full-fledged murderers yet. Those kids were sent somewhere else, housed in a building with no prayer of escape. And should one get close to fleeing, they might be strangled or drowned in a bucket of water and have it labeled an accident or suicide. But some of the girls at the prison school were definite contenders for serious miscreant behavior. Not premeditated like a sicario, but potentially taking a life if sufficiently set off. A couple of girls had tried to kill their fathers, stepfathers, or uncles for molesting them, and who could blame them? One girl stabbed a teacher. She told Talia she couldn’t stand sitting in that class, listening to that arrogant perra lecture for another minute. But as the girls said, it’s not easy to kill by knife, so the teacher survived just fine, and the girl was sentenced to a year on the mountain.

  The guy with the motorcycle didn’t ask Talia her name. He’d been calling her niña since they met. He said his was Andrés but everyone called him Aguja. She checked his arms and neck for needle tracks to see if that was how he got such a gross nickname but they were clean.

  He leaned his head back and asked how far she wanted to go. He could leave her at the gas station up ahead or drive a bit farther if she wanted.

  “Keep going,” she said.

  “What’s your final destination?”

  “Bogotá.”

  “I can’t take you that far, but I can probably get you to Barbosa.”

  They settled into the hum and pressure of the road. If she hadn’t doused Horacio with cooking oil, it would be just another school day for Talia. She was a good student, but the classes at the prison school were dumbed down and she refined her skill of keeping an alert face while falling into a trance, imagining her life once she got out of the country. Going to a new American school. Speaking En-glish. Enjoying life with her mother and siblings. She didn’t tell any girls on the mountain she had a ticket to the United States waiting for her. They’d gotten to be friendly, but some were rageful enough to sabotage the escape plan out of spite. Trust no one. That’s what her father always said. Trust only family, if you’ve got family to trust.

  * * *

  She didn’t remember much about her early childhood. It only came into focus around age four or five, when her father began appearing at Perla’s house more often, asking to see Talia. The rangy, sad-faced man, similar to the ones they found sleeping outside the doorway in the mornings before Perla opened the lavandería. Mauro always wore the same clothes and usually looked like he’d just woken up. Long unwashed hair. Walnut skin chafed by the highland winds. Still, there was something handsome about him. She hadn’t yet learned to be critical or judgmental. She looked at her father as a shining star, early inklings of what her mother might have seen in him when she loved him, before she let him go.

  She remembers the day he showed up in new clothes, hair cut to his ears. Eyes bright and centered, not stray bullets shooting around the room like before. Perla let him into the living room, and they sat, the three of them, as if just introduced. Talia was seven that day, and Mauro made a big deal of it. He told her seven was a magic number and it would be the year that determined her destiny.

  Perla said not to fill her mind with such nonsense. She didn’t like that when they started spending time together, Mauro would share with Talia stories from the Knowledge about the origin of the world that contradicted Perla’s imperial versions; that the first people were created not by God in the form of Adam and Eve or apes who learned to walk upright, but by the moon who put the earth into her vagina and gave birth to a son and a daughter. But even before the first humans, there was the darkness before light and the first beings the Creator, Chiminigagua, made were two black birds that spread wind from their beaks and from the wind came the breath of life that illuminated the world.

  And that from the lake Iguaque, the great mother Bachué emerged holding a boy by the hand, and when the boy was grown she made him her husband and gave birth to his children, traveling the earth, leaving daughters and sons like stardust wherever they went. This was how the world was populated, Mauro said. Bachué and her husband educated their progenies, taught them the laws of humanity and the ceremonies to live and remember them by, and when they were old, they returned to the sapphire lake, transformed into snakes, and disappeared into the water.

  Mauro appreciated that these stories offered explanations for his being, reminded him there was another land, a better one of divine logic wrapped inside this professed tierra de Colón, that he wasn’t pacing the earth blind as he often felt and Creation provided clues that made paths clearer, as simple as the blackbird song that announces oncoming rain and the whistles of the Andean sparrow that signal the clouds will soon part. And also because they were stories his mother had learned from her parents before leaving their ancestral home in Guachetá to find work in the city, and were the only inheritance she’d left Mauro before pushing him to the streets.

  Talia once saw a movie about a dead grandmother who visited her family members from the afterlife. She came to them each night, stood by their beds, and gave instructions and advice for how they should go on in the world of the living without her. When Perla started forgetting, her breath already something she could only hold steady with the help of plastic tubes up her nose, Talia told herself she didn’t need to worry because her grandmother would still come see her after they buried her.

  Mauro was living with them for a few years by then. Talia knew she would be safe with him. But she would miss Perla’s face, her voice, the way she talked about Elena and Talia as if they were almost the same person so Talia could feel connected to her mother even
though she had no memory of her touch or embrace.

  But after Perla died, she never came to see Talia, even as Talia kept vigil and whispered her grandmother’s name until she fell asleep. They celebrated a Mass for her in a church and Talia saved a space for Perla beside her in the pew. She set a plate for her at every meal and cleaned her room as if she might walk through the door at any moment. She recited Perla’s favorite psalms, sang the songs she’d taught her, and when her grandmother didn’t come, Talia sat before the large crucifix hanging in the foyer, staring up at the son of God—his glass eyes, that mane of real human hair—touching the five wounds the way Perla did every day before she left the house.

  Mauro told Talia their Muisca ancestors believed the soul leaves the body at death and begins a long journey through gorges and valleys of golden and black soil, crossing wide rivers until it reaches the kingdom of the dead at the center of the earth, beginning a new immortal existence that’s not so different from this mortal life in the upper world.

  Talia concluded that her grandmother was still in transit, among the hordes of the world’s newly dead, and if the traffic in the underworld was anything like rush hour in Bogotá, it would take her a long while to arrive. As soon as Perla sat down to rest, she would have time to visit her family.

  Since there was no money for a cemetery plot with a proper tomb, Perla was cremated. Mauro sent the ashes to Elena in a package that was lost in the mail for three months before it arrived. During those months, Talia imagined her grandmother’s ashes traveling the world, flying over oceans and jungles and deserts, seeing things they’d only seen on television, the world outside the barrio she’d hardly ever left.

  Talia had no idea what her mother did with those ashes. She’d wanted to reserve a scoop for herself, but Mauro said it wasn’t right to divide Perla’s remains, and she belonged more to Elena than to either of them. But Talia thought it was wrong to parcel her away from Colombia, a country she said she’d never leave, even if the gringos granted her a visa, even if her daughter and grandchildren made lives elsewhere. Now what was left of her was already in New Jersey and Talia was the last of her family line in the Andes.

  There was a girl at the prison school who called herself an espi-ritista, claiming she could cast spells and speak to the dead, and if a girl gave her their portion of dinner, she would cook up an hechizo or call upon whichever ancestor they wanted. She was fat from getting everyone’s rice and potatoes, but most of the girls only wanted her to harm people they felt wronged by in life—relatives, rivals, the judges who sentenced them. One night Talia gave the girl her whole slab of pork, tough as plastic, but she would eat anything. Later, in their dormitory, Talia told the girl to bring Perla to talk to her. The girl closed her eyes, recited some nonsense words, and said Talia’s grandmother would appear to her that night in her dreams.

  It didn’t happen. When Talia complained the next morning, the girl swore her grandmother had appeared to her, she just didn’t remember it. “The memory of her visit will come to you in the future,” the girl said. “Be patient.”

  If they’d been in the outside world, Talia might have smacked the girl. But since they were already locked up, all she could do was wait.

  * * *

  In the bathroom at a roadside restaurant near Oiba, Talia pulled some cash from her underwear. When she came out, she went to the counter and bought two sodas and empanadas. She found Aguja in the parking lot polishing the handlebars of his moto and gave him one of each.

  He sipped from the can. The liquid turned his top lip orange. “You said you would tell me why you’re in such a hurry once I got you out of Barichara.”

  “I have a flight to catch.”

  “Where to?”

  “The United States.”

  “Why?”

  “My mother lives there with my brother and sister. They’re waiting for me.”

  “Aren’t you afraid?”

  “Of what?”

  “Over there people walk into schools and buildings with weapons and kill everyone. They’re not even guerrilla or paramilitary. Just regular people. What are you going to do when you’re out shopping and some gringo points a machine gun at your forehead?”

  “I don’t think it’s any worse than here. Just different.”

  “Do you have a father?”

  “Yes. In Bogotá.”

  “What does he think about you going north?”

  “He always knew I would. I’m American.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “I was born there. My mother sent me here when I was a baby.”

  “Oh, you’re one of those. Sent back like some DHL package.”

  “You’re jealous I have a way out of here. Everyone is.”

  He gargled the last drops of his soda, kicking the empty can onto a patch of grass. Talia went to pick it up and drop it in the trash with her own can.

  “Who’s the guy you robbed?”

  “Some pervert.”

  “Did he do something to you?”

  “He tried.”

  “What were you doing in Barichara?”

  “Seeing some of my country before I leave it.” She was tired of his questions. “What about you? Are you in school?”

  “Not for years. I do odd jobs. Deliveries when people ask. I used to work for a mechanic, but I got bored and stopped going.”

  “Who do you live with?”

  “My girlfriend’s family. I was outside their house when you found me.”

  “Lucky me.”

  “Don’t start flirting with me. I told you I’ve got a girlfriend. You’re a kid, and I’m not a pervert like that other guy.”

  “Who’s flirting? I’m just saying I’m glad you got me out of that place.”

  He climbed onto his motorcycle, sliding his hips forward to make room for her. She eased onto the seat behind him, slid her hands around his waist, clasping them at his navel. “Don’t get attached, niña. Just a little longer on this road and you’re on your own.”

  TEN

  When the police told Mauro his daughter had brutally assaulted a man, that she could have blinded him for life, he was sure she did it in self-defense. She never caused problems at home or school. She had the manners he never had. He was wrong. It wasn’t self-defense, but still he believed she had her reasons and they must have been right and good.

  In his meetings for addicts there was a lot of talk of being overtaken by the devil. They said he sent lesser demons to corrupt mankind in innocuous ways until a person found themselves trapped in a citadel of misdeeds. Some addicts in the room said they’d felt possessed when using, and one guy said that at his lowest, when he was selling himself for drugs, he found himself face-to-face with el diablo in the form of a client who laughed as the man knelt before him and said, Look what I made you do.

  Some of their testimonies were hard to believe, even if in their country it seemed anything was possible. Many of the men were demobilized and reintegrated paras and guerrilleros with telltale awkwardness, agitation as if at any moment they might detonate. They never said so explicitly, but one could tell by their testimonies, which included hazing bordering on torture or being made to transport weapons and survey landmines; a life of discipline with comrades who replaced their families. Drugs and alcohol only came when they rejoined society, where they were shunned and their combat skills proved useless. In their old lives some might have been enemies—and often they were still hunted over old battle scores—but at the meetings, they assumed the tacit pledge to support one another’s sobriety and anonymity.

  The antidote to disgrace, according to even the atheists in the group, was humility and prayer. Mauro followed their instructions because they’d kept him clean for nearing a decade. But one day, when another addict started talking about the devil as some grand puppeteer, Mauro remembered when Perla warned him, as she was just starting to let him walk through her front door after years of trying, not to bring any dark energies with him because she’d alrea
dy gone through the trouble of having the house cleansed of bad spirits. Perla wasn’t worried about evil getting her at that late stage in her life; she’d done it, she said, to protect her grandchild.

  When Perla became sick and Mauro moved into the house with her and Talia, when the old woman started talking to him like he could be her son for the first time in both their lives, Mauro asked her as they sipped tintos at the kitchen table if she’d been serious about the cleansing or if it was just a story to keep him in line. Perla had trouble breathing, but she often refused to use her oxygen. Not around Talia because she knew it upset her, but at night after the little girl had gone to sleep, when she and Mauro stayed up talking, she removed the tubes from her nose and pushed the barrel on wheels away from her side. “A lifetime at this altitude and now the air is too thin for me,” she said. “What gives you life eventually takes it.”

  Mauro pressed Perla until she admitted that some years before, inexplicable things began happening around the house. During the brightest afternoon hours, the upstairs room, usually the most temperate, felt like an icebox. The water for the lavandería clotted with mire. She’d blamed the old plumbing and the unseasonal chill of winds blowing off the cordillera, but then things started falling from the walls—paintings, photographs—when no earthquakes had been reported. She found a basket of rusty razors on the doorstep, and Talia, who’d barely begun to speak sentences, told her abuela she saw silhouettes in her bedroom and felt them perch on the edge of her bed at night after she’d been tucked in for sleep. Perla called a nun she’d known since childhood, and the sister said the basket of razors was a clear sign of maleficio.