Infinite Country

by Patricia Engel

  Grunting until his final spasms. She still cannot say how much time passed. Minutes maybe, but she was already gone, soul departed, searching for remnants of who she’d been just minutes before. When he removed himself from her, she felt him cover her back with her coat. She pulled up her pants, her stretched underwear. She managed to ask why.

  Without meeting her eyes he said, “I don’t know. I’m not usually attracted to mothers.”

  She walked to the bus stop, scalp burning from where he pulled, propped onto her hip the whole ride because it hurt too much to sit, weeping into her sleeve. The next morning, when she went to pick up the children from Toya’s, she told her what happened as plainly as she could. Toya had been in the United States much longer, and Elena hoped she’d have some advice or wisdom. She heard her own voice as if it belonged to someone else. Toya walked to her stove, turned the heat on under the kettle, and leaned against the counter.

  “Amiga, I’m sorry to say these things happen all the time. Try to forget it.”

  “What do I do about the boss?”

  “Nothing. You can’t report him. The police won’t believe you. They could ask for your papers and arrest you because you don’t have any. They’ll send you back to your country and split up the kids because Nando was born here and Karina wasn’t. Go back to work and get your money. Start wearing a wedding ring. Don’t be alone with him. And if he tries again, remember it will soon be over.”

  If she’d spoken to anyone but Toya that day, she might have gone about things differently. But Elena trusted her to watch her children, and so she trusted her counsel too. She decided never to speak again of what happened in the restaurant even if she relived it in her mind without end. Not to Mauro, to Perla, to anyone. Instead, she lit a candle every night to the devotional card of the Virgen de Chiquinquirá her mother gave her before leaving for the United States. She begged not to become pregnant and cried when her period finally came.

  * * *

  It was Talia’s first Christmas and Elena’s first without Mauro since they’d met. The restaurant gave bonuses for the holidays. Elena was able to buy toys for Nando and Karina. She sent the rest to Perla to buy something for the baby and set some apart for Mauro for when he turned up at the house.

  Her calls with Perla got shorter. She couldn’t bear to lie to her mother, tell her everything was all right when it wasn’t. Normally Perla would put the baby on the phone before hanging up, but Elena was afraid of passing her pain to the child, as if contagious even by sound. She felt a liar, a conspirator to the man who abused her because she protected him with silence. Now she understood why he chose her.

  Elena and the children celebrated Nochebuena with the other residents of the Sandy Hill house who’d all pitched in to buy a Christmas tree, decorated with homemade ornaments and paper garlands, and between them prepared a feast. They’d just finished eating when Elena’s phone rang. She heard Mauro’s faint voice, his first call in months.

  “It sounds like a great party.”

  Elena ached to confess that despite the guitar strums and villancicos he heard sung in the background, she was drowning without him, but she knew in his own way he was drowning too. She put the children on the phone so they could hear their father and imagined the things he might be saying to them, watching their expressions of glee and confusion. Papi, they said over and over. Es Papi.

  Elena remembered a story Perla told her in the months before she and Mauro left Colombia. They were sweeping the lavandería as they did every evening after locking up. Elena worried about leaving her mother alone. The workers they hired were undependable, rarely lasting more than a few weeks. Perla told her about a mother and daughter who lived alone together like they had before Elena met Mauro. The mother and daughter were very close, loved each other very much, and had no family but each other. One day they were walking together on the road when they were confronted by a wicked man who macheted them both to death. The daughter had lived a pure life, so she went straight to heaven. But the mother had lived a longer, more complicated life, so she waited in limbo, looking up to heaven, and one day spotted her daughter in all her eternal glory. She called for her daughter to lower her hair so she could climb it and join her in the upper world. The daughter dropped her braids, her mother climbed, and the two were overjoyed at being reunited. The mother thought her daughter had saved her from languishing in the void, Perla had said. She didn’t know she’d already been purified, that her daughter was only waiting until it was the mother’s turn to be called home.

  FIFTEEN

  Mauro’s sobriety was still a fragile thing. He sometimes squandered months of it for a few blurry days that would leave him feeling sick down to his liver. He didn’t yet feel ready to return to live with Talia and Perla but visited often, and saw that in his daughter’s eyes he was becoming more familiar, someone she looked at with delight. He no longer resembled those she called “outside people,” who wiped windshields at intersections, or the unsheltered day-sleepers on sidewalks and patches of dead grass. Sometimes he brought Talia flowers, which she’d pull apart petal by petal, or a peluche when he could afford it. Her favorite was a small yellow bear that she took everywhere until she dropped it during an outing with her grandmother. At least that’s what Perla told him. He brought her a pink bear as a replacement, but she didn’t love it in the same way.

  In one of his meetings Mauro met a man who asked if he did handiwork. He said he managed an apartment building near El Retiro. They were looking for someone to do maintenance and repairs around the property.

  Mauro appeared at Perla’s door in a new uniform, said he had a good job and was ready to live in the house again, that he could pay more than his share and help with the lavandería before and after his shifts. He saw how Perla was struggling. Fewer customers and other supposedly loyal ones who never paid their long-running tabs. Perla was becoming sick too. Her breathing laborious, coughing fits that produced dots of blood. But she refused to see a doctor. Mauro, not wanting to disrespect her, didn’t insist.

  Mauro and Elena spoke every few weeks, mostly because she was calling for Perla and he happened to answer. Conversations that were largely transactional. He reported on the lavandería, told her what Perla wouldn’t, like that they’d moved her bed to the room on the ground floor behind the kitchen because the stairs overwhelmed her. Her memory fragmenting, words and names for things slipping from her grasp; how she referred to Karina and Nando as the girl and the boy and one day, when Mauro asked Perla to say their names, she could not.

  Mauro told Elena that Perla’s memory was restored in Talia’s presence. She knew every detail of her granddaughter’s life. The way she liked each meal prepared down to the stirring of a spice, waking to dress her for school, watching as she left the house with Mauro, who dropped her at class on his way to work. For Talia, her grandmother was not a fading sunset but a woman burning bright. And so, Elena agreed to postpone sending for her daughter to join her in the United States knowing, as Mauro did, that Perla would not survive long without her.

  * * *

  In the years that Mauro drifted further from the life he had with Elena, Karina, and Nando, he rooted deeper into his life with Talia. He heard his other children’s resistance when Elena forced them to the phone with him. Monosyllabic. They no longer called him Papi or Papá but Dad or nothing at all. He could not deny Talia was special to him because she was the one he watched grow.

  When she was seven, Mauro took her to the lake. It was the first time Perla let him travel beyond the barrio with the child without supervision. They took the bus across city limits, and Mauro carried her up the mountain slope on his back.

  He told her about Bochica, the Muisca god of wisdom who taught laws and morals to his people, and his rival, Chibchacum, who punished the world with the ancient diluvio, a universal flood that submerged all life until, with his staff, Bochica forced sunrays through the rain clouds, and the water puddled and parted, making lakes and fertile valleys,
pushing the excess through the mountain belt into what became the Tequendama waterfalls. Mauro told Talia how Bochica sentenced Chibchacum to carry the world on his back, and every time they felt an earthquake, it was just Chibchacum shifting under the weight.

  When they reached the top, taking in the valley of water below, Talia asked why they couldn’t go swimming in it. Mauro said Guatavita was a sacred lake. They’d come to honor it, and he’d been there with her mother and sister to make wishes for their new life in the north. He told her what Tiberio once told him: When the world was new, the creatures that ruled were the jaguar, the snake, and the condor. Of the snakes, the anaconda, the most massive serpent, swam in jungle waters among fish with tails as long as rainbows, crabs and turtles as wide as cars, crocodiles four times the size of the dwarfed ones that dwell in the Amazon and Orinoco Rivers. The boa queen was above all predators, able to constrict the life out of any creature she wanted. The boa’s power was its silence; eyes that saw everything, movement so graceful and subtle that no other animal could sense they were being watched or hunted. The snake didn’t need to prove its danger. The snake knew power came from patience.

  Mauro told Talia about the serpent that lived at the bottom of the lagoon. Some said she was Bachué, mother of the Muisca. Others insisted the serpent was the devil.

  From the lake we came and to the lake we will return, Mauro repeated Tiberio’s words, though Talia’s eyes were on the birds circling above. We’re all migrants here on earth.

  There was one story of Guatavita Mauro never told Elena or either of his daughters when he took them to see the lake. A story he wished he’d never learned, though it came from his mother, and was one he’d never be able to forget.

  The territory surrounding the lake was once governed by a powerful cacique who was married to a princess from another tribe and with whom he had a daughter. But the cacique was often drunk on chicha, off at bacchanals, and in his absence, his wife fell in love with a young warrior. The lovers were caught, and the cacique had the warrior tortured, cut out his heart, and presented it to his wife as proof of his ruthlessness and her infidelity. The princess ran away, thrusting herself, with her daughter in her arms, into the lake. The cacique sent his high priests to search for them. They soon returned to inform the cacique that his wife now lived below in the water kingdom as the bride of an enormous serpent. The cacique demanded his daughter be returned to him. The serpent sent back a young girl who resembled his daughter but with her eyes removed, so she could not see her father, recoiling when he tried to embrace her. And so it was the cacique who submitted, returning his beloved daughter to the lake to live with her mother and the serpent until the end of time.

  SIXTEEN

  Before they left for Texas, people warned Elena everyone gets fat in the north. Chemicals replace natural ingredients, so bread is not bread by the time one eats it. Meat from hormone-reared animals, mutant produce, colorful and rotund yet flavorless. Where fresh was expensive, and cheap was a tasty poison packaged as a meal. But after each time she gave birth in the United States, her body restored itself to its original form. It was after Mauro left that her body became something else, even as she walked more, ate less, carrying the children and their belongings every time they moved. She was stronger but never felt more tired or shapeless. When cell phones enabled people to see the person on the other side of the call, Elena held the camera close to her face to conceal from Mauro her new bulges.

  She remembered the first time Mauro’s eyes glinted in that small screen. For years she’d imagined them meeting again, and there he was in her hand, gaunt, his forehead wide and square. The long hair she so loved to bury her face in was gone. She could tell he was taking in the sight of her too. The new wrinkles mapping old smiles, grays sparking from her temples.

  “You’re as beautiful as ever, Elena.”

  “I’m not and I know it. You don’t have to lie.”

  Silence anchored until Talia took the phone from her father to ask Elena to send money to buy a new schoolbag.

  “The one you have is perfectly fine,” Mauro said, and Talia argued briefly as Elena watched through the phone, a spectator to an intimacy she no longer shared with either of them.

  Perhaps it had nothing to do with her body but with what the man at the restaurant did to her. The only man she’d ever been with besides Mauro. Their separation was involuntary. But time and borders did more to distance them than any divorce or widowing could.

  She’d remained faithful. If not with her body, with her mind and heart, still with Mauro even through his years lost to drinking and hiding in city streets, despite the sporadic contact and stilted conversations, the silence that on her end, at least, held fear that it would be that way forever. She had many nightmares, but when her dreams were good, they were only of him, of being old with Mauro, their children safe and grown with families of their own. In her dreams they were always back in Colombia, never in the north, waiting peacefully for death to find them in their own land.

  * * *

  She stayed to work at the restaurant a few months longer. These were zombie days of obstinate nausea when Elena understood that what she said or wanted meant nothing. She kept what happened to herself, even when she’d hear about another woman from the neighborhood who went through something similar. They never commiserated. They kept each other strong so they could keep mothering and survive.

  Maybe it goes back to the first time she got paid in the United States, apart from Mauro’s income, and was able to send money back to her mother. A pride, a satisfaction like no other she’d known. To be able to give to the one who gave her everything. To be able to make Perla’s days easier. A feeling that brought meaning and light to every dark day that came before or after.

  One spring day with a morning moon, instead of walking from the bus stop to her regular shift at the restaurant, Elena turned and headed past the main avenue to streets lined with houses, expensive cars parked in driveways, and began knocking on doors. In her best English, she pronounced: I can clean your house. First time you pay what you want.

  She soon had a few regular clients. She tried to be discerning. Yamira had taught her to be careful for whom she cleaned. Just like at any other job, one could be assaulted by an employer or work for weeks without getting paid.

  Some houses were bigger than others. In one case, the current housekeeper had just been fired. In another, the lady of the house told Elena her husband demanded she do the cleaning herself but she would hire her if she promised not to tell anyone and be gone before the husband returned from work. In another home, the patrona made Elena wear slipcovers over her shoes. In another, no shoes were permitted at all. One man insisted Elena clean everything with bleach, which made her so dizzy she’d often have to lie on the bathroom floor, cheek to tile, until she could see clearly again. Some nights, she coughed through her sleep. Hands calloused, fingertips inflamed. Back sore and feet blistered from treks to each house to the bus station and back home. But the money. It was everything.

  From her cleaning pay, she was able to set some aside to pay a lawyer she found through Toya to help her apply for a green card. He asked for only five hundred up front and collected the rest in monthly installments, which she could save by washing and folding clothes for other residents of the Sandy Hill house at the coin laundry. But after nearly a year of payments and nothing to show for them, Elena went to the lawyer’s office to inquire about her case’s progress and found his office had been vacated.

  She cleaned the house of a woman who learned Spanish during a school exchange in Sevilla. She loved to practice and sometimes invited Elena to sit with her as she ate lunch. She told her about the boyfriend she had in Spain who she still thought about, found on the internet, and dreamed of contacting. Elena felt she could trust this woman the way she trusted her. She told her what happened with the lawyer, hoping she might have advice since she was married to a lawyer, though her husband worked at a bank. She explained the family’s si
tuation, how Mauro had been sent back. It was the first time she’d ever gotten so personal with a boss, but this woman struck Elena as compassionate, how she straightened her house before Elena arrived to clean and always apologized for her son’s messes. She was surprised to learn Elena had three children, since she’d never mentioned them, including a boy exactly her own son’s age.

  “Can I ask you a question?” the woman said.

  Elena thought it would be something about Mauro’s case. Maybe his deportation story sounded too far-fetched.

  “Why do your people have so many children when you can’t afford to take care of them?”

  The way she said your people—gente como tú—with a biting gringa twang, confused Elena, since she thought of herself as a woman, a mother, just like the patrona.

  “My husband and I live comfortably, but we have made a conscious and, I believe, responsible decision to have only one child so we can provide a good lifestyle and education for him.” She touched Elena’s hand. “I understand accidents happen. But did you ever consider… other options?”