Infinite Country

by Patricia Engel

  He said he could feel Elena in the room with them, as if she were in the air or in the plume of light parting the curtains. Elena told him it was true. She had been there with them. Even as she lay in that twin bed with a boy who was not her own in a house that was not her own in a country that was not her own. For those minutes, as the one who gave her life, the one she created life with, and the life she created, held one another and her mother’s spirit slipped away, they were together again.

  NINETEEN

  You already know me. I’m the author of these pages.

  There is more to the story of me, but this is what you need to know for now: I’ve had borders drawn around me all my life, but I refuse to live as a bordered person. I hate the term undocumented. It implies people like my mother and me don’t exist without a paper trail. I have a drawer full of diaries and letters I never sent to my grandmother, my father, even to my younger sister that will prove to anyone that I am very real, most definitely documented; photos taped to our refrigerator, snapshots taken at the Sandy Hill house or other friends’ fiestas, the Sears portraits our mother used to dress us up for every year, making us sit on bus seats still as statues so we wouldn’t wrinkle to have a perfect picture to send back to her mother. Don’t tell me I’m undocumented when my name is tattooed on my father’s arm.

  This assigned status wants you to think of the US government as another kind of parent. The one who rejects you for its preferred child. Sometimes I feel bad for having ever longed for those papers, like who I am isn’t enough. Why should I want to be identified as gringa, reciting the pledge they made me memorize in school before I even understood English, if the government makes it so clear they don’t want people like me here? Maybe that I don’t have the documentation they want is good. It means they don’t own me.

  I told my brother we should make a sign to hold up at the airport when we pick up Talia that says WELCOME TO KILL YOURSELF, NEW JERSEY. Nando said she’d get on the next plane back to Colombia and our mom would die of sadness.

  It was a joke, but not really. I figured Talia would eventually learn there is no place that can turn a person suicidal with the quickness of a North American suburb. Every now and then someone at school has a go. Usually a white girl, but sometimes a white boy. A few years back a teenager leaped off the Fort Lee cliffs. The town made a big production of its devastation. A lot of the girls said he was a show-off and started thinking of ways to compete with more dramatic final exits, like diving off a Manhattan skyscraper or something retro like lying across train tracks.

  Every time there’s a suicide attempt, the school administrators hold meetings for parents to learn how to help their miserable children, and it’s expected everyone attends or your parents will be seen as uncaring assholes. Our mother went once, but when she got home she said she didn’t understand how these kids who had everything they could possibly want in life—nice homes, parents who didn’t abandon them, food, clothing, cars, debt-free college educations waiting to be claimed—somehow had no desire to live. She’s convinced depression is a gringo problem and since Nando and I have Andean blood, we are spared.

  She doesn’t know that when I was a freshman who managed to get the second highest grade point average in class, I had a total fucking freak-out in the girls’ bathroom, couldn’t breathe, a crushing in my chest, pierced by an awareness that I was about to die, and ended up in the school shrink’s office.

  “You’re having an anxiety attack,” the lady explained. She wanted to tell my mom so she could arrange support, find me a therapist or some crap.

  I said there was no money for that. She called home, but Mami was working, so she left a message saying she was concerned about my ability to cope with stress and suspected I was experiencing depressive feelings.

  “¿Qué dice?” Mami asked.

  “It’s my English teacher. She wanted to let you know I’m the best student in her class.”

  She was satisfied with this, and the next time I saw the school shrink, I told her my mother said not to bother her at home anymore with stuff I can deal with myself.

  There are things I wanted to tell my sister before her arrival. Like that you can love the United States of Diasporica and still be afraid of it. The day after the last election, some kids came skipping into homeroom like a war was won. Hearing cocaine jokes and mechanical hallway insults of Go back to your country was nothing new for me and Nando, but there was new brazenness, like a gloved hand reaching for our throats, reminding us we were not welcome.

  I’m our mother’s interpreter when she comes to talk to our teachers or when her bosses can’t make themselves understood with their college Castellano. I can toss around phrases, carry conversations, sing along with reggaetón, but my Spanish grammar is shit and Nando and I probably have kindergarten vocabulary. We didn’t speak English till we started school. They put us in the ESL program for a few years. I did all I could to get out and kill my accent, but Nando slid into the remedial trap, which is where they put the undesirables, poor kids and minorities who aren’t math or science whizzes. Another word I hate: minority. A way to imply we’re outnumbered (we’re not), and suggest we are less than.

  It’s kind of amazing how rapidly language is diluted if not altogether lost, quicker than memories, which I still have of Colombia. A house of dark wooden walls, permeated with gentle voices and the tang of soap. A sky vast as an ocean. My father holding me atop a crater, silver water below. You want to say I was only a baby when I left. How could I possibly remember anything? But the pictures and scents come from a place deeper than recall. I wish I could see it again, but that’s the thing about being paperless. This country locks you in until it locks you out.

  I also remember the day Talia was born. We lived then in a yolk-yellow room that reeked of pizza, and this must be why I can’t stand the taste of it. Our parents were gone a long time. The lady watching us couldn’t pry me and Nando from the window above the alley, topped with snow. Then our parents arrived, something bundled and round in our mother’s arms.

  “This is your sister,” she said, and Nando started crying.

  Mami lowered herself to us, and I remember reaching for the baby’s face. “Suave, suave,” she said, as I felt the baby’s fuzz of hair and warm cheeks.

  At night we slept in a family tangle, my head on my father’s chest, hard and flat under my small body. One day he was gone. The mattress huge and empty without him.

  I’ve wondered if he remembers these things as often and as intensely as I do. In the years since he was taken, I’ve guessed at why he didn’t call more. If he didn’t miss us as much as we missed him. Or if it was his plan all along to deliver us to this country and leave us here alone. When we did speak on the phone, I worried he was just dealing with Nando and me like you deal with an old bill you forgot to pay or some stinky chunk of meat you’ve left on the kitchen counter too long.

  If I were completely honest, I’d tell Talia I’ve always been jealous of her. She might think me nuts since, from where she stands, it might look like Nando and I got the better life deal while she was stuck with our drunk dad and dying abuela. But I sensed our mother saw Talia as her lost treasure, something she lived her whole life in hope of reclaiming, that even with two children holding on to her as we slept after our father was gone, the child our mother most loved was the one she couldn’t touch because she’d sent her away.

  TWENTY

  You asked me to tell you what happened, and I said hell no. Then you said write it down because you’re putting together a record of our family, so this is the best I can do.

  We’ve been trying to pass since we moved to this town. You were the one who told me performing Anglo is in how you walk, talk, and dress. It’s in how you think, what you spend your money on when you have it. It’s in what you love and who you hate. You said if I believed I was one of them, they might believe it too.

  I try to avoid them, but they always find me. Like one time on the hot-food line in the cafe
teria, this kid pinched my neck from behind calling me spic boy and little Escobar, asking when I’m going to get the fuck out of the country already. I pushed my tray along the counter, hoping the lunch lady who saw and heard would say something, but she didn’t.

  I was talking to Emma back then. She wears one of those Irish rings with the heart pointed out and is seriously into ballet. We had our photography elective together. We were learning to use the old kind of cameras and develop prints. She hated how the chemicals burned her nostrils, so I did her darkroom work for her. We took photos of each other. Me, against the wall behind the science wing, staring at a tree branch like it was calling my name. Emma, pulling one of her legs to her ear.

  When we spread our prints on the table she said my eyes are amazing, like someone just carved me open.

  Like a fucking pumpkin, some dude I’ve never even talked to said, elbowing his way between Emma and me. Everything that followed was shit I’ve heard before. Even on the news. To Emma: Don’t you know his people are rapists? To me: You’d better leave her alone, latrino, or I’ll make a little phone call and have your whole family deported.

  Latrino. That was a new one. I got a whiff of his jock funk, saw Emma’s eyes lower like she was bound to him out of some secret loyalty. Next class she had a note for the teacher saying she couldn’t develop prints because of her allergies, so he assigned someone else to do hers for extra credit.

  * * *

  The last time I went to the principal with complaints about this sort of thing, she called three of the guys who were harassing me down to her office to get their side of the story. I was hopeful because the school staff was being extra sensitive, since a few weeks before when that kid in Florida busted into his school and killed seventeen people. We sat in a row of chairs facing her desk. She asked if it was true that they called me names and threatened my family.

  These guys gave looks like someone trash-talked their mothers. One said, Frankly, I’m offended Fernando would even suggest such a thing. We’ve only tried to befriend him since we noticed he’s had a hard time fitting in at our school.

  The principal turned to me. I know English is not your first language, Fernando, so it’s possible you may have misunderstood what your classmates have been saying to you. As you can see, their only interest is in helping you fit in with our community.

  That’s when I realized rich kids make for great criminals. After school, they followed me home. Watched in a car as I waited for the bus, driving behind until I got off at the stop down the road from our house, where there are only fields and horses around. They pulled onto the grass. Two guys jumped out and yanked me into the back seat. Punched me all over. Air left my lungs. But they didn’t touch my face, so when they pushed me out near our gates, though I could barely walk, Mom’s first thought when she saw me dragging myself up the driveway wasn’t that I’d had the shit kicked out of me but that I was coming down with the flu.

  She helped me into bed and went to prepare me some caldo de pollo. I couldn’t tell her the truth. You only found out because those assholes took a video of the beating and sent it to their friends. And then they sent it to you and texted if you let them give it to you up the ass they’d leave me alone. You were crying when you told me this and that there was nothing to be done. I said I could get a Taser. Electrocute their balls off next time they touched me or threatened you. You made me cross my heart that I wouldn’t.

  I remember wondering what it must feel like to belong to American whiteness and to know you can do whatever you want because nobody you love is deportable. Your worst crime might get you locked up forever but they’ll never take away your claim to this country. We both agreed telling anyone else would only bring attention to our family. You said you hate this place, and I hugged you even though it hurt my body and we aren’t really huggers anymore.

  When Mom checked on us after dinner, we’d already sworn to each other not to say a word of what happened. When she asked how I was feeling, I said her soup had done its job, I was almost back to normal.

  TWENTY-ONE

  It should have occurred to them that by the time they’d arrive in Chiquinquirá it would be dark and cold and they’d be hungry and need a place to sleep, but it didn’t. The basilica was closed for the day. Aguja would have to wait till morning to visit the Virgin. They didn’t have enough money for a hotel room. It was Aguja’s idea to return to the town boundary, to a pedestrian bridge suspended over a thin river. Talia followed as he lowered the motorcycle down the ridge, resting it under the bowed branches of a roble tree. He lay beside it and made a pillow of his jacket.

  “We’ll freeze if we sleep out here,” Talia said.

  “Our bodies were made for this climate. Do you think our ancestors had electric heaters?”

  “They had fire.”

  “Keep complaining. The sun won’t come up any quicker.”

  She sat beside him, knees pressed tight to her chest, felt the chill of the grass through her clothes.

  “You can let your back touch the ground,” he said. “Nothing will happen to you.”

  “I’m cold.”

  “Lay next to me. It will warm us both.”

  She leaned back, settling against him as their bodies aligned. “If you touch me the wrong way I’ll dig out both your eyeballs.”

  “I don’t know why you want to leave the country. You’re obviously a guerrillera by nature.”

  It occurred to her that if he smelled this badly, she must smell bad too. Their odors comingled from being pressed together through exhaust clouds, behind trucks and buses on highways and country roads. Self-conscious, she tried to tilt herself away, but he pulled her in closer. She felt his bones against her shoulder. He adjusted his arm to cradle her neck and set his palm against her side.

  “Are you going to tell me the truth of how you ended up so far from home?”

  “I told you. I was trying to get away from a bad guy.”

  “But what were you doing in Barichara of all places?”

  It had been only days since she’d fled from the prison school, but Talia felt she’d been lying for a very long time, maybe her whole life. She decided to give him as much honesty as she thought he could handle without being tempted to turn on her.

  “I ran away.”

  “From where?”

  “A place they sent me for not being good.”

  He laughed. “I believe that.”

  “You wouldn’t make a joke if you knew what I did to be sent there.”

  “Did you slap some other girl at school?”

  “I hurt a man badly. I burned him and scarred him for life.”

  “How?”

  “With hot oil.”

  He was quiet. She heard the chime of the river current. Above, starlight refracted, the moon cloud-narrowed to a bullet.

  “Does your mother know what you’ve done?”

  “No.”

  “So you’re a fugitive.”

  “I suppose.”

  “You know what happens to fugitives when they flee the country? You can never come back. If you do, the police will be waiting to send you to prison.”

  “I’m not some drug trafficker or politician. I’m only fifteen.”

  She felt his fingers light on her hair but didn’t tell him to stop.

  “Are you ready to leave this country knowing you might never be able to return?”

  “I don’t want to think about that.”

  “When you get to the United States, nobody will understand you. I don’t mean just the language. It’s a country of strangers. It will be another kind of sentence. But one that as an immigrant you won’t be able to escape.”

  “You think this country is so much better?”

  “No, but it’s a land of brothers and sisters. You want to go to a place where you’ll be invisible.”

  “I want to be with my mother.”

  “Colombia is your mother too.”

  * * *

  Aguja slept, but Talia rem
ained awake on the bed of hard earth, deafened by the river. At home, when she couldn’t sleep, she’d go to her father’s room and ask him to tell her the story of how Chiminigagua created the sun, named Sué, and then his wife, Chía, the moon. Though they were loving companions, they argued over who should control the world through day and night. Since Chía watched the world through the darkness, Mauro said Talia should ask her help to guide her into a peaceful sleep until her husband, Sué, took over the care of the world at daybreak.

  Usually Talia fell asleep still whispering her petition to the moon, and when she awoke to the apartment bathed in morning light, her father, with breakfast ready in the kitchen, told his daughter she must be special because the moon always listened to her.

  She knew she would never know another night like this one. Not beside Aguja and not under flaring stars like nails hammered into the sky, the waft of dirt and mint and flowers, the murmur of the arroyo flowing toward the Río Magdalena to the mouth of the Caribbean Sea, where sharks fed on the burst of river fish. This land, with all its beauty, still manages to betray itself, she remembered her father saying. If this were true, and she was one if its children, it was no mystery why she turned her back on it just as her parents had done before her.

  She thought of what would be gained and what would be lost once she left.

  In the other country, she would embrace her mother and siblings for the first time since she was a baby. They would all sleep under the same roof.

  In the other country, she would fall in love for the first time. The thought thrilled her. But then she thought in this country she may never find love and felt blighted.

  In the other country, an uncharted future awaited. But it could only be so if she let her future in this country die.

  In the other country, she would no longer be a criminal. But in the other country half her family was and always would be.