Infinite Country Read online

  TWO

  The social worker described the compound like a summer camp, a small boarding school in the hills of Santander. A retreat, even if operated by the government. There were academic classes so the girls wouldn’t fall behind when, time served, they were free to return to their normal schools. She told Mauro he should be grateful his daughter wasn’t treated the same as girls from lower estratos, comunas, or invasiones, the ones usually sent to rougher facilities. Talia, she said, could pass for middle class, and this is why she was sentenced to only six months, given a path to redemption, even as Mauro argued this was a country of not second but hundredth chances for the chosen; a nation of amnesiacs where narcotraficantes become senators and senators become narcotraficantes, killers become presidents and presidents become killers.

  Mauro knew what it was to be locked away. He’d never spoken of it with any of his children, with Elena or Perla. Men corralled in a warehouse cold as a meat locker. The rationing of showers and blankets and food. The dream of release, not to Elena or the children, but to the land the gringos threatened to banish him to as if it were a return to hell.

  Home.

  When she was small Talia often asked her father the meaning of the word. Home. Sometimes she understood it meant a house or an apartment, the place a person returned to at the end of a long day. The place where one’s family lived even if they left it a long time ago. The place one felt most comfortable. All of these notions contradicted her first sense of it. Home, to Talia, was a space occupied by her grandmother Perla. A place Mauro came to visit when she and her mother, Elena, over the international wires, permitted it.

  Elena was far away with Talia’s siblings, Nando and Karina. When Talia heard her mother’s voice over the phone she often spoke of Colombia as home but quickly added, so her daughter wouldn’t misunderstand, that the United States was home now too. “It’s also your home,” she’d tell Talia, “because you were born here.”

  Years later, when it was just Talia and Mauro living together in Perla’s old house, she pressed her body close against her father’s chest when he came to her room to give her la bendición before sleep. “You are my home,” she’d said. “Even if my mother makes me leave you, I will always come back to you.”

  She was a girl who perceived leaving for North America as a distant threat. Something she could not imagine she would ever want. One day it was different. Mauro noticed Talia’s face when they watched gringo movies or television programs with subtitles. That unmistakable, irrevocable fascination. The way she started inserting English words into their conversations. He saw the longing take hold, crisp disdain for her familiar yet stale life with him.

  He blamed himself for the way he made both Elena and Talia resent their country. His tendency of pointing out evidence of hypocrisy as if their colonized land was more doomed than any other. He wanted to take it all back. The malignant seeds he planted in Elena, who, until she met Mauro, never saw another future beyond helping Perla run the lavandería, who’d only ever traveled as far as Villavicencio on a school trip, for whom a trip to Cartagena was as inconceivable as one to Rome.

  Mauro was the one who put it in her head that Bogotá was just another pueblo masquerading as a metropolis and there was more to discover. In their mountains and hungry valleys, they were all descendants of massacred Indigenous Peoples, their violated foremothers. They could hate the conquistadores for what they stole, but they couldn’t deny they carried the same genetic particles that pushed the original invaders to wander into the unknown. Los españoles occupied their land, christened it Nueva Granada. Diluted their bloodlines. Killed their tribes. The people they used to be. But instead, Mauro thought, they’d become something else. An adapted people unique to land reconceived by force as the New World; a singed species of birds without feathers who can still fly.

  “Maybe,” he once told Elena, “we are creatures of passage, meant to cross oceans just like the first infectors of our continent in order to take back what was taken.”

  Elena had more education than Mauro, but she let him believe his ideas were more important.

  People say drugs and alcohol are the greatest and most persuasive narcotics—the elements most likely to ruin a life. They’re wrong. It’s love.

  THREE

  The Bogotá of Elena’s and Mauro’s childhoods was another city from the one Talia knew. To the child, bombings and kidnappings were mostly faraway occurrences in guerrilla-occupied territories or distant campo villages, death tallies mere embers on news feeds. The hurricane of violence of the eighties and nineties was a specter in magazine retrospectives, horror written with near nostalgia, depicted on telenovelas. Nothing Talia, sheltered as she was, believed she needed to fear. In Bogotá, a girl of Talia’s age could almost forget the terror, pretend it was happening in some other country across the continent, that the faces of the disappeared had nothing in common with her schoolmates’ families, and the hardened expressions of children kidnapped or orphaned into fighting the nameless tentacled war could not have just as easily been hers.

  Mauro and Elena’s city of clouds was now a place where tourists came to dance and drink without the threat of death. The last broad-scale civilian-targeted bombing the capital had seen came the year before Talia was born, when their family was already on the northern continent, but her parents’ generation was raised in a time when the Andean air tasted of gunfire. On the nightly news, in the morning papers, on sidewalks. Executions of presidential candidates, teachers, judges, journalists, elected officials, and so many innocents. Cars and buses loaded with half tons of dynamite, enough to take down a building. A siege of the Palace of Justice. Exploded airplanes. Entire barrios in shambles. Exterminations of the so-called desechables. Children stolen and forced to the front lines. Hundreds of thousands tortured, maimed, displaced. Massacres of police and of the poor—cartels, army, narco-guerrillas, and paramilitaries each trying to take down the other’s loyal or purchased soldiers, and it was unclear who did the most killing.

  Mauro was no criminal, and Elena was no saint, but Mauro felt they were unevenly matched in that Elena told him her secrets and he told her almost none of his.

  Her life hadn’t been easy, but since they met he had a sense he might corrupt Elena with the pain of his past, so he hid it from her, providing only essential components, enough so she could feel she understood him though he kept so much more opaque. To start, she believed Mauro had been raised in La Candelaria when the truth was he lived with his mother farther south in El Pesebre, a few blocks from Avenida Caracas in a small green apartment block with a slanted metal roof.

  His father left soon after he was born. Sometimes Mauro’s mother claimed abandonment. Other times she said she’d chased out her husband armed with scissors and a broom. He’d lost the family apartment in a card game, but she persuaded his opponent to forgive the debt. His mother had overlooked rumors that her husband had another woman and child in San Benito, but gambling away their home was too much to accept.

  Mauro had his father’s face. Something his mother never let him forget. When he was mischievous she blamed his genetics with disgust—esos ojos mentirosos, esa quijada de salvaje—throwing shoes at his back, shaving his head to cull his inheritance of curls. She locked Mauro in the closet for hours. Sometimes all night. She withheld food when she didn’t want him in the house and brought men home who also felt free to push him around. People in the neighborhood called her la loca, but Mauro defended her the way he wished somebody would defend him.

  The year Mauro turned ten was one of Colombia’s bloodiest. It was also the year his mother decided he wasn’t a good enough student to deserve to stay in school, what with the cost of uniforms and books, and sent him to live with her sister, Wilfreda, in the western sabana near Bojacá. To earn his keep, he was ordered to dig graves at a roadside cemetery with Wilfreda’s companion, a limping ex-soldier named Tiberio.

  They started in the morning when it was still dark. Marking grave lines for t
he day’s freshly dead, stabbing soil with their shovels. Mauro hated his mother for shipping him off, forcing him into this kind of labor, but Tiberio explained it was safer out there in the sabana. He’d been in the army until discharged for a bullet in the thigh—a present from heaven, Tiberio proclaimed, otherwise he surely would have been killed in warfare like so many of his friends. “I used to be strong till they sent me to fight,” Tiberio said. “Now look at me, half crippled and bald as the moon.”

  Tiberio also said most people only knew the Colombia of campo tears and urban shame, of funerals and outcry, of corruption and displacement. It was not the land the gods intended. The real Colombia, he insisted, was a thing of majesty beyond their valleys and cordilleras. There were jungles, snowcapped sierras, and black- and white-sand beaches on different ends of the country; rivers that nourished the Amazon, the life force of the Americas; cloud forests and altiplanos; the tabletop mountains of Chiribiquete, and La Guajira, where honeyed desert kissed the Caribbean Sea. Birds and beasts so powerful they could tatter this nation’s most treacherous men with their claws and teeth.

  According to Tiberio, Ancestral Knowledge said the jaguar was the original divine possessor of fire and tools for hunting, but the animal took pity on man when he stumbled upon him in the rain forest, wet, cold, and starving, and shared with the hairless two-legged creature its secrets for survival. Man repaid the jaguar by stealing its fire and hunting weapons so that the animal now depended solely on its physical strength and cunning. For this reason, the jaguar waited forever for a chance at revenge.

  Tiberio had once seen a wild jaguar when his battalion was sent to patrol the Urabá coast, where mangroves met jungle. As one of the soldiers napped beneath a mango tree, a jaguar leaped from the brush to attack. They wondered: Did the animal know its prey was human? The soldier resisted, the jaguar disappeared into the forest, and the locals told him surviving a jaguar attack made him a magic man.

  Mauro thought of this when he went back to Wilfreda’s house that night as rain pecked the roof, and on many nights thereafter when, after years in the sabana, his mother let him return home. Though at fourteen, he looked even more like the man who’d caused her so much anguish, so she banished him again and, as he roamed public parks, struggling to catch sleep under the open sky, he considered how surviving a creature of sacred ferocity was enough to make a person holy.

  * * *

  Mauro went to live with different neighbors until each tired of him. He slept in empty lots and alleys, tunnels and caños, sometimes with other street kids who existed in a bazuco stupor until he met a mugger named Jairo who worked the streets of El Centro. Jairo took pity on Mauro and let him stay with his family in Ciudad Bolívar, the settlement built into cliffs on the southern cerros overlooking the city plateau, where rain turned dirt roads into gushing streams.

  With his profits from robbing pedestrians and businessmen, Jairo had been able to move his family from a shack on the upper ridge to a house with brick walls and electricity on the lower edges. Mauro only entered or left the area in Jairo’s company because the local pandilleros came after anyone they believed invading their turf. Everyone respected Jairo because he’d survived the police, who suspected he was in one of the barrio gangs when they captured him. They locked him in a room, stripped and beat him, pinched him with pliers, played at suffocating him with a plastic bag until he fainted. This went on for days, all to get Jairo to give up the names of gang leaders and their hideout locations. Jairo told the police nothing and eventually was released. Those were years when hundreds of teenage boys were murdered on the hills, victims of paramilitary hit men dressed as civilians, vigilante militias carrying out mass murders in the name of social cleansing. People said police only appeared on the bluffs to log the dead.

  Nights, Mauro lay on a mat on the kitchen floor while Jairo and his family slept in the two other small rooms. He felt the tectonic pressure of the hills around him, each sunset walling him deeper into this unmothered and unfathered life. An impulse to run with nowhere to go.

  When Jairo left the cerro each day to work the sidewalks near the Hotel Tequendama, Mauro went looking for a job of his own. He tried cafeterías, fast-food chains, and shops with no luck. He started hanging around the market at Paloquemao, trying to befriend vendors until he convinced an old man named Eliseo to let him stack his produce into neat pyramids at half pay if he let Mauro sleep in the stockroom.

  Elena came to the market once a week. Mauro looked forward to helping her each time. She chose her fruit carefully while other customers purchased theirs and moved on to other stalls. Lulo and guanabana were her favorites, though she said her mother preferred maracuyá. Mauro packed them for her as if they were gems so she’d find no bruises when she set them into a bowl at home. She said she came all the way to Paloquemao, to this stall in particular, because they had the best selection. She thought Mauro’s father should know and pointed to Eliseo.

  “He’s not my father. I just work here.”

  He was barely fifteen but somehow felt much older than Elena, who was fourteen, short and slight, almost feline with her long arms and bony hips. She dressed in bright pinks and flowery prints as if she lived by the sea and not their mountain city. Her long-lashed beetle-black eyes, often irritated from the detergents in her mother’s lavandería. Hair pulled into a braid when other girls wore theirs loose so they could touch it all the time. Never jewelry except for her necklace with a gold medal of La Virgen del Carmen. He was self-conscious when he talked to her, making an effort never to use slang or show his ignorance since stopping school. He heard educated people speak on television and read newspapers that shoppers left at the market so he could have things to talk about the next time she came to his stall. He wanted so much for Elena to believe he was worth getting to know.

  That April a car bomb detonated near Calle 93. The radio reported many dead and hundreds wounded. Bombazos were nothing new, but this time Mauro thought only of Elena. He didn’t know where she lived. He imagined she could have been nearby. The area was full of shops and cafés. He pictured her hanging out with friends. Then the explosion, and all of them running to save their lives.

  Mauro slept on a wooden pallet padded with cardboard, bunched under a cast-off blanket. Through the cold and humid nights, he often only managed to sleep with the help of liquor warming him from the inside. Tiberio once told him the Muisca believed night to be a time of regeneration, when the earth’s energies were most tranquil. But the city was a song of police and ambulance sirens. He could not imagine what it would be like to sleep with silence—as distant a possibility as sharing a bed with Elena.

  He counted the mornings until he might see her again. When she reappeared it was all he could do not to take her in his arms. Instead, he watched as she picked her fruit and told her he was happy to know she was safe.

  They slowly went from strangers to acquaintances to friends who spent a few hours together each week. He traveled to her neighborhood. Brought her cattleyas from the flower vendors at the market and used the little money he had to invite her to a mango con limón or a cheesy arepa, which they’d eat together on a bench in a park or plaza. Elena always saved her crusts for pigeons. She said it wasn’t their fault they were hungry.

  “No,” Mauro said. “It’s none of our faults.”

  Months later, in December, Elena snuck him into her house, on the poorer margins of Chapinero, while her mother worked in the laundry on the ground floor. They slid through the side door, up the stairs, past the bedrooms to the flat and unshingled roof. The surrounding buildings were still low enough that the city unfolded before them among brown mountain cushions.

  Elena never complained about the tedium of Bogotá’s everlasting gray, its reputation as the rainiest capital in Latin America, a brume-billowed horizon and reluctant sun that only ever teased at warmth. Not even about the traffic, the noise, the rumble of tremors under their feet. Not the way Mauro did. He envied her for this, and for many othe
r things too. She had a mother’s love and the security of having lived in one home all her life, even if parts of the house were crumbling while every extra peso went to keeping the lavandería in business. He knew that in her mind, Elena had experienced a lonely childhood. No siblings. A father who left when she was a baby to work in Venezuela and never returned. Few friends beyond the people in her neighborhood, since most of her free time was spent helping her mother run the laundry shop. This solitude could be why she’d welcomed him so easily into her life. He was also jealous of her predisposition for forgiveness, counting herself fortunate, not forsaken. He compared it to his anger at the chaotic landscape, the city with its funereal sky, home to his mother, her back forever turned, tongue pointed in accusal.

  How serene their Bogotá looked from up there, exhaled into rest after a long-held breath. Escobar had been killed on a Medellín rooftop a few days before and there was a confused electric current of ecstatic joy and hope that this would mark the end of the violence, tinged with disquiet for what might come next.

  Mauro told Elena that Escobar was the perfect scapegoat for a country that was no better than he was. In showing his lack of conscience, he forced the population to confront its own. “Can any of us born of this land be certain we’d behave differently with that kind of money and power?” He remembered Jairo and the boys in Ciudad Bolívar gathered on the cliffs to drink and shine their guns, saying there was more honor in being a narcotraficante than a politician.

  Elena only stared when Mauro said these things. He never told her about his years in the campo or in the hills, or even where he slept each night after he left her at her front door. She believed he went home to La Candelaria, where he claimed to live with an uncle. He’d told her he was an orphan, which didn’t seem a complete untruth. Elena didn’t ask many questions. She was not the way he was, perpetually looking back in time, sideways, thinking around everything. Elena saw only this moment, taking each day together as both their first and last on earth. For her, it was as if Mauro were born in the market at Paloquemao, as if the heavens put him there only for her. Maybe she didn’t demand disclosure because she’d intuited all along, in the way he masked his restlessness, his default state of agitation when he was with her so that she wouldn’t become wary of him. He wanted Elena to feel as safe with him as he felt with her. Maybe she perceived his need for sanctuary.