Infinite Country Read online

  That afternoon, they sat on the edge of her roof taking in the coppery spread of the capital and its darkening mountains. He kissed her, her lips soft as petals. Held her hand as night swallowed the firmament. He remembered the sabana where he’d dug homes for the dead and thought of the betrayed and vengeful jaguar somewhere below their city, beyond anything they would ever see.

  FOUR

  Even after months, then years as a couple, Perla wouldn’t allow Mauro to spend the night. Elena was raised on tales meant to keep daughters compliant. The child who talks back to their mother will have their tongue fall out. The child who raises their hand to a parent will see their fingers break off. One of Perla’s most repeated was the tale of the elderly mother who asked her daughter for food because she was hungry. The daughter was cooking at the stove and opened the pot to let out its wonderful aroma but refused to serve any of it until her husband came home because, as the man of the house, he got to eat first. When the husband arrived and the daughter lifted the lid again, a snake emerged from a crack in the floor, knotting its body around the woman’s throat, demanding to be fed or it would eat her face. And so the meal that the daughter had denied her mother was consumed by the snake, and the whole family went without.

  * * *

  Elena in love grew from an obedient daughter into an elaborate liar. She claimed to need to study to get out of her laundry shifts, taking Mauro into her bedroom while her mother worked in the shop below. Or when her mother was sleeping, when Perla believed Mauro and Elena were at the movies or a party, they hid in the back of the lavandería, fooling around in piles of sheets customers left to be washed and folded. If there was enough money between them they indulged in a few hours of privacy in dingy love motels on the city outskirts, balmy in the bed, dreaming up a shared life. They wanted many children so no single child would experience the solitary childhood they’d each had.

  Their first daughter, Karina, was born a few months into the new millennium. With Perla’s approval, Mauro finally moved into Elena’s bedroom, agonizing over the ways he might fail this child. He worried deceit ran through his blood, as dominant as his father’s features, dark curls and arequipe skin, which he’d already passed on to the baby. He vowed to give her more than he’d been given. The only way to do that, he determined, was by leaving their land.

  The end of the last century brought no closure to violence across the country, just new heads for the monster. From a populace rearranged by the dislocation of hundreds of thousands; to relentless attacks on citizens like the hijacking of a flight from Bucaramanga, its passengers abducted into the jungle; the mass kidnapping of parishioners from a church in Cali; the guerrilla takeover of the Amazon city of Mitú, where countless people were wounded and disappeared before the army response over three days of combat left hundreds of civilians, soldiers, and insurgents dead; paramilitary massacres in Macayepo and El Salado, where dozens, including children, were tortured, macheted, and murdered. In the capital, the No Más protests all but unheard by those who most needed to hear them.

  “This country doesn’t know it’s dying,” Mauro said as they watched the news after dinner.

  “It’s not the country we want, but it’s the country we deserve,” Perla answered while Elena remained quiet.

  That much might be true, Mauro thought, but there was no law condemning a person to life in the nation of their birth. Not yet.

  Perla’s laundry was near bankruptcy since washing machines had become more affordable and most people no longer needed to send their clothes out to a lavado de ropa por libras. For a time, she looked for a tenant to take over the shop space, but the barrio building facades were covered in profane graffiti. During Perla’s childhood, the street was as beautiful as an English country road, like the imitation Tudor and Victorian styles much of Chapinero was modeled on. Now it was a block most people avoided.

  In those days, Mauro thought he would have to go abroad alone. He did not imagine Elena would be willing to leave her mother. When he told her his idea to find work in another country so he could send money back for her, Perla, and the baby—sustenance for the lavandería and to keep the house from dereliction—he promised it would be only for a few months. Then he would return, and just think what they could do with the money he made! How far it would reach when converted to pesos.

  He was surprised Elena didn’t argue, only listened. When he was through making his case, she pulled a tin box from under her bed, filled with crumpled bills. Her secret savings, she said, though she never knew for what until that moment.

  “Take us with you.”

  FIVE

  Spain was the logical first choice because of the common language. This was years before Colombia’s entry to the Schengen Agreement that would allow them to travel there without visas, and so their applications were denied. Mauro and Elena decided to try for the United States, where they’d heard it was easier to get tourist visas as individuals rather than as a married couple. That’s how they rationalized not having a wedding just yet. They told Perla that Mauro had a cousin in Texas who invited them to stay for a while. It would be a long vacation of sorts. They’d get to know the city, find temporary jobs, make some fat American dollars to pay off Perla’s debts, and return home with their savings plumped. People did this kind of thing all the time.

  In Houston, they quickly understood they were not guests but boarders, tenants. The man who took them in was not a cousin but a friend of a friend from the fruit market to whom they paid rent and who otherwise didn’t want anything to do with them. Mauro found work moving furniture while Elena kept the house clean and washed and ironed the man’s clothes. She would have cooked for him, too, but he padlocked the fridge and said they had to find their own meals elsewhere.

  Neither Mauro nor Elena had ever seen the sea except in pictures and from the airplane from which they could only make out a desert of blue. A few weeks after their arrival, to ease her homesickness, Mauro fulfilled an old vow of showing Elena the ocean, taking them to the beach in a place called Bolivar, which seemed a promising omen. Elena had bought bathing suits for herself and Karina before leaving Colombia. The elastic pinched, but she didn’t care. The sun had never tickled so much of her body.

  They walked across the burning sand until the Gulf pooled at their waists. Mauro held Karina, gliding her toes across the current. Elena palmed the water. In her hands it was transparent, but around them it was all brown, tinted by silt and as murky as the Río Bogotá, nothing suggesting the turquoise waters Mauro had promised.

  In Bogotá’s interminable autumn, Elena’s complexion blanched. In Texas she goldened, her hair feathered her temples, whipping with humidity around her neck and shoulders. At the request of his new boss, Mauro buzzed off his long hair, which sharpened his features as if by a blade. They sweated through their clothes those first weeks in Houston. At sea level for the first time in their lives, they underwent a metamorphosis, an inverted soroche of breathlessness, headaches, and ravenous hunger while their ears took in English, English, all the time English, and if they heard Spanish, it was with no accent like their own.

  Phone calls to Perla were brief and expensive, so Elena tried to send a letter to her mother every week, though each one took days to write and weeks to arrive. She didn’t want to tell her mother the mundane details of her life in the house while Mauro worked. The hours she spent pushing the baby in a secondhand stroller around a desolate park because the man they were staying with turned off the air-conditioning when he went out and didn’t allow them to use the television or computer. She didn’t want her mother to worry or ask what the point of going abroad was if one had to live in worse conditions than at home, so she filled her pages with commentary on the velvety warmth of the Houston summer, plum sunsets, and the luxury of so much daylight. She told Perla about Mauro’s job, which earned him an hourly wage plus tips, since gringos loved to reward good service, and about people they met as if they were already dear friends, not single-encounter
acquaintances they were likely never to see again. It was not the working vacation she imagined. She thought during Mauro’s time off they’d explore the North American terrain they knew only from movies, but all Elena had seen, besides the day at the beach, were highways, roads, and bayous lining flatness upon flatness.

  She wrote her letters at night, as Karina slept and Mauro listened to a small radio he bought, repeating words and sentences the newscaster said until they felt right on his tongue. At his job, he’d already picked up far more vocabulary than Elena. He tried to teach her some, but she didn’t see the point in pushing herself since they would eventually go home.

  They did not consider themselves immigrants. They never thought that far ahead and were young enough to believe none of their decisions were permanent. They saw themselves as travelers discovering new frontiers. Their visas were for six months, though issued at different times, so Mauro’s would expire several weeks before Elena’s. They’d had to purchase return tickets for January as a condition of their visas, but with the hours Elena spent alone with Karina every day, the date felt further and further away.

  “I’m tired of this,” she told Mauro one night when he returned from his job. “We’re not seeing America. We’re not doing anything here.”

  “I’m working every day for our survival and to send money back to your mother. You call that nothing?”

  “Why don’t we go home? We have a house to live in. We have the lavandería to run. I feel so alone here. We never should have left.”

  On nights when Mauro sat by the window drinking the cheapest liquor he could find, his back turned to Elena even as she called him to bed, she considered leaving without him. She could take the baby and return to her mother, the house in Chapinero, the barrio where everyone knew her name.

  Things improved when Mauro found them a small apartment in Northside Village. A woman on the floor above paid Elena to watch her children while she went to work at a plastics plant. They monitored the calendar as weeks and then months passed and their visa expiration dates approached, debating whether to overstay or to return home. Elena was surprised it was now Mauro who was ready to go back. He was tired. The daily furniture hauling was becoming too much even for him. The men he worked with called him esqueleto, their own bodies thick from working in factories or fields. Compared to them he was skinny as a nail, more bone than muscle, limbs like arrows in leather sheaths. He resented the idea of becoming what some called illegal, as if just waking up another day in North America made a person a felon. He missed their city, knowing where they’d sleep each month, the fragrances of Perla’s lavandería and the fruit stacks at Paloquemao. He even missed Bogotá’s chaos, the city’s brittle air in contrast to the strangling boa of Texas heat.

  “Here we will always be foreigners,” he told Elena. “We’re Colombians. So is our daughter. It’s where we belong.”

  Elena nodded. Their return seemed to be decided.

  But then she said, “Mauro. I’m pregnant.”

  * * *

  In Houston, Mauro worked with many men who’d navigated the southern borderlands by foot, some four or five times. They came from different nations, passing through the corridor of the Americas, sometimes intercepted and sent back to their countries within days while others were held for months in camps with no walls, only tarps shielding them from the prickly southwestern sun and frigid night. Still, they returned, even as the journey became harder, the hazards more vicious, convinced this land offered more than theirs had already taken from them. Mauro and Elena arrived under different circumstances, but Mauro knew the consequences were the same if they didn’t leave when their visas expired. Without an adjustment or amnesty, a deportation order would come.

  As Elena and the baby slept, Mauro held his family’s three passports, running his fingers over the dates printed on each visa, Karina’s baby photo pressed onto the page. They’d had it taken in a shop near the house in Chapinero. The storeowner droned that she was too tiny to go on a plane and it was unnatural to make an Andean child cross the sea so soon. He warned she’d acquire an incurable vertigo from breeching their altitude so early in life that would haunt her no matter where she went.

  Later, Mauro and Elena laughed about the shopkeeper’s insistence. But he wondered about the baby who was coming. Elena was sure it would be a boy. Mauro didn’t know if she said so because she thought it was what he wanted or needed to hear, as if every man felt the primal urge to father a son. He thought of his own father who was no example to follow. Mauro worried he wouldn’t have anything to teach a son about how to be a man but at least he could give him a life in a new land rather than tow him back to their pasts, even if it would cost them in ways they could not yet imagine.

  At gatherings in the homes of Mauro’s coworkers, when the men passed around beers or tequila, or when talking to people from the neighborhood, no matter their nation of origin, when asked why they came to this country and stayed they all said the same thing: more opportunity. For themselves, for their children, for their queridos back home whom they were able to support with money earned in the United States. It became true for Elena and Mauro too. What they earned in one week in Texas was more than what Mauro and Elena made in a month working at the market and her mother’s laundry combined. Mauro had no education, and Elena didn’t attend university because she was expecting Karina. With a devalued currency, theirs was a country where it felt impossible to get ahead if one wasn’t born to a certain class, rich or corrupt, or talented and beautiful enough for fútbol or farándula.

  If Mauro and Elena ignored the exit date stamped on their passports, the option of returning to the United States would be closed for at least five or ten years, at which point they might be able to apply for reentry. That they’d received visas in the first place, without American sponsors and with the quota on Colombians admitted to the country each year, had felt like the intervention of saints. If they stayed, they’d be limited to their existence in North America until it came to its inevitable conclusion. Unless one won the green card lottery, but they were too scared to apply to take the chance. Political asylum was just as elusive. Coming from a place that gringos regularly stereotyped as a death trap didn’t mean they could prove they were unsafe without a documented history of threats. The perils of poverty didn’t count, only a demonstrated danger of physical harm. Since they never received letters vowing to kill or dismember their families, they weren’t deemed worthy of government protection. A good attorney might have been able to argue that even if one was not important enough to be a murder target it did not mean that person couldn’t be killed at any second. But they didn’t know how to find a trustworthy lawyer, having been warned about con-artists who preyed on people like them, self-proclaimed miracle workers promising citizenship in a year, who charged upfront, then vanished.

  There also existed the possibility of Elena and Mauro seeking citizenship by each marrying other people, since they weren’t already married to each other. The woman upstairs whose children Elena babysat had married a white Texan for this purpose. They only saw each other for appointments at the immigration office. She’d had to pay a few thousand already, and the rest was due in installments, but she never had to have sex with him and already had a green card in hand. The way she described it, marrying someone else as just a matter of paperwork didn’t seem unreasonable to Elena, but Mauro refused to consider it.

  They were careful. Scared even to play the radio too loud, not wanting to give anyone a reason to complain. They’d been told immigration officers only arrested people when tipped off. SWAT teams raiding apartment buildings, restaurant kitchens, or factories. Bulletproofed and body-armored officers with no-knock warrants, storming homes, breaking down doors if needed, as if the people inside were planning a bombing or a coup. They might take you away or if you were lucky, let you go with just a warning, but you’d be entered in their database, called for annual check-ins, and classified as deportable.

  Mauro and Elen
a could always go home. Their old lives would wait for them. Yet staying under such conditions would prevent them from ever being able to visit Perla without losing the life they were beginning to make in the north. If they remained without adjusted status, they’d need to dissolve into the population, praying the laws changed, for amnesty or asylum.

  Mauro passed time spinning bottles, flipping coins, pulling cards from a deck, searching for signs, a way to make the decision for his family to stay or to go. But there was no card for keeping Elena and her mother apart. No card for a life sentence of uncertainty. No card for forfeiting one country to bet on another. No card for regret.

  * * *

  Nando was much smaller than their daughter had been when she was born. Elena was sure it was the American diet, which somehow fattened a person while depriving them of nutrition. Mauro was in the room for the birth but was afraid to come back to see them in the hospital because he’d heard from neighbors of someone being arrested when visiting a dying relative, detained and swiftly deported. They heard such stories often. Mauro and Elena knew they would have to behave more perfectly than any natural-born citizen even if their complexions would always arouse suspicion. They were both people who followed the letter of the law, but once they overstayed they shuddered at the sight of police, who could ask point-blank for their government ID, and they’d have to admit they had none. For every deportation horror tale, there was another about someone receiving sudden amnesty, asylum, or a pardon so they could apply for residency, and they were filled with hope. And now they had a son who was different from them, with double the possibilities for his future.