Infinite Country(13)
The landlord called it unlawful occupancy, because of the number of tenants and because three out of the family of five did not have permission to be in the country. He said he could not risk being fined by the city, that harboring “illegals” was some kind of crime, he suspected, though Mister and Madame insisted that wasn’t true. He warned the couple that if they tried to hide the family in their home, he would change the lock on the door and have them evicted.
“You are good people,” he told them. “Don’t let yourselves be taken advantage of.”
Elena didn’t understand most of the conversation as it was being said. Mauro explained it later. How the landlord agreed to give them one week to find somewhere else to live before penalizing Mister and Madame. This was a special consideration, the landlord emphasized, because they had a newborn.
On his day off Mauro went to search for a place for the family to stay. He’d already asked his coworkers at the motel if they knew of anyone renting out an efficiency or a room or a trailer and came up with nothing. Next, he’d try the crew at the paper warehouse he used to sweep and then the factory where he once packed boxes of scented candles. They couldn’t go back to spending nights in the car. Not in this cold. They’d coped before, in spring and summer months when they made their way up the coast from South Carolina looking for a place to settle, washing in gas station bathrooms. Elena spent hours in parks or shopping malls with the children while Mauro hunted for work.
Before leaving that morning, he kissed Elena and each of the children. The new baby was on her chest, Karina and Nando curled at her sides, still sleeping. Since Talia’s birth, Mauro had kept his word. Not one finger of alcohol. Radiant with sobriety, he’d hold the baby, singing songs from their childhoods already fading from memory.
“I’ve had a premonition,” he whispered, wreathed in muted light. “Better things are coming for our family. I feel it as certain as the sunrise.”
In the bedroom long after he’d gone, Elena remembered the days when their love was new, taking hold like wildfire though safely contained by the mountains skirting their natal city; before they became infected by that dream more like a sickness, that their life in Colombia was no longer good enough for them. That somehow, they deserved more.
If there was a time to return home, Elena thought, it was now, but in the past two weeks alone, a car bomb ignited at an elite social club frequented by government officials just blocks from the house in Chapinero, killing thirty-six, the deadliest attack the country had seen in years, and another bomb in Neiva targeting the president took sixteen lives. No country was safer than any other.
A woman was found dead in the dumpster in the lot behind the motel where Mauro and Mister worked. It happened the previous night as they slept. Elena watched the Spanish TV news after everyone left the apartment for the day. As with the bathroom, the family could only use the kitchen when Mister and Madame were not, which wasn’t easy, since Madame spent her evenings cooking. Elena sat Karina and Nando at the kitchen table to eat canned noodles and held the baby close. The reporter said the victim was a motel guest, though the room wasn’t registered in her name. She might have been a prostitute. It was known that many passed through. Businesspeople stayed at the nicer chain hotels up the highway. This motel was nobody’s first choice. Mauro mopped the lobby and halls and bedroom messes too filthy for the motel maids to handle on their own. One of his coworkers must have found the woman’s body. Elena thought about the dead woman all day as she waited for Mauro to return. She wondered about her family, those who loved her, if they lived in the United States or elsewhere. How sad, Elena thought, that her life’s end had been discovered frozen among trash.
It was late. The children asleep. Mauro called from the police station. They got him, he said. He was in the minivan when two cops started knuckling the window.
Elena’s first thought was of the dead woman at the motel. Maybe after finding out he worked there, they’d try to pin something on him. The hours in solitude before he called made her feel anything was possible.
“Were you drunk?”
“No. I promised you no more. I was thinking what to do about our situation, and I fell asleep. Just a nap. The car was parked. I wasn’t in danger of hurting anyone.”
Since they’d bought the car, they’d known there was increased exposure. But Mauro had never even been pulled over. He’d learned to drive from Tiberio with military precision and obeyed every traffic law as if he’d written it himself.
“How can they arrest you for sleeping?”
“They can do anything they want.”
“Just tell me when you’re getting out.”
He said he’d passed the breath test but they arrested him for not having a valid license or insurance. There would be a hearing later. For now he needed her to ask Mister and Madame to lend them five hundred dollars so the police would let him go home.
* * *
Mauro reached out to a friend of a friend in New Jersey who said the family could stay with him for a while, and there were plenty of businesses hiring in the area. The police had impounded the car, so Mauro and Elena left the few pieces of furniture they owned to repay Mister and Madame their debt and took a bus to Newark. In those days there weren’t border control agents patrolling bus stations like there are now. They sat the five of them in a row meant for two. Mauro held Nando and Karina, a child on each knee, while Elena held the baby. Dante met them at the station and took them to his home in East Orange. He was from Buenaventura and lived in a big house with his Honduran wife, Yamira, her son, and nine others; a mix of relatives, friends, and people like Mauro and Elena who had nowhere else to go. They let the family have the basement since the previous occupants had just left for jobs at a meat factory in New Paltz.