Infinite Country(14)
Yamira had a degree in economics but showed Elena how to clean houses. Elena asked what was so complicated about cleaning that it needed to be taught. She grew up working in a lavandería, and Perla kept their house as impeccable as a surgical ward. Elena couldn’t leave her bedroom each morning without her bed made, clothes folded, floor swept, everything in its place. Yamira insisted cleaning for Americans was different and if Elena wanted to get jobs that could earn her a hundred dollars a day in the right neighborhood, she would have to learn to use their chemical products, operate an American-style iron and vacuum cleaner. She’d have to learn to clean fast, too, unless she was being paid by the hour, in which case she could draw some tasks out.
Elena accompanied Yamira on several jobs, watched how she made the beds, buried under mounds of thick comforters, and arranged the decorative pillows. Elena thought gringo households were full of unnecessary objects. Children had more toys than fit on their shelves. The wives’ and daughters’ closets overflowing with clothes and shoes. Husbands and sons with more cables and gadgets than a laboratory.
Yamira cleaned in towns with smooth, wide roads and neatly flowered hills, nothing like the twisty uneven roads in Bogotá. Her clients lived behind gates or in houses wrapped with porches like a ballerina’s tutu. Sometimes clients were home as they cleaned, watching television, looking at the computer, or even napping as the women worked. Sometimes Elena and Yamira overheard conversations and arguments, babies crying with nobody to console them. Elena wanted to pick up those children, hold them close, but Yamira warned that employers preferred they remain invisible. Getting personal could get them fired.
When Mauro and Elena went to work, a woman who lived with her husband and two others in one of the upstairs bedrooms of Dante and Yamira’s house looked after the children for twenty dollars. They managed this way for months, content in that windowless basement with the portable heater Yamira lent the family to keep by the bed where they slept in a nest of heartbeats.
Some evenings, Mauro and Dante went to a bar a few blocks away, where other guys from the neighborhood gathered. Mauro had started drinking again but much less than before, so Elena didn’t bother him about it. He’d found a job in another factory. This one bottled hair spray in metal cans. It was under-the-table work, as usual, so sometimes the checks were smaller than expected, but they couldn’t complain. They didn’t have bank accounts. Every surplus dollar was wired home to Perla. When they were paid, if not in bills, they went to a check-cashing place on Central Avenue. That day, Mauro gave Dante his paycheck to cash while he ran another errand. When Dante later met him at the bar with the money, Mauro noticed bills missing.
Elena later heard from witnesses that Mauro tried to reason with him, but Dante denied taking any. How dare you accuse me of being a thief when I’ve given your family a place to live? If it weren’t for me, you’d be on the streets! They said Dante pushed Mauro first. Petrified of being in trouble with the police again, Mauro stepped back, but Dante came at him with a punch, then a second and a third, until Mauro was on the floor. Some cops patrolling around the way heard about a fight and came to look. Dante was a citizen, so the police let him go without charges. But they looked up Mauro in the system and discovered his previous misdemeanor in Delaware, the hearing he skipped, his undocumented status, and took him away.
Elena was told only that Mauro was kept on an “immigration hold,” then handed over to ICE, what used to be INS, who put him in detention. She believed he’d have to complete some penance, then be released to her. He might have to report to Immigration once a year like some people they knew, then they would be free to go about their lives undisturbed. She did not yet understand that Mauro would never be returned to them and was already marked for deportation.
EIGHT
At a café in Barichara, Talia watched tourists at tables hunched over guidebooks, staring into their phones, wearing leather and string necklaces, mochilas at their sides. They drank coffee and juice, connected to the Wi-Fi. The only Spanish Talia heard came from the television hanging above the bar counter. Among the hour’s top stories: a dozen girls escaped from a reform school in the mountains of Santander. They didn’t show pictures or give names, only reporting that four girls had already been located but another eight were still missing. Cut to Sister Susana standing in front of the guard gate, a microphone held to her face: “We are concerned for the girls’ safety and hope anyone with information will do the right thing and contact us or the police. Their families have been notified and are very worried about them.”
Talia was glad she’d swapped her prison sweatshirt for a T-shirt she’d seen hanging on a clothesline after the old man left her on the town fringe, but she still wore her school sweatpants, grubby from running and wear. She finished the soda she’d paid for with money he gave her before parting along with a bendición across the forehead as if he were a relative. She went to the café bathroom to wash her face, topknot her hair. When she came out, she saw a man had just sat at a table alone—maybe her father’s age or a little younger, definitely not a local—and decided to approach.
“May I sit?”
He motioned with his hand to the empty chair opposite him. She’d learned a little English in school and from movies and TV programs that weren’t already dubbed. When her mother put Karina and Nando on the phone, she was able to understand some of what they said, even if she could tell they spoke extra slow for her benefit.