Infinite Country(20)
Then Talia came down with an unrelenting fever. Perla, too, began vomiting for days. On a night of rain, Perla ran around the house to make sure all the windows were closed and saw the immense crucifix she’d inherited from an aunt hanging on the foyer wall tremble and crash to the floor. The head of Christ broken off its neck, rolling to meet Perla at her feet.
Mauro laughed, saying that it sounded like a scene from a gringo horror film. The kind he and Elena sometimes watched in the United States, when they had a TV. Elena would cover her eyes with Mauro’s shirtsleeve while he pointed out the ridiculousness of the movie. “Now I see where your daughter gets her sense of terror.” But he knew with her story Perla meant that if he were to stay in the house with Talia after she was gone, he would have to understand the ways she’d cared for it and for her granddaughter. In this case, it involved a sort of exorcism, though Perla insisted they weren’t supposed to call it that but a despojo of the highest order because the person who did the cleansing was not clergy but the famous former bruja from Antioquia who’d once advised politicians, casting hechizos that won elections and beauty pageants until she herself was exorcised and began working for God and the righteous instead.
The details, Perla said, were to remain private among those who were there. She could only tell Mauro that as Talia slept on the top floor, she watched as the ex-bruja moved about the living room, making the floor shake under a violent gust that unfurled through the house, coiling like a tornado, its pressure against their faces, until she instructed Perla to open a window and a vane of airstream pushed past them to the night sky.
The next morning, Talia was no longer hot with fever. She was calm and nuzzled into her grandmother in a way she never had before. But Perla remained vigilant. The dark spirits relinquished her house, but she wondered why they’d come to lay claim in the first place; if it was the ill will of someone she knew, as presented in the basket of razors, or simply bad luck, the sins of an ancestor for which they needed to repent.
Perla ran out of breath. It was more talking than she did most nights. Mauro helped her take up her oxygen again, and they sat in silence a while longer before she left for her bedroom. He never told Perla there were times when he wondered if he was the source of her family’s misfortune. He was the one, after all, who’d taken her daughter from her home to that new, strange country and left her there. Maybe he’d brought the darkness with him when he was returned to Bogotá. Or maybe, he wondered, baby Talia brought it with her when she was sent to Colombia too.
* * *
A woman from the school in Santander called. “There’s been an incident,” she began, and Mauro imagined the worst things. He knew there were girls far more feral than Talia in that place. “Several of our pupils overpowered one of the guardians and managed to leave the property. Police are searching the area, but so far we have been able to recover only four of the missing twelve. Your daughter is not one of them.”
She asked if Mauro had any idea of her whereabouts. He assured her he did not. But before hanging up, the woman said if he were to hear from Talia, he was required by law to inform the police and turn her over so she could complete her sentence, which would likely be extended due to her escape, along with possible additional charges since the recovered girls claimed the initial plan had been Talia’s and she was the one who restrained the night guardian in order to flee. He couldn’t help feeling proud of Talia’s leadership and ingenuity but said yes, of course. If Talia appeared he’d call the authorities right away.
The woman on the phone must have known he was lying—what kind of parent would turn in a child?—because the next thing she said was, “If you don’t, I must advise you that you, too, can be prosecuted in a court of law.”
That night, the story of the breakout hit the news, a segment of less than a minute since there were more pressing concerns in the capital, like the hooded men who held up traffic for hours in protest of the guerrilla disarmament for the peace accord. The reporter spoke over aerial images of Talia’s school and the land around it. Mauro pictured her running, running, as she’d never been able to do on Bogotá’s congested streets. He said a prayer for her safety and watched the telephone all night waiting for her call.
The one who called instead was Elena. In the month or so since Talia had been sent away, she’d phoned many times, and he met her with different lies to keep his promise to Talia of protecting her mother’s ignorance of her crime. Elena told him she’d called Talia’s phone directly but it was turned off. Mauro couldn’t say her cell was right there in a kitchen drawer, since she was forbidden from taking it to the prison school.
“You know reception is not very good around here,” Mauro said, and started charging the phone so at least Elena would hear it ring and ring when she called, and leave messages. But then she would try Mauro again, asking why Talia was avoiding her calls, and he’d lie that she was out with friends, trying to spend as much time with them as possible before she left for the United States.
“Don’t worry. I’ll remind her she needs to call you back.”
He couldn’t help enjoying that Elena’s frustration in not being able to reach Talia led them to speak more in the past few weeks than they had in years. He heard her voice and wanted to pretend she was only blocks away, calling to make plans to meet at one of the park benches they used to sit on as teenagers, so enthralled in each other’s faces and touch that they didn’t notice the first vapors of rain.