Infinite Country(21)
“How are you, Elena?” he asked one day after covering for Talia. “How are Karina and Nando?”
“Karina is doing excellent in school. Nando has a harder time but he’s a good boy. They both help me with Lance.”
“Who is Lance?”
“The boy I take care of.”
How could the kid’s name slip his mind? He heard Elena sigh and knew he’d disappointed her again. When they spoke, he felt she suffered through their dialogue. He almost wanted to hear her weep just to know she still felt something more. The last time he heard her voice wet with tears was when he was sent back to Colombia. When, after weeks of evasion, he called her and it was decided, though he no longer remembered exactly how, that Elena and the children would remain on the other side of the sea.
He’d like to be able to say he’d found absolution in the years he spent in the house helping care for Perla and Talia; when he managed to quit drinking and swore he’d throw himself off the roof if he ever let down his family again. Elena couldn’t return to see her mother as her breath and memory left her. He knew that when Perla looked at Talia in her final days, she saw her own daughter. Talia knew it too. She was a compassionate girl who let her face become a window to the life Perla and Elena knew before anyone else came along. Each day that Mauro worked in the lavandería after Perla no longer could, he thought of Elena, hoping she’d see how far he’d come in his atonement and think him worthy of being hers again.
He wished he could tell Talia the things she never knew, things she was too young to remember, in case, once she left him, she never returned.
Before departing for Texas, Mauro took Elena and Karina, who was just a baby, on a day trip. Elena had seldom been beyond the city periphery. Mauro told her he wanted to show her a piece of their history before they left for who knew how long. For years, he’d wanted to see the sacred lake that Tiberio had told him about during his years digging graves, the place the Muisca believed the birthplace of human life. They had no car, so they took a bus. Karina cried and cried. He took the baby from Elena so she could look out the window, watch buildings turn to lush grassland pitted with cows. Karina went quiet, her small form against her father’s chest. Her hair was growing in black and wavy. Her cheeks pinked, bundled so warmly she splayed like a star. Mauro had been the one to name her Karina. Neither Elena nor his first daughter knew it was a tribute to the mother who did not want him.
The bus left them at the base of Guatavita, where tourists and backpackers gathered. From there they made the hard climb up the hill path, Karina in his arms, to the mossy ridge where the shimmering lagoon came into view. He still remembered a calm unlike any he’d known before, not even in the sabana. Silence interrupted only by the conversation of birds. It was cold. Mist fell over them. He told Elena it was no wonder the Muisca venerated not only the water but the elusive sun, believing it to be much cleverer than the moon, more deserving of praise than even the Creator, Chiminigagua.
Elena had only heard the stories of the gold offerings the ancestors made to a lake long before Bolívar crossed the Andes. How, for centuries, greedy, thieving nations sent explorers and divers to Guatavita and to the Siecha Lakes to scavenge for gold, even attempting to drain them. She’d seen the treasures of El Dorado on a school excursion to the gold museum in the capital. Knowledge seized, converted to what they call legend, and made so famous it was like it didn’t even belong to Colombia anymore. It made her sad they weren’t able to keep their most beautiful things secret in order to protect them from the rest of the world.
The real reason Mauro brought his family to the supposed holy place: Tiberio had said the Muisca believed gold to be the sun’s warmth and power incarnate; if a person harnessed it, one could make their own magic.
He told Elena they should turn their backs to the lake, holding in their hands an imaginary ball of sunlight, conjure their deepest desire, face the lake again, and blow their golden wishes to the water below.
His wish, to make a life for their family in the north with no need ever to return to what he believed was a forsaken land.
He suspects Elena wished for the opposite.
ELEVEN
Elena thought of destinies she and Mauro might have fulfilled if not for all the wrong turns. If he hadn’t argued with Dante, had let him keep those extra dollars, considering it part of their rent for the basement that was a haven for their family.
Fifty dollars. A fortune to them then, but for Mauro, it was also a question of principle and pride. But was it really? Not when Elena considered what it cost them. Maybe Dante hadn’t taken it. Maybe it was Mauro who had miscounted or misplaced it.
One of the alternate lives she imagined was if they’d never left Colombia. If their pull toward new frontiers had taken them only as far as another city. And seeing it was not as they hoped they could have returned to her mother’s house, which Elena grew up believing was meant for her and the family she would one day have.
Would they have stayed together if Mauro had not been forced to leave?
Would he have stopped drinking for good and kept the family afloat?
All five of them. And maybe Talia wouldn’t be the last child but an older sister to one more.
They could have lived in the house with Yamira and Dante a while longer until, with both their incomes, they would have saved enough for their own place. A small house with a yard for the children to play in. They were starting to build a community, and in that house of strangers found something like extended family. But from the day Mauro fought with Dante, even though the police would make him pay for the crime, Elena and the children were no longer welcome. If ICE showed up at the house to take Elena as a collateral arrest, Dante said it could endanger the other undocumented residents, who could then be taken too. It would be safer for everyone if she moved away. Yamira came down to the basement to tell Elena she’d tried everything to convince her husband otherwise, but he was so hardheaded, there was no point insisting. Especially because what Dante said was true. But she knew of shared houses that turned over tenants regularly up the parkway in Passaic County. She’d make a few calls and see if she could find a room for Elena and the children.