Infinite Country(25)
When he found himself back among his mountains and stepped out of El Dorado airport, a free man for the first time in months, he saw the sky jawed with clouds and decided the first person he should look for was his old friend Jairo, the closest thing he’d ever had to a brother, at his usual posts on the streets near the Hotel Tequendama. When he didn’t find him, he went back to Ciudad Bolívar, but Jairo’s family had moved and the new tenants didn’t know to where. Mauro then went to one of their old cliff hangouts, where a group of young men spotted him climbing the cerro and surrounded him, guns pointed.
Mauro held his up his hands and told them he was there for Jairo the mugger. The group stepped back, lowering their weapons.
“Jairo has been dead for a long time,” one guy said.
“Who got him?”
“Police. Who else?”
By the time Mauro arrived at Perla’s house, he was already drunk on stolen aguardiente and it wasn’t long before he vanished to the streets with his shame.
During his years with Elena, Mauro went from a boy who slept among crates in a cold warehouse to a man who slept with his prometida in a soft bed under a roof, a baby between them, to a father who took his family across the sea to uncertainty. He never imagined he’d once again sleep in parks and plazas until poked awake by police, taking cover from rain under flattened cardboard and chased out of alleys.
Every few weeks he would return to Perla’s door. She fed him. Gave him a place to rest and wait out the rain, or money so he could go to one of those places in El Centro where they rented bunks by the night. Perla let him see the baby and hold her if he washed his hands many times and cleaned under his nails. Sometimes Perla convinced Mauro to lower to his knees so they could pray together before the Christ in the foyer and ask for mercy. He begged Perla not to let Elena know the state he was in, that he had destroyed their life together and was destroying it still.
Was it the disease or guilt that kept him on the streets, sometimes sleeping on the pavement across from Perla’s house so he could watch the closed door knowing the baby was safe inside and that he hadn’t returned to his country alone? He’d become unrecognizable to himself when he caught his reflection in shop windows, invisible to those he passed on the sidewalk with their averted eyes, shifting to avoid grazing his dirty clothes. He thinned from days spent walking, wandering, searching for places to sit, to rest, hunting in trash cans for food, engaging the charity of street vendors who sometimes offered a free meal. He remembered how Elena hated the northern winters. How they shivered and warmed each other, their children in their arms. How much colder he felt with nothing but fabric and skin to comfort him, wind knifing his joints and webbing his face.
As the baby grew, Mauro stayed close. Those were years when he and Elena rarely spoke. When she must have wondered if he’d died or at least found another woman. But he was close enough to watch the baby leave the house nested in the stroller every morning before Perla opened the lavandería and in the evenings after she closed. So delicate in how she rolled the child along, sidestepping bumps in the concrete that she never noticed Mauro huddled on the ground, draped in a blanket, shadowed in soot.
One day the child emerged walking, guided by her grandmother’s hand in a pink coat, black curls peeking from her hood, wearing white booties smaller than his fists. He wanted to call after Perla, tell her the vagabundo they’d shuffled past had been him, but it’d been so long since he’d spoken, heard his own voice. He forgot his words.
He knew Talia didn’t deserve a father like him. Pathetic. Contorted like some hooved creature. He thought of going to the Salto del Tequendama and launching himself over the waterfall like the Muiscas who, with all hope lost of being saved by Bochica, chose suicide over colonial enslavement. But the sight of this daughter growing each day beside her grandmother kept him alive.
Until one day when a woman found Mauro on the street and invited him to a shelter where she said they helped people like him. He insisted he was a man with a family, not some lonesome crow moving through the world like a wraith. Or was he?
“You’ve lost your way,” she said, as if it were so simple. “We can help you find it.” Her name was Ximena. She was a few years out of university and killed by a drunk driver soon after they met.
Mauro decided if nothing else could make him quit alcohol, it would be Ximena’s sudden death. But before she was taken from her living body, before Mauro arrived at his day of true surrender, he sat with her in an otherwise empty conference room at her organization’s headquarters in the south of the city that reminded him of the stark detention center back in New Jersey where he’d met with court-appointed lawyers who proved useless.
“What do you feel when you drink?” she asked him.
“I feel her. I feel she’s with me. I feel her love.”
“Elena?”
By this time, Ximena knew all the names that mattered to him, how he and Elena left their land naive enough to think they’d never be separated, and that he watched his baby with the dedication of a kidnapper.
“No. Karina.”
“Your eldest daughter.”
“My mother.”
In the shelter, he felt a corpse among corpses. Lizard-skinned. Dead as wood. They gave him a bed, a place to shower. Fresh clothes and new shoes. Potions to make him shit out his worms. He remembers the first weeks without the salve of alcohol, his bones rigid as irons. When he felt ready, he went to the market at Paloquemao to ask for his old job, but Eliseo was gone and there was nothing else available. The warehouse manager gave him a broom. Told him to start sweeping until something else opened up. Again he slept on wooden pallets, showering with the hose they used to rinse floors the way he did when he and Elena met. It was better than in the shelter, where he was surrounded by men who talked to themselves and who sometimes attacked one another in the darkness.