Infinite Country(27)

Elena remembered a story Perla told her in the months before she and Mauro left Colombia. They were sweeping the lavandería as they did every evening after locking up. Elena worried about leaving her mother alone. The workers they hired were undependable, rarely lasting more than a few weeks. Perla told her about a mother and daughter who lived alone together like they had before Elena met Mauro. The mother and daughter were very close, loved each other very much, and had no family but each other. One day they were walking together on the road when they were confronted by a wicked man who macheted them both to death. The daughter had lived a pure life, so she went straight to heaven. But the mother had lived a longer, more complicated life, so she waited in limbo, looking up to heaven, and one day spotted her daughter in all her eternal glory. She called for her daughter to lower her hair so she could climb it and join her in the upper world. The daughter dropped her braids, her mother climbed, and the two were overjoyed at being reunited. The mother thought her daughter had saved her from languishing in the void, Perla had said. She didn’t know she’d already been purified, that her daughter was only waiting until it was the mother’s turn to be called home.





FIFTEEN


Mauro’s sobriety was still a fragile thing. He sometimes squandered months of it for a few blurry days that would leave him feeling sick down to his liver. He didn’t yet feel ready to return to live with Talia and Perla but visited often, and saw that in his daughter’s eyes he was becoming more familiar, someone she looked at with delight. He no longer resembled those she called “outside people,” who wiped windshields at intersections, or the unsheltered day-sleepers on sidewalks and patches of dead grass. Sometimes he brought Talia flowers, which she’d pull apart petal by petal, or a peluche when he could afford it. Her favorite was a small yellow bear that she took everywhere until she dropped it during an outing with her grandmother. At least that’s what Perla told him. He brought her a pink bear as a replacement, but she didn’t love it in the same way.

In one of his meetings Mauro met a man who asked if he did handiwork. He said he managed an apartment building near El Retiro. They were looking for someone to do maintenance and repairs around the property.

Mauro appeared at Perla’s door in a new uniform, said he had a good job and was ready to live in the house again, that he could pay more than his share and help with the lavandería before and after his shifts. He saw how Perla was struggling. Fewer customers and other supposedly loyal ones who never paid their long-running tabs. Perla was becoming sick too. Her breathing laborious, coughing fits that produced dots of blood. But she refused to see a doctor. Mauro, not wanting to disrespect her, didn’t insist.

Mauro and Elena spoke every few weeks, mostly because she was calling for Perla and he happened to answer. Conversations that were largely transactional. He reported on the lavandería, told her what Perla wouldn’t, like that they’d moved her bed to the room on the ground floor behind the kitchen because the stairs overwhelmed her. Her memory fragmenting, words and names for things slipping from her grasp; how she referred to Karina and Nando as the girl and the boy and one day, when Mauro asked Perla to say their names, she could not.

Mauro told Elena that Perla’s memory was restored in Talia’s presence. She knew every detail of her granddaughter’s life. The way she liked each meal prepared down to the stirring of a spice, waking to dress her for school, watching as she left the house with Mauro, who dropped her at class on his way to work. For Talia, her grandmother was not a fading sunset but a woman burning bright. And so, Elena agreed to postpone sending for her daughter to join her in the United States knowing, as Mauro did, that Perla would not survive long without her.



* * *




In the years that Mauro drifted further from the life he had with Elena, Karina, and Nando, he rooted deeper into his life with Talia. He heard his other children’s resistance when Elena forced them to the phone with him. Monosyllabic. They no longer called him Papi or Papá but Dad or nothing at all. He could not deny Talia was special to him because she was the one he watched grow.

When she was seven, Mauro took her to the lake. It was the first time Perla let him travel beyond the barrio with the child without supervision. They took the bus across city limits, and Mauro carried her up the mountain slope on his back.

He told her about Bochica, the Muisca god of wisdom who taught laws and morals to his people, and his rival, Chibchacum, who punished the world with the ancient diluvio, a universal flood that submerged all life until, with his staff, Bochica forced sunrays through the rain clouds, and the water puddled and parted, making lakes and fertile valleys, pushing the excess through the mountain belt into what became the Tequendama waterfalls. Mauro told Talia how Bochica sentenced Chibchacum to carry the world on his back, and every time they felt an earthquake, it was just Chibchacum shifting under the weight.

When they reached the top, taking in the valley of water below, Talia asked why they couldn’t go swimming in it. Mauro said Guatavita was a sacred lake. They’d come to honor it, and he’d been there with her mother and sister to make wishes for their new life in the north. He told her what Tiberio once told him: When the world was new, the creatures that ruled were the jaguar, the snake, and the condor. Of the snakes, the anaconda, the most massive serpent, swam in jungle waters among fish with tails as long as rainbows, crabs and turtles as wide as cars, crocodiles four times the size of the dwarfed ones that dwell in the Amazon and Orinoco Rivers. The boa queen was above all predators, able to constrict the life out of any creature she wanted. The boa’s power was its silence; eyes that saw everything, movement so graceful and subtle that no other animal could sense they were being watched or hunted. The snake didn’t need to prove its danger. The snake knew power came from patience.