Infinite Country(35)

“They had fire.”

“Keep complaining. The sun won’t come up any quicker.”

She sat beside him, knees pressed tight to her chest, felt the chill of the grass through her clothes.

“You can let your back touch the ground,” he said. “Nothing will happen to you.”

“I’m cold.”

“Lay next to me. It will warm us both.”

She leaned back, settling against him as their bodies aligned. “If you touch me the wrong way I’ll dig out both your eyeballs.”

“I don’t know why you want to leave the country. You’re obviously a guerrillera by nature.”

It occurred to her that if he smelled this badly, she must smell bad too. Their odors comingled from being pressed together through exhaust clouds, behind trucks and buses on highways and country roads. Self-conscious, she tried to tilt herself away, but he pulled her in closer. She felt his bones against her shoulder. He adjusted his arm to cradle her neck and set his palm against her side.

“Are you going to tell me the truth of how you ended up so far from home?”

“I told you. I was trying to get away from a bad guy.”

“But what were you doing in Barichara of all places?”

It had been only days since she’d fled from the prison school, but Talia felt she’d been lying for a very long time, maybe her whole life. She decided to give him as much honesty as she thought he could handle without being tempted to turn on her.

“I ran away.”

“From where?”

“A place they sent me for not being good.”

He laughed. “I believe that.”

“You wouldn’t make a joke if you knew what I did to be sent there.”

“Did you slap some other girl at school?”

“I hurt a man badly. I burned him and scarred him for life.”

“How?”

“With hot oil.”

He was quiet. She heard the chime of the river current. Above, starlight refracted, the moon cloud-narrowed to a bullet.

“Does your mother know what you’ve done?”

“No.”

“So you’re a fugitive.”

“I suppose.”

“You know what happens to fugitives when they flee the country? You can never come back. If you do, the police will be waiting to send you to prison.”

“I’m not some drug trafficker or politician. I’m only fifteen.”

She felt his fingers light on her hair but didn’t tell him to stop.

“Are you ready to leave this country knowing you might never be able to return?”

“I don’t want to think about that.”

“When you get to the United States, nobody will understand you. I don’t mean just the language. It’s a country of strangers. It will be another kind of sentence. But one that as an immigrant you won’t be able to escape.”

“You think this country is so much better?”

“No, but it’s a land of brothers and sisters. You want to go to a place where you’ll be invisible.”

“I want to be with my mother.”

“Colombia is your mother too.”



* * *




Aguja slept, but Talia remained awake on the bed of hard earth, deafened by the river. At home, when she couldn’t sleep, she’d go to her father’s room and ask him to tell her the story of how Chiminigagua created the sun, named Sué, and then his wife, Chía, the moon. Though they were loving companions, they argued over who should control the world through day and night. Since Chía watched the world through the darkness, Mauro said Talia should ask her help to guide her into a peaceful sleep until her husband, Sué, took over the care of the world at daybreak.

Usually Talia fell asleep still whispering her petition to the moon, and when she awoke to the apartment bathed in morning light, her father, with breakfast ready in the kitchen, told his daughter she must be special because the moon always listened to her.

She knew she would never know another night like this one. Not beside Aguja and not under flaring stars like nails hammered into the sky, the waft of dirt and mint and flowers, the murmur of the arroyo flowing toward the Río Magdalena to the mouth of the Caribbean Sea, where sharks fed on the burst of river fish. This land, with all its beauty, still manages to betray itself, she remembered her father saying. If this were true, and she was one if its children, it was no mystery why she turned her back on it just as her parents had done before her.

She thought of what would be gained and what would be lost once she left.

In the other country, she would embrace her mother and siblings for the first time since she was a baby. They would all sleep under the same roof.

In the other country, she would fall in love for the first time. The thought thrilled her. But then she thought in this country she may never find love and felt blighted.

In the other country, an uncharted future awaited. But it could only be so if she let her future in this country die.

In the other country, she would no longer be a criminal. But in the other country half her family was and always would be.

In the other country, she would have a sister and a brother. No longer a lone child caring for her grandmother’s health and her father’s heart.