Infinite Country(37)
Before they went on their way again, Talia asked if she could use his phone. She thought it was time to call her father, let him know she’d made it this far and that she’d be home in a matter of hours. Aguja’s phone was down to its last drops of charge, but he handed it over. She dialed and let it ring and ring, but there was no answer.
TWENTY-THREE
Mauro saw a missed call on his phone from a number he didn’t recognize. No message was left. He hoped it was Talia calling to say she was safe, then panicked that it was the police or a hospital reporting that she’d been arrested or hurt. He was at one of the apartments at his job, fixing a light fixture for some residents. As he worked on wires, he took in the sight of the family seated at their dining room table eating breakfast. The parents, a son, two daughters. Just like his family except not like them at all, so comfortable in their routine they mostly ignored one another. The father read the morning paper. The mother gave instructions to the housekeeper as she refreshed their coffees. The children mute with boredom. Mauro could not fathom the luxury of such familial indifference.
The father, wearing a pressed shirt and trousers, a suit jacket slung over the back of another chair, started talking about the peace treaty, calling it a farce, speculating which side would be the first to cheat the other. One of the daughters said the rebel forces had already demobilized and surrendered their arms, and the father said they weren’t fools enough to give up every weapon in their arsenal; they surely had hidden stockpiles. He predicted the official peace would bring dissension from revolutionary fringes, smaller factions would gain power, and insurgents already legitimized by the treaty would turn Colombia into a formalized guerrilla nation.
He spoke loudly in a way typical of the Latin American man of a certain class, presumed authority, each an aspiring president of their own miniature republic. The father told his children they were too young to remember the massacres of the Awá in Nari?o or the mass killings in Dabeiba and Chocó; an era when more parents buried their children than the other way around. Everybody wanted a peace parade, a Nobel Prize, and a new national holiday so badly they’d forgotten the hundreds of thousands dead and still missing.
As Mauro worked to restore light to the family’s hallway, he felt imperceptible. The kids had passed him in the lobby many times. They’d been raised to know some people merit polite greetings and others can go without. The father asked his name after Mauro helped him jump-start his car one day. After that, whenever he saw Mauro he would say, “How’s the family, Mauricio?” even though Mauro never told him anything about Elena or his children. The wife had visits from women friends most afternoons. Once, he was called when the kitchen sink flooded during a gathering. The wife was frantic as the housekeeper mopped the froth. A few days later the wife found Mauro in the lobby and asked if he knew anyone she could hire because her current housekeeper was leaving.
Mauro closed his eyes for a few seconds to try to trick himself, then opened them. For one suspended moment, he succeeded. There was his own family seated at the table: Mauro and Elena, each distracted by the details of the day, a life where ominous news headlines only infiltrated their nonviolent world as mealtime conversation. The children. His son, angular and slouched, an expression still hopeful, unmarked by the rejection Mauro had known as a boy, and not a hint of the desertion Mauro had imposed on his own kids. His first daughter. A face like her mother’s, serene but withholding. Talia was there, too, the one he worried had been so protected she’d become too fearless. He blinked again and they disappeared.
* * *
With the lavandería closed and no more prospective tenants for the shop below, the upkeep of Perla’s house became too expensive for Mauro to afford, even with Elena’s contributions from abroad. Mauro suggested renting out rooms, but Elena didn’t want her childhood home converted into a hostel or boardinghouse. The surrounding blocks were filling with cafés, galleries, bars, and trendy shops, though theirs was still untouched. Compared to the newer buildings coming up in the area, Perla’s house only looked more decayed. Every potential tenant remarked the same thing. The structure would need a complete remodel. It might be worth more torn down.
“Just sell it,” Elena said. She’d sign whatever papers were needed to give him the authority to do so on her behalf.
He wondered if time bleached her memories of the house so they were mere scratches on a pale canvas. No longer an inheritance but a gorge of debt, a place she didn’t expect ever to return to much less to live. But Mauro feared losing the house would make the family even more rootless; without it and with her mother already gone, once Talia joined Elena in the United States, there would be nothing left for her in Colombia.
Before turning the keys over to the new owners, Spaniards who planned to convert the building into a language school, Mauro and Talia went to the roof, the first place he’d kissed her mother, and sat on the ledge facing the crown of Monserrate. Lightning scissored in the distance. Talia said the city was so ugly and the weather so bad, she didn’t understand why the capital hadn’t been founded in a better climate. Mauro reminded her it was the land of their ancestors and their connection to it ran deeper than Bogotá being designated the nation’s principal city. In the time before colonization and extermination, before their language was outlawed and they were given a new god and new names, they were a potent and powerful civilization of millions.