Infinite Country(4)
“My niece.”
The soldier stared at her. “Is that true?”
“He’s my father’s brother.” Her mind flashed with the portrait of another life, one with aunts and uncles and cousins, a life she never knew.
The soldier stepped back, letting the mouth of his weapon slide toward the earth, signaling ahead to the other officers barricading the road to let the truck through. The downhill road smelled of gasoline, smoke, wet soil. She remembered when the police came for her at home. She’d asked if she could pack some clothes, but they’d said there was no need. She’d thought of running then, but there was only one way out of the apartment building and the officers were blocking it. Then the long drive up the mountain. One of six recently sentenced girls carted like livestock, wrists bound by plastic cuffs. The van windows blackened with paint but the scent of the unencumbered earth told her she was far from home.
TWO
The social worker described the compound like a summer camp, a small boarding school in the hills of Santander. A retreat, even if operated by the government. There were academic classes so the girls wouldn’t fall behind when, time served, they were free to return to their normal schools. She told Mauro he should be grateful his daughter wasn’t treated the same as girls from lower estratos, comunas, or invasiones, the ones usually sent to rougher facilities. Talia, she said, could pass for middle class, and this is why she was sentenced to only six months, given a path to redemption, even as Mauro argued this was a country of not second but hundredth chances for the chosen; a nation of amnesiacs where narcotraficantes become senators and senators become narcotraficantes, killers become presidents and presidents become killers.
Mauro knew what it was to be locked away. He’d never spoken of it with any of his children, with Elena or Perla. Men corralled in a warehouse cold as a meat locker. The rationing of showers and blankets and food. The dream of release, not to Elena or the children, but to the land the gringos threatened to banish him to as if it were a return to hell.
Home.
When she was small Talia often asked her father the meaning of the word. Home. Sometimes she understood it meant a house or an apartment, the place a person returned to at the end of a long day. The place where one’s family lived even if they left it a long time ago. The place one felt most comfortable. All of these notions contradicted her first sense of it. Home, to Talia, was a space occupied by her grandmother Perla. A place Mauro came to visit when she and her mother, Elena, over the international wires, permitted it.
Elena was far away with Talia’s siblings, Nando and Karina. When Talia heard her mother’s voice over the phone she often spoke of Colombia as home but quickly added, so her daughter wouldn’t misunderstand, that the United States was home now too. “It’s also your home,” she’d tell Talia, “because you were born here.”
Years later, when it was just Talia and Mauro living together in Perla’s old house, she pressed her body close against her father’s chest when he came to her room to give her la bendición before sleep. “You are my home,” she’d said. “Even if my mother makes me leave you, I will always come back to you.”
She was a girl who perceived leaving for North America as a distant threat. Something she could not imagine she would ever want. One day it was different. Mauro noticed Talia’s face when they watched gringo movies or television programs with subtitles. That unmistakable, irrevocable fascination. The way she started inserting English words into their conversations. He saw the longing take hold, crisp disdain for her familiar yet stale life with him.
He blamed himself for the way he made both Elena and Talia resent their country. His tendency of pointing out evidence of hypocrisy as if their colonized land was more doomed than any other. He wanted to take it all back. The malignant seeds he planted in Elena, who, until she met Mauro, never saw another future beyond helping Perla run the lavandería, who’d only ever traveled as far as Villavicencio on a school trip, for whom a trip to Cartagena was as inconceivable as one to Rome.
Mauro was the one who put it in her head that Bogotá was just another pueblo masquerading as a metropolis and there was more to discover. In their mountains and hungry valleys, they were all descendants of massacred Indigenous Peoples, their violated foremothers. They could hate the conquistadores for what they stole, but they couldn’t deny they carried the same genetic particles that pushed the original invaders to wander into the unknown. Los espa?oles occupied their land, christened it Nueva Granada. Diluted their bloodlines. Killed their tribes. The people they used to be. But instead, Mauro thought, they’d become something else. An adapted people unique to land reconceived by force as the New World; a singed species of birds without feathers who can still fly.
“Maybe,” he once told Elena, “we are creatures of passage, meant to cross oceans just like the first infectors of our continent in order to take back what was taken.”
Elena had more education than Mauro, but she let him believe his ideas were more important.
People say drugs and alcohol are the greatest and most persuasive narcotics—the elements most likely to ruin a life. They’re wrong. It’s love.
THREE
The Bogotá of Elena’s and Mauro’s childhoods was another city from the one Talia knew. To the child, bombings and kidnappings were mostly faraway occurrences in guerrilla-occupied territories or distant campo villages, death tallies mere embers on news feeds. The hurricane of violence of the eighties and nineties was a specter in magazine retrospectives, horror written with near nostalgia, depicted on telenovelas. Nothing Talia, sheltered as she was, believed she needed to fear. In Bogotá, a girl of Talia’s age could almost forget the terror, pretend it was happening in some other country across the continent, that the faces of the disappeared had nothing in common with her schoolmates’ families, and the hardened expressions of children kidnapped or orphaned into fighting the nameless tentacled war could not have just as easily been hers.