Infinite Country(41)
For months now, we’ve also seen news stories of other divided families, children separated from their parents at the southern border. I haven’t told anyone I dream of these children in particular, hear their cries, the eventual silence of capitulation, feel their ache of lost faith and unknowing. In my sleep, I am one of them. Our family didn’t cross any desert or river to get here. We came by plane with the right documents, now worthless. My life, like my sister’s and my brother’s, is a mishap, a side effect of our parents’ botched geographical experiment. I often wonder if we are living the wrong life in the wrong country. If the reason I have felt so out of place is because I, like the narco animals, have no biological or ancestral memory of this strange North American landscape or its furious seasons. These mountains and rivers are not mine. I haven’t yet figured out if by the place of my birth I was betrayed or I am the betrayer, or why this particular nation and not some other should be our family pendulum.
I looked over the bluff at the tidal ponds below and thought of lives lost to the crags and current. I clawed the rock I was sitting on, closed my eyes, felt wind scarf my neck, and imagined the feeling of hurling myself over.
“What do you think it will be like when she gets here?” my brother asked.
“We’ll have to look after her. Explain things. It might take a while for us to get used to each other.”
“What do you think will happen to us?”
“With Talia?”
“With everything.”
When he turns twenty-one, my brother can request to have our mother’s status adjusted. In applying, he will have to tell them where we are. The stakes are brutal. They could deny the request and instead come for her and for me. I wasn’t sure if this is what he meant with his question, so I said what I always say about our future.
“I don’t know.”
Then I asked myself more questions without answers: If I vaulted off this mountain what would the headline say? An undocumented girl fell to her death. Would they print my name, describe my life as a loss or as a waste? If the fall didn’t kill me, would anyone care to record the story of my survival? I pictured being saved by some gravitational reversal, sprouting wings that would carry me from this place until I found myself among other migratory beings, bound for somewhere that feels more like home.
TWENTY-SIX
As a child, Elena’s mother told her about the condor that lived deep in the cordillera, so lonely that he flew down to the valley in search of a wife. He found a girl tending to goats in her garden and asked if she would be his wife. The girl said she loved her home too much, she never wanted to leave it, and for this reason she knew she would never marry, but she didn’t mind because she couldn’t stand the thought of leaving her parents behind. The condor said he understood because he’d once had parents he loved until they left him alone in their nest and flew away. The next day, the condor returned and again asked the girl to be his wife. Again, she refused. This time the condor said he would leave but asked the girl if she would please first scratch a painful itch for him. He lowered himself so the girl could reach his shoulders to scratch beneath his feathers, but as she did so, he took flight with the girl still holding his back and flew to his cave in the mountains. Once there, he pulled out some of his own feathers, decorating the girl to make her his bride. At home, the girl’s parents cried with worry over their missing child. A green parrot that lived nearby heard their wails, approached, and told them: “If I am able to bring your daughter home, do you promise you will always let me eat fruit from your trees and take shelter in your garden?” The parents agreed, so the parrot left to search for the girl. He found her atop a sharp peak living with the condor. By now, she’d grown her own feathers and birthed half-avian chicks that died. She was no longer human but something else. As the condor slept, the parrot took the girl back to her family. Upon her return, her feathers fell out and soon she was the girl she’d once been, happy and at peace in her home. The condor was furious and came looking for her. But the parrot was waiting in the garden where he’d been permitted to live, and when the condor tried to eat him, the parrot gathered all his might and pushed straight through the other end of the condor’s body. The condor tried to eat the parrot again and again, but the parrot escaped each time out the other end, until the condor decided to tear the parrot apart with the force of its beak and crescent talons, swallowing the meaty bits, but each morsel swept through the condor’s body, emerging in the form of smaller, brightly colored birds. And this was how the land came to be populated by parrots from the scarlet macaws to the tiny golden parakeets people like to keep in cages in their homes.
* * *
When they lived together in Perla’s house, Mauro sometimes crept out of bed, careful not to wake Elena, and went to the roof to smoke cigarettes. He thought she never noticed, but Elena always woke to the void he left in their bed. When she followed, she’d find him staring past the veined mountain lights. Sometimes she watched and let him think he was still alone. When she did say his name, he met her with an indecipherable expression.
One night when Mauro left the bed, Karina sleeping in a crib at its foot, Elena lay still in the room thinking of her own father, a man she never knew beyond photographs Perla removed from their frames and placed in a chest that was never to be opened. In the same chest, she kept the deed to the house, bank papers, and a letter from a woman who claimed to be her husband’s new wife. Elena discovered it in a closet one day, though she never told her mother. When she had her own children, Elena understood a mother is entitled to her secrets.