Infinite Country(42)
She heard Mauro’s footsteps flat and rushed. Not his usual nocturnal choreography to avoid waking her and the baby. He came to her side and found her already awake. “Elena, I saw it. With these eyes. I saw it!”
“Saw what?” She expected he’d witnessed a car wreck or robbery on the street below. It wouldn’t be the first time. Or even that he’d spotted a UFO, since the news had reported more sightings of orbs like fireballs above the Nazca lines.
“A condor flying over our barrio, and when it came to our house the wind held it above me and—” He lost his breath, dropping his face in his palms. When he pulled them away, Elena saw his eyes glossed with tears and asked him to show her.
They ran together to the roof, but there was no great bird. Not even stars. Only clouds blotting the sky.
“There are no condors in the city, Mauro.”
“I saw one. I need you to believe me.”
She wanted to offer some logic to make the apparition more plausible, said it might have escaped from the zoo or been blown off course from the páramo of Chingaza. Mauro had spoken before about condors. He once told Elena he’d gone with a friend up to Ciudad Bolívar and saw boys shooting a condor as it glided over the escarpment but the bird had escaped their bullets. Elena didn’t believe his story, even if as a child she’d pretended Bogotá was not a city but a jungle thick as the manigua of Caquetá, the brick skins of buildings were tree bark, and police sirens were the calls of monkeys and birds.
In school, she’d learned condors preferred open tundra where they could feed easily and soar for miles without a flap of their wings. They were scarce because, besides being the national symbol of freedom and sovereignty and the largest flying creature on earth, they were believed sacred and immortal, guardians of the upper world. Their population diminished by poisonings and hunters after their bones, feathers, and organs, which were said to have healing properties.
That night, reading Elena’s skepticism, Mauro asked why it was so hard to believe the condor could have returned to the city. “This was its territory before man occupied it, after all. Maybe it came to remind us what we’ve stolen.”
Years later, when Mauro was down to his final days before deportation, he called Elena from the detention center and asked if she remembered the night he saw the condor fly over him on their roof. She told him she did.
“Do you know that when a condor is old or sick, or if its mate dies, it will push itself to fly higher than ever before, then drop out of the sky to end its own life?”
“I didn’t know that.”
She remembered that when they returned to their bedroom after searching for signs of the condor, they’d stood by Karina’s crib, watching as she slept. Her parents’ absence hadn’t pulled her awake. Mauro whispered then that a condor, which could live as long as a human, was faithful to one partner for life. Together they nested on impenetrable cliffs, sharing the duties of incubation, making a home for their family only they were able to reach.
* * *
Friends told Elena that when a child and a parent are reunited after so many years apart, the distance and time can be more difficult to breech than either anticipated. They warned her not to have unrealistic expectations for her daughter’s attachment to her or for her family’s bonding once she arrived. She tried to prepare herself for possible outcomes. She knew that when Talia landed she might feel so overwhelmed with the deluge of English, the vacillating weather, so far from her city and mountains she might eventually beg for a return ticket home, so Elena budgeted some money in case. She would not deny her daughter the right to go back to Colombia the way she’d denied it to herself. She knew Mauro’s arms would be hard for her daughter to leave and accepted that after so many years apart she likely loved her father far more.
She blamed herself for displacing her own children, especially her girls. Karina and Talia, binational, each born in one country and raised in another like repotted flowers, creatures forced to live in the wrong habitat. She’d watched the child who came to her that winter in Delaware grow through photographs and phone lines. Her voice was always new when they spoke. Her other children had lost much of their Spanish and sometimes Elena imagined it was Talia, the daughter she did not raise yet who had grown up in the same home as her mother, who knew her best.
When Karina and Nando were small, living in those cramped basements, they asked Elena why they didn’t have a house of their own like the families on TV. “We have a house,” she told them. “We just don’t live in it because it’s far away.”
“But why?” they asked over and over.
“Because we live here,” she would say, wishing there was a way they could comprehend what even she couldn’t. She was never sure if she’d made the right decision in staying. Eventually she’d understand that in matters of migration, even accidental, no option is more moral than another. There is only the path you make. Any other would be just as wrong or right.
Lately when they spoke on the phone, Mauro told Elena the news abroad showed a United States scorching with civilian massacres as bad or worse than Colombia’s ghastliest days of warfare, where ordinary American citizens were more heavily armed than any guerrilla or paramilitary fighter ever was. And was it true—he asked—the stories of cities contaminated by the water supply, children killed by police with impunity, communities left to fend for themselves against natural disasters as bad as the earthquakes and mudslides their land endured? How could people still think of gringolandia as some promised land knowing those things happened there?