Infinite Country(43)
She rarely remembered any danger when she thought of her homeland. Lies often accompany longing. But it was worth something that she’d never been hurt or had to hide from anyone the way she’d had to do in the United States. Her birthplace had its own bigotry, inequality, terrorism, oil spills, water contaminations, and poverty just like in the north. But every nation in the Americas had a hidden history of internal violence. It just wore different masks, carried different weapons, and justified itself with different stories. She couldn’t guarantee to Mauro or to anyone that this country was safer than any other, or even that it offered more advantages or opportunity. Not anymore. She could only meet Talia with the love she’d been guarding for fifteen years. Her daughter had two countries to call home. Where she made hers would be her choice. If she ever decided to leave, Elena made a silent promise to let her daughter go.
She’d sustained herself on reverie of her family reunited in the north. Now that her youngest was due to arrive in a few days, a new dream took shape: that of returning with her children to Colombia, possibly on the day they’d spent years wishing for, when they were each granted permission to travel freely, to navigate the routes between their nations without fear of detention or exile. There, she saw Mauro waiting for them at the airport, ready to fold them into his wings.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Across the sabana, Talia’s city came into view. The unexpected harmony of russet buildings, avenues the color of shrapnel shining with recent rain. She guided Aguja from her place behind him, lips close to his ear. They passed the old house, barricaded and papered with construction permits. An announcement of imminent demolition. She led him to her and Mauro’s current address, the third-floor apartment opposite the widow who shared her stews with neighbors. Aguja parked his motorcycle along the sidewalk. Talia had no key, so she rang the building bell, but there was no response. She could only wait until her father came home from work and hope that in the meantime nobody recognized her.
They went to a park a few corners away. An elderly couple on a nearby bench fed crumbs to pigeons at their feet. Across the plaza, a young woman strollered a child. Talia didn’t know any of these people but somehow felt acutely connected, tethered to the wooden bench, the concrete beneath her feet. A sense of her life’s incompletion had led her this far, but now she wondered if she wasn’t meant to live anywhere but Bogotá.
“I’m seeing our capital for the first time because of you,” Aguja said.
“So what do you think?”
“With this traffic and pollution I have a better idea why you want to leave.”
“That was never what bothered me about this place.”
They returned to the apartment building after dusk, a light in the living room window bright as fire. She rang the bell again, and this time her father’s voice came quick over the intercom. Papá was all she needed to say. In seconds the door opened and he was pulling his daughter to his chest, separating only so he could touch her face, hold her shoulders, study her eyes and know she was safe, unchanged, the child he knew. In trying to hug him with the force of her life, she realized how weak she was, exhausted, hungry. She turned from her father to introduce Aguja. Her father looked concerned but took her cue, shook Aguja’s hand, thanked him for helping Talia, and invited him inside. Aguja responded that he knew Talia’s and Mauro’s time together was limited. He didn’t want to intrude. He needed to get back to Barichara anyway.
Talia had already paid him what she promised but was grateful her father pulled out his wallet and handed over all the bills inside so Aguja could buy gas and food for the journey. She left Mauro to walk Aguja to his motorcycle. He slid onto the seat. She resisted the impulse to climb on too. Touching the string around her neck, she thanked him for bringing her home.
“If you ever find yourself back in Barichara, ask for me.” He offered his hand to shake, but she stepped in to kiss his cheek, rough, unshaven, sticky with sweat. She wouldn’t forget his smell. “You’ll be okay, ni?a. It’s like driving these mountain roads. You can’t see what’s ahead if you keep looking in the rearview mirror.”
* * *
There was a new feeling. A coming to the end of something while knowing it was the beginning of something else. Her last night at home with her father. The only home that had been truly theirs, not her grandmother’s house, which had been left to her mother. This was the apartment Mauro rented with two small bedrooms, a sitting area and kitchen with space for a small table. They’d lived there almost a year, but it still felt like a wrong fit, something they outgrew even before they arrived, a place of no memories, at least until tonight, and suddenly it felt like the only home she’d ever need.
He cooked one of his simple meals for her. The warmth of the stove reached every corner of the apartment. She showered away days of filth, sat on her bed in fresh clothes, the suitcase her father prepared resting beside the door. She thought of places she’d slept in order to arrive at this night, remembering the prison school, the nuns her father said called many times asking if she’d found her way back to him. Her homecoming was a secret they’d both have to keep. He didn’t ask for details of her escape. He wouldn’t know the things she’d done, the lies she’d told, what she’d stolen. Memories she hoped to drop from the sky the minute her plane left their mountains and crossed the ocean.