Infinite Country(7)
How serene their Bogotá looked from up there, exhaled into rest after a long-held breath. Escobar had been killed on a Medellín rooftop a few days before and there was a confused electric current of ecstatic joy and hope that this would mark the end of the violence, tinged with disquiet for what might come next.
Mauro told Elena that Escobar was the perfect scapegoat for a country that was no better than he was. In showing his lack of conscience, he forced the population to confront its own. “Can any of us born of this land be certain we’d behave differently with that kind of money and power?” He remembered Jairo and the boys in Ciudad Bolívar gathered on the cliffs to drink and shine their guns, saying there was more honor in being a narcotraficante than a politician.
Elena only stared when Mauro said these things. He never told her about his years in the campo or in the hills, or even where he slept each night after he left her at her front door. She believed he went home to La Candelaria, where he claimed to live with an uncle. He’d told her he was an orphan, which didn’t seem a complete untruth. Elena didn’t ask many questions. She was not the way he was, perpetually looking back in time, sideways, thinking around everything. Elena saw only this moment, taking each day together as both their first and last on earth. For her, it was as if Mauro were born in the market at Paloquemao, as if the heavens put him there only for her. Maybe she didn’t demand disclosure because she’d intuited all along, in the way he masked his restlessness, his default state of agitation when he was with her so that she wouldn’t become wary of him. He wanted Elena to feel as safe with him as he felt with her. Maybe she perceived his need for sanctuary.
That afternoon, they sat on the edge of her roof taking in the coppery spread of the capital and its darkening mountains. He kissed her, her lips soft as petals. Held her hand as night swallowed the firmament. He remembered the sabana where he’d dug homes for the dead and thought of the betrayed and vengeful jaguar somewhere below their city, beyond anything they would ever see.
FOUR
Even after months, then years as a couple, Perla wouldn’t allow Mauro to spend the night. Elena was raised on tales meant to keep daughters compliant. The child who talks back to their mother will have their tongue fall out. The child who raises their hand to a parent will see their fingers break off. One of Perla’s most repeated was the tale of the elderly mother who asked her daughter for food because she was hungry. The daughter was cooking at the stove and opened the pot to let out its wonderful aroma but refused to serve any of it until her husband came home because, as the man of the house, he got to eat first. When the husband arrived and the daughter lifted the lid again, a snake emerged from a crack in the floor, knotting its body around the woman’s throat, demanding to be fed or it would eat her face. And so the meal that the daughter had denied her mother was consumed by the snake, and the whole family went without.
* * *
Elena in love grew from an obedient daughter into an elaborate liar. She claimed to need to study to get out of her laundry shifts, taking Mauro into her bedroom while her mother worked in the shop below. Or when her mother was sleeping, when Perla believed Mauro and Elena were at the movies or a party, they hid in the back of the lavandería, fooling around in piles of sheets customers left to be washed and folded. If there was enough money between them they indulged in a few hours of privacy in dingy love motels on the city outskirts, balmy in the bed, dreaming up a shared life. They wanted many children so no single child would experience the solitary childhood they’d each had.
Their first daughter, Karina, was born a few months into the new millennium. With Perla’s approval, Mauro finally moved into Elena’s bedroom, agonizing over the ways he might fail this child. He worried deceit ran through his blood, as dominant as his father’s features, dark curls and arequipe skin, which he’d already passed on to the baby. He vowed to give her more than he’d been given. The only way to do that, he determined, was by leaving their land.
The end of the last century brought no closure to violence across the country, just new heads for the monster. From a populace rearranged by the dislocation of hundreds of thousands; to relentless attacks on citizens like the hijacking of a flight from Bucaramanga, its passengers abducted into the jungle; the mass kidnapping of parishioners from a church in Cali; the guerrilla takeover of the Amazon city of Mitú, where countless people were wounded and disappeared before the army response over three days of combat left hundreds of civilians, soldiers, and insurgents dead; paramilitary massacres in Macayepo and El Salado, where dozens, including children, were tortured, macheted, and murdered. In the capital, the No Más protests all but unheard by those who most needed to hear them.
“This country doesn’t know it’s dying,” Mauro said as they watched the news after dinner.
“It’s not the country we want, but it’s the country we deserve,” Perla answered while Elena remained quiet.
That much might be true, Mauro thought, but there was no law condemning a person to life in the nation of their birth. Not yet.
Perla’s laundry was near bankruptcy since washing machines had become more affordable and most people no longer needed to send their clothes out to a lavado de ropa por libras. For a time, she looked for a tenant to take over the shop space, but the barrio building facades were covered in profane graffiti. During Perla’s childhood, the street was as beautiful as an English country road, like the imitation Tudor and Victorian styles much of Chapinero was modeled on. Now it was a block most people avoided.