Infinite Country(8)
In those days, Mauro thought he would have to go abroad alone. He did not imagine Elena would be willing to leave her mother. When he told her his idea to find work in another country so he could send money back for her, Perla, and the baby—sustenance for the lavandería and to keep the house from dereliction—he promised it would be only for a few months. Then he would return, and just think what they could do with the money he made! How far it would reach when converted to pesos.
He was surprised Elena didn’t argue, only listened. When he was through making his case, she pulled a tin box from under her bed, filled with crumpled bills. Her secret savings, she said, though she never knew for what until that moment.
“Take us with you.”
FIVE
Spain was the logical first choice because of the common language. This was years before Colombia’s entry to the Schengen Agreement that would allow them to travel there without visas, and so their applications were denied. Mauro and Elena decided to try for the United States, where they’d heard it was easier to get tourist visas as individuals rather than as a married couple. That’s how they rationalized not having a wedding just yet. They told Perla that Mauro had a cousin in Texas who invited them to stay for a while. It would be a long vacation of sorts. They’d get to know the city, find temporary jobs, make some fat American dollars to pay off Perla’s debts, and return home with their savings plumped. People did this kind of thing all the time.
In Houston, they quickly understood they were not guests but boarders, tenants. The man who took them in was not a cousin but a friend of a friend from the fruit market to whom they paid rent and who otherwise didn’t want anything to do with them. Mauro found work moving furniture while Elena kept the house clean and washed and ironed the man’s clothes. She would have cooked for him, too, but he padlocked the fridge and said they had to find their own meals elsewhere.
Neither Mauro nor Elena had ever seen the sea except in pictures and from the airplane from which they could only make out a desert of blue. A few weeks after their arrival, to ease her homesickness, Mauro fulfilled an old vow of showing Elena the ocean, taking them to the beach in a place called Bolivar, which seemed a promising omen. Elena had bought bathing suits for herself and Karina before leaving Colombia. The elastic pinched, but she didn’t care. The sun had never tickled so much of her body.
They walked across the burning sand until the Gulf pooled at their waists. Mauro held Karina, gliding her toes across the current. Elena palmed the water. In her hands it was transparent, but around them it was all brown, tinted by silt and as murky as the Río Bogotá, nothing suggesting the turquoise waters Mauro had promised.
In Bogotá’s interminable autumn, Elena’s complexion blanched. In Texas she goldened, her hair feathered her temples, whipping with humidity around her neck and shoulders. At the request of his new boss, Mauro buzzed off his long hair, which sharpened his features as if by a blade. They sweated through their clothes those first weeks in Houston. At sea level for the first time in their lives, they underwent a metamorphosis, an inverted soroche of breathlessness, headaches, and ravenous hunger while their ears took in English, English, all the time English, and if they heard Spanish, it was with no accent like their own.
Phone calls to Perla were brief and expensive, so Elena tried to send a letter to her mother every week, though each one took days to write and weeks to arrive. She didn’t want to tell her mother the mundane details of her life in the house while Mauro worked. The hours she spent pushing the baby in a secondhand stroller around a desolate park because the man they were staying with turned off the air-conditioning when he went out and didn’t allow them to use the television or computer. She didn’t want her mother to worry or ask what the point of going abroad was if one had to live in worse conditions than at home, so she filled her pages with commentary on the velvety warmth of the Houston summer, plum sunsets, and the luxury of so much daylight. She told Perla about Mauro’s job, which earned him an hourly wage plus tips, since gringos loved to reward good service, and about people they met as if they were already dear friends, not single-encounter acquaintances they were likely never to see again. It was not the working vacation she imagined. She thought during Mauro’s time off they’d explore the North American terrain they knew only from movies, but all Elena had seen, besides the day at the beach, were highways, roads, and bayous lining flatness upon flatness.
She wrote her letters at night, as Karina slept and Mauro listened to a small radio he bought, repeating words and sentences the newscaster said until they felt right on his tongue. At his job, he’d already picked up far more vocabulary than Elena. He tried to teach her some, but she didn’t see the point in pushing herself since they would eventually go home.
They did not consider themselves immigrants. They never thought that far ahead and were young enough to believe none of their decisions were permanent. They saw themselves as travelers discovering new frontiers. Their visas were for six months, though issued at different times, so Mauro’s would expire several weeks before Elena’s. They’d had to purchase return tickets for January as a condition of their visas, but with the hours Elena spent alone with Karina every day, the date felt further and further away.
“I’m tired of this,” she told Mauro one night when he returned from his job. “We’re not seeing America. We’re not doing anything here.”