Infinite Country(9)
“I’m working every day for our survival and to send money back to your mother. You call that nothing?”
“Why don’t we go home? We have a house to live in. We have the lavandería to run. I feel so alone here. We never should have left.”
On nights when Mauro sat by the window drinking the cheapest liquor he could find, his back turned to Elena even as she called him to bed, she considered leaving without him. She could take the baby and return to her mother, the house in Chapinero, the barrio where everyone knew her name.
Things improved when Mauro found them a small apartment in Northside Village. A woman on the floor above paid Elena to watch her children while she went to work at a plastics plant. They monitored the calendar as weeks and then months passed and their visa expiration dates approached, debating whether to overstay or to return home. Elena was surprised it was now Mauro who was ready to go back. He was tired. The daily furniture hauling was becoming too much even for him. The men he worked with called him esqueleto, their own bodies thick from working in factories or fields. Compared to them he was skinny as a nail, more bone than muscle, limbs like arrows in leather sheaths. He resented the idea of becoming what some called illegal, as if just waking up another day in North America made a person a felon. He missed their city, knowing where they’d sleep each month, the fragrances of Perla’s lavandería and the fruit stacks at Paloquemao. He even missed Bogotá’s chaos, the city’s brittle air in contrast to the strangling boa of Texas heat.
“Here we will always be foreigners,” he told Elena. “We’re Colombians. So is our daughter. It’s where we belong.”
Elena nodded. Their return seemed to be decided.
But then she said, “Mauro. I’m pregnant.”
* * *
In Houston, Mauro worked with many men who’d navigated the southern borderlands by foot, some four or five times. They came from different nations, passing through the corridor of the Americas, sometimes intercepted and sent back to their countries within days while others were held for months in camps with no walls, only tarps shielding them from the prickly southwestern sun and frigid night. Still, they returned, even as the journey became harder, the hazards more vicious, convinced this land offered more than theirs had already taken from them. Mauro and Elena arrived under different circumstances, but Mauro knew the consequences were the same if they didn’t leave when their visas expired. Without an adjustment or amnesty, a deportation order would come.
As Elena and the baby slept, Mauro held his family’s three passports, running his fingers over the dates printed on each visa, Karina’s baby photo pressed onto the page. They’d had it taken in a shop near the house in Chapinero. The storeowner droned that she was too tiny to go on a plane and it was unnatural to make an Andean child cross the sea so soon. He warned she’d acquire an incurable vertigo from breeching their altitude so early in life that would haunt her no matter where she went.
Later, Mauro and Elena laughed about the shopkeeper’s insistence. But he wondered about the baby who was coming. Elena was sure it would be a boy. Mauro didn’t know if she said so because she thought it was what he wanted or needed to hear, as if every man felt the primal urge to father a son. He thought of his own father who was no example to follow. Mauro worried he wouldn’t have anything to teach a son about how to be a man but at least he could give him a life in a new land rather than tow him back to their pasts, even if it would cost them in ways they could not yet imagine.
At gatherings in the homes of Mauro’s coworkers, when the men passed around beers or tequila, or when talking to people from the neighborhood, no matter their nation of origin, when asked why they came to this country and stayed they all said the same thing: more opportunity. For themselves, for their children, for their queridos back home whom they were able to support with money earned in the United States. It became true for Elena and Mauro too. What they earned in one week in Texas was more than what Mauro and Elena made in a month working at the market and her mother’s laundry combined. Mauro had no education, and Elena didn’t attend university because she was expecting Karina. With a devalued currency, theirs was a country where it felt impossible to get ahead if one wasn’t born to a certain class, rich or corrupt, or talented and beautiful enough for fútbol or farándula.
If Mauro and Elena ignored the exit date stamped on their passports, the option of returning to the United States would be closed for at least five or ten years, at which point they might be able to apply for reentry. That they’d received visas in the first place, without American sponsors and with the quota on Colombians admitted to the country each year, had felt like the intervention of saints. If they stayed, they’d be limited to their existence in North America until it came to its inevitable conclusion. Unless one won the green card lottery, but they were too scared to apply to take the chance. Political asylum was just as elusive. Coming from a place that gringos regularly stereotyped as a death trap didn’t mean they could prove they were unsafe without a documented history of threats. The perils of poverty didn’t count, only a demonstrated danger of physical harm. Since they never received letters vowing to kill or dismember their families, they weren’t deemed worthy of government protection. A good attorney might have been able to argue that even if one was not important enough to be a murder target it did not mean that person couldn’t be killed at any second. But they didn’t know how to find a trustworthy lawyer, having been warned about con-artists who preyed on people like them, self-proclaimed miracle workers promising citizenship in a year, who charged upfront, then vanished.