Infinite Country

by Patricia Engel

Talia considered how people who do horrible things can be victims, and how victims can be people who do horrible things.

She told them her mother was abroad and sent her back to Colombia when she was a baby. But this particular family condition was so common it couldn’t possibly be considered trauma.

Mauro argued this was a country of not second but hundredth chances for the chosen; a nation of amnesiacs where narcotraficantes become senators and senators become narcotraficantes, killers become presidents and presidents become killers.

Exterminations of the so-called desechables. Children stolen and forced to the front lines. Hundreds of thousands tortured, maimed, displaced. Massacres of police and of the poor—cartels, army, narco-guerrillas, and paramilitaries each trying to take down the other’s loyal or purchased soldiers, and it was unclear who did the most killing.

When he was mischievous she blamed his genetics with disgust—esos ojos mentirosos, esa quijada de salvaje—throwing shoes at his back, shaving his head to cull his inheritance of curls.

Tiberio also said most people only knew the Colombia of campo tears and urban shame, of funerals and outcry, of corruption and displacement. It was not the land the gods intended. The real Colombia, he insisted, was a thing of majesty beyond their valleys and cordilleras.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

Nando was much smaller than their daughter had been when she was born. Elena was sure it was the American diet, which somehow fattened a person while depriving them of nutrition.

It happened far away from the capital, all the way on the Pacific coast, but it was still our country, our dead, Elena thought. Tragic, almost, that she never felt more patriotic than when grieving her country’s victims.

In Texas she’d had plenty of scans and checkups, and the doctors were always telling her something was wrong with her baby, that she would be wise to terminate or he might be born dead or close to it.

Only women knew the strength it took to love men through their evolution to who they thought they were supposed to be.

The antidote to disgrace, according to even the atheists in the group, was humility and prayer. Mauro followed their instructions because they’d kept him clean for nearing a decade.

The impossible and unforgiving Andean volcanic chain. Elena could see it all from this distance.

What was it about this country that kept everyone hostage to its fantasy? The previous month, on its own soil, an American man went to his job at a plant and gunned down fourteen coworkers, and last spring alone there were four different school shootings. A nation at war with itself, yet people still spoke of it as some kind of paradise.

And what was happiness? Not selfish fulfillment, of this she was certain. That seemed like a recipe for the opposite. Joy was in the loving and caring of others.

Police are not your friend. Even the cordial ones. Yes, they are there to help people in danger just like you’re taught in school, she’d tried to explain to her children, but in this country some people think the ones they need protection from are us.

There is more to the story of me, but this is what you need to know for now: I’ve had borders drawn around me all my life, but I refuse to live as a bordered person. I hate the term undocumented. It implies people like my mother and me don’t exist without a paper trail.

Don’t tell me I’m undocumented when my name is tattooed on my father’s arm.

Every time there’s a suicide attempt, the school administrators hold meetings for parents to learn how to help their miserable children, and it’s expected everyone attends or your parents will be seen as uncaring assholes.

The day after the last election, some kids came skipping into homeroom like a war was won. Hearing cocaine jokes and mechanical hallway insults of Go back to your country was nothing new for me and Nando, but there was new brazenness, like a gloved hand reaching for our throats, reminding us we were not welcome.

I remember wondering what it must feel like to belong to American whiteness and to know you can do whatever you want because nobody you love is deportable.

In the time before colonization and extermination, before their language was outlawed and they were given a new god and new names, they were a potent and powerful civilization of millions.

Emigration was a peeling away of the skin. An undoing. You wake each morning and forget where you are, who you are, and when the world outside shows you your reflection, it’s ugly and distorted; you’ve become a scorned, unwanted creature.

He went to his meetings nearly every evening and hoped they would be enough to keep him from his former vices during the wilderness of time he’d be sentenced to after Talia’s departure.

chancletazo,

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?

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.

Despite the distance and years apart, she’d somehow convinced herself she knew their daughter well. Now she understood that child was fiction. The daughter Elena was getting to know was smarter, wiser, as lovely and self-governing as a wildflower.

The next morning, one of thousands with which they’d mend the years torn from their family pages, creating new stories in place of elisions.

I told her I understood what it was to want to create justice to fix an injustice even if my justice could be considered a crime. I know what it is to hurt and to feel hurt on behalf of others.

That night I thought about how love comes paired with failures, apologies for deficiencies. The only remedy is compassion.

In my waking memory, I’d never seen them like this, had no recollection of them touching or even speaking face-to-face, but an intimate familiarity came over us; I felt a river current, a serpentine wind, an artery of lightning pass through my parents and through me.

There are innumerable joys left out of these pages. Sorrows too. A life rendered will always be incomplete.

I wondered about the matrix of separation and dislocation, our years bound to the phantom pain of a lost homeland, because now that we are together again that particular hurt and sensation that something is missing has faded. And maybe there is no nation or citizenry; they’re just territories mapped in place of family, in place of love, the infinite country.

Above all, I thank my mother and father for their love, their stories, and for holding on to each other no matter what.

Very early in my life I was made to feel both excluded and embraced by the two countries and cultures that formed me, and there were others, still, who had no idea what to do with me.

The word “myth” doesn’t convey the power that stories about the origin of the world and the logic of the universe really have.