Infinite Country

The narrator is now Nando, the middle child and the one American citizen in Elena’s household. Nando relates stories of how the bigotry of bullies has impacted him personally. First, a girl who finds him attractive is warned away by someone he does not even know who threatens to have his family deported and calls him “latrine.” In a prior incident, when he tried to complain about the treatment he received, he was chastised by the principal and then beaten and sexually harassed by a carload of bullies. Though he shared the story with his sister, to whom he is addressing this chapter, he kept the story from his mother. 

The omniscient narrator returns in this chapter to tell the reader that Aguja has delivered Talia to her next appointed stop in Chiquinquirá, where he is supposed to leave her to find her way to Bogotá. The two hide his motorbike and descend from the roadway to spend the cool night alongside the Rio Bogotá. Lying together on the riverbank, they spoon to keep warm. They engage in a philosophical discussion about whether Talia will be happier in the United States than in Colombia and about how she might permanently change.

After Aguja falls asleep, Talia thinks of her father and the stories he used to tell her to help her sleep. She wonders if she, as Aguja suggested, is truly a child of Colombia even though she is legally an American. If so, she decides, her mother Colombia has failed her: “This land, with all of its beauty, still manages to betray itself, she remembered her father saying. […] it was no mystery why she turned her back on it just as her parents had done before her” (140).

Talia rises, goes to the river, and bends down to touch the water. She takes a smooth stone; her father said such stones have been touched by souls of the dead “traveling between worlds” (141).

After the night on the riverbank, Talia and Aguja wait for the basilica to open so Aguja can light a candle for his mother. In theory, Talia is waiting for a bus that will travel the rest of the way to Bogotá. After visiting the basilica, Aguja returns to her with a gift pouch containing a scapular of the Virgin Mary—identical to his own—which he bestows upon her for good luck. Then he talks her into riding with him on his motorbike the rest of the way to Bogotá.

Before leaving, Aguja calls his girlfriend, whom he lives with, and lies about where he has been over the previous day. He tells her he will be home soon. Talia borrows his phone to call her father, who does not answer.

This chapter follows the progression of Mauro’s life, beginning with his recognition of the strange phone number calling him, then going backward in time to an experience in which he worked for a wealthy man with several children. The father is a typical know-it-all, the mother is helpless, and the children are lethargically bored, all a world away from his own experience and his own family.

Mauro sells Perla’s laundry after her death on behalf of Elena, her next of kin. In preparation for Talia’s departure, Mauro replaces Perla’s lost statue of the Virgen de Chiquinquirá with a new one that he had blessed by a priest. He prepares gifts for Karina and Nando. Even as he waits, hoping Talia will find her way home, he mourns the emptiness of his apartment once she will be gone for good. He attends AA meetings regularly, fearing that he might return to drinking with no one left in Colombia.