Infinite Country

“She was a girl who perceived leaving for North America as a distant threat. Something she could not imagine she would ever want. One day it was different. Mauro noticed Talia’s face when they watched gringo movies or television programs with subtitles. That unmistakable, irrevocable fascination. The way she started inserting English words into their conversations. He saw the longing take hold, crisp disdain for her familiar yet stale life with him. […] He blamed himself for the way he made both Elena and Talia resent their country. His tendency of pointing out evidence of hypocrisy as if their colonized land was more doomed than any other. He wanted to take it all back. The malignant seeds he planted in Elena, who, until she met Mauro, never saw another future beyond helping Perla run the lavandería, who’d only ever traveled as far as Villavicencio on a school trip, for whom a trip to Cartagena was as inconceivable as one to Rome. […] People say drugs and alcohol are the greatest and most persuasive narcotics—the elements most likely to ruin a life. They’re wrong. It’s love.”

Mauro, Talia’s father, regrets planting the seeds of discontent with Colombia in his wife, Elena, especially when he sees the same growing desire to leave the country in Talia. He realizes that his daughter will inexorably come to a point of wanting to immigrate to the United States. To him, her growing desire to leave and the absence of his wife and older children is another sign of his failure as a family leader.

“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.” 

This is an example of Colombian civil religion or what might commonly be called “old wives’ tales” and superstition. Perla, nominally a devout Catholic, cleaves to these cautionary, guilt-producing, works-righteousness tales as a measure of keeping her family in line. She uses these fables as teaching tools against Elena, Mauro, and Talia. Her Catholicism is expressed through the keeping of icons and church attendance on holy days. She imputes her own sacred meaning to the tokens, mostly related to her own family.

“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.’” 

Mauro lives on the street starting at age 10. Though uneducated, he manages to work his way to acceptability. His desire for a better life, now extended also to the young wife of whom he thought himself unworthy, leads him to think of leaving the perpetual want of Colombia for another nation. He is surprised when Elena, who never expressed any desire to travel, leaps at the thought of taking their child and finding a life elsewhere.

“They were careful. Scared even to play the radio too loud, not wanting to give anyone a reason to complain. They’d been told immigration officers only arrested people when tipped off. SWAT teams raiding apartment buildings, restaurant kitchens, or factories. Bulletproofed and body-armored officers with no-knock warrants, storming homes, breaking down doors if needed, as if the people inside were planning a bombing or a coup. They might take you away or if you were lucky, let you go with just a warning, but you’d be entered in their database, called for annual check-ins, and classified as deportable.” 

After Mauro and Elena allow their six-month travel visas to expire, they become subject to deportation. This is a description of the underground existence they must live. As their children grow older, they inculcate them in how to interact with US nationals so as to avoid drawing undue attention to themselves, especially from the police. They equate police with immigration officers, therefore suffering any crime or indignity to avoid having to engage with law enforcement or, for that matter, with any authority.

“Talia was born on the coldest day of the year, Mauro and Elena’s third winter in the new country though their equatorial blood was still not accustomed. They lived then on the edges of Hookford, a small and unfriendly Delaware town, after a year spent in South Carolina, where Mauro found work at a pet-food plant and saved enough to buy an old minivan from another worker. There, the family occupied a room in a barn converted to employee housing, its slats and roofing pocked and sagged by punishing summer rains. On the communal TV, they watched the United States shower bombs over Afghanistan. Mauro and Elena were born of domestic war but felt uneasy in a newly injured America, mourning its three thousand dead, so full of angst and vengeance.” 

Talia, named for Talia Shire, who played Sylvester Stallone’s wife in the Rocky movies, is the third child born to Elena and Mauro and the second born in the United States. The oldest child, Karina, is a Colombian citizen. Nando and Talia are US citizens. This passage relates the irony Mauro and Elena experience at the discomfort they feel—and soon the harassment they receive—as immigrants after the September 11 attacks. They grew up in a place of extreme violence during Colombia’s civil war, though apparently nothing there made them feel so much anxiety.

“When she met Mauro at Paloquemao—lean and long-haired, brows downturned in fatigue, in the moth-eaten ruana he wore till he saved enough to buy a flea market leather jacket—though he wasn’t like the more educated or family-bred boys she knew, he had an elegance she could not explain. She remembered how she thought of him after their initial market encounters, the tide of love beginning to roll over her as she worked at the lavandería, hoping with every jangle of the door chain that the next customer would be him.

Since they came to the north, there were moments when Elena considered taking the children and leaving him. But she convinced herself every woman experiences the same temptation. Real love, her mother once told her, was proven only by endurance. Elena’s impulse was always to stay, to remain a complete family. No matter where or how they lived, she was certain their chances of survival were better together than apart.” 

This is an ironic parallelism. Though tempted to leave because Mauro has become a slave to alcohol, Elena decides to remain with him in this very uncomfortable, inhospitable land. Throughout the novel, various individuals are confronted with similar decisions. Mauro believes his great failure was in making the decision to leave Colombia, which started the cascade of family crises and divisions. When Elena adheres to her mother’s proverb, that love is proven by endurance, she becomes the embodiment of the heart of Engel’s novel.

“She was a good student, but the classes at the prison school were dumbed down and she refined her skill of keeping an alert face while falling into a trance, imagining her life once she got out of the country. Going to a new American school. Speaking English. Enjoying life with her mother and siblings. She didn’t tell any girls on the mountain she had a ticket to the United States waiting for her. They’d gotten to be friendly, but some were rageful enough to sabotage the escape plan out of spite. Trust no one. That’s what her father always said. Trust only family, if you’ve got family to trust.” 

Distrust of everyone who is not family while longing for an idealized life in a distant place encapsulates two of Engel’s themes. Talia is wise not to trust any of the girls incarcerated with her, as is demonstrated by several occasions when fellow immigrants betray Elena and Mauro, one of whom is responsible for Mauro’s deportation to Colombia. Faithfulness to family, on the other hand, turns out to be the highest virtue.

“Perla said not to fill her mind with such nonsense. She didn’t like that when they started spending time together, Mauro would share with Talia stories from the Knowledge about the origin Of the world that contradicted Perla’s imperial versions; that the first people were created not by God in the form of Adam and Eve or apes who learned to walk upright, but by the moon who put the earth into her vagina and gave birth to a son and a daughter. But even before the first humans, there was the darkness before light and the first beings the Creator, Chiminigagua, made were two black birds that spread wind from their beaks and from the wind came the breath of life that illuminated the world.” 

This is an illuminating passage in that it demonstrates the diversity in belief that exists in Colombian religion. Perhaps North Americans view Colombians as homogenously Catholic. Engel’s novel reveals that pre-colonial animism is very much alive in Colombia. Neither Perla nor Mauro seem to be bothered by the superstitious nature of their faiths, which have little positive bearing on their lives.

“But he knew with her story Perla meant that if he were to stay in the house with Talia after she was gone, he would have to understand the ways she’d cared for it and for her granddaughter. In this case, it involved a sort of exorcism, though Perla insisted they weren’t supposed to call it that but a despojo of the highest order because the person who did the cleansing was not clergy but the famous former bruja from Antioquia who’d once advised politicians, casting hechizos that won elections and beauty pageants until she herself was exorcised and began working for God and the righteous instead.” 

This is another ironic passage in that it describes Perla inviting an Andean witch doctor into her home to exorcise an evil spirit that has made everyone sick. From Perla’s viewpoint, the healer has supposedly become a Catholic, which makes all her spell casting virtuous, in contrast to the evil it embodied previously.

“In Elena’s dreams, she, too, tried to pull Omayra to safety, but the girl felt heavy and only sank deeper into the mud, telling Elena to let her go. Other times, Elena became Omayra, feeling the weight of her aunt’s clutches, her body tearing, her lower half sinking into what used to be her family home while rescuers pulled her arms and torso free, though she knew she wouldn’t survive without the part of herself she left below. […] In her dreams now, Elena was no longer the girl trying to save another girl, or the dying girl herself, but a bird or a cloud watching from above. The drowning towns, citizens reduced to parts floating on the carbon tide. Parents and children crying out for one another, so many of whom never found each other again, and some of the recovered children adopted to foreign families in other countries and given new languages and new names. The impossible and unforgiving Andean volcanic chain. Elena could see it all from this distance.” 

Following Mauro’s deportation, when Elena is attempting to care for her two older children by herself, she experiences many bad dreams. In the first case, her dream relates to the tragedy of a young girl, Omayra, who was trapped in a mudslide and bent halfway around the eave of her house, with her deceased aunt holding onto her foot below, resulting in the child’s slow, inevitable death. The vision becomes a symbol to Elena of being trapped between Colombia, where her mother, husband, and youngest daughter are, and the Unite States, where she must stay to provide for her older children and send money back to Colombia. In the second dream, she observes all of creation as being similarly trapped. This is a description of the experience of many immigrant families who have been separated because of deportation and also an anachronistic reference to the influx of unaccompanied children attempting to cross the US border from Mexico as well as the later US policy of separating children from their families.

“Elena packed a bag with clothes, diapers, and food. She’d stopped breastfeeding in preparation for the day. Since Mauro was sent away she’d worried the stress would make her lose her milk, but she never did. She found a bench near the window and sat with the baby alone, whispering in her ear that she was her love and her heart and they would say goodbye for now but the heavens would bring them back together soon. She used the same voice she used every day, one that soothed and anchored the baby’s gaze to her own. But today it was as if the baby understood every word, because Elena had forced herself to be truthful, and the child cried as she never cried before, screams that turned the heads of passersby, and Elena cried with her.”

This passage expresses the extreme emotional pain experienced by Elena when, realizing she cannot care for an infant while also raising two slightly older children without the help of Mauro, she sends Talia back to Colombia to be raised by Perla. She is filled with guilt and remorse that is unabated throughout the time of their separation.

“Elena. Small, birdlike, as Mauro used to say, who brought three children into the world, shocked into pain far beyond the flesh.

Grunting until his final spasms. She still cannot say how much time passed. Minutes maybe, but she was already gone, soul departed, searching for remnants of who she’d been just minutes before. When he removed himself from her, she felt him cover her back with her coat. She pulled up her pants, her stretched underwear. She managed to ask why.

Without meeting her eyes he said, ‘I don’t know. I’m not usually attracted to mothers.’” 

The horror of Elena’s rape is made all the more grotesque when the man off-handedly comments that usually he is not attracted to women like her. In grappling with the assault, Elena recognizes that she has no recourse since she is an illegal alien subject to deportation and she cannot prove he raped her.

“The fissure of not being present for the end of her mother’s days was one from which she knew she would not recover. She considered scenarios in which they could all be reunited. […] But then practicalities came to mind. Karina, like Elena, would have to wait years for a chance at permission to return to the only country she knew. If Nando and Talia were to return to the country of their births, they would have to leave their mother, father, and sister, and endure the same sentence of separation Elena lived. Every way she could imagine it, the family would be split. And so, Elena chose to stay.” 

The irony and pain of separation mount throughout the course of the story. Successfully staying in the United States while under the constant threat of deportation, Elena is distraught about building a life apart from her husband and daughter but filled with remorse because Perla is dying and Elena, her only daughter and only surviving relative, will not be present. Every alternative she considers leave the family torn apart in some way.

“I figured Talia would eventually learn there is no place that can turn a person suicidal with the quickness of a North American suburb. […]

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. Our mother went once, but when she got home she said she didn’t understand how these kids who had everything they could possibly want in life—nice homes, parents who didn’t abandon them, food, clothing, cars, debt-free college educations waiting to be claimed—somehow had no desire to live. She’s convinced depression is a gringo problem and since Nando and I have Andean blood, we are spared.” 

At the beginning of this chapter, Karina, the oldest child of Elena and Mauro, reveals herself to be the writer of the book, although her brother Nando also has a couple of passages he narrates in the first person. There is abundant irony here. Though she is not a US citizen, she is the most inculcated of the family in US culture. Her cynicism comes through as she describes the ironic despair of white adolescents who have every privilege yet become suicidal. This is something beyond understanding to her mother, who has endured hardship, danger, and loss beyond anything experienced by these young people. In the following passage, Karina reveals that she, too, is depressed and self-destructive, though she has kept it from her mother.

“In the other country, she would embrace her mother and siblings for the first time since she was a baby. They would all sleep under the same roof.

In the other country, she would fall in love for the first time. The thought thrilled her. But then she thought in this country she may never find love and felt blighted.

In the other country, an uncharted future awaited. But it could only be so if she let her future in this country die.

In the other country, she would no longer be a criminal. But in the other country half her family was and always would be.

In the other country, she would have a sister and a brother. No longer a lone child caring for her grandmother’s health and her father’s heart.

In the other country, there would be no boy like Aguja sleeping beside her, who felt familiar the first time she saw his face, who knew hers too.

He was right. In the other country there would only be strangers and she would be a stranger, too, even to her own family. Her father would wait in Colombia, perhaps forever, for a daughter and a family who had learned to live without him.”

These are Talia’s ruminations as she considers the differences she will experience between Colombia, where she has lived since she was an infant, and the United States, where she is a citizen yet scarcely speaks English and does not feel part of the culture. She perceives she has a real future in the United States but is definitely surrendering a huge part of herself as she leaves Colombia.

“What she didn’t know, Mauro thought, was that after the enchantment of life in a new country dwindles, a particular pain awaits. 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 knew Talia believed her journey to be a renewal, and it would be. He hoped the love of her mother and siblings would be enough to soothe her when she met the other side of the experience, when she would learn what everyone who crosses over learns: Leaving is a kind of death. You may find yourself with much less than you had before.

It seemed to Mauro that in choosing to emigrate, we are the ones trafficking ourselves.” 

Mauro, unlike Perla and Elena, is able to take an emotional step back from his daughter Talia and allow her to make up her own mind about returning to the United States. He has come full circle in his understanding of immigrating to another country. Thus, while he knows that Talia is rightfully excited about the new beginning she will experience in the United States, she will also sacrifice a part of herself. He describes it in the most graphic terms: “trafficking ourselves.”

“In a couple of weeks, you’d graduate high school. Second in your class, though everyone knows you tied for first but the administrators had to decide which girl got to make the big speech at graduation and they picked the other one. You told Mom that in our town, with taxes so high the school may as well be prep, they couldn’t have a valedictorian who’s only planning to take a class or two at the local junior college when that other girl is on her way to the Ivy League. […] You earn your money babysitting and dog walking since none of the shops in town will hire you. You were too scared to apply for DACA when you were eligible. You said it was another trick to sniff you out in exchange for a work permit and two years of a semi-documented existence. And maybe you were right, now that the government froze the program, knows where everyone is, and can do whatever they want with that information. I know you’ve been thinking of ways to bring in more cash to pay for your classes since Mom forbids you to work off the books for a restaurant. But I didn’t expect to see your computer left open to a site with ads looking for webcam girls.” 

Here Nando, the only son of Mauro and Elena, is writing in the first person to his older sister, Karina. He admires and feels protective of her as he describes her accomplishments and the irony of how, even though she is quite accomplished academically, she has a distinctly limited future because of her immigration status. He also describes the ironic fate of those who signed up for the DACA (Dreamers) program, only to have it shelved by a subsequent presidential administration, leaving all of the young people who did sign up vulnerable to deportation. Perhaps the greatest irony is that, in the land of opportunity where achievement is supposed to be merit based, Karina is considering becoming a sex worker to make money. The reference to her mother’s unwillingness to allow Karina to work “off the books” for a restaurant is an oblique reference to her experience of having been raped while working off the books in a restaurant.

“For months now, we’ve also seen news stories of other divided families, children separated from their parents at the southern border. I haven’t told anyone I dream of these children in particular, hear their cries, the eventual silence of capitulation, feel their ache of lost faith and unknowing. In my sleep, I am one of them. Our family didn’t cross any desert or river to get here. We came by plane with the right documents, now worthless. My life, like my sister’s and my brother’s, is a mishap, a side effect of our parents’ botched geographical experiment. I often wonder if we are living the wrong life in the wrong country. If the reason I have felt so out of place is because I, like the narco animals, have no biological or ancestral memory of this strange North American landscape or its furious seasons. These mountains and rivers are not mine. I haven’t yet figured out if by the place of my birth I was betrayed or I am the betrayer, or why this particular nation and not some other should be our family pendulum.” 

Karina poignantly describes the rootlessness she feels in this passage. While she is aware of her parents’ reasons for leaving Colombia, the supposed US exceptionalism does not register as a reality for her. She has no commonality with her parents in this way. What she does have in common with everyone in her family, as she expressed it so clearly, is a feeling of failure and the perception that somehow the failure is her responsibility.

“Years later, when Mauro was down to his final days before deportation, he called Elena from the detention center and asked if she remembered the night he saw the condor fly over him on their roof.

She told him she did.

‘Do you know that when a condor is old or sick, or if its mate dies, it will push itself to fly higher than ever before, then drop out of the sky to end its own life?’

‘I didn’t know that.’

She remembered that when they returned to their bedroom after searching for signs of the condor, they’d stood by Karina’s crib, watching as she slept. Her parents’ absence hadn’t pulled her awake. Mauro whispered then that a condor, which could live as long as a human, was faithful to one partner for life. Together they nested on impenetrable cliffs, sharing the duties of incubation. making a home for their family only they were able to reach.” 

About to be separated indefinitely from his family, Mauro is relating to Andean animistic legends about condors who populated the earth with human beings and who were supreme creatures. He is at once promising Elena that he will be her mate regardless of the deportation separation and also that, should anything happen to her, he will destroy himself. Elena is stoic and practical, whereas Mauro is motivated by abstractions and symbols.

“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?

She rarely remembered any danger when she thought of her homeland. Lies often accompany longing.” 

This is a description of one of the many telephone calls between Mauro and Elena. In Colombia, he hears about atrocities, natural disasters, and manmade catastrophes such as the poisoning of the Flint, Michigan, water supply. It is ironic to him that anyone can perceive “gringolandia” as the wonderful haven that foreigners perceive it to be. For her part, Elena has forgotten the bombs, violence, and poverty she left behind in Colombia. Engel describes euphoric recall in her proverb: “Lies often accompany longing.”

“He cooked one of his simple meals for her. The warmth of the stove reached every corner of the apartment. She showered away days of filth, sat on her bed in fresh clothes, the suitcase her father prepared resting beside the door. She thought of places she’d slept in order to arrive at this night, remembering the prison school, the nuns her father said called many times asking if she’d found her way back to him. Her homecoming was a secret they’d both have to keep. He didn’t ask for details of her escape. He wouldn’t know the things she’d done, the lies she’d told, what she’d stolen. Memories she hoped to drop from the sky the minute her plane left their mountains and crossed the ocean.

As they ate, she watched her father, this man who was both young and old. He’d lost weight in her absence. His skin darkened in its hollows. After she left, he would continue to transform even more with age and time. She wanted to memorize him as he was now.”

Talia is caught in a memorable moment of transition. She has successfully made it from the mountain girls’ reformatory to the city where she grew up. Her father has fulfilled his responsibility of helping her prepare for the plane trip she is to take the next day. She is aware that she may never see him again. She does not provoke an emotional scene, preferring to watch him sleep and keep her thoughts to herself.

“In the end that was also a beginning, there was recognition beyond features and gestures. A love born before any of the siblings, that delivered her from her father back to her mother.

The mother held her child, both wanting to express everything with their embrace. Her mother’s arms were sinewy around her ribcage. She was shorter than Talia had believed. Her scent—powder, violets, something else—familiar yet new. Her earrings pressed hard against her daughter’s cheek, as she hummed, mi hija, mi hija, like a song.

Her brother and sister cloaked them with their bodies.”

This is a description of the airport reunion between Talia, her mother, sister, and brother. Talia had wondered if it would be awkward and even if they would recognize her. Instead, it is profound and fulfilling. The reunion is particularly poignant for Elena, as it relieves her of the tremendous guilt she felt for having sent Talia away as an infant. 

“I want to say that our family entered a new era, not just of reunification, but of truth-telling that began with our mother, who told me a few days before our sister’s arrival what happened to her years before when she worked at a restaurant, at the hands of the man who hired and paid her. Maybe I sensed something like this had happened to her because I didn’t react with tears. I only listened, and when she was through, her face slack as a sheet hanging in the rain, I held her and told her I was sorry for being too small to protect her, but she said it was the very reason she was telling me now, to protect me from something similar happening, and most of all, to defend me from silence. In time, she would tell my brother and sister, she said, and our father too.

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

Karina again narrates in the first person, describing the profound changes happening in her family. While their living situation has not changed and none of the underlying quandaries have been substantially addressed, there is a new shared depth of intimacy that accompanies a sense of wholeness and redemption. There is a profundity in her insights that belies both her age, since Karina is about 18, and the seeming simplicity of Elena’s life, in that she has determined that living silently is destructive.