* * *
She would look back on those months for years, trying to understand how she came to the decision. Was it a slow negotiation, or did it occur in a blaze of clarity or capriciousness? Was it the pressure of the women of the Sandy Hill house, who, in the isolation of motherhood, became something like sisters, or at least how she imagined sisters would be if she’d ever had one. She would recall how the homesickness that tortured her through her first years in the United States dulled and toughened her to the idea of going home. What followed was an accumulation of days that bridged one life in one country to a second life in another one. What Elena did not realize was the bridge had dissolved behind her.
She wonders even now, if somewhere in Talia’s memory there is the hidden picture of the day her mother let her go.
Newark airport on a drizzly morning. The baby would travel with Gema, who Elena knew from the panadería on Market, and who, for two hundred dollars and with a letter of parental authorization, agreed to carry the baby on her lap for the flight to Bogotá and deliver her upon landing to Perla before going to stay with her own parents.
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.
She doubted her decision every day since, telling herself she never should have sent her baby away, even if Perla and Mauro both agreed it was the wisest thing. The price of being able to work to provide for the rest of the family was their estrangement. She wasn’t foolish enough to believe that memories formed in infancy of being in her mother’s arms could be enough to comfort her daughter through the years. She knew Talia must have felt the loss as Elena had or even more.
Some mornings Elena woke and pretended it was morning in Bogotá and their entire family would meet in the kitchen of the Chapinero house for breakfast before they went about their day. Other times, she woke and expected to see Talia sitting in front of the television with her brother and sister. When people assumed she had only two children because those were the only ones they saw, she always clarified that she had three. Her youngest, she said, was coming soon. And then she would have all her babies together again even if they were no longer babies but almost grown, and Elena wondered if it was wrong to pray as she did each night that her own children would never do as she did to Perla, leaving their mother behind.
THIRTEEN
When he lived out in the sabana, Tiberio told Mauro that in Chocó, Traditional Knowledge maintained that the first race of humans was extinguished by the gods because of their cannibalism. A second generation of humans transformed into the animals that now inhabit the earth. The third race of humans was created anew by the gods, formed from clay. We are only soil and water baked in the sun to dry, Tiberio had said. Is it any wonder we are so fragile and destined to break?
In his meetings, Mauro referred to them as his lost years. They began when the officers escorted him onto a flight in the early-morning darkness. He watched New York’s rivers and light grid dying below. He thought of the candles with white dancing flames his mother would place in the apartment windows during the fiestas navide?as, the only time of year she did not seem to despise him.
When he found himself back among his mountains and stepped out of El Dorado airport, a free man for the first time in months, he saw the sky jawed with clouds and decided the first person he should look for was his old friend Jairo, the closest thing he’d ever had to a brother, at his usual posts on the streets near the Hotel Tequendama. When he didn’t find him, he went back to Ciudad Bolívar, but Jairo’s family had moved and the new tenants didn’t know to where. Mauro then went to one of their old cliff hangouts, where a group of young men spotted him climbing the cerro and surrounded him, guns pointed.
Mauro held his up his hands and told them he was there for Jairo the mugger. The group stepped back, lowering their weapons.
“Jairo has been dead for a long time,” one guy said.