When she was seven, Mauro took her to the lake. It was the first time Perla let him travel beyond the barrio with the child without supervision. They took the bus across city limits, and Mauro carried her up the mountain slope on his back.
He told her about Bochica, the Muisca god of wisdom who taught laws and morals to his people, and his rival, Chibchacum, who punished the world with the ancient diluvio, a universal flood that submerged all life until, with his staff, Bochica forced sunrays through the rain clouds, and the water puddled and parted, making lakes and fertile valleys, pushing the excess through the mountain belt into what became the Tequendama waterfalls. Mauro told Talia how Bochica sentenced Chibchacum to carry the world on his back, and every time they felt an earthquake, it was just Chibchacum shifting under the weight.
When they reached the top, taking in the valley of water below, Talia asked why they couldn’t go swimming in it. Mauro said Guatavita was a sacred lake. They’d come to honor it, and he’d been there with her mother and sister to make wishes for their new life in the north. He told her what Tiberio once told him: When the world was new, the creatures that ruled were the jaguar, the snake, and the condor. Of the snakes, the anaconda, the most massive serpent, swam in jungle waters among fish with tails as long as rainbows, crabs and turtles as wide as cars, crocodiles four times the size of the dwarfed ones that dwell in the Amazon and Orinoco Rivers. The boa queen was above all predators, able to constrict the life out of any creature she wanted. The boa’s power was its silence; eyes that saw everything, movement so graceful and subtle that no other animal could sense they were being watched or hunted. The snake didn’t need to prove its danger. The snake knew power came from patience.
Mauro told Talia about the serpent that lived at the bottom of the lagoon. Some said she was Bachué, mother of the Muisca. Others insisted the serpent was the devil.
From the lake we came and to the lake we will return, Mauro repeated Tiberio’s words, though Talia’s eyes were on the birds circling above. We’re all migrants here on earth.
There was one story of Guatavita Mauro never told Elena or either of his daughters when he took them to see the lake. A story he wished he’d never learned, though it came from his mother, and was one he’d never be able to forget.
The territory surrounding the lake was once governed by a powerful cacique who was married to a princess from another tribe and with whom he had a daughter. But the cacique was often drunk on chicha, off at bacchanals, and in his absence, his wife fell in love with a young warrior. The lovers were caught, and the cacique had the warrior tortured, cut out his heart, and presented it to his wife as proof of his ruthlessness and her infidelity. The princess ran away, thrusting herself, with her daughter in her arms, into the lake. The cacique sent his high priests to search for them. They soon returned to inform the cacique that his wife now lived below in the water kingdom as the bride of an enormous serpent. The cacique demanded his daughter be returned to him. The serpent sent back a young girl who resembled his daughter but with her eyes removed, so she could not see her father, recoiling when he tried to embrace her. And so it was the cacique who submitted, returning his beloved daughter to the lake to live with her mother and the serpent until the end of time.
SIXTEEN
Before they left for Texas, people warned Elena everyone gets fat in the north. Chemicals replace natural ingredients, so bread is not bread by the time one eats it. Meat from hormone-reared animals, mutant produce, colorful and rotund yet flavorless. Where fresh was expensive, and cheap was a tasty poison packaged as a meal. But after each time she gave birth in the United States, her body restored itself to its original form. It was after Mauro left that her body became something else, even as she walked more, ate less, carrying the children and their belongings every time they moved. She was stronger but never felt more tired or shapeless. When cell phones enabled people to see the person on the other side of the call, Elena held the camera close to her face to conceal from Mauro her new bulges.
She remembered the first time Mauro’s eyes glinted in that small screen. For years she’d imagined them meeting again, and there he was in her hand, gaunt, his forehead wide and square. The long hair she so loved to bury her face in was gone. She could tell he was taking in the sight of her too. The new wrinkles mapping old smiles, grays sparking from her temples.
“You’re as beautiful as ever, Elena.”
“I’m not and I know it. You don’t have to lie.”
Silence anchored until Talia took the phone from her father to ask Elena to send money to buy a new schoolbag.