TWO

The social worker described the compound like a summer camp, a small boarding school in the hills of Santander. A retreat, even if operated by the government. There were academic classes so the girls wouldn’t fall behind when, time served, they were free to return to their normal schools. She told Mauro he should be grateful his daughter wasn’t treated the same as girls from lower estratos, comunas, or invasiones, the ones usually sent to rougher facilities. Talia, she said, could pass for middle class, and this is why she was sentenced to only six months, given a path to redemption, even as 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.

Mauro knew what it was to be locked away. He’d never spoken of it with any of his children, with Elena or Perla. Men corralled in a warehouse cold as a meat locker. The rationing of showers and blankets and food. The dream of release, not to Elena or the children, but to the land the gringos threatened to banish him to as if it were a return to hell.

Home.

When she was small Talia often asked her father the meaning of the word. Home. Sometimes she understood it meant a house or an apartment, the place a person returned to at the end of a long day. The place where one’s family lived even if they left it a long time ago. The place one felt most comfortable. All of these notions contradicted her first sense of it. Home, to Talia, was a space occupied by her grandmother Perla. A place Mauro came to visit when she and her mother, Elena, over the international wires, permitted it.

Elena was far away with Talia’s siblings, Nando and Karina. When Talia heard her mother’s voice over the phone she often spoke of Colombia as home but quickly added, so her daughter wouldn’t misunderstand, that the United States was home now too. “It’s also your home,” she’d tell Talia, “because you were born here.”

Years later, when it was just Talia and Mauro living together in Perla’s old house, she pressed her body close against her father’s chest when he came to her room to give her la bendición before sleep. “You are my home,” she’d said. “Even if my mother makes me leave you, I will always come back to you.”

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.