Mauro and Elena spoke every few weeks, mostly because she was calling for Perla and he happened to answer. Conversations that were largely transactional. He reported on the lavandería, told her what Perla wouldn’t, like that they’d moved her bed to the room on the ground floor behind the kitchen because the stairs overwhelmed her. Her memory fragmenting, words and names for things slipping from her grasp; how she referred to Karina and Nando as the girl and the boy and one day, when Mauro asked Perla to say their names, she could not.

Mauro told Elena that Perla’s memory was restored in Talia’s presence. She knew every detail of her granddaughter’s life. The way she liked each meal prepared down to the stirring of a spice, waking to dress her for school, watching as she left the house with Mauro, who dropped her at class on his way to work. For Talia, her grandmother was not a fading sunset but a woman burning bright. And so, Elena agreed to postpone sending for her daughter to join her in the United States knowing, as Mauro did, that Perla would not survive long without her.

* * *

In the years that Mauro drifted further from the life he had with Elena, Karina, and Nando, he rooted deeper into his life with Talia. He heard his other children’s resistance when Elena forced them to the phone with him. Monosyllabic. They no longer called him Papi or Papá but Dad or nothing at all. He could not deny Talia was special to him because she was the one he watched grow.

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.

“The one you have is perfectly fine,” Mauro said, and Talia argued briefly as Elena watched through the phone, a spectator to an intimacy she no longer shared with either of them.

Perhaps it had nothing to do with her body but with what the man at the restaurant did to her. The only man she’d ever been with besides Mauro. Their separation was involuntary. But time and borders did more to distance them than any divorce or widowing could.

She’d remained faithful. If not with her body, with her mind and heart, still with Mauro even through his years lost to drinking and hiding in city streets, despite the sporadic contact and stilted conversations, the silence that on her end, at least, held fear that it would be that way forever. She had many nightmares, but when her dreams were good, they were only of him, of being old with Mauro, their children safe and grown with families of their own. In her dreams they were always back in Colombia, never in the north, waiting peacefully for death to find them in their own land.

* * *

She stayed to work at the restaurant a few months longer. These were zombie days of obstinate nausea when Elena understood that what she said or wanted meant nothing. She kept what happened to herself, even when she’d hear about another woman from the neighborhood who went through something similar. They never commiserated. They kept each other strong so they could keep mothering and survive.

Maybe it goes back to the first time she got paid in the United States, apart from Mauro’s income, and was able to send money back to her mother. A pride, a satisfaction like no other she’d known. To be able to give to the one who gave her everything. To be able to make Perla’s days easier. A feeling that brought meaning and light to every dark day that came before or after.

One spring day with a morning moon, instead of walking from the bus stop to her regular shift at the restaurant, Elena turned and headed past the main avenue to streets lined with houses, expensive cars parked in driveways, and began knocking on doors. In her best English, she pronounced: I can clean your house. First time you pay what you want.

She soon had a few regular clients. She tried to be discerning. Yamira had taught her to be careful for whom she cleaned. Just like at any other job, one could be assaulted by an employer or work for weeks without getting paid.