Even after months, then years as a couple, Perla wouldn’t allow Mauro to spend the night. 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.
Elena in love grew from an obedient daughter into an elaborate liar. She claimed to need to study to get out of her laundry shifts, taking Mauro into her bedroom while her mother worked in the shop below. Or when her mother was sleeping, when Perla believed Mauro and Elena were at the movies or a party, they hid in the back of the lavandería, fooling around in piles of sheets customers left to be washed and folded. If there was enough money between them they indulged in a few hours of privacy in dingy love motels on the city outskirts, balmy in the bed, dreaming up a shared life. They wanted many children so no single child would experience the solitary childhood they’d each had.
Their first daughter, Karina, was born a few months into the new millennium. With Perla’s approval, Mauro finally moved into Elena’s bedroom, agonizing over the ways he might fail this child. He worried deceit ran through his blood, as dominant as his father’s features, dark curls and arequipe skin, which he’d already passed on to the baby. He vowed to give her more than he’d been given. The only way to do that, he determined, was by leaving their land.
The end of the last century brought no closure to violence across the country, just new heads for the monster. From a populace rearranged by the dislocation of hundreds of thousands; to relentless attacks on citizens like the hijacking of a flight from Bucaramanga, its passengers abducted into the jungle; the mass kidnapping of parishioners from a church in Cali; the guerrilla takeover of the Amazon city of Mitú, where countless people were wounded and disappeared before the army response over three days of combat left hundreds of civilians, soldiers, and insurgents dead; paramilitary massacres in Macayepo and El Salado, where dozens, including children, were tortured, macheted, and murdered. In the capital, the No Más protests all but unheard by those who most needed to hear them.
“This country doesn’t know it’s dying,” Mauro said as they watched the news after dinner.
“It’s not the country we want, but it’s the country we deserve,” Perla answered while Elena remained quiet.
That much might be true, Mauro thought, but there was no law condemning a person to life in the nation of their birth. Not yet.
Perla’s laundry was near bankruptcy since washing machines had become more affordable and most people no longer needed to send their clothes out to a lavado de ropa por libras. For a time, she looked for a tenant to take over the shop space, but the barrio building facades were covered in profane graffiti. During Perla’s childhood, the street was as beautiful as an English country road, like the imitation Tudor and Victorian styles much of Chapinero was modeled on. Now it was a block most people avoided.
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.”