Infinite Country

“During the day, under the nuns’ watch, the girls practiced their downcast gazes. They attended classes, therapy sessions, meditation groups, completed chores uniformed in gray sweats, hair pulled back. Forbidden from gossip and touching, but they did both when out of sight.

At night, in the blackness of their dormitory, they gathered to whisper in shards of windowpane moonlight. When the nuns patrolled the hall outside their room, they became masterful mutes, reading lips, inventing their own sign language, moving quiet as cats, creeping like thieves. They listened for the nuns’ footsteps on the level below, sensing vibrations on the wooden floor planks; the search for rule breakers, disruptors their guardians would schedule for punishment at daybreak.”

This is Engel’s description of the reform school to which Talia has been committed for six months. As depicted in her repeated discussions of the school, which she refers to as a prison, the girls inside are not buying into the rehabilitation program. The nuns, particularly Sister Susana, whom Talia lures into a trap to spring a dozen girls, are portrayed as being faulty, eliciting wariness in the girls.

“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. […] People say drugs and alcohol are the greatest and most persuasive narcotics—the elements most likely to ruin a life. They’re wrong. It’s love.”

Mauro, Talia’s father, regrets planting the seeds of discontent with Colombia in his wife, Elena, especially when he sees the same growing desire to leave the country in Talia. He realizes that his daughter will inexorably come to a point of wanting to immigrate to the United States. To him, her growing desire to leave and the absence of his wife and older children is another sign of his failure as a family leader.

“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.” 

This is an example of Colombian civil religion or what might commonly be called “old wives’ tales” and superstition. Perla, nominally a devout Catholic, cleaves to these cautionary, guilt-producing, works-righteousness tales as a measure of keeping her family in line. She uses these fables as teaching tools against