Infinite Country

The chapter begins with a description of the girls’ reformatory where Talia is serving a six-month sentence. Though it is a state institution, it is run by nuns who still enforce the rules of their religious order on the girls. Talia has had a phone call with her father, Mauro, who has explained to her that everything he has tried to get her released from the institution has failed. Because her mother is expecting her to fly to the United States, she realizes she must break out of the reformatory and make her way back to Bogotá, where her father lives.

With the help of one of the other girls in her dormitory, she devises a plan to tie up Sister Susana at night, steal her keys, and escape. The effort goes flawlessly, and a dozen girls from the dormitory make it out into the darkness and woods. Talia goes a different way than the other girls. The narrator describes her escape by saying, “if you’d passed her in a car as she walked, small in her baggy captivity uniform, an expression more lost than determined, you might not have thought her a fugitive from the school for bad girls up the mountain, the place said to reform criminals in the making” (4).