Names on a Map

by Benjamin Alire Sáenz

  morning when we were crossing back into El Paso from Juárez.

  You know, up until that day, I’d never been in a cab. And I’d

  never been on airplane.

  I’d been eighteen for all of three months. I just couldn’t wait any longer to be a part of something bigger.

  It was one of the happiest days of my life.

  g us t avo

  My father first attempted to initiate me into the world of the hunt on a sunny and almost too perfect October morning. Fall

  days were like that in El Paso, sunny and almost too perfect.

  I was ten and working out on the front yard. I was complain-

  ing to myself about my sorry lot in life. I had a lot of complaints when I was ten. My father came out of the house and announced

  that he was going to take me deer hunting. It was more like a

  proclamation from an elected official. I, an ordinary and undeserving citizen, was the recipient of an act of generosity. I understood two things about his announcement: (1) I didn’t deserve

  the gift; and (2) it was my job was to be grateful. He sniffed the air like he knew it was just the right time of year. And I thought to myself, my sorry lot in life just got sorrier.

  My father wasn’t a particularly rugged man. He didn’t fit the

  Mexican macho stereotype. He was more complicated than that.

  He was tall and thin and he looked as though he might have been

  12 l t h e d a y t h e w a r c a m e an ascetic, like a mystic, like he was hungry, had been born that way, would always reside in a state of physical and emotional

  want.

  He wasn’t much of a talker. I always felt that he was a dis-

  appointed intellectual. He’d come from a prominent family in

  Mexico who’d lost their land, lost their standing, lost their souls, if not their hearts and minds. They’d fled to El Paso. I think he made a conscious decision to keep the bearing of a wealthy man.

  Or maybe it just came naturally to him. He was an armchair historian, formal, always reading, aloof, and he was a disciplinarian.

  Strict and austere, he was more comfortable with rules than with his children, though he communicated those rules quietly. He

  liked quiet as much as he liked order.

  It was he who looked over the classes we took in high school

  and made the final adjustments. It was he who told us when

  we could ride our bikes and when we should work. It was he

  who decided when we could watch television and what shows to

  watch. And it was he who allowed me to listen to the radio in my room—so long as I was also reading a book. Books were essential in our house. And it was the only area of my life that my father allowed me total freedom. He never censored what I read, though I knew he was displeased by most of my choices—just as he was

  displeased by almost everything else I did. I think I displeased him deliberately. There are some sons who live their lives pleas-ing their fathers. I wasn’t one of those sons.

  Displeased. That was his word. That word displeases me.

  If our house showed all the signs of my father’s passion for

  books, it showed no signs of his obsession for hunting. No stuffed deer or elk heads, no bear rugs, no trophies, no traces of the natural world, not so much as a painting of a mountain. I think my father liked the idea of going out into the wilderness with a lot of other men and getting away from my mother for a few days—

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  though really my mother was much better company than any of

  my uncles or any of his friends.

  So there it was, my father’s announcement: “We’re going

  hunting.” He seemed proud, happy. Happy was not something

  my father wore on his face very often. And it wasn’t an emotion he wore with grace.

  I smiled back—or tried to.

  I knew he owned some rifles that he kept at my uncle’s house.

  My mother detested guns. Hated, loathed, all of those words. She was fierce and resolute about this issue. Fierce. There’s a word. If my father had rules and rituals, so did my mother. I remember

  when I was a boy, maybe four or five, he brought a rifle home one afternoon. It was the first real rifle I’d ever seen.

  “Who are you going to shoot?” my mother asked.

  “I’m just going to clean it,” he said.

  “Well, if you need to clean something, you can start with the

  bathrooms.”

  My father got up, rifle in hand, and slammed the door on

  his way out. He never brought the thing back into the house.

  So that afternoon when he decided to place that same rifle in

  my hands, it didn’t happen at 1910 Prospect. He took me to my

  uncle’s house, my uncle who lived in the middle of a pecan or-

  chard, and there, in the middle of a bumper crop of pecans and far away from my mother’s disapproving gaze, he handed me that rifle. I examined the rifle carefully, running my hands across the steel and wood. It was clean and sparkling and it was, above all, heavy. I handled it awkwardly even though I was big for ten, my hands large, almost a man’s. I almost fell, then caught myself. I forced myself to stand there as if it were the most natural thing in the world. A boy carrying a rifle.

  “It’s beautiful,” he said.

  I shrugged.

  14 l t h e d a y t h e w a r c a m e

  “Don’t you think it’s beautiful?”

  At the age of ten, I thought birds and dogs and big trucks

  were beautiful. I thought baseball fields were beautiful. “No,” I said, “I don’t think it’s so beautiful.”

  I must have looked at him accusingly. I did look at him accusingly. I looked at him that way deliberately. I had always treated him as if he were a kind of enemy.

  His gaze was just as accusing as mine. “You don’t understand

  the aesthetics of being a man.”

  I’d never heard the word aesthetics—a word that betrayed his intellectual bent. Even before I went home and looked up the

  word, I had a feeling I knew what he meant. I looked back at him.

  “I just don’t think a rifle’s beautiful,” I said softly. More firmly than softly.

  And he and I, we were broken. Right then. And inexplicably

  and illogically, I wanted us to be broken.

  He kept his eyes on me for a lot longer than I could stand.

  Then he just looked away. After a while, he gently took the gun away from me. He leisurely strolled back toward my uncle’s

  house. I thought I heard him whistling. That’s how he controlled himself—by whistling.

  The interesting thing about my father was that he rarely ex-

  ploded at any of his children. When you disagreed with him, he didn’t shout you down, didn’t bother to debate or convince you.

  He didn’t waste his time. He just dismissed you. He just made

  you invisible. Invisible could be very, very good. Invisible could be devastating.

  We were fighting a complicated war.

  He went on that hunting trip without me.

  I stayed home with my mother. She was better company.

  That didn’t mean that a part of me wasn’t sad. Of course, I was sad—and it was a sadness that lay beyond tears.

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  • • •

  My father believed in the beauty of the hunt. But he did not believe in me.

  The hunt was pure. And I was not.

  I wrote down those four sentences when I was supposed to be

  listening to my high school history teacher talking about the causes of the Spanish Civil War. My notebooks, like my mind, were cluttered with painful confessions. I didn’t believe in priests, but I did believe in notebooks. Another time I wrote: I sometimes wish I had the consolation of faith. The consolation of faith was the subtitle of one of my father’s favorite
books. And still another time, I wrote: When my father looks at me, I’m sure he thinks something is missing in me. And he’s right. Something is missing in me. I always felt as if my heart existed only in pieces, a brittle, fractured stone, abnormal, incapable of accepting the established order that was supposed to give my life direction. Once, at the dinner table, my father was going on and on about his ideas of order: “Order is like a compass. It tells you which direction to go.” In class the next day, I spilled out another confession: I was born without a compass.

  Over the years, I wrote down a hundred sentences, maybe a

  thousand. Thoughts as disjointed as the way I lived my days. The things I wrote down never changed a thing. Didn’t change me.

  Didn’t change what was wrong between me and my father. Didn’t

  keep all the bad things from happening. Nothing could have kept all the bad things from happening.

  The night before my first communion, my father sat me down

  in the living room and tried to talk to me. We both felt awk-

  ward—as if being in each other’s presence were an unnatural act.

  He put down the book he was reading, and then informed me it

  was time for my quiz.

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  “Quiz?”

  “Concerning your catechism.”

  “Did you quiz Xochil?”

  “Your sister doesn’t need to be quizzed.”

  “Why just me?”

  He didn’t like it when I asked questions like that. “Because

  you don’t listen.”

  “I do listen.”

  “It won’t hurt to make sure.”

  I wanted to yell at him. They already said I could make my first communion! I already made my first confession! I think what I really wanted to do was strike out at him. Physically. As in hit him with my fists. I kept myself perfect and still. “Okay,” I whispered.

  He started with his questions—though they felt more like

  bullets. I answered them calmly, went through the seven sacra-

  ments and explained them as best I could. He corrected my

  pronunciation of Extreme Unction. I tried to look like I was

  grateful for being corrected. I explained the rosary without

  stumbling around too much. I recited the joyful and sorrowful

  mysteries, the Apostles’ Creed, the Our Father, the Hail Holy

  Queen, and the Act of Contrition. He nodded his approval, his

  eyes shut as he listened to my answers to his oral exam. When I finished, he opened his eyes and whispered, “Excellent.” But he seemed to be whispering to himself. He informed me I had arrived at the age of reason. He handed me an envelope—my gift,

  my reward. I reached out and took it, my hands on the verge

  of trembling. I knew it was a card—the kind you bought at the

  Rexall Drugstore for special occasions. I thought and hoped it would have money in it—but I knew better than to open it in

  front of him. He didn’t approve of behavior that made you ap-

  pear too anxious or too needy—especially if that behavior was

  in front of him.

  I thanked him.

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  He nodded and went back to reading.

  I took the card to my room and opened it. The card did have

  money in it, and I smiled as I held the crisp ten-dollar bill in my hand. But my father, in his most careful handwriting, also gave me these words:

  At the beginning of time, the universe had no form. God sent his angel to hover over the dark waters, and out of the chaos, he created order. Son, when we create order, that is when we are most like God. If you remember that, your life will be blessed.

  I was as familiar with the story of creation as I was with my

  father’s obsession with order. His need for control was a sickness.

  And my sickness was a need to escape him.

  Having, as my father put it, reached the age of reason, I think he expected me to understand what he was trying to say to me

  with those carefully chosen words. I didn’t—which was probably why I saved the card. I mean, I didn’t exactly save it for sentimen-tal reasons. His handwriting may have had a certain elegance,

  and his logic might have been accessible—at least to adults if not to seven-year-olds—but there wasn’t any affection behind the

  words. Not even a hint of it. Occasionally, I would take the card out. I would read it and read it and read it. I never tired of analyzing his words. Xochil would grab the card from my hands and say,

  “What do you think you’re going to find there?”

  “Him,” I said.

  “He’s not there, Gustavo. Give it up.”

  I didn’t know why I just couldn’t let it go.

  I finally came to the conclusion that since I didn’t share his need for order, then my life would never be blessed.

  These are more thoughts I discovered as I thumbed through my

  notebooks:

  18 l t h e d a y t h e w a r c a m e I cannot bring myself to believe that God could make someone like me holy.

  I am incapable of understanding how being an American will save me.

  I do not believe a war accomplishes anything—except that it kills all the wrong people.

  Hunting. God. Country. War. In my mind, they were all

  members of the same family. Brothers and sisters. Cruel. Savage.

  Not that I was above being cruel or even savage. I never thought of myself as being a virtuous human being. But that didn’t mean that there weren’t things in the world that were even less virtuous than me.

  I stopped attending Mass in the ninth grade. I stopped plac-

  ing my hand over my heart, stopped pledging allegiance, long

  before I earned the right to call myself a man. And the hunt, well, I went hunting only once. I was about fifteen years old—and I

  went only because of the guilt I felt over the time I had refused to be a part of his world. I got tired of giving that regret a home.

  It occurred to me one day that I should do something, anything, make some kind of gesture so that I could tell myself that I had tried. That I had really tried.

  But my father and I were beyond healing, and that excursion

  left me startled and more ill at ease with myself than I had ever been. But then again I had always been ill at ease with myself.

  That hunting trip just shoved that awareness down my throat.

  The four days of that hunting trip are still as clear to me as the gin my father liked to drink. From the day we headed north to

  New Mexico from El Paso, it seemed the entire trip was fated for disaster. One of the trucks broke down and had to be left with a small-town mechanic who smelled more of stale beer than he

  did of oil and grease. One of my uncles remained in his tent the entire time, sick with a severe cold and a fever that lasted two

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  days. I stayed with him until the fever broke. When he woke, he stared at me as if he were confronting a nightmare. He kept his eyes on me, a look of confusion and uncertainty on his face. And I thought I saw something else: He was startled, afraid. Of me.

  Finally, he asked me who I was.

  “Gustavo,” I said.

  “Gustavo?”

  “Octavio’s son.”

  “Oh yes, Octavio’s son.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “You’re my nephew.”

  “Yes.”

  “You have a twin sister.”

  “Yes.”

  “Xochil?”

  “Yes, Xochil.”

  “She’s very nice, your sister. And beautiful. You don’t look like her.”

  “No.”

  “You don’t look like you’re one of us. You never have.”

  “Maybe I’m not.”

  “That’s right,” he said. “You’re on the other side.” And t
hen he stared at me as if I were something he might consider shooting.

  Then he went back to sleep. The other side. It’s a strange thing, what fever does to a man. Sometimes it even makes him see the

  world he lives in.

  That first night, as we made camp, we were greeted with an un-

  expected cold front that descended on our hunting party, mak-

  ing us feel as if nature had decided to turn the tables—and we became the hunted.

  My four uncles and my father, and their four friends, they’d

  all been soldiers once. And all of them had seen action. The

  20 l t h e d a y t h e w a r c a m e older men had been in World War II. The youngest two—my

  father’s friends—had fought in Korea. Somehow, I could sense

  the wounds they carried. The fact that they’d all been in a war should have been of some help out in the wilderness, but the cold left them all off balance, left them exposed, reminded them that they were no longer young men with lithe, supple bodies that

  bent to their wills. I suspect they all recalled the scars that never healed, the things they thought had long since vanished from the world they inhabited—ugly, violent memories they no longer had the stomach or the strength to confront.

  I’ve learned a few things about ugly memories—they shoot

  through the heart like a bullet that maims and disfigures. A bullet that doesn’t have the decency to kill.

  They’d all been to war once. They all had memories.

  When my father accepted the invitation, I think he assumed

  they were all eager to rekindle some of that old companionship they’d once known and loved and counted on. Their survival

  had depended on that old companionship. But there was no

  going back. I think they must’ve cursed themselves for their

  nostalgia.

  We’d been told the herds of deer needed thinning, but the

  deer were scarce. Not so much as a sighting. My dad and my

  uncles and their friends grew humorless, began to argue with one another—I could smell their breaths—and as the hunt wore on,

  the arguments grew fiercer, louder. I became half afraid that if we found no game, they would begin to turn their rifles on one another.

  Perhaps they weren’t seeking that old companionship at all.

  Perhaps all they wanted was a kill. Any kill at all. What did it matter if it was a deer or a man.