Names on a Map

by Benjamin Alire Sáenz

  On the evening before we were to leave, we had one last chance to make a success of our failure. There was a quiet watering hole, about three miles southwest of our camp. On the advice of one of

  g us t avo l 21

  my uncles we went upwind of that spot. Upwind, the deer would

  be unable to smell us. That was the thing with hunting—you

  needed to grab what little advantage nature handed you.

  We climbed halfway up a hill and hid as best we could. Down

  below, we could see the watering hole without obstruction. The water shimmered, a piece of liquid silver in the light of a sinking sun.

  The deer would come. All we had to do was wait for them to

  come and drink. Water was the principle of order by which these animals lived.

  We waited.

  Just as the sun was about to set, the deer began to gather. It was as if the herd of deer had learned our tactics, knowing that they would not be shot by night. They had acquired an intelligence of the way we operated. They knew that rifles were allowed to kill only bucks. They carried that knowledge in the way they moved, in the way they lived and organized their society. We expected only the females to approach the water. And that is exactly what happened next. But we were patient, knowing the bucks

  were hiding, waiting to come to the water. Dying for a taste.

  We prayed silently that the bucks’ thirst would be greater than their patience.

  We waited. And we waited. We held a hope that at least one

  fearless buck would come to drink before darkness descended.

  No one spoke.

  We could scarcely hear our own breathing.

  Then we saw him: a buck—magnificent specimen of na-

  ture—walking toward the beckoning water, large as our imagina-

  tions and far more graceful. Cautiously, thoughtfully, he looked around, sniffed the air, turned his head left and right, left and right, searching, his antlers glistening in the dying light. And then, satisfied he was safe, he bowed his head and began to drink.

  We could see everything clearly through our scopes.

  22 l t h e d a y t h e w a r c a m e My uncle put his finger gingerly on the trigger of his rifle.

  We had drawn lots beforehand in order to determine whose kill

  it would be. The success or failure of our hunting endeavor rested in the resolve of this man—this man, my uncle, who had been

  gleeful as a boy at his own birthday party when he had selected the longest twig.

  I studied him as he looked into his scope, his rifle steady. I could see the lines on his face, his youth gone. I could see his concentration, his will banishing any residual uncertainty. He trembled slightly—and then his trembling ceased.

  Everything was still, quiet, perfect.

  I could hear my own heart. I could hear it thumping, thump-

  ing. And then I heard the shot—deafening—as it echoed in the

  dusk. The buck looked up, took a step—then stumbled to the

  ground.

  This— this was why we had come.

  It was a beautiful thing.

  I never went hunting again.

  xo ch i l

  That was the war that defined me and my brothers and my

  generation. At least that’s how my mother put it. I rewrote my mother’s observation in my head. I replaced the word defined with scarred. Defined implies something fixed, a sense of closure I have always lacked. And anyway, I’ve never been drawn to speak on behalf of an entire generation. I’ll leave that job to someone else—someone who’s in love with the word defined. I’ll stick with scarred.

  And something else: scarred lends itself to metaphors. I’ve always been in love with symbolic language.

  Whatever else that country was or is or meant—for me, it be-

  came a symbol that very nearly swallowed me whole. How many

  wars does that word Vietnam conjure? How many? In one war, there are a thousand wars within that war—each one private, singular, inaccessible, a fragment, a piece of a larger whole, parallel yet forever separate. And all we ever do in life is struggle with our

  24 l t h e d a y t h e w a r c a m e impoverished efforts to put our war into words. I don’t believe most of us ever succeed in our translations. It’s an art most of us never conquer. That’s why we argue with one another. We’re like countries—each of us clinging to our separate histories. We’re fighting one another about our translations, about what really happened. Which is another kind of war.

  I was born two minutes after Gustavo. I came to consciousness

  listening to his heartbeat, listening to his voice long before he knew how to shape and utter words. We shared a womb, a mother we very nearly worshipped, a father we came close to hating, a younger brother we adored. Our father never tired of remind-ing us that he was a child of exile. “We didn’t belong to Mexico.

  And we didn’t belong to the United States either . You are,” he said, “the first generation to belong.” Belong to what? One man’s belonging is another man’s exile. I didn’t make that up. I got that from my grandfather. He, too, was an expert on the word exile.

  For the first eighteen years of our lives, Gustavo and I listened to my father and my mother, observed the nuances of their difficult and beautiful love, told each other secrets, argued about the books we read, listened to the cadences and rhythms of our words and silences.

  And yet it was all those silences that had the last word.

  Gustavo and I—twins—genetically and emotionally tied to

  each other. A knot we carried around inside us that shifted from our minds to our stomachs to our hearts. Sometimes we even

  forgot the knot was there.

  We were born in El Paso in 1949 at Hotel Dieu, a Catholic

  hospital run by the Sisters of Charity of St. Vincent DePaul. My mother said we were as calm as a desert night when we came out of her womb. My father never referred to the day we were born, but he liked to tell people that his son and daughter were born in the middle of the American century. I don’t know why, but he

  xo ch i l l 25

  found some consolation in saying that. I think it had to do with a Mexican psychology of that word I just mentioned, that word

  exile. That was my theory anyway. He used to tell us that we were destined to live through the same history. Gustavo looked right at him and said, “I want to make history, not live through it.”

  “Only great men do that,” my father said.

  Gustavo ignored the insult. “So maybe I’ll be great.”

  “Not with your grades,” my father said. They used words like

  bullets. Such wasted ammunition. It made me angry, the way

  they treated each other. In the end I was angrier with my father.

  He was the adult. I held him to a higher standard. And anyway, my father was wrong. Gustavo and I did not live through the same history. No one lives through the same history. Not even a set of twins.

  He was born a man.

  I was born a woman.

  The world asked him to a fight a war he did not want to

  fight.

  The world asked me to fight a different kind of war.

  I wish I knew what it was like to be Gustavo, to inhabit the

  small piece of the world he inherited. When he said, “I hate this war,” I wondered if he was saying the same thing I was saying

  when I said, “I hate this war.” I wondered if he was saying the same thing my mother was saying when she said, “I hate this

  war.” Maybe we were all saying different things. And Gustavo

  was forced to say something I never even had to consider: “I do not want to fight in this war.” And my father, he didn’t even come close to repeating our words. All he could manage was “I hate

  what this war has done to my family.” This is what I think he was really saying: “I hate what my family has done to this war.” We’re back to the issue of
translation.

  And my youngest brother—Charlie—the family saint? He

  mostly kept quiet. I wish I knew what his silence meant. Maybe

  26 l t h e d a y t h e w a r c a m e his silence meant belonging. Mostly I think it meant love. That sounds insipid—even to me. But things can sound insipid and

  still be true.

  We lived in the same house. That much was true enough. But

  mostly we lived in our own particular and peculiar bodies. Bodies we didn’t choose. We hear, we see, we smell, we feel with our eyes and noses, ears and hands. We have minds. We have hearts.

  We have mouths and tongues. That is all we have. That is the

  only way we know anything—through the smallness of our own

  insignificant bodies. And so we remain separate, residents of our own small, separate countries.

  In one war, a thousand wars.

  I can only tell you about mine.

  My war began earlier than Gustavo’s.

  Rape. That is more than a word. I knew what it was before I

  knew the word that went with it. That’s when the war began for me. That’s when the woman in me was born. It was a summer

  evening. Why is it that everything is always quiet and normal and calm before something bad happens? Why is it that one minute

  there’s innocence and on the other side of that same minute there is violence? One minute you live in a wondrous solitude, and on the other side of that minute, you are swept up in an irredeem-able crime.

  A summer evening. An eleven-year-old girl is walking down

  an alley. She is going to meet a friend. She had been told to

  keep out of allies—but she had her own mind, never listened.

  Of course, she didn’t. Her not listening is part of the plot of the story. And so, for a long time, she blamed herself. But it wasn’t her fault.

  That’s how it was. I thought of a girl. Of a her. But it was me.

  I stopped blaming her. And she became me again.

  I was going to meet Leandra. We were going to buy an ice

  cream cone. That’s when it happened. The violent side of the

  xo ch i l l 27

  innocent minute. I was daydreaming about something. Because

  that’s what I did. Maybe I was thinking about a boy I liked or about a dress I wanted or about a movie I wanted to see, or maybe I was rewinding my tape and playing over an argument I’d had

  with Gustavo. I don’t know what I was thinking and I don’t how it happened.

  I just remember an arm around me, pulling at me, a hand

  covering my mouth. I almost couldn’t breathe. And I hardly had the words to describe what was happening, though the fear and

  pain I felt did not depend on words. I smelled that man for many months, the rancid sweat, the breath that smelled like a dying animal was buried inside him. And then I began to think it was only fifteen minutes of my life—or maybe less. Why should those few minutes rule my life? But it wasn’t those minutes that mattered.

  It was the aftermath. The aftermath is always what matters.

  The aftermath has been life.

  My war began early.

  I felt fragile and shaken for a long time. I made myself tough.

  Mentally, I mean. My mother once told me, “You’re so strong. It’s almost frightening.”

  “I’m not,” I said. I was afraid she was right. I didn’t want to be frightening.

  But strong or not, I had dreams and he was always in them.

  I kept smelling him on my skin. Every day for weeks, I washed

  myself meticulously. And then the dreams stopped. Because they found the man—dead—six weeks after he touched me, though

  touch is a kind word for what he did to me. Touch—that’s symbolic language.

  Someone shot him. They found his body in that same alley. It

  was then that I learned his name. A veteran, an alcoholic, mentally disturbed, a man “utterly destroyed by war.” That’s what my mother said as she stared at his picture in the paper. He was beautiful in the newspaper, young and dressed in a uniform, an American flag

  28 l t h e d a y t h e w a r c a m e in the background. My father said a man like that didn’t deserve to be killed—not like that. A terrible thing. A war veteran. But I knew. There was a reason someone had killed him. I knew in my

  heart it was a woman. I hoped they’d never catch her.

  Whatever he had caught in Korea— him, Eugenio Escan-

  dón—whatever he caught there, he transferred to other people.

  He transferred it to me. And to others, too, I think. He passed out wounds and scars like a general passing out medals.

  A few weeks after they buried that bastard in the ground, I

  began dreaming that it was me who’d shot him. I was strong in

  that dream—and I wasn’t afraid.

  Maybe it was true, what my mother said, that he was a man

  utterly destroyed by war. So the world that had conspired to destroy him had finished the job. Someone had put him out of his misery, though his misery continued to live in the woman who

  killed him.

  He was dead.

  He couldn’t hurt me anymore.

  Once, my father asked me to throw the trash out. I refused.

  “That’s a boy’s job,” I said.

  “I thought you didn’t believe in dividing the world into boys’

  jobs and girls’ jobs.”

  “I don’t throw trash out,” I said.

  “The alley’s only a few steps away.” His voice was stubborn,

  insistent.

  “No,” I said. I could out-stubborn anyone—a gift I discovered

  I possessed when I was five. Just then Gustavo walked into the house.

  “Your sister won’t throw out the trash.”

  Gustavo shrugged. “She thinks she’s too good. You know, way

  too good for manual labor.”

  I didn’t argue. “Yes,” I said, “I’m way too good. I’ll break a nail.”

  xo ch i l l 29

  Gustavo and my father laughed. I didn’t have nails. Gustavo

  threw the trash out.

  Years later, Gustavo and I were running late to catch a bus.

  “Let’s cut through the alley,” he said.

  “I hate alleys,” I said.

  “They’re just unpaved roads,” he said.

  “Where people store their trash,” I said.

  “So?”

  “It smells.”

  “So?”

  I grabbed his hand and pulled at him. “Let’s run,” I said.

  “We’re late.”

  We ran through the streets, Gustavo chasing me, then pass-

  ing me, then me chasing after him, begging him to slow down.

  “You’re the one who said let’s run.”

  We missed the bus.

  Gustavo tried to chase it down. He gave up and when he

  walked back to the bus stop and caught his breath, he lit a cigarette. “You’re too good to run through alleys and you’re too good to throw out the trash. What’s with you anyway?”

  “I’ll never be too good for you, baby.”

  He shook his head. “Ha, ha, fucking ha. I don’t get you.”

  “That’s because I’m a girl.”

  “Yeah, well, we’re probably going to miss the damned movie.”

  “We can go to a later one.”

  We waited in silence for more than half an hour. Even after

  we boarded the bus, he refused to speak to me. I didn’t care. I was safe. I was sitting next to him. On a warm seat. On a bus. And I knew he would forgive me.

  I have never set foot in an alley again. Not since that day. Not since I was eleven.

  There are reasons I have a penchant for the word scarred.

  adam

  Da Nang, Vietnam, September 16, 1967

  A soldier.

  His name is Adam.

&n
bsp; Eighteen months older than Gustavo. El Paso High, class

  of ’66.

  High school days are a long way from Da Nang, but some-

  times, his mind wanders. Today, he is thinking of a girl named Xochil. She was more beautiful than any girl he’d ever touched or kissed. He remembers the day he spoke to her. He doesn’t know, doesn’t care why he remembers every detail, her eyes, her hands, her smell, her Catholic school uniform. The hint of perfume. He watches himself bump into her as her books spill onto the hall floor. He hears her voice: “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I wasn’t watching what I was doing.” He sees her shrug and explain, “I’m looking for my brother.”

  He sees himself picking up all her books and handing them

  to her. “Your brother?”

  adam l 31

  “He goes to school here.”

  He watches her as she hugs her books. And then he sees the

  stupid look on his own face as he blurts out: “I enlisted. I’m going to be a Marine.”

  He sees her smile, sees her shrug. He wants to ask, Do you

  think you could ever love me?

  She looks at him and asks, “You enlisted?”

  He nods.

  “What if you get hurt?”

  “Hurt?”

  “I don’t want you to get hurt.” He hears her say that, and then sees her smile, and then sees her walk away.

  He wants to call her back, wants to ask: “Why don’t you want

  me to get hurt?” He sees a sadness in his own eyes. He shakes

  his head and chastises himself for playing the insignificant scene over in his head. The scene never mattered. Not to her.

  He listens to the rain.

  He vaguely hears someone calling him. Camera. No one calls him Adam anymore. Sometimes he even forgets he ever had

  that name. Maybe a name is like an old pair of pants that no

  longer fits. Or like a year that’s come and gone. Come and gone, like a breeze, like a storm, like a cloud. Nothing more than a memory.

  The others are all awake. He hears them talking. There were

  ten of them yesterday. Now there are only seven. They are dis-

  cussing what they should do next. A plan. There is always a plan.

  Their muffled voices make him think of his brothers—early ris-

  ers all of them. Except for him. They would wake and talk. He