Carry Me Like Water

by Benjamin Alire Sáenz

  Tired; she couldn’t fight the memory that popped into her mind as she looked out into her garden. Her mother was reaching for a peach that dangled from a tree. Her baby brother sat on the ground next to her. She had bruises on her face, her legs, her arms. “No era tu culpa, Mama, no eras culpable.” She did not notice she was speaking in Spanish. “What am I going to tell Eddie?” she asked herself. “What am I going to say?” She had lived this invented life for so long that she was no longer absolutely clear about her identity. If she told him the truth, would it be the truth? Or would it be just another invention posing as the facts of her past? But there was something else, something she had been refusing to acknowledge. The suppression of her self had nothing to do with her husband. She had changed her identity before she had even met him. And Eddie wouldn’t give a damn about her past, would not stop loving her because she had hidden her history from him. They had both done that, because it had been easier, because they were keeping something not from each other but from themselves. But it was no longer easier to pretend that they were not the products of a past that had formed and deformed them to a greater degree than either of them cared to put into words. They had played a game with each other, but if they didn’t stop playing soon, the game would end badly—for both of them. It wasn’t working anymore. Eddie was right. As she looked out into the morning light, she knew she could tell Eddie everything. “But, Helen, what are you going to tell yourself? How the fuck are you going to fix what you’ve done?” She shook her head in disgust as she heard herself use the word “fuck.” It was not a word she liked to use. “How will I find him?” She whispered his name. Diego. His name was a people she could not run from. She wondered how the return to her brother was possible. Why wasn’t Eddie enough? Eddie wasn’t everything after all. Everything was impossible—everything was too much to ask. She remembered the last lines of the poem she had read in the bookstore:

  Remember things back then

  as simpler than they were.

  She laughed and shook her head. She walked upstairs slowly to look for the book she had bought. She had hidden it in the bottom drawer of her desk. She had the urge to spend the day reading poems—to do something different. She opened the book and touched the letters of the poem she had read in the bookstore, “For you there are no conscious departures …” She repeated the words again and again as if she were sewing them into her skin.

  She picked up the phone; her husband’s secretary greeted her in that perfect telephone voice of hers. She heard herself ask for her husband, felt the stones washing around in her stomach, then heard his voice. She tried to speak but the words were stuck in her throat. She forced out the word that was her husband’s name: “Eddie.” “Eddie,” she said, “can you take me to the doctor’s this afternoon?”

  “What’s wrong, honey? Is it time?”

  “Yes, Eddie, it’s time—but not for the baby.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing, Eddie, I just want you to take me to the doctor’s office. Then I want you to take me to the ocean and hold my hand as we walk on the beach. And then I want to tell you stories about my previous lives.”

  Her husband was quiet on the other end. “Yes,” he said, but he was whispering, “I’ll be there after lunch.” She did not know what to think of the quiet in his voice. “Helen,” he said, but before he could finish his sentence, she interrupted him.

  “My name isn’t Helen,” she said. She paused, and tried to control her trembling. “My name is Maria Elena—Maria Elena Ramirez.” She felt the tears roll down her face as she heard herself say her name. She had not heard it in so long that the sound of it was louder than she had imagined. It was a big name, large, heavy, bigger than anything she had ever carried—heavier than her baby. And yet, saying it, she felt a kind of freedom as if she had just given birth.

  Eddie was silent as if he were listening to her tears. “Well,” he finally said, “Helen isn’t such a long way from Elena. It wasn’t such a big lie.” He laughed into the phone. “Maria Elena,” he said, then repealed it. “Maria Elena, It’s a very beautiful name.”

  She nodded, “And, Eddie, I was bom in the desert, and I was poor, and I had nothing, and I wasn’t raised in a suburb, and I’m not Italian—”

  “Shhh,” he whispered, “no fair. No more letting out secrets till I get home.” His voice was soothing, and she felt calmer. “Just remember, honey, you can’t do all the talking. I have stories, too.”

  “Yes,” she said, “tell me a story. Just hurry, Eddie, just hurry and come home.”

  13

  LUZ’S HAND REACHED OUT, lit the newly bought candle, and placed it on her altar. She touched the feet of each of her saints, and crossed herself. She kissed the feet of the crucifix, warm against her lips, warm from the heat of the desert that penetrated the entire house. She completed her ritual worship with a sense of duty—a sense that was, for her, a natural act. Her prayers were neither overly pious nor overly self-conscious. She prayed. It was what she did, what she had always done—even when she had denounced the European God. But she had remolded his face into something that looked like her world, like her people. She touched the silver milagro shaped like a human heart. It was hot to the touch. Everything in her small house was hot and she felt its heat deep within her. In all the years she had lived in this desert, the heat had never bothered Luz; her body was a part of it. But now that she was edging toward sixty, her body was no longer strong enough to absorb the harshness of the desert. With age, her body was divorcing itself from the land.

  She smiled at the cheap reproduction of San Martin Caballero and thought of her mother who had given it to her when she had first married. San Martin, a gentleman in rich attire on a horse, was handing a fine red robe to a naked beggar. As an adolescent she had pointed at the picture and complained to her mother that the rich man should have given much more than a robe to the poor man. He should have given him his horse—even his house. “The rich don’t give away their houses,” she had answered. “So why do we worship a rich man?” “Because he was kind—he didn’t have to give him anything.” “Kindness is not enough, Mama, The rich man has a name—but the beggar is nameless. We should be worshipping the beggar.” Her mother had not hidden her displeasure: “Who are you to criticize the saints? And if you don’t like the idea of a nameless beggar, then give him a name.” In the end, she had left the beggar nameless. She still hated that picture, and only kept it because her mother had given it to her. She had never prayed to San Martin Caballero, had never wanted a thing from him, not a robe, not a peso. She looked away from the picture and stared at her statue of San Martin de Porres. She whispered a greeting. He had became her favorite saint—aside from the Virgin. She was in love with his black skin and his perfect posture. Her mother had told her he was the son of a Spanish don and a black slave, and she often wondered about his mother’s life. Perhaps it was his mother who had been the saint, but the fact that she’d had a son carnally conceived disqualified her from veneration. Luz spoke to him as she often did. “Qué bueno Qué no saliste como tu papa. You’re lucky you got your mother’s blood—that’s why you’re a saint. Don’t ever forget it.” She nodded her head, kissed the tip of her fingers, and rubbed her kiss into San Martin’s feet.

  She fingered the frame around the picture of her two sons. She kept the only letter the youngest had sent years ago. They were both doing well in Mexico City, both of them married and successful. She kissed the picture. “I was not a good mother—but was I so bad?” She had spent too much time trying to find another man, had left them alone too often. She spoke to the picture. “But I loved you, con todo mi corazón, les di todo.”

  Cinco de mayo, 1954. El Paso

  She stood over the stove making dinner, the baby asleep in a basket near the screen door that led to the alley. There was a hint of the coming summer heat in the breeze that blew softly into the warm kitchen. Her older son, three years old, played with wooden blocks worn with use next to his slu
mbering brother. She watched them as she turned over a tortilla on the comal. “Your Dad will be home soon,” She had not seen him for two days. She fluctuated between worry and rage. She kept herself from falling into a panic, a panic that would make her insane. Who would care for her children? He had been gone for longer stretches at a time, yes, much longer. He had promised to be faithful, and perhaps he had been faithful, but it was not another woman that took him away from her. She had not counted on his drinking. As she turned over a tortilla, she wished he was addicted to women instead of to the bottle—a woman she could fight. I should leave him, she thought. A man looked at me today at the market—he looked at me with want. Twenty-one is not old, not too old. She shook her head. She put the stupid thoughts out of her head. She had allowed him too much power. It was too late for her. She would forgive him, forgive him for everything. He’s a good man, she thought. When he’s sober, he has no equal, the best. I married the very best. She made a vow to herself to stop nagging him about his drinking. I make it worse, she whispered, I make him stay away. When he comes back, I will make him want to stay. She bit her lip and whispered his name: “Ricardo, te estoy esperando.” She pictured herself walking with him down the street, arm in arm, she in a flowered dress, he in a white shirt and khakis—the most beautiful couple in the barrio. She rolled out the last tortilla on the table, looked at her children, and noticed that a man was standing at the door. She held up the rolling pin like a bat.

  “It’s me,” he said.

  “You scared me. Pasale.” Luz liked her brother-in-law. He had become overly anglicized in manner and speech, but he was kind and he loved her children. He stepped inside, picked up the boy playing with blocks, and kissed him on the forehead. She noticed a strange look of worry on his face.

  “Antonio, what is it?”

  He said nothing. He put the child back where he had been sitting and put a block in his small hand.

  “Antonio?”

  He tried to speak.

  She grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him.

  “It’s Ricardo,” he whispered.

  “No,” she said, Luz slapped him, already knowing the news, already denying it, already wanting to blame the messenger.

  “They found him,” he said.

  She slapped him again.

  He held her against his chest

  “On the street.” he whispered, “this morning.”

  She did not ask what had happened, she did not want to know. She held the picture of them together walking down the street, the spring breeze blowing softly against the skirt of her dress. She dug her face into the shoulder of her brother-in-law.

  Yean later, Luz tried to remember if she had cried or not. It was a long time before she could bring herself to touch her children—they looked too much like her Ricardo. She did allow herself to remember how much she had loved him, and she did not even let herself know that she looked for him in all the lovers she had ever taken.

  Luz looked around her small house. She took off her shoes and felt the coolness of the cement floor. At least the cement was still cool—so long as she hid it from the sun. She stood before the curtains she’d made herself. She kept the house dark in the summer because the darkness softened the hard heat of the desert. Today, the darkness provided little relief from the heat. Lluvia, San Martin, Iluvia. We need the water. As she flung the curtains open, the light flooded into the room. She opened the windows. She saw her surroundings clearly. For an instant she hated the poverty she struggled so hard to love, to embrace. Today, the sight of her house made her sad and sick, sad and sick as the brown river that pretended to be a border between Juárez and El Paso. She felt a vague rage rise from her stomach to her throat like an ugly word wanting to find its way into the air. Luz would not let the word out—she would not speak it. She felt calmer when she sat down in a rocking chair her mother had given her. She stared at her books on the opposite wall and shook her head.

  She rested for a moment, then rose and turned on a small fan she kept on the kitchen table. She thought of moving to El Paso—she could move there anytime she wanted—it was her home, her country. Her mother had chosen her nationality for her. She had waited until she was about to deliver, then walked into a clinic. She had been born a U.S. citizen in an ambulance on the way to the county hospital. She wondered why she had to choose between Juárez and El Paso, Everyone had always expected her to choose. But she would not choose, would never choose. She had spent a lifetime not choosing. She could not relinquish her Juárez because her family had lived in this ragged city for generations; it was her blood, her history, her inheritance; but she could not relinquish El Paso because it was the piece of dirt her mother had bequeathed to her; it, too, was her blood; it, too, was her history. When she first began working as a maid, she had hated El Paso more than she thought she could hate anything, hated the gringas who hired her and gave her their leftover clothes, their leftover food, their leftover conversations. They thought she knew no English because she spoke to them only in Spanish, and it was a disgusting thrill to know everything they said when they thought she could not understand their North American words. They assumed she was illiterate because she worked with her body. She had more books in her house than any house she’d ever cleaned. When she laughed at Diego for reading too many books, she knew she was laughing at herself.

  At times, she could have killed the women whose houses she cleaned for their arrogance, for their sense of superiority, their great pride in their whiteness, their nationality—but she hated their men even worse. One man promised her papers for a blow job. He had pulled her neck toward his crotch. She bit his hand. Her English appeared before him like Guadalupe had appeared to Diego at Tepayac. “I don’t need no papers,” she’d smiled. “I’m a citizen. And I have rabies so you better get a shot.” Before she had quit, she informed his wife—in English—about her husband’s advances. “Why should I believe you?” she’d shouted. “Because I’m a woman,” she’d yelled back. She never went back. After that, she chose her employers with care though they always believed it was they who chose her. She hated El Paso because it wanted to be an all-American city, wanted to pretend to be the heart of a great country, but could never be anything but a city on the fringes of Gringoland because too many people like her inhabited it, worked it, worshipped it, loved it until it disappeared into them. She had worked in El Paso all her life, had cleaned so many houses that her hands reeked of gringo dirt and gringo sweat and gringo shit. And yet she loved it—because she knew what everyone in Juárez knew, knew that El Paso belonged to them, belonged to the border, would never be like the rest of America because their faces were printed on its land as if it were a page in a book that could never be torn out by any known power, not by God, not by the Border Patrol, not by the president of either country, not by the purists who wanted to define Americans as something organic, as if they were indigenous plants. Luz laughed. El Paso was hers and she felt it like she felt the presence of the saints on her altar, and she would not relinquish it to any gringo—or any Chicana—who was not intelligent enough to acknowledge she was entitled to its poverty and its riches.

  Luz felt sick, and she needed to know the sickness, heal it. She thought of Diego, his raw intelligence, and his sense of wonder. He carried a great sadness she could not lift, and yet she found it disturbing that he was such an innocent. He was too old to be an innocent—he had no right to be one. She stared again at the picture of her sons. She had done badly with them, had been too harsh. After the death of their father, she had lost something of her ability to love. But she would not do badly with Diego. He was the only man she’d ever met that was capable of any kind of faithfulness. She wanted—needed—to protect him. But today she knew her sickness would not go away. More than she wanted to protect him, she needed time to rest—not from work—but from this place that was her. She stared at San Martin and waited for an answer. Finally, she heard him speaking to her. She could hear him whispering Chicago, Chicago
, Chicago. She waited for Carlos to come and visit. When he arrived, he said he would take her with him. But I will be back, my Diego. I will be back to take care of you.

  14

  JOAQUIN WALKED into the living room and shook his wet hair like a puppy. “Want breakfast?” he asked. “I’m starved.” He threw himself on the couch, then rolled onto the floor.

  “What’s gotten into you?”

  “Nothing—I’m just hungry, Jacob. It’s as if I haven’t eaten for months. I just want to eat and eat.”

  “A real appetite, J?”

  “I don’t want to be J—not today.”

  Jacob nodded. “Joaquin,” he said. “Stay,” he wanted to scream. “Stay with me forever.”

  “I haven’t felt this good in months. The poison pills I take must be working—at least today anyway.”

  Jake smiled but said nothing.

  “Wipe that I-told-you-so grin off your face. I hate it when you gloat.”

  Jacob laughed. “I’m right about the medicine—and you know it. I enjoy being right.”

  “Well, what the hell—it doesn’t happen that often. You want breakfast?”

  “I’ll make it.”

  “You always make it, Jake. Let me do it.”

  Jacob nodded. “OK. Let’s see—I’ll take two eggs over easy, English muffins lightly toasted, a side of hash browns, and freshly squeezed orange juice.”