“It’s a nice comfort,” Lourdes whispered, “that they’re all here, talking and laughing.”
Xochil nodded. “Everyone’s talking and laughing and cry-
ing—everyone but Dad.”
“Don’t be mean. It’s been a very painful day for him.”
“I don’t understand my father.”
“Why do you have to understand him?”
“Then maybe I’d love him more.”
“Do you understand Jack Evans?”
“No.”
“And you love him anyway.”
“I never said I loved him.”
Lourdes smiled. She left it alone. Her daughter would have to
solve the puzzle of boys and men and what she felt for them on her own. She didn’t need protecting. Certainly, she didn’t need to be protected from Jack Evans, who wasn’t mean, wasn’t dangerous, and wasn’t remotely her daughter’s equal. They sat there for a moment, saying nothing. “Such a beautiful night,” she whispered.
“Nights always remind me of Gustavo.”
“It’s his eyes.”
“Where is he, Xochil? Where has he gone?”
“He disappears sometimes, Mom.”
“Today is not a good day for disappearing.”
“You worry too much about him.”
“Your father says nothing will happen to him. He says he’ll go to Vietnam and nothing will happen to him.”
“Are you angry?”
xo ch i l . lourde s . l 221
“What else should I be?” She closed her eyes and looked up.
“Maybe you’re right,” she whispered. “I worry too much.”
“He knows how to take care of himself. He always has.”
“He’s always had you to watch out for him.”
“I do less watching than you think.”
She didn’t believe a word her daughter said. “He’s careless,
Xochil. That’s the way he is.”
“No, Mama, he’s not careless. He just has to go his own way.
Even being a twin, it’s like a prison for him.”
“For you too.”
“Yes. Sometimes. But it’s different for him, I think.”
“He adores you.”
“It’s not that. It’s that there’s something in him, something
that makes him uneasy. He’s like part of a flock of birds going south. Only he wants to go in another direction.”
“That bird will die alone, amor.”
“Maybe it’s the flock who’ll die, Mama. Maybe he doesn’t
want to die with them.”
“I wish it were that easy, Xochil. He’s not a bird, he’s a boy.”
“He’s a man now, Mama.”
“Well, countries are bigger than boys. Bigger than men too.”
She looked up at the sky. “It’s going to storm.”
“Good. We could use the rain.”
a b e
All during boot camp, sleep became an obsession.
This is the truth: we weren’t minds; we were bodies.
And so our bodies were worked and worked and worked.
Training is training. Like our DI said, “You are not here to take a vacation, maggots. You’re maggots and maggots never sleep.
They’re always crawling around. If they stop crawling, they die.
I’m here to make sure you don’t die. You hear me, maggots?”
Hell, we did our share of crawling, that’s for fucking sure.
In a way, it was like Lent. You gave up everything you knew
and loved. You gave up your family. You gave up women. You
gave up trying to be an individual. The only thing you had was your body and you were being trained to make it survive. If your body survived, then your mind survived. If your mind survived, you knew you were still alive. That was the name of the game—to stay alive.
But, God, I was tired.
a b e l 223
All the time, tired.
It always felt like I’d slept for ten minutes. That was exactly what it was like. I would hit the rack and ten minutes later, some asshole is waking me up with a fucking bugle. Man, you don’t
know how bad I wanted to shove that bugle up someone’s ass.
All I wanted to do was sleep. I was in love with the idea of it.
Sleep was almost as good as a woman. Some days, I wanted to
hop that fence and go get myself laid. And some days, I swear I wanted to hop that fence, rent me a hotel, and just sleep. Screw sex. Just let me fucking sleep. You know, I dreamed only a couple of times during basic training, and both of those dreams were
about sleep. I dreamed I was sleeping. It was like having a wet dream. It was fucking unbelievable.
It’s strange, but I never thought much about sleep till then.
Sleep was something you did when you were tired. End of story.
Yeah, but that changed. Shit, I mean to tell you I wasn’t in bad physical shape when I went in—but, hell, I never knew what my
fucking body could take. Course, it was mostly in the mind. I
think I always had this thing, when things got tough, I could just make myself take it.
You know, no one got to sleep in our unit, until their fuck-
ing little piece of the world shimmered like piss in the sun. And when your little piece of the world was actually cleaner than your butt when you were a baby, you’d hear the voice of God telling you to fucking hit the ground and do push-ups. And you would
do them until you thought your arms and chest were gonna ex-
plode. They did that to us only a couple of times at the beginning.
Mostly, they never fucked with our rest. Well, almost never.
You know, all you tell yourself is that you’re gonna go to fucking war, and this is just practice. If you’re not ready for the big game, you’re gonna leave your ass in some rice paddy and never see the fucking sun again.
By the end of the second day, I’d already learned how to take
224 l a n d t h e w o r l d d i d n o t s t o p a man’s hate—how to breathe it in. How to let it sit inside me for a while. It’s like processing food. I’d sit and chew on it. And I knew I’d find a way to shove it back down his lungs. See, that’s how I prepared myself.
When I think about it, no matter what else pops into my
mind, I have to say it: I took to that life. Almost like fucking love at first sight. The second night, I was shining my boots like I’d been born doing it. And it wasn’t about the boots. It had nothing to do with the fucking boots. It was like I was home.
War doesn’t fucking begin the first day they drop you off in a battle zone. War doesn’t even fucking begin when you get to boot camp. Oh no, baby, it begins way before that.
charl ie
Countries are bigger than boys.
I heard them as they talked, my sister and my mother. At thir-
teen, it was a hobby, listening in on other people’s conversations as if it were an entry into the world of the living. That’s how I used to feel—like everyone around me was more alive than me.
Especially Xochil and Gustavo. If ever two people were alive, it was them. They were a wind. I sometimes felt like a tree, and they were blowing right through me. All I could do was bend in the
face of their force.
I don’t know when it began, but I became something of a spy,
a ghost that haunted the house. I think I liked being invisible—it was better than being the beautiful, virtuous boy—the role my
mother and father and even Gus and Xochil had decided I would
play. Families are like that. They choose roles for you and sometimes they even give you lines to speak. I was obedient enough to play the role. It was the only way I knew how to love them back.
226 l a n d t h e w o r l d d i d n o t s t o p I sat under my mother’s oleander that night.
The oleander was as old as I was—older—and had grown so
; tall that it was more like a tree. I liked sitting under it, right there in that small space between the wall of the house and its thick branches and poisonous leaves. I fit there. And since it was on the front corner of the house, I could hear everything that was being said on the porch. I used to sit there and read books—especially when the weather was good.
That night, I didn’t go there to spy—I went there to disappear.
My aunt Sofia had hugged me and whispered, “¡Que cosa! Beautiful! Astonishing! ¡Que cosa tan linda! ” And I didn’t know what was happening, but I knew I had to get away, couldn’t breathe, just couldn’t breathe, and I was trembling.
I made it out the back door before anyone could see I was
crying, and I was glad the house was full and no one noticed.
It wasn’t Aunt Sofia, that wasn’t why I was crying. I was cry-
ing because it hurt me to see that look of grief on my mother’s face. I was crying because I’d loved Grandma Rosie, because she’d taught me how to tie my shoes and how to iron a shirt and how to read the stars in the sky and how to read Spanish and how to pronounce it so that Mexicans wouldn’t laugh, and she’d taught me the names of things—flowers, trees, bushes, the saints that lined the walls of the church. I was crying because I would never hear her voice again and I had never known a world without her in it.
I was crying because I somehow knew that the letter Gus had
received was going to take him away, force him to fight a war he and Xochil hated. I had heard them talking endlessly about that war—though they refused to speak to me about it. That’s why I
was crying. Because I was a boy and didn’t want to be one.
I don’t know how long I sat there sobbing, but it was the
first time in my life that I understood that emotional pain wasn’t emotional at all—it was something physical, was something that made the muscles and the organs ache, was something that could
charl ie l 227
break your body if that pain came along at the wrong time. And then I began to understand the people who wandered around
downtown without homes or family and the weight of the things
they must’ve carried.
I sat there for a long time.
I think I got tired of being alone, and that’s when I found
myself listening to the voices of my sister and my mother, who were speaking to each other on the front porch. I listened and fell in love with the listening, and I forgot the hurt I felt. All I wanted to do was make myself into a tape recorder so I could replay the tape and listen to the sound of their voices in my head until I was an old man.
o c t avio
Your mother is dead.
Now you are an orphan. Your father, who was always a strang-
er, who was kind, who loved his wife, who was gentle, whose heart ached always for Mexico, your father who laughed and cried and whose manner was always foreign, your father who tried to make you softer than you could ever be, your father died in her arms, your mother’s arms, your mother who is dead.
Is it possible to be a son when your parents are gone? You are a sky with no sun. The blue is gone. You are a river that holds no water. You are a tree without its leaves.
You grieve but you do not know how to grieve.
You do not live in your heart.
You live in your head.
You are fifty-four years old. You have provided for three chil -
dren, a wife, and for your mother, who is dead. You are a man.
You have no need for fathers or mothers.
o c t avio l 229
You remember what your father said when he was forced to
leave Mexico, forced to leave the only piece of earth he’d ever love. Todos somos huérfanos en este maldito mundo. Orphans all of us in this cruel and breaking earth. But orphans with mothers
and fathers. And now that office has been torn away from you,
that office of son. Such a lonely office. Now there is only the office of father. Only the office of husband. Those offices, far more lonely and austere than the office of son.
You think of her, your mother. She was the world when you
were small. She was the water you bathed in. She was the smell of the food you ate. She was the only song you knew. She was a tree, she was the shade, she was the breeze.
You loved her. And yet it was your wife who cared for her.
You loved her. And yet it was your wife who touched her. You
loved her. And yet it was your wife who spoke to her, sang to her, bathed her. You loved her. Yet, as a man, you never touched her.
You loved her. But your love was silent. You tell yourself that she knew the truth of that love and that is all that matters. And then you know: Your wife’s heart is made of tender flesh. Yours is made of something much harder. You wonder why. The wondering will change nothing. Yet the wondering continues. Perhaps
all of this is part of God’s plan. To some, He gives hearts of flesh.
To some, He gives hearts of stone. You have received the lesser gift. Your life is the lesser life. It is your cross to bear. And you must bear it. You must stand it.
You see the look on your wife’s face. That sorrow, that look
that laid bare her great and generous love. Why is that look not on your own face? Why? You remember your mother teaching
you how to read a book. You remember the smell of her skin as
you slept on her shoulder at Sunday Mass. You remember the
songs she sang and then you catch yourself singing one of the
songs— hay unos ojos que se me miran—and you feel the strange tears on your face.
230 l a n d t h e w o r l d d i d n o t s t o p And you wonder.
Did you grieve for your father? Did you grieve for the man
who carried you in his arms into this new country, this country that is yours but never his? Did you thank him for his laughter, which fell over his house like holy water? You remember that the largest part of you was always angry at this man. You do not want to remember. And then you remember his anger too, and you do
not want to remember, you do not want to remember, you do not
want to remember. But you see his face. His face the day before he died. You hear his words: You’re too hard on your son. A son can be an enemy ¿que no sabes? Listen, a son is a beautiful thing.
But you, you are blind. You have always been blind.
The accusation was a slap. You still feel that slap. But you
were blind too, my father.
You want to resurrect him, to remind him of things he forgot,
to tell him he forgave himself too easily, to tell him he was a good husband but a bad father, to tell him he was wrong. Resurrect
him? Only to tell him he was wrong? Was he wrong? What was
he wrong about? You are no longer so sure. Of anything.
The slap. On your face. You feel it still.
The strange tears on your face. Salty as the sea.
How can this be? Your heart is made of stone.
To thee do we cry poor banished children of Eve.
g us t avo
The smell of the bar, the light that shone on the dark wood, the reflection of light in the bottles that lined the wall. So many bottles and shapes, so many smells that became one smell. It wasn’t clear to him why he felt calm just sitting there. Calmness was not something that came easily to him. What came easily to him was the appearance of calmness. But that’s never how he felt. Here, in this bar, he fit here—or, at least, he didn’t have to fit. That was what he liked about bars. The rules were different. Different from his father’s.
He caught a look at himself in the large mirror behind the
bar. He seemed older to himself than eighteen, older, tired, nothing resembling a boy. And right then, he liked the way he felt, a man not needing a mother or a father or a brother or a sister, not needing anything except to be sitting there. It was strange, that need not to be
long, that need to be untethered to the spinning earth, and strange, too, to have that ache, that desperate need to
232 l a n d t h e w o r l d d i d n o t s t o p be a man, and he wondered where that came from, that need, that ache, as if knowing the source might cure the disease. But there was no cure, no inoculation. The only cure was to fall in love with the disease.
He wondered if all men felt that need. Of course they did. Of
course. Maybe all men were born with that need and lived their whole lives trying to discover a way to become that large, violent, brutal, unfathomable thing. He thought of his father and how he liked the silent, stoic life of the mind but also loved the hunt. Did he love the drama of it, the ritual, or was it something else? The visceral beauty of it? The smell of it? The power of it? The act of becoming God? The act of becoming the giver and taker of life?
He thought of how his father had tried to recruit him into that world of his and how he’d failed. I don’t think it’s beautiful. He’d lied. Of course, it was beautiful. So beautiful that it could have devoured him whole.
He thought of Jack Evans, who’d signed up to go fight in a war he didn’t know anything about. And hadn’t he done it because that was his way of being a man? His way of showing the world that
he wasn’t afraid, wasn’t afraid of being swallowed whole? Come and fucking get me. Wasn’t that part of the reason? Jack could prove to his father and to his uncles, to his mother and to his aunts, prove to his country that he was brave and that he would do his part, make of himself a sacrifice, lay his youth down for beautiful things and beautiful ideas and beautiful words, even though he didn’t understand any of the things, any of the ideas, any of the words—but if he died, laid down his life, then at least those he left behind would never doubt his manhood, his virtue, his beauty, despite the fact that there was nothing beautiful in the war he had decided to fight. Nothing beautiful in this war or any war, nothing beautiful at all. And he wondered why the words they exchanged had been so
unintelligent. They had acted like inarticulate boys. Was it better then? Better to be boys than to be men?
g us t avo l 233
• • •
“Shit, Gustavo, you’re just looking at me like, shit, man, like I don’t know what.”