CARRY ME
LIKE WATER
A Novel
BENJAMIN ALIRE SÁENZ
Patricia, eres la lluvia en mi desierto.
I give you this book—every word—for you.
We divide time into years. We divide years into seasons. We have different names for every river, a different name for every ocean on the earth. But the river does not know that we have named it “river”—it does not know that it is separate from the waters that call “Come.” Come. The river has flowed a thousand years. It is spring, and the river is spilling with the newness of winter’s melted snow, each season flowing into each season. River, I have been gone a long time. I am returning to your waters. River, I’ve come back. River. I’m afraid. Carry me like water.
Table of Contents
ONE DAY THEY WOKE AND FOUND THEIR LIVES HAD CHANGED
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2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
THE HERON DIES IN FLIGHT
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2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
THE END AND THE BEGINNING OF THE WORLD
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2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
CARRY ME LIKE WATER
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2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Praise for CARRY ME LIKE WATER
Also by Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Copyright
About the Publisher
ONE DAY THEY WOKE
AND FOUND THEIR
LIVES HAD CHANGED
1
WHEN DIEGO WOKE from his uneasy sleep he was lost and sad and far away from himself. It was as if he was always fighting to belong to his body, to himself, to the city he lived in. Always he woke wondering where he was, his body hurting. Naked, he felt himself trembling as though he were a tree whose leaves were being torn away by a wind that had no respect for anything that was green and growing, anything weaker than itself. His limbs felt bare and raw—exposed. In the winter, he shook from the cold; in the summer, from the heat. He took one hand and grabbed the other to make it stop shaking. He wanted to yell, scream, clear his lungs of everything that had settled inside him. When he woke, he always had the feeling he had taken into his lungs a million grains of sand—had swallowed all of the desert’s dust in one night, dust that cut into him like tiny pieces of crushed glass. His lungs and throat felt dry as ashes. He was drought itself. He was dust.
Diego wanted to wake and see a morning made of more than gray, colorless shadows that stood motionless and large before a dawn that was dark despite the rising sun. He wanted to wake to a good and perfect sun that would lift all the gray and dirt from the air. He wanted to wake. Instead, he remained in his noiseless trap of a body, caught in the endless repetitions that were his life. He always woke before the light entered the room. It was always the same, always black: black as his coffee, black as his eyes, black as his hair and the dreams he tried to keep himself from remembering. He stared at his hands, his legs, his feet. He stared at himself until he remembered where he was: in this room, this room where he slept but which would never be his. He felt himself to be always on the edge of homelessness. He could not talk. He could not hear. But in the morning that was all he ever thought of doing.
2
She is in a church. She thinks, “I do not know this place; I have never been here before.” Her gaze moves from one statue to another, each statue as unfamiliar as the one before. She focuses on the stained glass windows, and notices that the room is lit with a sun that is either setting or rising. She has lost her sense of time, her sense of direction, her sense of place. Looking for something familiar, she finds herself staring at a statue of some kind of virgin whose heart is pierced with a sword. Her blood looks real; her skin looks real, is real. She looks into the face of the suffering virgin that has come to life and recognizes the face. “Mama,” she whispers. “Mama!” She moves toward the woman and reaches out to comfort her, to touch her. But she cannot touch: She finds she has no hands; she has no body. She does not exist. A sense of panic fills her. She is lost. Perhaps, she thinks to herself she is dead. Her panic is real, her love for the woman is real. She sees. She knows that she sees. But where is my body? She begins to weep. She thinks she will weep forever. But then, she hears a man’s voice, deep, masculine, strong and steady. “You are more than your body,” the man says. “Do not weep for your body.” She looks up. The man—blond and strong—as beautiful a man as she has ever seen, smiles at her. She loves him and knows if she could regain her body her heart would bleed like the virgin’s, but she knows, too, that she does not need a body to love him. Still, she wants to touch him. She gazes into his eyes and finds a pain not unlike the virgin’s. She searches his thoughts for his name, but when she is close to finding it, the man disappears. She begins to weep again. She wants to hug herself, but there is nothing to hug. “I will weep forever, I will, I will, I will…”
Lizzie woke, startled and tired from her dream. “I will, I will,” she kept repeating, I will what? she wondered. She felt sad and disturbed, but she could not remember her dream. She felt a stranger to her body, and somehow it was useless and heavy, a burden. She pressed her fingers against her temples and tried to make herself remember her dream. The harder she tried to remember, the more frustrated she became. She sat up on her bed and stood on the firm floor. “It’s just a damn dream,” she yelled. “What’s a dream?” She wondered why she was yelling.
3
HELEN STOOD in front of the gas stove and watched the pasta as it danced around in the boiling water. The golden drops of olive oil swirled around like fish darting in a pond. She was mesmerized by the common occurrence—the physical fact—as if she was seeing something new and rare, as if she was observing some kind of miracle. She combed her hair out of her face and smelted her hands. Garlic. She sliced a lemon sitting in the fruit bowl, squeezed the juice into her palm, and rubbed it into her hands as if it were lotion. She liked the tingling, slightly burning sensation on her skin. She put her hands over the steam of boiling pasta, and smelled her hands again. Lately, she had taken to smelling herself—but not only herself—everything. It seemed that the world smelled so close, so intimate, so green like a freshly cut lawn or freshly picked cilantro. She breathed in the steam coming from the boiling water and held it in her lungs. She looked down at her large belly, and touched it. She ran her hand over the smooth, well-worn cotton fabric that pressed against her stomach as if she were rubbing a crystal ball, as if that ball were telling her the future would be as good and as warm as the evening sun that was filling her house with light.
She whispered to her baby, only half-aware she was speaking: “Does baby like
pasta?” she asked. “Daddy loves it; Mama loves it; does baby love it, too?” She smiled as she rubbed herself. Her friend Elizabeth had told her she would never have a firm stomach again. “I never had one to begin with.” She laughed softly, then slowly her laughter filled the air until there were more echoes of her voice in the room than there were rays of light. She stood glowing in the kitchen. She felt like one of the haloed madonnas in the paintings she’d seen in her husband’s art books—well-framed, well-kept, protected from all harm. So this is joy, she thought, so this is what it’s like. And though she knew this rush of pure adrenaline would melt as fast as snow on the desert, she felt complete and happy. When the sharp feeling passed, she did not feel sad and disappointed. She felt as if she had just had sex with Eddie, his warmth still inside her. She bit into the pasta. “Perfect,” she said. Just as she walked over to the sink to rinse the strands of thin pasta, she heard her husband walk through the front door. He stood in the doorway to the kitchen and stared at her. He did not say anything, but she saw the look on his face. Neither of them spoke. She looked at him and tilted her head: She became a camera photographing his face, swallowing him into her lens. She was drawn in by his fair skin, dark hazel eyes, the slight wrinkles around his eyes, his thick dark hair he could never tame. She knew everything about his face, every detail, how it was warm and soft when he laughed, how it could look like unbreakable glass when he was distant or sad, almost turning his eyes to blue, or how his mouth stretched to distortion when he was silent and angry. She could read every change of mood. “Te adoro,” she wanted to say, but she could not bring herself to speak to him in that language. She looked up at him from where she was standing. He said nothing. They studied each other for a few moments. “Pasta,” he finally said. “Pasta,” she repeated. So this is joy.
4
ON SECOND STREET, in El Segundo barrio, someone spray-painted the back wall of a convenience store and turned it into a political statement: LA POLICIA ASESINA A CHICANOS. Another sign, near Sacred Heart Church, read: MUERTE A LA MIGRA. No one ever attempted to erase those pieces of graffiti. They had been there for as long as Diego could remember. He thought of them as landmarks, murals, voices of the people who lived there. The spontaneous letters on the wail were as solid as his hands, full of a brash humor that bordered on violence; loud, bright, but weak like the light of a waning moon. For ail their energy those words on the wall were harmless—they went unread by the people they were aimed at. Written in Spanish, they could not be read by the gringo.
Diego read the signs every day as he walked home from work in the evening. The harsh sun did not seem to dull the fluorescent letters on the walls. He read them, all of them, even the ones with obscure messages he couldn’t understand. Sometimes the signs did not seem to him to be written in Spanish at all, but in a private language to which he had no access. He knew that behind the scrawled hieroglyphics there were worlds that he could not picture in his head. But some of the writings were clean and simple messages proclaiming perfect meanings. He smiled at the ones that promised undying love between people he would never know: MONICA Y RUBEN FOREVER. He wondered about the people who were bold enough to write public messages of love or daring enough to proclaim their political manifestos to a world that did not read, a world that did not acknowledge that the senders of the messages existed, breathed, lived—and hated. He smiled—laughed about these writers—and on his more cynical days he thought them all to be exhibitionists.
He had never known his father, and he was no longer curious about him. When he was young he had asked his mother about him, and all she said was that he had died. He had never believed her, but it didn’t matter since he would always be out of his reach—a man banished from his world for reasons he could not guess. His mother died when he was nineteen, though he did not remember anything about her death. But he did not want to dig deep into himself for that memory. Though he was only vaguely aware of it, he wanted to keep a part of who he was hidden from himself.
He no longer remembered what his sister looked like. She was five years older than he, and was alive somewhere, but he did not know the name of the city where she was now living. He had not seen her since their mother’s funeral, and neither one of them had made any effort to make contact. “What for?” he thought. He knew she didn’t like to see him. He had always seen in her eyes a need to run, as if somehow just the sight of him placed her in a prison where she could not escape. He was her jailer and keeper without even wanting to be. Perhaps, Diego thought, she was tired of being his voice. Perhaps she felt that because he could not speak that it was she who was obliged to be his lips, his voice. Or maybe she no longer wanted to be anybody’s sister—especially his. Diego had never understood her feelings. She had never spoken to him about what she fell, but he knew they shared an anger, and a common beginning—a beginning that mattered, that had to matter. But it was useless to think of bonds and beginnings because she had left him. Goddamnit, she had left him. Well then, Diego was glad of it, glad because he was free of her stupidity. He remembered vaguely how once he had written her a note and flung it in her face: “I am not a vegetable. I’m your brother.” She had ripped up the note in front of him. He had written about her in his journal, and all he had written was: “She was lost listening to the sound of her own voice. She was too proud of having one.” After that, he’d stopped keeping a journal. He burned it.
He no longer lived in El Segundo barrio. He had moved to the other side of downtown, to a place called Sunset Heights. It overlooked Juárez and the tall buildings of El Paso. Sunset Heights: He had liked the name when he first moved in. It was poetic, he thought, but after ten years of living here, the place had lost its poetry—if it had ever had any. He had heard there was a tunnel from Juárez that went under the river and into one of the houses in the neighborhood. The tunnel was supposed to have been used to smuggle guns, money, and ammunition into Mexico during the revolution. Diego had tried to find the tunnel when he first moved here, but he had stopped looking for it. He did not believe the tunnel had ever existed, and he could not remember why he had ever wanted to find it.
Sunset Heights was now nothing more than a once-fancy neighborhood with a false name, a place whose fame had faded. Most of the buildings still had the markings of wealth, but the façades resembled aging gravestones whose details had long since been erased by time and the wind and the rain. The rich had built their homes here at the turn of the century, but their money had been taken to other neighborhoods farther away from the traffic of downtown, farther away from the river, farther away from the illegal comings and goings of the border. All that was left were the rotting skeletons that had long since been turned into apartments like the one he lived in. The handcrafted, carved wood was buried beneath layer upon layer of cheap enamel. Diego often tried to reshape the houses in his mind. He thought of sanding off the cheap paint—freeing the wood. But it was too much work to sand it off. And like the wood, the inhabitants of Sunset Heights had been covered with too many layers of cheap paint. At least the rich could not take the view of the Juárez mountains with them. Often he felt as if the mountains had eyes and ears and lips. They heard everything. He wrote in his journal that if the mountains had legs they would run from the things they witnessed. But they did not have legs, so for now, the mountains were his. Unlike his sister, they would not abandon him.
The part of Upson Street where he lived faced the freeway and the remodeled train station that was newly equipped with automatic chimes. The new chimes rang out on Sundays and holidays—he read people’s lips at the place where he worked, lips talking about the new chimes. What was that to him who could not hear? And anyway, the station was still empty. It would become a restaurant or a clothes boutique, and it would be emptier than before.
But always the Juárez mountains were there with houses going right up to the point where they grew too steep. Always they were there to give him comfort. He imagined they held him close—closer than his mother had h
eld him when he was a little boy. At night, the lights from the houses looked like vigil lights surrounding a darkened altar. He had read somewhere that the Empress Carlota’s jewels were buried there. Maximilian had given them to her as a sign of enduring fidelity. Diego suspected Maximilian had not been the kind of man capable of being faithful to anyone but himself. He had read all about Maximilian and about Mexico, but he liked the legends he read on people’s lips better than the things he read in the books of the library. He liked to think about the legend and he dreamed of going into the mountains to find them. “Imagine me finding all those jewels—diamonds, gold, silver, eagles made of emeralds and rubies—every color in the world locked in a chest, imagine how they would look, how they would glitter, how they would feel in my hands.” The thoughts occupied him, but they passed—they were just thoughts that swept like clouds across the desert all summer long without dropping any rain. “I’ll never own Carlota’s jewels. I’ll never even go looking for them.” He knew the mountains were dangerous. He remembered his mother had warned him that the foothills were filled with thieves. “They’ll kill you,” she had admonished, “they’re poor, they’re hungry, and they’re mean. They have nothing better to do than sit around all day and sharpen their knives.” He had explored all of Juárez, but he had never explored the mountains because his mother’s voice had kept him afraid. And even if he knew where to go looking for the jewels, he would find himself with a knife in his back. Still, he thought, returning again to his fantasy, it wasn’t a bad way to die. He would die holding the jewels in his hands, the smell of Carlota all around him, the smell of her madness. So what if someone stuck a knife in him? No one would ever find his body. His funeral would be cheap.
Every day he crossed downtown—every day he followed the same steps, the usual journey into El Segundo barrio. He worked at a place called Vicky’s Bar, a bright blue square building which was not really a bar and not really a restaurant. It wasn’t much of anything. It was small and sat on a corner—and once it had been a house. After that it had been a bakery. It had been many other things after that; it had had many lives. The building had been so many things that no one remembered who had built it, why they had built it. It was a plain, worn-out ugly building; it should have been abandoned, should have been left to rot in the heat. Diego wondered why people insisted on resurrecting what should have been left for dead. His boss had painted the building a bright blue; “To match the color of the sky,” he said. “It looks cheap,” Diego thought. The paint drew attention to the sadness of the building—it wore the paint in the same way an old woman wore a tight dress; There was something sad and embarrassing about it. “It’s a happy color,” his boss’s wife had told him once. People will want to walk in here, and have fun.” He had stared at her handwritten note for a long time. He had nodded and written “yes” below her handwriting. But Diego could not imagine anyone having fun in this dark and over-air-conditioned hellhole. Happy people didn’t walk into Vicky’s. Every morning, when he walked through the doors, he could smell all of the building’s former lives mixed with cigarette smoke, pine cleaner, and stale beer. The smells were thick and rancid, and they only served to darken the already dull lighting.