Carry Me Like Water (2 page)

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 held 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.

He was the cook, janitor, waiter—the only full-time worker. He got paid three dollars an hour—cash—and he was happy to make that much since the money paid for his one-room apartment, and the food was free. But he had never liked crossing the downtown area at five in the morning. It was no more than a thirty-minute walk, but the journey frightened him, and not even the rosary in his pocket, which he fingered as he walked, could lift the fear that fell over him. Walking through El Paso at that hour was like walking through an ancient, empty church, a church he often dreamed about. The church was so large that the more he walked toward
the altar, the farther away it got—and in the dream he never reached the front of the church, but he could not turn back because the entrance had disappeared behind him. He woke from the dream knowing he had been swallowed up by a God who was not good. He knew there was a good God somewhere—but
that
God was not in his dream; that God did not visit the place where he worked; that God did not comfort him in the night. At five o’clock in the morning the streets of El Paso were like the endless rows of pews in that church. As he walked through the streets, he tried to shut out the dream because he knew the dream was real and he was living it in those awful sunless moments. But even when he was successful in chasing the dream away, it was only replaced by the feeling that he was being followed by shadows who were as noiseless as he was. It was an odd feeling—almost evil—and he had come to the conclusion that dark, empty streets were paths that the spirits reserved for themselves, and who reluctantly gave up their territories to the living—the living who were too arrogant to believe in anything but themselves.

He arrived at his job around five-thirty and prepared all the food for the coming day. He cooked the beans, the meat for the tacos, the red chile, the rice, and the soup. The special of the day was always the same: red enchiladas with rice and beans. Nothing ever happened at work. He didn’t like to think about his job very much because he knew his thoughts would change nothing.

Some of the people who came in to eat seemed nice enough. Others weren’t nice at all and he read their lips as they complained about the food and the prices, the weather and their wives, their jobs and this city. There were days when he wanted to throw all the plates of food at every person who walked in. Other days he felt as though he might break in half or cry, and the floor beneath him did not feel hard but soft, so soft that it seemed unable to support his thoughts, his steps, his weight. On those days he walked carefully as if he were walking on leaves he was afraid of crushing. On those days his boss would stare at him and shake his head. Diego would smile at him, and his boss would walk away.

He needed more sun, he thought. Once, he considered asking his boss to install a window in the kitchen, but he knew the answer
would be “no,” so sometimes he pretended there were rays of light where he worked. In his mind he worked on a painting. He pictured his hands with a brush in them, and colors as deep as the Juárez mountains in the evening. The canvas was as big as a wall, and the canvas was full of nothing but soft green grass, full of the dawn, full of a light that emanated from a sun that would not burn his skin.

5

H
ELEN SOFTLY SQUEEZED
an avocado marked with an
ORGANIC
label at the Whole Foods Market. An older woman stared at her and smiled. “You know my daughter’s pregnant, too,” she said. “After three miscarriages, she finally had a boy. And now, she’s about to have her second.” Helen had heard a hundred little confessions everywhere she went since the day she started showing. At first she had hated the fact that complete strangers would walk up to her and editorialize about morning sickness, about cravings, about miscarriages, about the night they knew they conceived, about the names they might label their forthcoming progeny, the pluses and minuses of knowing a child’s sex before birth, remedies for swollen feet, and the best positions to sleep in after the sixth month. But now she enjoyed the small kindnesses, the unthreatening intimacies, the quiet words that made her feel cared for, made her feel like an indispensable part of the world that suddenly appeared to be inexplicably kind. As she waited in line at the checkout, she turned over a bottle of wine in her hand. She imagined how it would taste. It had been almost seven months since she touched any alcohol or drank any caffeine.
Her baby was going to be perfect.
But the feeling that she’d like to sit alone and enjoy a glass of wine entered her and took control of her body. The urge to drink wine was solid as
a stone hitting her in the stomach. She pictured herself in her backyard, at ease, sipping on a glass of wine in the late afternoon, the sun reflecting in her eyes, reflecting off the glass. She felt the wine on her tongue, and swallowed the cool, rich, red, silky liquid. The taste of the wine was so real it held her motionless—then let her go like a strong hand loosening its grasp. She found herself standing in an aisle of the grocery store.

The sack girl asked her if she needed help lifting the groceries into her car. “No,” she said—then changed her mind. “Yes, that would be very helpful.” Another sacker, walking in the opposite direction, spoke to the young girl who was pushing Helen’s basket. “¡IQue muchachita tan linda!” he said. “Te quiero.” He said it half seriously, half in jest. Helen pretended not to hear, and, for an instant—perhaps for only a second—her face filled with an overpowering shame, a shame she could not hide even from herself, a shame that was as much a part of her as the color of her eyes, or the thickness of her hair, or the soft lilt in her voice, a shame that was part of a memory larger than the baby in her body, louder than her laughter, a shame that could never deliberately be remembered or recalled but could never be forgotten, a shame she kept successfully hidden most of her waking moments, a shame that kept returning to her like a boomerang or a bad penny or a bad dream. In that instant, that shame rose to her face and she felt the entire world could see it, could see the ugliness of her life, could see she did not deserve a husband or a baby or the house she lived in. She wanted to cover herself and be protected; she wanted to weep because she felt she would never be an adult, never be a grown-up woman because she would always be a little girl whom someone had hurt. And then the look was gone. Nobody in the store noticed. The look that deformed her face was too fleeting, was over almost as soon as it had arrived. She took a deep breath and steadied herself. She took several deep breaths—controlled her body—she kept it from shaking. “It’s just the pregnancy,” she told herself, “it’s just the baby.”