Carry Me Like Water

by Benjamin Alire Sáenz

  Mary read what Diego had written and went into a fit of laughter. “If more men were like you and my son, my Johnny, I might enjoy this damn fool world, yes sir, I would. Look, honey, if you see that man, you kick his ass for Mary. But ain’t it a nice day? Ain’t it though?” She kissed him on the cheek and straightened out her clothes. “But really got to run, honey.” She looked at her watch admiring it. “See my new watch?” She put her wrist in Diego’s face. “Ain’t it nice?” Diego took a good look at it and nodded even though he wouldn’t know a good watch from a cheap one. “Sometime I’ll tell you all about this watch, Johnny, it’s got a story. It was a present, a gift—from a man—can you believe that, honey, a gift from a real man! A real good looker, too. He thought I was gonna give up being a virgin for a watch. No sir, not Mary, no way. The Virgin ain’t lookin’ for no suitors. I just took the watch and marched myself down the street, and I didn’t look back neither.” She picked up her bag and walked away swiftly as if she had somewhere very important to go. Diego watched her. In the sun with all those clothes, she looked like a flag. Even her walk made her clothes seem as if they were being blown by a soft wind that made Diego think she had wings.

  As Mary walked down the street, a woman threw a dirty look her way almost as though she was tossing a penny in her path. It might as well have been a bullet, she thought. “Mary, why does it hurt? Why does it still hurt?” For no reason at all, she thought of the way her mother-in-law had always looked at her—always throwing her out of her house with her eyes, her exiling stares. She wondered why the past still haunted her. Her husband had left her years ago, had taken her children with him. It was no good to think of them. It was better when she had no memory, and she cursed this day for her temporary sanity. She chased away the memory of her husband like she would chase a cockroach out of a clean kitchen. She thought, instead, of Diego. “The kindest man I know.” She detested days like these, abhorred them, hated being so lucid, hated remembering she had a history on the earth, hated these moments when she appeared ridiculous even to herself. She touched her face with her thin bony fingers. “I am the Virgin. I am the Virgin. I am … Mary just don’t cry—don’t—this will pass, will pass. Memories are of the devil. God, take it away, take it, take it. This moment will pass. You won’t remember a thing, Mary, you won’t remember…”

  The thought crossed Diego’s mind that Mary was one of the only gringas he knew—her and the nurse at La Fe Clinic. He thought for a minute, and it entered his mind that maybe Mary might be just the right person to receive his suicide letter. He thought about it again and decided it wasn’t such a good idea since Mary might not be right on the day he killed himself. Maybe the nurse or maybe Luz would be better choices, but Luz was his editor. He would have to give it more thought. He liked the idea of addressing his letter to the nurse, since she wasn’t as crazy as Mary and she seemed to be very understanding. She touched people, and Diego knew that her voice had to be as soft as her hands. She would read his letter and understand. Diego thought about the nurse; he pictured her and imagined her smell. She smelled like the inside of a church. He laughed at himself, and his thoughts returned to Mary. He wondered where she lived, where she slept, where she ate. His boss had kicked her out of Vicky’s more than once. He said she wasn’t very different from most gringas: all of them were crazy, and all of them claimed to be virgins.

  He walked toward La Fe Clinic to see if Tencha was selling fruit. She had set up shop in front of the clinic since it was situated right in the middle of the Alamito projects. It had been a shrewd business move on her part, and a profitable one. Everyone who came in and out of the clinic stopped to buy fruit from her.

  As Diego approached the clinic, he could see Tencha talking to some of her customers. He let them talk as he reached into Tencha’s shopping cart that she had stolen from a nearby grocery store. He picked up a mango to see if it was ripe. Tencha watched him and shook her head as if to say that he had not picked a very good one. She picked up a better one and handed it to him. “Mira, m’ijo, compra ésta, te aseguro que está madura.” He nodded and handed her twenty cents. He had no idea what she’d said though she appeared to be yelling. People did that. She smiled at him and continued her conversation with her friends. He smiled back.

  He walked toward the Bowie Bakery, which was a fifteen-minute walk. He took the shortest route through the barrio, the projects, and the pink and lavender houses. It was a good time to walk through this neighborhood—mornings and early afternoons were safe. The night wasn’t so good—the gangs were out then, and there were lots of them. He only knew the gangs’ names through the graffiti on the walls. Mostly, the gangs were unknown presences to him: He knew they existed, but his life was so separate from theirs that they did not seem real to him. He knew a couple of the guys from the T-Birds whom he had met once at La Fe Clinic when they were waiting to be patched up after one of their fights. One of them had a finger cut off, and Diego remembered that he had not appeared to be in very much pain. They hid their pain well, Diego thought, and who knows, maybe it hadn’t hurt as much as he imagined. He knew the gang members didn’t like him, but a kid in the barrio had once handed him a note telling him not to worry because he had heard the big guys say it was bad luck to beat up on a deaf guy. They left him alone. As long as he walked the streets during the day, he wasn’t afraid of running into any trouble with the gangs; their lives were lived by night.

  The line at the bakery was long—it was always long. The Bowie Bakery, named after the high school in El Segundo barrio, was one of the most famous places in the barrio, and even people who lived in other parts of the city came here to buy their baked goods. It wasn’t unusual to see many gringos standing in line alongside the people who lived here. He saw the people speak to one another as they waited in line. A lady was telling a young woman that her mother was at the county hospital. He couldn’t read her lips well, so he missed out on the name of her illness, but he knew by the expression on her face that it was serious. Probably cancer, he thought. Cancer seemed to be everywhere, and Diego had a theory that people were getting cancer simply from being alive, from breathing in everybody else’s anger.

  He waited for his turn in line, and unlike most people, Diego enjoyed the wait. He was happy to be a part of the line and he liked imagining the sounds of the people’s voices. Their voices, he thought, must be the same color as their skins: they speak in brown. He pointed to two apple empanadas, two fingers for two of them. The guy behind the counter knew him; he was a regular at Vicky’s. “¿Dos empanadas de manzana? Si, señor. Thirty-five cents!” Diego could see he was yelling, the veins popping out from his neck as he shouted. The man yelled again, repeating what he had just said, and then wrote “35¢” on a pad and showed it to Diego. He yelled again: “¡Treinta y cinco centavos!” Diego wanted to yell back: “I can’t hear you any better because you’re yelling, you idiot!” He smiled at the man and gave him thirty-five cents. “Thank you,” he yelled, “y vuelva.” Diego nodded. When he walked out he flipped him one of Mary’s fingers. No one noticed.

  He walked down to the Mexican Consulate on San Antonio Street and began eating one of his empanadas. He sat on the steps and watched the traffic moving at a Saturday pace—slow and steady—cars with drivers who seemed almost not to be aware they were actually driving. He noticed the Border Patrol vans moving up and down the street, the men in the front seats noticing everyone on foot, staring at them, watching for signs of foreignness like scientists looking for that virus that did not belong in the healthy body. Some of the vans were half-full; some were almost empty. The passengers stared at him or the sky, stared out at everything outside of the van, their eyes like hands ready to grab at anything. Every time Diego saw those men staring out at him from the inside of a green van, he wanted to do something, hit someone, set them free—and yet, it was all so useless, and even his own feelings seemed useless to him—not worth anything at all. Maybe, he thought, I’ve been having too many conversations with
Luz.

  Another van passed him slowly, looking him over. He waved at the uniformed man behind the wheel and whispered quietly to himself: “Hello, you bastards.” He smiled, and cursed them, and it made him feel happy that they did not know why he was smiling. The green uniforms smiled back at him. He wasn’t afraid of them anymore. For the longest time he had lived in fear of them, always wanting to run when he saw them approach him, and then one day it happened: They picked him up. It had happened at San Jacinto Plaza, and after the whole incident had passed he’d wondered why he had ever been afraid. They were nothing, Diego thought, nothing. Luz was right about them. They were even stupider than his sister: They couldn’t even figure out he was deaf. They thought he was just another Mexican who couldn’t speak English. He had even signed things to them, and had tried to pull his pad out from his coat, but they grabbed him as if he was reaching for a gun or something. He toured the city with them, and when they’d filled the van with people who looked just like him, they’d driven them all to the bridge. At the time, he had enjoyed the ride since it was slower and cheaper than the city buses. He had had a good time driving around the streets of El Paso.

  They asked him questions at the immigration office at the border, and finally he convinced them to let him write something down: “My name is Juan Diego Ramirez. You know, like the guy who discovered Our Lady of Guadalupe, and I want to see a lawyer.” The two officers had looked at each other with questions all over their faces. One of them asked him if he was a U.S. citizen. Diego had nodded and written: “Why didn’t you ask me that before you decided to give me a free ride around the town?” One of the guys laughed and told him to beat it. “And try and stay off the streets.” What did he mean? Why the hell should he stay off the streets? “No,” he had written to Luz, “the streets are mine.” Luz had agreed. “Damn right,” she’d said, “they think everyone can afford a car.”

  Now he was less afraid. Luz had said that the border patrolmen were just a bunch of pendejos who had reached their highest station in life. “Some day somebody is going to write a story about them,” she said, “and they’re going to let the whole world know what a bunch of assholes they are.” But nobody will ever write that story, Diego thought, never write it because El Paso was too far away from all the places in the world that people liked to read about. Nobody would ever want to read a book about the border and the migra—it would all be too strange, too foreign, too dull and hot, too poor and desolate to be considered exotic. People liked exotic, Diego thought.

  He finished his second empanada. He played with the mango in his hands tossing it from one hand to the other. He would save the mango and eat it for dinner. He walked slowly toward home on San Antonio Street. He found himself standing outside the county jail, a tall, gray, concrete building with tiny windows. It was supposed to be escape proof, and as far as Diego was concerned, it was. Luz had brought him here once and pointed at it saying: “This is a giant dick, my Diego, that’s exactly what it is: a giant dick they use to screw the Mexicans.” He didn’t know what to think about that. Sometimes she said things because she was as much an actress as Mary, but he appreciated the logic behind her words. He once told Luz that Mary and she were very much alike in the way they thought. She had gotten so angry that she shook him by the collar and threatened to hang him up by his balls on the flagpole at the bridge: “The American flagpole,” she had yelled, “as a warning to other assholes.” He had apologized and she had forgiven him.

  Outside the jail, he saw mothers and children and old people gathered around the benches as if it were a park. Some were eating lunch and drinking soft drinks. Some were waving toward the windows as if they were waving at soldiers in a parade. Every day, there were people gathered here, happy and waving at windows and making signs—and behind those windows stood husbands, fathers, brothers, uncles. Their tongues were useless, here. All they had to speak with were their arms and hands. Diego felt close to them. He loved to watch them. A girl asked her mother which window was her father’s. The mother answered: “Over there, the one at the very top. He can see everything. Right now, he can see you.” She smiled at her daughter and took her up in her arms. Diego walked over to them and handed them his mango. The little girl laughed. He walked away reluctantly wondering why they weren’t angry or sad or ashamed.

  11

  LIZZIE STOOD at the entrance to the rectory of Mission Dolores. She looked around nervously and stared at the outside of the church. For some reason, looking at it made her nervous. She pulled her eyes from it, wondering at her strange attraction to that building—it was as if she carried a memory of it around in her. But it was not possible that she remembered her own baptism. A chill ran down her spine. She looked away from the church, rang the bell, and walked in just as the sign instructed. A dark-haired woman in her late fifties with a friendly voice was sitting behind the desk. She asked Lizzie if she had an appointment with one of the priests.

  “No,” she said, opening her mouth to say something more—but stopped.

  The secretary watched her for a moment. “Would you like to make an appointment—or are you here to pay for a Mass?”

  Elizabeth paused for a moment, “Well,” she said, “neither. You see—well—I’m looking for some information.” She had carefully planned out the encounter, but now she felt stupid for playing this childish game. She was too old to be playing hide-and-seek, but this was the only way of making sure that her visit last night had been real. It was as if she were here to spy on herself. She was no longer sure of anything. “You see,” she continued, “I’m a nurse at St. Mary’s, and one of our patients died yesterday. He mentioned he’d been baptized at Mission Dolores Church. For some reason, it seemed like an important thing to him. I don’t know if it’s true or not—sometimes it’s the dementia. Anyway, if he was baptized here, I want to give a gift to the church in his name.” She paused. “He was a special patient. I wanted to do something.” Her palms were sweating. She felt her story was a little precious, but when she had come up with this plan, she had figured if money was involved, the church would not ask too many questions. She despised herself for her cynicism. She was certain the secretary would discover her lie, but she had decided that telling the truth was not an alternative. “I’m a little nervous,” she said. “I’ve never been this close to a Catholic church.”

  The secretary smiled. “There’s really nothing to be nervous about.” Her voice was warm, deep, a slight Mexican accent mixed with a heavier southern drawl. “I know how you feel, though. I once went to a wedding in a Baptist church. I was so nervous, you’d have thought I was the bride.”

  Lizzie laughed not so much because she thought her joke was funny but because the laughter helped her relax. She was desperate for a cigarette.

  “It’s very nice of you to want to do something in your friend’s name.” The woman’s smile was warm and strong like a cup of coffee on a cool morning. “I love your earrings—beautiful,” She turned off her electric typewriter and gave Lizzie her full attention. “I’m sure that if he was baptized here, we’ll have a record. The only problem is that our system is a little bit, well, outdated. One of the younger priests wants to computerize the whole system, but the pastor won’t allow it. The old priest has this idea that’s it’s holier to write things out with your own hand than to write something out on a screen. And, me, well, I don’t take sides. I do what I’m told. Anyway, all of our records are kept in books—handwritten. There’s no way I can look up your friend’s record without knowing the year he was baptized—that’s how we do it here—by the year. It’s a simple system but it works.”

  Lizzie listened, already knowing what she would say. She paused a moment. “Well, according to his records at the hospital, he was born on—well—I have it written down.” She opened her purse. unfolded a piece of paper, and read the date. “He was born on August tenth. Does that help?” She felt as though the secretary could see right through her bad acting.

  The secretary smi
led. “Do you have a year?”

  “Oh yes—of course.” She stared at the paper. Nineteen fifty-five.”

  “I’m sure we’ll be able to come up with something.” She looked at Lizzie as if she were waiting for something.

  “Yes?” Lizzie asked.

  “His name. I’ll need his name.”

  Elizabeth broke out laughing. “I guess I expected you to have telepathy.”

  “Empathy, yes. Telepathy, no. I haven’t learned that one yet.”

  “I have,” she said, Lizzie was immediately sorry she’d spoken.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. It was just a joke.” She smiled to herself. “His name’s Salvador Aguila,” she said.

  “Aguila? What an unusual last name. Are you sure it isn’t Aguilar?”

  “No. It’s Aguila—I’m sure of it.”

  “Very unusual,” she repeated, “But it should make things easier. At least he’s not a Garcia or a Gonzalez—we have thousands of those. One moment. Let me just look this up in our records, I’ll be right back—it shouldn’t take too long, but you never know.”

  “I have time,” Lizzie said matter-of-factly.

  The woman walked through a door and down a hallway. She carried herself with grace, with a sense of certainty. Lizzie was sure this woman did not simply “do as she was told.” She sat in the room already familiar with its smell. It had smelled the same way last night, had smelled of book mold, and old wax, and old furniture. She thought there was something very soothing about this place. She felt tired and wanted to rest here for a long time.

  She expected to wait for a while, but the woman appeared almost immediately, holding two big leather books in her hand, “See,” she said, “if he was born in August of 1955, he was either baptized later that same year or very early in 1956—sometimes people wait a while for a relative to come into town or something. Take me, for instance: My godmother had to travel from Mexico City to San Antonio in order to be present at my baptism. She was sick when I was born. By the time she recovered and made the journey, I was already eight months old. Of course, back then, she made part of the journey in a horse-drawn carriage. You know, when I went to her funeral, I just hopped on a plane. I sometimes think we don’t live on the same earth as our ancestors.” As she talked, she opened the book labeled “I955.” “Let’s see, we’ll begin just after August tenth.” Something in her hoped this woman would confirm what she’d found the night before—then she would know that last night’s travels had not been a dream; then she would know that she had actually left her body and floated through the night like a holy specter; then she would know that her life would never again be ordinary, that she had left the legacy of the dull suburbs behind for good; then she would know she was sane, she would know she was gifted—gifted by that man whose voice ran through her like a cool wind. Salvador. She half-whispered his name. But the other half of her wanted her to find no names, no Salvador Aguila, no Maria de Lourdes Aguila, nothing. Half of her wanted this to be nothing more than a vivid dream born out of the sickness of being raised upper middle class. She sat there in the waiting room amid the familiar smell of dust wanting the smell not to be familiar. “Ahh,” the woman said, “here we go. Jesus Salvador Aguila, baptized August twenty-second, nineteen fifty-five, by a Padre Diego Landa. It’s him—I’m sure—date of birth, August tenth.” She looked up at Lizzie. “That wasn’t so hard, was it?” She looked down at the book again. “Did you know he was a twin?”