Sometimes, I wanted to go out after work. Going out sounded like something normal. I wanted normal, but something about normal scared me. Walking down streets at night. Something bad would happen. But there was this bar that all the waiters talked about, some dive called the Regal Beagle. I wanted to go. Normal.
One Saturday, I made up my mind. The bar was walking distance from the restaurant—but I decided to drive. I parked half a block away. I walked into the bar and smiled nervously as I looked around. I sat on a stool and ordered a drink. I polished off my bourbon in three gulps. I ordered another. As I finished my second drink, I thought about having a third—but already I felt lightheaded.
I didn’t notice her sitting next to me—until she spoke. “What’s your name?” Her voice was deep and raspy as if she had a cold. I stared at her cigarette, the smoke coming out of her mouth. “I’m Sylvia.”
I nodded.
“Quiet, huh?”
“Not much to say.”
“So what’s your name?” She smiled. She was pretty when she smiled. I guessed she was in her thirties—maybe older. It was hard to tell in the dim light of the bar.
“Nicholas,” I said. “My name is Nicholas.” I tried to pretend it was normal for me to be sitting in a dark bar having a couple of drinks and talking to a woman. Men did it all the time. Normal.
“You look nervous.” She offered me a cigarette.
“I don’t smoke.”
She laughed. “Maybe you should.”
“No thanks.” I caught the bartender’s eyes, lifted my glass.
“Aren’t you going to offer me one too?”
I smiled. “Sure.” Men sat at bars and bought women drinks all the time. Normal. I caught the bartender’s eye and tapped her glass.
The bartender placed a beer in front of her. “He’s a little young for you, isn’t he, Sylvia?”
She laughed, then she looked at me. “Are you too young?”
“I’m old enough to drink,” I said.
“Well, if you’re old enough to drink.” She laughed.
“You laugh a lot.”
“Well, there’s a lot to laugh about.” She took a sip of her beer.
“So what kind of beer do you drink?”
“Bud.”
I watched her lips move as she talked. I liked the sound of her voice—what she was saying didn’t matter so much. And anyway, men weren’t good at translating what women said. Something about her job and her ex-husband. We had another drink. I felt strange, like I was someone else. I wanted to know what it was like to kiss her, thought I’d like to try. But it didn’t seem right. “I better go,” I said. “It’s late.”
“We’re just getting started.”
“Are we?”
“What do you say we go to Juárez?”
I thought a moment. I’d already had too much to drink and then I heard myself saying, “What the fuck.”
She laughed. “Yeah, what the fuck.”
She held my hand as we walked over the Santa Fe Bridge. I found myself sitting at a booth in the Kentucky Club. It was strange. I should have felt drunker than I felt. She asked me questions. I answered them and I smiled to myself because I knew the answers weren’t true. Men lied to women all the time. Normal.
We weren’t there long. She said she liked the Florida better. So we walked down the street and had another drink. Maybe two. It was late and I was tired but she was kissing me as we sat there and I was kissing her back. “We should go,” I said.
“Where to?” She was smiling. “My place? Your place?”
“Your place,” I said.
She was still smiling. “I don’t live so far.”
She must have seen something in my expression.
“You don’t have to be so shy.”
“It’s the way I am.”
When I took her hand, I thought that it was as warm as the night. I could feel myself trembling.
“I won’t hurt you,” she said.
Her apartment was small and bare--but it was clean. She offered me a beer. I told her I should go, didn’t know what I was doing there, but when she reached over and kissed me again, I kissed her back and didn’t want to stop. It was strange, her tongue, the taste of cigarette and beer, but it was sweet, and I wanted to tell her I’d never done this before but words didn’t matter. They had never mattered. She unbuttoned my shirt, laughed because I was wearing a T-shirt underneath, and when my shirt was off, she tried to take off my T-shirt. I stopped her. “Not my T-shirt.” I hadn’t meant to sound angry, but that’s the way it came out. She looked at me, said everything was okay. “Then how about your pants?” I kissed her again, then let her take off my pants, then my underwear. I felt her warm hands on my legs, on my penis. I groaned softly.
“Nice,” she said. She stood in front of me and took off her clothes. I reached over and felt her body. I pulled her close to me and when I felt her back, it was smooth and unscarred.
“What do you like?” she asked.
“Just don’t touch my back.”
I woke to the sound of her breathing. I felt still and serene, and yet I felt worn out and hungover. I’d never woken up in someone else’s bed. In the dim light of the lamp, I could make out her features, the wrinkles around her eyes. She was forty—at least forty, maybe older. But she had felt young when I was inside her, and I had felt something I had no name for—and there hadn’t been any dreams. When we had been having sex, I had almost felt happy to be the owner of a body, happy, and I’d liked that moment of almost happiness. I had liked it so much.
I wondered if I’d pleased her. Maybe I hadn’t. Maybe she didn’t care. I lay there, the steady rhythm of her breathing like a lullaby. I felt stupid and guilty. But she hadn’t cared. She was used to this, had placed the condom on me as if it was just another simple and ordinary task—like drinking a glass of water. I stared at the white of my T-shirt, wondered if her smell would be on it when I went back home.
I looked at my watch. Three o’clock in the morning, and I was lying in a stranger’s bed. I wanted to leave, but I liked looking at her in the dim light of the lamp on her nightstand. I just kept staring. Suddenly I wondered if I owed her any money. It had all been too easy. Why would anybody want to sleep with me if it wasn’t for money? I sat up on the bed. My clothes were in the other room. I heard her voice.
“Going home, Mr. T-shirt?”
I turned around and looked at her. “Yeah,” I said. “Gotta get some sleep and go to work. Do I owe—”
“I’m not a fucking prostitute.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I just thought that—”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“It does matter. Look, I don’t do—I mean why would anybody want to sleep—I mean—”
“You don’t get out much.”
“No, I don’t.”
“I could tell.”
“That bad, huh?”
“No. You’re nice. Last night was nice.”
“And I’m young enough to be your son.”
“So what? What’s wrong with sleeping with someone you want to sleep with?”
“Nothing.”
“Well, then?”
“You’re not mad?”
“Go home. I bet you live with your parents.”
“So what?”
“Don’t get mad.”
“I gotta go.”
“Want my phone number?”
I got up from the bed. I didn’t like feeling stupid. So stupid. I walked into the living room, put on my pants, then carried my shoes and socks back into the bedroom. I sat on the bed and put on my shoes and socks. “Yeah,” I whispered.
“Yeah what?”
“Yeah, I want your phone number.”
“Good boy. Next time can I see your back?”
“No.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“I don’t like to talk about it.”
“Talking never hu
rt anybody.”
“Look, it’s private.”
“So’s your dick.”
“Forget it, then.” I put on my shoes, then stood up. “I’m sorry. I’m being an asshole. But that’s the way it is with me.”
“Fuck you,” she said.
“Yeah, right.” I slammed the door on my way out.
I looked up more words: sex, kiss, hands, tongue. No dictionary could define, could translate, the needs of the human body. I looked up the name Sylvia. It was Latin for forest. Maybe it was a place I could get lost in.
A week later, I found her at the Regal Beagle again, smoking her cigarette, drinking her beer. I wanted to apologize. I wanted to explain to her about my back. But I’d never spoken to anyone about what happened, not to my brothers and sisters, not to my parents, not to anyone. Well, except for the police—but that didn’t count.
I sat next to her at the bar. “I’m sorry,” I said.
She smiled.
I went home with her. Our sex was angry—more like a fight than sex. And even though there was plenty of life in the sex, there was no love. There was no love at all. Not that I was surprised. When I fell asleep, I woke up as she was trying to take off my T-shirt.
“I fucking said no,” I said.
“Just get out!” she yelled. “Just get the fuck out! You’re a fucked-up kid.”
I didn’t say a word as I finished putting on my clothes. She was right. I was fucked up.
“You’re fucked up,” she said again.
“I heard you the first time.”
I felt a sharp pain on my back as I moved toward the door. I tried not to wince, tried not to show any sign of pain as I started at the glass ashtray that had bounced off my back and had fallen to the floor with a thud. “Who’s more fucked up—me or you?”
“Is it a contest?” The look on her face, it reminded me of the look on the faces of those boys, the rage in it, the hate.
I took a deep breath and walked out the door.
I thought my back would have another bruise by the time I woke up in the morning. I started the engine, then sat in the idling car for a long time. Finally, I put the car in drive. As I drove home in the morning light, I found myself repeating basic Spanish grammar: yo soy, tu eres, el es, nosotros somos, ustedes son, ellos son. I whispered the word for the sun, sol, then whispered the word for night, noche. I liked night better than sun. Yo soy una noche sin estrellas. It was a sentence. A real sentence. The words did not feel foreign on my tongue.
As I lay in bed, words from my youth came back to me. Fuego. Lluvia. Desierto. Coraje. Odio. Trabajo. Sangre. Corazón. Muerte. I repeated the words to myself, used each one in a simple sentence, then translated it to myself: Tengo la sangre de mi hermana. I have my sister’s blood. En el desierto no cae lluvia. Rain does not fall in the desert. Tengo odio en mi corazón. I have hate in my heart. I wondered if my translations were accurate. I fell asleep translating, trying to make sense of what was inside me—but how could I translate the words on my back? How could I translate what had happened?
I woke up in the afternoon.
I went for a run in the desert.
The boys were there. They would always be there. They would be everywhere I went. There was nothing to do but outrun them. But their hate was a bullet. And who could outrun a bullet?
When I got back home, I took a shower. I knew that nothing could wash away the scars. I looked at myself in the mirror. My eyes were as black as a starless night.
My mother asked me if I was okay.
I nodded.
“You don’t look okay.”
“It’s just a hangover,” I said.
“You never used to drink,” she said.
There’s a lot of things I never used to do. That’s what I wanted to say. But I didn’t bother. I understood that my mom felt the presence of those words in the room.
I went to work. I waited tables.
I came home and went to my room and prayed for sleep. I remembered me as a boy, leaning into my mother’s shoulder during mass and wondering if God saw us. I remembered watching my father work in the sun, his skin glowing in his own sweat. I remembered the boy I had been in high school, looking up words in a dictionary. I fell asleep trying to think of the word for what I felt.
When I woke in the morning, I told myself that the scars on my back had always been there. They were nothing more than birthmarks. I thought of that night. I told myself I should not have yelled; I should not have been outraged as if that act had been undeserved and violent and indecent; I should not have begged them to stop in the name of a god I did not even believe in. What I should have done—when they were holding me down—what I should have done when they took that knife and wrote on me as if the knife was merely a pen and my own blood nothing more than ink—what I should have done—I should have looked at my attackers and told them I had been waiting for them. I should have looked them all in the eyes and told them I knew their hate, understood it, embraced its awful necessity. I should have offered up my body as a sacrifice to their cruel and hungry gods. It was a war, after all, and sacrifices were necessary in a war—though I had never acknowledged that the war existed.
War. Guerra. That was me. That was my name.
And then I knew that I would have to relearn the meaning of every word I had ever learned. I would have to learn how to translate all those words. Thousands of them. Millions of them. And then I smiled and felt the tears running down my face. Finally I understood. It wasn’t the words that mattered. It was me. I mattered. So now I would have to fight to translate myself back into the world of the living.
THE RULE MAKER
1.
There are things I still remember about growing up in Juárez: I remember the name of my school, Escuela Carlos Amaya. I remember my first grade teacher’s name, Laura Cedillos. I wanted her to be my mother, not because she was pretty, but because she was so nice and smelled like flowers. I remember the playground, cement and dirt and grass that never really grew up to become a lawn because it was never watered and because we stomped the ground until it was a fine powder. We couldn’t pound anything else but we could pound the dirt.
I remember the fence around the school, a fence that was there to make us feel safe. I remember the first time I got into a fight. I wasn’t any good at it. I was eight and Marcos Manriquez punched me right in the stomach and I writhed on the ground in pain. “¡Levantate!” he screamed. But I just lay there on the ground and refused to get up. Everyone laughed at me and called me a joto and all the other mean names kids call each other. I don’t think I cared that they called me names. It didn’t bother me because I didn’t think it was a good thing to know how to fight, to use your fists on other people. I never liked the idea of hurting other people—and if that made me a joto, then I guess that’s what I was. Not that I knew what joto meant at the time.
And anyway, after that fight, Marcos and I became friends. Marcos had good fists. But he had a better heart. He was the best friend I ever had. We rode our bikes around the streets of my neighborhood yelling and screaming and laughing. And then one day my bike got stolen.
I never really knew where my mother got the money for us to live. We had an okay house, small, two bedrooms, a living room, a bathroom, a kitchen. The walls were all painted white—except the yellow and blue kitchen. My mother had a picture of San Martín Caballero in her kitchen. San Martín was a gentleman on a horse and he was offering a beggar his cloak. I don’t know why I remember that. I guess you could say he became my patron saint because I’ve always given beggars on the streets all the change in my pockets. I didn’t have a cloak like San Martín Caballero, but I always had a quarter and a few pennies.
The small house where I grew up was clean—but it was clean because I taught myself how to clean a house. It’s not a bad thing to teach yourself things. And besides, I didn’t want the house I lived in to be dirty and I didn’t want the house to smell bad. I sometimes sprayed the house with my mother’s perfu
me. Except my room. I didn’t spray my room with anything. It smelled like old books and it probably smelled like me. Maybe my room didn’t smell so good, but I took a shower every day and I always brushed my teeth and combed my hair. And I washed my own clothes.
There wasn’t a father in the house. I didn’t know if my mother had been married or not married and nobody ever said anything about him. I remember asking her once, “Do you have a picture of my father?”
She looked right at me and said, “Nunca quiero que me preguntes de tu papá.” I knew it was serious business because she almost always spoke to me in English. When she spoke to me in Spanish, it meant I’d better listen. She had this thing that I had to learn English, even though I lived in Juárez. She said I was a U.S. citizen and that I should know the language of my country. But Juárez was the only country I knew—and it was the only country I cared about. She’d bring me to El Paso sometimes and I’d play with my cousins and we spoke both languages, English and Spanish. But El Paso wasn’t Juárez and it wasn’t mine and I always felt that I was just a visitor there.
I had a friend named Jorge who lived next door. I liked Jorge’s family because even though my mother disappeared for days, they always watched out for me. And Jorge’s dad was good to me and he would take me and Jorge with him to do things and I sometimes felt like he was my dad—only I knew he wasn’t. I was sad sometimes, but not sad, sad, sad. Just sad in a normal way, I think.
I liked my life when I lived in Juárez. And even though I was sad sometimes, I was also happy sometimes. I loved my mother and it’s not as if she was really mean to me. I knew she had lots of problems. People can’t help it when they have problems. Everyone in the world has problems—even rich people. At least that’s what Jorge’s father said. Jorge’s mother said that maybe it was true that rich people had problems too. But she also said, “If the rich don’t care about the problems of the poor, then why should the poor care about the problems of the rich?”
The rich and the poor, they were big topics of conversation in Jorge’s house. In my house too.