Carry Me Like Water Read Online Free PDF Page B

thing. He made a mental note and continued reading:
    “The owner of the place where I work, a place called Vicky’s Bar, he beats his wife. I’ve seen her bruises. She left him. She walked in one day and started throwing glasses and dishes and turning over tables all over the place. She had the strength of an earthquake. Talk about angry. ‘You’re lucky I don’t cut your balls off and feed them to the pigeons at the park!’ That’s what she yelled. She yelled alt kinds of other things. He laughed at her and told her all kinds of things. I couldn’t read his lips very well, but I do remember he kept telling her she was crazy. But she wasn’t crazy, not crazy at all. Anyone could see that. He called her a puta. Puta, puta, nothing but a whore. ‘Not yours!’ she said, ‘not yours anymore,’ And afterwards I had to clean up the mess.
    The boss told his friends that if he ever saw her again he’d beat the shit out of her. He almost changed the name of the bar after that since he’d named it after her, but he figured he might lose some business, so he kept the name. The boss doesn’t like his sons much, either. He says they’re like their mother. He hired me instead of one of his sons because he said they would rob him blind. He called his sons a bunch of cabrones, and everything else he could think of—lazy, castrated thieves on top of everything else, ‘And besides, the deaf guy’s cheaper.’ I saw him say that to his friend. Everybody’s a target to hit with fists or words; everybody’s toilet paper; everybody uses everybody. Everybody’s mad at everybody—me included. Who wants to live in a world like this? I don’t. Not me. What for?”
    He finished reading the letter, and looked it over. He hadn’t signed it yet. Today, it struck him he liked the ending very much, but he didn’t much like the part about his mother. Why drag her back into the world by mentioning her in his letter? She had died her own death already. Why drag her through another funeral?

7
    March 27. 1992
    Lizzie, you’re just tired—I kept repeating that to myself all the way home. But that last patient, that newly admitted patient, he was real. And I know that being tired has nothing to do with anything. He just stared at me with eyes as black as the grave, stared and stared and then he took my hand and stared into my palm. I had never seen him before and yet his hand felt safe and familiar. “You have a gift.” he said. I smiled at him: “Will my gift get me a raise?” “No,” he said. He didn’t smile back. “It’s not a commodity.” He seemed so sane and deliberate in his speech. It seemed impossible that such a body could speak with such force. I’ve seen so many AIDS patients that their breaking bodies no longer affect me—and yet I was surprised to feel afraid in his presence. I tried to make a joke. “You’re telling me I can’t make money on my gift? What about the free market? This is the nineties—Marxism is dead.” He laughed, but there was something cold and hard and ironic about the sound of his laughter. It was as if he was laughing not from his heart but from his memory. I felt a chill. The man kept talking, and it seemed odd to me that the cynicism in his voice completely disappeared: “You know, I used to be a Marxist—a real one. But now I’ve regressed back into Catholicism. Did you know you were born a Catholic?” It occurred to me that he had developed dementia. After I changed his IV, I asked his name. “Salvador,” he said. “It’s a lovely name,” I said. “Your friends call you Sal?” “I don’t have any friends,” he said, “they’re missing in action.” He sounded as if he were already accustomed to being alone—his voice as lonely as his laugh. I started to walk out of the room, but he spoke again. “You don’t believe, do you?” “Believe what?” I asked. “You don’t believe you’re Catholic,” he said. “You have to believe.” I lost my composure for