Que nadie se escandalice
Esto es privado
Esto es mentira
La poesía es ficticia y no salva a nadie1
Nevertheless, those were wild times. There’s hardly a photograph of Aura and her housemates where they aren’t holding beers, or looking totally stoned, or like they’ve been up all night: muss-haired, girl grimy, and pretty delicious. But Aura studied hard, wrote a paper in English on Raymond Carver that her professor read out to the class, and worked relentlessly on what she would submit as her baccalaureate thesis at the UNAM when the strike was over, on W. H. Auden. And for all the supposed craziness, she had only one boyfriend there, a Jewish kid originally from Houston, a musician in the Austin country-rock-hippy mode. One of the Panamanian girls, green-eyed Belinda who was three or four years younger than the other three, told me it was Aura who kept her out of trouble in Austin, guiding her through several crises; she said that Aura was like a surrogate mother to her. But Aura had a surrogate mother of her own in Texas, Irina. Though actually Irina was more like an antimother. She used to encourage and even intoxicate Aura with the idea that she should defy her mother’s expectations that she pursue an academic career, which Aura would at least seem to go on dutifully fulfilling for nearly the rest of her life. But some of Irina’s style and daring rubbed off on Aura, at least as a kind of ideal. In New York, Aura took kickboxing lessons for a few months at a gym near Penn Station, traveling the subways between Columbia and Brooklyn with scarlet boxing gloves dangling from her backpack. Later, Irina would be one of Aura’s three bridesmaids at our wedding, along with Valentina and Fabiola, who came to the beach with us that last summer. The book fair in Austin, where I gave the usual sparsely attended reading, was a reunion weekend for Irina and Aura, a chance for them to girl talk for hours like old times and catch up on everything, including the surprise news of our engagement.
When the weekend was over, Irina came to our hotel to drive us to the airport, and we were almost there when Aura realized that she wasn’t wearing her ring. She was sure she’d left it at the hotel. We had to go back for it. At the front desk they gave us another key card. There was no sign that anyone had been in the room since we’d left. The tray piled with our dirty breakfast plates was still on the floor by the unmade bed. We looked everywhere. Aura began to resemble a mediocre mime on barbiturates as she bumbled about the room, her repertoire of searching motions depleted. I said that we’d better get going back to the airport so that we wouldn’t lose our flight, too. It doesn’t matter, mi amor, I said, I’ll buy you a new one. But I couldn’t have afforded another ring like that one, and I silently sulked over Aura having taken the ring and what it had cost for granted. But she hadn’t asked for or required an expensive engagement ring, I argued with myself, and if I’d decided to go further into debt to buy it, that was 100 percent my problem.
The ring was lost: Aura’s helpless, stricken expression told me this was so. She sat cross-legged on the floor, slumped forward, her head in her hands, and sobbed. Though many things could make Aura cry, these were the bereft sobs that erupted only at moments of sorrow or terror or hurt or extreme humiliation or some combination of these, and that as the minutes passed, instead of subsiding, only seemed to mount in hysteria and grief and could actually make you feel afraid for her or for her sanity. How could so much strong emotion and so many tears fit into this one little body, I’d think, helplessly looking on, stunned, or bending to embrace her—me who practically never cried, who felt like I was having a romantic poet’s epiphany of feeling if my eyes got a little humid at a movie and then I’d try to call Aura’s attention to it, like a cat showing off its hunting prowess by dropping a mauled mouse at its master’s feet, exaggeratedly blinking my eyes, grabbing her fingers and raising them to the debatable teary moistness under my lashes, mira mi amor, I’m crying! At my father’s funeral I did weep, for about five minutes. Little did I suspect what could come pouring out of me, that I would ever learn what it was like to feel swallowed up by my own sobbing, grief sucking me like marrow from a bone. Aura sat on the hotel room floor, alongside the tray of breakfast plates, crying over having lost her engagement ring. Irina was kneeling in front of her, holding one of Aura’s hands in both of hers and raising it to her lips, and I was crouched on her other side, and we were both calling her sweetheart, both of us saying things like, Oh dear sweet Aura, oh my baby, it’s okay, it’s not the end of the world, it’s just a ring, forget it, let’s get going, let’s go to the airport. Then Aura moved her hand toward the breakfast tray and just bumped one of the plates aside—and there it was, glinting away, it had been hiding under the rim of that yolk-smeared plate. Screams of astonishment and joy!
In Brooklyn that day, it occurred to me that maybe I’d never see the ring again. It was such a tiny thing, and God knows where Aura had hidden it, if in fact she hadn’t lost it. If I find it, I should probably sell it, I thought. I have a lot of debt.
I bet I’ll never find it, I told Valentina and Adele.
Wait, let me think, said Valentina. I’m good at figuring things like this out. Anyway, women tend to use the same logic when they hide their jewelry.
She stood in the middle of the bedroom, one arm crossed under her breasts and the back of her hand propping her other arm’s elbow, chin resting on her fist, sunglasses dangling by one stem between two fingers, slowly swiveling her head. Hmmm, she said. Where. Wherewherewhere … Valentina walked directly to Aura’s chest of drawers, pulled open a lower one, parted the sweaters and shirts folded and balled-up in there so that she could reach toward the back, and, as if she’d hidden it there herself, retrieved a Mexican trinket box of lacquered painted wood and opened it. Inside that box was the little dark velvet box; she snapped the lid open, and there was that familiar happy sparkle.
I guess I would have found it eventually.
About a week after Aura’s death, at one of the little jewelry stores on the Zócalo, I’d bought a sturdy silver chain to wear around my neck and strung our wedding rings onto it there at the counter. (The horrible alacrity with which I’d set out on my daily mourning errands during those first weeks, as if furnishing a new home and life for my new sweetheart: getting prints made of digital photographs, searching out grief books in English and Spanish on the Internet and in bookstores, shopping for dark clothes, hiring a tailor to make me a mourning suit, trying out religions, sitting in churches, reading the Kaddish, going to meditation at the Centro Budista in Colonia Nápoles.) The jeweler used some tools, including a diminutive saw, to alter the clasp so that it couldn’t be opened with just your hands. Our rings were platinum bands, engraved on their insides with our names and the date of our wedding: Paco & Aura 20/8/2005. In Brooklyn, after Valentina found the engagement ring, I decided to add it to the chain along with the wedding bands. I pulled the silver chain off over my head—it was the first time I’d taken it off. At the kitchen table, I inserted a nail into the tiny hole in the clasp, jostled it around, probing for some tiny catch, and tapped on it with a hammer. The clasp opened. I added the diamond ring to the chain, then closed the clasp and pulled against the chain with both hands until I was satisfied that it would hold.
I wore the diamond around my neck for a few days. Why did I think that doing that would make me feel better, or that my mourning chain now had more significance, or a new magic, because I’d added that ring to it? I didn’t feel any better, I woke up every morning to the same sadness and grim stupor of disbelief, to which was now added the anxiety that that ring always seemed to awaken in me. What if one day I was robbed and the chain was stolen and I lost the engagement ring along with both wedding bands? It wasn’t the value of the ring that stressed me, though it was worth enough to buy a Subaru if that was what I wanted. I thought, Then I’ll be left without anything. Left without anything? They’re just things! But I took the diamond ring off the chain and put it back where Aura had kept it.
I still had the shampoo Aura had brought with her to the beach.
Tea-tree mint treatment shampoo in a little Sanborns bag. Whenever I was faced with some event or errand that seemed like it was going to be especially trying, I’d take the blue bottle into the shower and use just a small dollop of Aura’s shampoo. I dreaded the day when the bottle would be empty, as if then I would have used up all that was left of the protective power of Aura’s love too, which led to some tense inner debates—while the water in the shower warmed, or over morning coffee—about whether or not an occasion really merited using up more of the shampoo. She’d left two jars of face scrub in the shower, too. The first time I opened the pinkish jar, the larger of the two, I found the indentations of Aura’s scooping fingers like fossils in the scrub’s slushy, coconut-hued surface; I screwed the lid back on and put it away on the top shelf of the shower trolley—sometimes, though rarely, and only when the shower wasn’t running, I opened it to stare at the imprints of her fingers again. And sometimes, in the shower, I dabbed face scrub from the smaller jar onto my skin, the gritty lemony paste bringing back the soapy-citrusy morning smell of those cheeks I’d pressed my lips to.
I know now what a shrink might say: that I was grasping for external replacements for the internal Lost Object, and for that part of me lost along with the autonomous Lost Object. That via shampoo and face scrub voodoo, I was trying to bring back being loved by and loving Aura, along with everything else that, with her death, had been lost and couldn’t be a part of me anymore. Such is life in the shadow of the Lost Object. But I would never say that leaving the shampoo behind in Mexico would have been better. When the shampoo finally ran out, life would just become that much bleaker, that’s all—and why shouldn’t it become bleaker with every day that distanced me from Aura?
Here was an event that justified a bit of Aura’s shampoo: the first day, nine months after her death, when I finally found the resolve to ride the subway all the way up to Columbia. I ate alone in Ollie’s. Went and looked at CDs and DVDs at Kim’s. I stood on the corner where we always said good-bye before she walked down the block to Casa Hispánica, where her department was housed. Casa Pánica, as she and Valentina used to call it. She hardly ever let me kiss her good-bye on that corner. She was self-conscious about our age difference, for one thing, and didn’t want to give her professors or the other students anything to gossip about. I went into Butler Library and sat sipping a cup of coffee in a free chair against the bulletin-board-brown wall in the crowded cafeteria, which was where I often waited for Aura when I was lucky enough to find a table or even just a chair. I watched the students coming and going, watched them sitting, talking, studying, wearing their fashions, and thought about how, when I was with Aura, I was still connected through her to the global empire of youth, and that now I wasn’t. (When will I ever again spend an hour and a half trailing anyone around in a Sephora or an Urban Outfitters—a seemingly trivial example, except that I almost certainly will never do anything like that again.) I walked down the corridor to the men’s room and, for the first time in nine months, took a piss at one of its big old marble urinals, and even doing this felt ghostly. I went into the lobby and stood at one of the computers and wrote an e-mail to Aura telling her that I was back in Butler Library for the first time without her and how much I missed her. I went out the door into the quad. On Broadway I bought a New York Times for the subway ride home and, as always, when I turned to the obituary page and read, in the headings, dead at 90 … 88 … 73 … 96 … I felt that simmering acid rage. Whenever I did find an obituary for somebody even in his or her forties, I felt momentarily better; I felt a horrible satisfaction. See, you’re not the only one who fucking died young, I’d think. But the daily listings in the Times of American casualties in Iraq, most even younger than Aura and more than a few of them women, even adolescent girls, made for a more perplexing juxtaposition, as if it was all happening in some other casino where they played a different game of fate, with different rules and odds, or else it was the same casino, just different gaming tables and a different metaphor for fate. Not that there weren’t also bouts of nausea over the waste of those lives, too, and attempted subway telepathic communications: Hello Colorado, from the Brooklyn-bound F train, my name is Francisco … you can call me Frank … like your PFC Ramona, my Aura died very young … my most heartfelt … we know each other’s sorrow, so we know each other … maybe you would like to join my telepathic bereavement group.… The Iraqi dead aren’t listed by name, but in an article on the same page I read, 20 civilian cars coming north from Basra with coffins strapped to their roofs, heading to bury their dead in the Shiite cemetery in the holy city of Najaf, and I thought, At least one of those coffins holds a young wife who was adored by her husband; he rides in the car beneath her coffin. We know each other’s sorrow, and each other’s shame. We know each other.
What difference does it finally make, whether you visit the haunted places or stay away? It felt the same, either way, just the same.
I finally went up to Columbia, but fifteen months later I still hadn’t gone back to Café le Roy, the neighborhood restaurant Aura and I went to most often, especially on weekends for brunch. Aura was sure the name must be a reference to the Triste-le-Roy of the Borges story “Death and the Compass,” but no, it turned out the owner’s name was Leroy. The waiters and managers there were mostly young Mexicans, and always so friendly to us, no matter how crowded the restaurant was or how impatient the people waiting for tables. They took our orders in Spanish, and spoke English to everybody else; they eagerly interrogated us about our lives, and we asked about theirs. Now, passing Café le Roy on my way to the subway, I crossed to the other side of the sidewalk. But they must have seen me, and I’d tell myself, I bet they think Aura has left me.
Whenever the Ecuadorian checkout girl at the supermarket on our corner, a cheerful chubby girl with acne scars and Coke-bottle glasses, asked, ¿Y tu esposa, señor? I’d tell her that my wife was fine. And she’d laughingly tease, Ohhh, she makes you do all the shopping now. ¡Que bueno!
Nor had I been back to the fish store. I was no longer that guy who went with his wife or came in alone twice a week to buy wild Alaskan salmon, always fillets for two, a bit of a splurge but it was what Aura liked, and often one or the other of the two friendly guys who worked there would lift a big glistening tangerine-hued slab of salmon off the bed of ice and start cutting as soon as either of us walked into the store.
No longer him. No longer a husband. No longer a man who goes to the fish store to buy dinner for himself and his wife. In less than a year I would be no longer a husband longer than I was a husband. But we’d lived together two more years than that. But then will come the day when I will have been no longer with Aura longer than I was with Aura.
Sometimes I would wake with the sense that I’d dreamed about Aura but I wouldn’t remember the dream. One morning, though, a few weeks after I was back in Brooklyn that first time, I had a dream that I remembered when I woke up. I was in a chilly, austere room with walls of yellowish stone and understood I was inside a tomb. A brown-and-cream-striped wool blanket with a motionless human shape beneath it lay atop a rectangular stone slab. I knew that it was Aura under the blanket, because it was the same scratchy Guatemalan wool blanket we had at home, but now it was ragged and torn, like a blanket you’d see wrapped around a homeless person on the subway. I climbed onto the slab and stretched out beside her. Then there was movement under the blanket, and I realized she was slowly turning toward me. One end of the tattered blanket lifted as her two arms reached out, and I pulled the so familiar body close against mine, just as the top of her head emerged from underneath, her black hair (so like a Japanese girl’s hair), its morning unruliness and baked fragrance tucked under my chin, like it always was in the mornings. Her arms around my neck, Aura tightly embraced me, embraced me like she used to embrace me.
I woke and sat up. I wasn’t frightened, because it wasn’t really a nightmare. I stared blankly around the room. Then I burrowed back under the multicolored quilt and concentra
ted on remembering the details of the dream. It was the first time I’d felt a loving embrace in months—since the last time I’d dreamed that Aura was embracing me, a few nights after her death. I actually whispered, Gracias, mi amor. Te amo. And stayed in bed until about noon.
* * *
No day ever felt better than the one before it. Emptiness, guilt, shame, and dread, on an endless loop. I felt worse for Aura—thinking about all that she lost was the quickest way to make me want to drop, moaning, to my knees. Often I would think, But it’s even worse to lose a child, to lose your only child, your daughter … a single mother who has lost her only child! Even worse.
Before Aura went away to the University of Texas, she and her mother had hardly ever been apart for more than a few weeks. When she was thirteen she’d gone to summer camp in Cuba for three weeks; as a teenager she’d traveled through part of Europe on a package tour with her stepsister; later, two or three times, Juanita had sent her to Europe for summer school, to Paris and to Cambridge, England. Juanita paid for all of this on a university administrator’s salary, often filling two posts simultaneously, and sometimes even taking a third part-time job.
But Juanita and I had had no communication. I didn’t even know what she’d done with Aura’s ashes.
I thought I could live a few more months on the money Aura had left in her savings account, and also the insurance money from Columbia University that I’d received as her closest surviving relative—I was the one who’d done the paperwork and claimed it.
Who should rightly be regarded as the closest surviving relative, the widowed husband or the orphaned mother?
For all I knew, Juanita had already spread Aura’s ashes in some place she’d chosen for reasons entirely her own, and intended never to tell me where.
Juanita and her brother, or the university lawyers who were advising them, had wanted to have me arrested and sent to prison, even as they were waiting for investigators to turn up evidence against me—or maybe to fabricate evidence, that was a danger. A year later the risk of that happening seemed to have passed but my lawyer told me that if I was going back to the coast for the first anniversary of Aura’s death, I should stop in to the district prosecutor’s office there and give the necessary declaration to close the case file; it was just a formality, he said, but a prudent one. Go and tell your story. An open case, he said, is like a live animal.
Say Her Name Page 4