Say Her Name

by Francisco Goldman

  I struck the board and cried, No more, I will abroad!

  Aura was reciting poetry, in English, slowly moving her fist up and down. She could have been a (drunken) schoolgirl declaiming in a classroom. Her lovely lips seemed to form every word as if in Claymation, as if her lips and the words of the poem were made of the same malleable substance, and the words took shape in the air, solid and bright—chewable, kissable.

  What!?! Shall I ever … sigh and pi-i-i-i-ne?

  Sometimes her voice went up:

  My life and lines are freeee …

  And then went down, into her comical baritone:

  free as the road [rowww’d]

  And lower still, with bowed head, on the poem’s end:

  And I replied, My LORD.

  It was a pretty long poem! I’d never memorized a poem that long. She said it was “The Collar,” by George Herbert. A Mexico City girl standing in a Brooklyn bar reciting seventeenth-century English religious poetry. In the history of the borough, had that ever happened before?

  I know that I shall meet my fate

  Somewhere among the clouds above—

  After basking in my incredulity over the Herbert recitation and taking a drink of her vodka, Aura had set her glass back down on the bar and launched into the Yeats poem.

  Those that I fight I do not hate

  Those that I guard I do not lo-o-o-o-ve

  How that voice would echo inside me over the coming months, as it still does now.

  A lonely impulse of delight

  Drove to this tumult in the clouds

  … seemed waste of breath,

  A waste of breath …

  One day I would realize that once Aura passed her threshold of a certain number of alcoholic drinks, usually three, or even two, if she was feeling happy, happy and loved, or else when she just wanted to show off, she’d recite poetry, almost always these two poems, and often each more than once, like a jukebox where someone has punched in the same two songs to play over and over.

  I struck the board and cried, No more! I will abroad …

  In Zombie Hut, she was off again, round two.

  I know that I shall meet my fate …

  Then Aura’s mood changed. She forgot about me and became interested in Borgini again. That night, she never turned her attention back to me. They left the bar soon after. It all happened so fast. We were out on the sidewalk, saying good-bye, I kissed her cheek in the same way I would have if at dinner we’d only exchanged superficial pleasantries. I’d actually believed, in some part of my drunken, love-starved self, that I was going to be the one taking her home. Aura dove into the back of the taxi as if in pursuit of something rolling away from her, and he got in after and shut the door. For a moment she was a shadowy figure sitting up in the backseat of a taxi and I was never going to see her again. The taxi drove off down Smith Street. As if this were the end of a Babel story, I stood under the streetlight watching the taxi recede down the long street, revealed to myself as deluded, pathetic, and doomed to unhappiness.

  But we’d exchanged addresses and telephone numbers. Like I’d promised, I sent her a copy of my most recent novel, published four years before. The weeks and months went by, and I received no reply. I told myself, She must have hated my book. But that’s all right, she’s way too young. You really have to forget about her.

  Aura had first hooked up with Borgini the previous spring, at a literary conference at Brown in honor of the fortieth anniversary of the publication of Carlos Fuentes’s magical realist ghost story, Aura, cohosted by her nemesis professor, who wasn’t yet her nemesis. “Here we are, honoring Aura,” ad-libbed Borgini, during his talk at the conference, “and I have found my own Aura.” That created something of a sensation; Professor T__ may even have felt that the conference had been somehow hijacked by this too public romance between the glamorous young writer and the cute grad student with purple in her hair. Of course, he took it out on Aura. That’s probably what turned him against her. Even five years later, all you had to do was mention Professor T__ in Aura’s mother’s presence and her anger would reignite. Furiously, she’d recall how she’d wanted to fly up to Providence to confront and even assault him. Juanita was a good-looking woman, but in her wrath her face was almost unbearably vivid, as if her features were being reflected and magnified in a smashed mirror’s swept-up shards. She liked giving this kind of performance, taunting and slurring like a Mexican street thug, displaying the protective ferocity of her love for her daughter. And it wasn’t just an act. Juanita regarded Aura’s accomplishments—her success in school, her scholarships to U.S. universities—as her own accomplishments, too. She’d worked hard, double-time, triple-time, year after year, so that her daughter could have the same educational opportunities as any girl born into the Mexican upper class. When Professor T__ called her daughter a frivolous rich girl, he was uttering a blasphemous negation of Juanita’s entire life—that’s how Juanita took it, rather than as she might have, as a backhanded recognition of how well she’d succeeded.

  Juanita wasn’t a reader of fiction, but Fuentes’s Aura— that story’s beautiful young Aura is the mystical ghost of her hundred-year-old aunt who, succubus-like, inhabits her niece’s body for sex—was a touchstone book for her generation in Mexico.

  “My mother named me for your book, Maestro Fuentes,” Aura told Carlos Fuentes at the conference. Aura had him autograph a copy for Juanita. She and Borgini posed for a picture with him.

  In the diary Aura kept when she was at Brown from April to December, she mentioned only once, briefly, though in a tone of regret, the apparent end of her relationship with Borgini—JB, she called him there; almost everybody in her diary writings was referred to with initials, as if out of considerate discretion. She wrote very sketchily about her trip to New York, not even mentioning Borgini’s book event or her dinner with Salman Rushdie, nor did she even allude to having met me, or to the book I’d sent her—there is no suggestion in that diary that our meeting made any impression on her. She cryptically recorded another visit, later that same fall, from another boyfriend from Mexico, who she referred to as “P.”

  On several pages she described the quiet and boredom of Providence, which she felt suited her for the time being—she liked the long days of cold autumn rain spent holed up in her room with her books, or in the library. In one entry, she criticized herself for finding it so easy to write out of introspection while never having trained herself to be able to describe with precision how, on a sunny, windy day, Providence’s grid of streets filled and swirled with yellow, orange, red leaves. “Have spent much of this day thinking about my mother”— there was more than one entry like that. “Am worried about Ma.” “I miss my mother.” She wrote about the progress of her thesis with anxiety, but also with growing excitement and pride. She wanted that thesis to make her stand out, to provide proof of a destiny. She wanted it to show Professor T__ how wrong he’d been about her. She described the reliable sense of lonely refuge she found in her reading and in her books:

  … those lands are the only ones, it seems, that I can visit without ruining. But maybe that will help me, someday, to find a way to escape from this little piece of land that I’ve already ruined. I was born ruined, by a past I know nothing about.

  That might sound like a pretty typical expression of postadolescent angst and self-absorption. It sure was typical of Aura. Her insecurities and fears, her obsession with the mysteries of her early childhood and of her birth father’s abandonment of her and her mother when she was four fill so many pages of her notebooks and diaries that it’s impossible to read through them without feeling distressed for her, and puzzled over how relentlessly she punished herself. Was she really so unhappy and lonely, or was it just the exaggerated diary rhetoric of a young woman to whom, as she herself had observed, this kind of writing came too easily?

  In an entry later in the diary, dated April 24, the day she turned twenty-six, she wrote that her father had phoned her to wish her
a happy birthday for the first time in more than twenty years. The conversation was brief, she tersely reported, and he’d sounded nervous.

  That was the last time Aura ever spoke to her father.

  5

  Every so often, I dream of a picture taken of me at age 5. I’m sitting on the edge of a wooden fence. Behind, a humungous tree gives me shadow from a sun that can’t be seen.

  That’s the entire content of a document, written in English, saved as Toexist.doc in Aura’s computer. Every day I found something in her computer that I’d never read before. It was moving to discover that she used to dream about that photograph because it haunted me, too; I’d already switched it from her desk to mine. In the picture, five-year-old Aura is wearing wrinkled denim overalls and a pink T-shirt. Her black hair, shining glossily with light from that sun you can’t see, is cut in ragamuffin bowl style, jagged bangs falling over her eyebrows, and the lower halves of her ears stick out. Aura had big ears; I do, too. Our child was definitely going to have “humongous” ears. The fence is tall enough so that to have crawled up and settled onto her perch atop it must have felt like a small triumph, at least. So the look on her face, the close-lipped smile, the direct gaze toward the camera, could be one of quiet satisfaction. But her expression also seems so sweetly trusting and unknowing that you can’t help but reflect on the little girl’s solitude and vulnerability, a mood amplified by the darkened mass of foliage and thick snaking branches above her.

  It seems like just another unfairness to Aura to analyze her every childhood photograph for signs and portents of doom. But even when she was alive, every time I looked at that picture, I felt a new surge of protective feeling for her. I’d imitate the tight little smile that made her cheeks bulge, the blankly trusting gaze. I’d tell her she still looked like that.

  How do I look? she’d sometimes ask, and I’d imitate that look, and she’d say, Noooo, I don’t, and we’d crack up.

  I found another paragraph saved as Elsueñodemimadre.doc:

  My Mother’s Dream

  My mother’s dream, which growing up I made sure to gradually and systematically crumble, was to see me installed as a French Academic. The fact that my origins were in the Mexican Bajío and that I lacked all dexterity with the language of my great-grandfather never gave her any pause. Because of that, when I told her that I wanted to go to New York City to pursue a degree in the department of Hispanic languages, the glass of red Bordeaux wine she was sipping from went crooked in her hand and she made a scandal in the restaurant we were in, dining on crepes filled with four cheeses.

  6

  I’m an air balloon, circling the earth, hardly ever touching down, and nobody ever takes hold of my rope to pull on it and draw me close. It’s hard for me, listen, it’s so hard, it costs me everything, to touch down on earth. Sometimes I think it has to do with eating so little. At Brown I met a girl who told me that she’d been diagnosed as anorexic—she told me all about herself, and I realized she was like my double.

  I’m back in Mexico. In my mother’s new apartment. A difficult year awaits me. Uncertain in more than one respect.

  Aura had returned to Mexico City at the beginning of December, after her final semester at Brown, when she wrote that in her diary. She was lonely, feeling a little lost and fearful of the future. Up there in Brooklyn, I wasn’t exactly thrilled about my life; it had been five years since I’d last had a girlfriend or any even briefly steady lover. In Aura’s diary I can follow her innocent trek across that stretch of months, from when we first met in New York right up to where, turning the page, you’d expect to find us falling in love, except that’s where it ends, as if not even she could believe what happened next and abandoned her diary like a novel with a too far-fetched plot. During the years we were together, Aura didn’t keep a regular diary, so that notebook was the last of the dozens of diaries Aura had kept from the time she was six or seven, back when she used to write in her diary at all hours of the night, often under the covers with a flashlight while her stepsister Katia slept in her nearby bed.

  In a few hours we’re leaving for Guanajuato for Christmas.

  It’s still dark out, but down below on the Periférico, the all-day traffic jam is already underway, sounding like squawking plastic trumpets, pounding drums, and crazed roars in a crowded fútbol stadium buried under the earth.

  Juanita’s new condominium apartment was on the ninth floor of a building abutting the Periférico, the intracity north-south express-way. It must have been about five in the morning. Aura’s bed was the foldout couch in the study. She was probably sitting up, floppy leather-bound notebook pressed against her upraised thighs, sleep-tousled hair, the soft pucker of her mouth, the twitching pen in her fist, eyes fixed on the page with a liquid stillness of concentration, like perfectly aligned bubbles in a carpenter’s level. In the future, Aura and I would spend more than a few nights on that same couch, though if her stepfather Rodrigo was away when we visited, which he frequently was, I’d sleep there alone while Aura slept with her mother. Aura, when speaking or writing about her stepfather, tended to refer to him only as “the husband.” And Juanita rarely held herself back from belittling her husband with her famous sarcasm, whether about money (his lack of), politics (left-wing), ambition (missing), or even intelligence (lower than mother’s and daughter’s). Rodrigo was famous for taking it: a disciplined rocklike impassivity, though often seething inside and capable of eruption. But I could tell that he loved Aura, that he was proud of her, and he was always kind to me. We often talked about American football. He was a big Colts fan, for some reason. One Sunday we watched a Colts-Patriots play-off game at the Hooters on Insurgentes, where Aura and Juanita joined us later for burgers and beers, the two of them bemusedly observing the agile young waitresses in hot pants Rollerblading around the restaurant with loaded trays balanced on their shoulders beneath the luminous football-filled big screens, and that launched Juanita into a reminiscence about what a Rollerblading dervish Aura had been as a girl; she described her twirling and jumping around the Copilco parking lot like an Olympic star—what I remember is just the deeply contented sense of belonging to an ordinary family that I had that afternoon, a feeling I’d hardly ever known in my life.

  But I wasn’t on the scene yet that predawn morning, days before Christmas, when Aura, just home from Brown, was in bed writing in her diary. Outside her window the invisibly smoldering air over the Valley of Mexico was like a vast nighttime harbor, the illuminated tops of isolated tall buildings anchored in it like futuristic Chinese junks, television and radio towers like lit-up masts and cranes; on the horizon were the ink black mountains of the Sierra del Ajusco. For the next half hour or so, she watched those mountains slowly emerge from the starless dark, the uneven row of pointy peaks outlined by a silver glow, raspberry smears seeping into the sky just above; the dawn light gradually infusing the slopes like a blue phosphorescent dye, bringing into relief pine forests, winding strips of road, and mottled terrains. Aura carefully described all of that in her notebook. All her life, she reflected, in the DF, in Guanajuato and Taxco—maybe in San José Tacuaya, too, though she couldn’t remember—she’d woken to views of mountains outside her window. Then came the steamrolled Austin horizon, the cupcake hills of Providence. What would the next year bring? Hopefully, the skyscrapers and bridges of New York City. While she was at Brown she’d visited New York three times, including once with her mother, and each visit had left her more convinced that New York was where she wanted to be. She would live, she wrote in her diary, in one of those apartments that was like a nest perched high above a spectacular avenue. As soon as she stepped out onto any Manhattan sidewalk she felt swept up in the infinite city’s powerful and purposeful current—somehow Mexico City, also infinite, seemed as much New York’s reverse as the swarm of dangling threads on the underside of a tightly woven rug. The city of Auden, Bob Dylan, Woody Allen, of the tragic other Dylan whose poems she’d also memorized in her English poetry classes at the UN
AM, of Seinfeld and Elaine. (Aura had a rarely confided conviction that she could have been a successful comedienne. She’d imagined herself a film director, too; during her last year at the Colegio Guernica she kept a notebook in which she pasted newspaper cuttings and wrote about every movie she saw at the Cineteca Nacional. She even asked her mother for permission to apply to the Centro Nacional de las Artes to study acting and film. Juanita forbade it, but she had profound reasons for dreading that profession. Her father had acted in some of Mexico’s most iconic movies, playing opposite such stars as María Félix and Dolores del Río—he was the debonair young husband shot dead within the first five minutes of the movie, the flirtatious mailman who turns up at the door in the nick of time, eyes and teeth sparkling, to deliver the climactic love letter. But Juanita’s father was also a drunk, a morphine addict, a philanderer, and a gambler, and died at thirty-two, when she was an infant. Juanita possessed no memory of him.) Aura grew up watching videocassettes of Woody Allen movies, often at night in bed with her mother, the same movies over and over, especially the New York City romance and hyperneurotic comedies. She loved the screwball comedies, too, and as a little girl would act out routines from Sleeper in the shower, from Cantinflas and Tin-Tan movies, too. Juanita had practically installed Woody Allen as a household tutelary saint, his framed photograph hanging on her bedroom wall. Yet once Aura revealed her wish to go to grad school at Columbia, her mother hardly ever again passed up a chance to say something negative about New York.

  But wouldn’t any normal mother anywhere have worried if her only child, in the fall of 2002, announced that she wanted to study and live in New York City, when so many other cities in the world had first-rate universities to choose from? Despite her fear of flying, Juanita visited Aura in Providence and accompanied her to New York. Instead of assuaging Juanita’s fears, that visit only made them more vivid. In Grand Central and Penn Station, squads of burly, camouflaged, heavily armed soldiers patrolled with German shepherds. Going into libraries and museums, guards inspected every bag and purse, even shining flashlights into them, and Juanita always carried a large handbag that required extra-long searches. When they went to the restaurant where Woody Allen performed on his clarinet, they were told he wasn’t playing that night and that they needed a reservation anyway. Even Mexico City’s subways were cleaner than New York’s. Online, Juanita had sleuthed out information about the rapes and muggings of Columbia students in Morningside Heights and Harlem. But Mexico City had its own brand of terrorism, Aura reminded her mother. Had she read anywhere that New York City taxi drivers kidnapped passengers and took them at gunpoint to ATM machines, or worse?