Say Her Name

by Francisco Goldman

  Juanita’s maternal grandparents were French, though she’d never been to France herself, and didn’t speak the language. But even if Aura never realized her mother’s dream of becoming a professor at the Sorbonne, she should at least become an academic in Mexico, at the UNAM, where she’d have instant job security, a decent and reliable salary, independence, and respect. Surely there was nothing wrong with a mother wanting such things for her daughter; by the time she was Aura’s age, Juanita knew all too well about the treacheries that could befall a young woman without a career of her own. Someday, if a handsome, and preferably wealthy, young husband came along, so much the better, though in Mexico, as elsewhere—Aura’s mother certainly believed, anyway—a husband was never somebody who could be counted on to stick around for long, or to stay sober or sane, to not end up throwing his own career, along with his family, into the garbage. In Juanita’s opinion it made no sense for Aura to leave Mexico and the UNAM—where while completing her PhD she could already have a job as an adjunct professor—to study Latin American literature in New York.

  Nevertheless, Juanita accompanied Aura to Columbia on the day of her interview in the Hispanic languages department’s dilapidated Beaux Arts town house, where Federico García Lorca had once lodged, dazzling faculty and students at cocktail parties in the lounge. They decided that while Aura went for her interview, her mother would wait in the Hungarian Pastry Shop. It seemed that whenever anyone who’d ever had anything to do with Columbia University was asked a question such as, And where should we go to see what student life is like? the Hungarian Pastry Shop was the response. In Providence they’d looked up the Hungarian Pastry Shop on the Internet to copy the address, and found it described as a “a delightfully cozy café.” It turned out to be a dank, crowded little place that looked and felt like it was in a basement, though with long glass counters invitingly filled with pastries. Maybe it was a test of your suitability for Columbia—if it seemed like only a dingy coffee shop to you, you didn’t belong there. Juanita even remarked that if this café really represented el colmo, the summit, of student life at Columbia, then why go to New York—there were plenty of cafés just like it around the UNAM, not much better or much worse. Whatever, said Aura anxiously. She had to get to her interview. Her mother hadn’t brought anything to read, so Aura left her with a volume of Borges’s Obras Completas, festooned like a jubilee ship with brightly colored Post-it flags, and charged out the door.

  The interview was with the department head, a blond milk-pale Peruvian, and it lasted about an hour. They spoke at length about the work Aura had been doing on Borges and the English writers. More than midway through the interview the department head told Aura that she was going to be accepted, and with a full department scholarship. When she returned to the Hungarian Pastry Shop, her mother was sitting at the table by the wall at which she’d left her, her coat still on. There was no coffee cup or pastry plate on the table. She didn’t seem to have touched the Borges book. You didn’t order even a cup of coffee, Ma? asked Aura.

  Noooo, hija, said her mother, with a fed-up sigh. They have a very complicated system here. I suppose you need a genius IQ and perfect English to understand it. By the time I deciphered more or less how it works, I thought you’d be back from your interview any moment, y ya, I just didn’t want anything anymore.

  Ay, Mamá, please, don’t exaggerate—

  Exaggerate? You tell me, hija, if this seems like a normal process to make customers go through for only a cup of coffee. First you have to go to that counter to place your order—like the witness to a crime, Juanita pointed tentatively with her finger toward the counter, pausing as if to rehearse the whole terrible and confusing scene in her mind—and then they write down your order on one of those pieces of paper and you have to write your own name on it, too, and then you go back to your seat, and when it’s ready, the waitress comes out carrying your order on a tray with the piece of paper and walks through the tables calling out your name until you signal to her that it’s you she is searching for. For this, you have to be hoping that she is looking your way, so that you can catch her eye, and then raise your hand. But what happens if the waitress walks away from you, to the other end of the café? Are you supposed to shout your name at the waitress’s back? And why should I be forced to call out my name in a crowded café? Ees meee, Juaneeeta! The leetle Mexicana lady over here! Alo-o-o! Juanita swung her hand up as if tossing something away over her shoulder—Ay, no.

  Aura, laughing so deeply her eyes were squeezed shut, wheezed, Ay, Mamá!

  No-no-no, hija. Why do I have to give them my name just to order a cup of coffee? Are they going to ask to see my passport and visa, too?

  Nobody could make Aura laugh the way her mother could. Later, whenever we were in the Hungarian Pastry Shop, she’d recall her mother’s tirade.

  Her mother pointedly didn’t ask Aura how her interview had gone. They decided to go for a drink at the West End Bar, another don’t-miss-it venue of typical student life. They would have to cross the campus to Broadway. It was late afternoon, already growing dark. Aura led her mother through the university’s wrought-iron gates and out into the middle of the quad, with its monumental library buildings at each end, a wintry Zócalo with students trekking across browned grass and hedge-lined pavement in every direction, coming and going from buildings projecting multiple geometries of light into the dusk.

  Isn’t it beautiful, Ma? said Aura, stopping and gesturing around her. This is where I’m going to school next year.

  They resumed walking as if her mother hadn’t even heard her. But by the time they reached the other side of the quad, her mother’s cheeks were drenched with tears. Juanita hugged Aura and told her that she was proud of her, and that she knew how hard she’d worked for this. For that night, at least, a truce in their battle over New York City was declared. At the West End Bar, they drank and celebrated the shared saga of their twinned lives—the penniless abandoned mother with no job, professional skills, or prospects, who’d fled San José Tacuaya with her four-year-old daughter in a Volkswagen Bug that wasn’t hers, to start a new life in Mexico City. Now that daughter was going to be a PhD student, on full scholarship, at one of the world’s most renowned universities.

  Aura saw her biological father only twice after she was four. She was twenty-one when the first meeting, in a restaurant in Guanajuato, took place. After some telephone negotiations, initiated by Aura and kept secret from her mother, she rode the bus from Mexico City to Guanajuato, and he drove across the state from San José Tacuaya, where he was still living, now with his new family. When her father walked into the restaurant that day, dressed in a navy blue suit and a beige shirt, Aura, sitting alone at a table waiting, recognized him right away. He looked older than she remembered, of course, his graying brown hair shorter than before. Recognizing her recognizing him from her table near the back of the restaurant, his coal-dark eyes opened wide as if in fright. But he walked toward her with his long arms held out and that gentle eager smile she’d never forgotten and was sometimes surprised by in photographs of herself, and she stood up for his embrace. He had the droopy ears that she’d inherited along with his long sloping nose (though in a nicer, softer, feminine version). The next thing she noticed was that one of her father’s pant legs was covered with dried yellowish mud. It wasn’t even raining. Why did he have mud all over just one pant leg? She’d heard from her tía Vicky that he wasn’t doing well economically, but his suit seemed like an okay suit. She was too afraid of embarrassing him to ask about the mud, and he offered no explanation. In later years almost all of the aborted stories Aura tried to write about this meeting with her father included the muddy pant leg. You could tell that she wanted that mystery of the mud to stand metaphorically for the mysteries of her father and the past, but that she could never quite figure out how to make that work in a short story. The mud, she’d decided, must—or should—have a connection to the strawberry fields of San José Tacuaya—laboring in the muddy str
awberry fields covering the plains outside the city was the most common livelihood of the poor there. In her short stories, Aura was always searching for a way to link the muddy pant leg to the strawberry fields and both to a father’s first meeting with his daughter in seventeen years and to some as yet unrevealed truth about that long separation. Her father no longer had anything to do with the strawberry fields, though back when she was his adored baby girl and he was a rising local politician in the PRI, he’d campaigned and presided over many ceremonies on the strawberry farms, celebrating harvest festivals and new labor pacts; many times he’d come home with spattered shoes reeking of manure, which had to be taken off and left outside.

  An inexplicably muddy pant leg and a man’s never adequately explained abandonment of his wife and four-year-old daughter—could they really have anything to do with each other? Could the muddy pant leg really become a metaphor for whatever had actually happened seventeen years before? Aura’s inability to come up with that plausible narrative link was one reason she never completed any of those stories.

  Maybe young writers like Aura, along with readers, but also some older writers—those who haven’t learned to recognize a futile task even when it hits them in the face—sometimes overestimate the power of fiction to reveal hidden truths. If any two things are alike in some obvious way—the muddy pant leg and the abandonment of wife and child both characteristics of the same man—does that mean there must also be less obvious correspondences between them? Deeper, revelatory or at least metaphorical ones? Aura was sure there had to be and dug many long deep tunnels without finding what she was looking for, which doesn’t mean she might not have, eventually.

  Or else maybe sometimes you just need somebody to tell you what really happened.

  Pasted into Aura’s first-grade scrapbook, amid drawings and pages from vocabulary coloring books, was this letter to her father:

  Héctor

  Te amo papá no se porque se separaron.

  Pero de todas formas te sigo

  queriendo como cuando estábamos

  juntos. ?Oye tú me sigues queriendo

  como antes¿ espero que sí porque

  Yo hasta te adoro adiós papá te

  amo con todo mi ♥.2

  Aura claimed to have no definite memories of her parents’ separation. Throughout her childhood, in later years, and probably right up to the last days—something Aura said to me near the end makes me think this is true—Aura regularly interrogated her mother about the circumstances of the breakup. Juanita could never have foreseen that Aura’s love for her father, or that her obsession with him, would persist as it did. Providing a substitute dad by quickly remarrying had done nothing to loosen her daughter’s fixation on the lost original; probably it had the opposite effect. What was it about that four-year-old girl’s love for her father that, throughout the rest of her childhood and adolescence and even at twenty-five, it remained as lodged inside her as the sword in the stone?

  In Mexico, about two weeks before Aura died, she came home one afternoon after a long lunch with her mother and told me that she was beginning to suspect that the “great events” of her past hadn’t happened exactly as she’d always believed or been told. Coming up the steep stairs to the sleeping loft, she found me sprawled on the bed instead of working or reading the book lying next to me, and before she’d even spoken I’d looked up at her with a hopeful expression and asked—imitating the playful way she often liked to speak these words, like a child inviting you to come out and play—¿Quieres hacer el amor? But she definitely wasn’t the least bit in the mood. Instead, she said what she said about the great events, her voice brusque and a little rebuking, and I responded, ¿Ah, sí? and waited for her to say more. But she only picked some of her books and papers off the small plastic table she used as a desk when she wanted to isolate herself up there, and carried them to her desk downstairs. So, what had her mother told her that she hadn’t known before? It’s easy to claim now that I knew Aura didn’t want to talk about it just then but that I was sure she’d tell me later. Maybe it was my own laziness or disinterest that stopped me from pressing the question—I was bored of her mother’s dramas. I wanted to fuck, not talk about Juanita again. I also knew how protective Aura was of her mother. If Aura had been told a new version of the past that reflected badly on her mother—I can imagine now a drunkenly muddled confession, quickly recanted or rationalized, whatever coherence the conversation briefly possessed fading like ghost laughter—she really wasn’t likely to tell me the whole story, at least not right away. I don’t know if she would have told me eventually or not. I just don’t know. Aura and Juanita shared a secret world.

  7

  Amid mud and unborn strawberries, still spreading roots beneath the earth and fertilizer, the women were holding her white legs apart and urging her on with a chorus of, “Push, Señora Primera Dama, push!” And the Señora Primera Dama, who regarding this spare narrative of the facts, of which, I should confess, despite the surprise or mockery of those who don’t believe in this kind of prenatal memory, I also have unerasable recollections that manifest in dreams that lamentably frequently turn into nightmares—but let’s return to the strawberries and the story of my birth.

  —from “Of Strawberries,” an unfinished

  short story by Aura Estrada

  Before getting to know them profoundly (before having learned all about their origin and cultivation) she adored strawberries. She ate them at all hours. And when she wasn’t eating them, she liked to think about them; with cream, without cream, natural or flambée. It’s not improbable to speculate that it was her love for the Rosaceae Fragaria that led her into a rushed marriage to the future guardian and procurator of the Strawberry State. That union would also deliver her to an unforeseen hatred of that earthy fruit.

  —from “A Story of Mud,” an unfinished

  short story by Aura Estrada

  Where does he lose his daughter, where does he recover her??? The guilt that one evades, until you can’t evade it, until you find it, or it finds you.

  What is the great metaphor for guilt? The mud!!!!

  —from Aura Estrada’s notes for “The Visit,”

  an unfinished short story

  8

  Before her breakup with Aura’s father, Juanita had never before driven a car by herself. A few Sunday afternoons, on the quiet industrial zone streets of San José Tacuaya, her husband had given her lessons, sitting beside her in his Ford Falcon, his hand hovering over hers on the steering wheel. But she packed two suitcases, took a bus across the mountains to Guanajuato with four-year-old Aura, and borrowed Vicky’s Volkswagen Bug without telling her where she was going. Launching herself into the roaring truck traffic of the highway, she drove with her daughter all the way to Mexico City, a five-hour drive at least. Growing up, no matter how many times Aura heard that story, she was never able to recall anything about the legendary trip, not one detail.

  Aura did remember her dad: his nose, chubby cheeks, gleaming dark eyes. Her dad was always picking her up in his arms, swinging her in the air, carrying her around while she sat on his shoulders. He sang and played Cri-Cri songs for her on his guitar, taught her words in English and French. A zillion times a day he told her that he loved her. Aura had an old photograph of herself sitting astride the soft hump of her father’s belly while he lay sprawled on his back in the grass in their backyard, their snowy little terrier alongside, front paws raised, probably barking. Often when she studied that picture a giddy sensation quietly came over her, like the faint physical memory of tickling fingers, of tumbling forward, laughing, into his embrace, the bristle of his chin like singeing sparks against her cheek. That was the last time she ever lived in a house with a yard, except for that year in Austin, where the yard belonged to the boys who lived downstairs on the ground floor. That was one of the things Aura would always yearn for: a house of her own with a yard.

  Héctor stopped loving me, Juanita would answer, usually with a tired si
gh, whenever Aura asked what had provoked the separation. I begged him to take us back, nena, but he wouldn’t. After that, I knew we had to get away from there and find a way to start over. We had no other choice, hija.

  Aura did know the story—a story, at least—of how her parents had met. Juanita had met Héctor when she was a student at the university in Guanajuato and living in a rented house with two of the Hernández sisters, Lupe and Cali, and also Vicky Padilla—Aura’s future tías. Juanita’s mother, Mama Violeta, had sent her away from Taxco to Guanajuato when she was fourteen, to an all-girl Catholic boarding school. The Hernández sisters were day students there, and their mother, Mama Loly, virtually adopted Juanita, inviting her to move in with the family. She became friends with Vicky back then, too. Guanajuato, built on steep mountainsides, with its colonial architecture and churches and famous university and winding narrow streets and oblique plazas and bars, was then, like now, an international student town as well as a tourist destination. The midseventies were as boozy, druggy, and profligate a time in Guanajuato as anywhere else in the world. I can’t say for sure what the Hernández sisters and Vicky, or even Juanita, were like back then, but each of those women, in her individual way, was regarded as a wild beauty in her youth and was destined in adulthood, in varying degrees, for heartbreak, calamity, and alcoholism. It was back then that Juanita met Héctor, at a party in their house. A few years earlier, he’d dated Lupe Hernández. What drew Héctor’s attention to Juanita—so Aura always told me—was the leather miniskirt she was wearing that night, the way it showed off her shapely pale legs and thighs. Juanita had a loud laugh and liked to make bold and cutting remarks; black eyeliner, thickly drawn as if with moist Magic Marker, intensified her gaze’s stormy drama. She intimidated boys her own age. But Héctor, a lawyer and local politician, was ten years older. He was dressed all in white that evening and carried a white guitar. He wasn’t exactly handsome, Juanita always said, but his wheat-hued face was full of character, he was soft-spoken and funny, and he had a sad, sweet smile. A true orphan, adopted by a childless couple in San José Tacuaya—an accountant-bookkeeper and his wife—he’d gone to law school at the University of Guanajuato and shined there. A brilliant mind, everybody said so, and a brilliant future—a rising star in the PRI, even more so than Juanita’s brother Leopoldo, who was already an operator in the official party too. Héctor could perform any Beatles song on his guitar, and when he sang “In the Summertime,” in English, he sounded just like Mungo Jerry’s singer with a Mexican accent. Juanita and Héctor were married about two years after that meeting, and less than a year later Aura was born in a hospital in León, Guanajuato. They lived in San José Tacuaya. The PRI had selected Héctor to be the party’s candidate for the office of municipal president of that small city; it was like being mayor. Back then the official party’s candidates didn’t lose elections. Campaigning alongside his beautiful, fresh-faced young wife, with her long, wavy, chestnut hair, who wore jeans and embroidered peasant shirts, his own hair worn like Bobby Kennedy’s, falling over his big ears and into his eyes, Héctor represented the new image of the PRI, a chastened revolutionary party that had learned how to renew itself in the decade since the bloody cataclysm of the ’68 student massacres, in touch with youth and the times after all. As the Primera Dama Municipal, Aura’s mother was forced to be in the local public eye as much or even more than her husband, by his side at ceremonies and banquets, presiding over women’s lunches, afternoon teas, benefits, and all manner of festivals and events on the strawberry farms. Once Héctor had decided that he no longer wanted her for a wife, Juanita knew that the public spectacle of her and her daughter’s abandonment would make life unbearable in San José Tacuaya. It was unthinkable that she could raise Aura in such an environment. Anyway, she hated that boring, crass little city. One thing she would never in her life regret was the decision to come to the Distrito Federal to start their lives over.