Maybe what I felt that day was a quieter version of the terror Aura was talking about in the Japanese restaurant. That conversation gave me a new inkling of the depth of Aura’s bond with her mother, like something stored in a bank vault twelve stories under the earth that only they knew the combination to. Didn’t I have a responsibility to share some of what Aura felt for her mother, that mixture of pity and awe and grateful reverence? I did share it, at least partly. It was all new for me, this degree of intimacy and trust and its requirements: an expansion of attention and a concurrent narrowing of focus to be able to take in everything, past and present, inside the radius of Aura’s life that I could; to try to understand at least as much as she would allow; to be able to anticipate and protect, to be always ready. Love was new to me, believe it or not. How did I get well into my forties without ever having learned about or discovered this? And later, a little more than a year after Aura’s death, I was already feeling panic that I was losing or had already lost this ability to care about someone else in this way.
9
Juanita had Aura’s ashes. I had Aura’s diaries. She was keeping the ashes from me, and I kept the diaries from her. I rarely risked taking them out of the house, and spent whole days at my desk, poring over them, copying out sentences and paragraphs. The diaries from her childhood were sometimes disorienting to read because the love they aroused wasn’t the one I was familiar with, it felt more like the love of a parent. That was a delusion, maybe. Never having been a parent, how can I know what a parent knows or feels?
I copied down phrases like this one, recorded by Aura in her diary:
¡We’re called los bichitos!
That was probably the first diary she ever kept, its baby-blue plastic cover decorated with Little Bo Peep and baby sheep. Bichitos was her tío Leopoldo’s nickname for the small herd of children in pajamas—his own three children, Aura, and the new girl—romping in his walled-in yard. I pictured Leopoldo watching with a napkin-wrapped tumbler of scotch and soda in his hand, mustache and goatee framing his thin, acerbic-looking mouth, his expression both paternally stern and bemused. Why did this seem to make six-year-old Aura so happy? Because it was funny to refer, with such a straight face, to one’s own children and niece as little bugs. She also liked feeling included with her cousins. Aura and her mother had been living in the Terrible Tower for about a year, and Tío Leopoldo lived nearby in Coyoacán, with his wife and their children and servant in a renovated colonial house of yellow stucco and black volcanic stones. Aura saw a lot of her cousins back then. Later, after Leopoldo and his wife divorced and the children went to live with their mother and her wealthy new husband, she hardly ever saw them. (They didn’t come to our wedding; only one came to the funeral.)
That evening there was a new girl in the yard, Katia, tall and pretty. She stood off to the side as if she didn’t know how to play tag, until Aura’s cousin Rafa pulled her by the hands into the game and after that nobody could catch her; she bounded around the yard like a startled deer. Katia’s father was Rodrigo, a tall, sinewy man with an erect posture, black hair down to his shoulders, and sharp almond eyes. His coppery skin was darker than his daughter’s; Juanita’s was lighter than her daughter’s. Juanita and Rodrigo came into the yard to say good night, then left together to go somewhere else, and a little later los bichitos were put to bed. In the morning, as they had their breakfast and watched TV, Aura waited tensely for her mother to return, and Katia waited for her father. Finally, around noon, they came back:
Mamá and Rodrigo were wearing the same clothes they had on last night!
Aura noted in her diary. Soon after, Rodrigo and Katia moved into the too small apartment in the Terrible Tower with Juanita and Aura. From now on Aura was to call Rodrigo Papá, Katia was to call Juanita Mamá, and Aura and Katia were to be sisters. But who was Katia’s mother, and where was she? Her name was Yolanda and she was living in Orlando, Florida, near Disney World. With no warning at all, Yolanda had fled from her husband and daughter; supposedly no other man was involved. Why had she done that? Because Yolanda had her own dream to pursue. Her dream was to start a new life, in Orlando, USA. During her childhood Katia would visit her mother in Orlando only three or four times, during school vacations. As time went by, Katia had less and less contact with her mother, until finally she had no contact, not even telephone calls on her birthday. Yolanda had found work as a hostess in an Orlando restaurant, and it was there that she’d begun her self-education in the “high-end food service business.” Eventually she became, of all things, a sommelier. Of course, she became a U.S. citizen, too. They knew this because a magazine called Good Life Orlando published an article about Yolanda that she mailed to Rodrigo’s relatives in McAllen, Texas. Her personal life remained a mystery to those she’d left behind. The article made no mention of a husband, past or present.
Rodrigo and Yolanda were both from Culiacán, in the rugged, hot, dry north. He’d come to Mexico City to study at the university, where he majored in sociology and starred for the baseball team, pitching and playing the outfield. Though Rodrigo was a serious jock, university life and the times turned him into a hippy and into a supporter of leftist political movements, a marcher and protester and vehement political arguer. He vowed to find a career where he could make a difference in the life of the poor. But soon after graduating he found himself with a wife and baby to support and went to work for an uncle’s construction company. Within a few years he no longer had a wife to support, but he still had a daughter.
His willowy little girl, who had her mother’s silky brunette hair, large, glossy brown eyes, and pale rosy-cheeked skin, would always be, wherever she went to school, the prettiest girl in her class, the best behaved and the politest, the most popular among the popular, with the best study habits and nearly perfect report cards. Aura, two years younger than her new stepsister, was a good student, too, though not as disciplined or as consistent in her grades, and while her behavior was often amusingly mischievous, it was also occasionally odd and troublesome. For instance, the year when Juanita was summoned to the Colegio Kensington several times by the principal, Miss Becky, because Aura was caught stealing, daily, from her classmates’ schoolbags and knapsacks: a Spider-Man mechanical pencil, a Hello Kitty wallet, a Wonder Woman ruler, and so on, and it seemed that no classroom punishment or warning could put a stop to her larceny. Juanita and Rodrigo had promised Aura that if she was well behaved in school that year, as a reward she would be allowed to go with Katia to spend part of the summer at Yolanda’s house in Orlando, near Disney World. Aura was on the cusp of being expelled from school when Juanita finally understood that there was nothing her daughter wanted less than to go to Orlando with her stepsister and the sommelier. When she rescinded the promise, Aura’s crime spree ended.
Soon Rodrigo found the job that he would hold for the next two and a half decades, at least, at a consulting firm that advised local governments throughout Mexico on developing public housing projects. It was as close as he would ever come to his dream job, and he traveled the country, meeting with officials, building boards, community leaders, and the like, listening to their ideas, offering his recommendations. The firm matched those governments with private contractors, receiving a commission from the latter when the contracts for the projects were signed. Rodrigo didn’t have much to do with the contractors; he just delivered his reports and recommendations to his boss, the firm’s sole owner. The boss, Rodrigo’s former urban studies professor, grew wealthy from his dealings with the contractors. The job kept Rodrigo on the road, traveling all over Mexico, often as many as five days a week, which he seemed to like; it paid very little.
Working as a secretary for the head of the psychology department, part-time as a research assistant, and taking an evening shift in the library, Juanita earned more than twice what Rodrigo did. She alone paid the down payment on the new apartment in the Copilco residential complex, definitely a step up from the Terrible Tower. Rodrigo and Juanita shared a
bedroom and the girls shared the slightly smaller one across the hall. There were two bathrooms, a separate kitchen, and a central area that was both living room and dining room. A gated entrance with a guardhouse just off the avenue led into the walled-in parking lot. Here the children could play outside, ride their bikes, and roller-skate in the parking lot; you didn’t have to fear stairwells or walking to and from your parked car in the dark. Aura had a friend in the complex whose parents even allowed her to take the trash out to the Dumpsters at night—something my mother never lets me do,
she wrote in her diary. Those were the years of Mexico City’s pollution crisis, when children were often kept home from school because the air outside was too poisonous to breathe, and asphyxiated birds plummeted from the sky. A dead bird once landed directly in front of Aura’s bicycle as she was pedaling in circles in the parking lot.
Aura and Katia had, or at least each seemed to set about determinedly developing, opposite personalities. If one little girl’s side of their bedroom was always the model of neatness, the other girl’s—guess whose?—was a mess. Katia had a mild, at times perky and outwardly confident disposition, and she never cried or lost control, but she was also an emotionally distant girl, easily able to tune out everybody and everything around her. Aura was a champion crybaby, antic chatterer, back talker, and tantrum thrower. Katia from a young age was fastidious about clothes and even on the family’s tight budget knew how to help her stepmother outfit her in a way that always made her one of the best-dressed girls at school. Aura preferred jeans, corduroys with elastic waists, baggy sweatshirts, and overalls; she liked bright-colored sneakers, rubber rain boots and flip-flops, eccentric hats and big sunglasses. The older stepsister never broke her toys. The younger one reliably broke her own toys, and her stepsister’s. Katia liked Barbie dolls. Aura liked dolls, too, but also Transformers, Power Rangers, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Robotix, Atari, et cetera. Both girls liked books, but Aura liked them more—
I read a book in English, Little Women, and I understood it very well,
she wrote in her diary when she was nine; a few entries later, she rebuked herself for often preferring comics—Mafalda, Betty and Veronica, La Familia Burrón, to “real books.” Katia excelled in team sports. Aura liked riding her bicycle and roller skating. The two girls were sent to ballet school together. At first it was thought that Katia was a natural ballerina but she soon lost interest, bored by the drudgery of classes and rehearsals; she preferred spending her spare time with her friends. Aura, though she didn’t really have a ballerina’s physique like Katia, was surprisingly devoted to ballet and kept at it for years, becoming a lead soloist in school recitals and an assistant instructor of beginning students, an honor she’d long aspired to. There was even talk of sending her to Cuba to study at Alicia Alonso’s famous ballet school. In her diary Aura confided that she wished she didn’t have to share her bedroom with Katia so that she could turn it into a ballet studio, with a floor-to-ceiling mirror and dance barre.
With Rodrigo rarely at home during the week, it was Juanita who got Aura and Katia off to school in the mornings, took them to doctor, dentist, and eventually to shrink appointments, to ballet and confirmation classes, birthday parties, Girl Scouts, French and math tutors, the Freemasons’ summer day camp, and all the rest. Living walking distance from the university was a convenience. Also, many of Juanita’s closest friends from Guanajuato, the tías, were around to help out a bit now, having moved to the DF one after another, fleeing broken marriages and relationships, with children of their own in tow. Juanita hired a housekeeper, Ursula, who came in the mornings from the city’s outskirts and left at four in the afternoon for her long commute home to prepare dinner for her own husband and children.
My mother was basically a single mom who raised Katia as her own daughter, Aura used to say. If anything, she treated Katia better than she did me. Katia was Little Miss Perfect and I was the one who had all the problems. It was always important to Rodrigo that Katia be the well-adjusted one, the less ruined and happier one. He’d defend her no matter what. And in those days, mostly because she was afraid of being dumped again, my mother would go along with whatever Rodrigo wanted.
Aura talked about all the time she spent alone as a child. Her mother often didn’t get home from work until nine or ten at night. After school, Katia liked to be with her friends, and was usually invited to play at their homes outside the Copilco complex; she never included her little sister in these outings, and rarely brought her friends to Copilco—one of the few times that Katia did was also the last. Going into the kitchen to see what there was to serve as a snack to her friends, Katia found a tray of green ice cubes in the freezer, flavored, she supposed, with lime Jell-O or Kool-Aid. Aura had made the ice cubes, but the green color came from Lysol. Aura loved the smell of household liquid cleaners, and she’d discovered that when mixed with a bit of water and frozen in an ice tray, they had an especially refreshing tang. You held the tray close to your face, touched the tip of your nose to the ice—which in itself was a nice sensation, as she demonstrated twenty years later for her husband in their Brooklyn kitchen, though with just normal ice in the tray—and breathed in deeply: mmmmm, such a tart tingling blast to your nasal passages! Aura already had allergy-related sinus problems, worsened by the city’s pollution. Later, at thirteen, in her rebel-girl stage, smoking cigarettes so heavily that her school nickname was La Pipa, she would undergo sinus surgery. Katia served a green ice cube wrapped in a napkin to each of her friends. She gave one to Aura, too, who held hers to her nose, inhaled, and looked around happily to see if everyone else was enjoying their frozen Lysol, but what she saw was Katia and her friends, pink tongues out, licking. Later, Aura was unable to explain why she hadn’t warned the other girls; it hadn’t even occurred to her that they would be so stupid as to lick the Lysol cubes.
¡Diabla idiota! shrieked Katia, You poisoned my friends! There were panicked girls wailing, Call an ambulance! Aura gaped. They were just joking, no? A few of the girls, gagging and sobbing, phoned their parents. You’re going to jail for the rest of your life! screamed Katia. Aura shut herself into the bathroom, squalling in bewildered terror and shame. For all the hysteria, nobody had gotten sick, or even vomited; after one or two licks, all the girls had flung their cubes onto the carpet. Later, it must have been hard for Juanita not to be overwhelmed with pity for Aura, but still, she had to be punished. No riding your bicycle for two weeks! Some of the girls were forbidden by their parents to ever visit Katia in her home again—a cruel overreaction that caused Katia deep embarrassment at school.
I could have come home to find six dead girls lying on the floor! Aura heard her mother bemoaning into the phone to Mama Violeta, her grandmother. Juanita worried that the reason Aura had trouble telling fantasy from reality was because she spent too much time alone in the apartment. But she had to work late to make money to pay for both girls’ schooling. What could she do?
So that Aura could have some company in the afternoons, Rodrigo and her mother bought her a Scottie puppy in a market. Aura was overjoyed. But the puppy’s health quickly deteriorated, and after just one week it died. Her mother tried to explain that it wasn’t Aura’s fault, that the pet sellers in the market had knowingly sold them a mortally ill dog.
In the unfinished short stories and fragments that I later found in Aura’s computer, little girl narrators are always being tormented by older stepsisters:
“It’s your fault our housekeeper quit.”
“It’s not true,” I replied forcefully, almost shouting.
“It’s your fault that my father didn’t drive us to school today,” she went on.
I swallowed my saliva and repeated my words without conviction.
About two years passed, during which Rodrigo and Juanita were married. In her diary, Aura wrote:
I have everything, even a diary, and the love of my parents. I’m 10, and my sister is always busy. You know, I like to write stories, and I sen
t one to the newspaper, La Jornada.
My ma gave a lecture at the university, it was padrísima, I felt so happy!
Say Her Name Page 9