Say Her Name

by Francisco Goldman

  How come you never answered the e-mail I sent you? she asked. I answered that I’d never received any e-mail from her. She’d sent me an e-mail, she insisted, in which she’d thanked me for having mailed her my book, and also telling me that she was coming to New York again. I didn’t think she was the kind of person who wouldn’t thank someone for having sent her his book, did I? Well, I don’t know what happened to that e-mail, I said; it must have gotten lost.

  That night in El Mitote, you wouldn’t have guessed just by looking at Aura that she was a grad student. Her hair wasn’t quite so chic anymore; it was messier, and falling into her eyes. She’d come with a small group of friends who were on the other side of the bar. She was leaving for New York City in just three days, she told me, to begin her PhD studies at Columbia. That news lit a silent burst of sparks in me. I’d be flying back to New York myself in another two weeks. Then there’s no time for us to get together before you go, I said, but she said, Why not? There’s time. And we agreed to meet the following night at the San Angel Inn, a restaurant and bar in an old hacienda mansion where you sit on sturdy leather couches by the patio drinking margaritas and martinis served in individual miniature silver pitchers set in small ice buckets. I’m sure I wasn’t the first guy to have tried to impress her by inviting her there, but at least she wouldn’t think I hung out only in dumps like El Mitote.

  On the beige vinyl couch in Copilco, she turned some more pages in the notebook and came to one filled with writing from a turquoise roller-pen. This was a short story she’d recently finished. Do you want to hear it? she asked. It’s really short, only four pages. I said of course, and she read it to me. The story was about a young man in an airport who can’t remember if he’s there because he’s coming or going. It was written in a lonely minimalist airport tone, with a sweet deadpan humor. I wasn’t listening with the best concentration, though, because so much else was going through my mind. At dinner, I’d already been casting my hopes forward, plotting how quickly I could see Aura again in New York. Then she’d taken me completely by surprise, inviting me back to her apartment. Did she only want to read me a story? Sitting close to her, I watched her lovely lips form the words she was reading and wondered if I was really going to kiss her in the next few minutes, or hours, or ever.

  Aura’s parents had moved out of Copilco to their new place a year before. Left behind in the living room there was only the couch we were sitting on, and the round dining table, metallic gray and white, where Aura had sat through thousands of family meals. Most of her books and things were packed into cardboard boxes now. The steamer trunk was there. There were word magnets on the refrigerator door, and a “Keep Austin Weird” bumper sticker; inside the refrigerator there was a quart bottle of Indio beer, half empty and recapped, and Jumex orange juice in a glossy cylindrical container that I would drink from the next morning after brushing my teeth with Aura’s toothpaste on my finger. Empty beer bottles stacked in the corner, pizza cartons wedged behind a trash can. Aura had been living alone here for the last six months or so. Friends who still lived at home with their parents would come and stay the weekend, crashing on the couch and the floor. She’d been teaching introductory-level classes in English poetry and Latin American fiction at the UNAM while finishing her master’s thesis on Borges and the English writers, preparing for and taking her exams, months of pressure and nerves but also crazy nights. No other city where the night is longer, more excessive and absurd, than in the Dee Effeh. Every time in recent years that she’d started to make a real disaster of her life, she was convinced, it was because she’d given in again to the Mexico City night, where she might easily go off course forever.

  For months the date of her departure for Columbia had seemed impossibly far off. But just the other day she’d put a load of clothes into the washing machine and thought, The next time I wear these socks, I’ll be in New York. Oh, but she was going to miss Mexico, too. She was still chirping away with grateful excitement over the party her mother had thrown for her two weeks before in Tía Cali’s penthouse apartment, with its roof patio, to celebrate her passing her exams and receiving her master’s degree: a live band, dancing, the new scarlet party dress she’d worn—four years later, that would still be her favorite dress to wear to weddings and fancy parties. She was carrying snapshots of the party in her purse and had showed them to me earlier that night at the San Angel Inn.

  When Aura finished reading her story about the young man in the airport, I told her that I really liked it, and she thanked me and asked what it was that I liked about it. While I spoke she held herself perfectly still, as if she could hear my pulse and was measuring it like a polygraph. Then she said that I hadn’t meant what I’d said, that I’d only said what I’d said because I liked her. I laughed and said, It’s definitely true that I like you, but I liked the story, too, honestly, and I practically narrated back to her the part where her protagonist picks a discarded printed flyer up off the floor and reads that in cele bration of a Mexican airline’s new route to Hawaii free drinks are being offered at Departure Gate 37, and he goes there for his drink, enters a raffle to win a trip to Hawaii, and doesn’t win. She laughed, falling over sideways with her eyes squeezed shut, as if someone else had written it and she was hearing it for the first time and found it hilarious. That was the first of many conversations we would have in the coming years about her writing that would proceed more or less exactly like that, beginning with her claims that my praise was calculated to win her affection or some sex or just domestic peace. That night, on the couch, we began to kiss, and ended up in her bed, kissing and touching. I was so surprised by her warm sweet-smelling and supple youth and by this unexpected development in my life that I was in danger of getting carried away like a romping puppy in a field of tulips, and silently I urged myself not to lose control, to make love to her like a grown man, not an excitable teenager. But then she asked if I minded if she kept her jeans on. So we weren’t going to fuck. I said, That’s okay with me, really; no big hurry. I spoke gently, though maybe there was a trace of letdown or defensiveness in my voice. Plaintively, but also defiantly, as if not at all reconciled to an undesirable though inevitable-seeming task, she asked, Do I have to blow you or something? I laughed and said, Of course you don’t have to blow me, and wondered, What is it we do to our girls? I said that of course I wanted to make love to her, but only when she felt ready. Muy bien, she said. With my nose pressed into her hair, I said, Hmm, you smell so good, not just your hair, your whole head smells good, your head smells like cake. She giggled and said, It’s not true. It is true, I insisted, your head smells like cake, like tres leches, yum, my favorite. I put my nose in her hair again and inhaled and kissed her and even pretended to take a big bite out of her head and told her again, Your head smells like cake! A little later we fell asleep in each other’s arms, Aura with her jeans on. On her ceiling were hundreds of little glow-in-the-dark stars—she and Lola had taped them up there, carefully following the constellation map the stars came with.

  In the morning, when I was in the bathroom, she leaned out of the bed and took my wallet out of my pants on the floor. When I came back into the bedroom she was holding my driver’s license in her hand. She looked up and exclaimed, Forty-seven!

  Yup, I said, embarrassed.

  I thought you were at least ten years younger, she said. I guessed you were thirty-six.

  I guess I’m supposed to say thanks, I said. Nope, forty-seven.

  She’d never asked my age. Still, I was surprised she didn’t know. I thought Borgini, at least, would have said something about it. Aura was going to a wedding later that day, a Saturday. She said she’d be back early; she had so much to do to get ready to fly to New York the next morning. She’d be staying at her mother’s. I phoned her there that evening and Juanita answered. That was the first time we ever spoke, but she already knew my name. Frank, she called me. Hola Frahhhhnk, that Mexican pronunciation that coming from Aura sounded like a happy goose honk. Juanit
a spoke to me in such a friendly way on the phone that day that I thought Aura must have told her mother about me and that she must have said something nice. Aura wasn’t back from the wedding yet, but she’d taken her mother’s cell phone with her, I guess she’d lost or misplaced her own. Juanita gave me the number and when I phoned I got Juanita’s voice-mail message. Aura phoned back later that evening. She spoke through a background din of music and voices. She said she’d had a good time with me, and apologized for having forced me to listen to her airport story, and I told her that I’d loved hearing it, and also about the shoes that come when you call them. I told her that I’d call her as soon as I got to New York, in another ten days. When I put down the phone, I thought, In another ten days her life will have totally changed.

  For the previous six years, I’d rented an inexpensive apartment in Mexico City that I’d usually sublet whenever I went back to Brooklyn. Back in the eighties, when I’d worked as a freelance journalist in Central America, my paychecks had sometimes been wired from New York to banks in Mexico City and then I’d have to go up there to get them and convert them to cash. The first time was in 1984, when Aura was seven, when the megacity struck me, compared to Managua, Tegucigalpa, or Guatemala City, as radiant and inexhaustible, crammed with opportunity and surprise. I hadn’t even been in the DF twenty-four hours when I met a punky slip of a girl in tight pogo pants and neon pink sneakers in the Rufino Tamayo museum, a nineteen-year-old art student at Bellas Artes who had a delicate, Mayan princess face and who made out with me on the museum steps. But I never saw her again; the next day she was off to the Yucatán, where her family was from, for Christmas. They kept my passport as collateral at the desk of the cheap hotel downtown where I was staying, until the banks reopened after the long holiday vacation and I could pick up my money and pay them, and where one afternoon in the hotel coffee shop two whores—older than me, probably well into their thirties—asked if I wanted company and then came up to my tiny room, two beautifully ripened women, it turned out, in underpants like in the Life magazine ads of my childhood, one with a thin streak of black pubic hair like a wisp of flame licking up her soft broad tummy to her navel, the other lighter-haired and muscular, with small breasts. That’s still the only time I’ve ever done it with two women at once, on the single bed with its flimsy spring-coil mattress, they zestfully applauded every orgasm, theirs and mine, and when it was over I paid with my portable shortwave radio because I didn’t have any cash, and the black-haired woman said we could do it again the next day if I got my hands on something else I wanted to trade for sex, and I had the intuition, nothing more than that, that they were a pair of housewives and bisexual lovers who did this mainly for fun. The next time I returned to Mexico City was more than a year later, about six months after the earthquake. The hotel was gone but part of its old brick back wall was still standing, and from the opposite sidewalk you could see how the floors had collapsed into a multilayered concrete sandwich with rubble spilling out the sides. The city was full of ruins like that, more prevalent in some zones than others; the south, where Aura lived, was not built over the soft dirt of the ancient lake bed as in the center and was the area least affected. (Just now I wanted to call out, “Aura, what is it again that you remember about when the earthquake hit?” She told me about it once or twice, but now I can’t remember exactly what, it’s lost.) I’d followed the earthquake in the news and knew many journalists who’d been sent up from Central America to cover it, and some had come back totally shaken. Having no overt political narrative to impose on the worst of what they’d seen there, at least not one having to do with geopolitics and war, seemed to make it even more devastating. I had a friend, Saqui, who’d covered more war than anyone my age I knew: Afghanistan, Africa, and the Middle East, as well as Central America. Saqui told me about walking out of his hotel on Avenida Reforma the night he got to Mexico City, two nights after the quake, the air thick with smog, pulverized cement, and acrid smoke, and how, when he was crossing the avenue, he saw, in one of the lanes closed off to traffic, a dead child laid out on the pavement, a little girl in sweatshirt, jeans, and sneakers who looked like she’d been rolled in flour. There were two Mexican men standing over her, and my friend told me that they looked at him in a way that so sorrowfully but menacingly warned him not to come any closer that he swerved away as if they were pointing guns, not daring even to glance back until he’d crossed onto the opposite sidewalk, where he turned and saw the two men still standing over the little corpse as if they were waiting for a bus, and he thought that it was the saddest, most terrible thing he’d ever seen. And the weeping mothers standing outside schools that had collapsed when the quake hit, in the middle of the school day. Sixteen collapsed schools, thousands of dead children—schools that were supposed to have been earthquake-proof but weren’t, the direct result of the PRI’s corrupt dealings with building contractors—there was a political narrative, whatever comfort that gave. And the volunteers from all over the world who joined hundreds of thousands of Mexicans in the search for survivors in the rubble and the exhausted cheers that went up whenever someone was found still alive. Yet what most astounded Saqui was the way the city so relentlessly and quickly drove itself back to life, the avenues filling with traffic while the human moles of the rescue parties were still digging and the groups of mothers were still waiting and crying and the stench of death in the air was growing stronger every day.

  At least once a year I went back to Mexico City. I developed a fast allegiance to the city and was enthralled by its medieval mysteries because something about post-earthquake DF was like a medieval city celebrating the end of a death plague with carnivals and mystery plays. In 1993, my girlfriend and I even lived there for a year, in Coyoacán, when we must have walked by fifteen-year-old Aura hanging out with other scruffy teenagers and hippies in the plaza—she went nearly every weekend—or browsed alongside her in the Parnaso and Gandhi bookstores, or passed her rattling down the cobblestones of Calle Francisco Sosa on her bike. In 1995, when that same woman broke up with me, she stayed on in our apartment in Brooklyn and I moved down there, to the DF, feeling liberated from a failed relationship and exhilarated to be starting over, fueled by the romantic fantasy that I was going to find and marry that girl I’d kissed on the Museo Tamayo steps a decade before. I was definitely that kind of romantic fool, and though I was pretty sure I remembered her name, Selena Yanez, it’s not true that fortune always favors the fool, and I never found her, nor anyone who even knew her.

  Over the next few years, I ended up spending much more time in Mexico City than I did in New York, until I got a part-time post at Wadley College. The plan was to live in Brooklyn only when I was teaching, and in Mexico the rest of the year. My apartment was on Avenida Amsterdam in the Condesa, a rambling, five-room, barely furnished place in a nearly century-old building neglected in every way by its landlord. (He’s in prison now; a few years ago he was arrested for being the money launderer to a kidnapping ring.) There was a permanent gas leak in the kitchen; perilous, ancient light fixtures; spongy wooden floors painted a peeling viscous bathhouse-brown; and the French windows had termite-churned frames, with a few missing panes that let the rain and sometimes stray birds in. The only furniture I kept there were my cheap Dormimundo bed, two tables, a few chairs, and an old set of drawers that had come with the place. Trees stood outside the front windows, and during the long, rainy summer afternoons, I thought it was the most peaceful place to write I’d ever found. When I’d first moved there the Condesa was still a quiet residential neighborhood of middle-class homes, art deco apartment buildings, random old mansions, tree-lined streets, parks, circular plazas with fountains, and a few surviving old Jewish bakeries and musty Eastern European cafés, remnants from when Jewish immigrants and refugees had populated the neighborhood before prospering and moving their families to Polanco and the suburbs. But the Condesa was also on the cusp of what was going to be a speedy transformation into the city’s and maybe all of Latin
America’s trendiest hipster neighborhood, triggered, went the usual explanation, by the return of those same Jews’ artistic, bohemian, entrepreneurial, and coke-snorting Mexican-born descendants.

  Those first few months in Mexico, while I searched for Selena Yanez, I had an exuberant string of affairs and seductions, just what I thought I needed because I’d been in relationships, one after the other, since college, serially and sometimes overlapping. D., who I moved to New York with from college; Gus (we were married and divorced before I was twenty-six and now she was probably my closest friend); J.; then M.; and finally S. Then, practically before I knew it, I fell into yet another on-and-mostly-off-again nightmare, the most obsessive frenzied self-destructive relationship of my life. She was a heartbreakingly self-thwarting woman, a gifted artist probably destined never to realize her potential, thirteen years younger than me, acrimoniously self-exiled from her upper-class family, the only one of four sisters not to live at home until she married. It was still a fairly new phenomenon in Mexico City for young women of a certain upbringing to strike out on their own, living in tiny apartments like their counterparts in New York or Paris. She hardly knew what to make of herself. Damaged and full of conflict, she was also maniacally controlling: the first time I slept over at her apartment she threw me out in the morning for hanging a towel on the wrong rack in her bathroom. A niña perversa, as she liked to call herself, sultry and gorgeous, her enormous dark eyes an opaque glower, and yet so gentle and shy beneath all that. I don’t think I’d ever met anyone who so craved love, which she couldn’t help but spurn; it seems that everyone knows this type, though it seems I didn’t. Shouldn’t I have known what was coming after that first fuck in my apartment, when she declared that we were only going to have sex for one week and then never again? For a week she dutifully turned up at my door every afternoon; she’d ring my buzzer and I’d see her through the peephole nervously twirling a finger in her hair, and after that week was up she was gone. I nearly went insane, waiting for her outside her apartment, howling into the phone, leaving little love poems on strips of paper folded like Chinese cookie fortunes into the nameplate by her door buzzer. After about a month, she gave in, and we started up again. I seriously debased and fucked myself up with Z., that’s the truth of it. I didn’t have a friend who didn’t try to convince me to flee the torments of that relationship. That I wasted so many years on it is sad proof that I was missing something that every mature, functioning man should possess, except I didn’t even know what that something was. When it was finally over I had to confront, for what felt like the first time, the fact that even if I let someone really get to know me, and did my very best to love them, that it wouldn’t necessarily be enough to make them love me back. Gradually, I fell into a long funk. I dated, was rejected a lot (though almost never by anyone I cared that much about), and on a few occasions did the rejecting myself. By any measure that wasn’t deluded, I wasn’t young anymore. One year led to another and then to another, until it became five years of loneliness, with no affair that lasted more than a few weeks or days, and all of those a year or more apart. I worked on my novel like a dreamy tinkerer, without any urgency or drive to finish; did very little journalism; went to the gym; frequented places like El Mitote or El Closet, a strip club; ended up in after-hours dives like El Bullpen and El Jacalito and others whose names and addresses I don’t remember. Now I look back on that whole time as a long dress rehearsal for the real thing, the grief and melancholy and loneliness and dissolving of self that lay far ahead and that maybe now will never end. My father was slowly dying during those years. He took a long time to die, in and out of the hospital for about five years, battling for life with desperation and panic, starkly terrified of death, and suffering a lot, and I was always being summoned back to Boston from wherever I was—from Mexico, once from Barcelona, once from Havana where I was doing research—to his bedside for what was supposed to be the end at last, except he always pulled through.