But in Las Vegas, I was paying attention only to Aura, and don’t recall caring much about her mother’s reaction to me. Most of our other Las Vegas photos were taken in our gaudy Venetian hotel room, me posed like a gargoyle atop an armchair that resembled a papal throne, Aura vogueing, playing posh in her luxurious hotel bathrobe amid the pretentious furnishings. Another of her after sex, sitting up against piled pillows, the bathrobe’s parted lapels revealing her small tattoo and the soft upper slopes of her breasts, her eyes a little sleepy but looking directly, confidingly, into the camera—an axolotl gaze.
Later that night, at a blackjack table in the Bellagio casino, Aura, with her first bet ever, won fifty dollars. Fortune’s child! We’d joined up with her parents and the Hernández sisters and their friends—so far, I’d barely glimpsed them, they were always off gambling or shopping—to go to the birthday dinner. The Bellagio seemed as endless and grand as the Louvre, hall after hall of gambling tables, bars, restaurants, shops, and tourists snapping pictures. One moment Aura and I were walking with the others, absorbed in our own conversation, and the next we looked around and were alone in the crowd, Juanita, Rodrigo, the tías, their friends, all vanished, nowhere in sight. We didn’t know the name of the restaurant we were headed to, or under whose name the reservation had been made.
For nearly two hours Aura and I wandered from restaurant to restaurant—there were at least a dozen—poring over reservation lists and begging snooty maître d’s for permission to walk through their dining floors one more time. We repeated the circuit twice, thrice, within the vast Bellagio. The third time we stopped at Le Cirque we were turned away with a stony, Your parents are not here, before we could open our mouths. We’d flown all the way out to Las Vegas for this, to have dinner with Juanita on Saturday night. Finally, we took a break from our search to stop at one of the casino bars for a round of drinks. What if I never see my mother ever again? asked Aura. Where are we anyway, Francisco? I spoke reassuring words. But this being Las Vegas I knew that nothing was impossible and tabloid headlines—Mexican Family and Friends Vanish without Trace inside Bellagio— were already flashing through my mind as if on the electronic message board inside Beelzebub’s taxi. We went back to wandering the casino in a drifty stupor, holding hands like children afraid of being separated. Another half hour or so went by. ¿Cómo se dice una cobija de indios? Aura asked out of the blue, but before I could answer she said, Indian blanket? ¿Se dice así? and gave a little shout—there was Rodrigo, blocking our path, lifting a strong hand to each of our nearly touching shoulders as if to prevent us from escaping. He’d left the restaurant to look for us. After waiting a long time for us to turn up, they’d all finally eaten. Maybe we could still catch them for dessert. He led us to a cafeteria-style buffet restaurant that we hadn’t even noticed. Another happy reunion scene between Aura and her mom, and with the tías. Afterward we went for a walk outside on the neon boulevard with its illuminated fountains, a fake Eiffel Tower. Late the next morning Aura and I flew back to New York. On the plane, while she studied, I watched a movie about a racehorse. During the climactic racing scenes, horses stampeding down the homestretch, I bobbed up and down in my seat like I was the jockey, though I didn’t realize I was doing it until I felt a nudge, turned, and saw Aura imitating me, bouncing in her seat, staring at the screen, exaggerating my absorbed expression, and she laughed and began to kiss me, while I grinned madly, the surprise victor, riding my prancing heart down the dung-splattered track into the winner’s circle!
Nearly a year after Aura was gone, her cousin Fabiola told me that Juanita had tried to persuade Aura to leave me. Aura told Fabis, but she never told me. She has to understand, Aura would say to Fabis, I’m in love. Fabis also said that when she’d visited Aura at Brown, Juanita had phoned around eight nearly every morning to discuss Aura’s plans for the day, the progress of her thesis, and so on. Fabis said, I was surprised at how sweet Aura always was with her mother when she called, no matter how late we’d been out the night before, and I remember wishing that my mother cared about me like that, though now I’m grateful that she didn’t, that she respected my freedom. After Fabis accompanied Aura up to New York to help settle her at Columbia, Juanita phoned to thank her. She told Fabis that she’d saved her from the ten sessions with a psychiatrist she would have needed had Aura flown to New York by herself. What did she mean by that? asked Fabis. Ten sessions with a psychiatrist? I still don’t get it, she said. Fabis’s account struck me as holding possible clues to a scene that had long disturbed me, though I’ll never know what actually ignited it. I’d come into our apartment with a friend one day and found Aura sitting cross-legged on the kitchen floor, bent forward and clutching the telephone, crying and repeating in an extremely anguished tone,
No, Mamá …
NO, Mamá …
Nooo …
No Mamá, NO …
We closed the door quietly behind us and went to buy a bottle of wine on Atlantic Avenue, several blocks away. When we came back Aura was off the phone and didn’t even seem rattled, though she was still subdued. I asked about it later and all she said was, Oh, nothing. You know, my mother … But I can only think of one or two other times that I saw Aura so distraught. Her mother must be especially in despair, I remember thinking, maybe even threatening suicide, not really meaning it but totally freaking out her daughter.
No one hates Romeo more than Juliet’s mother—that’s the line I was ready to wield were Aura ever to bring up her mother’s hostility to me. But Aura never did, so I never got to use it. Now I knew, thanks to Fabis. But it couldn’t have been that easy for Aura to shrug off her mother’s maternal counsel. It couldn’t have been only a simple matter of, But I love him, Mami, and that’s that. There was an earlier episode that I’d nearly forgotten. We were in Mexico for the monthlong Christmas break, not three months after we’d started going out, though already we were living together in Brooklyn. We were staying in my Condesa apartment. (My Argentine subletter had gone back to her husband after less than two months.) After the way I’d talked it up—making it sound practically like a whole floor with a view in a sunny Florentine palazzo—Aura was disillusioned. She saw no charm in the rotted French windows with their missing and cracked panes, the kitchen window that opened on a well-like patio that bred mosquitoes in the rainy season, the constant seep of gas from the kitchen, the crudely carpentered furniture bought on street corners, and worst of all the windowless bedroom, its walls and ceiling speckled with dried mosquito splatter from the many grisly insomniac hours I’d spent over the years, standing on my bed or stalking around the room clutching a rolled-up magazine or swatter. This was probably the first time I’d so disappointed Aura. What did it mean? What if I was like that bedroom? A negligent, aging romantic goofball, his enthusiastic promise exposed as a gloomy, suffocating, cell of killing walls with an uncomfortable, cheap bed. Yes, yes, of course he’s like that, hija, that’s all you’ll ever be able to expect from him, you don’t think I know about men like that, niñotes from my own generation who refuse to grow up?
I have no proof that Aura and her mom ever had such a conversation. But for three days and nights in a row, Aura was cold and even cruel to me in a way she’d never come close to being before, or ever would again. She made love to me only once, so listlessly my dick fell and crept under the bed. In the mornings, she was off even before breakfast, with errands at the UNAM across the city and plans to see her mother, friends, past professors, even her old therapist, Nora Banini. She seemed not to want to introduce me to her friends. During the long days, she didn’t even phone. Was she with an old boyfriend? Borgini, for fucksake? (Juanita, I know now, had eagerly encouraged Aura’s relationship with Borgini.) But I knew Aura wasn’t like that. Was she? I was beside myself, every bone saturated with dread. She was treating me the way a woman treats a man when she knows she’s finished with him and is getting herself ready—going over her arguments, rehearsing with her mother and friends—to break up.
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What’s the matter? I wailed when she came home. What did I do? You’re right, this apartment is a shithole, I’ll get rid of it. Oh, God, you don’t love me anymore! Just like that?!?
Her eyes were cast down. She was across the bed from me, straightening the covers, the old feather-spurting comforter. The silence in that room crept toward death. The legs of the carcasses on the walls began to quiver, and also the wings, mosquitoes resurrected to zombie life by my breaking heart, which they would soon be sucking every last drop from.
Finally Aura said, quietly, It’s not that, Frank. Don’t worry, it’s nothing, it will pass.
And it did, the next morning. Like a fever, it lifted, and there she was, as if she’d been mischievously hiding underneath it, back to how she was before, pestering me to go everywhere with her. That morning she wanted me to accompany her to the Ghost Building. We never even spoke about why she’d been so cold to me. I was happy to leave those three days behind as if they carried a deathly contamination.
The Ghost Building was the most notorious eyesore on Insurgentes, a huge semi-abandoned condominium building, fifteen stories high—much taller than any building nearby—with broad, angled facades, capped by a concrete construction that resembled a fire-gutted airport control tower. It looked like it had barely survived the bombing of Dresden. An editor had offered Aura the chance to write a piece for the Talk of the Town–like section of a new magazine that a lot of younger writers were eager to write for, but she’d never done that kind of writing before. She’d just spent her first semester at Columbia taking classes that practically required her to learn a new language—critical theory—including one with professor Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, probably Columbia’s biggest lit-crit superstar since Edward Said. Aura was intimidated and baffled by Spivak but also adored her. Yet here she was, thrilled by the chance to write for a magazine that told Distrito Federal trendies where to eat, shop, and party.
She’d decided that she wanted to write about the Ghost Building. All I knew about it was that those all-night lowlife bars, El Bullpen and El Jacalito, used to be in the ground floor around the back but had been closed down. What goes on in there? I asked. Crack dens? Probably, she said, but I don’t know; that’s why we have to go. There’d been a murder in the building over the summer, she told me, a lawyer who had his office there. Oh great, I said, that makes it sound safer, lawyers have offices in there and they get murdered. We stood on the sidewalk, gazing up at the scorched-looking walls. Dun-colored sections of tile and concrete were cracked, cratered, and broken off. The windows had a sooty glare, some with shabby curtains or lowered blinds. Higher up, nearly floor-length sections were burned-out black voids. We didn’t trust the elevators, so we went through a small door off the lobby into a stairwell that smelled of rancid damp and piss. Fast light footsteps, a scrofulous kid coming down the stairs, dirty sleeveless T-shirt, tattoos—the crude blue-ink prison kind, a stingray of hair down his back, a rolled-up paper bag clutched in one hand, eyes down; he darted past without a hello. We climbed to the second floor and found ourselves creeping down a murky corridor, no lights, doors closed, silence, a musty rodent smell. Scattered doors held printed signs or plaques, one reading Oficina Jurídica— a criminal law office. We turned the corner into another corridor that was so long it seemed to vanish into gloom. We retreated to the stairwell and climbed to the next floor, and then to the next, each more abandoned-looking and claustrophobic than the one before. I wanted to get out of there. Anything might happen to us, and especially to Aura, in that barely inhabited ruin, and I’d be responsible. But in the next stairwell, when I began to lead Aura down, she pulled on my arm and whispered, Higher, let’s go higher—like she was under a spell. We’re not going higher, I said. We’re getting out of here. Later, she and Fabiola had a laugh over that. Me, the former “war correspondent,” afraid of the Ghost Building!
Señora Gama, administrator of Insurgentes Condominiums and the responsible party for the closing of two businesses on the ground floor of the battered building—the well-known dives El Bullpen and El Jacalito—walks with assured strides along the cracked and dark hallway of the tenth floor, wearing an electric-blue jacket and miniskirt. With a forced smile she makes way for her possible future tenants—two young women looking for a space to open a sewing business—to descend the staircase to the eighth floor. This is the highest floor to which the only one of four elevators to survive the 1985 earthquake arrives. It is adorned with colorful and unintelligible graffiti, and takes them down to the fourth floor.3
So opened the piece, “The Ghost Building,” that appeared in the magazine D.F. a few weeks later. The two young women who wanted to rent a space for their sewing business were Aura and Fabis. Without telling me until later, Aura had cajoled her cousin into going back there with her.
Curious to find out what lies beyond the tenth floor, the girls climb the frightful stairs. The view of the city is spectacular. When they get to the top, they find a sign that reads, Private property. Entry prohibited for all personnel. They peer down the deserted hallway. They see a wide pillar, burned and covered with graffiti. Where once there were windows, there are now only charred frames, filled with cloudless sky. There’s a radio playing somewhere. They follow the music and at the end of the hallway, beyond a door left ajar, they see a red carpet inside an apartment, and two men reading on a sofa. They hear footsteps approaching. Frightened, they look at each other and without a word run to the staircase.
When Aura handed her piece in, the editor was delighted with it and gave her a new assignment. We started staying in Aura’s old apartment in Copilco, in the bedroom in which she’d spent most of her life. There was hardly any furniture left and the telephone had been disconnected. Though it was no secret that we were there, we felt as if we were hiding out like teenaged runaways.
But Aura was soon to have her own apartment. Young architects were converting an old warehouse at the edge of Escandón into a condo-complex of loft apartments. Fabiola’s mom, Odette, knew one of the architect’s parents and bought two ground-floor one-bedroom apartments at a discount price before construction began, one for Fabis, another as an investment, and Juanita bought an apartment for Aura on the same floor, investing all her savings in the down payment. It was an extraordinary gift, intended to provide Aura with security and independence at the start of her professional career. The apartments would be ready to move into by summer.
The weekend before Christmas we went with Aura’s parents to Taxco, where Juanita had grown up, to spend the weekend in a recently restored grand hotel, Los Ángeles de Las Minas, as guests of the hotel’s owner, a good friend of Leopoldo. I hadn’t met Aura’s uncle yet—the one who, as Aura had warned, was supposedly going to hate me, and who supposedly I was going to hate back. He turned out to be the man standing in front of the hotel wearing a yellow construction hard hat, with architectural blueprints rolled under his arm, the top three buttons of his crisp white shirt unbuttoned to expose a hairless swimmer’s chest, a soft yellow sweater loosely knotted by the sleeves around his neck—Juanita’s sole brother, six years older, the law professor, former diplomat, and author. With his sharp black goatee, he had a Mephistophelian presence that seemed cultivated, supercilious, vain, and powerfully intelligent in a way that didn’t exactly warm your interest but put you on guard instead.
We exchanged polite if brusque introductions and greetings. There was no reason for Leopoldo to be wearing a hard hat because construction on his new cottage hadn’t begun yet; he was only going with the contractor to look at the lot. Maybe the rolled-up blueprint paper didn’t even hold architectural drawings. He was like a small boy dressing up, with grave ceremony, as Bob the Builder. I told Aura later that her uncle’s dressing up like that made me like him.
On the way up to our hotel room we paused at the display case of a silver-work shop in the lobby. Later that afternoon, when I came down to the bar to pick up a bottle of wine on the pretext of not wanting to wait for room
service, I slipped into the shop and bought a necklace that Aura had seemed to like. That’s how I was, buying her presents, an overjoyed spendthrift piling up credit card debt with squirrelly endeavor. Overcoming that mysterious three-day crisis had strengthened our love—our mystical wedding with the birds in Tulum was just two weeks away. I took a picture of Aura, in sleeveless black shirt, standing on the balcony outside our room in the late afternoon, a hazy blue mountain backdrop, her cheeks and nose flushed, a bashful smile and tilt to her head, a soft vulnerable shine to her eyes, all of this making her look even younger, startlingly and preposterously younger, like an enamored, just-ravished quinceañera, I recognize with some disbelief every time I look at that photograph. As evening fell, the mountainside grew so feverishly alive with sparkling and moving lights it was like a shaken-up snow globe, and a faint electric noisiness filled the air, as if coming from insect-sized motors and music boxes floating across the valley. We sat on the balcony, drinking wine. I pulled the necklace from my pocket.
When I look at that photograph of Aura now, I feel more aware of our age difference, more uneasy about it, than I ever did when we were together. Juanita rarely said anything, in my presence that is, to make me feel embarrassed or apologetic about my age. I think that wasn’t so much out of consideration for me as for her daughter, playing along, pretending to see us as Aura wanted others to; or maybe it was for herself, too. Juanita almost always spoke to me as if I were closer in age to her daughter than I was to her, but it’s not as if it would have been better for any of us if we’d spoken like two parents. What shames me now was the way, when we were with Aura’s mother, that I sometimes let immaturity masquerade as youthfulness, so that when I was spoken to as if I were practically still an adolescent, or a man-boy, a niñote, I’d allow myself to feel camouflaged and even flattered. Sixty is the new thirty. But that’s not how I was with Aura. Now, I have to guard against the danger of confusing how Aura’s mother regarded me or spoke to me with any aspect of how Aura did—one of death’s corrosive betrayals.
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