Say Her Name

by Francisco Goldman

  The carpenter said, Look at this woman, hit by a car and killed, a mother of two small children. These things can happen to anybody, Francisco, and they happen every day.

  Three wise men: the tailor, the carpenter, and the security guard. In those first days and weeks after Aura’s death, nobody spoke sounder words to me.

  Charcoal gray instead of black.

  Resignación, señor, resignación.

  These things happen every day.

  I did, at least, heed the tailor.

  On January 17, 2009, in Brooklyn, New York, our daughter Natalia wasn’t born. How did I mark that day? I didn’t even remember that it was the day until late in the afternoon. I dressed my ear, which seemed to be healing in a way that would leave it looking like the smashed torn ear of a boxer. Worked a bit. Went for a walk. I thought about stopping into a church to sit and think about Natalia and Aura for a while, but I didn’t.

  One frigid misty evening soon after, as I was walking back from a restaurant, I saw, in the tree at the end of our block, up amid the wet, bare branches shining in the streetlights’ glare, Aura smiling down on me the way she had a few nights after her death when she’d seemed to be floating inside her own halo of moonlight over the Zócalo. Happiness and amazement dissolved my disbelief, and I stood on the sidewalk grinning back at her, warming with a loving glow of my own. I went to the tree, laid my hands on the trunk, and kissed it.

  It seemed credible to me that Aura would choose a neighborhood tree to hide in, and especially that tree, the biggest on our block, a hale, silver maple, in summer lush with foliage though now its expansive boughs and intricate branches were bare. In the spring, Aura had walked up and down the streets photographing the trees with their bright new leaves and flowers; she’d bought a field guide to the trees of the Northeast so that she could identify them and learn their names. For the next several days, every time I came down the block, I found Aura in that tree, her smile and shining eyes floating among the branches, and sensed her happiness to see me, and I always stopped to kiss the trunk. But one afternoon I came walking down the block with something else on my mind and forgot to look up into the tree and I’d just passed by it when I felt a force yank my head back as if grabbing me by the hair. Disconcerted, chastened, I turned and went back to the tree, apologized, and kissed it. I wondered what the neighbors must think of this behavior. The tree happened to be directly in front of the brownstone where, in the basement apartment, a burly, aging biker-type with defensive-tackle biceps and a thick black-gray beard lived. I wondered what he would think when he noticed that I kept stopping in front of the gate to his apartment to kiss the tree. I wasn’t worried that he’d harm me but I did imagine him coming outside to say something like, What the fuck are you doing? and I wondered what I would answer. So, after about a week of this, if there were people out on the sidewalk, or if I saw the biker’s lights on and his curtains pulled aside, I only reached out a hand and tickled the trunk as I passed, while whispering, Hola, mi amor ¿cómo estás hoy? Te quiero. I felt an unaccustomed emotional lightness, something almost like happiness, during those days. Was I going a little crazy? It isn’t really Aura in the tree, I told myself. Nevertheless, one cold night I woke around three in the morning and remembered that I hadn’t stopped to greet the tree even once that day. I sprang out of bed, threw my down jacket on over my pajamas, put on my sneakers, and went outside. It had been a night of freezing rain. The sidewalk was slippery with ice and it reminded me of how Aura had never really mastered walking on icy sidewalks; she’d always slip and slide and I’d tease her that she was like Bambi on the frozen pond. Aura’s tree had never looked more beautiful than it did that night, enameled and blazing as if a mix of liquid diamonds and starlight had been poured over it.

  Francisco, she said, I didn’t get married just to spend time by myself in a tree!

  ¡Claro que no, mi amor! I put my arms around the trunk and pressed my lips to the frozen rough bark.

  My ear healed; it was as if Aura had come inside from her tree to give it a miraculous kiss in the middle of the night, or else it was the powers of the tea-tree mint treatment shampoo. If anything, the ear looked a little smoother and fresher than the uninjured one, as if it had grown a new layer of baby skin, the only scarring a few barely discernible minnow nibbles along the cartilaginous rim. And it made me think of Aura’s big beautiful ears, and of how Natalia should have been born by then, with big beautiful baby ears of her own.

  A few days later a check for $17,612 came in the mail from the insurance company of the teenager who’d hit me with her car.

  On January 29, I woke before dawn to find Aura stretched out beside me in our bed, nearly invisible, a lighter darkness within the darkness of the room but with her distinct shape. Was I awake? Was this longing? Or was it the result of having read that same day a book written by a psychiatrist who’d studied the survivors of near-death experiences? What I’d experienced after being hit by that car fit with the recurring and overlapping details in the survivors’ testimonies that had convinced that psychiatrist to posit the possible existence of some other spirit world beyond this one. Maybe the book was hokum, but it was suggestive.

  Did you just come in from the tree? I asked Aura.

  No, she said. Mi amor, that’s your imagination. Pobrecito. She giggled. Why would I want to hide in a tree in the middle of winter?

  So this is my imagination, too?

  No, this really is me. Of course it is.

  Aura, do you promise?

  Sí, mi amor, it’s me.

  I don’t get it. If you can visit me like you are now, then why don’t you come all the time? I’ve been so lonely without you.

  We’re not allowed out that often, she said. If I were here all the time, then I would be a ghost, and I don’t want to be a ghost. Ghosts suffer.

  That makes sense, I said. And I thought, It really does make sense.

  There was so much I wanted to ask her. Well, just imagine. But before I could get another word out, Aura said, Frank, I came now because I need you to do something for me. I want you to go to Paris to find my mother.

  Your mother’s in Paris?

  But Aura was gone, dispelled back into the air, into the chilled early morning light.

  I wrote an e-mail to Brasi and asked him to find out for me if Aura’s mother was in Paris. He wrote back that same day to tell me that he was sure Juanita was in Mexico. He’d seen her that morning at the UNAM.

  22

  A novel I read in the weeks after I was hit by the car had been recently published: it was described as a 9/11 book, the horror of that day and its dark aftermath being the cause of a separation between the main character and his traumatized wife, who leaves him in New York and takes their child back to Europe. It was a lonely story, narrated by a depressed main character, but near the end of the book, when he gets his wife and child back, his circumstances seem to brighten. They take a trip to a tropical beach, where the narrator discovers bodysurfing and encourages his wife to bodysurf, too. He tells her that it’s easy. What he describes as a slightly menacing wave comes along, and he says something like, Here we go, and he raises his arms and puts his head down, catches the wave, and surfaces however many yards away, exhilarated. But the wife hasn’t moved. She could care less about bodysurfing. When he exhorts her to catch the next wave she answers that she’d rather just swim, and coolly floats away on her back.

  Too uncanny, an impossible coincidence. Did the author know? When he made the wife reject her husband’s invitation to bodysurf and she just swims away, did he know that he was saving her life?

  Unbearable, if the answer to that question is actually yes.

  23

  At our wedding we put a disposable cardboard camera on every table, but afterward we left the cameras we’d collected in the apartment in Escandón, inside a plastic trash bag. It was only a few weeks after Aura died that I finally took them, about fifteen cardboard cameras in all, to a film lab in Mexico City
to be developed. I was surprised by how many intimate shots of Aura and me there were among the two hundred or so snapshots that came back. The two of us kissing, whispering to each other at our table, standing together in the shadows at the edges of the party, dancing close. It was as if private detectives had been hidden among the guests, spying on us, gathering evidence. These pictures seemed more close in, somehow, than those taken by the professional wedding photographer. Yet not one of those disposable camera spies caught either of us with even an accidental expression on our faces that I wasn’t happy with. My favorite of those snapshots, taken near the end of the party, is of Aura alone, from behind, carrying her bridal, platform disco shoes in her hand like an athlete leaving the field, one bare foot kicked back as she steps, hoisting the dress’s hem, her blistered sole smudged with shoe dye, perspiration, and even blood from all the hours of dancing. It turned out that the quick eye and reflexes that caught Aura’s naked foot just as it kicked back didn’t belong to some lucky amateur but to our friend Pia, a photographer whose work is shown all over the world. The black-and-white photograph on our wedding invitation was Pia’s, too—the invitations were Pia’s and her husband Gonzalo’s wedding gift to us—taken in a street near their Montmartre apartment. It shows Aura from the waist down in her winter coat and boots, one of my legs is on the left and our hands are joined in the middle; the heart of the image, though, is our stark shadows falling across the sun-brightened cobblestones, holding hands.

  We didn’t begin to look for a Catholic priest who could marry us until three months before the wedding. Aura’s mother wanted this, and I thought my mother would be happy, too. Mostly, I wanted to appease Juanita. The wedding planning was getting out of control. There’d been plenty of tense conversations about money, and disagreements, especially between Aura and her mother, who had different ideas. That wedding is the concrete foundation of my credit card debt. Juanita and I were more or less splitting the costs. She was inviting at least a hundred guests—family, friends, and colleagues, from all over Mexico—and Aura and I were inviting about sixty friends. In the end, more than two hundred people came. Our wedding planners, a team of San Miguel de Allende gringa expats, had plenty of suggestions that were surely perfect for the sorts of weddings they usually put together and that they relentlessly pushed on us but that I was constantly having to push back against, while at the same time trying to avoid the impression, before the wedding planners but also before Juanita, that I was skimping because I couldn’t afford it. No, we really didn’t want the wedding-party cover band the planners always employed; we’d hire our own DJ in the DF. We didn’t want illuminated thunder sticks, a Mexican hat dance, or a fireworks display. Yes, we did want the live donkey with flagons of tequila holstered to its saddle. We did want papel picado banners hung inside the tent over the tables, with “Aura & Frank” cut into them. It was Juanita’s idea to also order some that read, “Viva Red Sox,” in honor of my father’s memory. We did want mariachis for after the ceremony and at the end of the party. We wanted the tequila to last until dawn. I told Aura that I wanted our wedding to be like the climactic village fiesta scene in that movie The Wild Bunch, minus the massacre. I teased her that my best men, Saqui and Gonzalo, and I were going to ride in for the wedding ceremony on horseback and dressed in charro gear, like Steve Martin, Chevy Chase, and Martin Short in Three Amigos.

  But it turned out to be much harder than we’d expected to find a priest who could or would marry us. Mexican couples usually reserve their priests a year in advance, and are supposed to attend classes, and the priests expect to conduct the wedding Mass inside a church. None of that was in our plans. Couldn’t we find some easygoing lefty priest? Aura knew of a Catholic school and monastery run by Dominicans in the south of the city that, because of its activist role in poor neighborhoods and Chiapas, had some kind of unofficial involvement with the university, and she made an appointment. The school’s reception area was in an open corridor alongside a cement courtyard. The priest who came out to meet us looked like a high school football coach: a broad-shouldered man in windbreaker and jeans, with neatly combed gray hair, wearing silver-framed glasses. He was French, Padre Jacques. He sat against the edge of the reception desk, arms folded across his chest, while we sat before him like schoolchildren, in plastic chairs. We explained what we wanted: for him, if willing, to come to Atotonilco, the old Catholic shrine village outside of San Miguel, on the twentieth of August, to marry us. But instead of inside the church itself, our wedding would be on the grounds of a restored old hacienda we’d rented; if, under those circumstances, he couldn’t do a whole Mass—we didn’t actually want a nuptial Mass—we’d be grateful if he could say a blessing. We’d pay travel expenses, of course, and whatever else he charged.

  Aura had had the normal Catholic childhood education—some Sunday school, catechism classes, First Communion—and as a baby I’d been baptized and confirmed. Mostly, we confessed, we were doing this to please our mothers. Padre Jacques seemed to understand, and didn’t plumb us further. But he had plenty to say. His Spanish, however fluent, poured out sounding like French, his mouth making the forceful exertions of an excited French speaker, his chin jabbing at us. He only required six weeks of preparation classes. We still had time. Christ also reveals his oneness with us through the sacrament of marriage—so began the lesson part. Misterio Sacramental hasta la muerte, I definitely remember those words. Marriage, like all the sacraments, was best understood as a preparation for the final sacrament of death and for the eternal grace of salvation; that was his main point. It was about preparing our children for the eternal grace of salvation, and their children’s children. On and on he went, repeating the words “Christ,” “death,” and “salvation,” seemingly in every possible combination, getting more and more worked up and abstract. For some reason, this tirade made me feel like Woody Allen in Annie Hall, when he sits down to Thanksgiving dinner with the WASP family and they say grace and suddenly he turns into a Hassid. I was sharply biting the inside of my cheek to keep from laughing. Aura was straining to look attentive and serious, but I saw her eyes widen and her lips thin, and realized she was trying not to burst out laughing, too. Death, Christ, death, marriage, salvation, the Holy Ghost, the Trinity, on he went. Thank you, Padre, yes, we understand, our marriage is a preparation for eternal salvation. But Padre Jacques couldn’t marry us anyway, not in late August. No, c’est impossible. Still, we needed to come to the preparation classes. Out on the sidewalk Aura and I leaned against the whitewashed wall, barking with laughter, jajaja. What a bizarro priest! Oh, mi amor, I was trying so hard not to laugh, me too, that was hilarious, the way he kept going on about death! Jojojo.

  I don’t think we’re going to find a priest to marry us, I said. I’m ready to give up. Aura said, Yeah, I don’t even want a priest anymore. She wasn’t even sure she wanted a wedding, not a big one. She’d be happier, she kept insisting, if we just got married at city hall in New York.

  Then how did we, Aura, too, in the end, all get so carried away? Maybe Juanita began to see it as the kind of wedding she’d always dreamed of putting on for her daughter, in scale at least, however else it fell short of her fantasy, beginning with the groom; a wedding she never could have afforded on her own. The wedding was also a new way to prove to Juanita how much I loved her daughter. Juanita who’d once grabbed my BlackBerry off a restaurant table, inspected it, and held it aloft while she announced that I couldn’t be as in love with Aura as I claimed because I didn’t have a single photograph of her in my phone. But that BlackBerry didn’t have a camera, and I’d never e-mailed photographs from my computer to download them onto my phone because it hadn’t even occurred to me to do that. I remember kind of marveling at Juanita, that she’d honed in on this one chink in a love that I was always so proud to show off, like the proverbial tiny slipup that undoes the perfect crime. The wedding planning was one more thing that strained Aura’s nerves, but she got caught up in it anyway, spending hours organizing and
updating the wedding planning Web site on her laptop. She burned CDs with music that she imagined would play before the ceremony and that always included winsome, girly, Spanish pop from her early adolescence, like Jeanette and Mecano, as if to evoke the mood of a girl’s daydreams of marriage. Planning the seating, drawing diagram after diagram, analyzing why this person or couple should or shouldn’t be seated at the same table with that one, was like turning gossip into a board game.

  Aura and I understood our reasons for getting married; it wasn’t just romantic impulse, like it had mostly been for me the first time, when I was in my midtwenties. We knew there were ways to commit, to “feel married,” without undergoing the official rite. Had Aura and I been more radical-bohemian, planning to raise a family in Berlin or someplace like that, we could have forgone marriage. But we had practical motives, too, such as Aura’s immigration status. Also: a wedding as public expression-recognition-celebration with family and friends. I have found my missing half. We have found in each other. Let’s be joined in every way possible, including by marriage. Let’s make children.

  Our fat leather-bound wedding photo album that Natalia will so like to pore over, in childhood, in girlhood, in scornful adolescence: Look at Mom standing next to that little donkey in its straw sombrero, laughing, hair blowing across her face—okay, she does look beautiful—a bottle of tequila in her hand, a strap of her wedding dress fallen off her shoulder exposing that infamous tattoo she had until she got it lasered off just before I was born so that the whole world wouldn’t see it every time she had to breast-feed me. Mom gaping in astonishment as Daddy cuts into the wedding cake with a machete! Tía Fabis and Tía Lida throwing rose petals over Mom, and she’s smiling and jumping up into a cloud of falling petals, hands held out, so that she looks like she’s levitating. But, yuck, Daddy dyed his hair. You can tell that he dyed his hair because it’s so solid and black, not like in all the other pictures from back then. Mom made him do it. She said, Yeah, I made Papi dye his hair. See how your father would do anything for me? Poor ole Dad. Mom wanted him to look younger, especially in front of all Mama Juanita’s friends, colleagues, and distant relatives. That was before Mom finally forced my grandmother into AA by telling her she was barred from babysitting me if she didn’t go. Now Mama Juanita hasn’t had a drink of liquor in fifteen years! That doesn’t stop her from making fun of Daddy, who she treats like he’s a giant brain-damaged ostrich, but she makes fun of everybody, she’s hilarious, I love her; when I stay with her in her house in Taxco on school vacations I have the best time! After Mom wrote that famous book about the Mexican girl who goes to live with her shrink husband in a French lunatic asylum and invents the robot shoes, she and Daddy bought the house back from my great-grandmother Mama Violeta’s former maid, but that’s another story that I’ve heard a zillion times.