Say Her Name

by Francisco Goldman

  Still, as her thirtieth birthday approached, none of this—a few publications, work, ambition—was enough to soothe her. Aura could recite the names of every writer more or less of her own generation who’d published a novel or book of stories or essays in English or Spanish before they were thirty and she began to drive herself and me crazy with this scorekeeping. Aura, my darling, this desperation was something you were going to have to overcome. Those other writers hadn’t spent their twenties studying for PhDs they didn’t even want, I kept telling her. They’d devoted at least part of those years to their writing. It was okay! She’d started a little late but she was doing great! Better than great! Couldn’t she see how great she was doing? Hadn’t she realized that everybody saw how gifted she was?

  Well, not everybody. She’d been roughly criticized in a workshop by some of the students and hadn’t taken it well. (A story that has since been posthumously published in Harper’s, no less.) If one student said only one negative thing, she fixated on that and tuned out all praise.

  This summer, mi amor, two weeks at the beach in Mazunte. We’ll rent a beach house. Just three more months to go!

  She endured another of those stretches where every morning she woke before dawn and lay awake worrying. She got out of bed feeling dizzy and exhausted. Sometimes she put coffee grounds in the coffee maker but forgot to put in water before turning it on; or she put in water but no coffee. Maybe all this was a normal symptom of turning thirty? She phoned Lola, soon turning thirty, too, and asked what was the first thing on her mind when she woke in the mornings, and Lola said, To go and pee.

  It didn’t help matters that I was finishing my own book, which made me seem remote and self-absorbed. Aura would sit at her desk in the next room sometimes pounding out gibberish on her clattering keyboard to drown out my relentless typing. My inattentiveness irritated and wounded her. Every day she upbraided me about forgetting to make the bed, or for leaving gunk in the sink after I’d washed the dishes, or for not shutting a drawer in the bedroom bureau. My workload wasn’t quite as brutal as Aura’s but I was under pressure, too. I was teaching two classes and was behind on the book, which had to be turned in by May. It was a narrative nonfiction book about a case of political murder in Central America, hard-fought in the courts and with ties to organized crime. The case was rife with violence—witnesses, potential witnesses, and other people related to the case kept getting murdered or disappeared—and had a cast of sinister and even psychopathic characters, including a few who’d become somewhat entangled in my life, if at a seemingly safe distance. The reporting was pretty much finished; I made one last short trip that spring, and was keeping up by Internet. That book sometimes took over my inner life in a way that I hated, infusing it with a silent obsessed frenzy and violent emotions that made me feel isolated in a world I was determined to shield Aura from. I worried about revenge too, about killers who might know that harming Aura would be the surest way to ruin me. No such thing was likely to happen, but my fear that they could easily reach us in Mexico if they wanted to—some of them had ties to narcos, to the Cartel del Golfo and Los Zetas—demanded precautions. That was why I told Aura that, with the book coming out in the fall, this would be our last summer in Mexico for at least two years. In three years, I figured, the most dangerous of those enemies, if they were still alive, would have fresher targets.

  We’d spend the next summer in France; somehow we’d manage that, I promised her. And this summer we’d spend in Mexico, with those two weeks in Mazunte, rent a beach house there; I promised that, too. But it turned out that Aura was conflicted about spending even that summer in Mexico. She kept saying that she wanted to experience at least one summer in New York. If I said summer in New York was awful, hot, noisy, smelly, she said she wanted to find that out for herself and that I had no right to spoil it for her just because I’d lived there so long. Her friends loved summer in New York! At times she became fixated, again, on wanting to move to a new apartment, one with a garden, where we could have a dog. She spent hours cruising Craigslist for rentals, for a place that would allow pets. What she really wanted was to devote her energies to herself for once, to her own writing. It should have been obvious to me what was making her not want to go to Mexico. Even if it would have been impossible that summer for Aura not to feel that she had to be near her mother—and I believe it would have been impossible; but would it have been impossible?—I could have insisted that we go for only a month. We shouldn’t have gone at all. I should have helped her be as ruthless and selfish, for once, as perhaps she was yearning to be. I could have found a garden apartment to rent, in a cheaper neighborhood. Our downstairs tenants actually moved out in April and that apartment was briefly available. There was about a five-day window when we could have snagged it. The backyard had rosebushes, two apple trees and a fig tree, shrubs, vegetable and flower plots, and grape vines on the fence, most of it requiring constant upkeep so we couldn’t go away for the summer and let the grass turn to hay and everything be choked by weeds, withering in the summer sun. Also, that apartment rented for a thousand dollars a month more than ours. And you still weren’t allowed pets. No, Ow-rra. I wanted to go to Mexico. Universal jury, if you want to find me guilty of something, find me guilty on that count. We should have stayed in New York that summer, tending our garden. ¿Le gusta este jardín?

  For years, Aura had worried that Rodrigo was going to leave her mother. Juanita’s drinking, which had worsened, was usually his stated reason for their marital problems, though there were others. With more urgency than before, Aura had been begging and nagging her mother to seek help. During their nearly daily phone calls and Internet chats, they often fought furiously about it. One night in Mexico over Christmas break, Juanita and Rodrigo had come to meet us in a Condesa cantina-restaurant. We sat at a large round table drinking with our friends. When it was time to go, Juanita, leaning forward in her chair, reached across and around the table to snatch up glasses to drain the dregs, eyes fastening on each drink as if lining up a pool shot. Jaime, the deep-voiced Spaniard, murmured one of his kind jaunty jokes, Ay, caray, she beat me to it—something like that. Aura tried to be stoic but seeing her shame and anger went into me like a dagger. Her cheeks turned almost gray and with her grim expression, the sobered-up sadness in her eyes, her tightly downturned lips, it was like getting a glimpse of what a middle-aged Aura would look like if her life turned out to be a bitter disappointment. She shot a glare at her stepfather, helplessly-guiltily standing there, and went to her mother’s side. Rodrigo had left a self-help paperback on divorce on the backseat of Juanita’s car at least a year before and it was always there, like a sleeping skunk no one dared wake. Aura was convinced that her mother’s terror of being left by her husband was what lay behind her drinking, that and her long rupture with her own mother, a constantly bleeding wound. And there was Aura in New York, growing into a woman, married, pursuing her own ambitions, who had less time for her. Abandonment, loneliness, helplessness, fear, all circling, closing in, that’s what Juanita’s life had become. For all Rodrigo’s threats and insinuations that he was going to leave, Aura didn’t fully believe he’d go through with it, for one thing because he didn’t earn enough money to live somewhere halfway decent on his own. He was away, on the road, almost every week and, lately, on weekends, too. He was an athletically fit, still youthful-seeming man; it was hard to believe he didn’t have a lover. And when he was around he inflicted plenty of cruelty, in his passive-aggressive, stolid jock way. Yet, despite everything, you sensed that he was still devoted to Juanita, that it wasn’t just the home she provided. There was an undeniable voltage in her character that he, ordinarily a low-wattage guy, couldn’t unplug from. She kept him on tenterhooks.

  But we’d also perceived that Rodrigo, now a grandfather, yearned to spend more time with his grandchildren—two boys and a girl, the boys about four and two, the girl a newborn. In the past, Rodrigo had spent holidays with Juanita and Aura, choosing his moments to discree
tly phone or go off to be with his long-banished daughter, Katia, but now that he had grandchildren his priorities had changed. That increasing attachment to his family, against Juanita’s ongoing refusal to even acknowledge Katia’s existence, would be, Aura had fretted, what finally drove her stepfather away from her mother for good. If the family could be reunited, at least on holidays—Christmas, Father’s Day—might that be enough to keep Rodrigo from leaving? It was me who’d come up with that theory and, after clearing it with Aura, I’d spoken to Rodrigo. That was how our secret meetings with him and Katia began. I was the special envoi in this round of high-stakes diplomacy. Aura hadn’t seen her stepsister in twelve years. Our negotiations, Aura insisted, had to be kept secret from her mother. So far, we had met with Rodrigo and Katia twice, once the previous summer and again in the winter, in two different restaurants. Both times, Katia came with her husband, who had a midlevel managerial position in a multinational appliances plant outside the city. They dressed like a young suburban couple: Katia, for that first meeting, in a gray jumper dress worn over a white blouse, with unflashy gold earrings and necklace; her husband in a scarlet sweater and dark slacks. Katia still had the perky air of the high school popular girl. Her chestnut hair was long, lustrous, and neat. She had a friendly smile—at least I thought it was friendly—but behind the liveliness of her eyes there was something very guarded. I sensed darkness inside of her, from her childhood, from her wayward years, that she probably never discussed with anybody anymore, except Dr. Nora Banini. I think that was what made me feel that I liked her; I was interested in her, felt an intuitive complicity with her. I had a lot in my past that I kept hidden, too. We’d both done well to survive our own selves and to be where we were now. I told Aura that I couldn’t understand a parent, even a stepparent, banishing even a nineteen-year-old from home with such finality, forever refusing to try for any rapprochement. Of course, Katia had never sought to forgive or be forgiven, either. This was before I understood about Katia’s childhood cruelty to Aura; before Fabis told me about it later, and as it was exposed in Aura’s diaries.

  But I couldn’t have missed noticing, in Katia’s barely restrained cheeriness, how deeply satisfying our first meeting was to her. We’d come to her, to ask her to help save Juanita’s marriage. Katia let us know that she wasn’t, in principle, against the idea. She looked at Aura across the table and said that she’d missed her little sister. Aura smiled back at her, said she’d missed her, too, and sank down a little lower in her seat. Under the right circumstances, said Katia, she could see us all getting together for Christmas, but … but … To encourage Katia, I blurted out a passionate little speech about the importance of family, describing myself as a “family-first person.” Rodrigo and Aura both gaped at me and Aura said, with a little laugh, You’re a what? I felt my face turning red. They knew I wasn’t a family-first person, that no member of my own family had even come to our wedding and that I could have cared less. Look, I’m trying to be a diplomat here, I could have argued, not Moses or Jesus. What I meant, I said to Aura, is that as far as you and your family and the family we’re going to make together are concerned, I’m a family-first person now, and I always will be. Katia lit up: Aura, you’re having a baby? Nooo, said Aura, not yet. Someday, I interjected, and Aura nodded, and Rodrigo grinned at us with affection and delight and said, Órale.

  It was Katia’s husband who openly came out against what we were proposing. He seemed clean-cut, sturdy, a little somber, but when he had something to say he was blunt. Why should they risk it? he asked. He knew that Juanita was a difficult woman. Why should he expose his wife and his children, the tranquillity of his family, on Christmas no less, to this difficult situation and to this difficult woman. Really, it was years too late for this. Katia had no stake in trying to save her father’s marriage, no reason at all not to wish to see it end. The slightly nauseated look on Aura’s face—it was as if she’d just crammed down an entire pastrami sandwich again—showed that she felt she was betraying her mother just by being there. Aura could at least have allowed herself to silently exult a little: she was the one living in New York, enrolled in a PhD program, on her way to becoming a writer like she’d always dreamed. But I doubt Katia thought she was doing any worse, living a straight middle-class life, with a little starter home in the suburbs. She had beautiful kids, a young and devoted husband, a part-time job of her own as a data analyst for a market research company. At our next meeting, Katia’s husband said that it would have to be Juanita who made the first gesture of apology and reconciliation. He probably believed this was a conciliatory offer. If making it had been solely his idea, it would have been.

  Aura said, I’m only here for one reason, to help my mother. If Papi leaves her now, when she’s so vulnerable, it will destroy her. If there’s a way to repair our situation and that will help Papi want to stay, then I have to try to ask for your help. But if you know my mother at all—she looked directly at Katia—then you know she is never going to apologize first.

  Katia and her husband agreed to continue our negotiations when we came back from New York that next summer. In the end it was all for naught. In the spring, about a month before Aura’s thirtieth birthday, Rodrigo left. One late morning while Juanita was at work and he was supposed to be, Rodrigo came back into the apartment, hastily packed his things in boxes, carried them out to the car, and drove away. He snuck out like a rat, said Ursula, the housekeeper, on the phone to Aura. It wasn’t even his own car that he escaped in; he took Aura’s little red Chevy, which he’d lately been driving as if it were his own. Where is he going to live, scoffed Aura, under a bridge? That joke became her way of making light of the loss. I hope Rodrigo is sleeping comfortably tonight, under his bridge. We didn’t know where he was living; probably with Katia, we reasoned. I was surprised at first that this second paternal desertion hadn’t affected Aura as I’d feared it would, stirring up old trauma, but what Aura had always insisted on turned out to be true: only one Dad narrative ran through her life. To her, Rodrigo was first and foremost “the husband,” and now he wasn’t going to be. A few days after he moved out, we flew down to Mexico, the first of two such trips we made that final spring, leaving Friday afternoon after Aura’s last class. On those weekends, instead of going home to our own apartment in Escandón at night, we stayed with Juanita. I slept alone in the foldout couch in the study and Aura slept with her mother in her bed.

  Though supposedly nobody had stayed in our Escandón apartment since I’d been forced by Juanita and her lawyers to vacate it, Fabis, who lived across the corridor, told me in an e-mail that there’d been a few nights when she’d seen the light on in our bedroom. Coming home late from a night out with Juanca, her boyfriend, when she’d stood outside the door sentimentally scratching at the steel panel alongside it with her key—that was how she and Aura used to summon each other—and saying Aura’s name, the lights, she said, had flickered on and off. Spirits in the electricity, signaling by turning lights on and off, wasn’t that a cliché of ghost stories? That last summer, Aura and I had flown down on July 3. A year later, when I flew down to Mexico alone for the first anniversary, I again left on July 3, on that same evening flight from Newark, and went directly to Fabis’s apartment.

  Our apartment had a long horizontal window of frosted glass facing the corridor and, upstairs on the sleeping loft, a vertical window covered by a curtain. The lights were off when I got there but I stood outside our door, stroking it with my hand, whispering to Aura. No lights flickered on and off. Fabis said that she’d last seen the lights on only about a month before. It was hard to believe that Juanita might have come and slept there, in our bed, which I’d left behind. But sometime during the last few weeks someone had disconnected the telephone answering machine. I’d been phoning from Brooklyn for months, to listen to Aura’s hoarse-chipper greeting, until one day it didn’t pick up, and then it never did again. But Fabis had already found out, from one of the tías, what had happened. Rodrigo had taken
the answering machine to use in the new apartment he was renting somewhere in the city. He was still driving Aura’s little red Chevy, too. In the weeks after Aura’s death, Rodrigo had stayed by Juanita’s side; he’d been there for Juanita, as much as he could be, but that hadn’t led to their getting back together. Before he found his own place, had he been sneaking into our apartment to sleep?

  A wall of industrial concrete about eight feet high separated the rear of the parking garage from our apartment’s little garden patio. I could see our bamboos rising high above it, covering the flank of the old factory building next door. The bamboos had grown to a height parallel with the apartment above ours, which also had a glass wall on that side, but no patio. So their view was of our bamboos, of the soft dense foliage of those enormous green plumes, shimmering or pulled sideways in the rain and wind, delicate long shoots protruding like praying mantises waving their legs in the air. I didn’t know our upstairs neighbors, but I’m sure everybody in that building knew about the dead girl on the ground floor. I wonder if they ever thought of Aura when they contemplated our bamboos.