Say Her Name (12 page)

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 sent one to the newspaper,
La Jornada
.

My ma gave a lecture at the university, it was padrísima, I felt so happy!

I just got dressed and I’m fed up, Mamá is impossible, I don’t know what’s going on with her but the truth is I’m not really liking her that much, let’s say just the opposite, it’s just that we can’t get along anything I say she gets angry, even when I haven’t finished the first word of my sentence. But maybe I’m just in a bad mood and so I’m going to go outside and skate.

Something has happened, it feels weird, nothing is the same as before. Papá is always away, and when I see him on weekends, something isn’t right.

I think I need a new kind of friend. I’d like a friendship full of love, where we’d always be telling each other how much we love each other, talking in signs, forming a great team, but so far I haven’t found that kind of friend.

Today has been the same as others. I didn’t get bored but I didn’t have fun either. But in the afternoon we’re going to Perisur to buy Katia a bathing suit.

I went to eat and as I can’t stand eating with Katia I went to the kitchen with Ursula. She was finished but I promised to eat fast and quietly, then I sat with Ursula and had tea with a sweet bun and I said things to her in English and explained what the words meant.

Cárdenas got various votes including those of my mother and father and I support them. We went and stood outside the Congress building to support our party. The people from the PAN made noise but we just made V for victory signs with our hands and whenever somebody from the PRI came out to talk we all turned our backs. My mother knew one of them from the PRI and when he came over she started insulting him. I carried a sign that said

NO
AL FRAUDE

Today I’ve been happy and I learned that just because a mother can’t be with her daughter all the time, that doesn’t make her a bad mother, it’s not the amount of time that matters.

I’m wearing a bra!

Dear Diary:

Surely you are asking yourself why I am writing to you. Again, problems with your mother, or feeling lonely? No, today it’s not that, I just felt like writing. I’ll tell you everything that has happened—

We went to Disco Patín at night. There was a big rink and a little one, all lit up. We were skating in the big one—some poor mongolotito was following us, but they made him leave.

I met an instructor.

I don’t know why Frida got mad at me.

I feel like a flea, nobody pays attention to me, I feel like I’m going to cry. To feel like a flea is humiliating and too painful for me. I just have to hear that little laugh from my “PERFECT” sister who only receives praise, congratulations and love, and my heart feels tossed into the trash. But I suppose that’s just the way life is, some people are superior to others.

Played Atari like crazy, rearranged my Barbie house, watched television, read, set the table.

Entering secondaria [middle school] has been incredible. The worst has been my relations with my mother. I can’t stand her anymore because if she has no interest in my things, why do I have to be interested in hers?

Advice on how not to be like my maldita perra mother

1. Don’t discourage your children.

2. Don’t yell at them.

3. Make it so that they spend every day marvelously and never even find out what boredom is.

I’m a total pendeja of a girl. I never pay attention to anything and I’m fed up with myself, I HATE MYSELF. I want somebody I can tell all this to, somebody to hug, a lot and very tightly. But I look around, and I find no one.

Dear Diary:

Mamá isn’t here, I’m alone in the house so I can do what I want, my mother has forbidden me from going outside but I don’t care I’ll go out anyway, with that man with the motorcycle, the truth is he drives really fast.

I go with him, he lets me off at the wrong place and I’m hungry so I go into the store and slip some chocolate bars into my pocket but the employee sees me and I run out into the street but he catches me by the shoulder and takes the chocolate bars back, the next time I steal I better take more precaution.

Then I went to that horrible market and I ran into Luís who gave me whiskey, at first it was really strong but then I got used to it. Around 10:40 a.m. I decided to go home just in time to deceive my mother.

We had eggs for breakfast but I wasn’t hungry, the whiskey was more than enough. Then I had to accompany my mother to work and while she thinks that I’m sitting here at one of the many desks, I go down to the 1st floor, to the coke machine, I find it and carefully, without anyone seeing me, I bang the machine and pull out a soft drink. Mmmm, yummy. Then I go upstairs, and my mother doesn’t know anything that I’ve done today.

Maybe Aura suspected that her mother was snooping in her diary, or else that last entry was just a fantasy. By then, though, Aura had started tagging along with the older kids in the Copilco complex, and some of the stories she told me weren’t so different from that one, so who knows?

Juanita and I never had the chance to sit down together to talk about how to divide Aura’s belongings; we never came close to having that conversation. I would have given her almost whatever she wanted, the childhood diaries for sure. I did get a phone call from Juanita’s cousin, who told me that Juanita wanted Aura’s computer, but I said no, and not only because I’d bought it for Aura, but because so much of what was on it belonged to both of us, or was a part of our relationship—photos, music, the wedding site, texts we’d worked on together, and all Aura’s fiction was saved there. What I did instead was take the computer to a technician and pay him to copy the contents of Aura’s hard drive onto disks, minus, on the advice of a lawyer, her e-mail accounts. But about a month after Aura’s death, I received an e-mail from Juanita’s lawyer—a lawyer from the university, one of Leopoldo’s colleagues—giving me two days to vacate the Escandón apartment where Aura and I had been living. Actually, it wasn’t even an e-mail to me, it was sent to a friend of mine who’d come down for our wedding and also for the funeral, a lawyer in New York, but Juanita and her lawyer
seemed to be assuming that he must be my lawyer, which he wasn’t, though he did help me to find one in Mexico. They probably had no legal right to evict me, the widowed husband, so abruptly, even though it was technically Juanita’s apartment, but I had no desire or will to fight. It wasn’t that I was afraid of what they could do to me. I fled from having to confront the full force of their hatred and blame. I took everything in the apartment with me. That must have surprised Juanita. She probably expected me to leave most of Aura’s stuff behind, including that old steamer trunk in which she kept her childhood diaries and her old school papers and such. I took the disks with the contents of Aura’s computer back to Brooklyn with me, too.

One thing I did leave behind in the apartment was a copy of Leopoldo’s book of political aphorisms, inscribed to Aura. I put the book down on the floor, open, spine up, and stomped it, imprinting it with my footprint, and kicked it into a pile of trash. I left behind our cheaper furniture, too, including the pine dining table from the Tlalpan carpentry market, with Aura’s old school papers and old family photographs neatly stacked on top; also an envelope in which I’d put the silver charm bracelet that had belonged to Juanita when she was a child, “Juanita” engraved on its little plaque, with a note explaining that Aura had worn the bracelet into the ocean that last day.

I have an uncle who’s going to hate you, Aura had told me shortly after we started going out. And you’re going to hate him.

But I didn’t hate Leopoldo. He was one of Aura’s few relatives, she loved him, and he seemed to love her, so I did my best to get along with the guy. Anyway, he was funny. He liked to speak in aphorisms. Watching an elderly couple making a crabby, gesticulating scene with a waitress in a restaurant we were in, he remarked, in the same light dry tone he must have used when he charmed six-year-old Aura by referring to her and her cousins as bichitos:
Los viejitos sólo deben salir para ser amables, Old people should only go out in public to be sweet.

But he was also a haughty, vain, and pretentious man who knew exactly how he came off and, at least in some instances, seemed to enjoy making people wonder if he was really as appalling as he seemed, or if it was all just a twisted performance. As she had with Juanita, Mama Violeta had sent Leopoldo away at a young age, but to a military school in Tabasco where, as an intelligent, sensitive and lonely boy, he’d suffered horrors. The seething wound of those years was the source of his ramrod stiff bearing, his antiquated formality, and his general misanthropy and hostility.