Say Her Name (13 page)

I never really understood that he hated me until, at Aura’s funeral, I caught him staring at me. I was weeping, friends were pressed around me, it seemed I couldn’t greet anybody or receive an embrace without breaking down. I turned my head and caught Leopoldo aiming a stare of cold hatred directly at me. I remember thinking, What’s that about? but I quickly dismissed it, it seemed perfectly right for everybody to be acting crazy. Soon I understood that stare better. There was more to it than hate. There was scrutiny in it, the cold reflection of a developing suspicion and logic. He stared at me like he thought he was investigator Porfiry Petrovich and I was Raskolnikov.

10

That first winter of Aura’s death I was fixated on not losing my gloves, my hat, or my scarf. Since first being entrusted with the responsibility of looking after gloves, hat, and scarf in kindergarten, I’d probably never gotten through a whole winter without losing all of them. Aura was just the same, probably even worse. There were about a dozen single unpaired gloves, hers and mine, scattered around inside our big closet like unmated birds in a forlorn aviary. At least once every winter Aura would fall in love with a new winter hat, winter hats still being a novelty to her, and she’d wear it everywhere, even when it wasn’t cold out, and when I’d swoon over how cute she looked and want to cover her winter-glowing cheeks in kisses, I’d think, It’s just a matter of time before she loses this hat, and I was never wrong. One morning there I’d be, trying to reconstruct our path through the city the night before, phoning every bar and restaurant we’d been in, often speaking in Spanish to morning restaurant cleanup crews or kitchen workers and describing the hat Aura might have left behind. Everywhere I went that first winter without Aura, I was always patting the pockets of my down jacket to make sure the gloves were there, the pocket zippers closed, no matter how drunk I was, I’d suddenly remember to do that. If I noticed that a pocket’s zipper was open with a glove stuffed inside, if I saw any part of a glove or finger protruding, I’d gasp or even curse myself and zip it closed with such emphatic self-recrimination that, on the street or the subway or at the next table, I often drew alarmed and curious stares. Mi amor, I’m not going to lose these gloves, I promise, I’d mutter away, as if they were her gloves and she was depending on me to bring them home to her. And I didn’t, all that winter, for the first time ever that I remember, lose either
my gloves or my hat. But I did lose my scarf, during a long night of drinking in January, in Berlin, where I spent three weeks during that first winter without Aura, when I’d wanted to flee Brooklyn during the holidays, and then I refused to buy a new one, despite that city’s winter cold that feels like it blows in off Russian steppe battlefields strewn with frozen corpses. When I got back to Brooklyn about a week later I started wearing one of Aura’s scarves instead, a black pashmina with a white pattern, embroidered with silvery threads. People would say, What a nice scarf, or, What a pretty scarf, and I’d say, It’s Aura’s, and sometimes people, especially women, would respond, Yes, I thought it must be, or they’d give me a little pat on the shoulder. That was the scarf I was tying on again as I got ready for my second winter without Aura.

This time I didn’t even get as far as mid-December before I reached into the pocket of my jacket one evening as I was coming out of a subway exit and realized that I’d lost a glove. I went into our closet and found an old left-hand glove from some other separated pair, and when I soon lost that glove, too, I didn’t care. But I was still determined not to lose my hat, a gray cloth aviator cap with synthetic-fur-lined flaps. Aura was with me when I bought it for ten dollars in Chinatown during our last winter.

Aura lived in the Copilco apartment from about the age of six until she went away to the University of Texas. After she came back from Brown she lived in her mother’s new high-rise condo apartment for a few months, before moving on her own back to Copilco, where her mother hadn’t sold that apartment yet. Copilco was where Aura and I spent our first night together. So many of the turning-point moments in Aura’s life happened there. When she was eleven her grandmother Mama Violeta came from Taxco for what was supposed to be a month’s visit, maybe longer; there was even a chance that Mama Violeta was going to move in and live with them. But within days a fight erupted, overheard by Aura in her bedroom, her grandmother horribly insulting her mother, and her mother’s indignant shouts ordering Mama Violeta to leave. And Mama Violeta did leave, except she didn’t just storm out and stalk around the parking lot until she calmed down and came back and tearfully apologized to her daughter for the terrible things she’d said and vice versa, as Aura had expected; instead she packed up her suitcase and left, and never again spoke to her daughter, or even to her granddaughter. Back then Juanita rarely drank alcohol, and she went jogging with Rodrigo on weekends and took aerobics classes; her body was firm, her skin smooth and fresh, and she always dressed nicely. Oh, she was so lovely, you can’t imagine, Aura used to tell me with an adoring little girl’s pride. Aura never discovered, or never told me, what had caused the fight, but she believed that if one moment marked the beginning of her mother’s long, at first almost invisible, decline, it was that rupture with Mama Violeta.

Six years later, Juanita expelled Katia from the Copilco apartment, too. By then Katia was no longer considered so perfect. Excited by the possibilities of her own beauty, boy crazy and head-strong, she’d been battling Juanita throughout her adolescence. And then, despite her excellent grades, she’d failed the highly competitive UNAM admission exam. But when Katia, who wanted to study business administration and dreamed of a career in fashion,
was admitted to a private university, Juanita somehow came up with the tuition money and gave it to her. Some weeks went by. In the afternoons and evenings, Katia came home with shopping bags from Palacio de Hierro and other upscale stores, once sporting a pair of new Italian leather boots that in Aura’s memory became so iconic that years later, whenever she shopped for boots in New York or stopped to look in shop windows, it was always as if she saw Katia’s boots among the ones on display, barely worn, a little dusty and tragic, and she’d remember her stepsister who’d suddenly vanished from her life after having practically dominated it, like a tyrant really, for so long. For years Juanita, so as not to upset Rodrigo, had nearly turned a blind eye to Katia’s daily bullying of her younger stepsister. But when Juanita found out that although Katia had been pretending to go off to classes in the mornings she’d never matriculated and was spending the tuition money on clothes, on those boots, and on her boyfriend, she banished Katia from the household. Rodrigo did not defend his daughter, maybe didn’t dare to try. Katia was nineteen, no longer a child, and she’d committed a crime of seemingly demonic ingratitude; well, now she would have to learn to be responsible for herself. And Katia wasted no time in taking control of her life, as if being expelled from Copilco and her family was just what she’d been wishing for. She found a place to live, some modeling work, and then steadier employment as a secretary in an economics institute, and went back to school part-time, paying her own tuition. Rodrigo went on seeing his daughter more or less in secret. Juanita never forgave Katia. But Katia never forgave Juanita, either, and never apologized or gave any sign of wishing for a rapprochement. Ten years would go by before Aura and Katia saw each other again.

Though Aura hadn’t seen or spoken to her grandmother since she was eleven, she kept a framed photograph of Mama Violeta in our bedroom in Brooklyn. The photograph showed a fair-skinned, if wrinkly, European-looking woman with long bony limbs, flaccid cheeks, slack-mouthed (Juanita’s mouth when she was sad, exactly), and a familiar turbulence in her hurt-looking, intelligent
eyes. A frilly cushion that Mama Violeta had embroidered with Baudelairian purple, pearl gray, and crimson black-stemmed flowers and “AURA” stitched across the flowerpot in yellow was on our bed, atop the quilt of many colors.

Aura’s famous first therapy session, when she was eleven:

Do you feel that your mother listens to you, Aura?

Does
your
mother listen to
you,
Doctora?

Juanita, worried about the effects of so much traumatic leaving and cleaving on the girls—Aura’s father, Katia’s mother, Mama Violeta—had made separate appointments for each with Dr. Nora Banini, a psychoanalyst on the faculty of the psychology department. The elfin girl with the animated face and raspy voice, hair falling over her eyes, sitting forward on the soft leather couch, elbows propped on her lap, chin resting upon interlaced fingers, stared directly back at Nora Banini, seated opposite, who serenely persisted.

You seem angry, Aura, but you’ve just met me, so I don’t think you can really be angry with me. Is it your mother you’re angry with?

But I
do
want to get to know you, Doctora. Are you angry with
your
mother?

Please, Aura, call me Nora. Maybe you’re feeling angry with your mother for bringing you here today? Why do you think she wanted us to have this chance to talk?

Let’s talk about
your
mother. Is she nice to you? Why don’t you want to talk about your mother, Doctora?

Aura would keep on seeing Nora Banini until she was twenty-seven, though by then only when back on visits from New York. Katia, paying for her own sessions, would keep on seeing Nora Banini, too, until she was into her thirties, married and a mother.

In the summer of 1990—Berlin Wall down, Soviet Union on the cusp of collapse—Aura was sent to a summer camp in Cuba. By then Juanita, as much to antagonize Rodrigo as for any other reason, had
transformed into a jeering antileftist. So why send Aura there? Aura had once dreamed of studying ballet with the great Alicia Alonso, but those dreams were past. At thirteen, radicalized by Mexico’s stolen presidential election and the U.S. invasion of Panama, Aura was noisily declaring herself a Communist and a Cuban-type revolutionary and Juanita foresaw, or so Aura would always claim, that all it would take to demolish her daughter’s utopian illusions would be a few weeks in Cuba itself. The camp was by a beach and brought together young adolescents from all over the world, many from the Scandinavian countries. They were housed in what seemed to be an old hospital, with long green-painted corridors lined with airless green rooms, six cots in every room. That first night Aura couldn’t get to sleep; she was kept awake by the room’s suffocating heat, the pitch darkness, and the sonar weeping of another Mexican girl in a neighboring room whose wallet, stuffed with dollars given to her by her parents, had already been stolen. Within her first few days there, Aura lost her sandals on the beach, and then her sneakers were either lost or stolen, too. She ended up going barefoot. Every meal was rice and beans, and after each meal the campers had to scrape their leftovers into buckets that were brought around so that this could be added to the rice and beans served at the next meal, making an increasingly gluey and muddy-looking gruel. Aura stopped eating. When her mother went to pick her up at Benito Juárez Airport, Aura had lost so much weight she was holding her pants up with her hands, she was barefoot, her sun-caramelized skin was spotty with scratched-raw insect bites, and her clothes hadn’t been washed since she’d left Mexico. When Juanita asked her how she’d spent the three weeks at camp, she answered cheerfully:

Making out with Danish boys, Mami!

For Aura, “Communism” would forever after provoke a retch-inducing recall of communal buckets of rancid rice and beans. But her new scrawniness gave her a gamine prettiness that even she couldn’t deny. The anxious delight stirred by what she discovered in the mirror when she got home quickly developed into a borderline anorexia that would endure well into her twenties. Within weeks
she met the boy who would become her first boyfriend, at an all-night outdoor rave in the Bosque de Tlalpan. Juanita, naturally, had forbidden Aura to attend raves, an impediment solved via the ruse of fake sleepovers at girlfriends’ houses. That ruse exposed soon enough, Aura was grounded for two months, a period she always recounted fondly because of her discovery one Sunday afternoon, in Tío Leopoldo’s study, of a blue-bound volume of the selected works of Oscar Wilde, a name she recognized from Gandhi bookstore calendars and also from a T-shirt worn by
un dark
known as O.D., who painted his fingernails and eyes black and was a friend of the boy she’d met at the rave: the sad-eyed, jowly visage and folded-wings hairdo imprinted on O.D.’s T-shirt had reminded her of Mama Violeta. Aura brought the volume back to Copilco to accompany her through the remaining weeks of her imprisonment. In pink felt-tip pen, on the cover of her notebook, she wrote, “I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train,” surrounded by a little flock of pink hearts. Fifteen years later, when we moved into the Escandón apartment, she unpacked that same hefty blue volume from a box of books, held it up, and told me the story; now it’s in Brooklyn.

Dos Santos was the name of the boy she’d met at the rave, and he was eighteen, five years older than Aura. Dos Santos was actually his surname but Aura only used his first name whenever she phoned him at home and one of his parents answered. In the old steamer trunk where Aura also stored her diaries, I found Dos Santos’s poems, hundreds of them, reams of photocopied pages stuffed into plastic grocery bags. Around when they met, Dos Santos had also finished writing a six-hundred-or-so-page novel that he gave to his father to read. His father eagerly did so and, when he’d finished, told his son that it was worthless garbage, lacking any sign of talent or promise. For all his diffident airs, Dos Santos was a trusting and even naive boy who revered his dad, an eminent economist at the ITAM. Utterly crushed, he swore he’d never write again, even though he claimed there was nothing else worth living for.