Say Her Name (14 page)

Aura had never before felt so needed by anyone other than her mother. If there’s one thing young writers should never do, Aura told Dos Santos, it’s share their writing with their parents: sound advice that she’d rarely follow herself. She read Dos Santos’s tome and it thrilled her. Honestly, she wasn’t just saying that to make him feel better. Pages of wild prose that invented their own grammar, filled with silly and inscrutable jokes, and such a weird imagination he should be grateful his father hadn’t locked him up in an asylum! (The novel wasn’t among the writings of Dos Santos that I found in the steamer trunk.) Aura’s enthusiasm and praise, probably accompanied by kisses of the sort refined with Danish boys on the beach in Cuba, restored Dos Santos’s conviction in his own literary powers and rebel spirit, and that conviction, after all, had made Dos Santos who he was, a teenaged personage, El Poeta or whatever, not just some eighteen-year-old loser who hung around with a thirteen-year-old girl. Aura and Dos Santos became each other’s most indispensable companions. He was the secret sign-language friend she’d been longing for.

Where’s your sense of humor, mother? Love

It was not abnormal: love. For a person to fall in love, to construct a love that was young and innocent, it is terrible. Nothing abnormal either about believing that everyone was against me—according to Freud, paranoia is a natural reaction of young love. Except that in my case the paranoia was not without basis. It sat firmly on my mother’s shoulders, her whole body its pedestal as a frown descended over her face and she lifted her hands to the sky and groaned when the black object of her hatred came to visit: my First Boyfriend, sitting there—in HER CHAIR!—sporting dark glasses on a dark autumn Friday, under the obvious influence of marijuana. Lighten up, Ma; where’s your sense of humor? But my mother, my single mother, in particular with respect to her thirteen-year-old, pubescent, menstruating daughter, has no sense of humor. Not a drop. My single mother in particular is weighted down with suspicions, rigid with severe admonitions founded on statistics, opinion polls, worst-case scenarios. All of which had nothing, or very little, but more likely nothing at all to do with the fact that her daughter was in love for the first time. Instead of tenderness and concern, the punishments and prohibitions rained down like leaves dropping prematurely from the trees. That autumn never went away: it toppled the future before it in a domino reaction.
Fast forward
, when what I wanted was
rewind
.

—Aura Estrada

An authoritative mother’s unyielding disdain for her adolescent daughter’s boyfriend will usually win out, and Dos Santos and Aura were a couple few half-awake mothers would encourage. Dos Santos did eventually recede from Aura’s life, as if being slowly pulled away in an undertow that not even he noticed until he was disappearing into the lost years of his midtwenties. But Aura never stopped believing in Dos Santos—as years later she believed in me. Whenever we were just back in Mexico City and went into a bookstore, I always knew what she was hoping to find on the table of new books: Dos Santos’s just-published first novel or poetry collection. And I’d think, but I’d never say, He’s well into his thirties now, if it’s going to happen, isn’t it about time?

The last time I saw Lola, Aura’s best friend at the UNAM, who was also raised by a single mother in Mexico City, she said:

I used to wish I had a mother like that, who I knew would look out for me and fight for me no matter what. Do you know what I mean? A mother who fights for you like a mother should, but also the way a father should.

More or less, I understood. I suppose I could have used a parent like that, too, when I was a teenager, my father having been, actually, the opposite of someone who would fight for you.

That conversation with Lola took place last New Year’s Eve in a bar on Ludlow Street. She was still working toward her PhD at Yale and, just as she used to when Aura was alive, she came regularly to New York by bus on her way to see Bernie Chen, a PhD student at Cornell, now her fiancé. Five years earlier, when I had first met
Lola, right after Aura and I started going out, she’d taken me aside to offer a drink-fueled candid warning:

If Juanita is okay with Aura being with you, then she’ll be with you. But if she’s against it—Lola slowly shook her head no—then she won’t be. You know that, right?

So you’re saying that if Aura’s mother doesn’t want her to be with me you think she can break us up.

Juanita’s power over Aura is like something in a myth, said Lola. It’s like she can throw thunderbolts from Mexico.

I’m meeting Juanita in a few weeks, I said. In Las Vegas, if you can believe it.

Lola tried to cheer me up. When Juanita sees how happy Aura is with you, she said, everything will be fine. In the end, that’s what matters to her most.

With banished Katia no longer an expense, there had been more money to spend on Aura’s education. To become a doctoral student in comparative literature, Aura would need to be fluent in three languages, and so she was sent to Europe during the next three summers: twice to Paris to study French, once to Cambridge for courses in English literature. The only trips out of Mexico that Juanita and Rodrigo had ever taken were just across their country’s borders, by automobile, mostly to Texas, but one time into Belize. It was impossible to show enough gratitude for her mother’s sacrifices, but Aura tried.
A twenty-four-hour daughter to a single mother—
that’s how Aura described herself in her diary. Aura persisted in referring to her mother as single, partly because, with Rodrigo away so much, for all practical purposes she was. Even if she couldn’t yet put into words what it was that filled her with foreboding, Aura often felt consumed by worry about her mother. Every weekday she rushed home from the university and took over the kitchen from the housekeeper, Ursula, to prepare lunch for her mother, giving Juanita a chance to leave campus and be alone with her daughter for a couple of hours instead of spending the time at the
usual restaurants and
fondas
with faculty and coworkers—meals at which her mother, Aura knew, was sometimes unable to resist that second or third tequila, or even more, when the others were drinking, too. Like her mother, Aura didn’t really know how to cook—Ursula left their suppers prepared before she went home in the afternoons—but she began to teach herself from an English cookbook of international recipes that she found in the Gandhi bookstore’s sidewalk bargain bins. Nearly every weekday she took her shopping list to the supermarket. Aura liked to cook fish because it didn’t take long and was supposed to be healthy, but the English fish names in her cookbook didn’t correspond to those she found in the seafood section at Superama. Most fish was too expensive, too, but there was an affordable one called
punta de venta
and these packaged fillets were always available. We’re having punta de venta, Ma, she’d announce, phoning her mother at the university to tell her to hurry home, and whenever Juanita replied, Again? Aura would reassure her that she was cooking it a different way from the last time, whether that had been baked, fried,
à la veracruzana,
or even
à la meunier
.

One day Juanita said, Aura, you know, you really don’t always have to buy punta de venta, I’ll give you the money to buy something fresh, we can afford that. ¿Cómo? asked Aura, confused. Her mother asked if by chance Aura thought that punta de venta was a species of fish? Of course she knew, said Aura, that it was a fish. Wait, you mean, it’s
not
? Then what is it? Her mother explained that punta de venta was what the supermarket labeled any kind of fish that was discounted because it had reached its sell-by date. Ohhh! They were laughing themselves silly when Juanita said, You know, mi amor, you don’t really need to cook for me every day. A brief silence fell. Aura asked, You mean you don’t want me to cook for you anymore, Ma? Hija, said Juanita, this driving between work and home and back just to eat every day is going to kill me, el tráfico está de la chingada. Aura gave a short laugh, which her mother echoed with a forced guffaw, provoking another round of laughter, not as rollicking as the first. Hija, corazón, Juanita gently
pleaded, isn’t this a bit much for you, too, all this shopping and cooking; can you really spare the time? Wouldn’t you rather eat with your friends?

We’re all just a fantasy, Juanita remarked one day, during another conversation that Aura recorded in her diary.

None of Aura’s tías were actual family. Not blood family. They were fake or pretend family. Prosthetic family, as Aura called them.

And what am I supposed to do with that? asked Aura. How is it supposed to help me, to know that I’m a fantasy?

We both are, not just you, her mother answered. And you should enjoy it, and be grateful, instead of always arguing with it the way you do.

Did Juanita consider her husband, or both her husbands—maybe even all husbands everywhere and always—to be prosthetic relatives, too? Detachable, just part of a fantasy family? Were only mother-daughter relations real?

Reading in Aura’s diary about the months after we first met, when she returned to Mexico from Brown and went to Guanajuato for Christmas, it felt strange not to find myself included among the so-familiar cast—the tías, Mama Loly, Vicky Padilla, the godparents who were also Aura’s professors, Fabiola—all of whom I’d be spending the holiday with one year later as Aura’s new, older, boyfriend from New York. Juanita’s boss, usually referred to as el Dramaturgo, also came to Guanajuato that Christmas. In his twenties he’d written a sort of Angry Young Macho play that was still regularly staged in Mexican schools. Aura had acted in a production at the Colegio Guernica, playing the macho’s spirited but relentlessly mistreated young wife. “I hate digging bullets out of my own body, carajo!”—that had been one of her lines, and at home it had become a joking refrain wielded in moments of actual or ironic distress by all the females of the household, even Ursula. Now in his fifties, el Dramaturgo was rector of the humanities, one of the university’s most powerful posts. Soon after
the student strike that sent Aura away to Austin had ended, el Dramaturgo had hired Juanita as his administrative secretary of the humanities, a significant post in its own right. Now Juanita had her own office one floor beneath his, with two secretaries and a respectable salary. It had been a smart if unconventional choice to hire Juanita—no one understood better the mazes and murk of the massive university bureaucracy; there was hardly a university functionary, file clerk, security guard, or campus bus driver with whom Juanita wasn’t on a first name basis. She could have switched careers, become an important official for the university workers’ union—people had let her know how valuable she could be in that role—but Juanita’s heart and loyalties were with the academic side of the school, with the teaching and research faculties that had given her a way to survive when she was newly arrived in the capital with her baby girl. The university was like a Renaissance city-state that had taken Juanita in as a foundling in order to nurture her into one of its great ladies, a connoisseur of the wielding of power within its walls.

At least, Aura wrote in her diary, she was too old now to be ordered to call el Dramaturgo “Tío.” Her first morning in Guanajuato she went out into the streets, charged by her mother with the errand of buying a gift in the market that she would give to el Dramaturgo—she chose a carved wooden penholder—and flowers for the party in his honor that afternoon in Tía Vicky’s mother’s house, where they were staying. One of Mexico’s last surviving Golden Age movie stars, Carlota Padilla now mostly played grandmothers and wise old family servants on telenovelas. Though she lived in Mexico City, she owned a restored hacienda house on the outskirts of Guanajuato that resembled one of those colonial-era convents that are converted into five-star hotels; it had an old walled orchard out back and a swimming pool. Aura felt happy, wandering the streets on her party errands, admiring the colonial architecture and the steep mountains encircling the city. (She often liked to quote drunken Dr. Vigil’s line from
Under the Volcano
: “Guanajuato is sited in a beautiful circus of steepy hills.”)

I bought the flowers (Mrs. D, of VW) and went back to the house and found el Dramaturgo already there, tequileando with my mother, kicking off the alcoholic activities which, for me, have ended in horror. Conversations. Flattery—sincere and false. The meal. Meat. I abstain. Tequila. Iced tea for me. I clear my own plate, get up from the table; I dance alone in a corner, watch television. More tequila—my mother and her jefe. My mother’s husband adopts unexpected positions during a vehement political argument. Another dramaturgo arrives, this one has come all the way from Guadalajara just to visit el Dramaturgo. More tequila. My mother starts to touch on upsetting subjects. To such a degree that later, as he’s leaving, dramaturgo #2 whispers to me, Follow your own destiny. Do I have one? My nerves are on edge. I want to start my doctorate, go to a prestigious university, write, study, work, have a life. My godfather is good. He flatters me every which way. I’m not sure I believe him. If even half of what he says about me were true, I’d love it. He’s drunk. Like my mother.

Which upsetting subjects might those have been, mi amor? Maybe another mocking disquisition on how absurd it was to go away to study Latin American literature at a gringo university? Hadn’t Juanita raised and prepared Aura to do just that, to go away to study abroad? Now she didn’t want to let her go. Juanita dreaded being without Aura, dreaded being left alone in her marriage to a man who no longer loved her, and who wasn’t going to help her because the only way he could help her was by loving her. That dread was passed on to her daughter, the heaviest of the suitcases she’d bring with her to New York. Aura couldn’t love her stepfather if he wasn’t at least trying to make her mother happy. It wasn’t only his fault, she knew, but it was only her mother’s happiness that she cared about.