Say Her Name (15 page)

Why did you leave me to grow up without a dad? Aura had asked her father, face burning, in the restaurant there in Guanajuato that
first time in seventeen years that she’d seen him. Why didn’t you ever even answer my letters? So far, so good, she told herself. I haven’t cried. But then she did. She lay her head down on folded arms and sobbed and her father moved from his seat to one beside her and put his hand on her back and undoubtedly wondered why he was doing this to himself, and why was she doing this to herself, and why live at all anyway when life turns out to be such a fucking mess, sitting there with his sobbing daughter who he hadn’t seen in seventeen years, mud all over his pants.

Well, of course she was going to cry. But he said what he had to say, his slender hands folded on the tabletop, the explanation that he’d probably rehearsed on the drive across the state from San José Tacuaya:

I thought you should have only one father, hija. After your mother and I separated and she married Rodrigo, I wanted you to regard him as your father, and to love him. I thought that would be best for you. It’s not good for a child to have two fathers. Of course I’ve always loved you, and always missed you.

Thank you, Pa, she’d said. I’ve always loved and missed you, too. But thank you for what? The more she thought about her father’s answer, later, the more it saddened and even angered her. Her real father, she’d perceived that day, was an intelligent, sensitive, flawed person who lived in the world much as she did, always wanting to apologize for his existence. Everything about him—his gentle eyes, his hushed voice, his politeness, the mysterious mud on his pants—had filled her with compassion. She could tell they would have been strengthened by each other’s love, by their smart father-daughter complicity. Something essential, that both needed, had been ripped from them. This was the man who should have been her father.

The day after Christmas, having gone to Mama Loly’s to say her good-byes to Fabiola and the Hernández clan, Aura returned on foot to the Padilla house and she was just raising the key to the
lock when the old timber of the big zaguán door shook in its frame as if from an earthquake aftershock, followed by a burst of metallic fidgeting within the lock, which set the door handle quivering. She waited a moment, put the key in, turned it, pushed the heavy door open, and found Héctor, her father, on the other side, in the stone-paved vestibule, looking flustered, his mussed graying hair dangling over his forehead. His hands fluttered toward the door in futile pursuit when she let it close behind her. They looked at each other, exchanged cheek kisses, a slightly awkward embrace, holiday greetings, then Aura said, What a surprise, Pa, what are you doing here? He was dressed the same as the last time she’d seen him—same suit, she was pretty sure—only without a tie, but he looked older, as if he’d aged a decade in four years. He looked drained and haggard. I couldn’t figure out how to make the door open, he said, and he smiled crookedly. I heard from Vicky that you were here, he went on, and I decided to drive over to say hello, hija, but I’m sorry, now I have to go, as you see, I was just leaving. Está bien, Pa, she said, Feliz año, pues—confusion made her voice listless. Igualmente, hija, he said—I hope the New Year brings you all the happiness you deserve—and he bent to kiss her on the cheek again, and then he said, Perdón, Aura, this door, there’s some trick to opening it that eludes me. She opened it, pressing the lock lever while unlatching it on the side, and she said, It is a bit tricky, Pa, and she pushed on the door with both hands and held it open with her arm extended, smiling and making a little bow from the waist that he didn’t seem to notice as he thanked her and fled out the door as if freed from a cage.

At the end of the walk he gave her a nervous wave good-bye and turned into the street and that was the last time Aura ever saw her father. In a shadowy corner of the spacious living room she found her mother and Vicky sitting at a table like a pair of shady fortune-tellers, lowered eyes, curling cigarette smoke, and a bottle of tequila between them. They’d just been laughing, she could tell, and had stopped when she came in. They were laughing at my father, she thought. She wasn’t going to give them a chance to perform
their mocking account of his visit, would ask them nothing, would go directly to her room to pack and leave for the bus station in an hour. But Vicky asked, Did you see Héctor? so she had to answer, and said, Yes, tía, he was just on his way out. He only came because he wanted to see you, said her mother, not looking up. Vicky phoned to let him know you were here. I know, said Aura, he told me. Thank you, tía … well, I have to pack. What happened, said her mother, is that he remembered he had to go and collect empty bottles at the market, that’s why he was in such a rush. Both women sniggered. Aura said,
Yayaya,
and went on toward the bedroom. She was going to the beach with P., who’d been her boyfriend on and off since the summer. They would travel from the DF by all-night first-class sleeper bus to Puerto Escondido, Oaxaca, and then catch the local bus along the coast to that undeveloped stretch of three adjoining beaches separated by bluffs and rocky promontories: Ventanilla, San Agustinillo, and Mazunte. She’d longed to see these beaches since she was fourteen, when groups of her school friends had first begun going there on trips that her mother never allowed her to join. There wasn’t a single resort or conventional tourist hotel there, but there were lots of places that rented hammocks and a bit of shelter; other travelers just strung their own hammocks in groves of trees, or pitched tents on the beach and paid nothing. Aura’s relationship with P. would last only a few more months, but her new love for that stretch of coast would persist.

Over the next four years and seven months, she would visit those beaches at least eight more times, five with me, as if yielding to the pull of an irresistible destiny: geography and fate one and the same. P. took her to Ventanilla, the wildest of the three beaches, which lacked even the most rustic backpacker hostels. The largest dwelling there was a kind of two-story hut with a twin-peaked, thatched roof over a wooden floor that had a slatted half-wall running around it, the living quarters, itself held up by long palm trunk poles. A thatched overhang extended from the front of the structure over the brown sand. For a small price the fisherman who lived there with his family rented hammocks
or allowed travelers to hang their own from the poles under the overhang, or to pitch a tent in the sand, as P. and Aura did—what they were paying for was access to the outhouse and, during the day, to hammocks in the shade. The kitchen, a short distance from the house, was in an open-sided palapa where the fisherman’s wife and her sisters cooked their family meals and ran a simple restaurant serving breakfast and, throughout the long afternoons, the fish, shrimp, and lobster brought back by her husband and his brothers in the launches that they pushed off the sand and into the waves in the dark predawn.

With its vast spaces of ocean, sky, and beach, and the peaceful and simple life led by the fisherman and his family—a way of life that it seemed one could join or borrow just by renting a hammock—Ventanilla changed Aura, a girl from the megalopolis, raised in a small apartment where there was no escape from the other taxing personalities living there, where often, as she reflected in her diary, she had no better option than to just sit there
buzzing with anger
opposite her antagonist of the moment, and where she’d had to
master the arts of argument and the cutting remark to survive.
She hadn’t known that there was space inside herself for a place like Ventanilla. She discovered a new way to be there, she thought, a self that had always been hidden from her, truer, she felt convinced, than the anxious, self-protective, and defiantly lippy girl of Mexico City.

Ventanilla was a paradise, she wrote in her diary, that was also a labyrinth because there was so much that she’d never seen or experienced before. Even the flavors of the papayas were unlike any she’d ever tasted. The disciplined industry of the pelicans, drawing long straight lines of flight while skimming the water for fish with their enormous bills. White herons perched pensively on the rocks. The ocean wind blowing in her face all day, robust, scratchy with sand, but also caressing. The discovery that it was possible to spend almost a whole day in a hammock, reading, writing, staring out at the ocean, daydreaming, or closing her eyes and listening to the shouts and laughter of the fisherman’s children, their windblown fragments of speech like lines of experimental poetry.

The days were so long that by late afternoon she couldn’t be sure if what had happened in the morning had actually happened yesterday; evening always came as a welcome surprise, cooling the burning sand, filling the sky and air with diluted fruit drink colors, until finally it became too dark to read. So little was demanded or expected of the night that it was almost like being a child again. Falling asleep listening to the mechanical crunch of the waves, the comfort of knowing she was safely out of reach. The fisherman’s children spent hours playing fútbol with a plastic ball so deflated it was more like a hat, and the chatty little girls who went to a one-room schoolhouse in Mazunte never ran out of stories to tell. The girls carried their pet baby parrots and kittens around with them like favorite cloth dolls. She learned all the children’s names and couldn’t stop taking their pictures, on that first visit and subsequent ones. But the long line of jungle and palms at the back of the beach spooked her, there must be snakes in there, and she imagined eyes watching from within the green shadows. In the dense mists of early morning the figures walking on the sand looked like ghosts from Comala.

At one end of the beach rose a steep bluff with a large solitary cross on top. Millennia of erosion had opened a triangular window in the formation of enormous boulders jutting into the ocean at the foot of the bluff, the beach’s eponymous window, in which sunsets were framed like detached pieces of sky; she spent much time trying to imagine when and how wind and ocean had penetrated the rock, the instant when light and spray had first broken through, what could that have been like? The beach at Ventanilla was
mar abierto,
open wide to the ocean, bringing treacherous currents and ferocious waves. Everyone warned about the dangers of swimming, though the surfers seemed fearless.

The ocean surrounds you as soon as you go near it, she wrote in her diary, and pushes and pulls you and seduces you with the whispering of its foamy withdrawal over the bubbling sand. The heavy waves suspended in the air for miraculous instants in front
of your gaze. They fall fall fall with fury, and fling and drag you with more force than you’d calculated.

Most days, when I open my eyes in the morning, the first thing I see, projected out of my brain and eyeball sockets like lasers of horror, is Aura when they told me she was dead and I rushed back to her bed and saw her. Or the wide swathe of ocean foam receding, uncovering her floating facedown, and I always shout, NO! At any moment it comes back. Panic shooting up through me like silent antiaircraft fire, or down through me, because it’s also like the sensation of falling in your sleep except you’re awake. Hot flashes on my brow, sweat down my spine, chills. Fuck. Shout out, sometimes softly, sometimes loudly enough that heads turn. Standing on a subway platform or in the street or in a dark bar, hands clenched at my sides, staring down, head bobbing, going No No No no NO NO no no NO! NO!—waking from it with a start, looking around.

I’m terrified of losing you in me. Back in Brooklyn I still sometimes find myself trying to skip down our sidewalk as you used to, my angel. Aura used to challenge me to try it, and I would, and there she’d be, face scrunched, laughing at my spazzy effort. That agile hopscotch-like skipping she used to do on the sidewalk, a winged-heel blur, heel-kicked-back heel-kicked-back while also moving forward in an exhilarated burst down the sidewalk as if propelling herself back to her childhood in Copilco, the other girls huddled in the parking lot like lambs in the twilight, watching. I wish that everybody walking on Degraw Street could pause to remember Aura hop-skipping down the sidewalk like she used to, instead of noticing me trying to recall her in my half-century-old limbs, doing my clumsy stomping-stumble on the sidewalk, startling and baffling neighbors and other pedestrians with my futile widower’s dance.

11

February 2003 (DF)

My infancy wasted in my mother’s bottomless handbag, a lip pencil and a makeup case, prohibited evidence maybe: a blue vein pulsing in her forehead. Lowered eyes seeking forgiveness. Anguish and, later, insatiable rage.

There’s too much noise in my head, memory doing its thing, memories I’d rather forget return, return. This place is going to finish me off. My mother’s shadow.
Aura
, that damned book, a story and its coincidences. Fiction became reality. Or I’m a fiction. A nightmare of my mother’s. I can’t be me. Maybe thus the recurring idea of death. The only way for me to affirm myself, find myself, to be an individual, to commit a completely voluntary act. At least to find a language that she doesn’t understand, my own. But at the same time anxiety, nausea, guilt. Shitty psychoanalysis that doesn’t resolve anything in practice. To know is not to act. This place where I’m living: pure tears.

Romantic disillusion.

My childhood destroyed: a ruin.

An aged youth: I let hope die.

With her, everything is anguish, skepticism

March, 2003, Copilco—Been having these dreams. Men chasing me, having to save a bunch of guys, my mom drowning in the sea, my real dad coming back and abandoning us again, a swimming pool eaten by the sea.

May 25, 2003—I miss being in love, involved. In the morning I left P.’s house feeling angry, feeling so nothing, so unloved. The sensation of being a red cube in the middle of the desert.

June 3—power comes to me only when I feel safe. For two weeks I function, then for two weeks I’m a comatose vegetable who can’t even read. I wasn’t made for academia. Since I was 18, I’ve felt pursued by the idea that I should have dedicated myself to something else entirely. Some profession that doesn’t demand of me this commitment to solitude. I don’t know how to commit myself, not to a profession or to a person. There is something in me dedicated to destroying the confidence that I so slowly construct. Then I pass two weeks feeling creative and sure of myself and I begin to feel good in company with my solitude and my books (Chesterton, Yeats) but these two blessed weeks end and then again, spiritual ruin, dead motivation, all day in bed or staring nowhere in particular and anxiously waiting for the phone to ring, and for the masculine presence of the bars at night and that absurd companionship that only leaves me feeling more alone. Who am I kidding, it’s all got to do with menstrual periods and hormones.