Say Her Name (16 page)

I have so many friends and I feel so isolated here in this house, the house of my childhood, where I spent good moments but mostly just nerve-wracking ones.

Dead all in the same week:

Bolaño

Compay Segundo

Celia Cruz

Lupe Valenzuela (ex-wife of el Dramaturgo)

Bolaño born the same year as Dylan Thomas’s death (and Stalin’s, too)

Ventanilla, July 3—I’m in front of the ocean again. They are surprised that this time I didn’t come with P. I hope they will like me just for myself. It was weird when I decided to come here, I didn’t even think of P., of us, here. I just thought of the pleasure of seeing the beautiful brown faces of the children again. The fisherman’s wife is 24, and she already has five children. Sometimes I try to imagine what it will be like to study for a doctorate, I try to figure out if that’s really what I want and I am overwhelmed with confusion. At least I have Kafka with me right now, his exquisite posthumous stories,
The Great Wall of China
… but I’d better get back to reading Derrida for professional reasons … I hope writing won’t abandon me.

Thought is an agent of change, it has repercussions in life.

September 2003—I’m in New York. The departure has happened. The beginning is difficult. As for new ideas—cobwebs obscure my thoughts, threads of death woven with fear of failure and of never belonging anywhere. I’m afraid of myself. I don’t understand this compulsion of mine to seek out the street and the night when it does me so much harm. “You’re a public danger”—my mother is right.

February 2004 (Paris)

Où sont les axolotls?

12

That’s a robot?

Aura was showing me, in her notebook, a drawing of a pair of lace-up shoes surrounded by tiny handwritten notations, sketched patterns of angular and undulating lines.

They’re shoes that come when you call them, she said.

You mean you call out, Shoes, come here, and they come walking to you wherever you are?

Yeah, she said. Well, you can’t be
too
far away. And they can’t go up and down stairs.

You can wear them?

You have to be able to wear them. Robots, she explained, have to be useful, or else they’re not really robots.

We were in Copilco, sitting on a couch in the living room. The notebook, a plain spiral one with a red cardboard cover, was open on her lap. The robot shoes were her invention, though still no more than an idea. Aura had a bit of a thing for robots. She explained that each shoe would have sensors programmed to respond to its owner’s voice and that the shoes would walk toward that voice when called, in a room or apartment, or inside a house within a certain range. For situations when you didn’t want to call out, for example if you needed to slip out of a dark apartment without waking anybody but didn’t want to leave without your shoes, there would also be a remote. The robotics would be built into the shoes; the engineering of the walk was complicated, but imagine it, she told me, as a
synchronized iambic pentameter that makes the walk
.

That’s a pretty awesome invention, I said. She dipped her head like a proud circus pony, said thank-you, and turned some more pages of her notebook, stopping at one with a sketch of a dress
she’d designed. It was an odd-looking dress, drawn in colored pencil with blue and yellow and red hoops seeming to twirl around the skirt. You’d really wear that? I asked, and she said that she would. Designing dresses was one of her favorite ways of doodling and I found sketches of dresses in all her Columbia notebooks. This was our “first date.” Nine months after the night when I’d met Aura in New York—I hadn’t seen her since, or even had any news of her—in late August in Mexico, she’d turned up in El Mitote, a dingy bohemian and cokehead hangout on the edge of the Condesa. I was drinking at the bar with my friends Montiel and Lida, and there she was, standing before me. Hello again, my death. I felt as if I were staring at her through a thick haze—the cigarette smoke in the air, my own shy amazement and inebriation.

How come you never answered the e-mail I sent you? she asked. I answered that I’d never received any e-mail from her. She’d sent me an e-mail, she insisted, in which she’d thanked me for having mailed her my book, and also telling me that she was coming to New York again. I didn’t think she was the kind of person who wouldn’t thank someone for having sent her his book, did I? Well, I don’t know what happened to that e-mail, I said; it must have gotten lost.

That night in El Mitote, you wouldn’t have guessed just by looking at Aura that she was a grad student. Her hair wasn’t quite so chic anymore; it was messier, and falling into her eyes. She’d come with a small group of friends who were on the other side of the bar. She was leaving for New York City in just three days, she told me, to begin her PhD studies at Columbia. That news lit a silent burst of sparks in me. I’d be flying back to New York myself in another two weeks. Then there’s no time for us to get together before you go, I said, but she said, Why not? There’s time. And we agreed to meet the following night at the San Angel Inn, a restaurant and bar in an old hacienda mansion where you sit on sturdy leather couches by the patio drinking margaritas and martinis served in individual miniature silver pitchers set in small ice buckets. I’m sure I wasn’t
the first guy to have tried to impress her by inviting her there, but at least she wouldn’t think I hung out only in dumps like El Mitote.

On the beige vinyl couch in Copilco, she turned some more pages in the notebook and came to one filled with writing from a turquoise roller-pen. This was a short story she’d recently finished. Do you want to hear it? she asked. It’s really short, only four pages. I said of course, and she read it to me. The story was about a young man in an airport who can’t remember if he’s there because he’s coming or going. It was written in a lonely minimalist airport tone, with a sweet deadpan humor. I wasn’t listening with the best concentration, though, because so much else was going through my mind. At dinner, I’d already been casting my hopes forward, plotting how quickly I could see Aura again in New York. Then she’d taken me completely by surprise, inviting me back to her apartment. Did she only want to read me a story? Sitting close to her, I watched her lovely lips form the words she was reading and wondered if I was really going to kiss her in the next few minutes, or hours, or ever.

Aura’s parents had moved out of Copilco to their new place a year before. Left behind in the living room there was only the couch we were sitting on, and the round dining table, metallic gray and white, where Aura had sat through thousands of family meals. Most of her books and things were packed into cardboard boxes now. The steamer trunk was there. There were word magnets on the refrigerator door, and a “Keep Austin Weird” bumper sticker; inside the refrigerator there was a quart bottle of Indio beer, half empty and recapped, and Jumex orange juice in a glossy cylindrical container that I would drink from the next morning after brushing my teeth with Aura’s toothpaste on my finger. Empty beer bottles stacked in the corner, pizza cartons wedged behind a trash can. Aura had been living alone here for the last six months or so. Friends who still lived at home with their parents would come and stay the weekend, crashing on the couch and the floor. She’d been teaching introductory-level classes in English poetry and Latin American fiction at the UNAM while finishing her master’s thesis on Borges and
the English writers, preparing for and taking her exams, months of pressure and nerves but also crazy nights. No other city where the night is longer, more excessive and absurd, than in the
Dee Effeh
. Every time in recent years that she’d started to make a real disaster of her life, she was convinced, it was because she’d given in again to the Mexico City night, where she might easily go off course
forever
.

For months the date of her departure for Columbia had seemed impossibly far off. But just the other day she’d put a load of clothes into the washing machine and thought, The next time I wear these socks, I’ll be in New York. Oh, but she was going to miss Mexico, too. She was still chirping away with grateful excitement over the party her mother had thrown for her two weeks before in Tía Cali’s penthouse apartment, with its roof patio, to celebrate her passing her exams and receiving her master’s degree: a live band, dancing, the new scarlet party dress she’d worn—four years later, that would still be her favorite dress to wear to weddings and fancy parties. She was carrying snapshots of the party in her purse and had showed them to me earlier that night at the San Angel Inn.

When Aura finished reading her story about the young man in the airport, I told her that I really liked it, and she thanked me and asked what it was that I liked about it. While I spoke she held herself perfectly still, as if she could hear my pulse and was measuring it like a polygraph. Then she said that I hadn’t meant what I’d said, that I’d only said what I’d said because I liked her. I laughed and said, It’s definitely true that I like you, but I liked the story, too, honestly, and I practically narrated back to her the part where her protagonist picks a discarded printed flyer up off the floor and reads that in cele bration of a Mexican airline’s new route to Hawaii free drinks are being offered at Departure Gate 37, and he goes there for his drink, enters a raffle to win a trip to Hawaii, and doesn’t win. She laughed, falling over sideways with her eyes squeezed shut, as if someone else had written it and she was hearing it for the first time and found it hilarious. That was the first of many conversations we would have in the coming years about her writing that would proceed more or less exactly like
that, beginning with her claims that my praise was calculated to win her affection or some sex or just domestic peace. That night, on the couch, we began to kiss, and ended up in her bed, kissing and touching. I was so surprised by her warm sweet-smelling and supple youth and by this unexpected development in my life that I was in danger of getting carried away like a romping puppy in a field of tulips, and silently I urged myself not to lose control, to make love to her like a grown man, not an excitable teenager. But then she asked if I minded if she kept her jeans on. So we weren’t going to fuck. I said, That’s okay with me, really; no big hurry. I spoke gently, though maybe there was a trace of letdown or defensiveness in my voice. Plaintively, but also defiantly, as if not at all reconciled to an undesirable though inevitable-seeming task, she asked, Do I have to blow you or something? I laughed and said, Of course you don’t have to blow me, and wondered, What is it we do to our girls? I said that of course I wanted to make love to her, but only when she felt ready. Muy bien, she said. With my nose pressed into her hair, I said, Hmm, you smell so good, not just your hair, your whole head smells good, your head smells like cake. She giggled and said, It’s not true. It is true, I insisted, your head smells like cake, like tres leches, yum, my favorite. I put my nose in her hair again and inhaled and kissed her and even pretended to take a big bite out of her head and told her again, Your head smells like cake! A little later we fell asleep in each other’s arms, Aura with her jeans on. On her ceiling were hundreds of little glow-in-the-dark stars—she and Lola had taped them up there, carefully following the constellation map the stars came with.

In the morning, when I was in the bathroom, she leaned out of the bed and took my wallet out of my pants on the floor. When I came back into the bedroom she was holding my driver’s license in her hand. She looked up and exclaimed, Forty-seven!

Yup, I said, embarrassed.

I thought you were at least ten years younger, she said. I guessed you were thirty-six.

I guess I’m supposed to say thanks, I said. Nope, forty-seven.

She’d never asked my age. Still, I was surprised she didn’t know. I thought Borgini, at least, would have said something about it. Aura was going to a wedding later that day, a Saturday. She said she’d be back early; she had so much to do to get ready to fly to New York the next morning. She’d be staying at her mother’s. I phoned her there that evening and Juanita answered. That was the first time we ever spoke, but she already knew my name. Frank, she called me. Hola Frahhhhnk, that Mexican pronunciation that coming from Aura sounded like a happy goose honk. Juanita spoke to me in such a friendly way on the phone that day that I thought Aura must have told her mother about me and that she must have said something nice. Aura wasn’t back from the wedding yet, but she’d taken her mother’s cell phone with her, I guess she’d lost or misplaced her own. Juanita gave me the number and when I phoned I got Juanita’s voice-mail message. Aura phoned back later that evening. She spoke through a background din of music and voices. She said she’d had a good time with me, and apologized for having forced me to listen to her airport story, and I told her that I’d loved hearing it, and also about the shoes that come when you call them. I told her that I’d call her as soon as I got to New York, in another ten days. When I put down the phone, I thought, In another ten days her life will have totally changed.

For the previous six years, I’d rented an inexpensive apartment in Mexico City that I’d usually sublet whenever I went back to Brooklyn. Back in the eighties, when I’d worked as a freelance journalist in Central America, my paychecks had sometimes been wired from New York to banks in Mexico City and then I’d have to go up there to get them and convert them to cash. The first time was in 1984, when Aura was seven, when the megacity struck me, compared to Managua, Tegucigalpa, or Guatemala City, as radiant and inexhaustible, crammed with opportunity and surprise. I hadn’t even been in the DF twenty-four hours when I met a punky slip of a girl in tight pogo pants and neon pink sneakers in the Rufino
Tamayo museum, a nineteen-year-old art student at Bellas Artes who had a delicate, Mayan princess face and who made out with me on the museum steps. But I never saw her again; the next day she was off to the Yucatán, where her family was from, for Christmas. They kept my passport as collateral at the desk of the cheap hotel downtown where I was staying, until the banks reopened after the long holiday vacation and I could pick up my money and pay them, and where one afternoon in the hotel coffee shop two whores—older than me, probably well into their thirties—asked if I wanted company and then came up to my tiny room, two beautifully ripened women, it turned out, in underpants like in the
Life
magazine ads of my childhood, one with a thin streak of black pubic hair like a wisp of flame licking up her soft broad tummy to her navel, the other lighter-haired and muscular, with small breasts. That’s still the only time I’ve ever done it with two women at once, on the single bed with its flimsy spring-coil mattress, they zestfully applauded every orgasm, theirs and mine, and when it was over I paid with my portable shortwave radio because I didn’t have any cash, and the black-haired woman said we could do it again the next day if I got my hands on something else I wanted to trade for sex, and I had the intuition, nothing more than that, that they were a pair of housewives and bisexual lovers who did this mainly for fun. The next time I returned to Mexico City was more than a year later, about six months after the earthquake. The hotel was gone but part of its old brick back wall was still standing, and from the opposite sidewalk you could see how the floors had collapsed into a multilayered concrete sandwich with rubble spilling out the sides. The city was full of ruins like that, more prevalent in some zones than others; the south, where Aura lived, was not built over the soft dirt of the ancient lake bed as in the center and was the area least affected. (Just now I wanted to call out, “Aura, what is it again that you remember about when the earthquake hit?” She told me about it once or twice, but now I can’t remember exactly what, it’s lost.) I’d followed the earthquake in the news and knew many journalists who’d been sent up from Central America to cover it, and some
had come back totally shaken. Having no overt political narrative to impose on the worst of what they’d seen there, at least not one having to do with geopolitics and war, seemed to make it even more devastating. I had a friend, Saqui, who’d covered more war than anyone my age I knew: Afghanistan, Africa, and the Middle East, as well as Central America. Saqui told me about walking out of his hotel on Avenida Reforma the night he got to Mexico City, two nights after the quake, the air thick with smog, pulverized cement, and acrid smoke, and how, when he was crossing the avenue, he saw, in one of the lanes closed off to traffic, a dead child laid out on the pavement, a little girl in sweatshirt, jeans, and sneakers who looked like she’d been rolled in flour. There were two Mexican men standing over her, and my friend told me that they looked at him in a way that so sorrowfully but menacingly warned him not to come any closer that he swerved away as if they were pointing guns, not daring even to glance back until he’d crossed onto the opposite sidewalk, where he turned and saw the two men still standing over the little corpse as if they were waiting for a bus, and he thought that it was the saddest, most terrible thing he’d ever seen. And the weeping mothers standing outside schools that had collapsed when the quake hit, in the middle of the school day. Sixteen collapsed schools, thousands of dead children—schools that were supposed to have been earthquake-proof but weren’t, the direct result of the PRI’s corrupt dealings with building contractors—
there
was a political narrative, whatever comfort that gave. And the volunteers from all over the world who joined hundreds of thousands of Mexicans in the search for survivors in the rubble and the exhausted cheers that went up whenever someone was found still alive. Yet what most astounded Saqui was the way the city so relentlessly and quickly drove itself back to life, the avenues filling with traffic while the human moles of the rescue parties were still digging and the groups of mothers were still waiting and crying and the stench of death in the air was growing stronger every day.