Say Her Name (22 page)

15

Aura was stuck in a broken elevator in Butler Library—she phoned me on her cell when I was at Wadley. There were other people in the elevator with her, someone urgently ringing the emergency bell, spritzing panic through the phone. I told Aura to stay calm, that surely it would be fixed within minutes, and to call me back as soon as it was. When after fifteen minutes or so I hadn’t heard from her, I phoned and there was no answer. Class was about to start. (We were discussing
The Street of Crocodiles,
the book she’d have with her at the beach that final day.) I didn’t turn my phone off. About midway through, I told the students I had to make a call and stepped out—I got her voice mail and left a message asking her to let me know that she was okay. I pictured horrifying scenarios: air running out, Aura gasping, claustrophobic hysteria. Class was a disaster. When it was over and she still didn’t answer, I phoned the Columbia switchboard, was transferred and put on hold until finally someone at campus security told me there’d been no report of a stuck elevator at Butler Library that day. It was as if the elevator had vanished, with Aura and the others inside, and no one had noticed.

Within seconds of her call to me, it turned out, the elevator glitch had fixed itself, the door had slid open, and Aura had proceeded directly into the reading room, where she was required to turn off her cell phone, and there she’d stayed studying for several hours, until finally she checked her e-mails, saw my frantic messages, and remembered …

Or that time we had to go to a cocktail party in Manhattan. Aura was at home and I was a few subway stops closer to Manhattan,
down in Dumbo, where I was subletting a friend’s inexpensive writing studio for a few months. The plan was that she would take the F train to the York Street stop, find me waiting on the platform, and then we’d ride the next train into Manhattan. One train came, its doors opened, a few people got out; another pulled in several minutes later. The station, winter trapped inside, was a grimy cement and iron deep freezer. The pay phones were broken. My cell phone didn’t work down there. Robotic rats on the tracks, eating electricity and iron filings. How could this be happening? We’d timed it, I’d phoned her and said, All right, I’m ready to go to the station, and she’d said, Give me five more minutes, and so I’d waited five more minutes. She’s still trying on clothes, I thought, pulling dresses on and taking them off because they’re too sexy or too ostentatiously fashionable or because they show off her breasts too much or reveal her tattoo. She liked the way her most prized dresses, including some of the ones I’d bought for her, looked in the mirror, she just wouldn’t wear them out of the apartment. Four trains had passed. My fingers and feet stung from the cold, my nose was running. I climbed the long stairs out of the station to phone her from the street. I had to walk nearly a block before my phone regained its signal. Wind gusted off the East River, whirling litter like frozen bats. She didn’t answer her cell or our telephone at home. I went back into the station and, as I descended the stairs, I heard coming from far below, like the crash of rough surf, the sound of a train entering or leaving the station. On the platform, looking into the tunnel, I saw the dwindling green lights and orange dot of a Manhattan-bound F train. What if she was on it? I waited another half hour, then climbed out to the street again. I phoned the apartment where the party was, but she wasn’t there, either. That déjà vu sensation of loneliness, bafflement, and sadness, of, Is this really happening? Then—I didn’t know what else to do—I redescended into the station. If I described all of this to a psychoanalyst as a nightmare I’d had, wouldn’t it seem to be about separation and death?

What had happened, it turned out, was that Aura had gotten on the train at Carroll Gardens and ridden it only one stop, to
Bergen Street, and had waited for me there; she’d confused Bergen with York Street, two stops farther on, or had spaced out when I’d told her the plan. Finally, she’d trudged back toward home, feeling as bewildered and sad as I was, and she stopped into Sweet Melissa for a hot chocolate.

Arriving back from abroad to New York airports, we always had to join separate lines at U.S. Immigration, even after we were married, with Aura in the much slower line for foreign visitors. I’d always clear passport control well before she did, then wait by the wall in front of where foreigners came out. Sometimes guards would tell me that I couldn’t stand there, and I’d retreat to the luggage carousel, but often they left me alone, my unease stirring as the minutes passed and still Aura hadn’t appeared. Finally, I’d see her step up to one of the booths and I’d feel a new surge of nerves, because what if there was something wrong with her papers again, or the agent was in a bad mood, or just liked to harass Mexicans, and turned her away on the slightest pretext; we’d all heard stories like that. Someone at the U.S. embassy in Mexico had told Aura over the telephone that even having a Fulbright scholarship was no guarantee anymore of a student visa. What if at any moment, here at the mouth of the gate, she was going to be pulled back and returned to Mexico without even being allowed to speak to me. I rarely got to spy on Aura from afar like that, watching as she obediently pressed her fingers down on the fingerprint scanner and answered questions, meeting the customs officer’s eye, smiling or even laughing in response to some remark from him, or else remaining serious and composed—this always brought back memories of being a small boy watching my mother talking to a policeman who’d just given her a parking ticket, or to a bank teller, or to a butcher in Haymarket Square, my awareness of their awareness of my mother’s delicate prettiness and foreignness, my own sense of an unbreachable apartness—until finally I saw the shrug of the officer’s shoulder as he stamped her passport, and within seconds Aura was walking into my embrace.

* * *

Moments of temporary separation and absence and even loss that were like little rehearsals for what was coming. Not premonition, but actual visitations, death coming through its portal, taking Aura away, putting her back, receding back into its hole.

Death, a subway train going the wrong way that you can’t get off of because it makes no stops. No stopping for hot chocolate in Death.

That week after our first Christmas and New Year’s together in Mexico, we took a room for five nights at a boutique hotel on the beach at Tulum. The first three mornings we wound up having to drive from Tulum to the passport office in Cancún and back again in the afternoon, almost a hundred miles each way. Aura had realized, before we left for the beach, that since arriving in Mexico a few weeks before she’d lost her passport. Tía Lupe express-mailed Aura’s birth certificate from Guanajuato to the FedEx office in Cancún. Mexican bureaucracy is notorious: long lines stretching all the way back to the Aztec empire; multiple appointments to schedule at this teller window or that counter; many official forms to buy at those tiny stationery stores always owned by nice old ladies, to fill in, have notarized, then buy and fill in again because at one window some bureaucrat found one stupid infinitesimal thing filled out incorrectly, then renotarize, and so on. Aura was a veteran of Mexican bureaucracies, the UNAM’s being among the worst. It was captivating to witness the unruffled manner with which she endured it all, her serene, polite, and even pleasant interactions with the clerks and secretaries, winning over even the most bristlingly petty or hostile ones. All this opened a window into her temperament, I thought. I loved waiting in those passport office lines with Aura, even though it was how we were spending our Tulum vacation instead of at the beach. That mostly two-lane highway that we spent so
much of that brief vacation driving on, beaches and cenotes and ruins hidden from view, was like any ordinary highway, despite the billboards announcing resorts and water parks with Mayan names and motifs. Our rental car had a CD player, and at a gasoline station, because I told her I didn’t really know his music, Aura bought a CD of José José’s greatest hits. That was the only music we listened to on the long drives between Tulum and Cancún, the same sad ballads her mother had listened to in the Terrible Tower, weeping over her abandonment.

On the Tulum-bound drive we kept seeing small hand-painted signs directing us to “Subway,” which must be the name of a Mayan town, I deduced, pronouncing it
Soobway
. I even said, Maybe it says Subwaj and we’re not getting a good look at the signs. But no, it was a
y
, not a
j
. For some mysterious reason, someone was trying to lure travelers to
Soobway
. But it turned out to be Quintana Roo’s first Subway sandwich franchise, in a small shopping plaza off the highway by a golf club outside Tulum. Aura hardly ever again passed by a Subway anywhere in the world without remarking, There’s your pueblo Maya, mi amor—
Soobway
. To reach the beach where our hotel was, we’d turn off the highway onto a long stretch of dirt road, the car hitting the softer surface at nearly highway speed, bouncing and seeming to lift off and float through a brown cloud of churned-up dirt as if riding one prolonged note of José José’s sonorous voice, and that sense of dislocation again, of being propelled through a portal, from an in-between world, back into the beach town of Tulum. In the end, a bureaucrat at a window finally told Aura she could get her passport only in the state of her permanent residence. Why wasn’t she told that on the first day? There is no answer to that question.

Aura beside me in bed: What would happen to you, mi amor, if I ever left you?

I would die, mi amor, you know that.

You would, I know, you
would
die, wouldn’t you?

I really would.

And she laughed, with a kind of childish delight, and said, Or if something happened to me, if it was me—

No, Aura! No, stop!

—if it was me who died—

Then I would die, too. I would. Aura, don’t even say that!

You
would
die, wouldn’t you? Ay, mi amor—sadly shaking her head.

You are so lucky, Francisco, she would say. You are the luckiest man on earth, to have a young, intelligent, talented wife who loves you the way I do. Do you know how lucky you are?

I know, mi amor. I’m the luckiest guy alive.

You are, Francisco, you really are.

I am, I know.

And if you’re going to be a father at your age, you’re going to have to keep yourself in top shape. Babies weigh a lot, you know, and you have to carry them everywhere.

That’s why I go to the gym so much. I’m getting ready.

And you have to pay attention all the time to what’s going on around us when we walk in the street. If neither of us is good at paying attention, then I’m not having a baby with you.

I know, mi amor, I’ll pay attention for both of us, I promise.

Every day a ghostly ruin. Every day the ruin of the day that was supposed to have been. Every second on the clock clicking forward, anything I do or see or think, all of it made of ashes and charred shards, the ruins of the future. The life we were going to live, the child we were going to have, the years we were going to spend together, it was as if that life had already occurred millennia ago, in a lost secret city deep in the jungle, now crumbled into ruins, overgrown, its inhabitants extinguished, never discovered, their
story never told by any human being outside it—a lost city with a lost name that only I remember—
Soobway
.

On the Ninety-sixth Street subway platform where, after a late lunch at the Columbia Ollie’s, we were waiting for the express back to Brooklyn, Aura was saying Ohhh, you know, it’s a text that’s about the way texts generate discourses among texts, so no reason even to mention authors or authorial intention. Well, okay, I know that’s true, but … But in her class that afternoon, taken up by a discussion of Borges’s short story “Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote,” no one had laughed even once. But Frank,
Frank,
she exclaimed, didn’t anybody realize that Borges was being
funny
when he wrote that story? The story’s narrator, she recounted, is a mediocre critic who is indignant because his late friend Pierre Menard was left out of some catalog of important writers assembled by another critic. Okay, but does anyone else agree that Menard was so great? The baroness and the countess, they agree, said Aura, both of them friends of Menard and the critic. But they’re just the baroness and the countess! she exclaimed. And the French countess, she lives in W
ee
chita or someplace like that now, married to a rich gringo, don’t you think
that’s
a clue? A clue that Borges was also being silly
and
making fun of self-important bad writers. She mimicked a scolding professorial basso: No,
Ow-rra,
wrong. Silly?
¿Qué? Bad
writers? That’s not how we read texts
here
,
Ow-rra.

The red-and-pink tassels of yarn dangling like bunches of dwarf bananas, three on each side, from the Andean earflaps of Aura’s ridiculous pointy wool hat and the spiky red tassel that crowned it jiggled in unison with her bobbing cheeks and the peal of her laughter. Aura was having fun, too, her eyes gleaming; she’d go on like this, chattery, ebullient, all the way back to Brooklyn. Aura was discovering in those days that she wasn’t like the other grad students, ideologically prohibited from considering the person and mischief of the author. She wasn’t always so giddy to revel in or acknowledge
these differences, she was often tormented with worry—I’m going to be expelled! They’re going to take away my scholarship! They’re going to send me to the Gulag!

Do you think Jim has a wooden leg? she asked, switching the subject to one that had lately preoccupied her. Valentina’s husband, Jim, the super-rich investment banker, also quite a bit older than his wife—hadn’t I noticed? Wasn’t that a wooden or prosthetic leg limp that Jim had? From the knee down, she said, his shone bone, his shun sheen, what do you call it? What if she asked Valentina if Jim had a wooden leg and it turned out that he didn’t, would she be offended? Valentina was already so insecure about how prematurely aged Jim looked that she wouldn’t let him come anywhere near Columbia. Well, even if his shin is made of cheese, I said, it won’t be just some ordinary Camembert, that guy makes a ton of money. Ay, mi amor, she said sweetly, ¡qué tonto eres! One night a few months later, coming out of a movie, we let ourselves lag behind Valentina and Jim on the sidewalk so that I could study his walk. Maybe he does, I thought. That summer they invited us to their country house and we went swimming—arthritic stiffness was all it was.