Say Her Name (29 page)

Three months later, in March, she received an e-mail from a writer—an actual Famous Irish Writer—who taught in the MFA program. He told her that he liked her stories but that he needed to speak to her. Could she come into the college for a “chat”? An appointment was made for later in the week. Over the ensuing days, this impending chat dominated our conversations. Were they going to accept her or not? Why would the FIW waste his time by asking her to come in for a meeting if he didn’t want to accept her into the program? Maybe, I said, he just needs to know about your visa status. But Aura anguished, she was sure something was wrong, maybe they also had a rule against studying in two places at once. When she went to the college the FIW was waiting for her in his office, and so was the older, even more Famous Australian Writer who directed the program. The two were friends, and they’d obviously discussed Aura. They asked her some questions about herself, and she answered. No problem with her studying at Columbia at the same time, they told her. They had a different, well, not a problem, a concern. The stories she’d submitted were impressive, but they were translations, and it seemed she hadn’t even done the translations herself—at the end of each story, she’d typed,
Translated by Aura with some help from her friends
. But the program was conducted entirely in English. They
were now satisfied that she could converse in English, but could she write in English? To be in the program, she would have to. They gave her twenty-four hours to write an autobiographical statement in English of no fewer than six hundred words explaining why she wanted to enroll in the creative writing program. She went home and did it. A few days later the FIW phoned again, this time to tell her that she was accepted. For another week she heard nothing else. Shouldn’t there be an official letter? Maybe the FIW had spoken before consulting with the FAW, who didn’t agree. Oh, Aura, I said, you’re accepted, just send them an e-mail and ask. She did. A few days later, the FAW answered, “Dear Aura, Everything is okay. You are in. You have been accepted into the MFA program. You will receive a letter on letterhead, but this is the REAL LETTER. We are proud and happy to have you.” That evening we met downtown for oysters at a small French restaurant with a zinc bar. We split a bottle of champagne, and then went to see a movie with Valentina and Jim in the Village. Afterward Aura pulled me to a near stop on the sidewalk so that Jim and Valentina would walk ahead of us. She wanted me to take a good look at Jim’s walk. Was that a prosthetic left leg limp? Maybe it was. I wasn’t sure.

One of the short stories Aura had included in her application was about a little girl who is caught stealing every day from her schoolmates’ knapsacks and lunch boxes. Her parents, summoned for a meeting by the school’s principal, are baffled by their daughter’s behavior.
They looked at her as if a totally unknown person was standing before them.
Previously, the mother had promised the little girl that if she was on her best behavior, she could go with her stepsister to her stepsister’s mother’s house in Orlando, Florida, for the summer vacation, and the reader perceives that that is why the little girl is stealing, because she doesn’t want to go to Orlando. As punishment, the mother forbids her daughter from riding her bicycle in the parking lot of the residential complex where they live. The little girl disobeys, going for a ride not just in the parking lot but, for the
first time in her life, she pedals out into the dangerous traffic of the avenue. Encouraged by her admission to the MFA program, Aura sent the story, “
Un viaje fallido,
” to a South American online literary magazine and they accepted it. Her first published short story! She told her mother the good news. But when Juanita read the story, it upset her. For one thing, she didn’t like that the mother in the story doesn’t figure out why her daughter is stealing. In real life, she’d figured it out, hadn’t she? That was why Aura hadn’t gone to Orlando with Katia. Why was Aura publicly airing turbulent episodes from the past, and distorting what had really happened? Aura tried to explain that it was fiction, and that if the story had gone on longer surely the fictional mother would have figured it out, too. But the story’s meaning was in the bike ride, the little girl’s brief, reckless dash toward adventure and freedom—and to a McDonald’s down the avenue, where on weekends there was always a clown and children playing on the big plastic slide, but that on that weekday afternoon was deserted and dirty.

Several months later, when Aura had another short story published, this one also set in a Copilco-like residential complex, about a single mother and her daughter, her mother reacted similarly. Were these stories Aura’s first attempts to write an
X-ray of my early childhood
? Dangerous and troubling secrets were embedded there. Don’t many young female writers eventually write about their mothers?

The story should conclude with the central character happily embarking on a journey to unknown lands. The enthusiasm pales for the reader in light of his awareness of the disaster. But the disaster will have a resplendent obverse side.

Those words, from Aura’s notes for the novel she wanted to write, seem cryptically prophetic. But if they are prophetic they pose an obscene riddle because how can there be a resplendent obverse side to Aura’s death? I think she was referring to graduate school. In the novel, meant to be told backward, the unknown lands that the fictional Alicia happily embarks to include New York City and the hallowed university where she is to study for her PhD. That was going to be the disaster: her academic experience. Not anything or anyone else. Am I right about this?

20

Four nights after Aura’s funeral, her mother telephoned me. She got right to the point. She’d obviously prepared the words she was about to speak, maybe even had rehearsed them. Juanita said:

Aura was a graduate of the university. I have always worked at the university and so has my brother. The university is our family and the university looks out for us the way a family does, and what the university lawyers tell me is that it is very suspicious that you didn’t give a legal statement.

As I listened, I could see myself reflected in the two-stories-high glass panes separating our Escandón apartment from its little patio: cordless phone held to my ear, standing next to the pale wooden stairs leading up to the sleeping loft. Dwarfed by the apartment’s vertical spaciousness, the high yellow wall, I looked like a miniscule figure with blurred features in the lower left corner of an immense painting. The sliding door was open and I could hear the whispery rustle of the bamboos at the back of the patio. I’d planted the bamboos myself, six in all, never imagining that they would grow like fairy-tale plants, now nearly two stories high. Less than a week before she’d died Aura had stood not far from where I was standing and looked up at me as I came down the stairs. I love this apartment, she’d announced. The apartment was ours: her mother had bought it for her. It had been empty and new when we’d moved in. Over four years, she’d been slowly and carefully furnishing it just as, within our means, she wished. A carpenter was building us bookshelves that we’d arranged to have delivered after we came back from the beach. Now I was back from that beach without Aura, and on the telephone with her mother. What was she accusing me of? What did she mean when she said that
according to the university lawyers it was very suspicious that I hadn’t given a statement?

It was Juanita who’d decided that Aura should be cremated. That meant that we—Fabiola and I, along with Juanita—thirty or so hours after Aura’s fatal accident in the Pacific waves, had had to go directly from the Mexico City hospital where she’d died to a nearby
delegación,
a mixture of a neighborhood police station and district attorney’s office, to give witness statements about Aura’s death that were meant to verify that we weren’t trying to hide anything by requesting authorization to cremate her. There would have to be an autopsy, too. They split us up, Fabiola was taken into one room, or else it was a cubicle, Juanita to another, and I to another—or was Juanita with me?—my memories of this are confused, but I do remember the grim bustle of the delegación: handcuffed prisoners in street clothing sitting on a bench against a wall, police and criminal-lawyer types coming and going, the walls, the furniture, the grungy hues of yellow and brown. I hadn’t slept since our last night at the beach. It was afternoon or early evening or maybe it was already night. I sat in a chair at a steel desk across from a clerk, an overweight fortyish woman with a sluggish expression who was sitting at an old desktop computer—black screen, neon green lettering—who told me to tell her what had happened. So I told her, and she typed, never showing any emotion, her fingers powerful and fast on the keyboard. It was the first time I’d told the full story of Aura’s accident and death, and probably I told it with more detail than she needed, but she steadily typed every word as soon as I spoke it, that at least was my impression. I was still in my bathing suit, sandals, and a T-shirt. Before, when we were waiting in the delegación, I’d been shivering with cold, but now I wasn’t. When I was finished giving my statement, she asked for my identification. I had none. I’d left my passport back at the beach house we’d rented in Mazunte. All I had in my wallet was a credit card. Since I didn’t have any ID, the woman behind the desk said that my statement couldn’t be accepted. All that typing for nothing.

But Juanita, I said into the telephone, I did give a statement. You were there. At the delegación. It wasn’t accepted because I
didn’t have any identification. I left my passport back at the house in Mazunte.

Drawing out every word—I knew this voice, Juanita’s most sarcastic, sneering voice—she said,
Ayyy,
what a pretty story. What a pretty story. (Qué bo-
neee-
ta his-
tohhh-
ria.) You didn’t have your
paaassport
. You left it behind at the
beeeeach
. You can tell your pretty story to the lawyers and judge.

Juanita, I said. What are you accusing me of?

My advice, she said, is that you consider fleeing the country for your own good.

I’m not fleeing the country, I said. I have no reason to flee the country.

The university lawyers want to have you arrested and imprisoned right now, she said, her voice quickening. But I’ve stopped them. I am acting as your protector in this. I don’t want to see or talk to you, not while you’re under investigation. My brother is acting as my attorney. From now on, anything you have to say to me, you should say to him.

That was the last conversation I ever had with Aura’s mother. When I got off the phone I immediately phoned Leopoldo to ask him what was going on. Why had Juanita spoken to me that way? That brief conversation with Leopoldo, the last I ever had with him too, ended with him telling me to put whatever I had to say in writing; then he hung up on me. Later that same night, or maybe it was the next night, Juanita phoned Fabiola and told her that she should keep away from me, to not talk to me or be seen with me while I was under investigation so that she wouldn’t be pulled into the investigation, too. Fabis left her apartment and crossed over to ours and knocked on the door. I found her almost in a state of shock, like a traffic accident survivor; she was shaking and trying not to cry and could barely tell me what had just happened. She phoned her mother. Odette was indignant. That night she took Fabis and me out for dinner, to a crowded restaurant, so that anybody could see that we weren’t hiding anything.

21

The sensation that my brain was leaking, spurting dream images into the day. Fatigue like a hand inside an old soft leather glove, softly gripping my brain, the discernible pressure of its twitching fingers. Waking at around three or four in the morning, and instead of just desperately staring into the dark, slipping back into one snatch of dream or nightmare after another; waking from each with a jolt in the same instant that I registered relief that I might be sleeping. Finally I’d give up, let go of the pillow clutched over my head, get out of bed feeling shaky and drained, mentally rummaging and kicking through the debris of images and scenes that had been so jerkily streaming through me.

Aura was the blue color of a Popsicle, or one of her old frozen household liquid cleaners, but she didn’t feel cold, curled alongside me, legs drawn beneath her, slowly bending over to kiss me, and that’s when I was jerked awake. Then I was in a department store’s grimy bargain basement, where in a plywood bin I found Aura’s dresses for sale, tightly folded into brick-sized rectangles, each with a crisp cardboard band around it; I picked one up, recognizing which dress it was, same with a few more, and then I was awake again, staring up into the dark. I dreamed that I’d been on a date with her, in Parque Chapultepec, and now I wanted to phone her and ask her out again, but I couldn’t remember her name. Who was that nice, brilliant young woman? I asked. But I did remember her face and, especially, the pretty freckles on her nose. From that one I woke up with a grin. As if my forgetting her name had only been one of her supernatural jokes.

* * *

The wedding-cake molding at the tops of the walls, the angel and the wedding dress and the altar; the shimmery heart made of hammered Mexican tin that hung on the wall; her desk, her books, her computer, her crowded pencil holder, chocolate Valentine’s Day heart, Orphan Annie eyes of the woolen stuffed cats from Chiapas; mismatched bedside lamps from neighborhood antique stores, one with a red shade and a rooster painted on its ceramic base; her RoboSapian atop the dark-wood bureau; her clothes in the dressers and her makeup and perfume containers and bottles; the long drawn curtains through which light barely filtered; the steamy gurgling and hissing and the tiny ecstatically trumpeting elephants inside the radiator pipes, keeping the room snug, along with her humming space heater, during those dark winter weeks after the accident that I mostly spent sprawled on the bed on our multicolor quilt. Her books, her things, her music, her enduring if faint smells or else the warmed smells of all her things. Waking to the squeaking tires of a car driving through predawn snow, the airport-runway rip and thump of a snowplow passing by.