Say Her Name (32 page)

But none of her closest friends ever described Aura in such a way—her closest high school companions, the ones who stayed friends with her for the rest of her life, spoke of her precocity, the brainy girl who was also their loving, loyal best girlfriend. In New York, at Columbia and in her MFA program, Aura was known as sweet natured and shy, someone who in class always had to be coaxed to speak up. She’d even suffered over this; in one of her Columbia notebooks, she described herself as a “zipped-up timid mouse.” Why such a change? Maybe she’d identified that earlier personality—defensive, always on the preemptive attack with cutting words—as something that she’d inherited or learned from her
mother, or that she associated with her mother. Aura didn’t want to be like her mother, just as I didn’t want to be like my father. In New York it was as if she’d taken that personality off like a suit of spiky armor and laid it on the ground.

Aura and I never spoke too explicitly about any of this, though maybe we should have, because who knows what the impact of an accelerated, more explicit self-knowledge would have been, maybe—the physics of our destinies being so kinetically compacted inside us, reactive to the slightest alterations and shifts—it would have led Aura to some other chain of decisions and choices, resulting, somehow, in her not even being at the beach in Mazunte that day in July, in her having gone to a summer writers’ colony to work on her novel instead, or in our staying at home because she’d decided sooner that she’d wanted a baby and was too pregnant to go to the beach, or in her having left me; or even, if we’d ended up at that beach on that same day anyway, in her having gone into the water an hour later than she did, because maybe that final morning it would have kept her at her writing desk in our beach house one more hour; or, deep in thought—thinking to herself, Is that really what I did, did I really take off and lay down my mother’s spiky armor?—it would have slowed her steps from her beach chair across the sand to the water just enough to make her miss that wave, or made her, distracted, her mind still absorbed, duck that wave instead of, given over to the moment—in that last fatal impulse of delight—decide to ride it just like I’d ridden the one before.

One thing that never changed in the four-plus years that we were together: once Aura passed her two- or three-drink limit, she’d start reciting poetry. Of course sometimes she went well beyond those two or three drinks, whether with me or out with her girlfriends, especially Lola. She was famous among her friends for always phoning the next day, voice thick with hangover and remorse, to apologize, and they’d tell her she had nothing to
apologize for, that they’d all been drinking and had a great time. With me, on the other hand, whenever Aura drank too much, the night usually ended with her curled up in some corner of the floor, crying for her father. I didn’t have a dad, she’d bleat, in that slurred voice of a little girl that seemed to possess her in those moments. My dad abandoned me! He left us alone! He didn’t care about me! And she’d weep, while I did my best to soothe her. Sure, sometimes this exasperated me: was Aura really going to cry over her father like this for the rest of her life? But I’d also wonder with awed and mystified pity about that hole her father’s abandonment had left inside of her.

My father, on the other hand, trying to keep his tight grasp on his family, had done none of us any favors. My sisters used to implore my mother to divorce him, especially in the wake of one of his rampages of abuse. He didn’t beat up on my sisters like he did on me, he savaged them with words instead. They’d never had the strength or determination to get as far away from home as they could and should have, because they were so attached to my mother and always wanted to be near her; he denigrated them constantly. I don’t know which of the two—the thrice-married, wealthy, real-estate sister or the poor, never-married, Holiday Inn desk-clerk sister—now curses my father’s memory more bitterly or is more paranoid, defensive, and emotionally crippled. By the time you were thirteen, my mother has said to me, we never saw you anymore, you were always out in the streets with your friends, and then after high school you were gone for good. That is true, Mom, and it saved me. If Aura’s parents had stayed together, if she’d grown up in a stable home as the adored daughter of a respected Bajío politician and lawyer, a princess of the Land of Strawberries, who and where would Aura be now?

The last two years we were together, Aura stopped crying over her father. Was that because in me she’d found a reliable replacement father? A pretty facile piece of psychology; I can even imagine Aura having a good laugh over that. She was convinced that of the two of us, she was the more mature. But that doesn’t mean there
might not be a bit of truth to it anyway. I was more than one thing to Aura. I played multiple parts, just as she did for me.

In the reception room at the Gayosso funeral home, outside the chapel where Aura lay in her white-enamel coffin, I saw a man in a rumpled gray suit come in. I’d never seen him before. More than his distraught expression, it was his bearing that caught my attention, the way he held out his arms as he walked. He looked like somebody charging back into a room he’s just left, desperate for one more chance to plead his case. Or like he’d been walking around looking for somebody to hug for hours and now his arms ached with fatigue. He had a long, sloping nose and a shock of gray-brown hair falling over his forehead. He was searching, I deduced, for Juanita. This was Aura’s father, Héctor; I knew it even before I heard one of the tías say so. From a short distance I watched his long embrace with Juanita. I went up to him. I’m Francisco, Aura’s husband, I said. Oh, so you’re Aura’s husband, he echoed wanly. Though he’d seen Aura only twice in the last twenty-six years, he seemed deeply shaken by her death, I mean as much so as anyone, as if he also didn’t know how he was going to get through the rest of his life now. I felt weirdly protective, but what could I protect him from? We really didn’t have much to say to each other, not there, at that moment. But I sat next to him on a couch in a corner, hardly speaking, and felt relieved when Vicky came over to talk to him. I did learn that Héctor and his second wife had only one daughter; Aura had told me she had two half sisters whom she’d never met, though she’d never been really sure about that. Six weeks later, at the end of August, when I was finally getting ready to go home to our apartment in Brooklyn without Aura, I heard her say, silently but emphatically, inside my own thoughts: Francisco, before you leave Mexico, you have to go and see my father and find out what really happened between him and my mother. Also, find out why he had mud on his pants—I clearly heard Aura ask me to do this, as if I was her last chance to solve that mystery, which would allow
her to finally finish writing her short story about the day when he’d come into that restaurant in Guanajuato for their first and only meeting in seventeen years.

At the funeral, Héctor had given me his telephone number and invited me to come and visit. I phoned and, a few days later, took a bus into that part of Mexico called El Bajío, where Aura was born and where we’d had our wedding, to San José Tacuaya. Aura and I had gone to San José Tacuaya together only once, the weekend before our wedding, to bring a basket of eggs to a convent of cloistered nuns so that in exchange they would pray for it not to rain on our wedding day. It was also local tradition to stick knives in the earth the night before a wedding, and we did that, too. It rained on our wedding anyway, though not heavily, and just for a short while. That day in San José Tacuaya, Aura hadn’t wanted to try to find the house with a yard where she’d lived the first four years of her life, having no memory of what it looked like from the outside, or even any idea of what neighborhood it was in.

From Mexico City it was a five-hour bus trip to San José Tacuaya. I left at dawn. Movies, one after the other, blared on the video monitors, making it hard to sleep. I ended up watching most of the second movie, which was about a blue-collar, Philly neighborhood guy who tries out for the Philadelphia Eagles and makes the team. It was dubbed into Mexican Spanish, with football players, white and black, snarling chinga tu madre and cabrón at each other and chanting ¡Viva los Aguilas! in the locker room. Then I remembered Aura and her quarterback drop back. Nearly all my life I’ve had an American boy’s restless habit of imitating a quarterback’s three-step drop back into the passing stance. I’d do it over and over, sometimes when watching the news on television, or while thinking about something or other, a form of pacing. One day Aura asked me to show her how to do it, as if it was an interesting dance step she wanted to learn. Nothing to it, I told her, it’s just three steps backward. You hold the football here, by your chin, like this, I said, and take one step back, the first step, with the foot that’s on the same side as your throwing arm—so I explained and did it, followed by the next two steps
and the throw. But Aura took her first step back with the foot that was on the
opposite
side of her throwing arm. That turned her body so that she faced front and made her rock from side to side like an off-balance, backward-stumbling penguin while she tried to finish the drop back, invisible football clasped under her chin, her teeth biting her lower lip, eyes wide open. It was hilarious. She looked like Giulietta Masina clowning in
La Strada
. She must eventually have figured out the right way to do it, but she kept doing it the wrong way. Sometimes, if she thought I was feeling blue or not even, she’d announce, Mira mi amor, and she’d perform her spazzy quarterback drop back, just to make me laugh.

As the bus approached San José Tacuaya, the view became flat brown-and-green strawberry fields stretching to the horizon, and the highway was lined with small restaurants and wooden stands advertising fresh strawberries and cream. Closer to the city, the industrial outskirts began, gigantic auto plants and smaller factories. Aura’s father now lived near the city’s old colonial center, on a long street lined with drab storefronts; his address was easy to miss, being just a simple wooden door wedged between the facades of two businesses: a pharmacy and a dry cleaners. A minute or two after I rang, Héctor came out to meet me and led me back along a narrow corridor that led to a small, dank patio and an old, four-story house that originally must have been the home of a prosperous family but was now divided into separate apartments. Héctor and his family lived on the ground floor, in a cramped-seeming apartment with the kind of massive, old-fashioned furniture that reminded me of my grandparents’ house in Guatemala City. We went directly into a study that was also the living room, where Héctor sat in an armchair and I on a low sofa alongside bookshelves crammed with an impressive collection of law books and other tomes, mostly scholarly, on politics and history. But the books were covered with dust, I noticed, and looked as if they dated from the seventies or earlier; it appeared as if a new book hadn’t been added in twenty-five years. Héctor told me that he was semiretired, teaching law only part-time at a community college in the city. Naturally, I didn’t mention his supposedly
collecting bottles for resale at the market. His wife worked, too, he told me, and his daughter, Aura’s younger half sister, was living in the DF, working as a waitress. That was a surprise. I wanted to ask where but sensed that I shouldn’t.

That time during Christmas, in Guanajuato a few years ago, I asked, was that the last time you saw Aura? I knew it was. I felt, with some dismay, the scheming journalist in me awakening, strategizing, laying down a seemingly innocuous question in order to get him talking. He told me about the afternoon when Aura had found him struggling to let himself out of Vicky Padilla’s mother’s house, that final flustered and abrupt good-bye; afterward, when Aura had gone inside and found her mother and Vicky drinking tequila, something in their attitude had made her not want to discuss her father with them. His voice rising with indignation, Héctor told me that Juanita and Vicky had mocked him that afternoon, that that was why he’d left instead of staying to spend time with Aura. Juanita and Vicky had been complaining about money. But then Juanita had said, It’s no surprise we’re poor, but you, Héctor, you have no excuse; by now you should be a wealthy, powerful man but look at you, you’re even poorer than we are! And then, he said, Juanita and Vicky had laughed at him. He recounted this in his quiet, tired-sounding voice, his hands loosely entwined between his knees, staring straight ahead instead of looking directly at me. In order to commiserate, I said, I know what Juanita and Vicky can be like when they’re together. Then I brought up that other time he’d seen Aura, a few years before, when she was twenty-one and they’d met at the restaurant. It was during one of her breaks from the University of Texas. Wasn’t that the first time you’d seen her in seventeen years? I asked. Were you surprised that your daughter had turned out to be such a beautiful and intelligent young woman?

After a moment, Héctor said, Yes, beautiful, of course, a wonderful girl, and he emphatically nodded and said that no, no, it hadn’t surprised him, he’d always known how exceptional Aura was, even when she was an infant. It’s obvious, he said, that Juanita did a magnificent job of raising Aura.

Oh, yes, I said. This was the moment I’d been waiting for. I said, But you know, Héctor, Aura never truly accepted Rodrigo as her father, because she never got over losing you. She never kept her love for you a secret. She never understood why you and Juanita separated. Aura was obsessed with that mystery, but also with why you so completely stayed away from her afterward. She knew plenty of children of divorce who still saw both their parents. Why couldn’t she?

Héctor had been holding himself still and leaning forward as he listened, as if better to concentrate on my every word, but then he lost it; he sat back and covered his face with his hands and quaked from within with dry harsh sobs. When he’d recomposed himself, he explained his reason for that distance. It was the same reason that he’d given Aura: Juanita had remarried and he’d thought Aura should have only one father. But why, I asked, didn’t you ever even answer any of the letters Aura sent you? Héctor said that he’d never received any such letters. Maybe my expression was openly skeptical, because he blurted, Juanita, you know, has always been a little crazy. Then, just like that, Héctor gave up the secret of their past, the one that had been withheld from Aura her entire life even though she’d witnessed it, the events she seemed to have intuited and perhaps half-remembered but had never found a way of exposing or even expressing.