Say Her Name (34 page)

Aura, do you promise?

Sí, mi amor, it’s me.

I don’t get it. If you can visit me like you are now, then why don’t you come all the time? I’ve been so lonely without you.

We’re not allowed out that often, she said. If I were here all the time, then I would be a ghost, and I don’t want to be a ghost. Ghosts suffer.

That makes sense, I said. And I thought, It really does make sense.

There was so much I wanted to ask her. Well, just imagine. But before I could get another word out, Aura said, Frank, I came now because I need you to do something for me. I want you to go to Paris to find my mother.

Your mother’s in Paris?

But Aura was gone, dispelled back into the air, into the chilled early morning light.

I wrote an e-mail to Brasi and asked him to find out for me if Aura’s mother was in Paris. He wrote back that same day to tell me that he was sure Juanita was in Mexico. He’d seen her that morning at the UNAM.

22

A novel I read in the weeks after I was hit by the car had been recently published: it was described as a 9/11 book, the horror of that day and its dark aftermath being the cause of a separation between the main character and his traumatized wife, who leaves him in New York and takes their child back to Europe. It was a lonely story, narrated by a depressed main character, but near the end of the book, when he gets his wife and child back, his circumstances seem to brighten. They take a trip to a tropical beach, where the narrator discovers bodysurfing and encourages his wife to bodysurf, too. He tells her that it’s easy. What he describes as a slightly menacing wave comes along, and he says something like, Here we go, and he raises his arms and puts his head down, catches the wave, and surfaces however many yards away, exhilarated. But the wife hasn’t moved. She could care less about bodysurfing. When he exhorts her to catch the next wave she answers that she’d rather just swim, and coolly floats away on her back.

Too uncanny, an impossible coincidence. Did the author know? When he made the wife reject her husband’s invitation to bodysurf and she just swims away, did he know that he was saving her life?

Unbearable, if the answer to that question is actually
yes.

23

At our wedding we put a disposable cardboard camera on every table, but afterward we left the cameras we’d collected in the apartment in Escandón, inside a plastic trash bag. It was only a few weeks after Aura died that I finally took them, about fifteen cardboard cameras in all, to a film lab in Mexico City to be developed. I was surprised by how many intimate shots of Aura and me there were among the two hundred or so snapshots that came back. The two of us kissing, whispering to each other at our table, standing together in the shadows at the edges of the party, dancing close. It was as if private detectives had been hidden among the guests, spying on us, gathering evidence. These pictures seemed more
close in,
somehow, than those taken by the professional wedding photographer. Yet not one of those disposable camera spies caught either of us with even an accidental expression on our faces that I wasn’t happy with. My favorite of those snapshots, taken near the end of the party, is of Aura alone, from behind, carrying her bridal, platform disco shoes in her hand like an athlete leaving the field, one bare foot kicked back as she steps, hoisting the dress’s hem, her blistered sole smudged with shoe dye, perspiration, and even blood from all the hours of dancing. It turned out that the quick eye and reflexes that caught Aura’s naked foot just as it kicked back didn’t belong to some lucky amateur but to our friend Pia, a photographer whose work is shown all over the world. The black-and-white photograph on our wedding invitation was Pia’s, too—the invitations were Pia’s and her husband Gonzalo’s wedding gift to us—taken in a street near their Montmartre apartment. It shows Aura from the waist down in her winter coat and boots, one of my legs is on the left and our hands are joined in the middle; the heart of the image, though, is
our stark shadows falling across the sun-brightened cobblestones, holding hands.

We didn’t begin to look for a Catholic priest who could marry us until three months before the wedding. Aura’s mother wanted this, and I thought my mother would be happy, too. Mostly, I wanted to appease Juanita. The wedding planning was getting out of control. There’d been plenty of tense conversations about money, and disagreements, especially between Aura and her mother, who had different ideas. That wedding is the concrete foundation of my credit card debt. Juanita and I were more or less splitting the costs. She was inviting at least a hundred guests—family, friends, and colleagues, from all over Mexico—and Aura and I were inviting about sixty friends. In the end, more than two hundred people came. Our wedding planners, a team of San Miguel de Allende gringa expats, had plenty of suggestions that were surely perfect for the sorts of weddings they usually put together and that they relentlessly pushed on us but that I was constantly having to push back against, while at the same time trying to avoid the impression, before the wedding planners but also before Juanita, that I was skimping because I couldn’t afford it. No, we really didn’t want the wedding-party cover band the planners always employed; we’d hire our own DJ in the DF. We didn’t want illuminated thunder sticks, a Mexican hat dance, or a fireworks display. Yes, we did want the live donkey with flagons of tequila holstered to its saddle. We did want
papel picado
banners hung inside the tent over the tables, with “Aura & Frank” cut into them. It was Juanita’s idea to also order some that read, “Viva Red Sox,” in honor of my father’s memory. We did want mariachis for after the ceremony and at the end of the party. We wanted the tequila to last until dawn. I told Aura that I wanted our wedding to be like the climactic village fiesta scene in that movie
The Wild Bunch,
minus the massacre. I teased her that my best men, Saqui and Gonzalo, and I were going to ride in for the wedding ceremony
on horseback and dressed in charro gear, like Steve Martin, Chevy Chase, and Martin Short in
Three Amigos
.

But it turned out to be much harder than we’d expected to find a priest who could or would marry us. Mexican couples usually reserve their priests a year in advance, and are supposed to attend classes, and the priests expect to conduct the wedding Mass inside a church. None of that was in our plans. Couldn’t we find some easygoing lefty priest? Aura knew of a Catholic school and monastery run by Dominicans in the south of the city that, because of its activist role in poor neighborhoods and Chiapas, had some kind of unofficial involvement with the university, and she made an appointment. The school’s reception area was in an open corridor alongside a cement courtyard. The priest who came out to meet us looked like a high school football coach: a broad-shouldered man in windbreaker and jeans, with neatly combed gray hair, wearing silver-framed glasses. He was French, Padre Jacques. He sat against the edge of the reception desk, arms folded across his chest, while we sat before him like schoolchildren, in plastic chairs. We explained what we wanted: for him, if willing, to come to Atotonilco, the old Catholic shrine village outside of San Miguel, on the twentieth of August, to marry us. But instead of inside the church itself, our wedding would be on the grounds of a restored old hacienda we’d rented; if, under those circumstances, he couldn’t do a whole Mass—we didn’t actually want a nuptial Mass—we’d be grateful if he could say a blessing. We’d pay travel expenses, of course, and whatever else he charged.

Aura had had the normal Catholic childhood education—some Sunday school, catechism classes, First Communion—and as a baby I’d been baptized and confirmed. Mostly, we confessed, we were doing this to please our mothers. Padre Jacques seemed to understand, and didn’t plumb us further. But he had plenty to say. His Spanish, however fluent, poured out sounding like French, his mouth making the forceful exertions of an excited French speaker, his chin jabbing at us. He only required six weeks of preparation classes. We still had time. Christ also reveals his oneness with us
through the sacrament of marriage—so began the lesson part.
Misterio Sacramental hasta la muerte,
I definitely remember those words. Marriage, like all the sacraments, was best understood as a preparation for the final sacrament of death and for the eternal grace of salvation; that was his main point. It was about preparing our children for the eternal grace of salvation, and their children’s children. On and on he went, repeating the words “Christ,” “death,” and “salvation,” seemingly in every possible combination, getting more and more worked up and abstract. For some reason, this tirade made me feel like Woody Allen in
Annie Hall,
when he sits down to Thanksgiving dinner with the WASP family and they say grace and suddenly he turns into a Hassid. I was sharply biting the inside of my cheek to keep from laughing. Aura was straining to look attentive and serious, but I saw her eyes widen and her lips thin, and realized she was trying not to burst out laughing, too. Death, Christ, death, marriage, salvation, the Holy Ghost, the Trinity, on he went. Thank you, Padre, yes, we understand, our marriage is a preparation for eternal salvation. But Padre Jacques couldn’t marry us anyway, not in late August. No,
c’est impossible
. Still, we needed to come to the preparation classes. Out on the sidewalk Aura and I leaned against the whitewashed wall, barking with laughter, jajaja. What a bizarro priest! Oh, mi amor, I was trying so hard not to laugh, me too, that was hilarious, the way he kept going on about death! Jojojo.

I don’t think we’re going to find a priest to marry us, I said. I’m ready to give up. Aura said, Yeah, I don’t even want a priest anymore. She wasn’t even sure she wanted a wedding, not a big one. She’d be happier, she kept insisting, if we just got married at city hall in New York.

Then how did we, Aura, too, in the end, all get so carried away? Maybe Juanita began to see it as the kind of wedding she’d always dreamed of putting on for her daughter, in scale at least, however else it fell short of her fantasy, beginning with the groom; a wedding she never could have afforded on her own. The wedding was also a new way to prove to Juanita how much I loved her daughter. Juanita who’d once grabbed my BlackBerry off a restaurant table,
inspected it, and held it aloft while she announced that I couldn’t be as in love with Aura as I claimed because I didn’t have a single photograph of her in my phone. But that BlackBerry didn’t have a camera, and I’d never e-mailed photographs from my computer to download them onto my phone because it hadn’t even occurred to me to do that. I remember kind of marveling at Juanita, that she’d honed in on this one chink in a love that I was always so proud to show off, like the proverbial tiny slipup that undoes the perfect crime. The wedding planning was one more thing that strained Aura’s nerves, but she got caught up in it anyway, spending hours organizing and updating the wedding planning Web site on her laptop. She burned CDs with music that she imagined would play before the ceremony and that always included winsome, girly, Spanish pop from her early adolescence, like Jeanette and Mecano, as if to evoke the mood of a girl’s daydreams of marriage. Planning the seating, drawing diagram after diagram, analyzing why this person or couple should or shouldn’t be seated at the same table with that one, was like turning gossip into a board game.

Aura and I understood our reasons for getting married; it wasn’t just romantic impulse, like it had mostly been for me the first time, when I was in my midtwenties. We knew there were ways to commit, to “feel married,” without undergoing the official rite. Had Aura and I been more radical-bohemian, planning to raise a family in Berlin or someplace like that, we could have forgone marriage. But we had practical motives, too, such as Aura’s immigration status. Also: a wedding as public expression-recognition-celebration with family and friends. I
have
found my missing half.
We have found in each other
. Let’s be joined in every way possible, including by marriage. Let’s make children.

Our fat leather-bound wedding photo album that Natalia will so like to pore over, in childhood, in girlhood, in scornful adolescence: Look at Mom standing next to that little donkey in its straw sombrero, laughing, hair blowing across her face—okay, she does look beautiful—a bottle of tequila in her hand, a strap of her wedding dress fallen off her shoulder exposing that infamous tattoo she had
until she got it lasered off just before I was born so that the whole world wouldn’t see it every time she had to breast-feed me. Mom gaping in astonishment as Daddy cuts into the wedding cake with a machete! Tía Fabis and Tía Lida throwing rose petals over Mom, and she’s smiling and jumping up into a cloud of falling petals, hands held out, so that she looks like she’s levitating. But, yuck, Daddy dyed his hair. You can tell that he dyed his hair because it’s so solid and black, not like in all the other pictures from back then. Mom made him do it. She said, Yeah, I made Papi dye his hair. See how your father would do anything for me? Poor ole Dad. Mom wanted him to look younger, especially in front of all Mama Juanita’s friends, colleagues, and distant relatives. That was before Mom finally forced my grandmother into AA by telling her she was barred from babysitting me if she didn’t go. Now Mama Juanita hasn’t had a drink of liquor in fifteen years! That doesn’t stop her from making fun of Daddy, who she treats like he’s a giant brain-damaged ostrich, but she makes fun of everybody, she’s hilarious, I love her; when I stay with her in her house in Taxco on school vacations I have the best time! After Mom wrote that famous book about the Mexican girl who goes to live with her shrink husband in a French lunatic asylum and invents the robot shoes, she and Daddy bought the house back from my great-grandmother Mama Violeta’s former maid, but that’s another story that I’ve heard a zillion times.

The wedding video and color photographs were a wedding gift from Juanita’s cousin. But I can’t stand to watch the wedding video. You’d think I’d want to watch it all the time, as it’s the only video of Aura that I have. That video used to make me want to scream with embarrassment even when Aura was alive. Why so much more footage of me than of Aura? Why was the camera person so riveted by me? Because I looked like I’d just been miraculously cured of blindness, aiming my stretched Muppet grin all over the place. My exuberance is pure—it’s not like I felt undeserving, or like I’d gotten away with something. But I’d stopped—long before Aura—expecting
or imagining that a day like this one would ever come, and that’s too obvious in the video. There was something unguarded, out of control, undignified in my comportment, going among the guests like a romping dog, showing everybody my enormous grin.