Say Her Name (7 page)

Until recently, at Brown, Aura had worn dyed purple highlights in her hair. But I didn’t find that out until after Aura was dead, when Mauricio, her friend at Brown, recalled it in a condolence e-mail.
When I first met Aura
, he wrote,
she had purple dye in her hair. Before we became friends, I thought of her as that girl with purple hair. Somehow, it really suited her. Suddenly, one day her hair was all black, and so it remained. For a while, after her hair was no longer purple, I felt a little sad whenever I saw her, as if some criminal had stolen it from her in a robbery and we all knew there was no way to get it back
.

That night we switched back and forth between English and Spanish. You could tell that Aura was proud of her English—it was better than my Spanish, though I never admitted that to her. Most of the Mexico City girls I knew spoke English with a soft, melodic lilt, as if they wanted to sound like Parisian girls trying to speak English, but not Aura.

How come when you speak English, I asked her, you sound like a New York Jew? We’d left Gabriela’s and were walking on the sidewalk, with Borgini, whom we were ignoring. Salman Rushdie had vanished—inside a floating bubble, or else in a taxi.

Ha ha. She had an explanation for that. Because her mother was always working, when she was a child she’d spent many hours alone in their apartment watching television, and she’d taught herself English by watching television,
Seinfeld
, especially. They had cable, and
Seinfeld
was her and her mother’s favorite show.

That night Aura told me a little bit about her mother. For most of Aura’s life, her mother had worked as a secretary, mainly in the psychology department, and as an administrator at the UNAM. During her free hours, though, she’d been a student, too, taking classes in psychology and finally completing the college degree that she’d nearly finished at the university in Guanajuato before Aura was born. Then she’d begun enrolling in graduate classes, one a semester. Now she only needed to deliver her thesis to graduate with a doctorate in psychology.

We ended up in Zombie Hut, on Smith Street, for a nightcap. At the dinner party we’d drunk wine, but now we switched to vodka. A nightcap became one more, another, and probably another, though Borgini made his one vodka tonic last as long as all of our drinks. I was struck by how intimidated he looked. He stood facing Aura, holding on to his drink like it was a subway pole on a careening train, as if he couldn’t find the composure he needed just to lift the glass to his lips in one motion, as if he couldn’t even quite swallow. I’m sure that Zombie Hut was the last place Borgini wanted to be, with me tagging along—what a clamoring fool he must have thought me, openly hitting on Aura after bringing her into the “
petit comité
” from which he’d deviously or pusillanimously or just mystifyingly excluded her. But he didn’t dare complain. He was, like they say,
so busted
. Yet, there in Zombie Hut, Aura couldn’t have seemed more nonchalant about whatever his not inviting her to the dinner party had exposed about him. By then I’d half convinced myself that there couldn’t be anything between them anyway. They must be just friends. Was Borgini gay?

I struck the board and cried, No more, I will abroad!

Aura was reciting poetry, in English, slowly moving her fist up and down. She could have been a (drunken) schoolgirl declaiming in a classroom. Her lovely lips seemed to form every word as if in Claymation, as if her lips and the words of the poem were made of the same malleable substance, and the words took shape in the air, solid and bright—chewable, kissable.

What!?! Shall I ever
…
sigh
and
pi-
i-i-i-
ne
?

Sometimes her voice went up:

My life and lines are free
ee …

And then went down, into her comical baritone:

free as the road
[
rowww’d
]

And lower still, with bowed head, on the poem’s end:

And I replied,
My LORD.

It was a pretty long poem! I’d never memorized a poem that long. She said it was “The Collar,” by George Herbert. A Mexico City girl standing in a Brooklyn bar reciting seventeenth-century English religious poetry. In the history of the borough, had that ever happened before?

I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above—

After basking in my incredulity over the Herbert recitation and taking a drink of her vodka, Aura had set her glass back down on the bar and launched into the Yeats poem.

Those that I fight I do not hate
Those that I guard I do not lo-
o-o-o
-ve

How that voice would echo inside me over the coming months, as it still does now.

A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds
… seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath …

One day I would realize that once Aura passed her threshold of a certain number of alcoholic drinks, usually three, or even two, if she was feeling happy, happy and loved, or else when she just wanted to show off, she’d recite poetry, almost always these two poems, and often each more than once, like a jukebox where someone has punched in the same two songs to play over and over.

I struck the board and cried, No more! I will abroad
…

In Zombie Hut, she was off again, round two.

I know that I shall meet my fate …

Then Aura’s mood changed. She forgot about me and became interested in Borgini again. That night, she never turned her attention back to me. They left the bar soon after. It all happened so fast. We were out on the sidewalk, saying good-bye, I kissed her cheek in the same way I would have if at dinner we’d only exchanged superficial pleasantries. I’d actually believed, in some part of my drunken, love-starved self, that I was going to be the one taking her home. Aura dove into the back of the taxi as if in pursuit of something rolling away from her, and he got in after and shut the door. For a moment she was a shadowy figure sitting up in the backseat of a taxi and I was never going to see her again. The taxi drove off down Smith Street. As if this were the end of a Babel story, I stood under the streetlight watching the taxi recede down the long street, revealed to myself as deluded, pathetic, and doomed to unhappiness.

But we’d exchanged addresses and telephone numbers. Like I’d promised, I sent her a copy of my most recent novel, published four years before. The weeks and months went by, and I received no reply. I told myself, She must have hated my book. But that’s all right, she’s way too young. You really have to forget about her.

Aura had first hooked up with Borgini the previous spring, at a literary conference at Brown in honor of the fortieth anniversary of the publication of Carlos Fuentes’s magical realist ghost story,
Aura,
cohosted by her nemesis professor, who wasn’t yet her nemesis. “Here we are, honoring
Aura,”
ad-libbed Borgini, during his talk at the conference, “and I have found my own Aura.” That created something of a sensation; Professor T__ may even have felt that the conference had been somehow hijacked by this too public romance between the glamorous young writer and the cute grad student with purple in her hair. Of course, he took it out on Aura. That’s probably what turned him against her. Even five years later, all you had to do was mention Professor T__ in Aura’s mother’s presence and her anger would reignite. Furiously, she’d recall how she’d wanted to fly up to Providence to confront and even assault him. Juanita was a good-looking woman, but in her wrath her face was almost unbearably vivid, as if her features were being reflected and magnified in a smashed mirror’s swept-up shards. She liked giving this kind of performance, taunting and slurring like a Mexican street thug, displaying the protective ferocity of her love for her daughter. And it wasn’t just an act. Juanita regarded Aura’s accomplishments—her success in school, her scholarships to U.S. universities—as her own accomplishments, too. She’d worked hard, double-time, triple-time, year after year, so that her daughter could have the same educational opportunities as any girl born into the Mexican upper class. When Professor T__ called her daughter a frivolous rich girl, he was uttering a blasphemous negation of Juanita’s entire life—that’s how Juanita took it, rather than as she might have, as a backhanded recognition of how well she’d succeeded.

Juanita wasn’t a reader of fiction, but Fuentes’s
Aura—
that story’s beautiful young Aura is the mystical ghost of her hundred-year-old aunt who, succubus-like, inhabits her niece’s body for sex—was a touchstone book for her generation in Mexico.

“My mother named me for your book, Maestro Fuentes,” Aura told Carlos Fuentes at the conference. Aura had him autograph a copy for Juanita. She and Borgini posed for a picture with him.

In the diary Aura kept when she was at Brown from April to December, she mentioned only once, briefly, though in a tone of regret, the apparent end of her relationship with Borgini—JB, she called him there; almost everybody in her diary writings was referred to with initials, as if out of considerate discretion. She wrote very sketchily about her trip to New York, not even mentioning Borgini’s book event or her dinner with Salman Rushdie, nor did she even allude to having met me, or to the book I’d sent her—there is no suggestion in that diary that our meeting made any impression on her. She cryptically recorded another visit, later that same fall, from another boyfriend from Mexico, who she referred to as “P.”

On several pages she described the quiet and boredom of Providence, which she felt suited her for the time being—she liked the long days of cold autumn rain spent holed up in her room with her books, or in the library. In one entry, she criticized herself for finding it so easy to write out of introspection while never having trained herself to be able to describe with precision how, on a sunny, windy day, Providence’s grid of streets filled and swirled with yellow, orange, red leaves. “Have spent much of this day thinking about my mother”
—
there was more than one entry like that. “Am worried about Ma.” “I miss my mother.” She wrote about the progress of her thesis with anxiety, but also with growing excitement and pride. She wanted that thesis to make her stand out, to provide proof of a destiny. She wanted it to show Professor T__ how wrong he’d been about her. She described the reliable sense of lonely refuge she found in her reading and in her books:

… those lands are the only ones, it seems, that I can visit without ruining. But maybe that will help me, someday, to find a way to escape from this little piece of land that I’ve already ruined. I was born ruined, by a past I know nothing about.

That might sound like a pretty typical expression of postadolescent angst and self-absorption. It sure was typical of Aura. Her insecurities and fears, her obsession with the mysteries of her early childhood and of her birth father’s abandonment of her and her mother when she was four fill so many pages of her notebooks and diaries that it’s impossible to read through them without feeling distressed for her, and puzzled over how relentlessly she punished herself. Was she really so unhappy and lonely, or was it just the exaggerated diary rhetoric of a young woman to whom, as she herself had observed, this kind of writing came too easily?

In an entry later in the diary, dated April 24, the day she turned twenty-six, she wrote that her father had phoned her to wish her a happy birthday for the first time in more than twenty years. The conversation was brief, she tersely reported, and he’d sounded nervous.

That was the last time Aura ever spoke to her father.

5

Every so often, I dream of a picture taken of me at age 5. I’m sitting on the edge of a wooden fence. Behind, a humungous tree gives me shadow from a sun that can’t be seen.

That’s the entire content of a document, written in English, saved as Toexist.doc in Aura’s computer. Every day I found something in her computer that I’d never read before. It was moving to discover that she used to dream about that photograph because it haunted me, too; I’d already switched it from her desk to mine. In the picture,
five-year-old Aura is wearing wrinkled denim overalls and a pink T-shirt. Her black hair, shining glossily with light from that sun you can’t see, is cut in ragamuffin bowl style, jagged bangs falling over her eyebrows, and the lower halves of her ears stick out. Aura had big ears; I do, too. Our child was definitely going to have “humongous” ears. The fence is tall enough so that to have crawled up and settled onto her perch atop it must have felt like a small triumph, at least. So the look on her face, the close-lipped smile, the direct gaze toward the camera, could be one of quiet satisfaction. But her expression also seems so sweetly trusting and unknowing that you can’t help but reflect on the little girl’s solitude and vulnerability, a mood amplified by the darkened mass of foliage and thick snaking branches above her.

It seems like just another unfairness to Aura to analyze her every childhood photograph for signs and portents of doom. But even when she was alive, every time I looked at that picture, I felt a new surge of protective feeling for her. I’d imitate the tight little smile that made her cheeks bulge, the blankly trusting gaze. I’d tell her she still looked like that.

How do I look? she’d sometimes ask, and I’d imitate that look, and she’d say, Noooo, I don’t, and we’d crack up.

I found another paragraph saved as Elsueñodemimadre.doc:

My Mother’s Dream