Say Her Name

by Francisco Goldman

  I just got dressed and I’m fed up, Mamá is impossible, I don’t know what’s going on with her but the truth is I’m not really liking her that much, let’s say just the opposite, it’s just that we can’t get along anything I say she gets angry, even when I haven’t finished the first word of my sentence. But maybe I’m just in a bad mood and so I’m going to go outside and skate.

  Something has happened, it feels weird, nothing is the same as before. Papá is always away, and when I see him on weekends, something isn’t right.

  I think I need a new kind of friend. I’d like a friendship full of love, where we’d always be telling each other how much we love each other, talking in signs, forming a great team, but so far I haven’t found that kind of friend.

  Today has been the same as others. I didn’t get bored but I didn’t have fun either. But in the afternoon we’re going to Perisur to buy Katia a bathing suit.

  I went to eat and as I can’t stand eating with Katia I went to the kitchen with Ursula. She was finished but I promised to eat fast and quietly, then I sat with Ursula and had tea with a sweet bun and I said things to her in English and explained what the words meant.

  Cárdenas got various votes including those of my mother and father and I support them. We went and stood outside the Congress building to support our party. The people from the PAN made noise but we just made V for victory signs with our hands and whenever somebody from the PRI came out to talk we all turned our backs. My mother knew one of them from the PRI and when he came over she started insulting him. I carried a sign that said

  NO

  AL FRAUDE

  Today I’ve been happy and I learned that just because a mother can’t be with her daughter all the time, that doesn’t make her a bad mother, it’s not the amount of time that matters.

  I’m wearing a bra!

  Dear Diary:

  Surely you are asking yourself why I am writing to you. Again, problems with your mother, or feeling lonely? No, today it’s not that, I just felt like writing. I’ll tell you everything that has happened—

  We went to Disco Patín at night. There was a big rink and a little one, all lit up. We were skating in the big one—some poor mongolotito was following us, but they made him leave.

  I met an instructor.

  I don’t know why Frida got mad at me.

  I feel like a flea, nobody pays attention to me, I feel like I’m going to cry. To feel like a flea is humiliating and too painful for me. I just have to hear that little laugh from my “PERFECT” sister who only receives praise, congratulations and love, and my heart feels tossed into the trash. But I suppose that’s just the way life is, some people are superior to others.

  Played Atari like crazy, rearranged my Barbie house, watched television, read, set the table.

  Entering secondaria [middle school] has been incredible. The worst has been my relations with my mother. I can’t stand her anymore because if she has no interest in my things, why do I have to be interested in hers?

  Advice on how not to be like my maldita perra mother

  1. Don’t discourage your children.

  2. Don’t yell at them.

  3. Make it so that they spend every day marvelously and never even find out what boredom is.

  I’m a total pendeja of a girl. I never pay attention to anything and I’m fed up with myself, I HATE MYSELF. I want somebody I can tell all this to, somebody to hug, a lot and very tightly. But I look around, and I find no one.

  Dear Diary:

  Mamá isn’t here, I’m alone in the house so I can do what I want, my mother has forbidden me from going outside but I don’t care I’ll go out anyway, with that man with the motorcycle, the truth is he drives really fast.

  I go with him, he lets me off at the wrong place and I’m hungry so I go into the store and slip some chocolate bars into my pocket but the employee sees me and I run out into the street but he catches me by the shoulder and takes the chocolate bars back, the next time I steal I better take more precaution.

  Then I went to that horrible market and I ran into Luís who gave me whiskey, at first it was really strong but then I got used to it. Around 10:40 a.m. I decided to go home just in time to deceive my mother.

  We had eggs for breakfast but I wasn’t hungry, the whiskey was more than enough. Then I had to accompany my mother to work and while she thinks that I’m sitting here at one of the many desks, I go down to the 1st floor, to the coke machine, I find it and carefully, without anyone seeing me, I bang the machine and pull out a soft drink. Mmmm, yummy. Then I go upstairs, and my mother doesn’t know anything that I’ve done today.

  Maybe Aura suspected that her mother was snooping in her diary, or else that last entry was just a fantasy. By then, though, Aura had started tagging along with the older kids in the Copilco complex, and some of the stories she told me weren’t so different from that one, so who knows?

  Juanita and I never had the chance to sit down together to talk about how to divide Aura’s belongings; we never came close to having that conversation. I would have given her almost whatever she wanted, the childhood diaries for sure. I did get a phone call from Juanita’s cousin, who told me that Juanita wanted Aura’s computer, but I said no, and not only because I’d bought it for Aura, but because so much of what was on it belonged to both of us, or was a part of our relationship—photos, music, the wedding site, texts we’d worked on together, and all Aura’s fiction was saved there. What I did instead was take the computer to a technician and pay him to copy the contents of Aura’s hard drive onto disks, minus, on the advice of a lawyer, her e-mail accounts. But about a month after Aura’s death, I received an e-mail from Juanita’s lawyer—a lawyer from the university, one of Leopoldo’s colleagues—giving me two days to vacate the Escandón apartment where Aura and I had been living. Actually, it wasn’t even an e-mail to me, it was sent to a friend of mine who’d come down for our wedding and also for the funeral, a lawyer in New York, but Juanita and her lawyer seemed to be assuming that he must be my lawyer, which he wasn’t, though he did help me to find one in Mexico. They probably had no legal right to evict me, the widowed husband, so abruptly, even though it was technically Juanita’s apartment, but I had no desire or will to fight. It wasn’t that I was afraid of what they could do to me. I fled from having to confront the full force of their hatred and blame. I took everything in the apartment with me. That must have surprised Juanita. She probably expected me to leave most of Aura’s stuff behind, including that old steamer trunk in which she kept her childhood diaries and her old school papers and such. I took the disks with the contents of Aura’s computer back to Brooklyn with me, too.

  One thing I did leave behind in the apartment was a copy of Leopoldo’s book of political aphorisms, inscribed to Aura. I put the book down on the floor, open, spine up, and stomped it, imprinting it with my footprint, and kicked it into a pile of trash. I left behind our cheaper furniture, too, including the pine dining table from the Tlalpan carpentry market, with Aura’s old school papers and old family photographs neatly stacked on top; also an envelope in which I’d put the silver charm bracelet that had belonged to Juanita when she was a child, “Juanita” engraved on its little plaque, with a note explaining that Aura had worn the bracelet into the ocean that last day.

  I have an uncle who’s going to hate you, Aura had told me shortly after we started going out. And you’re going to hate him.

  But I didn’t hate Leopoldo. He was one of Aura’s few relatives, she loved him, and he seemed to love her, so I did my best to get along with the guy. Anyway, he was funny. He liked to speak in aphorisms. Watching an elderly couple making a crabby, gesticulating scene with a waitress in a restaurant we were in, he remarked, in the same light dry tone he must have used when he charmed six-year-old Aura by referring to her and her cousins as bichitos: Los viejitos sólo deben salir para ser amables, Old people should only go out in public to be sweet.

  But he was also a haughty, vain, and pretentious man
who knew exactly how he came off and, at least in some instances, seemed to enjoy making people wonder if he was really as appalling as he seemed, or if it was all just a twisted performance. As she had with Juanita, Mama Violeta had sent Leopoldo away at a young age, but to a military school in Tabasco where, as an intelligent, sensitive and lonely boy, he’d suffered horrors. The seething wound of those years was the source of his ramrod stiff bearing, his antiquated formality, and his general misanthropy and hostility.

  I never really understood that he hated me until, at Aura’s funeral, I caught him staring at me. I was weeping, friends were pressed around me, it seemed I couldn’t greet anybody or receive an embrace without breaking down. I turned my head and caught Leopoldo aiming a stare of cold hatred directly at me. I remember thinking, What’s that about? but I quickly dismissed it, it seemed perfectly right for everybody to be acting crazy. Soon I understood that stare better. There was more to it than hate. There was scrutiny in it, the cold reflection of a developing suspicion and logic. He stared at me like he thought he was investigator Porfiry Petrovich and I was Raskolnikov.

  10

  That first winter of Aura’s death I was fixated on not losing my gloves, my hat, or my scarf. Since first being entrusted with the responsibility of looking after gloves, hat, and scarf in kindergarten, I’d probably never gotten through a whole winter without losing all of them. Aura was just the same, probably even worse. There were about a dozen single unpaired gloves, hers and mine, scattered around inside our big closet like unmated birds in a forlorn aviary. At least once every winter Aura would fall in love with a new winter hat, winter hats still being a novelty to her, and she’d wear it everywhere, even when it wasn’t cold out, and when I’d swoon over how cute she looked and want to cover her winter-glowing cheeks in kisses, I’d think, It’s just a matter of time before she loses this hat, and I was never wrong. One morning there I’d be, trying to reconstruct our path through the city the night before, phoning every bar and restaurant we’d been in, often speaking in Spanish to morning restaurant cleanup crews or kitchen workers and describing the hat Aura might have left behind. Everywhere I went that first winter without Aura, I was always patting the pockets of my down jacket to make sure the gloves were there, the pocket zippers closed, no matter how drunk I was, I’d suddenly remember to do that. If I noticed that a pocket’s zipper was open with a glove stuffed inside, if I saw any part of a glove or finger protruding, I’d gasp or even curse myself and zip it closed with such emphatic self-recrimination that, on the street or the subway or at the next table, I often drew alarmed and curious stares. Mi amor, I’m not going to lose these gloves, I promise, I’d mutter away, as if they were her gloves and she was depending on me to bring them home to her. And I didn’t, all that winter, for the first time ever that I remember, lose either my gloves or my hat. But I did lose my scarf, during a long night of drinking in January, in Berlin, where I spent three weeks during that first winter without Aura, when I’d wanted to flee Brooklyn during the holidays, and then I refused to buy a new one, despite that city’s winter cold that feels like it blows in off Russian steppe battlefields strewn with frozen corpses. When I got back to Brooklyn about a week later I started wearing one of Aura’s scarves instead, a black pashmina with a white pattern, embroidered with silvery threads. People would say, What a nice scarf, or, What a pretty scarf, and I’d say, It’s Aura’s, and sometimes people, especially women, would respond, Yes, I thought it must be, or they’d give me a little pat on the shoulder. That was the scarf I was tying on again as I got ready for my second winter without Aura.

  This time I didn’t even get as far as mid-December before I reached into the pocket of my jacket one evening as I was coming out of a subway exit and realized that I’d lost a glove. I went into our closet and found an old left-hand glove from some other separated pair, and when I soon lost that glove, too, I didn’t care. But I was still determined not to lose my hat, a gray cloth aviator cap with synthetic-fur-lined flaps. Aura was with me when I bought it for ten dollars in Chinatown during our last winter.

  Aura lived in the Copilco apartment from about the age of six until she went away to the University of Texas. After she came back from Brown she lived in her mother’s new high-rise condo apartment for a few months, before moving on her own back to Copilco, where her mother hadn’t sold that apartment yet. Copilco was where Aura and I spent our first night together. So many of the turning-point moments in Aura’s life happened there. When she was eleven her grandmother Mama Violeta came from Taxco for what was supposed to be a month’s visit, maybe longer; there was even a chance that Mama Violeta was going to move in and live with them. But within days a fight erupted, overheard by Aura in her bedroom, her grandmother horribly insulting her mother, and her mother’s indignant shouts ordering Mama Violeta to leave. And Mama Violeta did leave, except she didn’t just storm out and stalk around the parking lot until she calmed down and came back and tearfully apologized to her daughter for the terrible things she’d said and vice versa, as Aura had expected; instead she packed up her suitcase and left, and never again spoke to her daughter, or even to her granddaughter. Back then Juanita rarely drank alcohol, and she went jogging with Rodrigo on weekends and took aerobics classes; her body was firm, her skin smooth and fresh, and she always dressed nicely. Oh, she was so lovely, you can’t imagine, Aura used to tell me with an adoring little girl’s pride. Aura never discovered, or never told me, what had caused the fight, but she believed that if one moment marked the beginning of her mother’s long, at first almost invisible, decline, it was that rupture with Mama Violeta.

  Six years later, Juanita expelled Katia from the Copilco apartment, too. By then Katia was no longer considered so perfect. Excited by the possibilities of her own beauty, boy crazy and head-strong, she’d been battling Juanita throughout her adolescence. And then, despite her excellent grades, she’d failed the highly competitive UNAM admission exam. But when Katia, who wanted to study business administration and dreamed of a career in fashion, was admitted to a private university, Juanita somehow came up with the tuition money and gave it to her. Some weeks went by. In the afternoons and evenings, Katia came home with shopping bags from Palacio de Hierro and other upscale stores, once sporting a pair of new Italian leather boots that in Aura’s memory became so iconic that years later, whenever she shopped for boots in New York or stopped to look in shop windows, it was always as if she saw Katia’s boots among the ones on display, barely worn, a little dusty and tragic, and she’d remember her stepsister who’d suddenly vanished from her life after having practically dominated it, like a tyrant really, for so long. For years Juanita, so as not to upset Rodrigo, had nearly turned a blind eye to Katia’s daily bullying of her younger stepsister. But when Juanita found out that although Katia had been pretending to go off to classes in the mornings she’d never matriculated and was spending the tuition money on clothes, on those boots, and on her boyfriend, she banished Katia from the household. Rodrigo did not defend his daughter, maybe didn’t dare to try. Katia was nineteen, no longer a child, and she’d committed a crime of seemingly demonic ingratitude; well, now she would have to learn to be responsible for herself. And Katia wasted no time in taking control of her life, as if being expelled from Copilco and her family was just what she’d been wishing for. She found a place to live, some modeling work, and then steadier employment as a secretary in an economics institute, and went back to school part-time, paying her own tuition. Rodrigo went on seeing his daughter more or less in secret. Juanita never forgave Katia. But Katia never forgave Juanita, either, and never apologized or gave any sign of wishing for a rapprochement. Ten years would go by before Aura and Katia saw each other again.

  Though Aura hadn’t seen or spoken to her grandmother since she was eleven, she kept a framed photograph of Mama Violeta in our bedroom in Brooklyn. The photograph showed a fair-skinned, if wrinkly, European-looking woman with long bony limbs, flaccid cheeks, slack-mouthed (Juanita’s mouth
when she was sad, exactly), and a familiar turbulence in her hurt-looking, intelligent eyes. A frilly cushion that Mama Violeta had embroidered with Baudelairian purple, pearl gray, and crimson black-stemmed flowers and “AURA” stitched across the flowerpot in yellow was on our bed, atop the quilt of many colors.

  Aura’s famous first therapy session, when she was eleven:

  Do you feel that your mother listens to you, Aura?

  Does your mother listen to you, Doctora?

  Juanita, worried about the effects of so much traumatic leaving and cleaving on the girls—Aura’s father, Katia’s mother, Mama Violeta—had made separate appointments for each with Dr. Nora Banini, a psychoanalyst on the faculty of the psychology department. The elfin girl with the animated face and raspy voice, hair falling over her eyes, sitting forward on the soft leather couch, elbows propped on her lap, chin resting upon interlaced fingers, stared directly back at Nora Banini, seated opposite, who serenely persisted.

  You seem angry, Aura, but you’ve just met me, so I don’t think you can really be angry with me. Is it your mother you’re angry with?

  But I do want to get to know you, Doctora. Are you angry with your mother?

  Please, Aura, call me Nora. Maybe you’re feeling angry with your mother for bringing you here today? Why do you think she wanted us to have this chance to talk?

  Let’s talk about your mother. Is she nice to you? Why don’t you want to talk about your mother, Doctora?

  Aura would keep on seeing Nora Banini until she was twenty-seven, though by then only when back on visits from New York. Katia, paying for her own sessions, would keep on seeing Nora Banini, too, until she was into her thirties, married and a mother.

  In the summer of 1990—Berlin Wall down, Soviet Union on the cusp of collapse—Aura was sent to a summer camp in Cuba. By then Juanita, as much to antagonize Rodrigo as for any other reason, had transformed into a jeering antileftist. So why send Aura there? Aura had once dreamed of studying ballet with the great Alicia Alonso, but those dreams were past. At thirteen, radicalized by Mexico’s stolen presidential election and the U.S. invasion of Panama, Aura was noisily declaring herself a Communist and a Cuban-type revolutionary and Juanita foresaw, or so Aura would always claim, that all it would take to demolish her daughter’s utopian illusions would be a few weeks in Cuba itself. The camp was by a beach and brought together young adolescents from all over the world, many from the Scandinavian countries. They were housed in what seemed to be an old hospital, with long green-painted corridors lined with airless green rooms, six cots in every room. That first night Aura couldn’t get to sleep; she was kept awake by the room’s suffocating heat, the pitch darkness, and the sonar weeping of another Mexican girl in a neighboring room whose wallet, stuffed with dollars given to her by her parents, had already been stolen. Within her first few days there, Aura lost her sandals on the beach, and then her sneakers were either lost or stolen, too. She ended up going barefoot. Every meal was rice and beans, and after each meal the campers had to scrape their leftovers into buckets that were brought around so that this could be added to the rice and beans served at the next meal, making an increasingly gluey and muddy-looking gruel. Aura stopped eating. When her mother went to pick her up at Benito Juárez Airport, Aura had lost so much weight she was holding her pants up with her hands, she was barefoot, her sun-caramelized skin was spotty with scratched-raw insect bites, and her clothes hadn’t been washed since she’d left Mexico. When Juanita asked her how she’d spent the three weeks at camp, she answered cheerfully: