Say Her Name

by Francisco Goldman

  Those were the circumstances that inspired the novel that Aura worked on during the last year of her life, and that she’d tentatively titled Memoirs of a Grad Student. The grad student in the novel is named Alicia, a young woman from Mexico City who is studying for a PhD in literature in New York. Alicia doesn’t want to be an academic, but doesn’t dare defy her mother to pursue her secret dream. Real-life Aura didn’t always keep her yearning to write a secret from her mother, but she knew her mother disapproved. Her mother believed that Aura needed to focus all of her mercurial energies on her academic career if she was going to succeed.

  Aura completed two chapters of her novel, and left many fragments. The novel’s first chapter is about Alicia as a little girl in Mexico. There we meet her mother, Julieta; the family’s domestic servant, Irma; and Julieta’s former boyfriend, Marcelo Díaz Michaux, a psychoanalyst who has just returned to Mexico City after years of study and practice in France. Later in the novel Marcelo Díaz Michaux was going to convince Julieta that her housekeeper, Irma, needed to become his patient, and then he was going to send her to an experimental utopian asylum in France. Like real-life Ursula, Irma is a cheerful, talkative, and dwarfish woman who is described as having a ten-year-old’s body even though she’s about forty. I remember Aura laughing about what those first therapy sessions between Irma and Marcelo were going to be like. A household servant as witness to family secrets, a lonely little girl’s closest after-school friend and confidante, those would also have figured into Aura’s scheme.

  The novel’s radical French asylum also had its counterpart: a renowned institution a few hours outside of Paris called La Ferte. Aura had already corresponded with the asylum’s eighty-seven-year-old director, arranging a visit so that she could research it for her novel. We were planning to go to La Ferte the next year, in the spring of 2008.

  These were the last bits of her novel that Aura wrote, which I later found saved as a separate document in her computer:

  Marcelo Díaz Michaux:

  Even Julieta as the dead mother played a number on me. And now there’s no beating her … although we’ll see about that. I’m young—sixty is the new thirty—she’s dead, so who’s winning now? Of course, she has left me homeless, along with Alicia, my wife, and our child, having decided, at the last moment, to leave the house to our long-time maid, Irma Hernández, who now resides in France, somewhere outside Paris, where I’m flying to right now.

  The Characters

  Marcelo Díaz Michaux

  Born in 1946 in Mexico City to a diplomat father and a devoted housewife. Raised in Mexico City by his mother (mostly). He attended (in Mexico) the French Lyceum where he met Julieta. At twenty-six, Marcelo went to study psychiatry at the Sorbonne. Two years later, when he received Julieta’s wedding invitation, his downfall began. Fifteen years later he returned to Mexico to set up his office to practice a kind of Lacanian psychotherapy. On the side he started working on an essay about clouds as an ideological construction.

  Alicia—Julieta’s daughter

  She was born in 1977: frond, rings, marooned, barreling up, lewd, skein, squall, crevice, drumstick, divot, crocuses, encroach, flinch, slither, daft, cadge, baksheesh, a spider spinning.

  In 2008, Alicia is thirty-one.

  Alicia is the same age Aura would have reached had she lived another nine months, until April 24, her birthday, in the spring of 2008. If all had gone according to our plan, we would have visited La Ferte in the spring of 2008, and Aura would have been pregnant.

  Was I a model for Marcelo Díaz Michaux? On the surface, we didn’t seem to have much in common. She’d made him a decade older than me, which may have been an expression of anxiety, or an anxious joke, about our age difference. Of course Julieta couldn’t have been too happy about that nutjob, her old boyfriend, marrying her daughter. But as an eminent Parisian shrink, Marcelo would have had a lot more money to spend than I did. Thus, in the summer of 2007, Marcelo and Alicia would have vacationed in Tulum, or somewhere in the Yucatán, like the Riviera Maya, on the placid Caribbean, not at a Pacific hippie beach with tumultuous surf in Oaxaca. Having gone to Tulum, and not to Oaxaca, Alicia is alive in the spring of 2008, when she turns thirty-one. Why didn’t Aura and I go back to Tulum that summer, where we spent five days during the first week of 2004, instead of to the beach in Oaxaca? Because I couldn’t afford to rent a cottage for two weeks in Tulum, though I could in Oaxaca.

  frond

  rings

  marooned

  barreling up

  lewd

  skein

  squall

  crevice

  drumstick

  divot

  crocuses

  encroach

  flinch

  slither

  daft

  cadge

  baksheesh

  a spider spinning

  I memorized that list, and often meditated on it, sometimes focusing on just one word until I found Aura in it, and laughed as if she were there with me and we were sharing a giggle over what she’d meant by “drumstick.” Or I chanted the list of words and waited for whatever came: images, memories, other words, visions.

  * * *

  Crevice: cenote. On the dirt road just past our hotel in Tulum, before you entered the Maya Biosphere Reserve, there was a small cenote by the side of the road, a seemingly bottomless crevice filled with the crystalline water of a subterranean river. We pulled our rental car over—we were in bathing suits—and got out to swim alongside the local kids who climbed up into the scraggly trees on the banks to dive into the water. I did that, too, provoking shy grins and laughter, launching hairy-belly-hanging-over-bathing-suit and winter-pale barrel-torso into the air, making a big splash as I went under, driving my arms and kicking as hard as I could to see how deep I could go into the chilly purplish depths until, overcome by fear of accidentally swimming into a cave and not being able to escape, I turned and kicked frantically upward. The Yucatán peninsula, we learned from my travel book, is one immense slab of brittle limestone flattened millions of years ago by a giant meteor, the impact filling it with deep fissures and cracks through which all rainwater seeps, feeding the underground rivers running beneath the peninsula’s arid surface. Whenever there’s a collapse of rock above a watery void, or the shifting of tectonic plates opens a crevice in the limestone strata, a cenote is formed.

  Portal to the underworld is how Aura and I heard a guide at a Mayan ruin site explain a cenote to his package-tour gaggle, that one’s smooth pea-green surface hiding the sinkhole’s murky depths and the skeletons of human sacrifice victims tossed in after their hearts were cut out. Hell-Ha was the name Aura gave to the Mayan theme park Xel-Ha, a mobbed tourist trap that we went to because it promised cenotes and lagoons to snorkel in, though underwater there were many more pairs of human legs dangling and kicking from inner tubes floating by overhead than there were fish to see below, and lots of drifting, semitranslucent bits of crud.

  * * *

  There was also that little lagoon or lake or pond that we found one afternoon in the Maya Biosphere Reserve. We’d driven far into it on a rough dirt road that was filled with muddy ruts and swampy craters, unbroken scrub jungle on both sides, when off to the right we saw a small parking area and an observation tower, painted bright yellow, rising above the low trees like a lost lifeguard’s chair. We parked, got out, and followed a path until we reached the tower, then climbed the zigzagging stairs to the platform on top. It was a surprise to see the blue Caribbean no more than two hundred yards away, at the far edge of jungle canopy across the road; also, it was later than we’d realized, the sun falling in the sky, orange and pulsing.

  When we climbed down, instead of heading right back to Tulum, we followed the trail farther in, to that hidden lagoon, where we sat on a low wooden dock, no one else around. Soon we were watching the iridescent pastels of the sunset spreading over the water and blazing in the sky above the strip of jungle between us and the ocean, the whole p
lace throbbing with bird calls, as if every glowing tree and plant hid a boisterous bird or two, and we both felt stunned into separate peaceful meditations on the crazy sublimity of what we were witnessing, each of us filling with a sense of mystical wonder and loneliness that merged into one mystical wonder and loneliness together. It was as if we’d just been married in a secret ceremony conducted by the birds. Sometimes I think that if cenotes really are portholes to the underworld and I can go through one and be reunited with Aura, it’s on the shores of that jungle lagoon that I’ll come out and find her waiting.

  Well, Hell-Ha, mi amor. No happy memory that isn’t infected. A virus strain that has jumped from death to life, moving voraciously backward through all memories, obligating me to wish none of it, my own past, had ever happened. But I’m like a sentry who keeps nodding off at the quarantine gate, letting the inmates stream past. Still, it’s lonely to be left with only my versions. Aura can’t say: But it wasn’t really like that, mi amor, it was more like this. Someday it was going to be her, holding my boney hand, leading me through our memories of falling in love. That sweet elation of waking up and finding her beside me in bed. The apartment filling up with music I’d never heard before, tuneful, clever, girl music—Belle & Sebastian—on the happiest mornings of my life so far. (Four years later I still hadn’t gotten over it, the daily surprise of happiness.) She brought her own CDs those first nights she stayed over. “Dear Catastrophe Waitress,” “Wrapped up in Books,” “Judy and the Dream of Horses,” and

  If you find yourself caught in love

  Say a prayer to the man above

  Thank him for every day you pass

  You should thank him for saving your sorry ass.

  Was this really happening? In my life? I can’t listen to those songs anymore without fogging up. Soda Stereo, Charlie García, Smiths, Pixies, OOIOO; her beloved Beatles and Dylan. And what did I turn Aura on to? Iggy Pop and the Stooges, I guess. Te quiero aún más hoy que ayer, I love you even more today than I did yesterday—every morning those were the first words I’d say to her, like the superstition of rabbitrabbitrabbit being the first words you speak out loud on New Year’s morning. It would be months before the morning came when I’d forget to say it. Aura pretended, for about two minutes, to be indignant, What, you’re falling out of love with me already? The next morning I remembered but in less than a year repeating those words did finally begin to feel too automatic. Still, it wasn’t something to toss away as if all used up, there would still be mornings when I especially wanted her to hear it, or just wanted to say it again. One morning, back during that first or second week, she led me from bed to stereo, put in her Bjork CD, and advanced it to “It’s Oh So Quiet,” the song about falling in love, where Bjork’s lullaby shhh-shhhs turn to euphoric shrieks of WOWWW WOWWW … THIS IS IT!!!—I could inspire that?! Bjork-like was the slant and shape of Aura’s eyes, the fall of her hair, her air of a mischievous sprite. Another night, sitting on my lap, she read out a poem from the Carol Ann Duffy book she’d brought with her: At childhood’s end, the houses petered out … till you came at last to the edge of the woods. It was in a clearing in those woods that the poem’s speaker, Little Red-Cap, first clapped eyes on the wolf. With wolfly drawwwl, the old wolf, wine-stained snout, was reciting his poems, book held in hairy pawww—Aura lowered her voice into those internal rhymes, the crimped black points of her tights over her toes rising on the beats like cat’s ears lifting toward sound. What big eyes … what teeth, hahaha, and bought me a drink, my first. Why does Little Red-Cap want to go with the old wolf? Aura pressed her warm forehead against mine: Here’s why. Poetry. She repeated it: POETRY. Little Red-Cap wants to be a poet, too.

  What little girl doesn’t dearrrly love a wolf?

  —ebulliently chanted and drawn out like the chorus of a favorite rock anthem. Except the poem didn’t end happily, not for the wolf anyway. After ten years of listening to him perform the same old songs without finding a voice of her own, Little Red-Cap cuts the wolf open scrotum to throat with an ax, finds her grandmother’s bones inside. Oh no, I said, Please, my love, don’t ever do that to me, I won’t stifle your voice, I’m not that kind of old wolf!

  Our first Sunday in New York together, we went to Katz’s Deli so that Aura could have her first pastrami sandwich. The plan was to go from there to the Metropolitan Museum, then maybe walk in the park, drinks in some romantic hotel bar, go to a movie, and someplace for a late dinner. The sandwiches at Katz’s being so enormous, I suggested we split one, and order two matzo ball soups, because she’d never had that either, but she so liked the sample tidbits of pastrami the counterman gave her and was so excited by the look of the sandwiches, the piled juicy meat spilling out the sides, that she wanted one just for herself. She devoured it. Then, on the sidewalk outside Katz’s, she said that her stomach hurt. She had a bewildered look in her eyes, her face was drawn, and when I pressed my lips and nose to her cheek it was clammy and smelled slightly of mustard and meat fat. Ohhh, she moaned, bent over, arms clasped over her abdomen, I have to go home. You mean, to my place? I asked. She nodded. I waved down a taxi and we went back to my apartment in Brooklyn, where she spent the rest of the afternoon in bed, while I made her drink Alka-Seltzer, dashed out to the supermarket for chamomile tea, read, watched some football with the sound off while she napped, tickled the inside of her forearm like I already knew she always wanted me to, feather-lightly raking my fingertips up and down over her skin. By night she felt better, and for dinner I ordered her chicken-and-rice soup from the Chinese take-out place around the corner, Sing Chow Mei Fun for me, and we watched a DVD. I’d pretty much forgotten that it was possible to spend a Sunday the way Aura and I spent that one.

  Now, whenever I pass near Katz’s Deli, I stop to stare in a mute muddle at that sidewalk, at the long blackish snake of the curb, the empty air above. Sometimes I go and stand where it happened and whisper, You mean, to my place? Descending into memory like Orpheus to bring Aura out alive for a moment, that’s the desperate purpose of all these futile little rites and reenactments.

  To celebrate Juanita’s fiftieth birthday, two of the tías, Lupe and Cali, and a few friends, including Aura’s childhood dentist, had invited her and Rodrigo for a long weekend in Las Vegas. Aura had classes on Friday and Monday, so we flew there on Saturday morning just to have dinner with her mother that night; we were flying back the next day. A black, flat-topped mountain, or maybe it’s a butte, overlooks Las Vegas, rising out of the Mojave Desert against the horizon like a giant black van in an empty parking lot, hot and shiny in the blazing sunlight. Aura and I decided that it radiated evil, spraying it in continuous arcs, like long-range cat pee, over the gleaming city. Our taxi driver was at least partly responsible for this lasting first impression, driving us from the airport as if he was under orders to deliver us in the fastest possible time to the sinister mountain, where his Lord Master, the judge and ruler of our fate, was waiting in his cave. Speeding down a long straight avenue behind the glassy Las Vegas strip, tires squealing as he jolted forward from every red light, he drove like he was in a rage, as if he already knew our fate and was powerless to prevent it. Aura was gripping her seat, gasping; we traded expressions of alarm. The driver’s first name, according to his taxi ID card, was Boguljub, and his taxi was an SUV with an electronic message board facing the backseat that only amplified the claustrophobic frenzy, flashing announcements for shows, casinos, and discount steakhouses. We passed a billboard for Siegfried and Roy, Masters of the Impossible, though one of them, I forget which, had been mauled and nearly killed by one of their tigers about a month before—a white tiger that dragged Siegfried or Roy around the stage, jaws clamped around his neck and shaking him, I recalled from a news report, “like a rag doll.” (How and why did he survive?) Boguljub turned left, pedal to the floor as he shot up the long side street to our hotel, the Venetian. We weren’t going to the mountain after all. Beelzebub, of course, is how Aura and I forever after referred to him, tho
ugh with his sandy hair and blue eyes he less resembled the anvil-headed taxi driver of Aura’s childhood terror than the evil mountain did.

  For all my alarm over Lola’s warning that Juanita could break Aura and me up just by commanding it, I don’t even remember the moment we met. Hola Ma, this is Francisco, and Juanita’s eyes locking on me for the first time—no memory of that. I had to go and look at the snapshots we took with our disposable camera. Juanita, Rodrigo, and Aura sitting at a table with unwrapped presents and cocktail glasses on top, Juanita holding up a pink T-shirt with “New York City” glitteringly imprinted across it and smiling as if it really was the most remarkable gift. Aura was always a last-minute and impatient gift shopper—in the coming years, I would often be the one to pick out her parents’ presents. The photos show a glassy atrium area, Juanita’s face flushed and overjoyed, Rodrigo in a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes, Aura looking Audrey Hepburn–collegiate, in cream sweater, gray wool skirt, with her hair in a loose bob, happy to be with her mom. Not much fuss was made over me. Perhaps this was partly shyness, theirs and mine, but also, I was just one more boyfriend; Aura’s boyfriends came and went, so why shouldn’t I? Maybe they didn’t know yet how old I was, that in less than three years I’d be celebrating my own fiftieth birthday. Aura doted on her mother, baaing “Mami” and making Juanita grin giddily. I didn’t yet perceive, beneath his quiet, collected demeanor, Rodrigo’s often-brooding separation. At one point I caught Juanita studying me across the table. She looked away when she realized I’d noticed. The next time I caught her looking at me, later that night, I think she’d made up her mind. Aura and I, like other charged-up lovers, could shut others out, lean in close and laugh at everything either of us said no matter what. The first time I caught Juanita spying on us during a moment like that was about six weeks later, in Mexico, at the ostentatious New Year’s Eve gala in the Salon del Lago that Leopoldo invited us to, her expression more thoughtful, sadder, than when she’d fixed her sight only on me. She looked like a maternal Prospero, all powers waned, helplessly spying on a closely huddled, inexplicably enamored Miranda and Caliban.