Say Her Name

by Francisco Goldman

  * * *

  Aura said, This is where I spent the happiest days of my childhood. We were standing on a steep street in Taxco, looking at Aura’s grandmother’s house, the one now occupied by Mama Violeta’s longtime maid and her family, though Mama Violeta was still very much alive. Painted a rich indigo with bright yellow shutters and decorated with tiles, the two-story house stood on a corner, embedded in the hillside. From that elevated part of the sidewalk it seemed that with a running leap you’d be able to land on the rooftop if it weren’t surrounded by dense strands of barbed wire and broken bottle glass. The house was packed with small shaded patios and secluded rooms, and had windows on two sides opening on views of the mountaintops where the silver mines were, including the one where Aura’s great-grandfather, a French mining engineer, had worked. During her summer vacations from school Aura had sometimes spent as much as a month at a time here. Now Mama Violeta no longer even spoke to any of her children from her first marriage. Leopoldo had sounded out his half siblings and learned that Mama Violeta really did intend to leave the house to her former maid when she died. Mama Violeta’s four children from her second marriage all lived far away, one somewhere in Texas, the rest scattered around Mexico, like the daughter she was now living with, on an avocado plantation in Nayarit. Their father, Mama Violeta’s second husband, couldn’t have been more unlike her first, the dissipated actor. An accountant at one of the silver mines, he never drank alcohol, coached boys’ fútbol teams, and was a regular churchgoer who participated in Holy Week processions. He died when Aura was still in elementary school.

  Mama Violeta was also a gifted dressmaker and seamstress, and in her youth had dreamed of moving to Paris to pursue a career in haute couture; maybe, if her first husband hadn’t died so young, she would have. In a family where looks were often made too much of, Leopoldo’s elder daughter, Sandrita, and Katia were regarded as the indisputable beauties and rivals, yet Mama Violeta often treated Aura as if she was her favorite. Mama Violeta once spent many weeks sewing and embellishing a dazzling party dress that she’d designed herself. Who was it for? Mama Violeta wouldn’t say. All her granddaughters coveted it and dreamed it would be theirs. Mama Violeta told eleven-year-old Aura that she was making it especially for her, but that she had to promise to keep it a secret. Aura didn’t even tell her mother. When the dress was ready, Mama Violeta gave it to her cousin Sandrita, who was a year older than Aura. She said she was giving it to Sandrita because she was the most beautiful, and from its cut it seemed clear that she’d been making it for the tall, long-legged, rail-thin Sandrita all along; that’s why when Aura started sobbing and told her mother about Mama Violeta’s broken promise, nobody believed her.

  Madness runs in families, of course, said Aura on the sidewalk that day in Taxco. Supposedly, more among women then men. For three generations it gets passed down mother to daughter, and then stops. Maybe that’s just folk wisdom, she said, but that doesn’t mean there’s no truth to it. Well, my grandmother is obviously crazy, and my mother is crazy, so what I need to find out is, was my great-grandmother crazy, too?

  Mi amor, you’re not crazy, I said, I promise. But what about that great-grandmother? Her great-grandmother, said Aura, had gone back to France for a visit to her own mother, who was soon to die, and had never returned to Mexico; she fell ill while she was over there and died. Ill with what? I asked. Aura didn’t know. Mama Violeta had been on the cusp of adolescence when that happened. Her father, who never remarried, went on raising her alone, then died a few years later.

  That would be a great place to write in, said Aura, pointing at a corner room on the second floor. If only we could convince Mama Violeta to sell the house to us, she said. Aura and I agreed to start saving money to buy the house. This was Aura’s long-held dream. She wanted to restore the house for her mother, too, who now refused to even come and look at it. But Aura hadn’t seen or spoken to Mama Violeta since she was twelve, since that day her mother and grandmother had had their terrible fight in Copilco. Maybe next summer, said Aura, we’d drive up to Nayarit and surprise her grandmother with a visit.

  That last day in Taxco we bought the carved, whitewashed wooden angel with the lewd but friendly scarlet lips that hung over our bed in Brooklyn, perpetually watching us, slowly turning away, watching.

  ¡Ay mi amor, qué feo eres! That funny silent laugh of hers, mouth open, eyes squeezed shut, wagging her head.

  ¿Soy feo?

  Síííí mi amor, pobrecito.

  I looked like a frog, too, she liked to tease. ¿Cómo está tu papada? she’d say, as if the loose skin under my chin, not quite a froggy wattle, possessed an independent life. She’d tug on it with both hands, laugh, and huskily say, Tu papada, mi amor.

  Pobrecito, no tienes cuello. Poor you, you don’t have a neck.

  Poor you, you’re old. She’d say that sometimes, too, whenever I couldn’t stay awake if we were in bed watching a DVD or television. It’s true that even if I liked the movie or television show we were watching, I usually dozed off. That only happened in bed, hardly ever in theaters. I always fell asleep reading in bed, too. Was that a symptom of age?

  I’ve never returned the last DVDs that Aura ordered from Netflix. I found the envelopes, but two of the discs were missing. I didn’t know what she’d done with them, didn’t really know where to look. I went on paying the monthly fee; I’ll probably have to for the rest of my life, an eternal contract, even if I never order another DVD, which I probably won’t. Aura still owed astronomical amounts at every DVD rental store in our neighborhood and around Columbia. I’d stopped watching DVDs at home anyway. I didn’t like being alone in the room with the DVD player. Its mechanical click-clicking and whirrs, furtive little lights, its autonomous lifeless companionship depressed me, made me feel like the last person left alive on earth.

  One cold winter night, I fell asleep beside Aura while she was reading in bed. An hour or so later, she shook me awake.

  I gasped, What?

  She gestured at the light switch on the wall—it operated the lamp that the angel hung from—and said, Turn off the light, mi amor.

  I gaped at her.

  Impishly pleased with herself, she cracked up.

  I got out of bed and turned off the light.

  Gracias, mi amor.

  …

  It’s cold! I didn’t want to get out of bed!

  The way she pronounces Frank when we’re alone, and the way it wakes up my heart. I can hear and feel it inside me, that soft near-honk caressed by plush lips, a down-stuffed vowel that floats on her breath past n and lightly smacks k. But in her writing, in her e-mails, she always called me Paco.

  She would occasionally say, Why couldn’t you be ten years younger? Then everything would be so perfect!

  It was an imperfection, my age, no doubt about it. But did my so-called youthfulness—not just that I looked younger than my age but my immaturity—make us more compatible? Probably it did, at times, but it also worried her. How had I gotten to be my age without having saved more money, or having planned better for the future? She didn’t think of me as a failure, but I worried that she would, that someday she’d even be justified in thinking so. I worried about her leaving me over that—I was determined to work hard, to earn money—more than I did about our age difference. Maybe this was delusional, but we both claimed that I’d surely inherited my father’s hardy constitution, and that I would also live vigorously into my nineties, that I was going to be one of those barrel-chested, squarely built, ornery and horny old men, the Picasso or Mailer type, though happily loyal to just one woman! In the past, when I was younger and had girlfriends who were somewhat older than Aura, people had sometimes asked if I was the father, that most common humiliation of the older male lover. But that never happened to me when I was with Aura. How could that be? I guess when we were together in public, we just didn’t give the impression of a father out with his daughter.

  My father used to munch on whole onions as if the
y were apples, I’d told her once. I thought of it as evidence of his hearty Russian peasant appetite and ways. No one who ate onions like that could have a weak constitution. A few days later, alone in the kitchen, I impulsively took a bite out of a red onion, to feel what that was like. In the bedroom, all the way at the other end of the apartment, Aura heard the crunch and shouted, Did you just bite into an onion?! Don’t you even try to kiss me now!

  How did she know it wasn’t an apple?

  In department stores, she’d pester me about male cosmetics, antiaging facial creams, and the like, even Botox. Please, mi amor, for me, don’t you want to look young for your young wife? I used to wonder if she was serious: if I actually came home one day with my face looking like a frozen piecrust after Botox, wouldn’t she be horrified? She’d send me e-mails with links to information about calf hormone antiaging creams or whatever, and where to order them online. She knew I’d never use such creams. Creams you have to slather all over your face before bed, and again in the morning, imagine. But Aura was a fanatic about facial creams. During our last trip to Paris, which was a short one—just two full days, because I was there only to promote a book—I spent four hours following Aura through the Sephora superstore on the Champs-Élysées. Aura, it can’t be that we’re spending one of our two afternoons in Paris in a makeup store, I complained. She said, But they have things here they don’t have in New York! Then they confiscated most of her Sephora treasures at airport security in Charles de Gaulle because she’d packed all those tubes and bottles in her carry-on.

  We were on the subway, that first fall, on a morning when I’d walked Aura to the Carroll Gardens F train stop and she’d talked me into coming up to Columbia with her. The train was being held in the station. She was kissing me, on my lips, all over my face; that morning she couldn’t stop kissing me, and I was laughing and kissing her and I glanced aside and saw a well-known book critic who lived nearby standing there in his dark raincoat, halfway down the subway car, staring at us, his mouth a dour slit between downward creases and a nose like an old marshmallow. Whenever I saw the critic around the neighborhood he’d rarely say hello, maybe a quick nod and often not even that, but I’m certain he knew who I was, and because we’d occasionally coincided at parties some twenty years earlier, he knew he was about my age, though even back then, barely out of college, he’d looked middle-aged. So there he was, gray-haired and balding, pallor nearly gray, his raincoat a greasy gray-green, watching us with the lusterless longing and thirst of a mummy. I remember that I even felt a slight shudder of suspicion and fear, as if his gaze might carry a curse. The train started to move and he sat down and opened his newspaper.

  Aura never comes back to sit in her Journey Chair on the fire escape, it’s a one-way journey she went away on. I tried to feel braced by the tough antimysticism of that. Some mornings I’d come into the kitchen and look out the window and see the chair covered in snow. The boughs of the trees in the backyards weighted with snow, snow striping the floor of the fire escape, about five inches’ accumulation on the seat. It reminded me of that haiku Borges wrote: This hand is the hand that touched your hair. Snow that sits where you used to sit.

  14

  December 2003

  Everything changed. Another path opened, and I don’t know

  where it’s headed.

  Era of: Us against the World.

  World against Us.

  I still don’t know how to write in a diary.

  Diary: another year is drawing near. It never ceases to surprise me that each one, since I got out of high school, has had a special event. Some definitive act that has sent me in a new direction. Hopefully my life will obey that law for many more years. Right now I don’t know how far into the future this road will reach … isste caminho … nao sel … en si sei que en estou contenta. With doubts and bad moods like always, but in general, very, very pleased with life and its surprises and gifts. Indeed I have to say/write how grateful I am. Before Paco the world had darkened. I’d erased myself. Loneliness struck me down. I’d lost hope. The pain of deep solitude, a Heart that didn’t belong to anybody.

  Paris 2004—(one year later!)

  Party upstairs. My life upside down. Unrecognizable. I am fat, no longer skinny. 27 years old. Pissed. Attempting to write je ne sais quoi. Life so beautiful. I feel the guilt of beauty. I feel the guilt of being. What am I doing!?

  December 24, 2006

  We’re alone. Only Paco and me on Christmas. This is the second time, the first was Paris and it was magical. We’re on a plane, we’ve spent most of the day traveling, Paco asleep on my shoulder. Love is a religion. You can only believe it when you’ve experienced it.

  15

  Aura was stuck in a broken elevator in Butler Library—she phoned me on her cell when I was at Wadley. There were other people in the elevator with her, someone urgently ringing the emergency bell, spritzing panic through the phone. I told Aura to stay calm, that surely it would be fixed within minutes, and to call me back as soon as it was. When after fifteen minutes or so I hadn’t heard from her, I phoned and there was no answer. Class was about to start. (We were discussing The Street of Crocodiles, the book she’d have with her at the beach that final day.) I didn’t turn my phone off. About midway through, I told the students I had to make a call and stepped out—I got her voice mail and left a message asking her to let me know that she was okay. I pictured horrifying scenarios: air running out, Aura gasping, claustrophobic hysteria. Class was a disaster. When it was over and she still didn’t answer, I phoned the Columbia switchboard, was transferred and put on hold until finally someone at campus security told me there’d been no report of a stuck elevator at Butler Library that day. It was as if the elevator had vanished, with Aura and the others inside, and no one had noticed.

  Within seconds of her call to me, it turned out, the elevator glitch had fixed itself, the door had slid open, and Aura had proceeded directly into the reading room, where she was required to turn off her cell phone, and there she’d stayed studying for several hours, until finally she checked her e-mails, saw my frantic messages, and remembered …

  Or that time we had to go to a cocktail party in Manhattan. Aura was at home and I was a few subway stops closer to Manhattan, down in Dumbo, where I was subletting a friend’s inexpensive writing studio for a few months. The plan was that she would take the F train to the York Street stop, find me waiting on the platform, and then we’d ride the next train into Manhattan. One train came, its doors opened, a few people got out; another pulled in several minutes later. The station, winter trapped inside, was a grimy cement and iron deep freezer. The pay phones were broken. My cell phone didn’t work down there. Robotic rats on the tracks, eating electricity and iron filings. How could this be happening? We’d timed it, I’d phoned her and said, All right, I’m ready to go to the station, and she’d said, Give me five more minutes, and so I’d waited five more minutes. She’s still trying on clothes, I thought, pulling dresses on and taking them off because they’re too sexy or too ostentatiously fashionable or because they show off her breasts too much or reveal her tattoo. She liked the way her most prized dresses, including some of the ones I’d bought for her, looked in the mirror, she just wouldn’t wear them out of the apartment. Four trains had passed. My fingers and feet stung from the cold, my nose was running. I climbed the long stairs out of the station to phone her from the street. I had to walk nearly a block before my phone regained its signal. Wind gusted off the East River, whirling litter like frozen bats. She didn’t answer her cell or our telephone at home. I went back into the station and, as I descended the stairs, I heard coming from far below, like the crash of rough surf, the sound of a train entering or leaving the station. On the platform, looking into the tunnel, I saw the dwindling green lights and orange dot of a Manhattan-bound F train. What if she was on it? I waited another half hour, then climbed out to the street again. I phoned the apartment where the party was, but she wasn’t there, either. That déjà vu
sensation of loneliness, bafflement, and sadness, of, Is this really happening? Then—I didn’t know what else to do—I redescended into the station. If I described all of this to a psychoanalyst as a nightmare I’d had, wouldn’t it seem to be about separation and death?

  What had happened, it turned out, was that Aura had gotten on the train at Carroll Gardens and ridden it only one stop, to Bergen Street, and had waited for me there; she’d confused Bergen with York Street, two stops farther on, or had spaced out when I’d told her the plan. Finally, she’d trudged back toward home, feeling as bewildered and sad as I was, and she stopped into Sweet Melissa for a hot chocolate.

  Arriving back from abroad to New York airports, we always had to join separate lines at U.S. Immigration, even after we were married, with Aura in the much slower line for foreign visitors. I’d always clear passport control well before she did, then wait by the wall in front of where foreigners came out. Sometimes guards would tell me that I couldn’t stand there, and I’d retreat to the luggage carousel, but often they left me alone, my unease stirring as the minutes passed and still Aura hadn’t appeared. Finally, I’d see her step up to one of the booths and I’d feel a new surge of nerves, because what if there was something wrong with her papers again, or the agent was in a bad mood, or just liked to harass Mexicans, and turned her away on the slightest pretext; we’d all heard stories like that. Someone at the U.S. embassy in Mexico had told Aura over the telephone that even having a Fulbright scholarship was no guarantee anymore of a student visa. What if at any moment, here at the mouth of the gate, she was going to be pulled back and returned to Mexico without even being allowed to speak to me. I rarely got to spy on Aura from afar like that, watching as she obediently pressed her fingers down on the fingerprint scanner and answered questions, meeting the customs officer’s eye, smiling or even laughing in response to some remark from him, or else remaining serious and composed—this always brought back memories of being a small boy watching my mother talking to a policeman who’d just given her a parking ticket, or to a bank teller, or to a butcher in Haymarket Square, my awareness of their awareness of my mother’s delicate prettiness and foreignness, my own sense of an unbreachable apartness—until finally I saw the shrug of the officer’s shoulder as he stamped her passport, and within seconds Aura was walking into my embrace.