* * *
Moments of temporary separation and absence and even loss that were like little rehearsals for what was coming. Not premonition, but actual visitations, death coming through its portal, taking Aura away, putting her back, receding back into its hole.
Death, a subway train going the wrong way that you can’t get off of because it makes no stops. No stopping for hot chocolate in Death.
That week after our first Christmas and New Year’s together in Mexico, we took a room for five nights at a boutique hotel on the beach at Tulum. The first three mornings we wound up having to drive from Tulum to the passport office in Cancún and back again in the afternoon, almost a hundred miles each way. Aura had realized, before we left for the beach, that since arriving in Mexico a few weeks before she’d lost her passport. Tía Lupe express-mailed Aura’s birth certificate from Guanajuato to the FedEx office in Cancún. Mexican bureaucracy is notorious: long lines stretching all the way back to the Aztec empire; multiple appointments to schedule at this teller window or that counter; many official forms to buy at those tiny stationery stores always owned by nice old ladies, to fill in, have notarized, then buy and fill in again because at one window some bureaucrat found one stupid infinitesimal thing filled out incorrectly, then renotarize, and so on. Aura was a veteran of Mexican bureaucracies, the UNAM’s being among the worst. It was captivating to witness the unruffled manner with which she endured it all, her serene, polite, and even pleasant interactions with the clerks and secretaries, winning over even the most bristlingly petty or hostile ones. All this opened a window into her temperament, I thought. I loved waiting in those passport office lines with Aura, even though it was how we were spending our Tulum vacation instead of at the beach. That mostly two-lane highway that we spent so much of that brief vacation driving on, beaches and cenotes and ruins hidden from view, was like any ordinary highway, despite the billboards announcing resorts and water parks with Mayan names and motifs. Our rental car had a CD player, and at a gasoline station, because I told her I didn’t really know his music, Aura bought a CD of José José’s greatest hits. That was the only music we listened to on the long drives between Tulum and Cancún, the same sad ballads her mother had listened to in the Terrible Tower, weeping over her abandonment.
On the Tulum-bound drive we kept seeing small hand-painted signs directing us to “Subway,” which must be the name of a Mayan town, I deduced, pronouncing it Soobway. I even said, Maybe it says Subwaj and we’re not getting a good look at the signs. But no, it was a y, not a j. For some mysterious reason, someone was trying to lure travelers to Soobway. But it turned out to be Quintana Roo’s first Subway sandwich franchise, in a small shopping plaza off the highway by a golf club outside Tulum. Aura hardly ever again passed by a Subway anywhere in the world without remarking, There’s your pueblo Maya, mi amor—Soobway. To reach the beach where our hotel was, we’d turn off the highway onto a long stretch of dirt road, the car hitting the softer surface at nearly highway speed, bouncing and seeming to lift off and float through a brown cloud of churned-up dirt as if riding one prolonged note of José José’s sonorous voice, and that sense of dislocation again, of being propelled through a portal, from an in-between world, back into the beach town of Tulum. In the end, a bureaucrat at a window finally told Aura she could get her passport only in the state of her permanent residence. Why wasn’t she told that on the first day? There is no answer to that question.
Aura beside me in bed: What would happen to you, mi amor, if I ever left you?
I would die, mi amor, you know that.
You would, I know, you would die, wouldn’t you?
I really would.
And she laughed, with a kind of childish delight, and said, Or if something happened to me, if it was me—
No, Aura! No, stop!
—if it was me who died—
Then I would die, too. I would. Aura, don’t even say that!
You would die, wouldn’t you? Ay, mi amor—sadly shaking her head.
You are so lucky, Francisco, she would say. You are the luckiest man on earth, to have a young, intelligent, talented wife who loves you the way I do. Do you know how lucky you are?
I know, mi amor. I’m the luckiest guy alive.
You are, Francisco, you really are.
I am, I know.
And if you’re going to be a father at your age, you’re going to have to keep yourself in top shape. Babies weigh a lot, you know, and you have to carry them everywhere.
That’s why I go to the gym so much. I’m getting ready.
And you have to pay attention all the time to what’s going on around us when we walk in the street. If neither of us is good at paying attention, then I’m not having a baby with you.
I know, mi amor, I’ll pay attention for both of us, I promise.
Every day a ghostly ruin. Every day the ruin of the day that was supposed to have been. Every second on the clock clicking forward, anything I do or see or think, all of it made of ashes and charred shards, the ruins of the future. The life we were going to live, the child we were going to have, the years we were going to spend together, it was as if that life had already occurred millennia ago, in a lost secret city deep in the jungle, now crumbled into ruins, overgrown, its inhabitants extinguished, never discovered, their story never told by any human being outside it—a lost city with a lost name that only I remember—Soobway.
On the Ninety-sixth Street subway platform where, after a late lunch at the Columbia Ollie’s, we were waiting for the express back to Brooklyn, Aura was saying Ohhh, you know, it’s a text that’s about the way texts generate discourses among texts, so no reason even to mention authors or authorial intention. Well, okay, I know that’s true, but … But in her class that afternoon, taken up by a discussion of Borges’s short story “Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote,” no one had laughed even once. But Frank, Frank, she exclaimed, didn’t anybody realize that Borges was being funny when he wrote that story? The story’s narrator, she recounted, is a mediocre critic who is indignant because his late friend Pierre Menard was left out of some catalog of important writers assembled by another critic. Okay, but does anyone else agree that Menard was so great? The baroness and the countess, they agree, said Aura, both of them friends of Menard and the critic. But they’re just the baroness and the countess! she exclaimed. And the French countess, she lives in Wee chita or someplace like that now, married to a rich gringo, don’t you think that’s a clue? A clue that Borges was also being silly and making fun of self-important bad writers. She mimicked a scolding professorial basso: No, Ow-rra, wrong. Silly? ¿Qué? Bad writers? That’s not how we read texts here, Ow-rra.
The red-and-pink tassels of yarn dangling like bunches of dwarf bananas, three on each side, from the Andean earflaps of Aura’s ridiculous pointy wool hat and the spiky red tassel that crowned it jiggled in unison with her bobbing cheeks and the peal of her laughter. Aura was having fun, too, her eyes gleaming; she’d go on like this, chattery, ebullient, all the way back to Brooklyn. Aura was discovering in those days that she wasn’t like the other grad students, ideologically prohibited from considering the person and mischief of the author. She wasn’t always so giddy to revel in or acknowledge these differences, she was often tormented with worry—I’m going to be expelled! They’re going to take away my scholarship! They’re going to send me to the Gulag!
Do you think Jim has a wooden leg? she asked, switching the subject to one that had lately preoccupied her. Valentina’s husband, Jim, the super-rich investment banker, also quite a bit older than his wife—hadn’t I noticed? Wasn’t that a wooden or prosthetic leg limp that Jim had? From the knee down, she said, his shone bone, his shun sheen, what do you call it? What if she asked Valentina if Jim had a wooden leg and it turned out that he didn’t, would she be offended? Valentina was already so insecure about how prematurely aged Jim looked that she wouldn’t let him come anywhere near Columbia. Well, even if his shin is made of cheese, I said, it won’t be j
ust some ordinary Camembert, that guy makes a ton of money. Ay, mi amor, she said sweetly, ¡qué tonto eres! One night a few months later, coming out of a movie, we let ourselves lag behind Valentina and Jim on the sidewalk so that I could study his walk. Maybe he does, I thought. That summer they invited us to their country house and we went swimming—arthritic stiffness was all it was.
Waiting for the train to Brooklyn, listening, looking down into her face, so full of puppyish excitement and her own particular innocence: What was that innocence? What was Aura innocent of that I wasn’t? Much past experience of failure and disappointment. Was love making me innocent again, wiping that history away? Aura was innocent of the power of her own gifts and that, her innocent promise and humility, sometimes made her seem so fragile to me. At such moments, there on the subway platform, practically dizzy with love for her, I would sense how vulnerable she was—so caught up in her own excitement, not paying attention, so physically slight—to a shove from behind by some fiendish lunatic off his medication, into the path of an oncoming train. This recurring fear of a crazed subway pusher was sometimes so strong that I would almost feel the urge to push her off the platform myself, as if the fiendish lunatic was me and I needed to get the inevitable over with, or as if I just couldn’t endure so much love and happiness one more second, and simultaneously, in a silent burst of panic, I’d pull her to safety, away from the edge of the platform. My hands around her waist or on her shoulders, I would gently pull her back into the mass of waiting passengers and put my own body between her and the tracks, and give her a relieved kiss on the cheek. I never understood it, this awful urge to push her off the subway platform while simultaneously pulling her to safety, rescuing her from phantom fiends but also from myself.
16
The first time I put on my down jacket in November, heading into my second winter without Aura, I found an empty pink condom wrapper in the zippered pocket on the outside, over the breast, and for an instant I couldn’t remember how it got there. I stared at the words printed on it, Extra feucht, Zartrosa, as if they were code I’d once understood but had forgotten. It was from last winter, those few weeks in Berlin. One night I’d gone to a bar with a young woman, just a girl really, a Mexican art student visiting Pancho Morales, a writer I knew from the DF who was in Berlin on a German DAAD grant. She was studying in London but knew Berlin inside out, and we were going on to another bar when she realized that she’d lost her hat, a sort of iconic art object of a hat that she’d made herself—another Mexican girl into her hats—and she wanted to go back to Pancho’s apartment to see if it was there, and it was, hanging on a coat peg in the hallway. There was a Christmas tree in the hallway, too, completely stripped of bark and foliage, its pale branches decorated with what looked like snowflakes and icicles that turned out to be delicately tied strips of medical gauze and shards of broken mirror hung from white threads. What a beautiful Christmas tree, I said to her, because it really was, and it turned out that she’d made it for Pancho and his wife. Your art must be amazing, I said, and she said that I could see some of it on her computer if I wanted. We went into the room where she was staying, took off our shoes, sat down on the futon on the floor, and she opened up her laptop and started showing me her art, and before long I was kissing her neck and, as she leaned forward, her shirt rode up, exposing the skin of her waist and the small of her back, and I kissed that, too, and then she asked, Do you want to eat me out?—just like that, with disconcerting frankness; all this like an echo of my first night with Aura, when she’d read me her airport story and shown me the drawing of the robot shoes. Aura and I didn’t fuck that first night, but the girl in Berlin and I did, after I’d eaten her out like she’d asked, with a desperate hunger, for a long time. We used a rubber that she had in her bag and it had a pink wrapper.
She was only twenty-five, the same age as Aura when we’d met, but now it was five years later, when Aura would have been, was still, thirty. We slept, then stayed in bed until late afternoon; it was one of those Berlin days without daylight, that pass on silent wings like a soot-colored owl, and the apartment was silent. Pancho was out on one of his famous binges from which he wouldn’t return for three days, and we saw or heard no sign of his wife. We fucked some more, went to a movie at the Sony Center, ate sausages and drank gluhwein at a Christmas market, and then at three in the morning I put her and her many suitcases into a taxi to the airport, and I went back to the apartment I was staying in, that belonged to my Guatemalan friend and his German wife. When I woke up later that morning it was as if those one and a half nights of sex and sweet female company hadn’t happened, though of course they had, it just made no difference that they had. I felt the same as I did every morning, the same darkness and sadness, the same memories, images (Aura dead …). Sex and intimacy with a beautiful young woman made no difference, I could fuck all I wanted, or not fuck, and it wouldn’t change anything—later, when I found the pink condom wrapper in my jeans I decided to save it as a reminder of that lesson, and put it back in the pocket of my down jacket. Over the next few weeks while I was in Berlin, and when I got back to Brooklyn, we exchanged a few e-mails, and then I never heard from her again, though now and then I looked at her Facebook page. She was snowboarding in the Alps. She’d decided to go on the wagon and stop using drugs. She was making sculptures from smashed mirrors.
* * *
Valentina, with Jim, was visiting me in my apartment when I asked her for help in setting up my screen saver to rotate different pictures of Aura—without Aura around, I needed outside help for even the simplest computing puzzles—and she noticed that I had at least five hundred photographs of Aura saved in my computer.
Why do you have so many photos of Aura? she asked.
Because I loved her, I said, and could never stop taking pictures of her.
Valentina turned to Jim and asked, Why don’t you have pictures of me in your computer like Frank does of Aura?
Jim’s gentlemanly lack of expression said, So pictures in a computer are a sign of love, but the Gramercy Park town house we live in isn’t?
Some nights I would meet Valentina and some of Aura’s other New York friends, like Wendy, or Juliana, a Chilean who was also at Columbia, in a bar near my apartment or in another neighborhood, sometimes even in Manhattan. They missed Aura, too, and sought connection to her through our conversations and through me, just as I looked for Aura in them, always encouraging, hectoring, begging them to describe every detail they could recall of even the most ordinary moments they’d spent with her. There were complications and dangers in allowing ourselves to get as close as we did during those months, that first winter and spring of Aura’s death, just before I went to Berlin and, especially, after I came back.
Valentina was a norteña, with long slender legs, the upright posture of a lifelong rider of horses, and the brash informality and swagger of a spoiled rancher’s daughter. Except her parents were music teachers who owned a little musical instruments store in a Monterrey shopping plaza, and Valentina had spent way more time in mosh pits than anywhere near a corral. Before Jim, she’d serially dated self-destructive junkie rock musicians and the like. Now she dressed like a rich emo girl, with fantastic hairdos that always made her look like she’d just come directly from Tokyo’s hippest hair salon. She shared with Aura some of that childlike volubility, and they ignited bouts of goofy hilarity in each other. Raua was what Valentina called Aura; Navilenta, Aura called Valentina; they liked to talk, to e-mail each other, in a nearly made-up language. They loved each other, but their friendship had sharp edges, and Aura was wary of Valentina’s sometimes stunningly insensitive tongue. Aura used to be intimidated by Valentina, until, as the years passed, she realized that she shouldn’t be. Valentina was smart and fun to talk to, but like a lot of New Yorkers from the art-hipster-money world—her husband was one of those high-finance guys who haunt Chelsea and Williamsburg art galleries and rock and experimental music clubs, dressed like an aged punk rocker though one who
drank only very expensive wine—Old Man Sex Pistol, I liked to called him—a lot of that talk was intellectual fashion, which doesn’t mean that it was empty, or not often clever, but it usually adhered, however loosely, to a recognizable script. Valentina wasn’t happy in her marriage. It had been in a long crisis that she was always trying to work out. She desperately wanted a baby but Jim, with two grown sons from his first marriage, didn’t. It wasn’t easy for a middle-class Mexicana, into her late thirties now and still struggling to finish her PhD thesis, to even contemplate walking away from a twelve-million-dollar town house on Gramercy Park and all the perks—private masseuse, at-home pilates and yoga instructors. I found myself feeling drawn to Valentina, seeking her out, craving her attention, even. I’d stand as close to her as I could, looking down into her face, trying to ignite in her some of the silly playful banter that she used to share with Aura, and whenever I succeeded I was surprised by the intensity of the longing it aroused, a sugar rush that, when it faded or burned out, plummeted me into a vacant stupor.
Say Her Name Page 18
