17
We’d rented a huge house in San Miguel de Allende so that Juanita and Rodrigo and some of our friends could stay with us the week of the wedding. But Tuesday night I left on a bus for Mexico City, because I had to be there at eleven the next morning to pick up my foreigner’s permit to marry a Mexican in Mexico. I sat at the front, to watch the landscape. The bus was a ways out of San Miguel when I pulled the manila envelope out of my backpack to look over the paperwork, my duplicate copies of the submitted application forms, birth and health certificates, and so on. That’s when I realized that I’d left my passport in San Miguel, at the house. Without the passport, they wouldn’t give me the permit. And I would need the permit back in San Miguel on Thursday for our license to marry in the state, and to procure a justice of the peace to perform the wedding. By Thursday night guests would already be arriving, some from as far as Europe. The wedding was on Saturday. The rehearsal dinner and prewedding cocktail party was on Friday. But if I didn’t have my passport with me tomorrow morning in Mexico City, there wasn’t going to be a wedding. Aura was at the house in San Miguel and I phoned her, and she quickly found the passport. One of the wedding planners was with her, and she hatched a plan. I went and knocked at the door of the bus driver’s booth. The door opened and I spoke to him over his shoulder as he drove. I explained the situation, and that my wedding was at stake. By now we were at least twenty minutes out of San Miguel. He said all right, he’d drive in the right-hand lane as slowly as he reasonably could to give the wedding planner’s driver a chance to catch us. If he hadn’t caught us when we reached the busy multilane toll highway at Querétaro, it would be too late.
The wedding planner’s assistant was driving a black SUV. I sat in my seat, eyes riveted to the right-side passing mirror, in which was framed the narrow highway behind us and some of the arid landscape. Traffic was light and I could see the headlights of trucks and cars pursuing us at varying speeds, slowly overtaking us. In the mirror, the darkening light slowly began to dissolve the highway’s pavement, the sky filled with towers of blue-black clouds, and the horizon resembled evening over a wintry ocean just after sunset. I looked at the clock on my phone. Nearly forty-five minutes had passed. What was I going to do if the wedding was canceled on account of my carelessness? Why did Aura and I always have so much trouble with official papers and documents, lost and forgotten passports, the U.S. student visa she hadn’t realized was expired until she was at the airport counter in Paris? Would our lives have turned out differently if we were the types of people who never lost anything, who always had their papers in order? Mishap is the mother of comedy. Those days of waiting in line at the Cancún passport office, laughing and chattering away while we were supposed to be at the beach in Tulum, without a moment of exasperation or recrimination between us, had revealed as much to us about the character of our young love as sex, probably even more. Mishap is the father of displacement: unexpected journeys and detours, lost and shamed wanderings in the desert, but also providential visions, like when that black dot with headlights appeared in the mirror on the crest of the dark horizon. I tried to judge the speed of its approach. It was coming fast, like an airborne object.
Mishap: mother-father of death: yours, then nearly mine. The first two CAT scans had revealed a spot of blood on my brain. If the spot grew, it would mean I was hemorrhaging, and then I might die, sir. Two dark spots on the horizon, one growing, and the other, well, until the next CAT scan they wouldn’t know.
There were already signs for Querétaro and the toll highway. My cell phone rang. It was the wedding planner’s assistant. Is that you? He blinked his headlights on and off. Yes! I knocked on the bus driver’s booth, told him, thanked him profusely. The bus decelerated to a stop in the break-down lane. Space shuttle dockings in outer space. The doors opened, I bounded down the steps into the open air, breathing in sagebrush and manure and diesel fuel beneath the first stars in the gravity-less purplish sky. The black SUV pulling in behind us in a festive spray of pebbles, the passenger door opening and Aura stepping out with my passport in her hand; I was lost and now I’m found, that funny, slightly stiff-legged run of hers, like a ballerina running off the stage; an embrace by the highway, Ay, Francisco ¿qué te pasa? Don’t you want to marry me? Francisco, you better stay out of the cantinas and away from those cocainómano friends of yours. I will, I promise! The rescued bridegroom climbed back onto the bus waving his passport and the passengers broke into applause. ¡Viva México, cabrones!
I opened my eyes and found Gus—Augusta—my first wife, sitting in a chair beside me in the emergency ward. We’d gotten married when she was twenty and I was twenty-four, back when she was putting herself through Columbia by dealing coke to students at Cannon’s Pub. I went off to Central America to work as a journalist during our second year of marriage, and that was basically the end of that. Now she was my closest friend, more like family than anyone in my actual family. I’d given her phone number when they brought me into the hospital, though I had no memory of that, and they’d phoned her at five in the morning. She’d been asleep for not even three hours, and was still a little drunk. Her husband had driven her in from Brooklyn, and then he’d driven home to go back to bed. She had bags under her bleary blue eyes, her chestnut hair was a tousled mess. The emergency ward was packed: New Year’s Eve was St. Vincent’s second busiest night of the year, after Halloween. On one side of me was a beefy guy with an Eastern European accent who’d fallen through a store window, the big panes of shattering glass slicing deeply into his back, arms, and thighs. His girlfriend was crying into her hands and he kept shouting at her to stop. On my other side was a long pale transvestite with smeared, sky-blue eye shadow and a Southern accent who’d tried to commit suicide with an overdose of pills. He was better now and wouldn’t shut up, launching into his life story almost as soon as he noticed I was awake, how he’d run away from home when he was thirteen and come to New York. He was a drag performer, and when he told Gus she looked butch, she told him to fuck off. My head was caked with mostly dry blood but I was still bleeding from my left ear. Gus kept yelling at nurses to clean me off whenever they rushed by, but they said there were more urgent cases. I asked Gus what had happened to me, and she said nobody was sure. Maybe someone had attacked me with a metal pipe or a hammer, or maybe I’d been hit by a car and fallen on my head. Anyway, I’d been found unconscious in the street, lying by the curb. My ear was a mangled, pulpy mess, though the most serious wound was in the back of my skull. Also, I had three broken ribs. The police, Gus said, had asked her if I had any enemies.
Enemies? I took that in. Mishap: mother-father of death, but also of shameless melodrama. Did you tell them about Aura’s uncle and mother? I asked, sort of joking. It wasn’t conceivable that Leopoldo could have hired someone to trail me from a bar on Ludlow Street to the West Village. The next time I woke up I was somewhere else; I’d been wheeled into a corridor. Gus was still with me. I told her to go home but she said she wouldn’t until I was in a room and they’d cleaned me up and dressed my ear. They were taking me down for another CAT scan soon. I was going to have to stay in the hospital, even though I no longer had insurance.
What’s wrong with my ear? Is it going to be deformed?
It looks really bad. I’m sorry.
I touched it, felt its throbbing stickiness.
Not Leopoldo. Who else might actually try to harm me? I thought of the last journalism book I’d done, about a murder: Mono de Oro, Tito, and their homo assassin chafas, la pareja diabólica, no worse enemies than those, but trail me from a Lower East Side bar on New Year’s Eve to run me over or whack me in the head?
Gus, did I tell you that I lost my hat? Can you believe it?
Later that morning they moved me from the corridor to a room. Gus went home to sleep, promising to come back in the afternoon, though I told her she didn’t have to. I was sharing the room with another patient, hidden from view by the drawn curtain. The little sink was wedged between t
he bed and in the closet was my shredded tailored suit in a plastic bag on the floor. The aluminum rails around the bed, the monitors. Why was I hooked up to an IV, what were they giving me? The silent television mounted high in the wall. Plastic wristband. Oh, the memories—hello, Dad. A glimpse of New York City brick and a wintry sky outside the window. This was the hospital where the AIDS pandemic had first hit in New York, where it raged for years; how many young and not so young men had died in this same room, on this same bed? A memory of seeing black balloons rising over West Village rooftops, and knowing why. Memories of my first years in New York, when I used to work in restaurants, usually as a busboy, faces and voices of waiters but only a few names not forgotten now, Sandy, Gino, their lewd dirty talk and teasing, sometimes hilarious, sometimes disturbing; Danny, who used to sneak up behind me at the busboy station to sing into my ear, Whatever Lola wants, Lola gets … All those dead waiters, how many of them had died in this very hospital?
They’d stitched the back of my head with a staple gun and it seemed my ear was going to heal into an ugly clump. A small team of robed doctors came in to see me. The spot on my brain hadn’t grown, one of the doctors told me. I was very fortunate not to have hemorrhaged. I had a severe concussion. They wanted to keep me under observation for a couple of nights. That weirdly pleasurable ache in my side was my broken ribs. When I woke up again late in the afternoon Gus was back. Guess what, she said. You were hit by a car, a hit and run. A teenaged girl from the Bronx. The teenaged girl confessed to her father because she thought she’d killed you and he made her phone the police.
I mulled this new information. Then I said, I remember now. A car, yeah. It drove onto the beach, around this big sand dune. I stared at Gus with that now familiar sense of being mystified by my own words even as I spoke them. The car came right at me, I said, over the sand, really fast. Gus stared at me, lips parted. I shut my eyes. Where was Aura in this scene? I wasn’t making any sense. That tall dune, the parking lot behind it, that was a Cape Cod beach I used to go to as a teenager.
Well, I don’t think so, said Gus, because you were hit by a car right off Sixth Avenue. No sand dunes around there that I’ve ever seen.
I didn’t remember anything about it. Someone had found me lying there and phoned 911. In my hospital room later that same day, or maybe it was the next day, Gus told me a story about coming over to the house I’d rented in San Miguel on the afternoon after the wedding. Aura, hungover, had retreated into the cool shadows of our bedroom, and was lying facedown on the bed. I was outside, in the garden, with friends. We were driving back to Mexico City that afternoon, and then the next day Aura and I were flying to the Pacific coast for our honeymoon. Gus was in the living room with Juanita and some others. Aura’s wedding dress was draped over a sofa. Juanita picked up the dress and held it in her arms; with one hand she lifted the ripped, mud-splattered, danced-on ruffled skirt hem to look at it more closely, and she smiled to herself. It was such a lovely smile, said Gus.
When I was released from the hospital the woman in the administration office told me that my hospital bills would be paid by the insurance of the girl who’d hit me. She gave me forms to fill out. She said that I ought to be able to get some money for myself out of this, too, and told me what to do. It won’t be much, probably, she added, but something. Seems you were pretty inebriated yourself, she said. I would have to come back in about a week for an MRI, and then to get my stitches out. If I felt nausea or had a severe headache or had double vision or trouble walking, I was to go straight to an emergency room. Gus and her husband drove me home. I felt woozy for days, weak in the knees, my insides a trembling gelatin. I felt fucking old. In the hospital they’d given me stuff to treat my ear: disinfectant, creams, cotton, gauze, tape. A weird clear liquid, as if from a runny nose, constantly dripped from the ear. I went home and lay on the bed, near Aura’s wedding dress, and kept the heavy beige curtains drawn. The stillness and silence in that room, those long days, the crepuscular light. I read some in the books on death and grief that I’d been amassing for over a year. I thought about the peaceful sensation that had filled me when the orderly in the elevator said, You might die, sir; that sense of following Aura down a dark velvety tunnel. Well, I didn’t die, didn’t follow. In the evenings I turned on the television. I got up from the bed a couple of times a day and went into the bathroom to wash my ear and replace the gauze bandage covering it. In the morning I went outside to buy coffee and the newspaper, walking slowly, like a decrepit old man. But after a few days I no longer felt so trembly when I walked. I did a little bit of work. Ordered takeout. When I took a shower, I used Aura’s tea-tree mint treatment shampoo.
18
As she listened to the professor, her legs im[handwriting unintelligible] opened, her body thrust downward, like a sinking ship.
In a warm mid-September day, as she listened to her professor read in a perfect Cuban-Spanish accent the words of Nobel winner poet Pablo Neruda, her mind easily wandered the abysses of the white page she had in her lap. Having arrived late, she had been confined, not unhappily, to one of the corners of the non-air-conditioned room—until the feeling of an intent look forced her to lift her head. Her involuntary head movement coincided with the end of Neruda’s poem. What she found upon lifting her head should have warned her of what was to come, but at the moment, not knowing what the older girls knew (she thought she must be mistaken) it could not be that the professor’s green eyes made bigger by magnified seeing glasses were locked on her bossom. It simply could not be. Not in front of the whole class, not while reading Neruda (oh, but specially because of reading Neruda). Not only did the professor’s eyes remain fixed there or so it appeared to Guadalupe’s (wild) imagination—but he even dared to ask her a question: ¿Qué piensas del poema Guadalupe? Before she could answer the professor was already unpassionately engaged in a diatribe against Neruda and his “corny poetry.” “Neruda,” he said, “no lo vamos a leer, clase, porque no me gusta.” Guadalupe thought this sudden censorship rather odd for a graduate level course and the same question that had been haunting her since she set foot in JFK’s famous airport popped into her head like a popcorn in a microwave (the head being the popcorn, the classroom the microwave): what am I doing here? Why did I come here? Who am I here? Okay, so it was not just one question haunting her, but three, or, rather, that first question unfolded like a paper Chinese fan—other questions, all part of the same bucolic, enigmatic scene in red, white, or black. Then she thought of her mother. “Yes, my mother,” she answered to an imaginary judge in an imaginary trial of the Academic Law of Justice System. She also pictured the judge—a sort of blurry Derrida-Lyotard-Foucault triad—heartily, heavily, unheartily, laughing … Followed by the judges, the person who tapes trials (the trial-taper?), the audience (all wearing glasses, painstakingly taking notes of what not to answer, of how not to be) laughing at her. “Laughing at me.”4
19
The professor who didn’t like Neruda did like words of his own coinage, such as “foota nota.” In class, he’d say, As it says in the foota nota … Aura told me that she’d cringed and looked over at Valentina, who’d rolled her eyes: the first spark of friendship had passed between them. In Spanish lit and Cultural and Latino studies departments all over the country, clever academics were dissing Neruda, or whomever, and dazzling their students with Spanglish witticisms like foota nota. Behind his back, his students called this professor Mi Verguita. (Ver-gee-tah) My Little Penis. Mi Verguita discovered references to phalluses in every text, and was always guiding his class into discussions of phallic subjects and contexts that often included the amusing or strained references to his own “privileged signifier” that had earned him his nickname. But Mi Verguita had also published some fiction, and displayed in his office a flyer for a reading he’d once given in a Barnes & Noble; thus, at least some of the other professors in the department despised him, and were conspiring against him.
Mi Verguita lived with his wife and childre
n in Boston and traveled to New York every week to give his classes. Aura took a class with Mi Verguita—the one in which he trashed Neruda and unveiled foota nota—during her first semester at Columbia. At first the class was held in a seminar room but then they met in the evenings in Mi Verguita’s university-supplied apartment. He always brought a gallon jug of red Chilean wine to those classes, and often rum as well. After class, Mi Verguita would put on music—from the Spanish Caribbean, mostly—and encourage his students to dance. Soon he was especially focusing his attentions on a shy, pretty, usually conservatively dressed student who’d come to study at Columbia directly from Bogotá, Colombia—a young woman, it so happened, who was married to a civil engineer who’d put his own career on hold to accompany his wife to New York so that she could earn an Ivy League PhD, and who now worked downtown in a computer repair shop. She was dazzled by Mi Verguita; who knows what he whispered in her ear when they danced after class, but it always made her lift her chin and look into his eyes, smiling and biting her plump lower lip like a rabbit with a secret. One afternoon Aura sent me an e-mail from Columbia with the news that Mi Verguita had been suspended. Supposedly the student’s husband, after his wife hadn’t come home after class, had gone to the acting department head to accuse the professor of having seduced his wife after plying her with drink. Within days Aura and her classmates found themselves at the heart of an Academic Law of Justice System sexual harassment investigation.
Mi Verguita was the last, or maybe next to last, full-time Latin-American literature professor in the department. Professors who still taught novels and poetry in their classes were being forced out. Specialists in critical theory and cultural studies were taking over. Aura had unwittingly enrolled in a department where a purge was under way. The department was finally, belatedly, modernizing, bringing itself in line with other cutting-edge programs around the country. Where was it written that every department that taught Spanish owed a special allegiance to fiction and poetry? What percentages of the world’s native Spanish-speakers had ever read a novel or were even literate enough to read one?
Say Her Name Page 22
