At the end of her second year at Columbia, on May 29, 2005, Aura wrote in her notebook:
I do not wish to be an academic.
I wish to be me. I am not me when I am an academic. I am not an academic nor will I ever be. La imaginación/las imágenes se avalanzan en una corriente de descarga poderosa una vez fuera del tanque que es/se ha vuelto/la Universidad. Casa Pánica. Las restricciones que no se entiende a si mismo. No confía en si mismo. Hay mejores maneras de la desconfianza que la auto referencia pedestre y estéril. Mi vida está en otra parte.5
Why NYC?
I want to stay. [Here Aura drew eight floating hearts]
Clarice L’Inspector.
A short story collection. Variaciones sobre la verguenza. [Variations on shame, or embarrassment; verguenza can be translated either way. Aura listed five short stories she’d either already written or planned to write.]
I wish to kill my TV.
I wish I did not have one.
I do not need a TV.
I don’t know how to begin the summer. Maybe I’ll never write great literature. It’s enough to write. And write.
An X-ray of my early childhood.
NO ESCRIBIR CON ESPERANZA NI DESESPERANZA, SÓLO CON ESMERO. [Write with neither hope nor hopelessness, only with great dedication.]
Among Aura’s papers I found her marked-up photocopy of Foucault’s canonical essay “What Is an Author?” Out of curiosity, I read it. I haven’t read much critical theory. As I understood it, according to Foucault, this is how we should now regard “the author”: as just a name that is useful for classifying texts, for marking some books off from other books. It was easy to imagine Aura finding that a pretty funny Borgesian idea. Did her professor and classmates parse this essay as solemnly as they had Pierre Menard? I don’t know. The essay seemed to me like a dazzling web woven by an insane genius spider. I read to the part where Foucault cites Saint Jerome’s contention that even an author’s name has no credibility as an individual trademark, because different individuals could have the same name, or someone could write under someone else’s name, and so on. Foucault then asks, “How then can we attribute several discourses to one and the same author?” The weary student glances ahead at the next several pages of dense text. Foucault’s answer is going to take a while. The afternoon light is fading. Aura has been at this a couple of hours. She asks herself, Wouldn’t I rather be reading The Portrait of a Lady? Isn’t that basically her problem, maybe her biggest problem in life right now? Wonder what’s for dinner … wild salmon?
In her class on critical theory, taught by the new acting department head, a California Chicano whose name was Charly García, same as the Argentine rock star, each student was required to give an in-class presentation on a contemporary theorist. Aura chose Gayatri Spivak, the reigning luminary of Columbia’s comparative literature department, whose class Aura had taken during her first year. In her presentation Aura explained the development of Spivak’s ideas from her famous translation and preface of Derrida’s De La Grammatologie, through her seminal text, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”—in which the self-referential gesture, said Aura, is taken to its ultimate consequences—up to her most recent work at the time, Death of a Discipline.
Then Aura got to her main point, the reason she’d chosen Spivak for her presentation. She put the following question before the class:
What is the role of literature in this theoretical scheme?
And she answered:
In fact, a predominant one. Spivak doesn’t abandon the study and criticism of literary texts, said Aura, and she went on to explain a few of Spivak’s ideas about the importance of literature. One of those is that literature, books, permit a kind of teaching that is unique and unverifiable. The unverifiable aspect of literature is key here, said Aura, because, for Spivak, it’s what distinguishes literary discourse from all other humanistic discourses. Then she dutifully went on to describe some of the criticisms of Spivak. How could Spivak be the leading exponent of Subaltern theory and still defend literature, which can’t even attempt to represent the voiceless marginal Other, the Subaltern, without committing an act of colonization? Spivak, Aura said, is not afraid of contradictions.
Charly García complimented Aura on the presentation, but said he disagreed with Spivak’s attitude toward the literary text. I just don’t understand it, he said, emphatically bouncing his fists off his lap. I just don’t understand how Spivak can still defend the literary text.
Aura’s thesis was going to be on some of the young writers and artists who’d emerged in Mexico in the nineties and just after, with the fall of the PRI. I remember seeing her at her computer, into her fifth or sixth draft. She looked up and wailed, I used to write so beautifully, and now I’m forgetting how! Look what they’re making me do! By beautifully Aura partly meant in the style of criticism and essays published in the kinds of journals she liked to read, the London Review of Books, say. Now she had to write a jargonized political and economic analysis of the fall of the PRI.
Students who weren’t up to the exacting standards of the new regime were being expelled. One of the first to go was Moira, Aura’s friend-nemesis from her first weeks at Columbia. Aura convinced herself that she was next. At home, it was almost all she talked about. She had insomnia almost nightly. Why did Aura make this so hard for herself, choosing for her thesis adviser the brilliant Uruguayan Marxist literary theoretician and taskmaster Pilar Segura? Because the Uruguayan was the department’s new star hire, the professor that hotshot students clamored to work with, and Aura was competitive. In the fall of 2005—we’d been married that summer—during one of their thesis meetings, the Uruguayan said, Oh, Aura, really, you are still so innocent. We have to get rid of this naive love you have for the literary text.
The love of literature isn’t innocent or naive, thought my wife. Anyway, is the love of Marxist theory less naive?
Aura decided to apply to a City College MFA in Creative Writing program. She hardly ever showed her writing to anyone but me, and sometimes to Lola, but somehow her thesis adviser’s condescension gave her the courage to expose herself to the judgment of whoever it was at the MFA program who decided which writing students to accept. We got to work translating three of her short stories for the application. It had to be top secret: her Columbia scholarship required a full-time commitment; studying at any other institution simultaneously was forbidden. I know plenty of people around the world who disdain younger American writers who enroll in MFA programs for taking such a safe, conventional, even bureaucratic path to a writing career that usually, in the best cases, is actually a creative writing teaching career. Aura’s choice was maybe the bravest of her life. Even by just applying, she was putting her PhD at risk. She was terrified of rejection, even of criticism, of exposing her dream of a writing career to the test of her talent and determination. She wasn’t going to tell her mother—not yet—she didn’t need any more stress, wasn’t she already enough of a nervous wreck? So that she could relax while putting her application together, I took her to Mohonk for the weekend, a place she loved. Mohonk Mountain House is a huge rambling Victorian castle in the Hudson Valley that felt like the perfect setting for a Gothic horror movie or an Agatha Christie murder mystery. Aura made me take pictures of her lying sprawled like a murder victim in the long, door-lined corridor. Then she photographed me playing dead in the corridor. They had a spa; she had massages. There was a big outdoor Jacuzzi where you sat in the churning water, steam billowing off you in the chilly November air. Hiking trails. The clientele was mainly middle-class families, plus quite a few elderly, and scattered younger couples. If you wanted, you could just sit around playing board games all afternoon, drinking hot cider or hot chocolate, eating freshly baked cookies and pumpkin pie. Big plush armchairs and couches in front of stone fireplaces with fires perfect for roasting a stag. We sat together in front of the fire, computers on our laps, translating her most recent story, “Un secreto a voces.”
Three m
onths later, in March, she received an e-mail from a writer—an actual Famous Irish Writer—who taught in the MFA program. He told her that he liked her stories but that he needed to speak to her. Could she come into the college for a “chat”? An appointment was made for later in the week. Over the ensuing days, this impending chat dominated our conversations. Were they going to accept her or not? Why would the FIW waste his time by asking her to come in for a meeting if he didn’t want to accept her into the program? Maybe, I said, he just needs to know about your visa status. But Aura anguished, she was sure something was wrong, maybe they also had a rule against studying in two places at once. When she went to the college the FIW was waiting for her in his office, and so was the older, even more Famous Australian Writer who directed the program. The two were friends, and they’d obviously discussed Aura. They asked her some questions about herself, and she answered. No problem with her studying at Columbia at the same time, they told her. They had a different, well, not a problem, a concern. The stories she’d submitted were impressive, but they were translations, and it seemed she hadn’t even done the translations herself—at the end of each story, she’d typed, Translated by Aura with some help from her friends. But the program was conducted entirely in English. They were now satisfied that she could converse in English, but could she write in English? To be in the program, she would have to. They gave her twenty-four hours to write an autobiographical statement in English of no fewer than six hundred words explaining why she wanted to enroll in the creative writing program. She went home and did it. A few days later the FIW phoned again, this time to tell her that she was accepted. For another week she heard nothing else. Shouldn’t there be an official letter? Maybe the FIW had spoken before consulting with the FAW, who didn’t agree. Oh, Aura, I said, you’re accepted, just send them an e-mail and ask. She did. A few days later, the FAW answered, “Dear Aura, Everything is okay. You are in. You have been accepted into the MFA program. You will receive a letter on letterhead, but this is the REAL LETTER. We are proud and happy to have you.” That evening we met downtown for oysters at a small French restaurant with a zinc bar. We split a bottle of champagne, and then went to see a movie with Valentina and Jim in the Village. Afterward Aura pulled me to a near stop on the sidewalk so that Jim and Valentina would walk ahead of us. She wanted me to take a good look at Jim’s walk. Was that a prosthetic left leg limp? Maybe it was. I wasn’t sure.
One of the short stories Aura had included in her application was about a little girl who is caught stealing every day from her schoolmates’ knapsacks and lunch boxes. Her parents, summoned for a meeting by the school’s principal, are baffled by their daughter’s behavior. They looked at her as if a totally unknown person was standing before them. Previously, the mother had promised the little girl that if she was on her best behavior, she could go with her stepsister to her stepsister’s mother’s house in Orlando, Florida, for the summer vacation, and the reader perceives that that is why the little girl is stealing, because she doesn’t want to go to Orlando. As punishment, the mother forbids her daughter from riding her bicycle in the parking lot of the residential complex where they live. The little girl disobeys, going for a ride not just in the parking lot but, for the first time in her life, she pedals out into the dangerous traffic of the avenue. Encouraged by her admission to the MFA program, Aura sent the story, “Un viaje fallido,” to a South American online literary magazine and they accepted it. Her first published short story! She told her mother the good news. But when Juanita read the story, it upset her. For one thing, she didn’t like that the mother in the story doesn’t figure out why her daughter is stealing. In real life, she’d figured it out, hadn’t she? That was why Aura hadn’t gone to Orlando with Katia. Why was Aura publicly airing turbulent episodes from the past, and distorting what had really happened? Aura tried to explain that it was fiction, and that if the story had gone on longer surely the fictional mother would have figured it out, too. But the story’s meaning was in the bike ride, the little girl’s brief, reckless dash toward adventure and freedom—and to a McDonald’s down the avenue, where on weekends there was always a clown and children playing on the big plastic slide, but that on that weekday afternoon was deserted and dirty.
Several months later, when Aura had another short story published, this one also set in a Copilco-like residential complex, about a single mother and her daughter, her mother reacted similarly. Were these stories Aura’s first attempts to write an X-ray of my early childhood? Dangerous and troubling secrets were embedded there. Don’t many young female writers eventually write about their mothers?
The story should conclude with the central character happily embarking on a journey to unknown lands. The enthusiasm pales for the reader in light of his awareness of the disaster. But the disaster will have a resplendent obverse side.
Those words, from Aura’s notes for the novel she wanted to write, seem cryptically prophetic. But if they are prophetic they pose an obscene riddle because how can there be a resplendent obverse side to Aura’s death? I think she was referring to graduate school. In the novel, meant to be told backward, the unknown lands that the fictional Alicia happily embarks to include New York City and the hallowed university where she is to study for her PhD. That was going to be the disaster: her academic experience. Not anything or anyone else. Am I right about this?
20
Four nights after Aura’s funeral, her mother telephoned me. She got right to the point. She’d obviously prepared the words she was about to speak, maybe even had rehearsed them. Juanita said:
Aura was a graduate of the university. I have always worked at the university and so has my brother. The university is our family and the university looks out for us the way a family does, and what the university lawyers tell me is that it is very suspicious that you didn’t give a legal statement.
As I listened, I could see myself reflected in the two-stories-high glass panes separating our Escandón apartment from its little patio: cordless phone held to my ear, standing next to the pale wooden stairs leading up to the sleeping loft. Dwarfed by the apartment’s vertical spaciousness, the high yellow wall, I looked like a miniscule figure with blurred features in the lower left corner of an immense painting. The sliding door was open and I could hear the whispery rustle of the bamboos at the back of the patio. I’d planted the bamboos myself, six in all, never imagining that they would grow like fairy-tale plants, now nearly two stories high. Less than a week before she’d died Aura had stood not far from where I was standing and looked up at me as I came down the stairs. I love this apartment, she’d announced. The apartment was ours: her mother had bought it for her. It had been empty and new when we’d moved in. Over four years, she’d been slowly and carefully furnishing it just as, within our means, she wished. A carpenter was building us bookshelves that we’d arranged to have delivered after we came back from the beach. Now I was back from that beach without Aura, and on the telephone with her mother. What was she accusing me of? What did she mean when she said that according to the university lawyers it was very suspicious that I hadn’t given a statement?
It was Juanita who’d decided that Aura should be cremated. That meant that we—Fabiola and I, along with Juanita—thirty or so hours after Aura’s fatal accident in the Pacific waves, had had to go directly from the Mexico City hospital where she’d died to a nearby delegación, a mixture of a neighborhood police station and district attorney’s office, to give witness statements about Aura’s death that were meant to verify that we weren’t trying to hide anything by requesting authorization to cremate her. There would have to be an autopsy, too. They split us up, Fabiola was taken into one room, or else it was a cubicle, Juanita to another, and I to another—or was Juanita with me?—my memories of this are confused, but I do remember the grim bustle of the delegación: handcuffed prisoners in street clothing sitting on a bench against a wall, police and criminal-lawyer types coming and going, the walls, the furniture, the grungy hues of yellow an
d brown. I hadn’t slept since our last night at the beach. It was afternoon or early evening or maybe it was already night. I sat in a chair at a steel desk across from a clerk, an overweight fortyish woman with a sluggish expression who was sitting at an old desktop computer—black screen, neon green lettering—who told me to tell her what had happened. So I told her, and she typed, never showing any emotion, her fingers powerful and fast on the keyboard. It was the first time I’d told the full story of Aura’s accident and death, and probably I told it with more detail than she needed, but she steadily typed every word as soon as I spoke it, that at least was my impression. I was still in my bathing suit, sandals, and a T-shirt. Before, when we were waiting in the delegación, I’d been shivering with cold, but now I wasn’t. When I was finished giving my statement, she asked for my identification. I had none. I’d left my passport back at the beach house we’d rented in Mazunte. All I had in my wallet was a credit card. Since I didn’t have any ID, the woman behind the desk said that my statement couldn’t be accepted. All that typing for nothing.
But Juanita, I said into the telephone, I did give a statement. You were there. At the delegación. It wasn’t accepted because I didn’t have any identification. I left my passport back at the house in Mazunte.
Drawing out every word—I knew this voice, Juanita’s most sarcastic, sneering voice—she said, Ayyy, what a pretty story. What a pretty story. (Qué bo-neee-ta his-tohhh-ria.) You didn’t have your paaassport. You left it behind at the beeeeach. You can tell your pretty story to the lawyers and judge.
Say Her Name Page 23
