Say Her Name

by Francisco Goldman

  The last two years we were together, Aura stopped crying over her father. Was that because in me she’d found a reliable replacement father? A pretty facile piece of psychology; I can even imagine Aura having a good laugh over that. She was convinced that of the two of us, she was the more mature. But that doesn’t mean there might not be a bit of truth to it anyway. I was more than one thing to Aura. I played multiple parts, just as she did for me.

  In the reception room at the Gayosso funeral home, outside the chapel where Aura lay in her white-enamel coffin, I saw a man in a rumpled gray suit come in. I’d never seen him before. More than his distraught expression, it was his bearing that caught my attention, the way he held out his arms as he walked. He looked like somebody charging back into a room he’s just left, desperate for one more chance to plead his case. Or like he’d been walking around looking for somebody to hug for hours and now his arms ached with fatigue. He had a long, sloping nose and a shock of gray-brown hair falling over his forehead. He was searching, I deduced, for Juanita. This was Aura’s father, Héctor; I knew it even before I heard one of the tías say so. From a short distance I watched his long embrace with Juanita. I went up to him. I’m Francisco, Aura’s husband, I said. Oh, so you’re Aura’s husband, he echoed wanly. Though he’d seen Aura only twice in the last twenty-six years, he seemed deeply shaken by her death, I mean as much so as anyone, as if he also didn’t know how he was going to get through the rest of his life now. I felt weirdly protective, but what could I protect him from? We really didn’t have much to say to each other, not there, at that moment. But I sat next to him on a couch in a corner, hardly speaking, and felt relieved when Vicky came over to talk to him. I did learn that Héctor and his second wife had only one daughter; Aura had told me she had two half sisters whom she’d never met, though she’d never been really sure about that. Six weeks later, at the end of August, when I was finally getting ready to go home to our apartment in Brooklyn without Aura, I heard her say, silently but emphatically, inside my own thoughts: Francisco, before you leave Mexico, you have to go and see my father and find out what really happened between him and my mother. Also, find out why he had mud on his pants—I clearly heard Aura ask me to do this, as if I was her last chance to solve that mystery, which would allow her to finally finish writing her short story about the day when he’d come into that restaurant in Guanajuato for their first and only meeting in seventeen years.

  At the funeral, Héctor had given me his telephone number and invited me to come and visit. I phoned and, a few days later, took a bus into that part of Mexico called El Bajío, where Aura was born and where we’d had our wedding, to San José Tacuaya. Aura and I had gone to San José Tacuaya together only once, the weekend before our wedding, to bring a basket of eggs to a convent of cloistered nuns so that in exchange they would pray for it not to rain on our wedding day. It was also local tradition to stick knives in the earth the night before a wedding, and we did that, too. It rained on our wedding anyway, though not heavily, and just for a short while. That day in San José Tacuaya, Aura hadn’t wanted to try to find the house with a yard where she’d lived the first four years of her life, having no memory of what it looked like from the outside, or even any idea of what neighborhood it was in.

  From Mexico City it was a five-hour bus trip to San José Tacuaya. I left at dawn. Movies, one after the other, blared on the video monitors, making it hard to sleep. I ended up watching most of the second movie, which was about a blue-collar, Philly neighborhood guy who tries out for the Philadelphia Eagles and makes the team. It was dubbed into Mexican Spanish, with football players, white and black, snarling chinga tu madre and cabrón at each other and chanting ¡Viva los Aguilas! in the locker room. Then I remembered Aura and her quarterback drop back. Nearly all my life I’ve had an American boy’s restless habit of imitating a quarterback’s three-step drop back into the passing stance. I’d do it over and over, sometimes when watching the news on television, or while thinking about something or other, a form of pacing. One day Aura asked me to show her how to do it, as if it was an interesting dance step she wanted to learn. Nothing to it, I told her, it’s just three steps backward. You hold the football here, by your chin, like this, I said, and take one step back, the first step, with the foot that’s on the same side as your throwing arm—so I explained and did it, followed by the next two steps and the throw. But Aura took her first step back with the foot that was on the opposite side of her throwing arm. That turned her body so that she faced front and made her rock from side to side like an off-balance, backward-stumbling penguin while she tried to finish the drop back, invisible football clasped under her chin, her teeth biting her lower lip, eyes wide open. It was hilarious. She looked like Giulietta Masina clowning in La Strada. She must eventually have figured out the right way to do it, but she kept doing it the wrong way. Sometimes, if she thought I was feeling blue or not even, she’d announce, Mira mi amor, and she’d perform her spazzy quarterback drop back, just to make me laugh.

  As the bus approached San José Tacuaya, the view became flat brown-and-green strawberry fields stretching to the horizon, and the highway was lined with small restaurants and wooden stands advertising fresh strawberries and cream. Closer to the city, the industrial outskirts began, gigantic auto plants and smaller factories. Aura’s father now lived near the city’s old colonial center, on a long street lined with drab storefronts; his address was easy to miss, being just a simple wooden door wedged between the facades of two businesses: a pharmacy and a dry cleaners. A minute or two after I rang, Héctor came out to meet me and led me back along a narrow corridor that led to a small, dank patio and an old, four-story house that originally must have been the home of a prosperous family but was now divided into separate apartments. Héctor and his family lived on the ground floor, in a cramped-seeming apartment with the kind of massive, old-fashioned furniture that reminded me of my grandparents’ house in Guatemala City. We went directly into a study that was also the living room, where Héctor sat in an armchair and I on a low sofa alongside bookshelves crammed with an impressive collection of law books and other tomes, mostly scholarly, on politics and history. But the books were covered with dust, I noticed, and looked as if they dated from the seventies or earlier; it appeared as if a new book hadn’t been added in twenty-five years. Héctor told me that he was semiretired, teaching law only part-time at a community college in the city. Naturally, I didn’t mention his supposedly collecting bottles for resale at the market. His wife worked, too, he told me, and his daughter, Aura’s younger half sister, was living in the DF, working as a waitress. That was a surprise. I wanted to ask where but sensed that I shouldn’t.

  That time during Christmas, in Guanajuato a few years ago, I asked, was that the last time you saw Aura? I knew it was. I felt, with some dismay, the scheming journalist in me awakening, strategizing, laying down a seemingly innocuous question in order to get him talking. He told me about the afternoon when Aura had found him struggling to let himself out of Vicky Padilla’s mother’s house, that final flustered and abrupt good-bye; afterward, when Aura had gone inside and found her mother and Vicky drinking tequila, something in their attitude had made her not want to discuss her father with them. His voice rising with indignation, Héctor told me that Juanita and Vicky had mocked him that afternoon, that that was why he’d left instead of staying to spend time with Aura. Juanita and Vicky had been complaining about money. But then Juanita had said, It’s no surprise we’re poor, but you, Héctor, you have no excuse; by now you should be a wealthy, powerful man but look at you, you’re even poorer than we are! And then, he said, Juanita and Vicky had laughed at him. He recounted this in his quiet, tired-sounding voice, his hands loosely entwined between his knees, staring straight ahead instead of looking directly at me. In order to commiserate, I said, I know what Juanita and Vicky can be like when they’re together. Then I brought up that other time he’d seen Aura, a few years before, when she was twenty-one and they’d met at th
e restaurant. It was during one of her breaks from the University of Texas. Wasn’t that the first time you’d seen her in seventeen years? I asked. Were you surprised that your daughter had turned out to be such a beautiful and intelligent young woman?

  After a moment, Héctor said, Yes, beautiful, of course, a wonderful girl, and he emphatically nodded and said that no, no, it hadn’t surprised him, he’d always known how exceptional Aura was, even when she was an infant. It’s obvious, he said, that Juanita did a magnificent job of raising Aura.

  Oh, yes, I said. This was the moment I’d been waiting for. I said, But you know, Héctor, Aura never truly accepted Rodrigo as her father, because she never got over losing you. She never kept her love for you a secret. She never understood why you and Juanita separated. Aura was obsessed with that mystery, but also with why you so completely stayed away from her afterward. She knew plenty of children of divorce who still saw both their parents. Why couldn’t she?

  Héctor had been holding himself still and leaning forward as he listened, as if better to concentrate on my every word, but then he lost it; he sat back and covered his face with his hands and quaked from within with dry harsh sobs. When he’d recomposed himself, he explained his reason for that distance. It was the same reason that he’d given Aura: Juanita had remarried and he’d thought Aura should have only one father. But why, I asked, didn’t you ever even answer any of the letters Aura sent you? Héctor said that he’d never received any such letters. Maybe my expression was openly skeptical, because he blurted, Juanita, you know, has always been a little crazy. Then, just like that, Héctor gave up the secret of their past, the one that had been withheld from Aura her entire life even though she’d witnessed it, the events she seemed to have intuited and perhaps half-remembered but had never found a way of exposing or even expressing.

  He had not left Juanita, Héctor told me. Whatever marital troubles they’d had back then, he would never have done that, because of Aura, his little girl, whom he adored, he said. No, Juanita had left him. She’d run off to Mexico City with another man, a rival politician, and taken Aura with her. After that, said Héctor, I had to tear her from my heart. I tore Juanita from my heart. And so you tore Aura from your heart too? I thought. Later, Juanita had tried to come back to him, he said. She drove back to San José Tacuaya with Aura, and when he came outside to meet them, four-year-old Aura, from inside the car, announced, We can come home now, Papi! But Héctor wouldn’t take Juanita back, he’d torn her from his heart.

  I sat stunned. Was this what Aura had alluded to in her diary? There’s too much noise in my head, memory doing its thing, memories I’d rather forget return return. Her childhood memories, silenced and denied, replaced by a fragmented narrative of lies, hurt, guilt, and senselessness. Memories she’d kept secret, as if, or because, she had no words for them.

  Héctor was dry-eyed and calm now, as if spent. I sensed that if I were to ask him one more thing, it would be a brutal trespass. What he’d told me, all its implications, should be absorbed in silence, and very slowly. But I did have another question, and now was the time to ask it. That time you met in the restaurant, I said, when Aura was twenty-one. It wasn’t raining out, it was a dry day, at least that’s how she remembered it, but you came into the restaurant with mud all over one of your pant legs. I forced a smile. Aura always wondered why, I said. It was another big mystery to her.

  He nodded, and said, On the drive over, I had a flat tire and got out to change it. Out there on the highway it had rained, and a truck went past, through a puddle, and sprayed me.

  A moment later he got up and went into the kitchen to make us some coffee. I checked my BlackBerry. There was a message marked urgent from a friend in New York, Johnny Silverman, my corporate lawyer friend, a winningly extroverted guy who’d befriended Juanita at our wedding. Now Juanita had cast him as my lawyer, which he wasn’t, and her lawyer, one of the university lawyers, had sent Johnny an e-mail telling him that I had two days to vacate our Escandón apartment. When Héctor came out, I told him that I’d better catch the next bus back to the DF But aren’t you going to stay to eat? he asked, his tone somber and anxious. He was expecting me to stay for lunch; his wife, who’d be home from work soon, had prepared a special meal, a mole de olla. I apologized and said, I have no idea what to do about this situation, so I better get back and deal with it. I told him some of the story: the apartment Aura’s mother had bought for her, how I’d offered to go on making the monthly payments while I tried to gather the money to buy the apartment outright. It seemed legally dubious, I said, that they could evict the widowed husband just like that. To move out in two days seemed impossible! Héctor said that under Mexican law, he was sure I had legal rights, that I wasn’t merely a third party, as Juanita and her lawyer described me. Excusing myself, I typed a fast message to Johnny, asking him to request permission from Juanita and her lawyer to move four months later, in January, and meanwhile I’d go on paying the monthly bank payments. After that, I wrote, I would pack the apartment up and leave, and Juanita would owe me nothing; if Juanita wasn’t amenable to that, could I at least have another week? Even if I could get the money together to buy the apartment, I realized now, there was probably no way Juanita would sell it to me. I left for the bus station, feeling guilty about not staying to eat. I’d promised Héctor that I’d come back to San José Tacuaya as soon as I could, though I never did. On the way back to the DF I phoned Gus in New York and told her everything.

  Remember, it’s only his version, she cautioned. That doesn’t make it all true. Maybe leaving him was the best thing Aura’s mother ever did. He sounds like a wimp. She probably knew he was going to fall apart and wreck his career anyway.

  A politician gets his wife stolen by another politician in a small Mexican macho city, I said, where everyone knows everyone, you don’t think that could have hurt his political career?

  Oh, come on, she said. Take your wife and child back, for God’s sake, and go and screw some other politician’s wife if you need to. There are two sides to this. As always. You don’t give up a daughter like Aura for any reason, she shouted into the phone.

  After we’d hung up, I sat with my eyes closed, leaning my head against the mesh curtain over the bus window until I dozed off, falling into one of those half-awake dream states where I was on a lonely train ride like in the movie version of Doctor Zhivago, through the desolate Siberian wilderness full of howling wolves that had so frightened me when I’d seen the movie as a child. Juanita is like a dark forest—I thought that, or dreamt it; it seemed to spell itself out one letter at a time. She’s the forest but she’s also the mother of the forest, its queen, its great hunter, its spell-casting wizard. She’s the wolves, the bears, the nourishing fish in the rivers. She’s the woodpecker that haunts the forest, shattering skulls and eating memories like grubs. Now I’m trapped deep inside this forest, while with every day that passes I’ll remember less of who I was before, until soon there’ll be nothing left for the woodpecker to devour. Is Aura here, trapped inside this forest, too? I’ll never find out, there are no answers in this forest.

  I was still on the bus, about an hour outside of Mexico City, when I received an e-mail from Johnny, forwarding me the message he’d just gotten from Juanita:

  Estimable lawyer Silverman, in response to your attentive request, I’d like to comment that I have no objection to Frank staying for another week, until the date that you’ve indicated, though nevertheless it is very important that he realize that after that date I will take charge totally and absolutely of my house.

  I didn’t even realize until nearly two years later, when I went back through old e-mails and found the ones that were written that day and in the ensuing ones, that I must also have asked Johnny to write this message, which he’d cc’d to me:

  Querida Juanita:

  Now that I’ve read with care your previous mail about Frank, I see that I must have omitted something that is very important. Frank has asked me to ask you if y
ou can give him just a small portion of Aura’s ashes to take back to Brooklyn. I apologize for asking this so bluntly, but I don’t know how one is supposed to ask a question like this.

  Later, I would hear that when, two days after the funeral, I phoned Juanita’s apartment to tell her I was coming over, Juanita told the others gathered there that she had to hide Aura’s ashes because I was coming to take them away. Madness of a mother’s grief—it stabs my indignant heart with pity, for whatever that pity is worth.

  The old tailor told me that Aura would not want to see me dragging my sadness around in a heavy, black wool suit and recommended a charcoal gray. When Chucho, our favorite among the security guards in the building at Escandón, a stocky fiftyish man with kind, almost feminine eyes, saw me for the first time after Aura’s death, he came out from his booth to intercept me, and said:

  Resignación, señor. Resignación.

  On what would have been the first Monday after our vacation at the beach the carpenter turned up, as we’d arranged, to deliver our beautiful new bookshelves. It had been twelve days since Aura’s death. The carpenter lived in the far outskirts of the city, and despite his working-class origins and life, he had rust-colored hair and blue eyes in his craggy face. The morning when he’d come to measure our walls, he’d noticed that both Aura and I were hungover from a night out in the cantinas, and had given us a gruffly paternal speech about his own youthful alcoholism and how he’d given up drinking forever when he became a father. Now I told him about Aura. After a long moment of silence, he put the newspaper he was carrying—one of the city’s many crime and scandal tabloids—down on the table and opened it to a story about a woman in Polanco who’d been struck by a car and killed. There was a photograph of her lying on her stomach in the street, in a blue dress, her hands open on the pavement, blood pooling around her head.