Say Her Name

by Francisco Goldman

  The wedding video and color photographs were a wedding gift from Juanita’s cousin. But I can’t stand to watch the wedding video. You’d think I’d want to watch it all the time, as it’s the only video of Aura that I have. That video used to make me want to scream with embarrassment even when Aura was alive. Why so much more footage of me than of Aura? Why was the camera person so riveted by me? Because I looked like I’d just been miraculously cured of blindness, aiming my stretched Muppet grin all over the place. My exuberance is pure—it’s not like I felt undeserving, or like I’d gotten away with something. But I’d stopped—long before Aura—expecting or imagining that a day like this one would ever come, and that’s too obvious in the video. There was something unguarded, out of control, undignified in my comportment, going among the guests like a romping dog, showing everybody my enormous grin.

  I had no family at the wedding. About nine days before, my mother had fallen and broken her hip, and my sisters were staying to take care of her. But I was relieved not to have to deal with them. The ceremony was on a small island in the middle of a pond on the hacienda, while the guests watched from the lawn. The civil judge who conducted it was a baby-faced twenty-six-year-old in his first year of practice. Pia took a photograph that captured Aura walking alone—before she reached her waiting stepfather who would accompany her the rest of the way—across the lawn toward the island, her white veil hiding her face, holding her bouquet; above her, fuming, dark clouds can be seen atop still sun-suffused ones, casting shadows and light on the Alamo trees. It’s a lonely and disquieting photograph, the last in that roll of film, and sprocket tears pierce the image on the far right like scorching talons. It rained, a windy drizzle, and guests retreated to the porch of the hacienda house, but before the ceremony was over it stopped. I went through the vows grinning and nodding like a bobblehead doll. Aura looked attentive, serious, a bit overwhelmed. The Mexican civil ceremony is traditional Old Mexico, long but not so poetic. No phrase so memorable as “love, honor, cherish, and protect,” though vow number four states that the man, as the principal source of courage and strength, owes the woman, along with nourishment and direction, his protection. The woman is lauded for her beauty, self-sacrifice, compassion, and intuitive insight; she should treat her husband always, says vow number five, with delicacy and respect. Afterward, Aura joked that they could edit those vows down to one line and save a lot of time—she dropped into her low voice: The truth of the Master is the Slave, and the truth of the Slave is the Master.

  When it was over, mariachis started to play, and two boys led the little tequila-bearing burro across the wet lawn. The Mexicans surged into the big white, open tent and sat wherever they wanted, totally ignoring our painstakingly planned seating. When our hipster Mexican DJ led off his first set with Pérez Prado and some techno-cumbias, he provoked a stampede of middle-aged Mexicans, Juanita’s people, to their parked cars; they came rushing back with Beatles and ABBA CDs in their hands that the DJ, though at first he protested—“Then you cannot say that DJ OXO played at your wedding”—obligingly mixed into his playlist the rest of the night. The dancing went on until nearly dawn. There’s a Mexican tradition among wedding waiters to try to get the bride and groom totally smashed, probably once a great boon in a country where the bride was supposed to come to her marriage bed a virgin. Every time I turned, a waiter was waiting to refill my tequila glass. I felt like I was being hunted. I fell backward into the mud, laughing, as Aura and I climbed into one of the vans waiting to take guests back into San Miguel.

  A wealthy friend of Juanita’s in Guadalajara had donated a good portion of the tequila. A friend of mine who owns restaurants in the Condesa got me a wholesale price on the wine. And so on. That’s how we pulled off our grand wedding. Its success did help establish a feeling of family unity, some trust, and a softening, I think, of Juanita’s maternal angst. Even if Aura kept saying she would have been just as happy to get married at city hall.

  How were we supposed to be, now that we were married? Should there be a change? There was some shyness or confusion about that, manifested as constraint, during the first day and a half of our honeymoon, at a remote eco resort with a baby-sea-turtle hatchery, on the Pacific Coast in Nayarit. What a beautiful sunny morning! Time to get down to the serious honeymoon business of reading serious literature in our hammocks! On the second day, we went horseback riding. My horse galloped away with me down the beach, ignoring my shouts and yanks on the reins. The comedy of our narrative was restored: Aura had fun evoking me bouncing helplessly in the saddle as the horse bolted, to the amused cackles of our cowboy guide. Our cabaña was on the ocean, lit at night only by candles and oil lamps; there was no electricity. Blue crabs scuttled everywhere and we took photos of them backed into corners, raising their samurai claws. There was a lagoon that we rowed across in a little boat to go to supper at night. In the dining room we drank margaritas and played Scrabble, allowing both English and Spanish words. Aura played Scrabble with a book to read in her lap at the same time. The other hotel guests also kept to themselves, and gave the impression of being rock stars and middling financial hoodlums on badly needed retreats, never removing their dark glasses and their baseball hats with the bills pulled low, staying out of the sun. The surf was too rough and treacherous for swimming; the hotel had signs on the beach that prohibited going in the ocean. There was a pool area sculpted to seem like a part of the beach. I went swimming in the ocean anyway, though it’s more accurate to say I ran in just far enough to dive under a wave, then turned and charged out through the heavy rock-scrambled drag. A hotel attendant watched me come up the beach from the water with a disapproving expression. He pointed at the sign and called out, Está prohibido nadar, señor.

  No matter what, Aura told her friend Mariana, she knew that she could count on me to protect her. She felt safe with me. I always looked out for her. I’d throw myself in harm’s way before I’d ever let anything happen to her, Aura said to Mariana in Mexico City, a few days before we went to Mazunte in July of 2007, and that was one of the reasons she was happy in her marriage to me.

  Even though, earlier that spring, I’d nearly gotten Aura killed. We’d gone up to New Bedford, where I wanted to do some research for a novel I was starting. Like many New Yorkers who don’t keep cars in the city, I rarely get to drive. I’m more nervous at the wheel now than I used to be when I drove more regularly, though I’m not a hesitant driver. In Mexico City, where Aura had a little red Chevy hatchback that she kept at her mother’s, she always drove, darting around in that clogged anarchic traffic like a whirligig beetle. But on our trip to New Bedford I drove, in our rented SUV. I missed a turn and, in a flustered burst, tried late to catch it, turning sharply across the lane to my right. The car in that lane screeched to a stop, the driver laid on its horn, and shouts of You fucking asshole, astounded and nasty stares, broke out all around me.

  Aura was sitting in the passenger seat, where the car would have struck. Shaken, she blurted in English, You are a stupid, stupid man.

  She’d never spoken to me with such contempt. Ashamed, I drove on, imitating a normal person who’d never even intended to turn. A few minutes passed before Aura softly apologized, almost mumbling: I didn’t mean it. In that kind of situation people say things they don’t mean. It’s the adrenaline, she said.

  A stupid, stupid man. I couldn’t get it out of my mind; it nagged at me for days and whenever I remembered it made me feel sad again. It was a stupid, stupid thing to have done, to try to turn without even looking across that lane. Why such a panicked impulse over a missed turn?

  24

  I took Aura’s pack of Camel Lights out of the kitchen hutch drawer, got some matches, put on my down jacket, and went outside. It was after ten at night and freezing; when I sat down on the stoop, the cement stung like dry ice through my jeans. A few parked cars were still crusted with last week’s heavy snow, or, not yet dug out, trapped in their icebergs, but on the sidewalks and in the middle of the str
eet, the snow was now reduced to scraps and a dirty frozen slush. I lit up. Locked to the inside of the black iron fence in front of the downstairs entrance and the trash cans was Aura’s bicycle, half-buried in a mound of snow, missing its seat, rusting away. I hadn’t been able to find the key to her lock. Every couple of weeks, it seemed, somebody used to steal her bicycle seat. Where were those seats now? How far away does the traffic in stolen bicycle seats reach? Was someone in Moldova riding around on Aura’s bicycle seat? This was the first cigarette I’d smoked in thirteen years. I inhaled and coughed. I inhaled again, held the smoke down. Dizziness; a slowly whirling nausea rising up through me. My fingers and ears hurt from the cold. I looked toward the end of the block, at the black gnarled branches and wispy twigs of her tree against the moon hovering directly behind. A couple of bicycle delivery guys came pedaling down the street, sweatshirt hoods up from under their jackets, the crunch of their tires through mud-ice, the soft percolation of their Mexican Spanish, every few words a güey. I want my friend back, I thought; we talked in signs and formed a great team. Maybe I feel sick of people not understanding what this is like, but it’s not like I wish for anyone else to live through this. I stamped out Aura’s cigarette and lit another one. Hold her tight, if you have her; hold her tight, I thought, that’s my advice to all the living. Breathe her in, put your nose in her hair, breathe her in deeply. Say her name. It will always be her name. Not even death can steal it. Same alive as dead, always. Aura Estrada.

  25

  It’s so cold in Alaska …

  You were going to become a rock star. You didn’t realize it yet, but you were going to drop out of Columbia—and probably end up dumping me, too—for the grungy glamour of life on the road and at least modest stardom. Raul, a kid you knew from Mexico City who was at Columbia, too, studying architecture, had formed a band that was playing at clubs downtown and around the Northeast. The band had decided that what they needed to get them “to the next level” was a female vocalist, and so they were holding auditions. Raul invited you to try out. For days you shut the French doors to our bedroom and sat on the floor playing that song on your laptop and singing along to it:

  Stephanie says …

  It’s so cold in Alaska …

  I knew they’d choose you. You didn’t have a great voice, but you didn’t need one. You would just need to be able to carry a tune and softly speak-sing the lyrics, well, like Nico. The band, I was sure, must above all be seeking a certain look, and you looked like a Mexican Bjork. I had to accept it. I’d vowed to avoid the caricature of the controlling older lover. The last thing you were looking for was a Tommy Mottola. Anyway, you didn’t think it would be the end of us if you became a rock musician, it would only mean the occasional weekend away and rehearsal time. I knew all the things it could and probably would mean, but kept my mouth shut.

  That was during our first winter together. I went with you to the Lower East Side the day of your audition, a gloomy February Saturday afternoon. While you went off to the recording studio the band had rented, I waited in a coffee shop next to the Tenement Museum. I sat at the window, sipping coffee, telling myself to feel happy for you, “Stephanie Says” playing over and over inside me like the saddest good-bye song ever. I felt a kind of grief, not the heavy eviscerating thing itself, but its predatory shadow, like a shark’s shadow, pass through me that day. Everything was about to change. I had to accept it. Finally you came into the coffee shop, with that tight goofy smile, sat on a stool next to me, took a sip of my coffee—the startling vermilion lipstick smudge you left on the cup’s whitish rim—and then after you’d gulped down a big chunk of my second order of carrot cake, your gap-toothed smile widened into one of broad embarrassment and you merrily announced, ¿Te cae, güey? Raul says I have the worst voice ever, that I don’t have the least idea of how to sing. But they were nice about it. Oh, and the girl who went before me was so good, they have to choose her. They made videos of all the singers who tried out. Frank, we have to get that video back and destroy it.

  I told you how brave you’d been to try and how proud I was of you and that I loved the way you sang “Stephanie Says” and that I would give anything to see that video.

  You always felt destined for stardom of one kind or another. But the fear that maybe that wasn’t true wouldn’t leave you alone. That you were no more than the classes you’d taken, the schools you’d attended, the books you’d read, the languages you spoke, your scholarships, your master’s thesis on Borges and the English writers, and so on, but nobody unique, with a talent only your own. You were desperate for something that was yours alone. I was yours alone, but that isn’t what you meant.

  26

  “La Casa Grande” was what we called Columbia, and the MFA program was “La Casa Chica,” the way in Mexico a man refers to the house where he lives with his wife and children by the former, the secret abode he keeps for his lover by the latter. Three days a week Aura taught undergrads at Columbia, while working on her thesis proposal, and helped organize an academic conference sponsored by her department. She had MFA classes two nights a week and a steady stream of reading and writing assignments. She accepted every invitation to write for Mexican magazines and the occasional English-language literary review. Was it possible to take on such a heavy workload without eventually being overwhelmed by it? Not really.

  We just have to make it to the summer, we exhorted each other. This summer we’ll spend two weeks in Mazunte—our favorite Pacific beach. Neither of us in our lives had ever spent more than a week at a beach. Our honeymoon had lasted six days.

  At Columbia only a few of Aura’s closest friends knew she was in a writing program. If found out, she’d probably be expelled; she might even be sued or deported. Deportation was our midnight fear. She was in the United States on a student visa through Columbia, and what if it was revoked? City College’s policy toward undocumented students was don’t ask, don’t tell; Aura’s being enrolled there would hold no sway with the ICE agents. Marriage to a citizen no longer automatically brought a green card and we’d been warned that getting one was now an extremely slow process, embedded with traps. We knew we’d better get an immigration lawyer but so far all we’d managed to do was tape to the refrigerator the telephone number of a lawyer recommended by Silverman.

  In the MFA program, Aura’s being at Columbia didn’t have to be kept so secret, but she played it down as much as she could. Many writing students, Aura had quickly discovered, didn’t read much. Or they read mostly from the same bowl of U.S. contemporary fiction soup, a few Brits, Irish, and the like floating in there, too. When the Famous Australian Writer assigned the opening chapter of The Portrait of a Lady in “craft class” as an example of “how to introduce multiple characters and their relationship to each other,” some of the other students complained. What’s this? Boring and old-fashioned. How is this supposed to help us manage multiple points of view in the contemporary manner? But Aura and her friend Wendy immersed themselves in those pages, meeting the night before class to go over it line by line. For Aura, being able to read this way again, letting every word convey meaning and emotion she was under no pressure to discount, was a revelation. I think being in an MFA program gave Aura a new perspective on Columbia: that in combination the two were adding up to what she’d originally hoped for from graduate school. Applying her doctoral readings, however inappropriately, to her fiction led to something like new muscles; deeper patterns and layers. Her writing in English was overcoming its second-language fuzziness; she took more confident risks.

  And you thought, Sure! God would like Baby D’s harp and accordion the same as he likes the androgynous angels music; and perhaps you will find out when you go to heaven, after your gig with the Shanghai Bureau. And perhaps you will find your bear costume in a closet in Heaven …

  That was from a class exercise assigned in the FAW’s workshop, and when Aura read that piece aloud, a hush fell over the class, impressed, disconcerted; and I felt my heart brea
k again, more than a year later, when I heard the FAW read it aloud at the memorial service—“a fragment … of a fragment … of a fragment of a life,” he called it—that fragment of a life that was still everything to me.

  But reading her thesis proposal is painful. There she seems either like a butterfly thrashing against flypaper or like a figure skater laboriously hitting her compulsory marks in the short program: “performativity in crisis,” the “larval fascism of subjectivity,” the market, globalization, and so on. But ideas like the Deleuzean one about literature being part of the same disease against which it fights, playfully infiltrate her fiction, like in the story “The Belgian Artist,” where the artist is reading a book called The History of Germs and a young woman comes to his bookshelf-lined apartment and says, “I can’t stand books. They make me nervous.” She was working on her novel, and also beginning to publish pretty regularly: an essay on Bolaño and Borges that was noticed by young literary writers in New York; more short stories. Later that spring, in May, for Gatopardo, a sort of Latin American Vanity Fair, she wrote a profile of a Mexican tailor in Nashville who used to design outfits for Elvis; also for Dylan. That was the first time she was ever flown anywhere by a magazine to write an article. In the pictures I saw of Aura in Nashville, at the tailor’s annual Cinco de Mayo party, she looked so self-possessed and mysterious, as if she belonged there, among those Southern strangers in their redneck-hip Western wear, a world I could never have felt at ease in.