Say Her Name

by Francisco Goldman

  The director apparently thought that maybe Aura had drowned, though that is not what happened. The waves were reasonably calm. Swimmers, even little children, were not having any noticeable difficulty exiting the water that day, or at least not that I noticed. Waves violently dissipating—that seemed exactly right, as did “landed on her head.”

  As soon as I reached Aura and Fabis in the water, we all seemed to decide at once that now we were going to try to bodysurf. I quickly caught a wave about as well as I ever catch one, and came up about twenty or fifteen yards away, exhilarated, thrusting my arms in the air. Wasn’t I the equal, or near equal, in bold and playful energy, of any far younger man on that beach? Fabis tried to catch the next wave but missed it. The next wave rose toward us as if pushed from behind by an invisible bulldozer, and I heard Aura shout:

  ¡Esta es mía!—This one’s mine!

  ¡Esta es mía!—her cheerful-plucky voice suffused with her last ever impulse of delight.

  I was out of position to catch it but I saw her launch herself and thought, as I dove under, that this wave seemed bigger, heavier, somehow more sluggish than the others, and I felt a twinge of fear (or is that just a trick of memory?). I came up amid a wide swathe of seething foam—the water looked like it was boiling. Fabis was next to me. Did you catch it? I asked her, and she said, No, did you? but I was already looking around for Aura. Where’s Aura? I didn’t see Aura. I swept my gaze back and forth over the teeming surface, waiting for her head to pop back up, gasping, her hands brushing hair and water out of her eyes. The most extraordinary bafflement, fear … She wasn’t in the water. Then I saw her. The withdrawing foam uncovered her like a white blanket slowly being pulled back: her smooth round back and shoulders floating; she was floating, utterly motionless, facedown in the water. I reached Aura an instant or two ahead of three or four other swimmers and we hoisted and carried her onto the beach. How heavy she was. We set her down on the sand. She was unconscious, water dribbling from her nostrils. But then she opened her eyes. People were shouting, Don’t move her! She gasped that she couldn’t breathe. Someone shouted, Give her mouth to mouth, and I brought my lips to hers. I blew in and felt the hot breath slowly push back into me. I was surprised at the steepness of the beach; it was as if we were in a gulley. (Had it been like that earlier? Did it have something to do with the tide?) A wave came in and almost covered her. Several pairs of hands picked her up, and she slipped from all our grasps, and we grasped her again and carried her up onto the hot dry sand. A doctor, an ambulance, I was pleading. I had to stay by her. She said, Help me breathe, and I put my lips against hers. She whispered, That was too hard, and after the next breath, Like that. Somebody, maybe Fabis, said that it was susto, fright, that was making it hard for her to breathe, that once she calmed down she’d be able to breathe, and I repeated to her, Aura, you’ve had a terrible fright, that’s why you can’t breathe, when you calm down you’ll be able to. I thought Fabis had gone to phone an ambulance and found out later she’d actually left to find a doctor. Just before she took off was when Aura said to me, Quiéreme mucho, mi amor. Love me a lot, my love. She couldn’t move her limbs, nor did she have any feeling in them. She told me that with utmost composure, as if she believed that by keeping very calm and still, this horror might decide to abandon her and move on to some other prey. I told her that it was only temporary, that soon the feeling would start coming back. I was holding her hand, squeezing it, but she couldn’t feel my squeezes. She was caked in sand. One of the other people kneeling around her prodded her leg and asked her if she could feel it. Where the fuck was the ambulance? Somebody, a German he sounded like, kept stating with authority that she shouldn’t be moved. Aire, said Aura, whenever she needed me to help her breathe. The word came off her lips like a bubble quietly popping.

  No quiero morir, she said. I don’t want to die.

  Of course you’re not going to die, my love, don’t be silly. Squeezing her hand, stroking hair off her forehead. My lips to hers, in, out, wait, in, out, wait …

  Fabis never found the doctor. Somehow the doctor found us first. He was a wiry young Mexican who looked like a surfer. Maybe he was a medical student, not a doctor. By now Fabis was trying to call an ambulance but was having a difficult time. At first the restaurant owners didn’t want to let her use their phone, or couldn’t tell her who it was she should call for an ambulance. Finally she came back with the news that there was no ambulance. There was only one ambulance on that whole stretch of coast, she reported, and it was currently two hours away. So, no ambulance.

  Aire, whispered Aura.

  The young doctor took control. We couldn’t afford to wait two hours, we had to get Aura to the nearest hospital, in Pochutla, about twenty miles away inland. Somebody volunteered to drive Aura to the hospital in his SUV. We would use a surfboard as a stretcher and load Aura into the back. When the doctor asked for help, some of the young men standing around moved away as if a blowtorch was being held to their feet, but others came forward to kneel around Aura and they carefully lifted her as a surfboard was slid beneath her and we carried her to the SUV. I was holding the board under her head. In the back of the SUV, I crouched behind her head, holding it with both hands, trying to keep her head and neck from moving, while continuously bending forward to give her breath. The SUV lurched slowly from side to side on the rough dirt road, every rut like a mountain or a deep ditch, and it was impossible to keep her completely still. Another youth was crouched at the end of the surfboard, as much to keep it from sliding out onto the road as to hold Aura’s legs steady. Somehow he had a green feather in his hand, and he was stroking it against the bottom of Aura’s feet and asking if she felt anything. She whispered that she did, and I kept telling her that being able to feel the feather meant that everything was going to be okay. The youth with the feather was praying over Aura. You’re like an angel, I told him. Finally we hit paved road. About forty-five minutes after leaving the beach at Mazunte we reached the hospital in Pochutla. It was about three in the afternoon.

  Pochutla is a small busy commercial town. The hospital was on the town’s outskirts, a flimsy-looking, one-story construction that resembled a rural elementary school. They allowed me into their emergency care area with Aura. It was small and extremely spartan. They kept her on the surfboard, which they laid atop a bed. They put a neck brace on her. But that hospital didn’t even have a respirator. I still had to help her breathe.

  The first doctor who came to look at Aura was clearly an alcoholic: disheveled, bleary, and utterly indifferent. Outside the emergency room there was a little waiting area with screen windows and plastic chairs. Fabis was out there, making a last few calls on her cell phone before its battery ran out. She tried to call Aura’s mother but got her answering service. She couldn’t reach Rodrigo, either. At the end of that long day, Fabis would record forty-one unanswered calls to Juanita and Rodrigo. Her cell phone charger was back at the house in Mazunte. She asked the SUV’s owner if he could go and get it for her, and he said that he would. She drew him a map and gave him the keys. He came back with the charger in not much more than an hour. He’d driven much faster than he’d been able to with Aura in the back.

  Aura asked me, Am I going to die?

  No, my love, of course you’re not going to die. You’re going to be okay, I promise. This happens to football players sometimes, I told her. They carry them off the field just like we carried you and then, bit by bit, the feeling in their arms and legs comes back. Don’t you have a little feeling in your limbs already?

  Sí, mi amor.

  Finally they brought a hand-operated respirator and a nurse held the mouthpiece over Aura’s lips while I, with both hands, rhythmically pressed the ovoid white plastic balloon that pumped air. When I was told I had to fill out forms, another nurse took over the balloon, and I was led into a tiny cubicle that had a desk with a manual typewriter to wait for the doctor. I got out my BlackBerry and it had a signal. I phoned Juanita and got no answer so I se
nt an e-mail telling her that Aura had had a swimming accident, was in the hospital, and to please phone me or Fabiola immediately. My phone’s battery was also very nearly gone. I e-mailed Silverman, my editor in New York, Gus, Saqui, and I don’t remember who else, to ask for help in getting Aura medevaced to the United States. I was in my bathing trunks and a T-shirt and was barefoot. Fabis had handed me the T-shirt. She’d had the presence of mind to run and collect all of our things where we’d left them on the beach.

  The doctor who finally came into the cubicle where I was waiting was an old man with white hair and a mustache. He would make the diagnosis that Aura didn’t have ocean water in her lungs—good news, except it would turn out that he was wrong. He asked me questions for his forms and slowly typed my answers; the process seemed interminable. I thought I heard Aura calling for me and abruptly got up and left. When I got back to Aura there was a new doctor there, a husky young man with chubby cheeks and an air of benevolent intelligence. He was working the manual respirator now, calmly squeezing it between his hands and looking intently from Aura’s face to the monitor attached to her. I asked if Aura had been calling for me and the nurses said no, that she was tranquila. The young doctor handed the balloon off to a nurse and we went out into the corridor; there he, Fabiola, and I discussed what to do. We made the decision to get Aura as quickly as possible, by air ambulance, to a hospital in Mexico City, not to the hospital in the city of Oaxaca, which had been mentioned as a possibility. Aura needed to go that very day, the young doctor told us. When I got back the nurses asked me to pull Aura’s blue bathing suit off of her, as if that was an act, even in a hospital, that could only be performed by a husband. They lifted her a bit, and I rolled the sandy bathing suit off her shoulders, down her body, and off her legs, and they pulled a bedsheet over her. With a wire cutter they snipped Juanita’s old charm bracelet off of Aura’s wrist. I took over the manual respirator and kissed her forehead and her cheek and she opened her eyes and closed them. The young doctor told me that her pulse and heartbeat had slowed considerably, but that they’d given her a shot of epinephrine and restored them to nearly normal. I was told to keep an eye on the monitor and that if her heartbeat sank below forty, to say something. The old doctor picked up Aura’s hand and let go, and it flopped down limply. When he hammered under her knees there was a tiny reflex movement. He ran the reflex hammer down the sole of her foot and asked if she felt anything, and she said that she had. The nurses and I smiled at each other.

  The doctor pretended to do it again, swiping the hammer downward but without actually touching her skin, and when he asked Aura if she’d felt something, she again said that she had.

  My memories of all that happened that endless day will always be clouded and uncertain. I do know that Fabiola was constantly working her telephone. The tías were trying to track down Juanita and Rodrigo, though they wouldn’t succeed until hours later, finding Rodrigo first. The plan now was to arrange for an air ambulance to fly Aura back to the DF from either Puerto Escondido or Huatulco, but we also needed to find an ambulance to bring Aura to either of those two airports. Both were proving to be difficult tasks. I went out to the corridor, where I’d left my book bag under a chair, to get my sandals and wallet, and that’s when I discovered that somebody, probably back at the beach, had stolen all the cash in my wallet and then put the wallet back into the bag. I had one credit card, which the thief had left alone—an AmEx card, useless in any Mexican ATM. My other cards were back at the house in Mazunte. I heard Fabis on her cell phone say plaintively but urgently, But Ma, imagine if it was me—Odette had asked Fabis if we couldn’t wait until tomorrow for an air ambulance. Fabis said, But Ma, she might not make it until tomorrow, the doctor says she has to go today. Just then a nurse popped out and told me that Aura was asking for me, and I went back inside.

  Odette and Fabis’s sister found an air ambulance service in Toluca, just outside Mexico City, that would fly to Huatulco. Time was short, it was already late afternoon, and the two of them were rushing to a bank branch that was still open to withdraw the twelve thousand dollars in cash that the ambulance service was demanding.

  Inside, Aura said that her nalgas, her ass, hurt from lying on the surfboard. Clearly, that meant that she wasn’t going to be paralyzed. I whispered passionately into her ear that she was going to be okay and kissed her face until a nurse told me to step aside. It was strange to observe the nurses standing over Aura, working the manual respirator, watching the monitor, chatting away to each other about their everyday lives. But we were all cheered up now, because if Aura was complaining that her ass hurt, surely the sensation in her limbs must be returning—it was unthinkable that she wouldn’t recover. An air ambulance was coming for her. It was already past dusk. Supposedly a Red Cross ambulance was finally on its way, too. In Mexico City, Fabiola’s sister had found a spinal cord specialist, the father of a friend, who was one of the very best in Mexico City and who was waiting for Aura at the Hospital Ángeles, in Pedregal, one of the city’s wealthiest areas.

  But there was a new problem: the air ambulance couldn’t take off from Toluca because the Huatulco airport was denying permission to land—they were closing for the night.

  The young doctor said that if Aura spent the night in Pochutla, she wouldn’t live.

  The Huatulco airport official was named Fabiola, too. On her phone Fabis told her, If my cousin dies you’re going to have that on your conscience the rest of your life. Johnny Silverman, my lawyer friend in New York, was now applying pressure, too. His law firm had worked on corporate cases with one of the most powerful and connected lawyers in all Mexico, and he convinced this lawyer to call the Huatulco airport. After his call, the Huatulco Fabiola relented and said the airport would stay open until midnight.

  The ambulance came at about nine, two hours later than arranged. The Pochutla hospital couldn’t relinquish its only neck brace so Fabis and I dashed out to a pharmacy to buy one. The Red Cross ambulance didn’t have a working respirator, either. The young doctor, who was actually an intern from Guadalajara recently assigned to the hospital, volunteered to accompany us, with the manual respirator. Finally Aura, wrapped in a bedsheet, was lifted off the surfboard onto the ambulance gurney. Whoever owned that surfboard had apparently given it up for Aura.

  The airport at Huatulco was about twenty miles away on a slow, winding road. It took us nearly an hour. We came into the airport through a back entrance, amid vapor lamps and steamy tropical air, and I heard the whine of an idling jet engine. We were back in the twenty-first century, or had even leapt ahead to the next one, because the air ambulance looked to me like something out of a sci-fi movie; in my memory its crew of young medics wore shiny flight suits, though I doubt that’s true. The lead doctor was a beautiful young woman with the cheerfully reassuring manner of the Good Witch of the North. The young doctor from Pochutla wouldn’t even accept money from Fabis for a taxi back to Mazunte; off he went, after a round of heartfelt and hopeful good-byes, carrying the manual respirator, to stay at the house of a friend. Aura was transferred to a new stretcher and covered snugly in a silvery thermal blanket. The beautiful doctor said that Aura’s vital signs were good and that she was sure she was going to be fine. Once we were in the air, she said that Aura didn’t even need a respirator. It was true: she was managing to breathe on her own. Aura looked at me and asked:

  Mi amor, ¿me puedo dormir un poquito? Can I sleep a little bit?

  That might be the last full sentence Aura ever addressed to me; I don’t remember any other. She slept awhile. So as not to wake her, I restrained myself from pouring whispered words of love and reassurance into her ear.

  The last ambulance took us from Toluca all the way across Mexico City to Pedregal in the south. I rode in back with Aura, and Fabis sat up front with the driver. That last ambulance was austere and basic, with a metallic interior. Aura was back on a respirator. With us in back was a doctor who looked barely into his twenties, quick and sure in his movements;
he seemed alert, serious and capable, pale, with delicate sharp features and glasses, Jewish probably. He was intently watching the monitor, reading Aura’s vital signs. Then he said, his voice abrupt and tense, I don’t like how this looks. The optimism of the air ambulance—such a mystery to me now—was gone. Now I can’t say whether I am grateful for those last moments of hope and relief, or feel that we were cruelly deceived. Neither, I suppose.

  Juanita and Rodrigo were waiting for us outside the hospital emergency entrance. Some of the tías were there, too. It was about two in the morning. Juanita, arms folded, glaring at me, spoke her accusation. This was how I’d brought her daughter back to her, the daughter she’d given away to me to protect in marriage, as I’d vowed to do. This was how I’d returned Aura to her mother.

  Aura was awake. It was as if she’d saved up all her energy to be able to give her mother this last cheerful-plucky declaration: Fue una tontería, Mami. It was a stupidity, Mami.

  I think the renowned surgeon-specialist and his team of doctors knew almost right away. I don’t remember how long it took before they came out to speak with us in the waiting room. The surgeon-specialist was a tall, corpulent man. He told us that Aura had broken and dislocated the second, third, and fourth vertebrae of her spinal column, and that they had pressed into her spinal column and severed the nerves that controlled her breathing and her torso and limbs. It was probable that she was going to be completely paralyzed for life. They were trying to stabilize her spinal cord so that its swelling might go down. Then they would decide if there was any way to operate. She’d ingested ocean water, too, and they were working to clear it from her lungs. I pleaded with the doctor. I told him that Aura had had sensation in her limbs off and on throughout the day, that in the air ambulance her vital signs had been fine and that she’d even breathed on her own. I told the doctor that she was going to be fine, and that he had to believe me, and I remember his stricken eyes helplessly observing me—me in my dirty, sweaty T-shirt and bathing suit.