None of us were allowed into the intensive care unit to see Aura. The medical teams needed to work without interruption. Fabis went home with Juanca to sleep. I don’t remember anyone else in the waiting room other than Juanita and Rodrigo. They weren’t speaking to me. They sat on one side of the waiting room, on the vinyl couches, and I sat alone on the other. The light in the room was very dim. We were on an upper floor. I couldn’t phone anyone because I had no charger. Juanca had promised to bring me one in the morning. At one point I went out and walked in the long empty corridors and stopped into a little chapel to pray. I swore that if Aura survived I would live a religiously devout life and show my gratitude to God every day. Besides noticing it, I don’t remember having any thought about Juanita and Rodrigo keeping their distance from me. My thoughts were only about Aura. If she was going to be paralyzed for some time, I would find a way to get her into the best rehab facility in the United States. I would read to her every day and get her to dictate her writing to me; those were the kinds of thoughts I was having. Now and then I got up and went to the shuttered window of the intensive care unit, picked up the receiver, pressed the button, and asked if I could come inside to see my wife, and every time I was told that visitors weren’t allowed until the morning.
28
What did you think about that long night, my love, as you lay there dying, as horribly wounded as any soldier in war, and alone?
Did you blame me? Did you think of me with love even once? Did you see or hear or feel me loving you?
29
It wouldn’t be until the next morning, when Aura was in a coma, that I was finally let in to see her. The eminent surgeon’s assistant, a bulldoggish woman, told me that during the night Aura had had two heart attacks. I finally had a chance to press my lips to Aura’s beautiful ear to thank her for the happiest years of my life, and to tell her that I would never stop loving her. Then the assistant surgeon brusquely ordered me out again. Ten or fifteen minutes later, stepping back in through the white curtain, I instantly sensed a vacuumed-out stillness around Aura’s bed, a nuclear-blast brightness, and the assistant surgeon told me that Aura had died minutes before. I went to her. Her lightless eyes. I kissed her cheeks that were already like cool clay. My sobs must have been heard throughout the hospital.
30
Juanca missed the funeral because he went with a friend out to Mazunte to bring back our things. They found the house just as we’d left it. They packed up everything, even Aura’s shampoo. Aura always just closed the lid of her laptop when she was done working for the day, so when I opened it later, I found the screen as she’d left it. There were two open documents, the latest version of her story about the schoolteacher, and something new, probably the start of yet another short story, titled “¿Hay señales en la vida?” or Does Life Give Us Signs?
31
At first the district prosecutor seems to misunderstand why I’ve come, and why my lawyer made this appointment. He seems determined to defend himself against, I realize, accusations of a negligent or mishandled investigation. In his little office, in the gnashing light caused by that maladroitly hung fan, he insists that he and his assistants have thoroughly investigated Aura’s fatal injury at Mazunte. They’ve interviewed witnesses—the owners and employees of restaurants on the beach, the medical staff at the hospital in Pochutla—and have found nothing to indicate that it was anything but an accident. I tell him that I know it was an accident but that I’m here to give my required legal statement. I want to tell him my story, the one that, over the last year, I’ve ceaselessly refined into a narrative in which my own actions and lack of action, too passive, too assertive, too intrinsic to my character, all weigh as evidence. There is much else that I don’t tell him about—the premonitory signs, the adolescent and later fixations on death in Aura’s diaries, the mysterious pull that that stretch of beaches on the Oaxacan coast exerted on Aura as if her destiny were somehow foretold in its geography. What was I doing, at my age, bodysurfing in those waves? I should have known how dangerous it was. I knew the counterarguments to this, that had I been the kind of man who “acted his age,” then I would have been a different person, one Aura wouldn’t have fallen in love with. True enough. She’d broken her neck in the waves as a direct result of my being myself. In that sense, I was the wave.
But what about free will? Aura was a better swimmer than me, she chose to bodysurf, she chose to try to ride that wave; it was her impulse. Her whole adult life and even earlier she had struggled against the attempts of other people to control and to define her. So do you or I have any right to try to control her in death? All of that is true, but the fact remains, if I hadn’t joined her in the water when I did, if I hadn’t surfed a wave first, if I hadn’t been there being myself, she wouldn’t have flung herself into that wave.
There are dangerous beaches on this coast, says the district prosecutor. Zipolite is called la Playa de la Muerte because every year there are so many fatalities there. Puerto Escondido, Ventanilla, even San Agustinillo can be dangerous. But not Mazunte. Oh sure, you can get rolled and banged up in the waves and get hurt. But Aura is the first fatality at Mazunte in years. It was incredibly bad luck, what happened to your wife, says the prosecutor, well, that’s how it seems to me.
He has the numbers. The district prosecutor goes down the list of beaches and notes how many have died at each one in recent years—I don’t remember the figures, except that at Zipolite there’d been a lot, and at least a couple fatalities at every other beach, except Mazunte, where there were none, until Aura.
An accident so freakish it has happened to only one person, Aura, and to not one other of the countless swimmers who’ve bodysurfed at Mazunte for years and years, day after day. Aura has been most unfortunate. She died because I was being myself, an eternal adolescent, a niñote. She died because, bursting with love, I decided to join her in the water. But all of that is also an evasion of the TRUTH, against which my diligently constructed narrative collapses like a huge wave of nothing. My being myself shouldn’t have been enough to kill Aura. Aura’s being herself, launching herself into that wave for whatever reason, also should not have been enough to kill her. The utter freakishness and meaninglessness of it—there is the TRUTH. That day, after I leave the district prosecutor’s office, that seems even harder to bear than my own responsibility.
It turns Aura’s death into something that will never stop happening, as if the ludicrous fan in the district prosecutor’s office is always blowing her death out into the universe, as if the sun and light of the world are now like the light in that office, frenetically gnashing at the earth, at the night, at my sight whether my eyes are open or shut.
32
The front steps of our building in Brooklyn were unusually steep, and because I have a gimpy knee from an old high school football injury, I’d take every step going down with that leg first, keeping it stiff, lowering it like a crutch. Descending at my side, Aura would imitate me, exaggerating, lurching like a cripple, her face turned up at me with a funny look of strained concentration. On cold damp days, when my knee ached, I’d limp a bit, and Aura, walking next to me, would imitate my limp, matching her steps precisely to mine. To people behind us on the sidewalk we must have looked pretty comical.
All my life I’ve been a tripper and stumbler. Frankie, lift your feet when you walk, don’t drag your feet—when I was a boy, my father was always on me about that. But Aura thought it was hilarious whenever I stumbled against a curb or a raised crack in the sidewalk; she’d laugh like I’d performed a clown pratfall just for her. One reason she found it so funny, I thought, was because she never tripped. She was so light on her feet. Icy sidewalks did give her trouble, though, and then it would be my turn to giggle. I tripped and stumbled but I never fell: I always quickly regained my footing, like a halfback bouncing off a tackle, I was at least still limber enough for that.
Back in Brooklyn after Aura’s death, only a week or two after that first return without
her, coming up the stairs from the reeking summer furnace of the Broadway-Lafayette subway station, I tripped and fell as I never had before, facedown, astonishingly hard—my whole body slammed the stairs and I slid down several steps, my knees and torso and hands banging against the hard filthy iron. Mostly people kept on charging up and down, ignoring me, but a few bent to help, holding out their hands, asking if I was okay. A man in a suit actually knelt by me with his hand on my shoulder, and asked, Are you hurt? Should we get help? I’m fine, I said. Please, thank you, leave me alone, I’m okay. I pushed myself up onto my feet and resumed climbing the stairs. My knees and hands ached as if they’d been sledgehammered and I felt blood trickling down my shin. There was a small tear in my jeans over my knee. My face was burning and there were tears in my eyes, of humiliation as much as anything else.
What did it mean? Did that hard fall on the stairs mark the start, finally, of being old? Maybe, but that’s not the lesson I decided to take. Later it seemed a lesson about grief. One of the most common tropes and complaints in the grief books I’ve read is about the loneliness of the deep griever, because people and society seem unable, for the various reasons always listed in those books, to accommodate such pain. But what could anybody possibly do or say to help? Inconsolable doesn’t mean that you are sometimes consolable. The way things are has seemed right to me; it’s all been as it should be, or as if it could not be any other way. I even feel grateful for some of the appalling things that have been said to me—Why can’t you go back to being the way you were before you met Aura?—because they starkly demarcate a border, showing you a truth about where you are now, whereas a supposedly sensitive comment might only soften that border a little, but never make it less impenetrable. You have to, can only, live this on your own.
33
When I spoke to Rodrigo at Fabiola’s after the memorial service one year after, I found out for the first time that he and Juanita were let into the intensive care unit to see Aura that last night. Now Rodrigo thanked me. He thanked me for all that Fabiola and I had done, throughout that last day and night, to bring Aura home to Mexico City so that her mother could say good-bye to her.
When they were let in to see Aura, she was still conscious.
What did she say? I asked him.
Rodrigo told me:
Aura said, I don’t want to die. She said, There’s so much I want to do. No quiero morir.
34
I don’t know how Juanita endures. I worry about her, and I don’t say that to make myself seem less cold. I try to picture Juanita in her apartment, where she lives with Aura’s ashes, try to follow her through her day, and I feel frightened. I worry about carrying the blame for another death. She no longer even speaks to the tías. If she were grieving in some other way, some way that appeared more positive at least to others, would it make a difference in how she feels? Maybe she survives with superhuman strength. She believes she will be reunited with her daughter in the afterlife. I hope she has found a new, very close friend to whom she can speak as she never could even to the tías, who can even make her laugh, who makes her feel loved and forgiven or understood, and who will always be there for her no matter what, who somehow always knows how to pull her back from the abyss.
Of course it was Aura, only Aura, with whom Juanita had a relationship like that.
35
A woman friend of mine—a bit older than me and the mother of a recently married young daughter—said that Aura had still belonged more to her mother than to me, that Juanita had still been Aura’s “rightful caretaker.” She meant no unkindness, and was only expressing what seemed obvious to her.
You hadn’t had time yet to make Aura all your own, she said. Once you’d had a child and started a family of your own, that metamorphosis would have been complete.
Aura’s closest friends, especially Lola and Fabiola, close observers over the years of Aura’s relationship with her mother, themselves the daughters of mothers with strong personalities and careers of their own—Mexican mothers if that makes any difference—didn’t agree.
Aura didn’t think of her mother as her caretaker anymore, said Lola. If anything, it was the other way around. Aura had already taken her steps away and made her decisions, and she’d already started her own family, with you.
Will Lola still see it that way when, years from now, her own daughter, baby Aura, is taking her first seemingly decisive but perhaps only defiant steps away?
If she wanted to, would Juanita win this argument?
36
However you try to justify it, I thought, it’s not right to keep a wife’s mortal remains from her husband. Surely, most religions would forbid that. Even leaving religion out of it, a husband has a sacred right and duty to bury his wife’s body, bones, ashes. I should have gone and taken the ashes, just like Juanita was afraid I was going to. What’s wrong with me, why didn’t I, why am I so cowardly?
But I also thought what I usually think: Poor woman, let her have the ashes, Aura is not her ashes, I’ll keep the Aura I have.
Confusion, I don’t know how to resolve this question, am not sure where the right or the wrong lies, but I look for answers where I usually do, in books. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s first wife died at a young age after a long struggle with tuberculosis; for two years he was despondent and people feared for his sanity and health. Finally he had his wife’s coffin dug up and opened so that he could confront the physical fact of her death and decay. Then he went to Europe. I haven’t been able to confront that truth, but do I need to? I usually picture myself scooping Aura’s ashes up in my hands and rubbing them all over my face, into my eyes, nose, even into my mouth.
I went to Europe too, using the insurance money from being hit by that car. And inside a church, I had a sort of revelation. The church was in a medieval fortress town about two hours by train outside of Paris. In the oldest part of its nave, high up in the walls, were two intact stained-glass windows from the fourteenth century. During World War II, townspeople had taken the windows down, carefully disassembled them, and stored them in a safe place, and that’s how the windows had survived the bombs that later destroyed a large part of the church. Mass was over and I was wandering around the restored nave, reading the pamphlet that told the history of the windows in English, and remembering the times Aura and I had visited old churches and cathedrals in Paris. Aura described herself as a believing Catholic, though she never went to Mass or performed any observances in her daily life. She always lit candles, though, when she visited these churches, and would cross herself and sometimes pray silently. I stopped at a little side chapel to the Virgin, dropped a euro in the tin box, lit a candle, and thought my own silent prayer, Virgin, if you exist, please take good care of Aura, while at the same instant, in harmony, another inner voice mocked me.
Then I stood under one of those ancient windows and tried to imagine the townspeople holding those seven-hundred-year-old pieces of colored glass in their hands, so fragile and precious, and carefully folding them away inside—inside of what? For a moment I got stuck on that. Old newspapers, old clothes, tablecloths, rags, maybe priests’ vestments and the like? Purple, red, blue, yellow, green, the window was a translucent circle of those colors packed into a complex geometrical pattern that also gave the impression of a joyous simplicity. Seven hundred years, the window seemed to say, that’s nothing, probably I’ll still be here in a thousand years, looking just like I do now. In the expanse of time that the window and the dusky interior of that church suggested, I was just a speck, one more human who’d lost someone, among the thousands upon thousands of humans who over seven hundred years had sat or stood in this church staring up at those same windows while thinking of loved ones lost. I really don’t have much time left, I thought. It’ll all be over in a blink. I thought of Juanita and Leopoldo and their hatred of me, and their determination to erase from Aura’s history our love and marriage. In a way, I thought, it’s as if they took those windows down and instead of putting them away
and keeping them safe, they stole and hid them. These words came to me: Your hatred can save me. Your hatred can even free me. Because it leaves behind an emptiness that I have an obligation to fill in for Aura and me. Those are the words that came to me in that church.
I walked to the other window. The sky must have been a little less overcast on that side of the church, because it was as if a finger had pressed down on a computer keyboard’s sun-icon key, infusing that stained-glass window with just a little more light. It was easier to distinguish the ancient kaleidoscopic patterns, the colored circles inside of circles and other shapes, images of plants and tiny human and animal figures. That yellow oblong shape down near the bottom, I thought, looks like a drumstick.
I left the church and walked down through the streets toward the river, marking my steps with frond, rings, marooned, barreling up, lewd, skein, squall, crevice, drumstick … in 2009 Aura Estrada is thirty-two. Her birthday was a little more than a month away. I was in my down jacket and was wearing a new Chinatown aviator’s hat, fake-fur earflaps down. Stairs led from the sidewalk down to the river. Long wild grass grew along the bank, and I walked on some large smooth stones out amid reeds and stood there with the shallow water flowing around me. The bridges that spanned the river, the long uniform row of black-roofed, dun-colored houses on the opposite bank, smoke from the chimneys, gray sky, ducks.
Say Her Name Page 34
