Say Her Name (10 page)

Was there another woman involved, Ma? Aura would sometimes ask her mother.

Who knows, hija. Nothing would surprise me. But Héctor was never much of a womanizer.

But what about me? Aura would ask. Why did he want to leave me? Why doesn’t he answer my letters?

Sometimes even adults who’ve made the most wonderful child can fall out of love, Juanita would try to explain, and she’d tell Aura all over again how much her father had loved her. But Héctor changed, she would say. It seemed obvious now that something was wrong with him—psychologically, she meant. He always doubted every good thing life gave him, hija. So charming and brilliant, but on the inside, never able to overcome whatever it was that had predestined him to always ruin his own chances for happiness.

Things hadn’t gone at all well for her father, Aura knew, since his glory days as municipal president. Instead of rising higher, he’d plummeted—swiftly or gradually, she didn’t know. Tía Vicky sometimes had news about him: he was teaching law at a community college, but he also had a side business delivering bottled soft drinks to market stalls and collecting the empty bottles to bring back to the distributors. It was hard to believe that her father had fallen so far. And then, years later, as if the official party had never understood how much they needed the former young hotshot presidente municipal of San José Tacuaya to help lead them into the future, the PRI, rotted and loathed, had finally fallen, too.

Aura’s earliest memories of their new life in Mexico City were of her mother sitting in the dark in the living room of their tiny apartment for hours, playing sad songs on her record player, her face soaked with tears. Aura could never hear any of José José’s bathetic ballads without remembering that time. She wrote letters to her father. Her mother helped, until she could write them by herself. In some of these letters, she even asked why he wouldn’t let her and her mother come home. Her mother mailed the letters, but her father never wrote back.

Before long Juanita had found secretarial work at the university, in the psychology department. Aura and her mother lived in a small one-bedroom apartment in the south of the city in a complex of tall
towers that provided inexpensive housing for university employees, though many tenants didn’t seem to have any link to the university, and had probably moved in illegally after relatives and friends had left, paying the required bribes. The apartment smelled of moldy cement and gas. In high winds pieces of the buildings fell off, clattering down the sides, cracking and shattering windowpanes. At night, Aura could hear cats yowling and hungry kittens crying for help inside the twelve-story stairwells but she was forbidden to go to their rescue because, said her mother, drug addicts lived in the stairwells, too. Aura used to imagine the drug addicts sleeping in the stairwells upside down like bats, living off the blood of cats and lost children.

I know that to this day most people who work at the university and live in those apartment towers really don’t think they’re so bad. But Aura’s impressions of what she sometimes called “the Terrible Tower” hadn’t only been shaped by childhood memories of a desperate time—one night something happened there that Aura had only fragmentary memories of, something she couldn’t even be 100 percent sure had really occurred. But it was as if those few glinting memory shards had sheared her neurons in some way that had left her vulnerable to certain stimuli, the way light flickering through trees or flashing behind a barred fence, or even a vividly striped shirt passing on a sidewalk on a sunny day can provoke seizures in certain people.

Aura, whenever we came back to Mexico during school breaks or the summers, used to like to take me on long walks that were guided tours of the daily routes of her childhood and adolescence in the neighborhoods surrounding the Ciudad Universitaria and across the campus itself, a semiautonomous city-state bigger than the Vatican. Once, walking to a sushi restaurant on Avenida Universidad, while stopped at a corner waiting for the light to change, she pointed out three towers clustered on the horizon, back from the row of shopping centers and lower commercial buildings and offices lining the avenue, and she said that there, in that unidad habitacional, in the tower on the far left, was where she and her
mother had lived during their first few years in the city. The buildings had originally been constructed to house athletes for the ’68 Olympics. Smudged by a haze of smog and smoldering sunlight, they looked like bluish-gray construction-paper cutouts pasted to the gray-yellow sky. While Aura described her memories, I stared at the tower, trying to imagine stairwells filled with howling cats and vampire drug addicts. When the light changed we crossed and went on along the avenue holding hands. Because her mother was afraid of having to bring trash out to the Dumpsters in the parking lot at night, said Aura, she’d always ask their neighbor to come with her. Their neighbor was a fat, quiet man who was a lab worker in the university’s school of veterinary medicine. Whenever he opened his apartment door while Aura was standing outside, she could see a mangy blue macaw on its perch at the back of his living room, and the terrariums where he kept snakes and spiders. The neighbor also had a little yellow mongrel dog that was as quiet as his owner, never barking, though he always wagged his tail and wiggled all over whenever they met in the corridor. But that poor little dog, said Aura, had a terrible elevator phobia. At least twice a day, the neighbor took his dog out for a walk, and so at least twice a day they had to wait in the corridor for the elevator, which always took a long time to come and was grindingly noisy when it did, and while they waited, the fat man would try to calm his dog, patting him and speaking reassuring-sounding words, always to no avail, because as soon as the elevator rumbled to a stop and the doors opened, that terrified little dog would lose control of his bladder and pee on the floor. As if addressing an exasperating but coddled child, the fat man would softly scold his dog in a resigned nasal voice that Aura could still imitate,
You have to wait until we get outside, perrito necio,
and then he’d go back into his apartment to fetch his mop. No matter how often the neighbors complained about the lingering smell of dog urine in front of the elevators, no matter what a pain it must have been to have to mop up every time he took his dog out for a walk, their fat neighbor never once lost his temper, or even mentioned the possibility of getting rid of the dog.

Is that an example of unconditional love or what? I remember saying as we walked along the sidewalk.

After a moment Aura said, Yeah, but I think it would have been even more loving if he’d taken his dog to live somewhere else, on the first floor.

Maybe he wouldn’t move, I said, because he was even more in love with your mother.

Quién sabe, could be, said Aura. Poor Áyax.

Ajax, like the soap? I asked.

Áy-yax
, she said, as in
The Illiad
, and she grabbed my chin and said, Ay, mi amor ¿por qué eres tan tonto? and kissed me. That was another of our routines, though my dumb remarks, contrary to what her teasing seemed to presuppose, weren’t always intentional. Aura explained that in Mexico the soap is called Ajax, too, but in Spanish the Greek hero is Áyax. Anyway, her mother would only go down to the Dumpster at night if Áyax went with her. Maybe Áyax really was in love with my mother, said Aura, and would save up his trash, just so that he’d always have some ready whenever she knocked on his door, I wonder … That was when I realized that Áyax was the neighbor’s name, not the dog’s, and I was about to make some silly remark, but something stopped me. It was the way Aura said,
I wonder,
a note of sadness in her voice, like somebody pressing down once, gently, on one minor piano key.

What a funny story, I ventured, encouraging her to go on. But it was obvious that, just like that, her mood had changed. What was the dog’s name? I asked. I don’t remember, she said. She leaned close, resting her head against my shoulder while we walked, and she hardly said another word until we were sitting in the restaurant. By Mexico City standards, the sushi was pretty good in that restaurant. It was a family-run place, and the family was Japanese instead of the usual Mexicans dressed in kimonos and sword-master headbands. It was decorated in a traditional-seeming manner, with dark, intricately carved wood and red paper lanterns imprinted with Japanese ideograms.

Maybe it was by the Dumpsters where it happened, said Aura, not in a stairwell like I’ve always thought.

What maybe happened by the Dumpsters? I asked cautiously.

Something really terrible, she said. To my mother. I don’t know, maybe. You can’t imagine what my mother endured in those days, Frank. That’s one reason, you know, I can never really stay angry with her. I don’t think she’ll ever tell me the whole truth about what happened. Not even when she’s on her deathbed—Aura gave an exaggerated shudder, and embraced herself as if she was cold. She pulled up the sleeve of her cotton sweater and held out her arm. Look, she said. She had goose bumps. I took her hand in mine and her palm was sweaty.

¿Qué te pasa, mi amor?

She just stared sadly down at the table for about five minutes—maybe it was less, but it seemed like a really long time—while I sat nearly paralyzed across from her.

Well, I was only four or five, she finally said, so I don’t really remember—now Aura held her gaze off to the side as she spoke, and her voice became deliberate and a little bit childish. We’d come home late in a taxi, I know that. My mother must have taken me with her to Vicky’s house, or something like that. A vocho verde, a Volkswagen, like all the taxis back then, with the front passenger seat taken out. I was probably asleep—she must have woken me—and she said, Aura, stay right here, I’ll be right back, I just have to go and get some money. Her voice was normal but she looked terrified, like she was making a huge effort to control herself; her face was quivering like it might burst open. Do I really remember this, or is it something I just made up a long time ago like a story, to fill in a blank or my confusion? I don’t know.

You mean you’re not sure if you really remember her saying that? I asked. Well, isn’t that to be expected? It was so long ago. But is there anything you
are
sure you remember?

I remember the driver, said Aura, at least I think this must be a real memory. First, I remember the back of his head. He had a
really huge head, but with short black hair, kind of flat on top. He must have had ears—she let out a slight, mirthless giggle—but I don’t remember any ears, just his head. His head was like a dead planet. A dead planet radiating antimatter, you know what I mean? Second, his neck, because it was like a pig’s neck. Third, his eye. He turned his head when my mother got out of the taxi, and that’s when I saw his eye. Haven’t you ever noticed—now Aura was looking at me almost pleadingly—how quiet I get whenever we’re sitting in the back of a taxi and the driver has a huge head like that?

You mean just here in Mexico, or New York, too? I really hadn’t ever noticed anything like that.

Mainly just here, she said. In New York the taxis are different, with those, you know, partitions, between you and the driver.

Maybe I’ve noticed something a few times, without realizing that the driver’s head was the reason, I said.

When I saw his eye, it scared me.

Scared you how?

Aura turned her head to the side and narrowed her eye to a slit.

That is pretty scary—I smiled, but she had that expression on her face that says, I know that seemed really cute to you, but what I need is for you to believe and understand what I’m trying to tell you. I asked, So what do you think happened that night?

They left me alone in the taxi, she said. They both got out, the taxi driver and my mother. He probably locked the doors, I don’t remember. Can you imagine what that was like?

No, I can’t, I said. Though I could picture four-year-old Aura sitting splay-legged in the taxi’s backseat like a forgotten doll, chubby doll cheeks and eyes full of incomprehension and fear.

Maybe they walked across the plaza in front of the building, said Aura, and went inside, but I don’t know. I don’t remember if there was anybody around, or how long it was before my mother came back. But when she did come back, she pulled me out of the taxi and carried me; I remember hiding my face in her shoulder. I was probably crying. But I think that’s all I remember.

Aura said that she’d pored over those fragments of memory countless times over the years, including in therapy, trying to piece them together, but she’d also asked her mother about the incident. Ayyy no, hija, not now!—that’s how Juanita usually responded to her questioning—Are you going to try to tell me you really remember that? It was nothing. ¡No pasó n
aaad
a! Once, when Aura persisted, asking, Did you at least call the police, Ma? her mother responded with a blast of fake laughter: Of course! Isn’t that what anybody would do? Call the police? So they could buy the cabrón a tequila and toast him? Toast him for what, Ma? Aura asked her, and her mother just stared at her, then said, For robbing me, hija, what else?

Aura fiddled at her napkin. After a moment, her voice quiet and shaky, she said, Frank, sometimes I feel so afraid I lose it completely. It just takes over me. You’ve seen that, you know what I mean.

I got up from my side of the table and sat next to her, put my arms around her. I had seen that, and would again. A late-night conversation about the 3/11 train bombings in Madrid, which had happened about five months before, had ignited the fit she must have been referring to, up to then the only one I’d witnessed. Though Aura hadn’t been in Madrid or anywhere near on the day of the bombings, her seizure of trembling and weeping over that act of mass murder hadn’t struck me as excessively histrionic, in fact it had seemed kind of magical, like the clairvoyant empathy of a holy child, and I remember thinking that everybody at least now and then should react like that to the world’s murderous horrors. The next time it happened, though, we were home on a cold winter night in Brooklyn, watching a DVD of the movie about the capture of the Sendero Luminoso terrorist leader Abimael Guzman. Early in the movie Guzman was still spreading death from his sunless hiding place, and there was a close-up of Guzman’s waxy face, his sinister sneer and a serpent’s glint in his cold eyes, and that’s what ignited Aura’s terror. She backed away from the television and cowered in a corner of the bed, her arms over her head, and soon she was
violently shaking and weeping. It didn’t matter that it was just an actor we were watching, it was as if Guzman’s murderousness and his indifference to the suffering he caused and even the satisfaction he took from it—in other words, actual evil—had somehow leaked into our bedroom through some fissure in the television screen. Aura’s terror so overwhelmed her that night that it scared me to think of how much worse it might have been if I hadn’t been there to hold and reassure her. Those fits, though they happened only a few times in the four years we were together, were like a combat veteran’s unhinging flashbacks.