Say Her Name (19 page)

* * *

There was also that little lagoon or lake or pond that we found one afternoon in the Maya Biosphere Reserve. We’d driven far into it on a rough dirt road that was filled with muddy ruts and swampy craters, unbroken scrub jungle on both sides, when off to the right we saw a small parking area and an observation tower, painted bright yellow, rising above the low trees like a lost lifeguard’s chair. We parked, got out, and followed a path until we reached the tower, then climbed the zigzagging stairs to the platform on top. It was a surprise to see the blue Caribbean no more than two hundred yards away, at the far edge of jungle canopy across the road; also, it was later than we’d realized, the sun falling in the sky, orange and pulsing.

When we climbed down, instead of heading right back to Tulum, we followed the trail farther in, to that hidden lagoon, where we sat on a low wooden dock, no one else around. Soon we were watching the iridescent pastels of the sunset spreading over the water and blazing in the sky above the strip of jungle between us and the ocean, the whole place throbbing with bird calls, as if every glowing tree and plant hid a boisterous bird or two, and we both felt stunned into separate peaceful meditations on the crazy sublimity of what we were witnessing, each of us filling with a sense of mystical wonder and loneliness that merged into one mystical wonder and loneliness together. It was as if we’d just been married in a secret ceremony conducted by the birds. Sometimes I think that if cenotes really are portholes to the underworld and I can go through one and be reunited with Aura, it’s on the shores of that jungle lagoon that I’ll come out and find her waiting.

Well, Hell-Ha, mi amor. No happy memory that isn’t infected. A virus strain that has jumped from death to life, moving voraciously backward through all memories, obligating me to wish none of it,
my own past, had ever happened. But I’m like a sentry who keeps nodding off at the quarantine gate, letting the inmates stream past. Still, it’s lonely to be left with only my versions. Aura can’t say: But it wasn’t really like that, mi amor, it was more like this. Someday it was going to be her, holding my boney hand, leading me through our memories of falling in love. That sweet elation of waking up and finding her beside me in bed. The apartment filling up with music I’d never heard before, tuneful, clever, girl music—Belle & Sebastian—on the happiest mornings of my life so far. (Four years later I still hadn’t gotten over it, the daily surprise of happiness.) She brought her own CDs those first nights she stayed over. “Dear Catastrophe Waitress,” “Wrapped up in Books,” “Judy and the Dream of Horses,” and

If you find yourself caught in love

Say a prayer to the man above

Thank him for every day you pass

You should thank him for saving your sorry ass.

Was this really happening? In
my
life? I can’t listen to those songs anymore without fogging up. Soda Stereo, Charlie García, Smiths, Pixies, OOIOO; her beloved Beatles and Dylan. And what did I turn Aura on to? Iggy Pop and the Stooges, I guess. Te quiero aún más hoy que ayer, I love you even more today than I did yesterday—every morning those were the first words I’d say to her, like the superstition of rabbitrabbitrabbit being the first words you speak out loud on New Year’s morning. It would be months before the morning came when I’d forget to say it. Aura pretended, for about two minutes, to be indignant, What, you’re falling out of love with me already? The next morning I remembered but in less than a year repeating those words did finally begin to feel too automatic. Still, it wasn’t something to toss away as if all used up, there would still be mornings when I especially wanted her to hear it, or just wanted to say it again. One morning, back during that first or second week, she led me from bed to stereo, put in her Bjork CD,
and advanced it to “It’s Oh So Quiet,” the song about falling in love, where Bjork’s lullaby
shhh-shhh
s turn to euphoric shrieks of WOWWW WOWWW … THIS IS IT!!!—I could inspire
that
?! Bjork-like was the slant and shape of Aura’s eyes, the fall of her hair, her air of a mischievous sprite. Another night, sitting on my lap, she read out a poem from the Carol Ann Duffy book she’d brought with her:
At childhood’s end, the houses petered out
…
till you came at last to the edge of the woods
. It was in a clearing in those woods that the poem’s speaker, Little Red-Cap, first
clapped eyes on the wolf
. With
wolfly draw
ww
l,
the old wolf, wine-stained snout, was reciting his poems, book held in
hairy paw
ww—Aura lowered her voice into those internal rhymes, the crimped black points of her tights over her toes rising on the beats like cat’s ears lifting toward sound.
What big eyes
…
what teeth
, hahaha,
and bought me a drink, my first.
Why does Little Red-Cap want to go with the old wolf? Aura pressed her warm forehead against mine:
Here’s why. Poetry.
She repeated it:
POETRY.
Little Red-Cap wants to be a poet, too.

What little girl doesn’t dear
rr
ly love a wolf?

—ebulliently chanted and drawn out like the chorus of a favorite rock anthem. Except the poem didn’t end happily, not for the wolf anyway. After ten years of listening to him perform the same old songs without finding a voice of her own, Little Red-Cap cuts the wolf open
scrotum to throat
with an ax, finds her
grandmother’s bones
inside. Oh no, I said, Please, my love, don’t ever do that to me, I won’t stifle your voice, I’m not
that
kind of old wolf!

Our first Sunday in New York together, we went to Katz’s Deli so that Aura could have her first pastrami sandwich. The plan was to go from there to the Metropolitan Museum, then maybe walk in the park, drinks in some romantic hotel bar, go to a movie, and someplace for a late dinner. The sandwiches at Katz’s being so enormous, I suggested we split one, and order two matzo ball soups, because she’d never had that either, but she so liked the sample tidbits of pastrami the counterman gave her and was so excited by the look of
the sandwiches, the piled juicy meat spilling out the sides, that she wanted one just for herself. She devoured it. Then, on the sidewalk outside Katz’s, she said that her stomach hurt. She had a bewildered look in her eyes, her face was drawn, and when I pressed my lips and nose to her cheek it was clammy and smelled slightly of mustard and meat fat. Ohhh, she moaned, bent over, arms clasped over her abdomen, I have to go home. You mean, to my place? I asked. She nodded. I waved down a taxi and we went back to my apartment in Brooklyn, where she spent the rest of the afternoon in bed, while I made her drink Alka-Seltzer, dashed out to the supermarket for chamomile tea, read, watched some football with the sound off while she napped, tickled the inside of her forearm like I already knew she always wanted me to, feather-lightly raking my fingertips up and down over her skin. By night she felt better, and for dinner I ordered her chicken-and-rice soup from the Chinese take-out place around the corner, Sing Chow Mei Fun for me, and we watched a DVD. I’d pretty much forgotten that it was possible to spend a Sunday the way Aura and I spent that one.

Now, whenever I pass near Katz’s Deli, I stop to stare in a mute muddle at that sidewalk, at the long blackish snake of the curb, the empty air above. Sometimes I go and stand where it happened and whisper, You mean, to my place? Descending into memory like Orpheus to bring Aura out alive for a moment, that’s the desperate purpose of all these futile little rites and reenactments.

To celebrate Juanita’s fiftieth birthday, two of the tías, Lupe and Cali, and a few friends, including Aura’s childhood dentist, had invited her and Rodrigo for a long weekend in Las Vegas. Aura had classes on Friday and Monday, so we flew there on Saturday morning just to have dinner with her mother that night; we were flying back the next day. A black, flat-topped mountain, or maybe it’s a butte, overlooks Las Vegas, rising out of the Mojave Desert against the horizon like a giant black van in an empty parking lot, hot and shiny in the blazing sunlight. Aura and I decided that it radiated
evil, spraying it in continuous arcs, like long-range cat pee, over the gleaming city. Our taxi driver was at least partly responsible for this lasting first impression, driving us from the airport as if he was under orders to deliver us in the fastest possible time to the sinister mountain, where his Lord Master, the judge and ruler of our fate, was waiting in his cave. Speeding down a long straight avenue behind the glassy Las Vegas strip, tires squealing as he jolted forward from every red light, he drove like he was in a rage, as if he already knew our fate and was powerless to prevent it. Aura was gripping her seat, gasping; we traded expressions of alarm. The driver’s first name, according to his taxi ID card, was Boguljub, and his taxi was an SUV with an electronic message board facing the backseat that only amplified the claustrophobic frenzy, flashing announcements for shows, casinos, and discount steakhouses. We passed a billboard for Siegfried and Roy, Masters of the Impossible, though one of them, I forget which, had been mauled and nearly killed by one of their tigers about a month before—a white tiger that dragged Siegfried or Roy around the stage, jaws clamped around his neck and shaking him, I recalled from a news report, “like a rag doll.” (How and why did
he
survive?) Boguljub turned left, pedal to the floor as he shot up the long side street to our hotel, the Venetian. We weren’t going to the mountain after all. Beelzebub, of course, is how Aura and I forever after referred to him, though with his sandy hair and blue eyes he less resembled the anvil-headed taxi driver of Aura’s childhood terror than the evil mountain did.

For all my alarm over Lola’s warning that Juanita could break Aura and me up just by commanding it, I don’t even remember the moment we met. Hola Ma, this is Francisco, and Juanita’s eyes locking on me for the first time—no memory of that. I had to go and look at the snapshots we took with our disposable camera. Juanita, Rodrigo, and Aura sitting at a table with unwrapped presents and cocktail glasses on top, Juanita holding up a pink T-shirt with “New York City” glitteringly imprinted across it and smiling as if it really was the most remarkable gift. Aura was always a last-minute and impatient gift shopper—in the coming years, I would
often be the one to pick out her parents’ presents. The photos show a glassy atrium area, Juanita’s face flushed and overjoyed, Rodrigo in a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes, Aura looking Audrey Hepburn–collegiate, in cream sweater, gray wool skirt, with her hair in a loose bob, happy to be with her mom. Not much fuss was made over me. Perhaps this was partly shyness, theirs and mine, but also, I was just one more boyfriend; Aura’s boyfriends came and went, so why shouldn’t I? Maybe they didn’t know yet how old I was, that in less than three years I’d be celebrating my own fiftieth birthday. Aura doted on her mother,
baa
ing “Mami” and making Juanita grin giddily. I didn’t yet perceive, beneath his quiet, collected demeanor, Rodrigo’s often-brooding separation. At one point I caught Juanita studying me across the table. She looked away when she realized I’d noticed. The next time I caught her looking at me, later that night, I think she’d made up her mind. Aura and I, like other charged-up lovers, could shut others out, lean in close and laugh at everything either of us said no matter what. The first time I caught Juanita spying on us during a moment like that was about six weeks later, in Mexico, at the ostentatious New Year’s Eve gala in the Salon del Lago that Leopoldo invited us to, her expression more thoughtful, sadder, than when she’d fixed her sight only on me. She looked like a maternal Prospero, all powers waned, helplessly spying on a closely huddled, inexplicably enamored Miranda and Caliban.

But in Las Vegas, I was paying attention only to Aura, and don’t recall caring much about her mother’s reaction to me. Most of our other Las Vegas photos were taken in our gaudy Venetian hotel room, me posed like a gargoyle atop an armchair that resembled a papal throne, Aura vogueing, playing posh in her luxurious hotel bathrobe amid the pretentious furnishings. Another of her after sex, sitting up against piled pillows, the bathrobe’s parted lapels revealing her small tattoo and the soft upper slopes of her breasts, her eyes a little sleepy but looking directly, confidingly, into the camera—an axolotl gaze.

Later that night, at a blackjack table in the Bellagio casino, Aura, with her first bet ever, won fifty dollars. Fortune’s child! We’d joined up with her parents and the Hernández sisters and
their friends—so far, I’d barely glimpsed them, they were always off gambling or shopping—to go to the birthday dinner. The Bellagio seemed as endless and grand as the Louvre, hall after hall of gambling tables, bars, restaurants, shops, and tourists snapping pictures. One moment Aura and I were walking with the others, absorbed in our own conversation, and the next we looked around and were alone in the crowd, Juanita, Rodrigo, the tías, their friends, all vanished, nowhere in sight. We didn’t know the name of the restaurant we were headed to, or under whose name the reservation had been made.

For nearly two hours Aura and I wandered from restaurant to restaurant—there were at least a dozen—poring over reservation lists and begging snooty maître d’s for permission to walk through their dining floors one more time. We repeated the circuit twice, thrice, within the vast Bellagio. The third time we stopped at Le Cirque we were turned away with a stony,
Your parents are not here
, before we could open our mouths. We’d flown all the way out to Las Vegas for this, to have dinner with Juanita on Saturday night. Finally, we took a break from our search to stop at one of the casino bars for a round of drinks. What if I never see my mother ever again? asked Aura. Where are we anyway, Francisco? I spoke reassuring words. But this being Las Vegas I knew that nothing was impossible and tabloid headlines—
Mexican Family and Friends Vanish without Trace inside Bellagio—
were already flashing through my mind as if on the electronic message board inside Beelzebub’s taxi. We went back to wandering the casino in a drifty stupor, holding hands like children afraid of being separated. Another half hour or so went by. ¿Cómo se dice una cobija de indios? Aura asked out of the blue, but before I could answer she said, Indian blanket? ¿Se dice así? and gave a little shout—there was Rodrigo, blocking our path, lifting a strong hand to each of our nearly touching shoulders as if to prevent us from escaping. He’d left the restaurant to look for us. After waiting a long time for us to turn up, they’d all finally eaten. Maybe we could still catch them for dessert. He led us to a cafeteria-style buffet restaurant that we hadn’t even noticed. Another happy reunion
scene between Aura and her mom, and with the tías. Afterward we went for a walk outside on the neon boulevard with its illuminated fountains, a fake Eiffel Tower. Late the next morning Aura and I flew back to New York. On the plane, while she studied, I watched a movie about a racehorse. During the climactic racing scenes, horses stampeding down the homestretch, I bobbed up and down in my seat like I was the jockey, though I didn’t realize I was doing it until I felt a nudge, turned, and saw Aura imitating me, bouncing in her seat, staring at the screen, exaggerating my absorbed expression, and she laughed and began to kiss me, while I grinned madly, the surprise victor, riding my prancing heart down the dung-splattered track into the winner’s circle!