Say Her Name (21 page)

When I look at that photograph of Aura now, I feel more aware of our age difference, more uneasy about it, than I ever did when we were together. Juanita rarely said anything, in my presence that is, to make me feel embarrassed or apologetic about my age. I think that wasn’t so much out of consideration for me as for her daughter, playing along, pretending to see us as Aura wanted others to; or maybe it was for herself, too. Juanita almost always spoke to me as if I were closer in age to her daughter than I was to her, but it’s not as if it would have been better for any of us if we’d spoken like two parents. What shames me now was the way, when we were with Aura’s mother, that I sometimes let immaturity masquerade as youthfulness, so that when I was spoken to as if I were practically still an adolescent, or a man-boy, a
niñote,
I’d allow myself to feel camouflaged and even flattered. Sixty is the new thirty. But that’s not how I was with Aura. Now, I have to guard against the danger of confusing how Aura’s mother regarded me or spoke to me with
any
aspect of how Aura did—one of death’s corrosive betrayals.

* * *

Aura said, This is where I spent the happiest days of my childhood. We were standing on a steep street in Taxco, looking at Aura’s grandmother’s house, the one now occupied by Mama Violeta’s longtime maid and her family, though Mama Violeta was still very much alive. Painted a rich indigo with bright yellow shutters and decorated with tiles, the two-story house stood on a corner, embedded in the hillside. From that elevated part of the sidewalk it seemed that with a running leap you’d be able to land on the rooftop if it weren’t surrounded by dense strands of barbed wire and broken bottle glass. The house was packed with small shaded patios and secluded rooms, and had windows on two sides opening on views of the mountaintops where the silver mines were, including the one where Aura’s great-grandfather, a French mining engineer, had worked. During her summer vacations from school Aura had sometimes spent as much as a month at a time here. Now Mama Violeta no longer even spoke to any of her children from her first marriage. Leopoldo had sounded out his half siblings and learned that Mama Violeta really did intend to leave the house to her former maid when she died. Mama Violeta’s four children from her second marriage all lived far away, one somewhere in Texas, the rest scattered around Mexico, like the daughter she was now living with, on an avocado plantation in Nayarit. Their father, Mama Violeta’s second husband, couldn’t have been more unlike her first, the dissipated actor. An accountant at one of the silver mines, he never drank alcohol, coached boys’ fútbol teams, and was a regular churchgoer who participated in Holy Week processions. He died when Aura was still in elementary school.

Mama Violeta was also a gifted dressmaker and seamstress, and in her youth had dreamed of moving to Paris to pursue a career in haute couture; maybe, if her first husband hadn’t died so young, she would have. In a family where looks were often made too much of, Leopoldo’s elder daughter, Sandrita, and Katia were regarded as the indisputable beauties and rivals, yet Mama Violeta often treated
Aura as if she was her favorite. Mama Violeta once spent many weeks sewing and embellishing a dazzling party dress that she’d designed herself. Who was it for? Mama Violeta wouldn’t say. All her granddaughters coveted it and dreamed it would be theirs. Mama Violeta told eleven-year-old Aura that she was making it especially for her, but that she had to promise to keep it a secret. Aura didn’t even tell her mother. When the dress was ready, Mama Violeta gave it to her cousin Sandrita, who was a year older than Aura. She said she was giving it to Sandrita because she was the most beautiful, and from its cut it seemed clear that she’d been making it for the tall, long-legged, rail-thin Sandrita all along; that’s why when Aura started sobbing and told her mother about Mama Violeta’s broken promise, nobody believed her.

Madness runs in families, of course, said Aura on the sidewalk that day in Taxco. Supposedly, more among women then men. For three generations it gets passed down mother to daughter, and then stops. Maybe that’s just folk wisdom, she said, but that doesn’t mean there’s no truth to it. Well, my grandmother is obviously crazy, and my mother is crazy, so what I need to find out is, was my great-grandmother crazy, too?

Mi amor, you’re not crazy, I said, I promise. But what about that great-grandmother? Her great-grandmother, said Aura, had gone back to France for a visit to her own mother, who was soon to die, and had never returned to Mexico; she fell ill while she was over there and died. Ill with what? I asked. Aura didn’t know. Mama Violeta had been on the cusp of adolescence when that happened. Her father, who never remarried, went on raising her alone, then died a few years later.

That would be a great place to write in, said Aura, pointing at a corner room on the second floor. If only we could convince Mama Violeta to sell the house to us, she said. Aura and I agreed to start saving money to buy the house. This was Aura’s long-held dream. She wanted to restore the house for her mother, too, who now refused to even come and look at it. But Aura hadn’t seen or spoken to Mama Violeta since she was twelve, since that day her
mother and grandmother had had their terrible fight in Copilco. Maybe next summer, said Aura, we’d drive up to Nayarit and surprise her grandmother with a visit.

That last day in Taxco we bought the carved, whitewashed wooden angel with the lewd but friendly scarlet lips that hung over our bed in Brooklyn, perpetually watching us, slowly turning away, watching.

¡Ay mi amor, qué feo eres! That funny silent laugh of hers, mouth open, eyes squeezed shut, wagging her head.

¿Soy feo?

Síííí mi amor, pobrecito.

I looked like a frog, too, she liked to tease. ¿Cómo está tu papada? she’d say, as if the loose skin under my chin, not quite a froggy wattle, possessed an independent life. She’d tug on it with both hands, laugh, and huskily say, Tu papada, mi amor.

Pobrecito, no tienes cuello. Poor you, you don’t have a neck.

Poor you, you’re old. She’d say that sometimes, too, whenever I couldn’t stay awake if we were in bed watching a DVD or television. It’s true that even if I liked the movie or television show we were watching, I usually dozed off. That only happened in bed, hardly ever in theaters. I always fell asleep reading in bed, too. Was that a symptom of age?

I’ve never returned the last DVDs that Aura ordered from Netflix. I found the envelopes, but two of the discs were missing. I didn’t know what she’d done with them, didn’t really know where to look. I went on paying the monthly fee; I’ll probably have to for the rest of my life, an eternal contract, even if I never order another DVD, which I probably won’t. Aura still owed astronomical amounts at every DVD rental store in our neighborhood and around Columbia. I’d stopped watching DVDs at home anyway. I didn’t like being alone in the room with the DVD player. Its mechanical
click-clicking and whirrs, furtive little lights, its autonomous lifeless companionship depressed me, made me feel like the last person left alive on earth.

One cold winter night, I fell asleep beside Aura while she was reading in bed. An hour or so later, she shook me awake.

I gasped, What?

She gestured at the light switch on the wall—it operated the lamp that the angel hung from—and said, Turn off the light, mi amor.

I gaped at her.

Impishly pleased with herself, she cracked up.

I got out of bed and turned off the light.

Gracias, mi amor.

…

It’s cold! I didn’t want to get out of bed!

The way she pronounces Frank when we’re alone, and the way it wakes up my heart. I can hear and feel it inside me, that soft near-honk caressed by plush lips, a down-stuffed vowel that floats on her breath past
n
and lightly smacks
k
. But in her writing, in her e-mails, she always called me Paco.

She would occasionally say, Why couldn’t you be ten years younger? Then everything would be so perfect!

It was an imperfection, my age, no doubt about it. But did my so-called youthfulness—not just that I looked younger than my age but my immaturity—make us more compatible? Probably it did, at times, but it also worried her. How had I gotten to be my age without having saved more money, or having planned better for the future? She didn’t think of me as a failure, but I worried that she would, that someday she’d even be justified in thinking so. I worried about her leaving me over that—I was determined to work hard,
to earn money—more than I did about our age difference. Maybe this was delusional, but we both claimed that I’d surely inherited my father’s hardy constitution, and that I would also live vigorously into my nineties, that I was going to be one of those barrel-chested, squarely built, ornery and horny old men, the Picasso or Mailer type, though happily loyal to just one woman! In the past, when I was younger and had girlfriends who were somewhat older than Aura, people had sometimes asked if I was the father, that most common humiliation of the older male lover. But that never happened to me when I was with Aura. How could that be? I guess when we were together in public, we just didn’t give the impression of a father out with his daughter.

My father used to munch on whole onions as if they were apples, I’d told her once. I thought of it as evidence of his hearty Russian peasant appetite and ways. No one who ate onions like that could have a weak constitution. A few days later, alone in the kitchen, I impulsively took a bite out of a red onion, to feel what that was like. In the bedroom, all the way at the other end of the apartment, Aura heard the crunch and shouted, Did you just bite into an onion?! Don’t you even
try
to kiss me now!

How did she know it wasn’t an apple?

In department stores, she’d pester me about male cosmetics, antiaging facial creams, and the like, even Botox. Please, mi amor, for me, don’t you want to look young for your young wife? I used to wonder if she was serious: if I actually came home one day with my face looking like a frozen piecrust after Botox, wouldn’t she be horrified? She’d send me e-mails with links to information about calf hormone antiaging creams or whatever, and where to order them online. She knew I’d never use such creams. Creams you have to slather all over your face before bed, and again in the morning, imagine. But Aura was a fanatic about facial creams. During our last trip to Paris, which was a short one—just two full days, because I was there only
to promote a book—I spent four hours following Aura through the Sephora superstore on the Champs-Élysées. Aura, it can’t be that we’re spending one of our two afternoons in Paris in a makeup store, I complained. She said, But they have things here they don’t have in New York! Then they confiscated most of her Sephora treasures at airport security in Charles de Gaulle because she’d packed all those tubes and bottles in her carry-on.

We were on the subway, that first fall, on a morning when I’d walked Aura to the Carroll Gardens F train stop and she’d talked me into coming up to Columbia with her. The train was being held in the station. She was kissing me, on my lips, all over my face; that morning she couldn’t stop kissing me, and I was laughing and kissing her and I glanced aside and saw a well-known book critic who lived nearby standing there in his dark raincoat, halfway down the subway car, staring at us, his mouth a dour slit between downward creases and a nose like an old marshmallow. Whenever I saw the critic around the neighborhood he’d rarely say hello, maybe a quick nod and often not even that, but I’m certain he knew who I was, and because we’d occasionally coincided at parties some twenty years earlier, he knew he was about my age, though even back then, barely out of college, he’d looked middle-aged. So there he was, gray-haired and balding, pallor nearly gray, his raincoat a greasy gray-green, watching us with the lusterless longing and thirst of a mummy. I remember that I even felt a slight shudder of suspicion and fear, as if his gaze might carry a curse. The train started to move and he sat down and opened his newspaper.

Aura never comes back to sit in her Journey Chair on the fire escape, it’s a one-way journey she went away on. I tried to feel braced by the tough antimysticism of that. Some mornings I’d come into the kitchen and look out the window and see the chair covered
in snow. The boughs of the trees in the backyards weighted with snow, snow striping the floor of the fire escape, about five inches’ accumulation on the seat. It reminded me of that haiku Borges wrote: This hand is the hand that touched your hair. Snow that sits where you used to sit.

14

December 2003

Everything changed. Another path opened, and I don’t know

where it’s headed.

Era of: Us against the World.

World against Us.

I still don’t know how to write in a diary.

Diary: another year is drawing near. It never ceases to surprise me that each one, since I got out of high school, has had a special event. Some definitive act that has sent me in a new direction. Hopefully my life will obey that law for many more years. Right now I don’t know how far into the future this road will reach … isste caminho … nao sel … en si sei que en estou contenta. With doubts and bad moods like always, but in general, very, very pleased with life and its surprises and gifts. Indeed I have to say/write how grateful I am. Before Paco the world had darkened. I’d erased myself. Loneliness struck me down. I’d lost hope. The pain of deep solitude, a Heart that didn’t belong to anybody.

Paris 2004—(one year later!)

Party upstairs. My life upside down. Unrecognizable. I am fat, no longer skinny. 27 years old. Pissed. Attempting to write je ne sais quoi. Life so beautiful. I feel the guilt of beauty. I feel the guilt of being. What am I doing!?

December 24, 2006

We’re alone. Only Paco and me on Christmas. This is the
second time, the first was Paris and it was magical. We’re on a plane, we’ve spent most of the day traveling, Paco asleep on my shoulder. Love is a religion. You can only believe it when you’ve experienced it.