Say Her Name (28 page)

When I was released from the hospital the woman in the administration office told me that my hospital bills would be paid by the insurance of the girl who’d hit me. She gave me forms to fill out. She said that I ought to be able to get some money for myself out of this, too, and told me what to do. It won’t be much, probably, she added, but something. Seems you were pretty inebriated yourself, she said. I would have to come back in about a week for an MRI, and then to get my stitches out. If I felt nausea or had a severe headache or had double vision or trouble walking, I was to go straight to an emergency room. Gus and her husband drove me home. I felt woozy for days, weak in the knees, my insides a trembling gelatin. I felt fucking
old
. In the hospital they’d given me stuff to treat my ear: disinfectant, creams, cotton, gauze, tape. A weird clear liquid, as if
from a runny nose, constantly dripped from the ear. I went home and lay on the bed, near Aura’s wedding dress, and kept the heavy beige curtains drawn. The stillness and silence in that room, those long days, the crepuscular light. I read some in the books on death and grief that I’d been amassing for over a year. I thought about the peaceful sensation that had filled me when the orderly in the elevator said, You might die, sir; that sense of following Aura down a dark velvety tunnel. Well, I didn’t die, didn’t follow. In the evenings I turned on the television. I got up from the bed a couple of times a day and went into the bathroom to wash my ear and replace the gauze bandage covering it. In the morning I went outside to buy coffee and the newspaper, walking slowly, like a decrepit old man. But after a few days I no longer felt so trembly when I walked. I did a little bit of work. Ordered takeout. When I took a shower, I used Aura’s tea-tree mint treatment shampoo.

18

As she listened to the professor, her legs im[
handwriting unintelligible
] opened, her body thrust downward, like a sinking ship.

In a warm mid-September day, as she listened to her professor read in a perfect Cuban-Spanish accent the words of Nobel winner poet Pablo Neruda, her mind easily wandered the abysses of the white page she had in her lap. Having arrived late, she had been confined, not unhappily, to one of the corners of the non-air-conditioned room—until the feeling of an intent look forced her to lift her head. Her involuntary head movement coincided with the end of Neruda’s poem. What she found upon lifting her head should have warned her of what was to come, but at the moment, not knowing what the older girls knew (she thought she must be mistaken) it could not be that the professor’s green eyes made bigger by magnified seeing glasses were locked on her bossom. It simply could not be. Not in front of the whole class, not while reading Neruda (oh, but specially because of reading Neruda). Not only did the professor’s eyes remain fixed there or so it appeared to Guadalupe’s (wild) imagination—but he even dared to ask her a question: ¿Qué piensas del poema Guadalupe? Before she could answer the professor was already unpassionately engaged in a diatribe against Neruda and his “corny poetry.” “Neruda,” he said, “no
lo vamos a leer, clase, porque no me gusta.” Guadalupe thought this sudden censorship rather odd for a graduate level course and the same question that had been haunting her since she set foot in JFK’s famous airport popped into her head like a popcorn in a microwave (the head being the popcorn, the classroom the microwave): what am I doing here? Why did I come here? Who am I here? Okay, so it was not just one question haunting her, but three, or, rather, that first question unfolded like a paper Chinese fan—other questions, all part of the same bucolic, enigmatic scene in red, white, or black. Then she thought of her mother. “Yes, my mother,” she answered to an imaginary judge in an imaginary trial of the Academic Law of Justice System. She also pictured the judge—a sort of blurry Derrida-Lyotard-Foucault triad—heartily, heavily, unheartily, laughing … Followed by the judges, the person who tapes trials (the trial-taper?), the audience (all wearing glasses, painstakingly taking notes of what not to answer, of how not to be) laughing at her. “Laughing at me.”
⁴

19

The professor who didn’t like Neruda did like words of his own coinage, such as “foota nota.” In class, he’d say, As it says in the
foota nota
… Aura told me that she’d cringed and looked over at Valentina, who’d rolled her eyes: the first spark of friendship had passed between them. In Spanish lit and Cultural and Latino studies departments all over the country, clever academics were dissing Neruda, or whomever, and dazzling their students with Spanglish witticisms like foota nota. Behind his back, his students called this professor Mi Verguita. (
Ver-gee-tah
) My Little Penis. Mi Verguita discovered references to phalluses in every text, and was always guiding his class into discussions of phallic subjects and contexts that often included the amusing or strained references to his own “privileged signifier” that had earned him his nickname. But Mi Verguita had also published some fiction, and displayed in his office a flyer for a reading he’d once given in a Barnes & Noble; thus, at least some of the other professors in the department despised him, and were conspiring against him.

Mi Verguita lived with his wife and children in Boston and traveled to New York every week to give his classes. Aura took a class with Mi Verguita—the one in which he trashed Neruda and unveiled foota nota—during her first semester at Columbia. At first the class was held in a seminar room but then they met in the evenings in Mi Verguita’s university-supplied apartment. He always brought a gallon jug of red Chilean wine to those classes, and often rum as well. After class, Mi Verguita would put on music—from the Spanish Caribbean, mostly—and encourage his students to dance. Soon he was especially focusing his attentions on a shy, pretty, usually conservatively dressed student who’d come to study at Columbia
directly from Bogotá, Colombia—a young woman, it so happened, who was married to a civil engineer who’d put his own career on hold to accompany his wife to New York so that she could earn an Ivy League PhD, and who now worked downtown in a computer repair shop. She was dazzled by Mi Verguita; who knows what he whispered in her ear when they danced after class, but it always made her lift her chin and look into his eyes, smiling and biting her plump lower lip like a rabbit with a secret. One afternoon Aura sent me an e-mail from Columbia with the news that Mi Verguita had been suspended. Supposedly the student’s husband, after his wife hadn’t come home after class, had gone to the acting department head to accuse the professor of having seduced his wife after plying her with drink. Within days Aura and her classmates found themselves at the heart of an Academic Law of Justice System sexual harassment investigation.

Mi Verguita was the last, or maybe next to last, full-time Latin-American literature professor in the department. Professors who still taught novels and poetry in their classes were being forced out. Specialists in critical theory and cultural studies were taking over. Aura had unwittingly enrolled in a department where a purge was under way. The department was finally, belatedly, modernizing, bringing itself in line with other cutting-edge programs around the country. Where was it written that every department that taught Spanish owed a special allegiance to fiction and poetry? What percentages of the world’s native Spanish-speakers had ever read a novel or were even literate enough to read one?

At the end of her second year at Columbia, on May 29, 2005, Aura wrote in her notebook:

I do not wish to be an academic.

I wish to be me. I am not me when I am an academic. I am not an academic nor will I ever be. La imaginación/las imágenes se avalanzan en una corriente de descarga poderosa una vez fuera del tanque que es/se ha vuelto/la Universidad. Casa Pánica. Las restricciones que no se entiende a si mismo. No confía en si mismo. Hay mejores maneras de la desconfianza que la auto referencia pedestre y estéril. Mi vida está en otra parte.
⁵

Why NYC?

I want to stay. [Here Aura drew eight floating hearts]

Clarice L’Inspector.

A short story collection. Variaciones sobre la verguenza. [Variations on shame, or embarrassment;
verguenza
can be translated either way. Aura listed five short stories she’d either already written or planned to write.]

I wish to kill my TV.

I wish I did not have one.

I do not need a TV.

I don’t know how to begin the summer. Maybe I’ll never write great literature. It’s enough to write. And write.

An X-ray of my early childhood.

NO ESCRIBIR CON ESPERANZA NI DESESPERANZA, SÓLO CON ESMERO. [Write with neither hope nor hopelessness, only with great dedication.]

Among Aura’s papers I found her marked-up photocopy of Foucault’s canonical essay “What Is an Author?” Out of curiosity, I read it. I haven’t read much critical theory. As I understood it, according to Foucault, this is how we should now regard “the author”: as just a name that is useful for classifying texts, for marking some books off from other books. It was easy to imagine Aura finding that a pretty funny Borgesian idea. Did her professor and classmates parse this essay as solemnly as they had Pierre Menard? I don’t know. The essay seemed to me like a dazzling web woven by an insane genius spider. I read to the part where Foucault cites Saint Jerome’s contention that even an author’s name has no credibility as an individual trademark, because different individuals could have the same name, or someone could write under someone else’s name, and so on. Foucault then asks, “How then can we attribute several discourses to one and the same author?” The weary student glances ahead at the next several pages of dense text. Foucault’s answer is going to take a while. The afternoon light is fading. Aura has been at this a couple of hours. She asks herself, Wouldn’t I rather be reading
The Portrait of a Lady
? Isn’t that basically her problem, maybe her biggest problem in life
right now
? Wonder what’s for dinner … wild salmon?

In her class on critical theory, taught by the new acting department head, a California Chicano whose name was Charly García, same as the Argentine rock star, each student was required to give an in-class presentation on a contemporary theorist. Aura chose Gayatri Spivak, the reigning luminary of Columbia’s comparative literature department, whose class Aura had taken during her first year. In her presentation Aura explained the development of Spivak’s ideas from her famous translation and preface of Derrida’s
De La Grammatologie,
through her seminal text, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”—in which the self-referential gesture, said Aura, is taken to its ultimate consequences—up to her most recent work at the time,
Death of a Discipline.

Then Aura got to her main point, the reason she’d chosen
Spivak for her presentation. She put the following question before the class:

What is the role of literature in this theoretical scheme?

And she answered:

In fact, a predominant one. Spivak doesn’t abandon the study and criticism of literary texts, said Aura, and she went on to explain a few of Spivak’s ideas about the importance of literature. One of those is that literature, books, permit a kind of teaching that is
unique
and
unverifiable.
The unverifiable aspect of literature is key here, said Aura, because, for Spivak, it’s what distinguishes literary discourse from all other humanistic discourses. Then she dutifully went on to describe some of the criticisms of Spivak. How could Spivak be the leading exponent of Subaltern theory and still defend literature, which can’t even attempt to represent the voiceless marginal Other, the Subaltern, without committing an act of colonization? Spivak, Aura said, is not afraid of contradictions.

Charly García complimented Aura on the presentation, but said he disagreed with Spivak’s attitude toward the literary text. I just don’t understand it, he said, emphatically bouncing his fists off his lap. I just don’t understand how Spivak can still defend the literary text.

Aura’s thesis was going to be on some of the young writers and artists who’d emerged in Mexico in the nineties and just after, with the fall of the PRI. I remember seeing her at her computer, into her fifth or sixth draft. She looked up and wailed, I used to write so beautifully, and now I’m forgetting how! Look what they’re making me do! By beautifully Aura partly meant in the style of criticism and essays published in the kinds of journals she liked to read, the
London Review of Books,
say. Now she had to write a jargonized political and economic analysis of the fall of the PRI.

Students who weren’t up to the exacting standards of the new regime were being expelled. One of the first to go was Moira, Aura’s friend-nemesis from her first weeks at Columbia. Aura convinced
herself that she was next. At home, it was almost all she talked about. She had insomnia almost nightly. Why did Aura make this so hard for herself, choosing for her thesis adviser the brilliant Uruguayan Marxist literary theoretician and taskmaster Pilar Segura? Because the Uruguayan was the department’s new star hire, the professor that hotshot students clamored to work with, and Aura was competitive. In the fall of 2005—we’d been married that summer—during one of their thesis meetings, the Uruguayan said, Oh, Aura, really, you are still so innocent. We have to get rid of this naive love you have for the literary text.

The love of literature isn’t innocent or naive, thought my wife. Anyway, is the love of Marxist theory less naive?

Aura decided to apply to a City College MFA in Creative Writing program. She hardly ever showed her writing to anyone but me, and sometimes to Lola, but somehow her thesis adviser’s condescension gave her the courage to expose herself to the judgment of whoever it was at the MFA program who decided which writing students to accept. We got to work translating three of her short stories for the application. It had to be top secret: her Columbia scholarship required a full-time commitment; studying at any other institution simultaneously was forbidden. I know plenty of people around the world who disdain younger American writers who enroll in MFA programs for taking such a safe, conventional, even bureaucratic path to a writing career that usually, in the best cases, is actually a creative writing
teaching
career. Aura’s choice was maybe the bravest of her life. Even by just applying, she was putting her PhD at risk. She was terrified of rejection, even of criticism, of exposing her dream of a writing career to the test of her talent and determination. She wasn’t going to tell her mother—not yet—she didn’t need any more stress, wasn’t she already enough of a nervous wreck? So that she could relax while putting her application together, I took her to Mohonk for the weekend, a place she loved. Mohonk Mountain House is a huge rambling Victorian castle in the Hudson Valley that
felt like the perfect setting for a Gothic horror movie or an Agatha Christie murder mystery. Aura made me take pictures of her lying sprawled like a murder victim in the long, door-lined corridor. Then she photographed me playing dead in the corridor. They had a spa; she had massages. There was a big outdoor Jacuzzi where you sat in the churning water, steam billowing off you in the chilly November air. Hiking trails. The clientele was mainly middle-class families, plus quite a few elderly, and scattered younger couples. If you wanted, you could just sit around playing board games all afternoon, drinking hot cider or hot chocolate, eating freshly baked cookies and pumpkin pie. Big plush armchairs and couches in front of stone fireplaces with fires perfect for roasting a stag. We sat together in front of the fire, computers on our laps, translating her most recent story, “
Un secreto a voces
.”