Say Her Name (30 page)

On Degraw Street one night I watched her coaxing a stray or lost cat out from under a parked car, bent over in her down winter coat, clucking and cooing to it, dancing her mitten in front of its crouching stare; this went on for at least ten minutes, until the cat crept out and she picked it up in her arms; it was a black and white tabby, already at home in her embrace, paws dangling over her forearm, Listen to that purr! The cat aimed a hostile stare at me as I approached. She said, Francisco, we’re taking this cat home, and I said, No, Aura, we’re not allowed to have pets, you know that, and I said, Anyway, it’s probably a stray, who knows what diseases it has, and I said,
No, Ow-rra
, we
can’t
.

* * *

I’m sorry that we didn’t move to a new apartment, sorry we never got a dog or a cat, sorry we didn’t rent the downstairs apartment when it came open so that we could have stayed here in New York that summer tending the garden instead of going to Mexico—I wrote e-mails to Aura about all of that. I’m sorry about your mother, I wrote. I’m sorry I don’t know what to do about your mother. I’m sorry I haven’t been able to help your mother. What could I possibly do to help your mother—throw myself off the Brooklyn Bridge? When I returned to Mexico nearly a year after your death, people told me that everyone at the university believes that I’m to blame for your death. That at the university whenever anyone mentions you or me or us, someone inevitably remarks, Ohhh, but nobody knows what really happened there. Something happened, they say, but who knows what, it’s all very mysterious. He didn’t even give a legal statement, you know; he fled the country without even giving a statement, very suspicious. Even your godfather, the literature professor and poet, goes along with this because he’s afraid of your mother’s and Leopoldo’s power at the university. He even refused an invitation to take part in a memorial reading your friends organized more than a year after your death because I was going to be there; he said, I have to be loyal to Juanita. Your godfather, to show loyalty to your mother, said that he wouldn’t even read a poem or say a few words about you at your memorial reading, because I was going to be there, and he had to be loyal to your mother. Why shouldn’t they go crazy? Why shouldn’t they be deranged with hate and accusation? To try to understand and even sympathize is the least I can do; probably also the most I can do.

The last novel Aura read, which she’d begun in Mexico City and finished the day before we left for the beach, was Onetti’s
La Vida Breve,
and now I had it with me in Brooklyn but I couldn’t bring myself to read it yet. I did read her copy of Thomas Bernhard’s
The Loser,
and also her
Under the Volcano,
underlined and with notations in her hand throughout. I was glad to be reading some fiction again after so many months of grief and mourning books and also books that I thought might help me imagine the radical French psychoanalysts and asylums of Aura’s novel. One day, opening my paperback copy of
Pnin,
I discovered and followed the fairy trail of Aura’s green ink markings and wasn’t even out of the first chapter before I felt her laughter welling up inside and tumbling out through her parted lips when poor Pnin realizes he’s taken the wrong train to Cremona; next laugh stop, the squirrel that gets Pnin to press the button on the drinking fountain. Aura had drawn little green brackets around such phrases as “a rustling wind” and “in the silvery sun” and had neatly printed the word “weather” in the margins. Why would anyone write “weather” next to every description of weather in a novel? I knew why. In her creative writing workshop, the FAW had given the assignment of keeping a weather diary. Observe the weather, describe the weather, it’s not so easy. Pay attention to the literary uses of weather. Every day that semester—while she was also preparing to defend her doctoral thesis proposal—Aura had dutifully described the weather in her notebook. Later, Wendy told me that only two students in the workshop actually wrote in their weather diaries every day: she and Aura.

Sometimes that was like a holy gift, the memory-sensation of Aura laughing inside me. I could never will that laughter, but sometimes, like while reading
Pnin
, it just arrived, as if crossing over from the spirit world. I could, however, slightly push the corners of my lips back into my cheeks, just enough to make my cheeks bulge a little, and hold them there, like two warm, peeled soft-boiled eggs, and that always conjured Aura’s smile in repose, her soft, everyday expression, as if three-dimensionally superimposing not just her face over mine, but some of her disposition, so much more gentle and pleasant than mine. I was still always flicking with my thumb at the base of my ring finger, expecting to touch the ring; the ring had
fit loosely and I was always clamping my thumb over it whenever I had to throw something away in a trash receptacle; flutters of panic whenever I was surprised by that finger’s nakedness, calmed a split second later as my brain issued its incredulous reminder—
Still
? I have to tell you this
again
?—that the ring was on the chain around my neck with Aura’s.

During those weeks after my accident, I also tried to reread
Lord Jim
: I had the idea that it was time for me to do what Lord Jim does, disappear with my shame and wrecked life, hide myself away in some remote and demanding place where maybe I could start over. But now I felt baffled by that book, by the fear of death that drives the characters, the grotesque antics that didn’t even deserve to be called cowardice; unfunny clowns, those men struggling to ready the lifeboat under cover of night to flee the Malay pilgrim ship they are mistakenly convinced is sinking, falling all over themselves, one so panicked that he even collapses and dies from a heart attack, and Jim’s fateful leap into the lifeboat—it reminded me of that time in the hospital when my father, a week or so after he’d come out of his coma, ripped out his feeding and oxygen tubes, the IVs out of his arms, and flung himself over the bed railings and landed on his side on the floor where he lay running in place while a nurse and I grabbed and held him down, his hospital gown hoisted around his hips, his thin, old-man’s dick flapping, the shock of his wild animal energy in my hands as he kept trying to
run away from death
. Instead of being impressed by his life force, if that’s what it was, it disgusted me, made me ashamed, or maybe I
was
impressed—because it was impressive, no doubt about that—and then ashamed later, after the nurses had bound him into the bed, his wrists to the rails with leather straps, like some dangerous psycho. My father’s hysteria, that’s what the death-panicked sailors in
Lord Jim
reminded me of. And I remembered a conversation I had with my mother as we sat in his hospital room just after—little did we know my father would live another four years—when I asked her, Why is Daddy so afraid to die? and my mother said quietly, Who knows, that’s just the way your father is. You know, he’s always been a hypochondriac.
Was a terror of death, I wondered, a form of hypochondria? A few minutes later, after I’d slipped back into my usual hospital routine of staring off into space, my mother said, I’m not afraid to die, with her delicate titter and an expression of prim, almost embarrassed conviction. I said, Me either, not like that. I don’t think we meant we wouldn’t feel any fear as we faced death, but that how to face death was something that at least my mother had thought about and decided on. Don’t eat with your mouth open like your father; Don’t slurp your soup like your father; Don’t beat up on your kids like your father; Don’t
not
fuck your wife like your father; Don’t face death with panic and cowardice like your father. I was fearful of many things, did that make me like my father? Wasn’t a fear of dogs related to a fear of death?—a primordial fear of being ripped apart and devoured by beasts, your own blood bubbling from their nostrils, their snouts soaked in it. When I was about three, in our front yard, I yanked a dog’s tail from behind, a short-haired gray mongrel with a tail like a cobra, and the dog whirled, snarling, and pounced, slashing my forearm with its teeth as I lay underneath it shrieking until a neighbor came running with his rake. I still have the tiny scars and, ever since, menacing dogs—though I actually liked dogs and had several as pets—dogs that barked, growled, or charged at me, had sent fear, adrenaline, panic coursing through me, though I’d learned to disguise it; even by early adolescence I could almost always proceed with outward calm, heart pounding, instead of running away or climbing a tree. About a week after Aura’s death, Odette and Fabiola invited me to their country house in Malinalco so that I could rest and get some sleep. Every day I went on long walks into the countryside, on muddy roads through cornfields and pastures, startling peasant farmers, some of them on horseback, who’d probably never seen a man like me, middle-aged, comparatively light-skinned, clearly not a local, walking along those roads with tears streaking his cheeks and sometimes even bawling like a child—I bet, hearing me from a short way off, the farmers thought it was laughter and looked to see what was so funny. It was during those walks that I discovered that when dogs chased me now, or
stood alone or in packs in the middle of the road baring their teeth and growling, or frenziedly barked from behind gates and fences as I passed, I no longer felt fear, that whatever used to set off those riotous alarms in me was now stone.

During her last night, the long night before her death, Aura must have realized she was going to die, or that at least probably or very possibly she was going to die. That abyss that she faced all by herself that night, without me, was what I feared now, more than I’d ever feared anything, my darling. I couldn’t even begin to edge close, to contemplate it, without feeling my body react as it used to when threatened by dogs, cringing, shrinking back though still urging myself forward, sometimes halfheartedly, eyes half shut, throat suddenly dry and tight, too much—. What did she feel, what did she know, what was it like, what did she think? The lonely terror that must have flooded her with an intimacy unlike any I or anyone else ever reached or touched inside of her, and that I cannot bear even to try to imagine, or just can’t. Not even when that orderly said, You might die, sir, not even close, because, at that moment anyway, I didn’t really care anymore, or maybe I didn’t really believe it, and I know Aura cared, and that she must have believed it. That night when she must have felt more frightened and lonelier than I am able to imagine was also when she might have judged me. Her judgment of me might have been one of her last conscious thoughts.

Fue una tontería,
that’s what Aura said to her mother, at two in the morning, in Mexico City, as they wheeled her from the ambulance into the hospital emergency entrance.
Una tontería
: dumbness, a stupid act, an idiocy even, Aura told her mother. Those were the last words I ever heard Aura speak, in that tone of willed cheer she often used with her mother—the plucky camper. How did I spend my summer vacation? Making out with Danish boys, Mami. Fue una tontería, Mami. My tontería? But she didn’t say that, not at all. She did not sound as if she was blaming anyone. She sounded like a hero. I do remember her mother crossing her arms, face pale, staring at me with hatred and blame, and why shouldn’t she have? Bringing her daughter home to her like that, paralyzed from the neck
down, from her accident in the waves. But that is a cloudy memory, maybe more an imagined re-creation. Maybe I didn’t even register Juanita and what she allegedly said to me as I followed behind Aura as they wheeled her into the hospital after our twelve-hour journey from the beach. Maybe I didn’t really care about her mother at that moment, maybe I just don’t remember, maybe I’ve
repressed
it, because Fabis told me that what she distinctly remembers is me reacting to Juanita’s words with a stunned glance of, Why did you say that? but that without breaking stride I followed Aura into the hospital. Fabis told me that what Juanita said to me, as they wheeled her daughter past her into the hospital where twelve hours later she would die, was,
Esto es tu culpa
. This is your fault.

There was a week or so, in 2005, months before our wedding, when Aura lay awake every night, worrying that she was condemning herself to a miserable early widowhood by marrying me. I’d wake and find her staring into the dark beside me, her warm insomnia breath like pulling open the door of an oven, her body steamy. Wasn’t it logical to assume that I would die at least twenty years before she did? Shouldn’t she think ahead, spare herself that ordeal? We talked about it more than once. I told her, Don’t worry, mi amor, I won’t stick around longer than seventy-five, I promise. Then you’ll still be in your early fifties, you’ll still be beautiful, and probably famous, and some younger guy will want to marry you for sure. You promise? she’d say, cheered up or at least pretending to be, and I’d promise. You’d better keep your word, Francisco, she’d say, because I don’t want to be a lonely old widow, or end up like your mother; she knew how taking care of my father had worn out my mother. But even if I don’t die by seventy-five, I’d say, you can just warehouse me somewhere and go and live your life, really, I don’t care. As long as we have children, I won’t care that much. Just give me a kid, one kid, that’s all I want. And she’d say, Okay, but I want five kids. Or maybe three. Well then we’d better move to Mexico, I’d say, so they can go to the UNAM. I wanted to move back to Mexico anyway; it was Aura who, for now, wanted to stay in New York. One afternoon during that final spring, after she’d turned thirty, Aura turned to me from her desk while I lay on the bed reading, and she said, We have everything we need to be happy. We don’t have to be rich. We can get jobs in universities if we need them. We have our books, our reading, our writing, and we have each other. Frank, we don’t need more to be happy, we are so lucky. Do you know how lucky we are?

Another day late that last spring Aura also announced that she’d decided that she wasn’t going to be one of those women who in her thirties is consumed with being as thin as she’d been in her twenties; she was going to allow herself to be
rellenita,
a little filled out, did I have a problem with that?