Say Her Name (33 page)

He had
not
left Juanita, Héctor told me. Whatever marital troubles they’d had back then, he would never have done that, because of Aura, his little girl, whom he adored, he said. No, Juanita had left
him
. She’d run off to Mexico City with another man, a rival politician, and taken Aura with her. After that, said Héctor, I had to tear her from my heart. I tore Juanita from my heart. And so you tore Aura from your heart too? I thought. Later, Juanita had tried to come back to him, he said. She drove back to San José Tacuaya with Aura, and when he came outside to meet them, four-year-old Aura, from inside the car, announced, We can come home now, Papi! But Héctor wouldn’t take Juanita back, he’d torn her from his heart.

I sat stunned. Was this what Aura had alluded to in her diary?
There’s too much noise in my head, memory doing its thing, memories I’d rather forget return return
. Her childhood memories, silenced and denied, replaced by a fragmented narrative of lies, hurt, guilt, and senselessness. Memories she’d kept secret, as if, or because, she had no words for them.

Héctor was dry-eyed and calm now, as if spent. I sensed that if I were to ask him one more thing, it would be a brutal trespass. What he’d told me, all its implications, should be absorbed in silence, and very slowly. But I did have another question, and now was the time to ask it. That time you met in the restaurant, I said, when Aura was twenty-one. It wasn’t raining out, it was a dry day, at least that’s how she remembered it, but you came into the restaurant with mud all over one of your pant legs. I forced a smile. Aura always wondered why, I said. It was another big mystery to her.

He nodded, and said, On the drive over, I had a flat tire and got out to change it. Out there on the highway it had rained, and a truck went past, through a puddle, and sprayed me.

A moment later he got up and went into the kitchen to make us some coffee. I checked my BlackBerry. There was a message marked urgent from a friend in New York, Johnny Silverman, my corporate lawyer friend, a winningly extroverted guy who’d befriended Juanita at our wedding. Now Juanita had cast him as my lawyer, which he wasn’t, and her lawyer, one of the university lawyers, had sent Johnny an e-mail telling him that I had two days to vacate our Escandón apartment. When Héctor came out, I told him that I’d better catch the next bus back to the DF But aren’t you going to stay to eat? he asked, his tone somber and anxious. He was expecting me to stay for lunch; his wife, who’d be home from work soon, had prepared a special meal, a mole de olla. I apologized and said, I have no idea what to do about this situation, so I better get back and deal with it. I told him some of the story: the apartment Aura’s mother had bought for her, how I’d offered to go on making the monthly payments while I tried to gather the money to buy the apartment outright. It seemed legally dubious, I said, that they could evict the widowed husband just like
that. To move out in two days seemed impossible! Héctor said that under Mexican law, he was sure I had legal rights, that I wasn’t merely a
third party,
as Juanita and her lawyer described me. Excusing myself, I typed a fast message to Johnny, asking him to request permission from Juanita and her lawyer to move four months later, in January, and meanwhile I’d go on paying the monthly bank payments. After that, I wrote, I would pack the apartment up and leave, and Juanita would owe me nothing; if Juanita wasn’t amenable to that, could I at least have another week? Even if I could get the money together to buy the apartment, I realized now, there was probably no way Juanita would sell it to me. I left for the bus station, feeling guilty about not staying to eat. I’d promised Héctor that I’d come back to San José Tacuaya as soon as I could, though I never did. On the way back to the DF I phoned Gus in New York and told her everything.

Remember, it’s only his version, she cautioned. That doesn’t make it all true. Maybe leaving him was the best thing Aura’s mother ever did. He sounds like a wimp. She probably knew he was going to fall apart and wreck his career anyway.

A politician gets his wife stolen by another politician in a small Mexican macho city, I said, where everyone knows everyone, you don’t think that could have hurt his political career?

Oh, come on, she said. Take your wife and child back, for God’s sake, and go and screw some other politician’s wife if you need to. There are two sides to this. As always. You don’t give up a daughter like Aura
for any reason,
she shouted into the phone.

After we’d hung up, I sat with my eyes closed, leaning my head against the mesh curtain over the bus window until I dozed off, falling into one of those half-awake dream states where I was on a lonely train ride like in the movie version of
Doctor Zhivago,
through the desolate Siberian wilderness full of howling wolves that had so frightened me when I’d seen the movie as a child.
Juanita is like a dark forest
—I thought that, or dreamt it; it seemed to spell itself out one letter at a time. She’s the forest but she’s also the mother of the forest, its queen, its great hunter, its spell-casting wizard. She’s the wolves, the bears, the nourishing fish in
the rivers. She’s the woodpecker that haunts the forest, shattering skulls and eating memories like grubs. Now I’m trapped deep inside this forest, while with every day that passes I’ll remember less of who I was before, until soon there’ll be nothing left for the woodpecker to devour. Is Aura here, trapped inside this forest, too? I’ll never find out, there are no answers in this forest.

I was still on the bus, about an hour outside of Mexico City, when I received an e-mail from Johnny, forwarding me the message he’d just gotten from Juanita:

Estimable lawyer Silverman, in response to your attentive request, I’d like to comment that I have no objection to Frank staying for another week, until the date that you’ve indicated, though nevertheless it is very important that he realize that after that date I will take charge totally and absolutely of my house.

I didn’t even realize until nearly two years later, when I went back through old e-mails and found the ones that were written that day and in the ensuing ones, that I must also have asked Johnny to write this message, which he’d cc’d to me:

Querida Juanita:

Now that I’ve read with care your previous mail about Frank, I see that I must have omitted something that is very important. Frank has asked me to ask you if you can give him just a small portion of Aura’s ashes to take back to Brooklyn. I apologize for asking this so bluntly, but I don’t know how one is supposed to ask a question like this.

Later, I would hear that when, two days after the funeral, I phoned Juanita’s apartment to tell her I was coming over, Juanita told the others gathered there that she had to hide Aura’s ashes because I was coming to take them away. Madness of a mother’s grief—it stabs my indignant heart with pity, for whatever that pity is worth.

The old tailor told me that Aura would not want to see me dragging my sadness around in a heavy, black wool suit and recommended a charcoal gray. When Chucho, our favorite among the security guards in the building at Escandón, a stocky fiftyish man with kind, almost feminine eyes, saw me for the first time after Aura’s death, he came out from his booth to intercept me, and said:

Resignación, señor. Resignación.

On what would have been the first Monday after our vacation at the beach the carpenter turned up, as we’d arranged, to deliver our beautiful new bookshelves. It had been twelve days since Aura’s death. The carpenter lived in the far outskirts of the city, and despite his working-class origins and life, he had rust-colored hair and blue eyes in his craggy face. The morning when he’d come to measure our walls, he’d noticed that both Aura and I were hungover from a night out in the cantinas, and had given us a gruffly paternal speech about his own youthful alcoholism and how he’d given up drinking forever when he became a father. Now I told him about Aura. After a long moment of silence, he put the newspaper he was carrying—one of the city’s many crime and scandal tabloids—down on the table and opened it to a story about a woman in Polanco who’d been struck by a car and killed. There was a photograph of her lying on her stomach in the street, in a blue dress, her hands open on the pavement, blood pooling around her head.

The carpenter said, Look at this woman, hit by a car and killed, a mother of two small children. These things can happen to anybody, Francisco, and they happen every day.

Three wise men: the tailor, the carpenter, and the security guard. In those first days and weeks after Aura’s death, nobody spoke sounder words to me.

Charcoal gray instead of black.
Resignación, señor, resignación.
These things happen every day.

I did, at least, heed the tailor.

On January 17, 2009, in Brooklyn, New York, our daughter Natalia wasn’t born. How did I mark that day? I didn’t even remember that it was the day until late in the afternoon. I dressed my ear, which seemed to be healing in a way that would leave it looking like the smashed torn ear of a boxer. Worked a bit. Went for a walk. I thought about stopping into a church to sit and think about Natalia and Aura for a while, but I didn’t.

One frigid misty evening soon after, as I was walking back from a restaurant, I saw, in the tree at the end of our block, up amid the wet, bare branches shining in the streetlights’ glare, Aura smiling down on me the way she had a few nights after her death when she’d seemed to be floating inside her own halo of moonlight over the Zócalo. Happiness and amazement dissolved my disbelief, and I stood on the sidewalk grinning back at her, warming with a loving glow of my own. I went to the tree, laid my hands on the trunk, and kissed it.

It seemed credible to me that Aura would choose a neighborhood tree to hide in, and especially that tree, the biggest on our block, a hale, silver maple, in summer lush with foliage though now its expansive boughs and intricate branches were bare. In the spring, Aura had walked up and down the streets photographing the trees with their bright new leaves and flowers; she’d bought a field guide to the trees of the Northeast so that she could identify them and learn their names. For the next several days, every time I came down the block, I found Aura in that tree, her smile and shining eyes floating among the branches, and sensed her happiness to see me, and I always stopped to kiss the trunk. But one afternoon I came walking down the block with something else on my mind and forgot to look up into the tree and I’d just passed by it when I felt a force yank my head back as if grabbing me by the hair. Disconcerted, chastened, I turned and went back to the
tree, apologized, and kissed it. I wondered what the neighbors must think of this behavior. The tree happened to be directly in front of the brownstone where, in the basement apartment, a burly, aging biker-type with defensive-tackle biceps and a thick black-gray beard lived. I wondered what he would think when he noticed that I kept stopping in front of the gate to his apartment to kiss the tree. I wasn’t worried that he’d harm me but I did imagine him coming outside to say something like, What the fuck are you doing? and I wondered what I would answer. So, after about a week of this, if there were people out on the sidewalk, or if I saw the biker’s lights on and his curtains pulled aside, I only reached out a hand and tickled the trunk as I passed, while whispering, Hola, mi amor ¿cómo estás hoy? Te quiero. I felt an unaccustomed emotional lightness, something almost like happiness, during those days. Was I going a little crazy? It isn’t really Aura in the tree, I told myself. Nevertheless, one cold night I woke around three in the morning and remembered that I hadn’t stopped to greet the tree even once that day. I sprang out of bed, threw my down jacket on over my pajamas, put on my sneakers, and went outside. It had been a night of freezing rain. The sidewalk was slippery with ice and it reminded me of how Aura had never really mastered walking on icy sidewalks; she’d always slip and slide and I’d tease her that she was like Bambi on the frozen pond. Aura’s tree had never looked more beautiful than it did that night, enameled and blazing as if a mix of liquid diamonds and starlight had been poured over it.

Francisco, she said, I didn’t get married just to spend time by myself in a tree!

¡Claro que no, mi amor! I put my arms around the trunk and pressed my lips to the frozen rough bark.

My ear healed; it was as if Aura had come inside from her tree to give it a miraculous kiss in the middle of the night, or else it was the powers of the tea-tree mint treatment shampoo. If anything, the ear looked a little smoother and fresher than the uninjured one, as if it
had grown a new layer of baby skin, the only scarring a few barely discernible minnow nibbles along the cartilaginous rim. And it made me think of Aura’s big beautiful ears, and of how Natalia should have been born by then, with big beautiful baby ears of her own.

A few days later a check for $17,612 came in the mail from the insurance company of the teenager who’d hit me with her car.

On January 29, I woke before dawn to find Aura stretched out beside me in our bed, nearly invisible, a lighter darkness within the darkness of the room but with her distinct shape. Was I awake? Was this longing? Or was it the result of having read that same day a book written by a psychiatrist who’d studied the survivors of near-death experiences? What I’d experienced after being hit by that car fit with the recurring and overlapping details in the survivors’ testimonies that had convinced that psychiatrist to posit the possible existence of some other spirit world beyond this one. Maybe the book was hokum, but it was suggestive.

Did you just come in from the tree? I asked Aura.

No, she said. Mi amor, that’s your imagination. Pobrecito. She giggled. Why would I want to hide in a tree in the middle of winter?

So this is my imagination, too?

No, this really is me. Of course it is.