Say Her Name (39 page)

We were staying at the Santa Fe, one of the nicest hotels on the beach. In the hotel’s garden courtyard a ripe coconut plummeted from a tall palm and landed on the paved path just a few inches behind me with a hard splatter. We laughed about it, but if it had hit me on the head, I could easily have been killed.

In front of our hotel, across the road, there was a stone
mirador,
or lookout point, facing the ocean, and I had thought I might propose there, even if it did seem a little too picture-postcard. But the mirador wasn’t so ideal after all, with its direct view of a rock formation topped by a grim statue depicting the hand of a drowning person thrust out of the water. The statue had been placed there by the families of swimmers and surfers, Mexican and foreign, who’d died in those waves.

I’d hidden the diamond engagement ring in our room’s safety deposit box. I hadn’t found the perfect moment or setting to propose in Puerto Escondido, and considered trying to do it in Mazunte when we went there during the day. But where could I safely hide the ring when I went swimming? I always worried about thieving druggies on that beach. By the last evening in Puerto Escondido I still hadn’t proposed. My neck was stiff and aching from when I’d hit my head during our surfing lesson, I’d come down with a cold, and, worse, the bad shrimp I’d eaten the night before was giving me stomach cramps. For dinner all I had was a
bowl of chicken soup and nursed just one margarita. Still, I had to do it. I couldn’t go back to Mexico City not having proposed. I excused myself from the table and went to the room. A light rain was falling, one of those warm tropical drizzles that feel like the moisture-saturated air inside a cloud, soft as finest silk against your face. It might be even more romantic, I thought, to propose outside on the beach in this rain. I went into the bathroom and when I came out I took the little box with the ring out of the safe and put it into my pocket. Aura came into the room. Let’s go out to the beach, I said. Why? she asked. I don’t want to go out to the beach, it’s raining. It’s barely a drizzle, I said, come on, we have to go to the beach. I have to ask you something. She looked at my hand in my pocket and grinned. Ask me here, she said, laughing. Ay, mi amor, what do you have in your pocket? This is serious, I said, and I pulled out the box and dropped to one knee.

So Puerto Escondido, where we got engaged, in retrospect, might seem to have been sending us signs that suggested a warning that went unheeded. But it didn’t go unheeded. Except for that one surfing lesson, we didn’t swim there. We swam at Mazunte, which we believed to be safe. And what about Mazunte, were there episodes and premonitory signs there as well? The relation of premonitions and signs to evidence—how do you assign what wasn’t correctly interpreted or heeded and should have been? A chain of evidence like footsteps in melting snow.

On one of those mornings when Aura and I took the microbus to Mazunte, we met two other passengers who got on at Puerto Escondido. He was a Mexican who’d studied in Sweden and settled there, but now he’d returned with his Swedish wife for a vacation. He was a computer programmer or technician or something like that. He sat across the aisle from Aura and, during the half hour or so drive to Mazunte, kept up an ebullient monologue about Mexico and its beaches. Sweden has a lot going for it but no beaches like Mazunte! He even chanted a long list of tropical fruits grown on that coast, including, he emphasized, five different kinds of bananas. He’d never actually been to Mazunte. He and his wife were both
wearing straw cowboy hats that looked brand-new. We were let off at the intersection where you catch another camioneta into Mazunte, San Agustinillo, or Ventanilla; they got off a little before us, to visit Mazunte’s little sea-turtle museum and hatchery before they went to the beach. The Mexican’s nerdy, unjaded bumpkin quality delighted Aura—
The best beaches in the world! Five different kinds of bananas!
Several jungle-lined dirt roads led from the village to the curving cove of the beach. Thatched-roof palapas, restaurants, cheap rustic hotels, and hammock places lined the back of the beach; in front were beach chairs and tables with umbrellas that rent for the day—that’s where Aura and I were sitting when a commotion broke out, shouts for help and swimmers running to the aid of someone who’d had an accident. We went, too, and saw the Mexican from Sweden at the edge of the shore, lying facedown in only a few inches of pooled water, flailing and kicking as if he were drowning. He was carried up onto the beach and set down on the sand, where he lay coughing, sputtering, and gasping, his wife crouched alongside. People stood around watching. Some had seen what had happened. He’d been knocked over by a wave, had apparently been disoriented by the rush of surf, swallowed some water, and totally panicked, even as the wave receded, having practically deposited him on the beach. He was fine. We went back to our chairs. Later we saw him and his wife trudge past us, sun hats back on, carrying their things. We said good-bye but only the wife replied; he stared morosely down at the sand. Over the next few years, we occasionally recalled the Mexican-Swede—a funny-sad story about the danger implicit in a certain kind of touchingly naive enthusiasm, rather than one about danger itself—and we’d always laugh.

We’d reserved and paid for tickets on the Monday night, July 23, first-class night bus to Puerto Escondido, which had seats that converted almost into beds. We decided not to fly because Fabis needed to save money; anyway, she and Aura had always traveled to the beach by bus. That was pretty novel, this frugal planning
ahead, and I was glad to be spared the price of airfares. Juanca had to work that first week and would join us the next weekend. About a week before we were supposed to leave, I went to Aura’s family doctor for a checkup and had my first ever blood tests for cholesterol and the like. Aura had been hectoring me to do it throughout the past year but I’d always said I didn’t have the time. I was to pick up the lab results on Saturday and bring them to the doctor on Monday. Meanwhile, we were monitoring the weather in Puerto Escondido online—we couldn’t get the weather for Mazunte—it was showing clouds and rain every day. That morning Aura gave me a draft of her story about the wayward teacher, “
La vida está en otra parte,
” to read. I found lots to praise, but I also told her that I thought she’d rushed the ending. The next day, Saturday, the twenty-first, a bit past one in the afternoon, I was just leaving the gym, where I’d gone to a spinning class, when I got a message from Aura on my BlackBerry:

fabiola is here making a phone call and I made her eggs and coffee for breakfast. I’m still drinking coffee and working on my story which has already changed a lot. Did you really mean it last night when you said that I’m an artist? Or were you just flirting and working me up???? … when are you coming back, you have to go and pick up your lab results.

I wrote back: Claro que eres una artista, mi amor, de maxima sensibilidad e inteligencia. (Of course you’re an artist my love, of maximum sensibility and intelligence.)

She wrote back: Gracias mi amor, ¿pero a qué hora regresas? (… but what time are you coming back?)

I wrote back: Ya en un ratito, mi amor (Right away …)

At 1:29, she wrote back: Ya ven estamos viendo de irnos hoy! (Come now, we’re seeing if we can go today!) We’re missing all the good weather.

That’s the last e-mail I ever received from Aura.

When I got home, Aura and Fabis were in a state of high excitement. Fabis had been on the phone to a friend who’d just returned from Mazunte and who said the weather was great—our online weather reports had been all wrong. But we’d better go today because, according to the friend, it was definitely going to rain later in the week. They couldn’t change our bus reservation because all the buses were fully booked, but Aura and Fabis had concocted a circuitous plan. We’d take a bus to the city of Oaxaca, stay overnight, and fly to Puerto Escondido, a short hop over the cordillera, in the morning, on a small airline called Aerovega. We’d lose our bus tickets, but we had to get to the beach while the weather was still good. I could go to the doctor with my lab results when we got back. Hurry up and pack!

Should I have fought against this new plan? No,
Ow-rra,
we already paid for bus tickets, we need to stop throwing money away! What about my doctor’s appointment? I could and should have said that; I did, actually, but not very forcefully. (Juanita used to criticize me for always giving in too easily to Aura.) The woman from whom we were renting the beach house had already given me keys. We were on our way out the door when Aura remembered she’d forgotten to pack her coffee press. We’d need it, right? It wouldn’t fit in her suitcase so she put it in a black plastic bag and we went out to the taxi.

At El Tapo, the bus terminal, we had enough time before our bus left to eat in the diner downstairs, delicious greasy tortas. It was supposed to be about a five-hour drive to Oaxaca. When we got there we’d still have time to go to El Central for a drink. But the trip took much longer than five hours. When we pulled into Oaxaca, its streets and plazas were deserted and dark, and we had to be up at five-thirty to go to the airport. We were carrying our bags from the taxi into the hostel when Aura realized that she’d left her coffee press on the bus. Back at El Tapo, when she’d placed the coffee press in the rack over our seat, where it was quickly hidden behind our other bags, I’d thought that it could easily be forgotten there and had made a mental note to remember; then I hadn’t.

Well, now we can buy the turquoise one, I said.

But I’ve had that coffee press since Austin, Aura sighed sadly.

I wasn’t happy about sleeping in a hostel. In my male dorm, a few other travelers were already asleep in their bunks, and I moved about as quietly as I could without turning on any light. Was this a
youth
hostel, I wondered, or just a hostel? I had only one thin blanket, and slept in T-shirt and jeans. I lay in the hard narrow bed and was angry with myself for giving in so easily to this roundabout and wasteful rush to the beach. Why was Aura so impatient?

That night, as we slept, where was Aura’s wave in its long journey to Mazunte? Having done some research on waves since, I’m certain that that wave already existed. Most surface waves of any decent size, even the moderate-sized waves that reach Mazunte on a normal day, have come thousands of miles. A wind blows ripples across a calm sea and those ripples, providing the wind with something to get traction on, are blown into waves, and as the waves grow in height, the wind pushes them along with more force, speeding them up, building them higher. It’s not the water itself that travels, of course, but the wind’s energy; in the turbulent medium between air and ocean, water particles move in circles something like bicycle pedals, constantly transferring their energy forward, from swell to crest and back into the trough and forward again. Short choppy waves, like the ones you see on lakes, come from nearby. Large waves charge steadily along on high-velocity winds that have been traveling across the open ocean for many thousands of miles and for days; those are the waves you watch from a Pacific beach, forming into swells that, as they near the shore, rear into high curving crests that finally peak and break. Aura’s wave might easily have gotten its start a week or more before, during a storm in the warm seas of the Indian Ocean, where strong winds consistently blow in one direction. The older a wave is, the more dangerous it is; the height of a wave, its steepness, I read, is related to its age: “As a wave ages, it gradually grows higher, longer and consequently faster.” Where was Aura’s wave that night, as we slept in our bunks in the
hostel in Oaxaca? Was it already a murderous old wave, or still a relatively young one, born only the night before in a tropical storm maybe only a thousand miles out to sea? There’s a Borges poem that ends with the lines:

¿Quién es el mar, quién soy? Lo sabré el día
Ulterior que sucede a la agonía.

Who is the sea, who am I? I’ll know the day that follows after the agony—
agonía,
in this context, could be even more accurately translated as “death throes.”

Am I the wave?

We reached the house in Mazunte at about noon the next morning. I had a hand-drawn map that the taxi driver had trouble deciphering, but finally we found the callejón we were looking for: a jungle-lined alley running below a restaurant that was perched on the steep slope above; at its end was a gate that we unlocked, and then we climbed several levels of stairs to the house, which was like a Swiss Family Robinson tree house nestled amid sprawling branches in a tropical forest. There were a few roofed patio areas, and Aura chose the largest, pushing furniture around to quickly create a self-contained writing studio. I took a smaller, shaded little deck, one level lower. Fabis, a graphic designer, was adamantly on vacation and didn’t need a work area. There were bedrooms, with screened windows and beds covered by mosquito netting, and hammocks all around, but the best place to sleep was up on the roof platform, from which you could see out over the jungle to the bay and the ocean. We wrestled two thin futon mattresses up the ladder. Fabis would sleep with us up there, too, until Juanca came.

We swam in the ocean that afternoon. It was overcast, and there’d been a rainstorm the night before—the first rain in weeks. Nobody we spoke to had heard that more rain was forecast for the
coming days, but the storm was why the water was cloudy and full of plant debris, twiggy and grassy little clusters. Though she’d so often been to these beaches, and loved going into the water, Aura was always afraid of the waves; that day they were not very big. Aura would cling to my arm and make me wait with her at the water’s edge, studying wave sets, timing them, and then we’d go running in. Afloat in the water she’d throw her arms around my neck and hold on until she felt ready to swim out, diving beneath waves until she was past where they broke, where the water was smoother, the swells gently rocking her as they passed before cresting. Aura loved to stay out there, tirelessly swimming back and forth, I always thought, like a friendly seal.