Say Her Name (40 page)

El agua está picada hoy, Aura said. Between swells were many smaller waves, little splashing bursts, as if stones were being dropped from the sky all around us. There were other swimmers in the waves bodysurfing, young men, mostly, adolescents and boys. I swam in closer to catch a wave. I missed a few and then timed one well, launching forward and swimming hard ahead of the wave’s cresting curl, letting it catch and carry me, body and arms extended, head up and out of the water just ahead of its roaring break, finally engulfed by it, thrilled by the force and speed with which it propelled me almost onto the beach. As I swam back out to Aura, I wore a proud grin.

Is it dangerous? Aura asked. She definitely asked me that. Her curiosity about bodysurfing had been aroused. She was a much better swimmer than her fifty-year-old husband. If he could bodysurf, why couldn’t she?

It is dangerous, I said, if your head gets driven into the sand. You always have to keep your head up. That’s how I answered Aura’s question, I’m sure of it, saying no less, but no more.

Getting out of the water, she’d hold on to me, too, until the smaller wave she’d been waiting for shoved her forward and she’d let go and scamper up onto the beach through the churning foam. It was sometimes a struggle to get out of the water as it flooded
back. You’d get pushed back down, but then you’d let the next wave pitch you forward.

We had dinner that night in the Armadillo restaurant, perched just above the callejón leading to our house. Having hardly slept the night before, we went to bed early, climbing up onto our sleeping platform, where we put on insect repellent. The way the breeze off the ocean rustled the leaves in the trees all around us made the sound of a young restless sea. We woke in the morning to a cacophony of birdsong and squawks and to a view of the bay’s rounded arc—enclosed on one side by Punta Cometa, and on the other by the far bend of hills separating Mazunte from San Agustinillo—and the Pacific Ocean spread out beyond, merging with the blue haze of the sky. We could see fishing boats and a freighter. We climbed down, leaving Fabis still sleeping. Aura was eager to get to work at her computer. There was a coffeemaker in the kitchen; we’d bought coffee, with our groceries, the previous afternoon. Aura cut up some papaya. When I remember that day, the only entire one we’d have at the beach, it feels like two days, or even three, because it seemed to last so long and pass so slowly, the way time is supposed to pass at the beach.

What did I work on that morning? I don’t even remember. Maybe the novel I’d been trying to get started. I also had a book to review, a new translation from the Portuguese of a six-hundred-page nineteenth-century novel by Eça de Queirós,
The Maias
. I’d read up to the part where the indolent but intelligent young Carlos Maia is beginning his romantic love affair with Madame Gomes in a decadent, enervated Lisbon. I sat at a crudely carpentered wooden desk in the shade listening to the birds, watching hummingbirds buzz around flowers, getting up and walking around, sitting down again, feeling a little envious of the concentration with which Aura was already working, and how much nicer the work area she’d set up for herself was than mine. At about ten-thirty we all went for breakfast at the Armadillo. Then we went to the beach. Aura had an old boyfriend, J., who now owned a popular bar in
Mazunte that often had live music at night. This boyfriend was a murky legend to me. All I knew was that when Aura was eighteen or nineteen, he’d broken her heart. He’d dropped out of the UNAM and come to live the hippie life in Mazunte. The summer before, we’d watched the France-Italy World Cup championship match on the widescreen television in his bar and I’d met him, a young man with a compact build, a short haircut, and a soldierly bearing, who’d clearly cleaned up his act. He was married now and had a child. He and Aura had talked that afternoon for the first time in years.

At some point, while I sat reading
The Maias,
Aura and Fabis went for a walk, probably to the village’s Internet café. But when Aura came back, she looked upset. You won’t believe it, she said, sinking down onto her beach towel. This is the last thing I needed. She told me that when they’d stopped into J.’s bar to say hello, J.’s wife had told them that J. was in the DF. And guess what he’s doing there? asked Aura. When I said I had no idea what he was doing there, Aura said that J. had gone to the city to look at the artwork for his book jacket. J. was having a book published. A book of short stories about Mazunte.

So even my dropout hippie bar-owner ex-boyfriend, said Aura, is getting a book published before I am.

Well, I said, it’s not like his book is going to win the Juan Rulfo Prize or anything. Stories about Italian hippies and potheads in Mazunte? Who’s going to want to read about that?

That isn’t the point, said Aura. Anyway, maybe it’s great. It doesn’t matter what it’s about. I’m such a loser.

Oh, Aura, come on, you’re not a loser. You’re writing a great story right now. Off I went, into my usual pep spiel. But I felt irritated by this routine. Don’t go and spoil the day, I thought, after you’ve been looking forward to this for so long. But it did seem like weird luck that her ex-boyfriend was publishing a book and that she had to find out about it on her first day at the beach. Of course I’ve kept an eye out for that book ever since, and have never seen it in any bookstore, or been able to find any mention of it anywhere.

One thing about Aura, though, she could always rebound quickly from these little crises and defeats. We went for a swim. She never stayed out of the water for long. Pretty soon we were playing around and kissing in the ocean. I don’t recall bodysurfing that day; if I did, I didn’t get a good ride. Mazunte wasn’t a big surfer’s beach but there were almost always people bodysurfing and riding boogie boards. The few surfers usually went out near evening. The red cloth banner warning against swimming would have been up on its pole, because it always was, every day. But not even the beach waiter I would eventually ask about it knew why that was, or even who was in charge of it.

That night we had dinner on the beach. Out of habit I took out my BlackBerry; all day it hadn’t worked but now, at night, it had a weak signal. There was an e-mail from my friend Barbara who works at a publishing house. She wrote to tell me that my nonfiction book on the murder had received a starred review in one of the prepubs. Well, yay! That was a wonderful night: the deep blue phosphorescent evening, the brightly glimmering strings of lights around the outdoor restaurants, the butane torches flaring an incandescent orange. The night darkened to purple and finally hid the ocean. Rock music on the restaurant speakers mixed with the steady percussion of the waves, much softer here than at Puerto Escondido. We shared two mediocre pizzas, two pitchers of watery margaritas, and were very happy. It felt as if we possessed a kind of wealth, a small fortune in saved-up nights on the beach like this one.

In the morning Fabis went off to do some errand, leaving us alone for a while, and Aura and I got to make love, though not for long, sweetly but anxiously—Aura was nervous about Fabis coming back. When we were dressed and had climbed down the ladder and were in the kitchen, she grabbed my crotch and put her lips to my ear and told me that soon we were going to be making love all the time to make our baby. Ay, ya quiero un bebí! she exclaimed. And all that
made me feel so charged up and optimistic. Soon, for the first time in either of our lives, we’d be having sex to procreate!

Aura was working well that morning. I came upstairs and saw her at her laptop typing, headphones on. Later, around ten, we went to breakfast at the Armadillo again, sat at a table covered with a blue-and-white checked tablecloth, in front of the painted wooden statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe and another, unpainted, of a gryphon’s head. I had enchiladas in a bright red sauce, fried eggs, and black beans. Aura ordered fruit and yogurt, like the day before, and split an order of enchiladas with Fabis. We each had big glasses of the orange juice mixed with carrot and beet juices they served there, mugs of strong coffee, and also, because it was so good, we all shared an order of toasted homemade bread, served with local honey.

We were walking to the beach when Aura said, I’m writing a really great story.

Of course, it was unlike Aura, and maybe unprecedented, for her to speak that way, but she’d spoken with shy conviction. Sure, the next day she might have felt discouraged again. But something was definitely happening for Aura. This seemed obvious to me later, when I realized how much her story about the teacher had changed and improved in only a few days; that last morning, she’d left it nearly finished—close enough, in fact, that it was eventually published, after a bit of editing. She’d been working so hard all year, why shouldn’t it have arrived around then: that “click” when it feels as if a previously locked door has opened and words and sentences suddenly seem to exist in a new dimension located somewhere between your brain and the screen or page, leading you through an infinite house whose rooms have strange geometric shapes you’ve never seen before, yet you always somehow know where you are. We’d had a fumbling conversation like that recently, trying to describe that.

And to think, she still had two weeks left of those gloriously long beach days! Probably, she said, there’d even be days when she’d spend the afternoon working instead of at the beach.

Makes sense to me, I said. I was glad we’d decided to come a few days early after all. If we’d taken the Monday night bus, we might just be arriving in Mazunte now, wiped out and only wanting a cold beer and a nap.

An unforgettable aspect of that sunny, nearly cloudless day was the surprisingly large number of people at the beach and how many of them were in the water, including small children—swimming but also bodysurfing. The waves, I assume, must have seemed inviting that day. Moderate waves, maybe not so
old
after all. But waves travel across the ocean in sets, or trains, and it’s never just one train that arrives at a beach, because along the way wave-trains meet or converge or overtake one another and mix, older waves with somewhat younger ones. But even a moderate wave, I’ve since learned, breaks and surges toward the shore with the innate force of a small automobile going at full throttle.

Sitting in our chairs, we watched the bodysurfers. Aura seemed especially interested, and kept commenting on their skills. I remember a pair of young guys in particular, light-skinned, well built, who I thought must be brothers and who were the best out there, skimming over the ocean surface expertly poised on the edge of their waves, arms out, looking like flying superheroes. We’d been into the water at least twice already and each time we’d all tried to catch waves. I don’t think Aura and Fabis had caught any, though; mostly they’d tried to get in position and then, as a wave loomed over them, ducked under. I had one short ride. I rarely timed it just right.

I didn’t like the skanky look of the young guy—long-haired, whippet thin, crudely tattooed, a piercing beneath his lower lip—who took the chair right next to ours. Why sit so close? Then his friend came and laid out a towel in front of him. Aura said she wanted to go back into the water. Again? That would be the third time already! I wanted to read.
The Maias
was getting interesting, the reader realizing, long before the characters do, that Carlos Maia has fallen in adulterous love with his long-lost sister, Madame Gomes—a great beach read, after all. Aura had finished reading
a Fabio Morabito collection of stories the day before—she loved it—and was now restlessly switching between Silvina Ocampo and Bruno Schulz, and talking to Fabis.

But look how crowded the water is, I said. It still surprises me that Aura wasn’t repulsed by all the people in the water. The water actually looked stippled with the heads of swimmers and Aura was usually, and oddly, hypersensitive to that—she could rarely even look at any surface that was densely patterned in that way, stippled, daubed, striated, without a shiver of revulsion going through her, goose bumps breaking out on her arms, which she’d always show me, grimacing. That’s what the water looked like to me that day, like just the kind of pimpled surface that Aura couldn’t stand!

I whispered to her that I didn’t want to go into the water and leave all our things within easy reach of the creepy guys alongside us. Aura whispered back that she was sure they wouldn’t steal anything. They were just beach hippies.

You two go in, I said.

Come on, both Aura and Fabis pleaded. The water’s great today. Come with us!

No, I said, I’m going to skip this one. I want to read.

Aura was wearing the wet-suit booties she’d bought for this trip, which gave her a slightly waddling gait, making it harder for her to keep up with Fabis, much taller and voluptuous, as they walked down to the water’s edge, Aura swinging her arms a bit to speed herself along, her head lifted and tilted up at Fabis while she talked, happily, excitedly, to her cousin. In her blue one-piece bathing suit, from behind, she looked just a little egg-shaped, much more so than she actually was. What an adorable, funny, beautiful person my Aura is, I thought to myself. This is the moment that decided everything: if I’m the wave, this is when I begin to crest, with an aching surge of love inside my chest; even if it had been only the prelude to just an inconsequential swim, I’m sure I would still remember it. I thought: I promise
to stop feeling annoyed with Aura, with her insecurities, with her constant need for reassurance, who gives a fuck, my God, I’m going to love her more than ever and of course I’ll go swim with her right now. Next, I turned my attention to securing my things against thievery without being too obvious or insulting about it. I put my wallet, T-shirt, sandals, and that book that I would (will) never again open into my cloth Gandhi bookstore bag, and looped the bag’s handles around a chair leg that I lifted and firmly planted in the sand. I could see Aura and Fabis up to their shoulders in the water, facing each other, still talking, ducking waves, bobbing back up. I got up and ran down the beach, over the searing sand, and into the ocean.