Say Her Name (43 page)

Back in Brooklyn after Aura’s death, only a week or two after that first return without her, coming up the stairs from the reeking summer furnace of the Broadway-Lafayette subway station, I tripped and fell as I never had before, facedown, astonishingly hard—my whole body slammed the stairs and I slid down several steps, my knees and torso and hands banging against the hard filthy iron. Mostly people kept on charging up and down, ignoring me, but a
few bent to help, holding out their hands, asking if I was okay. A man in a suit actually knelt by me with his hand on my shoulder, and asked, Are you hurt? Should we get help? I’m fine, I said. Please, thank you, leave me alone, I’m okay. I pushed myself up onto my feet and resumed climbing the stairs. My knees and hands ached as if they’d been sledgehammered and I felt blood trickling down my shin. There was a small tear in my jeans over my knee. My face was burning and there were tears in my eyes, of humiliation as much as anything else.

What did it mean? Did that hard fall on the stairs mark the start, finally, of being old? Maybe, but that’s not the lesson I decided to take. Later it seemed a lesson about grief. One of the most common tropes and complaints in the grief books I’ve read is about the loneliness of the deep griever, because people and society seem unable, for the various reasons always listed in those books, to accommodate such pain. But what could anybody possibly do or say to help? Inconsolable doesn’t mean that you are sometimes consolable. The way things are has seemed right to me; it’s all been as it should be, or as if it could not be any other way. I even feel grateful for some of the appalling things that have been said to me—Why can’t you go back to being the way you were before you met Aura?—because they starkly demarcate a border, showing you a truth about where you are now, whereas a supposedly sensitive comment might only soften that border a little, but never make it less impenetrable. You have to, can only, live this on your own.

33

When I spoke to Rodrigo at Fabiola’s after the memorial service one year after, I found out for the first time that he and Juanita
were
let into the intensive care unit to see Aura that last night. Now Rodrigo thanked me. He thanked me for all that Fabiola and I had done, throughout that last day and night, to bring Aura home to Mexico City so that her mother could say good-bye to her.

When they were let in to see Aura, she was still conscious.

What did she say? I asked him.

Rodrigo told me:

Aura said, I don’t want to die. She said, There’s so much I want to do.
No quiero morir.

34

I don’t know how Juanita endures. I worry about her, and I don’t say that to make myself seem less cold. I try to picture Juanita in her apartment, where she lives with Aura’s ashes, try to follow her through her day, and I feel frightened. I worry about carrying the blame for another death. She no longer even speaks to the tías. If she were grieving in some other way, some way that appeared more positive at least to others, would it make a difference in how she feels? Maybe she survives with superhuman strength. She believes she will be reunited with her daughter in the afterlife. I hope she has found a new, very close friend to whom she can speak as she never could even to the tías, who can even make her laugh, who makes her feel loved and forgiven or understood, and who will always be there for her no matter what, who somehow always knows how to pull her back from the abyss.

Of course it was Aura, only Aura, with whom Juanita had a relationship like that.

35

A woman friend of mine—a bit older than me and the mother of a recently married young daughter—said that Aura had still belonged more to her mother than to me, that Juanita had still been Aura’s “rightful caretaker.” She meant no unkindness, and was only expressing what seemed obvious to her.

You hadn’t had time yet to make Aura all your own, she said. Once you’d had a child and started a family of your own, that metamorphosis would have been complete.

Aura’s closest friends, especially Lola and Fabiola, close observers over the years of Aura’s relationship with her mother, themselves the daughters of mothers with strong personalities and careers of their own—Mexican mothers if that makes any difference—didn’t agree.

Aura didn’t think of her mother as her caretaker anymore, said Lola. If anything, it was the other way around. Aura had already taken her steps away and made her decisions, and she’d already started her own family, with you.

Will Lola still see it that way when, years from now, her own daughter, baby Aura, is taking
her
first seemingly decisive but perhaps only defiant steps away?

If she wanted to, would Juanita win this argument?

36

However you try to justify it, I thought, it’s not right to keep a wife’s mortal remains from her husband. Surely, most religions would forbid that. Even leaving religion out of it, a husband has a sacred right and duty to bury his wife’s body, bones, ashes. I should have gone and taken the ashes, just like Juanita was afraid I was going to. What’s wrong with me, why didn’t I, why am I so cowardly?

But I also thought what I usually think: Poor woman, let her have the ashes, Aura is not her ashes, I’ll keep the Aura I have.

Confusion, I don’t know how to resolve this question, am not sure where the right or the wrong lies, but I look for answers where I usually do, in books. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s first wife died at a young age after a long struggle with tuberculosis; for two years he was despondent and people feared for his sanity and health. Finally he had his wife’s coffin dug up and opened so that he could confront the physical fact of her death and decay. Then he went to Europe. I haven’t been able to confront that truth, but do I need to? I usually picture myself scooping Aura’s ashes up in my hands and rubbing them all over my face, into my eyes, nose, even into my mouth.

I went to Europe too, using the insurance money from being hit by that car. And inside a church, I had a sort of revelation. The church was in a medieval fortress town about two hours by train outside of Paris. In the oldest part of its nave, high up in the walls, were two intact stained-glass windows from the fourteenth century. During World War II, townspeople had taken the windows down, carefully disassembled them, and stored them in a safe place, and that’s how the windows had survived the bombs that later destroyed a large part of the church. Mass was over and
I was wandering around the restored nave, reading the pamphlet that told the history of the windows in English, and remembering the times Aura and I had visited old churches and cathedrals in Paris. Aura described herself as a believing Catholic, though she never went to Mass or performed any observances in her daily life. She always lit candles, though, when she visited these churches, and would cross herself and sometimes pray silently. I stopped at a little side chapel to the Virgin, dropped a euro in the tin box, lit a candle, and thought my own silent prayer, Virgin, if you exist, please take good care of Aura, while at the same instant, in harmony, another inner voice mocked me.

Then I stood under one of those ancient windows and tried to imagine the townspeople holding those seven-hundred-year-old pieces of colored glass in their hands, so fragile and precious, and carefully folding them away inside—inside of what? For a moment I got stuck on that. Old newspapers, old clothes, tablecloths, rags, maybe priests’ vestments and the like? Purple, red, blue, yellow, green, the window was a translucent circle of those colors packed into a complex geometrical pattern that also gave the impression of a joyous simplicity. Seven hundred years, the window seemed to say, that’s nothing, probably I’ll still be here in a thousand years, looking just like I do now. In the expanse of time that the window and the dusky interior of that church suggested, I was just a speck, one more human who’d lost someone, among the thousands upon thousands of humans who over seven hundred years had sat or stood in this church staring up at those same windows while thinking of loved ones lost. I really don’t have much time left, I thought. It’ll all be over in a blink. I thought of Juanita and Leopoldo and their hatred of me, and their determination to erase from Aura’s history our love and marriage. In a way, I thought, it’s as if they took those windows down and instead of putting them away and keeping them safe, they stole and hid them. These words came to me: Your hatred can save me. Your hatred can even free me. Because it leaves behind an emptiness that I have an obligation to fill in for Aura and me. Those are the words that came to me in that church.

I walked to the other window. The sky must have been a little less overcast on that side of the church, because it was as if a finger had pressed down on a computer keyboard’s sun-icon key, infusing that stained-glass window with just a little more light. It was easier to distinguish the ancient kaleidoscopic patterns, the colored circles inside of circles and other shapes, images of plants and tiny human and animal figures. That yellow oblong shape down near the bottom, I thought, looks like a drumstick.

I left the church and walked down through the streets toward the river, marking my steps with
frond, rings, marooned, barreling up, lewd, skein, squall, crevice, drumstick
… in 2009 Aura Estrada is thirty-two. Her birthday was a little more than a month away. I was in my down jacket and was wearing a new Chinatown aviator’s hat, fake-fur earflaps down. Stairs led from the sidewalk down to the river. Long wild grass grew along the bank, and I walked on some large smooth stones out amid reeds and stood there with the shallow water flowing around me. The bridges that spanned the river, the long uniform row of black-roofed, dun-colored houses on the opposite bank, smoke from the chimneys, gray sky, ducks.

37

I’d flown to Paris. I wanted to stand outside the amphibian house in the Jardin des Plantes, go to the Cité Universitaire where Aura and I had once stayed in a windowless basement room of the Maison du Mexique, and to 15 rue Violet, where we’d subletted a small apartment for a month during the holidays of 2004–’05. I wanted to go to the neighborhood market where we’d bought the capon she cooked for our Christmas dinner and to the little laundromat where we’d washed, dried, and folded our own clothes, something we’d never done even once in New York or Mexico because there we always dropped our laundry off. I retraced the long walk—which Aura described in one of the completed chapters of her novel—that Marcelo Díaz Michaux, the future psychoanalyst, then a Mexican student at the Sorbonne, takes on that snowy afternoon in 1972 when he receives a letter from Julieta, his sweetheart, Alicia’s future mother, telling him that she’s marrying another man—starting at Rue du Bac, going down to the Boulevard Saint-Germain, across the Seine at the Pont de Sully, up through the Place des Vosges, and all the way to Boulevard Voltaire in the Oberkampf, where Marcelo stops at Le Bataclan to buy a ticket for that night’s Velvet Underground concert.

I wanted to go to one of those small musty cinemas where we used to see movies in languages that neither of us spoke—Arabic, Thai—though Aura had no problem following the French subtitles. I loved sitting close to Aura in the dark, not understanding what the characters were saying, trying to decipher and piece the story together like something I’d give to her later, like a gift I’d made myself. One movie was about a Lebanese family in war-torn Beirut. Out on the sidewalk, I said:

Well, obviously, that girl had really cruel parents and brothers, the way they wouldn’t even let her out of the house. No wonder it ended like that, poor girl.

Frank, she was a
slave
! said Aura. That’s the whole point! She’s a Lebanese Christian slave, and the family that owns her is Muslim. ¡Ay, mi amor!

I went into one of those cinemas without Aura, saw a movie in Finnish, crushingly tedious, and fell asleep about a third of the way through. I was staying alone in the same fleabag hotel near Les Gobelins that Aura and I had once stayed in. A friend had recommended the Jeanne d’Arc to us but later we discovered that multiple hotels had that name and this was not the one my friend had meant. We were about to board our flight back to New York when Aura, at the ticket counter, was informed that her student visa was expired. In the freezing cold, near the Arc de Triomphe, I waited outside the U.S. consulate while Aura was inside. French police kept telling me I couldn’t stand there with our possibly bomb-packed luggage, but I kept refusing to move. There were more suitcases than I could carry and then how would Aura find me? Go ahead and arrest me, I said heatedly, I’m not moving, I’m waiting for my wife—I pulled out my U.S. passport and waved it in their faces—and nobody’s going to tell me I can’t wait for my wife outside my own country’s consulate! I’d said wife though Aura wasn’t yet my wife. But the police did leave me alone after that. Because of the visa screwup we had three extra days in Paris, which we spent in the Jeanne d’Arc our friend had recommended, in the Marais.

Of course there’s a nice Paris and a supremely nasty Paris; people get consigned to one or the other, and that’s the Paris they know. That’s how it seemed to me, but going to Paris with Aura was like stepping through the Looking Glass. Now waiters stood over our tables making wiggly cat’s cradles with their hands and struggling with their terrible Spanish, trying to translate obscure French menu items for Aura. If we asked directions, the French practically turned into cordial Mexicans,
Paris es tu casa
. They
were delighted to take our cameras and snap pictures of us. The French really liked Aura, though a disconcerting number thought she resembled Amelie, that pretty but annoying Parisian movie character.

Now I was back in pre-Aura Paris. Youngish French goons in tracksuits trailed me off a Metro train, taunting me by mimicking stereotypical Egyptian music—
dada-dah-dah-dahhh
. Oh, and so on. The world, not just Paris, is too idiotic and hateful to be left alone in. I’m remembering that New York wedding we went to, where Aura found herself seated next to a glamorous rich white writer. In the middle of a conversation they were having, he exclaimed, You’re Mexican? Then how come you speak English? Aura was beginning to realize what it was going to mean to be a Mexican writer in the United States. That was one reason she’d decided to make her career mostly in Spanish.