Say Her Name (6 page)

I woke and sat up. I wasn’t frightened, because it wasn’t really a nightmare. I stared blankly around the room. Then I burrowed back under the multicolored quilt and concentrated on remembering the details of the dream. It was the first time I’d felt a loving embrace in months—since the last time I’d dreamed that Aura was embracing me, a few nights after her death. I actually whispered, Gracias, mi amor. Te amo. And stayed in bed until about noon.

* * *

No day ever felt better than the one before it. Emptiness, guilt, shame, and dread, on an endless loop. I felt worse for Aura—thinking about all that she lost was the quickest way to make me want to drop, moaning, to my knees. Often I would think, But it’s even worse to lose a child, to lose your only child, your daughter … a single mother who has lost her only child!
Even worse
.

Before Aura went away to the University of Texas, she and her mother had hardly ever been apart for more than a few weeks. When she was thirteen she’d gone to summer camp in Cuba for three weeks; as a teenager she’d traveled through part of Europe on a package tour with her stepsister; later, two or three times, Juanita had sent her to Europe for summer school, to Paris and to Cambridge, England. Juanita paid for all of this on a university administrator’s salary, often filling two posts simultaneously, and sometimes even taking a third part-time job.

But Juanita and I had had no communication. I didn’t even know what she’d done with Aura’s ashes.

I thought I could live a few more months on the money Aura had left in her savings account, and also the insurance money from Columbia University that I’d received as her closest surviving relative—I was the one who’d done the paperwork and claimed it.

Who should rightly be regarded as the closest surviving relative, the widowed husband or the orphaned mother?

For all I knew, Juanita had already spread Aura’s ashes in some place she’d chosen for reasons entirely her own, and intended never to tell me where.

Juanita and her brother, or the university lawyers who were advising them, had wanted to have me arrested and sent to prison, even as they were waiting for investigators to turn up evidence against me—or maybe to fabricate evidence, that was a danger. A year later the risk of that happening seemed to have passed but my lawyer told me that if I was going back to the
coast for the first anniversary of Aura’s death, I should stop in to the district prosecutor’s office there and give the necessary declaration to close the case file; it was just a formality, he said, but a prudent one. Go and tell your story. An open case, he said, is like a live animal.

4

Like in that José José song, “Gavilán o Paloma,” where he sings that he was pulled toward her like a wave,
una ola,
and he went up to her and said,
hola,
that’s how it happened.

When I got to the King Juan Carlos Center at NYU, José Borgini’s
presentación de libro
was just getting under way. An Argentine professor was giving the usual introductory remarks from the podium, and I launched myself into a late arrival pantomime of contrite hurry, practically breaking into a run as I pulled my wheeled suitcase down the auditorium aisle, yanked off coat, hat, and scarf and dumped them in an empty seat in front, and then I “bounded” up the side stairs to the stage, stumbled a bit against the top step, “strode” across the stage, and took my seat at the table next to Borgini. There were giggles in the audience and I saw the skunk-bearded professor looking over at me from the podium, his eyeglasses opaque glares in the stage lights. Señorrr Paaaco Gohhhldman, I presume—his Argentine accent was strong, and he had a high-pitched voice, almost a shriek. I lifted my hand and nodded, and when I reached for the bottle of Poland Spring water I knocked it over and it rolled to the front of the table but I caught it before it went off the edge. I was definitely cutting a dorky enough figure. That was Aura’s first impression of me—she was in the audience—and she always laughed delightedly whenever she recounted it.
Pulling his suitcase behind him,
she liked to say with a low cackle, as if that was the
funny
part, imitating my trot down the aisle by rapidly bobbing her head and pertly holding her fist out as if clutching a suitcase handle. It
was my yearly teaching semester at Wadley College, in Connecticut, and I used to stay over on campus one or two nights a week. I’d had an afternoon class there, and then caught the Metro North train to Grand Central right after.

I knew Borgini a little from Mexico City, though he was about ten years younger, in his thirties. I hadn’t seen him since his last novel had won a big prize in Spain. Now that the book was coming out in English, he’d invited me to take part in his New York presentación, which is the way they do book launches in Mexico, other writers talking about the book instead of the author giving a reading. Borgini had flown over from Berlin, where he’d recently been named cultural attaché at the Mexican embassy. The other presenter was the Mexican novelist Gabriela Castresana, who’d moved from Mexico to Brooklyn some years before, to a duplex apartment that she owned only blocks from me and where she now lived with her two teenaged children. Gabriela, a charismatic flamboyant beauty in her forties, was the sort of socially agile writer who, wherever she went, seemed to make friends with everybody in the literary world, famous or not. That night, after the event, she was giving a dinner for Borgini in her apartment and supposedly Salman Rushdie was coming. When she told me on the phone I couldn’t help cracking, What about Saul Bellow, doesn’t he want to meet José Borgini, too? After the presentación, Borgini stayed in his seat signing books, Gabriela stood at the edge of the stage holding court with her fans, and I made for the wine table at the back of the auditorium. There was only one other person already there, a slight, pretty young woman, black hair in a chic pixie cut and gleaming black eyes—an elfin prettiness, a slim and lovely build, vivid lips, red lipstick. She smiled at me with that smile and I must have smiled back as if I couldn’t believe my luck.

Hola! I said, and holding her plastic cup of red wine, looking at me in a way that anticipated a conversation, she responded, Hola.

(Hello! Meet your death.

Hello, my death.)

She had a gap between her top teeth and a beauty mark beneath the right side of her bottom lip. She was wearing a trim light-gray sweater, a pleated black wool dress, dark tights, and leather boots. An NYU grad student, is what I guessed. But she looked young enough to be an undergrad. My Latin American dream girl, ten years too late. I asked her if she’d liked the presentación, and she said, Sí, por supuesto, estaba muy bien, punctuated by an abrupt little nod that, along with her polite praise, seemed to say that of course the presentación had been the usual nonsense and hot air, not that she was blaming me, or anybody, or even cared, because it was the rare presentación that wasn’t. Her voice was incredibly charming, husky and raspy, a little bit nasal, somewhat like a cartoon character’s, with youth and good nature thrumming through it. Aura’s smile and voice were always the first things people noticed about her. Also, her intelligence, her sweetness, and an otherworldly quality. (Many of the condolence messages had phrases like: Aura had an otherworldly quality … Aura reminded me of an enchanted forest creature, her eyes and her smile, and the funny things she used to say …) I was bowled over, and full of excited curiosity. I really was the kind of person who believed that this was the way it happened: at the most unexpected moment you met somebody, there was a magical connection, an instant complicity, and your life changed. Despite the contrary evidence of so many false alarms, I’d faithfully been waiting for such a moment for years. Another voice inside me warned, Fool, are you kidding? Look at her, she’s
way
too young.

It turned out that she didn’t study at NYU or even live in New York. She was at Brown. She’d come all the way from Providence.

You mean you came all the way to New York just for José Borgini’s book presentación?

Yes, she said. She looked as if she wanted to say more. Finally she added, Well, not just for that. She said excuse me and turned back to the table for another cup of wine. I steeled myself against
what I knew was coming: a friendly wave good-bye over her shoulder, and then she was going to walk back into the milling crowd, probably to rejoin whoever she’d come with, and in a few minutes I’d see her and her friends with their coats on, headed toward the exit, or maybe she’d leave with a boyfriend, though so far there’d been no sign of one. Either way I’d never get to speak to her again, or ever see that smile again. Surely she hadn’t come from Providence, just for Borgini’s book presentación,
all by herself
.

But she came back, and her expression was a bit anxious now, her smile more demure. Her nose was large, and speckled with light freckles or small beauty marks, but the funny thing about it was that from the front her nose actually looked small, or normal sized, roundish and a little turned up. Like everything else in her face, even her nose looked friendly and full of personality.

You came from Providence with friends? I asked.

No, not really, she said. I came by bus, the
Bonanza
bus, to the
Port Authority
. She smiled shyly, as if to say, I really like pronouncing those names.

But what did that mean, that she hadn’t
really
come with friends?

What do you study at Brown? I asked, and she told me that she had a postgrad research scholarship in Latin American literature. So that explained it. She’d come to New York because of an academic interest in José Borgini’s novels.

Well, he’s my friend, she said.

How could I not have foreseen that? And I said, Ohhh, okay, you’re José’s friend. Great. So you’re coming to dinner at Gabriela’s?

Noooo, she said ruefully, I’m not. She’d pursed her lips and was looking at me intently, as if trying to make up her mind whether or not to explain. I swear my heart leapt and I thought, I’ll take you to dinner, I’ll skip Gabriela’s and we’ll go somewhere else, but before I could say that, she said, José says that it’s a private dinner. He says he tried really hard to get me invited, but no. It’s a dinner
petit comité,
for him to meet Salman Rushdie.

Petit comité?

Yes, she said.

That’s what he said?
Petit comité?

Yeah, she said. I don’t really know what that’s supposed to mean, that it’s a dinner
petit comité
. Are they going to negotiate a big problem in world literature and save us? Then, making her voice go low, as if imitating a deep paternal voice that didn’t seem to have much to do with soft-spoken Borgini, she said,
You know how these things are, Aura. It’s Salman Rushdie
.

The funny deep voice, her forlorn smile and shrug, made me laugh out loud. I see, I said. And while we’re at the
petit comité,
what are you supposed to do?

Oh, just go back to the hotel and wait, she said.

I was baffled. How could Borgini be involved with her if he wasn’t even bringing her to dinner? Then why should she go back to his hotel—to his room?—to wait? Wait for what? Why hadn’t he invited her to dinner?

That’s crazy, I said. Everybody in New York gets to have dinner with Salman Rushdie sooner or later. (Not that I ever had.) Of course you can come with us. And if you can’t, I’ll have dinner with you somewhere else.

Oh no, you don’t have to do that—with a burst of wheezily pealing laughter, the first time I ever heard that laugh.

Seconds later, Gabriela walked by on her way to the wine table, and I touched her arm. Gabriela, I said, this is Aura. A friend of José Borgini. She can come to dinner, right?

Gabriela glanced at Aura, and back at me, widening her enormous eyes as if adjusting to an intrusion of bright light. ¿Por qué no? she said. Yes, she can come.

At dinner, Borgini sat wedged between Gabriela and Salman Rushdie—the famous, heavy-lidded, narrowed eyes, and a surprisingly cherubic face beneath the balding Pnin-like dome; a complicated expression, like someone in a gentle-jolly mood and a dangerously mordant one at the same time. Borgini, with the much larger male body on his left speaking across him to the also larger,
expansive-gestured female on his right, looked like the Dormouse. Salman Rushdie didn’t speak Spanish and made it clear right off that it wasn’t going to be a night for practicing diplomat French. But Borgini’s English wasn’t good enough for him to keep up. Gabriela, like a school crossing guard, occasionally halted the conversation to give Borgini a chance to speak, coaxing him with a question, helping with his English. I’d guess that Rushdie probably doesn’t even remember meeting Borgini that night, and I’d bet the bank he has no memory of having sat opposite me, or that he ever learned my name. I wonder if he even remembers Aura. I thought it was all great—Aura and I left to ourselves at a corner of the table—the best thing that could have happened. I hardly recall even glancing over at Mt. Rushdie, and I wasn’t feeling at all self-conscious about being in the presence of such an important world figure, as I probably would have if I hadn’t been sitting next to Aura. To the background score of Salman Rushdie’s burnished, clipped English voice and boyish titter, I was falling in love with Aura. (Do you remember us, Mr. Rushdie? Could you tell, peering at us through your famous falcon eyes, with your great novelist’s noticing power, that we were falling in love, or that at least I was? Anything else? The faintest shadow of a hideous fate? Star-crossed, did you think? Am I going to survive this? Do I deserve to?) My attention was on Aura. If Borgini was looking across the table at her with a baleful or annoyed or any other kind of expression, she seemed oblivious. We sat close together at a corner of the table, knees touching, drinking wine, talking and laughing. She’d say something, I’d laugh, I’d say something, she’d laugh. A way of conversing with each other was established that was going to be
our
way of conversing. We liked to be comedians for each other, always. It didn’t matter if what we were saying was actually funny or not. I wish I could remember everything we talked about at dinner that night, but of course I can’t. I discovered that she was only twenty-five (damn!). Her study scholarship at Brown would be over in April. She was doing research there for her UNAM master’s thesis in comparative literature, which was about the influence on Borges of such English writers as Hazlitt,
Lamb, and Stevenson. She was applying to PhD programs in the States and Europe. Recently the house in Providence where she was renting a room had caught fire and she’d had to move; luckily the flames hadn’t reached her room, so she’d been able to save most of her possessions, though water from the firemen’s hoses had soaked through the floor and ruined some of her books and the bedding. She said that all her clothes, even what she’d dry-cleaned, smelled of smoke now, and she raised her forearm so that I could smell her sweater. I took her fingers in mine and lifted her hand a bit while I lowered my nose to her sleeve and inhaled, and maybe there was a just discernible scent of wood smoke, of cigarette, too, and faint perfume, and that fragrance of bodily warmth as if baked into the wool that I could still find in her sweaters more than a year after her death. I looked up into her eyes and said, Yes, smoke, I can smell it. Anyway, she said, she didn’t own that much, and she’d left her computer and most important books in her study carrel at the library. She told me about her friends in Providence, Mauricio, a gay lit student, also from Mexico, and Frances, a chubby black girl, her housemate in the fire-destroyed house, an art student at RISD. But the professor who was directing her studies at Brown, an eminent Chilean professor of comparative literature, Professor T__, who’d doted on her, had suddenly turned against her. Meeting with her in his office, Professor T__ had told Aura that she was never going to succeed as a literary scholar because she lacked seriousness. She was a frivolous rich girl, he told her, who thought the university’s primary purpose was to entertain her. Is he handsome? I asked. Uy no, she shuddered, está
muy feo
. Also about sixty, divorced, ridiculously vain. Fox-red hair and beard, obviously dyed. Something wrong with one of his eyes, the pupil straying off to the side, like a little black fish, she said, that’s always bumping against the same side of its bowl. Aura’s smile could make anybody feel welcomed into her life, but it also left her vulnerable to grubby miscalculation. I said, Sounds like a case of unrequited crush, at least, which is understandable, though it sure doesn’t excuse his speaking to you like that. I’m not a rich girl, said Aura, but sometimes I give people that impression.
I don’t know why. Well, it’s not necessarily an insult, I said. What did you say to him after he said that to you? Nothing, she said. I was so humiliated and sad, I went back to my room and cried. And I phoned my mom. She said “mom,” in English. When she told her mother what Professor T__ had said, her mother was even more upset than Aura. She’d threatened to get on a plane from Mexico and come up there and punch him in the face. Well, he would have deserved it, I said. Yeah, said Aura, what a fucking asshole; that
asshole
. Though she’d probably learned to talk like that in Texas, she spoke English with something like an old-fashioned Brooklyn accent, like a hoarse cartoon chipmunk with a Brooklyn accent. She’d been avoiding Professor T__ ever since. She was spending all her time in the library working on her thesis on Borges and the English writers, and in the gym. She especially liked going to the gym at three in the morning, she told me, to work out on the elliptical machine. During exam weeks, the gym never closed.