Say Her Name (8 page)

My mother’s dream, which growing up I made sure to gradually and systematically crumble, was to see me installed as a French Academic. The fact that my origins were in the Mexican Bajío and that I lacked all dexterity with the language of my great-grandfather never gave her any pause. Because of that, when I told her that I wanted to go to New York City to pursue a degree in the department of Hispanic languages, the glass of red Bordeaux wine she was sipping from went crooked in her hand and she made a scandal in the restaurant we were in, dining on crepes filled with four cheeses.

6

I’m an air balloon, circling the earth, hardly ever touching down, and nobody ever takes hold of my rope to pull on it and draw me close. It’s hard for me, listen, it’s so hard, it costs me everything, to touch down on earth. Sometimes I think it has to do with eating so little. At Brown I met a girl who told me that she’d been diagnosed as anorexic—she told me all about herself, and I realized she was like my double.

I’m back in Mexico. In my mother’s new apartment. A difficult year awaits me. Uncertain in more than one respect.

Aura had returned to Mexico City at the beginning of December, after her final semester at Brown, when she wrote that in her diary. She was lonely, feeling a little lost and fearful of the future. Up there in Brooklyn, I wasn’t exactly thrilled about my life; it had been five years since I’d last had a girlfriend or any even briefly steady lover. In Aura’s diary I can follow her innocent trek across that stretch of months, from when we first met in New York right up to where, turning the page, you’d expect to find us falling in love, except that’s where it ends, as if not even she could believe what happened next and abandoned her diary like a novel with a too far-fetched plot. During the years we were together, Aura didn’t keep a regular diary, so that notebook was the last of the dozens of diaries Aura had kept from the time she was six or seven, back when she used to write in her diary at all hours of the night, often under the covers with a flashlight while her stepsister Katia slept in her nearby bed.

In a few hours we’re leaving for Guanajuato for Christmas.

It’s still dark out, but down below on the Periférico, the all-day traffic jam is already underway, sounding like squawking plastic trumpets, pounding drums, and crazed roars in a crowded fútbol stadium buried under the earth.

Juanita’s new condominium apartment was on the ninth floor of a building abutting the Periférico, the intracity north-south express-way. It must have been about five in the morning. Aura’s bed was the foldout couch in the study. She was probably sitting up, floppy leather-bound notebook pressed against her upraised thighs, sleep-tousled hair, the soft pucker of her mouth, the twitching pen in her fist, eyes fixed on the page with a liquid stillness of concentration, like perfectly aligned bubbles in a carpenter’s level. In the future, Aura and I would spend more than a few nights on that same couch, though if her stepfather Rodrigo was away when we visited, which he frequently was, I’d sleep there alone while Aura slept with her mother. Aura, when speaking or writing about her stepfather, tended to refer to him only as “the husband.” And Juanita rarely held herself back from belittling her husband with her famous sarcasm, whether about money (his lack of), politics (left-wing), ambition (missing), or even intelligence (lower than mother’s and daughter’s). Rodrigo was famous for taking it: a disciplined rocklike impassivity, though often seething inside and capable of eruption. But I could tell that he loved Aura, that he was proud of her, and he was always kind to me. We often talked about American football. He was a big Colts fan, for some reason. One Sunday we watched a Colts-Patriots play-off game at the Hooters on Insurgentes, where Aura and Juanita joined us later for burgers and beers, the two of them bemusedly observing the agile young waitresses in hot pants Rollerblading around the restaurant with loaded trays balanced on their shoulders beneath the luminous football-filled big screens, and that launched Juanita into a reminiscence about what a Rollerblading dervish Aura had been as a girl; she described her twirling and jumping around the
Copilco parking lot like an Olympic star—what I remember is just the deeply contented sense of belonging to an ordinary family that I had that afternoon, a feeling I’d hardly ever known in my life.

But I wasn’t on the scene yet that predawn morning, days before Christmas, when Aura, just home from Brown, was in bed writing in her diary. Outside her window the invisibly smoldering air over the Valley of Mexico was like a vast nighttime harbor, the illuminated tops of isolated tall buildings anchored in it like futuristic Chinese junks, television and radio towers like lit-up masts and cranes; on the horizon were the ink black mountains of the Sierra del Ajusco. For the next half hour or so, she watched those mountains slowly emerge from the starless dark, the uneven row of pointy peaks outlined by a silver glow, raspberry smears seeping into the sky just above; the dawn light gradually infusing the slopes like a blue phosphorescent dye, bringing into relief pine forests, winding strips of road, and mottled terrains. Aura carefully described all of that in her notebook. All her life, she reflected, in the DF, in Guanajuato and Taxco—maybe in San José Tacuaya, too, though she couldn’t remember—she’d woken to views of mountains outside her window. Then came the steamrolled Austin horizon, the cupcake hills of Providence. What would the next year bring? Hopefully, the skyscrapers and bridges of New York City. While she was at Brown she’d visited New York three times, including once with her mother, and each visit had left her more convinced that New York was where she wanted to be. She would live, she wrote in her diary, in one of those apartments that was like a nest perched high above a spectacular avenue. As soon as she stepped out onto any Manhattan sidewalk she felt swept up in the infinite city’s powerful and purposeful current—somehow Mexico City, also infinite, seemed as much New York’s reverse as the swarm of dangling threads on the underside of a tightly woven rug. The city of Auden, Bob Dylan, Woody Allen, of the tragic other Dylan whose poems she’d also memorized in her English poetry classes at the UNAM, of Seinfeld and Elaine. (Aura had a rarely confided conviction that she could have been a successful comedienne. She’d imagined herself a film
director, too; during her last year at the Colegio Guernica she kept a notebook in which she pasted newspaper cuttings and wrote about every movie she saw at the Cineteca Nacional. She even asked her mother for permission to apply to the Centro Nacional de las Artes to study acting and film. Juanita forbade it, but she had profound reasons for dreading that profession. Her father had acted in some of Mexico’s most iconic movies, playing opposite such stars as María Félix and Dolores del Río—he was the debonair young husband shot dead within the first five minutes of the movie, the flirtatious mailman who turns up at the door in the nick of time, eyes and teeth sparkling, to deliver the climactic love letter. But Juanita’s father was also a drunk, a morphine addict, a philanderer, and a gambler, and died at thirty-two, when she was an infant. Juanita possessed no memory of him.) Aura grew up watching videocassettes of Woody Allen movies, often at night in bed with her mother, the same movies over and over, especially the New York City romance and hyperneurotic comedies. She loved the screwball comedies, too, and as a little girl would act out routines from
Sleeper
in the shower, from Cantinflas and Tin-Tan movies, too. Juanita had practically installed Woody Allen as a household tutelary saint, his framed photograph hanging on her bedroom wall. Yet once Aura revealed her wish to go to grad school at Columbia, her mother hardly ever again passed up a chance to say something negative about New York.

But wouldn’t any normal mother anywhere have worried if her only child, in the fall of 2002, announced that she wanted to study and live in New York City, when so many other cities in the world had first-rate universities to choose from? Despite her fear of flying, Juanita visited Aura in Providence and accompanied her to New York. Instead of assuaging Juanita’s fears, that visit only made them more vivid. In Grand Central and Penn Station, squads of burly, camouflaged, heavily armed soldiers patrolled with German shepherds. Going into libraries and museums, guards inspected every bag and purse, even shining flashlights into them, and Juanita always carried a large handbag that required extra-long searches. When they went to the restaurant where Woody Allen performed
on his clarinet, they were told he wasn’t playing that night and that they needed a reservation anyway. Even Mexico City’s subways were cleaner than New York’s. Online, Juanita had sleuthed out information about the rapes and muggings of Columbia students in Morningside Heights and Harlem. But Mexico City had its own brand of terrorism, Aura reminded her mother. Had she read anywhere that New York City taxi drivers kidnapped passengers and took them at gunpoint to ATM machines, or worse?

Juanita’s maternal grandparents were French, though she’d never been to France herself, and didn’t speak the language. But even if Aura never realized her mother’s dream of becoming a professor at the Sorbonne, she should at least become an academic in Mexico, at the UNAM, where she’d have instant job security, a decent and reliable salary, independence, and respect. Surely there was nothing wrong with a mother wanting such things for her daughter; by the time she was Aura’s age, Juanita knew all too well about the treacheries that could befall a young woman without a career of her own. Someday, if a handsome, and preferably wealthy, young husband came along, so much the better, though in Mexico, as elsewhere—Aura’s mother certainly believed, anyway—a husband was never somebody who could be counted on to stick around for long, or to stay sober or sane, to not end up throwing his own career, along with his family, into the garbage. In Juanita’s opinion it made no sense for Aura to leave Mexico and the UNAM—where while completing her PhD she could already have a job as an adjunct professor—to study Latin American literature in New York.

Nevertheless, Juanita accompanied Aura to Columbia on the day of her interview in the Hispanic languages department’s dilapidated Beaux Arts town house, where Federico García Lorca had once lodged, dazzling faculty and students at cocktail parties in the lounge. They decided that while Aura went for her interview, her mother would wait in the Hungarian Pastry Shop. It seemed that whenever anyone who’d ever had anything to do with Columbia University was asked a question such as, And where should we go to see what student life is like? the Hungarian Pastry Shop was the
response. In Providence they’d looked up the Hungarian Pastry Shop on the Internet to copy the address, and found it described as a “a delightfully cozy café.” It turned out to be a dank, crowded little place that looked and felt like it was in a basement, though with long glass counters invitingly filled with pastries. Maybe it was a test of your suitability for Columbia—if it seemed like only a dingy coffee shop to you, you didn’t belong there. Juanita even remarked that if this café really represented
el colmo,
the summit, of student life at Columbia, then why go to New York—there were plenty of cafés just like it around the UNAM, not much better or much worse. Whatever, said Aura anxiously. She had to get to her interview. Her mother hadn’t brought anything to read, so Aura left her with a volume of Borges’s
Obras Completas,
festooned like a jubilee ship with brightly colored Post-it flags, and charged out the door.

The interview was with the department head, a blond milk-pale Peruvian, and it lasted about an hour. They spoke at length about the work Aura had been doing on Borges and the English writers. More than midway through the interview the department head told Aura that she was going to be accepted, and with a full department scholarship. When she returned to the Hungarian Pastry Shop, her mother was sitting at the table by the wall at which she’d left her, her coat still on. There was no coffee cup or pastry plate on the table. She didn’t seem to have touched the Borges book. You didn’t order even a cup of coffee, Ma? asked Aura.

Noooo, hija, said her mother, with a fed-up sigh. They have a very complicated system here. I suppose you need a genius IQ and perfect English to understand it. By the time I deciphered more or less how it works, I thought you’d be back from your interview any moment, y ya, I just didn’t want anything anymore.

Ay, Mamá, please, don’t exaggerate—

Exaggerate? You tell me, hija, if this seems like a normal process to make customers go through for only a cup of coffee. First you have to go to that counter to place your order—like the witness to a crime, Juanita pointed tentatively with her finger toward the counter, pausing as if to rehearse the whole terrible and confusing
scene in her mind—and then they write down your order on one of those pieces of paper and you have to write your own name on it, too, and then you go back to your seat, and when it’s ready, the waitress comes out carrying your order on a tray with the piece of paper and walks through the tables calling out your name until you signal to her that it’s you she is searching for. For this, you have to be hoping that she is looking your way, so that you can catch her eye, and then raise your hand. But what happens if the waitress walks away from you, to the other end of the café? Are you supposed to shout your name at the waitress’s back? And why should I be forced to call out my name in a crowded café?
Ees meee, Juaneeeta! The leetle Mexicana lady over here! Alo-o-o!
Juanita swung her hand up as if tossing something away over her shoulder—Ay, no.

Aura, laughing so deeply her eyes were squeezed shut, wheezed, Ay, Mamá!

No-no-no,
hija. Why do I have to give them my name just to order a cup of coffee? Are they going to ask to see my passport and visa, too?