Say Her Name (18 page)

You could say I never really had a chance to grieve for or mourn my father, but I don’t think I would have mourned him that much anyway. One night I woke from a bad dream and he was sitting on the edge of my bed, only where his face should have been there was just a shadow-filled oval, like the portal to a black hole. It was a little more than two weeks after the funeral that Aura phoned and said she needed urgently to speak to me; she needed my advice about a problem she was having. She wanted to see me that very day; could I? I told her to meet me at two in the Barnes & Noble in Union Square. I was standing by one of the new-books tables in the front of the store when she came up to me. She was wearing faded jeans and a striped jersey under a hooded zippered sweatshirt; with her bangs partly hiding her eyes, her smile looked magnified. Slung over her shoulder was a cloth book bag emblazoned with the Columbia emblem; she was even skinnier than when I’d last seen her in Mexico six weeks before. My only friends have turned against me! she blurted. Those were the first words out of her mouth. I’ve made such a mess! She laughed as if embarrassed at herself, the damsel in distress. I suggested we go outside and talk in the park. It was a sunny fall day, just like the day of my father’s funeral, limpid azure sky, a few white clouds, trees patched with color, the air clean and
brisk, a beautiful day that turned Union Square, I told Aura, into the Luxembourg Gardens minus the statues of the queens. The queens have escaped, I went on, but look how they shed their long, brown stone dresses so that they could run away, do you see? See all those crumpled brown paper bags blown against the curbs and mixed in with the leaves, and balled into those trash cans over there, and that one standing up straight on that park bench next to that man eating a sandwich? Those are the queens’ dresses. Aura slowly looked around at all the paper bags, as if what I said might be true, and grinned. And where did the queens go? she asked. That’s what everyone’s trying to find out, I said. Well, maybe I can run away there, too, she said. We sat down on one of the benches and she told me about the problem she was having with her friends. During her first days at Columbia, two girls, inseparable best friends, neither of them first-year students, had adopted Aura as the proverbial third wheel. One, Moira, was from the Dominican Republic and New York, the other, Lizette, was from Venezuela. At an academic conference sponsored by the department, Moira, a very pretty mulatta but also a total neurótica and a
pinche obsesiva de controlar todo
, got a crush on a guy from Princeton who’d come to give a presentation on the subject of his dissertation, “The Representation of Childhood in Three Latin American Female Writers.” Here we digressed into a brief conversation about the three female writers: one, Clarice Lispector—Clarice L’Inspector, Aura called her—was a favorite of us both; she liked Rosario Castellanos, too, who I’d never read; Aura said the third, who I’d never heard of, was practically the only contemporary writer the professors in her department approved of, and that was because her novels
are so well suited to theoretical readings
. The Princeton guy had initially seemed interested in Moira, he’d even made plans with her to get together the next weekend, but ever since he’d gone back to New Jersey he’d been phoning Aura. Worse, he e-mailed Moira to tell her he’d fallen in love with Aura, going so far as to describe himself as a victim of the
flechazo,
love’s arrow, and Moira had immediately forwarded that e-mail to Aura and the other friend, Lizette, and probably to other people
in the department as well. After a series of distraught confrontations, Moira and Lizette had written Aura an e-mail formally ending their friendship, as if she’d signed some sort of friendship contract and now they were abrogating it. Aura had gone to both of their apartments, but her knocks had gone unanswered, though she was positive she’d heard muffled voices through the door at Lizette’s. So, here she was six weeks into her first semester, without friends, being unjustly portrayed as a man stealer.

After an interlude of apparently sage mulling, I asked, Did he pick that as his dissertation topic because he’s more interested in women’s issues than in any other subject, or because he wants other women to think he is?

Aura laughed. Oh, but there must be easier ways to pick up women, even in academia, she said. He’s obsessed with his mother, and I’m obsessed with my mother, so that’s what we talked about. But just because a guy is obsessed with his mom doesn’t make me want to go out with him. Probably the opposite.

Well, I’m not obsessed with my mom, I said, so you don’t have to worry about that.

Aura’s bag was heavy with books and her laptop. Was she going to the library? I asked. No, but she did have some reading to do. There wouldn’t be a day the rest of her life when she wouldn’t “have some reading to do.” She was thinking of going to a café. If she wanted, I told her, we could go back to my place to read for a while, and then I’d take her to dinner. We rode the subway back to Brooklyn and spent the rest of the afternoon and into the evening sitting in my apartment, she on the ugly blue- and-white striped couch that was destined to be the first piece of furniture she was going to jettison, and soon I was being lulled by the soft rapid clicking of her keyboard.

We had dinner in a restaurant on Fifth Avenue in Park Slope, a Mediterranean place; it was still warm enough to sit outside in the garden. I tried to kiss her on the sidewalk after. She turned her head away with a winsome smile. What, she wasn’t going to kiss me? I laughed, as if I didn’t care whether she kissed me or not, ever.
We walked back to my apartment and made love until just about dawn and again in the late morning after we woke up. But when she was leaving I actually said,

Will I see you again?

She looked at me, a little disconcerted, and said, Of course you will. She came back that night.

13

My mother and her friends belong to the Shaky Grasp Generation, Aura told me once. Of reality, she added. The post-’68 generation stranded in a Mexico City that had turned out not to be San Francisco, New York, or Paris after all, just the same old Mexico City, only more traumatized and disorienting than ever before.

Among the Shaky Grasp Generation’s Mexico City intelligentsia, an enthusiasm for psychoanalysis took hold. The promise of a higher, more just, and poetic organization of life—according to Aura—was now to be sought and perfected in the individual’s intimate core and within the circle of the nuclear family and closest friends, before, surely someday, it could be brought to the masses. Certain Mexican shrinks were almost obsessively discussed and gossiped about among her mother’s and uncle’s colleagues and friends. Some seduced and had love affairs with their patients. And it became a fashion, represented as an enlightened duty, among the Shaky Graspers to send their domestic servants—women and adolescent girls who were almost without exception uneducated and illiterate—into therapy. In Mexico, of course, even an administrative secretary can afford to hire at least a part-time housekeeper, because domestic workers are paid so little. Aura’s uncle was among the first to send his live-in “muchacha” to the family psychotherapist. If he and his wife and their children were in therapy, Leopoldo had explained, it could only benefit the household gestalt for the family servant to undergo therapy, too.

Those were the circumstances that inspired the novel that Aura worked on during the last year of her life, and that she’d tentatively titled
Memoirs of a Grad Student.
The grad student in the novel is named Alicia, a young woman from Mexico City who is studying for a PhD in literature in New York. Alicia doesn’t want
to be an academic, but doesn’t dare defy her mother to pursue her secret dream. Real-life Aura didn’t always keep her yearning to write a secret from her mother, but she knew her mother disapproved. Her mother believed that Aura needed to focus all of her mercurial energies on her academic career if she was going to succeed.

Aura completed two chapters of her novel, and left many fragments. The novel’s first chapter is about Alicia as a little girl in Mexico. There we meet her mother, Julieta; the family’s domestic servant, Irma; and Julieta’s former boyfriend, Marcelo Díaz Michaux, a psychoanalyst who has just returned to Mexico City after years of study and practice in France. Later in the novel Marcelo Díaz Michaux was going to convince Julieta that her housekeeper, Irma, needed to become his patient, and then he was going to send her to an experimental utopian asylum in France. Like real-life Ursula, Irma is a cheerful, talkative, and dwarfish woman who is described as having a ten-year-old’s body even though she’s about forty. I remember Aura laughing about what those first therapy sessions between Irma and Marcelo were going to be like. A household servant as witness to family secrets, a lonely little girl’s closest after-school friend and confidante, those would also have figured into Aura’s scheme.

The novel’s radical French asylum also had its counterpart: a renowned institution a few hours outside of Paris called La Ferte. Aura had already corresponded with the asylum’s eighty-seven-year-old director, arranging a visit so that she could research it for her novel. We were planning to go to La Ferte the next year, in the spring of 2008.

These were the last bits of her novel that Aura wrote, which I later found saved as a separate document in her computer:

Marcelo Díaz Michaux:

Even Julieta as the dead mother played a number on me. And now there’s no beating her … although we’ll see about that. I’m young—sixty is the new thirty—she’s dead, so who’s winning now? Of course, she has left me homeless, along with Alicia, my wife, and our child, having decided, at the last moment, to leave the house to our long-time maid, Irma Hernández, who now resides in France, somewhere outside Paris, where I’m flying to right now.

The Characters

Marcelo Díaz Michaux

Born in 1946 in Mexico City to a diplomat father and a devoted housewife. Raised in Mexico City by his mother (mostly). He attended (in Mexico) the French Lyceum where he met Julieta. At twenty-six, Marcelo went to study psychiatry at the Sorbonne. Two years later, when he received Julieta’s wedding invitation, his downfall began. Fifteen years later he returned to Mexico to set up his office to practice a kind of Lacanian psychotherapy. On the side he started working on an essay about clouds as an ideological construction.

Alicia—Julieta’s daughter

She was born in 1977: frond, rings, marooned, barreling up, lewd, skein, squall, crevice, drumstick, divot, crocuses, encroach, flinch, slither, daft, cadge, baksheesh, a spider spinning.

In 2008, Alicia is thirty-one.

Alicia is the same age Aura would have reached had she lived another nine months, until April 24, her birthday, in the spring of 2008. If all had gone according to our plan, we would have visited La Ferte in the spring of 2008, and Aura would have been pregnant.

Was I a model for Marcelo Díaz Michaux? On the surface, we didn’t seem to have much in common. She’d made him a decade older than me, which may have been an expression of anxiety, or an anxious joke, about our age difference. Of course Julieta couldn’t have been too happy about that nutjob, her old boyfriend, marrying her daughter. But as an eminent Parisian shrink, Marcelo
would have had a lot more money to spend than I did. Thus, in the summer of 2007, Marcelo and Alicia would have vacationed in Tulum, or somewhere in the Yucatán, like the Riviera Maya, on the placid Caribbean, not at a Pacific hippie beach with tumultuous surf in Oaxaca. Having gone to Tulum, and not to Oaxaca, Alicia is alive in the spring of 2008, when she turns thirty-one. Why didn’t Aura and I go back to Tulum that summer, where we spent five days during the first week of 2004, instead of to the beach in Oaxaca? Because I couldn’t afford to rent a cottage for two weeks in Tulum, though I could in Oaxaca.

frond
rings
marooned
barreling up
lewd
skein
squall
crevice
drumstick
divot
crocuses
encroach
flinch
slither
daft
cadge
baksheesh
a spider spinning

I memorized that list, and often meditated on it, sometimes focusing on just one word until I found Aura in it, and laughed as if she were there with me and we were sharing a giggle over what she’d meant by “drumstick.” Or I chanted the list of words and waited for whatever came: images, memories, other words, visions.

* * *

Crevice: cenote. On the dirt road just past our hotel in Tulum, before you entered the Maya Biosphere Reserve, there was a small cenote by the side of the road, a seemingly bottomless crevice filled with the crystalline water of a subterranean river. We pulled our rental car over—we were in bathing suits—and got out to swim alongside the local kids who climbed up into the scraggly trees on the banks to dive into the water. I did that, too, provoking shy grins and laughter, launching hairy-belly-hanging-over-bathing-suit and winter-pale barrel-torso into the air, making a big splash as I went under, driving my arms and kicking as hard as I could to see how deep I could go into the chilly purplish depths until, overcome by fear of accidentally swimming into a cave and not being able to escape, I turned and kicked frantically upward. The Yucatán peninsula, we learned from my travel book, is one immense slab of brittle limestone flattened millions of years ago by a giant meteor, the impact filling it with deep fissures and cracks through which all rainwater seeps, feeding the underground rivers running beneath the peninsula’s arid surface. Whenever there’s a collapse of rock above a watery void, or the shifting of tectonic plates opens a crevice in the limestone strata, a cenote is formed.

Portal to the underworld
is how Aura and I heard a guide at a Mayan ruin site explain a cenote to his package-tour gaggle, that one’s smooth pea-green surface hiding the sinkhole’s murky depths and the skeletons of human sacrifice victims tossed in after their hearts were cut out.
Hell-Ha
was the name Aura gave to the Mayan theme park Xel-Ha, a mobbed tourist trap that we went to because it promised cenotes and lagoons to snorkel in, though underwater there were many more pairs of human legs dangling and kicking from inner tubes floating by overhead than there were fish to see below, and lots of drifting, semitranslucent bits of crud.