Say Her Name (31 page)

Esto es tu culpa. This is your fault. Did Aura think that, at all, even once, during that last long night? That it was my fault? It was not my fault. Of course it was my fault. If I truly believed it was my fault, would I be able to go on living? Apparently, yes, I would be able to go on living, if I was only as afraid of death as I’d once been of dogs. Except I’m not afraid.

During those first weeks of death, Aura, I was pretty sure, made her presence known and even visible to me. But afterward I’d convinced myself, with my rational New York–New England skepticism, that I didn’t believe in the spirit world. I didn’t believe Aura could ever come back and sit in her Journey Chair, or that I’d ever come home and find her standing in the middle of the bedroom in her wedding dress, confused about where she’d been and how long she’s been away. Those first incidents, I argued myself into believing, were really projections of shock and longing. Everywhere I went those first few days after Aura’s death, for instance, I heard Beatles songs that she’d loved: “Octopus’s Garden” blaring from a car window just as we were going into Yosh and Gaby’s building, where friends arriving from New York and elsewhere were gathering that night; “Lovely Rita” in stalled traffic outside the Gayosso funeral home; “Lucy in the Sky” in the supermarket where we went to pick up liquor to bring back to the apartment after; there were several instances like that in the coming days that startled everybody, and that Aura’s Mexican friends commented on with knowing glances. Was Aura signaling to her friends with Beatles songs? The Beatles never went out of fashion in Mexico: wherever you go there, you hear the Beatles. So it was not even a surprising coincidence, right?

Three nights after her death, I was sitting in nearly the front row at an outdoor concert in the Zócalo that a friend took me to—people led me around from place to place during those days—where the singer was going to dedicate a song to Aura, and I looked up and saw, hovering over the stage and the centuries-old buildings overlooking the Zócalo, Aura’s face luminous in the night sky as if floating inside her own sphere of moonlight, her most sweetly excited, loving smile, and I smiled back, tears blurring her. I felt her love that night and was grateful for that, but I also had the idea that she was enjoying the novelty of death and its magic, that it was as if she still hadn’t understood what it meant. Two nights in a row she woke me in bed in the middle of the night, weightlessly on top of
me, the naked lusciousness of her breasts filling me with that same shy rapture as always because I thought that not even young Marilyn Monroe’s breasts could have been so buoyant and splendid as Aura’s, they always startled me, probably because she was so modest and even secretive about her breasts. And, oh, that sexy honey in her gaze when she said, the way she always used to, ¿Quieres hacer el amor? How I jerked off in our bed during those first few weeks without her, with a grim, self-hating, tear-it-out-by-the-fucking-root fury, or like an insatiably horny ape or psychotic dementia inmate; it was hideous. A friend’s mother made an appointment for me with a psychoanalyst, a thanatologist—an elegant Jewish-Mexican woman who was also a serious Buddhist, who gave me a prescription for sleeping pills. She was the one who told me about the Buddhist practice of visualizing recently lost loved ones inside a white glow to help them leave and find peace, and one day as I was trying to do this, I saw Aura struggling to make her way back to me, lifting her hands to me in a pleading gesture, looking bereft and terrified about “disappearing into the light.” A few days later, during spinning class at the gym, I saw Aura again, standing in the corner, extremely distinct though the transparent shade of a ghost, looking lost and as if she really understood now what death was going to mean, gesturing to me as she had inside the white glow, begging for help, for me not to let her disappear, but this time with a wild panicked confusion.

I suppose anyone would think it was reprehensible that I was back at my Condesa gym two weeks after Aura’s death, at a spinning class no less, mainly surrounded by women trying to keep their weight down and gay telenovela supporting-actor types. What a ridiculous fucking
fresa,
anyone would think. But not much else was left of my old daily routines, or was possible, without Aura. Spinning class, an hour of hard pumping on a stationary bicycle to pounding music, was at least a way to tire myself so that maybe I’d be able to sleep a bit, and also to sweat out my hangovers. In the middle of class one evening, pedaling away, I thought, What is this awful new feeling? Inside me, lodged between spine and sternum,
I felt a hard hollow rectangle filled with tepid blank air. An empty rectangle with sides of slate or lead, that’s how I visualized it, holding dead air, like the unstirred air inside an elevator shaft in a long-abandoned building. I thought I understood what it was, and told myself, The people who feel this way all the time are the ones who commit suicide. I wanted to just get off the bike and run away, or drop to the floor in fetal position, or raise my arm and call for help. But I kept pedaling hard, moving to the music and the instructor’s commands, and the rectangle full of dead air slowly faded. I didn’t feel
good
after, but it went away, that sensation of absolute emptiness and dread eroding me from within with geometric precision, like a mathematical proof of the meaninglessness of life, or of my life.

It comes back pretty often, but so far it has always gone away. During those first weeks and months after Aura’s death everything I did felt futile and absurd anyway. I sought out friends to drink with every night; they understood, and being Mexicans, they were willing to drink with me, not the same friends every night, of course, they took turns, I was the only one drinking as if trying to turn my blood to tequila. Stunned silent hungover days. Went to the gym, then to the cantinas. Once, well after midnight, when there was nobody around to drink with and I just wanted to drink a while more and no place else was open, I went into El Closet, the Condesa’s venerable strip club or table dance place—
un teibol,
as they call them—that often stayed open until dawn or even later. I hadn’t been back to that place since before Aura. I climbed the stairs, past the floor with the kitchen where you often spied the teiboleras in their glittering G-strings scarfing down meals, and then up to the next landing where, standing in the entrance to the dark foyer leading into the rooms for fucking, I was surprised to see Blanca, the homely, stumpy lady who attended to those rooms—bringing condoms and towels, cleaning up after—standing there in that same old disheveled white janitorial outfit and droopy dark cardigan. Blanca scowled at me and exclaimed
¡Pero Fraaank!
¡Esto es PECADO! ¡Tu estás CASADO! This is a SIN! You’re MARRIED! It wasn’t just that she remembered my name after all this time, it was the realization that
news of my having found love and a wife had somehow reached her and that she cared, that’s what blew me away, left me momentarily speechless. Blanca, who I’d once spotted trudging home through the tree-bowered streets of the Condesa at around nine in the morning, stooped back, stubby legs, having finally finished her chores at El Closet, probably headed to a Metro stop that would carry her to some distant slum barrio—this troll of a woman with her horrible job had been happy to find out about me and Aura, she’d been happy for me.
There’s a man who needs to be married, who would make a good husband.
Could that really be what Blanca had thought, observing me in El Closet back then? Now, seeing me come up those stairs for the first time in five years, she was indignant that I’d betrayed her illusions. ¡Tu estás CASADO! But Blanca, I finally responded, it’s not what you think, honestly, I’m just here to have a drink, and I turned into the club.

I sat at a table in a corner, far from the stage. At the tables and banquettes against the walls, as always, las teiboleras sat in groups, their own little cliques, talking among themselves, trying to get through their long, tedious shifts, occasionally looking out across the room for customers who seemed as if they might be worth soliciting a drink or even a lap dance from, if not something more; some getting up to patrol the floor like sultry sleepwalkers, or heading to the dressing rooms because soon it would be their turn to perform on stage. Some sat with customers at their tables, or were lap dancing for them in the shadows in the far corners of the room. Waiters in white shirts and black pants continually circled, pressuring customers to buy drinks for the dancers; a middle-aged woman who sold cigarettes, candies, little stuffed animals, and cheap perfume from her vendor’s tray; the women in dowdy schoolgirl uniforms who walked the floor selling lap-dance tickets, or led teiboleras by the hand to customers who’d requested them. And sometimes a teibolera headed to Blanca’s back rooms with a customer. On the stage, at the edge of my vision, almost as if through the wrong end of a telescope, teiboleras, one at a time, were doing their thing: dancing, taking off their tops, tossing them
to customers, some but not all taking off their bottoms, writhing on the floor, performing their pole gymnastics. Cheap perfume, a smoky female muskiness, the warm heavy air like an intimate emanation from all the naked voluptuousness in that room. In my loneliest post-Z, pre-Aura years, I’d sometimes fantasized that I might marry a teibolera. Now and then you met one who was putting herself through college. Once, in another teibol place, I met a teibolera who was studying literature at the UNAM, who talked about Dostoyevsky and Rimbaud, and asked me to send her a copy of
Finnegans Wake
when I was back in New York because she couldn’t find one in Mexico, and I actually did, though I never heard back from her and doubt that it was her real address, in Las Portales, or even her real name that she’d given me; I’d known that, but mailed her the book anyway. There in El Closet one night, long ago, I’d taken the lady with the vendor’s tray aside, known to everyone just as Mami, and asked her who of all the girls working that night would make a good wife. Mami took my question seriously, her eyes slowly panning the room from one teibolera to another until she turned back to me with the gleefully wicked grin of a long retired puta and said,
Ninguna
. Not one.

It was a different cigarette vendor working that night, not Mami, and I didn’t recognize any of the dancers from five years before, either; they’d all moved on in the years since I’d met Aura. I rebuffed all drink solicitations and made it clear that I didn’t want company. But then a very young woman, in red lingerie, with chalk-pale, thin arms, long black hair, a gentle pretty face, makeup plastered over pock-scarred cheeks, sat down at my table and softly said, I’ve been watching you. Why are you so sad? I told her that something terrible had happened but I didn’t want to talk about it, that I just wanted to drink alone. But she must have gotten me to talk a little, because I remember that she told me that she was nineteen, which could have been a lie, that she was a Protestant, and that she was only working there to be able to support her child, a little girl, which was the same reason, I knew, that almost every one of those women, certainly the Mexicans, worked there. Just
before she got up to leave she said, I can tell you have a noble heart. Something good is going to happen to you.

I’d thanked her for those words and told myself, That was like being visited by an angel. I didn’t disagree that, at least during my years with Aura, my heart had loved in a way that could be called noble. It seemed at least possible that a broken heart could still be noble, but I don’t think a totally shattered one can be. If that angel teibolera could see me now, going on two years later, would she still say what she’d said that night? Was there anything left of my noble heart, as I hid out in our apartment in deep winter in the weeks after the accident? Might her prophecy ever come true? But the truth is that teiboleras and whores tend to be wrong about many things.

Aura didn’t know about my past in the teibols. There were things she kept from me about herself, too, and that I didn’t find out about until after—nothing nearly as sleazy as the teibols, though, just the modest, bad-girl transgressions of adolescence. Don’t tell Frank what I used to be like, she begged Brasi, her old schoolmate from the Colegio Guernica, pulling him aside in the cantina where we’d gone to watch a telecast of a World Cup match from Germany with Fadanelli and his friends, including Brasi, who Aura hadn’t seen in years. What did she mean? What didn’t she want me to know about? Brasi told me later, when I was back in Mexico a year after her death, that during high school Aura had for a while had two boyfriends at once. One of these was the most conceited guy in their class: handsome, rich, a jock, phony, and shallow—yes, they have them in Mexico too. According to Brasi, the guy fell totally in love with Aura but she made a public clown out of him: lying to him, ridiculing him, putting the horns on him, sharing with everyone his conceited and moronic confidences, a kind of show trial of which only he was unaware. There was a kind of justice to it but, carajo, it was really cruel, said Brasi, though that didn’t stop him from chuckling, these fourteen or so years later. The other boyfriend, though, he couldn’t have been too happy about it. Was he Dos Santos? I asked. Brasi
said he didn’t know, that he didn’t remember. It was hard to believe that Aura could have acted that way, there must have been more to it. But Brasi had known Aura since elementary school, and now he was a philosophy professor at the UNAM; I knew he wasn’t just making it up. Aura, poor baby, had never even mentioned Brasi to me until we ran into him that night, as if she’d actually been in dread of what he could tell me about her at fifteen and had wanted to hide his existence. A few times since Aura’s death, I’d met people who’d known her—though usually not that well—people I encountered in places like that cavernous cantina in Colonia Roma, La Covadonga, that had become so trendy and where people of around Aura’s age came up to me out of the blue to introduce themselves, to offer their condolences, and sometimes to share their memories. Some had used words like
contestatária,
a back-talker, lippy, cutting, sarcastic, standoffish, or aloof. They spoke as if everyone knew those things about Aura, though I’d never heard anyone describe her like that when she was alive. Usually these recollections were offered in a tone of affectionate respect, as if they were saying, Oh, yes, Aura was so smart and funny, but you really had to watch out because, boy, did she have a fast, sharp tongue. I’d occasionally gotten a dose of that sharpness. Don’t speak to me the way your mother speaks to Rodrigo, was how I’d usually respond, and sometimes that made her retreat, abashed, or else she’d fire back, Well don’t be as stupid as Rodrigo, then.