Say Her Name (38 page)

At the memorial service, Fabis, her mother, and I sat in a pew behind Rodrigo, Katia, her husband, and their three children. The
ponytailed baby girl kept leaving her mother’s side to crawl along the back of the pew and climb onto Rodrigo’s lap where she would grab his cheeks with her little hands. He beamed with the pride of a youthful grandfather. Katia’s husband kept reaching out to take Katia’s hand, and he snuck her quick pecks on the cheek. She looked beautiful. Though I rarely see Katia, I thought, whenever I do, I feel more fondness for her. She moves me. People do change, they grow, and it also helps to have a good-guy husband who adores you.

27

The summer before the last one, Aura and I had stayed with Jaime and Isabel and their little children for a few days at San Agustinillo, the beach adjacent to Mazunte. They, along with another couple—a poetry professor and his wife—and some friends from Madrid, had rented a row of bungalows on the beach. Aura had taken a few classes with the professor at the UNAM. He had a meek yet gallant demeanor. I guess it was no secret that he’d had a crush on Aura when she was his student ten years before—Aura had known it. I saw him squinting at her with a lingering, slightly befuddled expression, and knew he was thinking something like, Seems like just yesterday. Later, when we’d fallen silent listening to the surf, the professor spoke about his friend the poet Manuel Ulacia, who’d drowned one night, elsewhere on the Pacific coast, a few years before.

Down the beach, boulders and rocks jutted and hooked sharply into the ocean, barricading the waves in a way that, close to shore, created a shallow swathe that children could play in.

But out at the steep, jagged end of the promontory, currents swirled. That’s where, the next day, the professor was swimming when we heard his panicked yelps for help,
Auxilio, auxilio!
Jaime and I scrambled along the rocks and clumsily plunged-flopped into the water, too far from the professor to help him, but Aura darted to the top of a high boulder and launched herself into the air and landed like a ray from the sky alongside the professor and swam him to safety, her arm around his chest. That the professor hadn’t been in any danger of being pulled out to sea and had just lost his nerve in the current’s pull and was very sheepish afterward didn’t diminish Aura’s heroism. Aura saved my life, the professor kept repeating, looking bewildered, as if he wanted to make light of it
but couldn’t. Aura saved your life! we all clamored. Mi amor, what were you thinking? I heard him shouting for help, she said, and I just reacted! Impulsive, yes, with no time for fantasy or reflection. The fast fearless impulsiveness of a superior human, is what I honestly thought. My Aura! What a mother she’s going to be! We had hearty laughs, too, at my and Jaime’s expense, how the professor would have drowned if saving him had been up to us. I was disappointed when everybody, within hours, after lunch and their siestas, no longer wanted to talk about how Aura had saved the professor’s life, as if now it was more important to protect the professor’s feelings, or maybe his wife and children’s feelings, by not referring to the incident anymore.

But what if it really had been a riptide and it had swept the professor and Aura out into the ocean and drowned them both? What would we be saying about Aura’s impulsiveness now?

Impulsiveness: an ungovernable excess bubbling up from within.

Originally we were going to go to Mexico in late May or June, but then Aura decided to teach a summer-semester Spanish class at Columbia. She was taking care of her CV again, the extra money would come in handy, and she was in no hurry to get to Mexico. Our apartment in Mexico needed some work, though, so it was agreed that I’d go down in early June for a week or so to get things ready. Aura made me a to-do list: I was to find a carpenter to build bookshelves; install some needed extra lighting; we needed stuff for the kitchen; she needed a desk. I was looking forward to being in Mexico on my own like in the old days. But a few reprobate nights in the cantinas and terrible hangovers later, I felt baffled by myself. What had I actually been hoping for? I missed Aura; she missed me. We were running up a huge bill with our cell phone calls and I complained about it in an e-mail. She wrote back, This is why we work and earn salaries, Francisco. I bought her a table-desk, with a dark reddish finish. I tracked down the carpenter who seemed the most esteemed, to build bookshelves, and flew home.

* * *

On July 3, 2007, at about half past two in the afternoon, Aura went out the door of our Brooklyn apartment for the last time, and I brought our luggage down to the waiting car. Her new multicolored quilt had been left behind, folded in the closet; her unseated bicycle was double-locked to the iron fence. By four, we were in the airline’s lounge at Newark, having received one free upgrade thanks to my frequent flier status after decades of hoarding miles. I told Aura she could go first class, of course; I’d ride in economy. We drank champagne and toasted the summer.

By the end of our first week back in Mexico, Aura began to feel freer and to enjoy herself. We went out, saw our friends. She was reading Juan Carlos Onetti’s novel
La Vida Breve.
She’d been devouring Onetti’s writing all spring. The short story she was writing, in Spanish, was about a young man who drops out of a U.S. doctoral program to take a teaching job at a secondary school in a remote part of Mexico; the school and the faculty seem imagined by a Mexican Kafka—a reviewer later wrote precisely that, after it was published—as does the main character’s fraught nighttime telephone conversations with his father in Mexico City. That story’s title is “
La vida está en otra parte.
” She worked at her new desk downstairs, by the slid-open glass door to the patio. She loved her apartment. She was sure now that sometime in the near future we’d be spending more than just summers and school vacations here, and that was fine with me. If her writing career was primarily going to be in Spanish, as Aura had now decided it was going to be, it would make sense to live in Mexico for a while, and if we were going to have a baby, she wanted to be near her mother.

Just around the corner from where we lived, a brand-new shopping mall had opened on Patriotismo. Our neighborhood was about a half hour walk from the Condesa, and before it hadn’t even had a convenience store or anywhere close by to eat except for a few small, very humble comida corrida places and sidewalk stands, but
no place to get a decent cup of coffee. Now we had a Starbucks, a Sanborns, an Italianni’s, and some of those other chain restaurants that Aura had childhood nostalgia for, all beneath one roof, along with the usual mall stores. A few times for lunch we went and rode the escalator up to the food court and, one time, stayed to watch some of the martial arts movie playing on the giant wall of video panels, starring the late Brandon Lee. One evening Aura bought a tube of Chinese pick-up sticks in Sanborns and we took it into the mall’s T.G.I. Friday’s where, over tequilas and beers, we played. It was surprisingly absorbing, requiring a pickpocket’s deftness and steadiness of touch. Aura won every game, by a wide margin. That cardboard tube of pick-up sticks is on the altar now. But when I poured the sticks out onto the dining table, instead of the numinous glow that I seem to have expected to emerge from the uncapped tube, some surviving glimmer of that sweet hour or trace of Aura’s featherlight touch and laughter, it brought back nothing. I was alone with a pile of plastic sticks.

Maybe memory is overrated. Maybe forgetting is better. (Show me the Proust of forgetting, and I’ll read him tomorrow.) Sometimes it’s like juggling a hundred thousand crystal balls in the air all at once, trying to keep all these memories going. Every time one falls to the floor and shatters into dust, another crevice cracks open inside me, through which another chunk of who we were disappears forever. I wouldn’t sell that tube of sticks for a thousand dollars.

In Starbucks, Aura stopped at the shelves where retail goods were displayed, held up a turquoise coffee press, and gave me that smile, eyebrows entreatingly raised, that she’d use whenever she wanted me to buy something not very sensible. She already had a coffee press back in the apartment except it was black. I asked how much it cost. She told me. Now we were supposed to spend forty dollars just to bring this splash of shiny turquoise into our kitchen?

You already have one just like it, I said.

She made a disappointed face and put it back. That coffee press now looms like another uncanny sign or clue that I missed and can’t decipher. Given the role her old coffee press was destined to play in our trip to Mazunte, it seems more like a clue, or evidence, though not in the ordinary forensic sense.

If I’d bought her the turquoise coffee press … ?

July 3, 2008, one year to the day after Aura and I flew from Newark Airport to Mexico, and I’m back: same evening flight to Mexico, same complimentary upgrade. On the flight to Mexico City, I have to fill in the immigration form, which requires that I identify myself as either married or single. I mark married, as I always do on such forms. Three weeks later, on July 22, I fly to Puerto Escondido and the next day take a taxi to the district prosecutor’s office in Puerto Ángel, on a side street, back from the rancid harbor.

A sign on a closed door at the end of a short corridor off the front door reads,
Oficina de Investigación Criminal.
But the district prosecutor takes me into a small windowless office on the left, where there is a desk with the usual clunky, old desktop computer. The light in the room has a flickering, snippy quality, as if the air itself is rapidly blinking. There’s a reason: the plastic blades of the revolving fan have been fastened
beneath
the two illuminated lightbulbs on the ceiling fixture they twirl from. The district prosecutor is a lanky young man with a nut-brown, chiseled face and shiny black hair, combed straight back. I will tell him my story that day as I haven’t to anybody since hours after Aura’s death, when I told it to that woman in the delegación who typed it all down and then couldn’t use it as testimony because I didn’t have my passport. That story has been running silently inside me ever since, but changing, too, seeking and finding its path, like a wild torrent narrowing into a stream: a story in which I assume what seems the proper amount of responsibility and blame, not as much as Juanita and Leopoldo assigned to me, probably not enough to send me to prison under any but corrupt circumstances, but enough to ensure that I’ll never
have a respite from self-condemnation, horror, and shame. But what the district prosecutor in Puerto Ángel will tell me that day when I’m done will alter that narrative again.

The house we’d rented in Mazunte was large enough to accommodate the several friends we hoped would come and spend at least part of the two weeks there with Aura and me and her cousin Fabiola and her boyfriend. Originally, Aura’s friend Mariana was going to come, too. Mariana worked out of her own little apartment as a masseuse and mystic healer in the Hindu tradition; in university she’d studied to be a Lacanian psychoanalyst until one day, as she tells it, she admitted to herself that instead of sublimating the ego, she wanted to get rid of it. We were in Pata Negra when Mariana told us that she wasn’t going to be able to come. She was having a hard time making ends meet and couldn’t afford a vacation. She said she didn’t want to go to Mazunte anyway, because the waves were too rough.

What? But Mazunte is a safe beach! That’s how we—Aura and I, Fabis and Jaunca—unanimously answered Mariana. Because Mazunte is famously situated in a curving cove that impedes the waves rolling in from the ocean enough to diminish their size, momentum, and strength, it’s considered safe for swimmers. Ventanilla, and even San Agustinillo, open to the ocean, are the dangerous beaches. You take your life into your hands when you swim at Ventanilla, to say nothing of Puerto Escondido or, farther down the coast, Zipolite, notorious for its riptides and known as la Playa de la Muerte because so many drown there every year, though people keep going, it being still the favored beach of hippies, druggie drifters, Euro nudists, and the like.

I know Mazunte may be safe compared to those other places, said Mariana. But you can’t just have a peaceful swim there. Maybe I’m just getting old, but I don’t like being knocked and rolled around in the waves and always having sand inside my bathing suit, in my hair, even in my teeth.

Aura said that if you swim out past where the waves break, the water is calm. That was where Aura always swam. Mariana said that she much preferred the Caribbean, especially Tulum with its placid sea, its yoga retreats. Yes, I like Tulum, too, I said. We all liked Tulum. But who could afford to rent a beach house in Tulum for two weeks? The airfare was more expensive, too, as much from Mexico City as from New York. But we all loved Mazunte. The waves could be rough, but they didn’t scare me. Going into the water there, I never felt that trepidation in the pit of my stomach, like I did whenever I even thought about swimming at Puerto Escondido. The waves at Mazunte seemed about the same as at Wellfleet, on Cape Cod, where I’d learned to bodysurf as a teenager.

The first few times we went to that coast, Aura and I stayed in Puerto Escondido, for the hotels, but in the mornings we’d take a microbus to Mazunte and its beach, about a forty-five-minute drive, and a taxi back in the evening. A few years before I’d met Aura, I’d spent the millennial New Year in Puerto Escondido with Jaime and Isabel; when we arrived people were talking about the rogue wave that had dashed three surfers into the cliffs at the far end of the beach the day before, killing them. My first morning, I went swimming and then directly to breakfast at a café on the beach where the waiter, a scruffy Italian, said that the last time he’d gone into the ocean there, he’d come out bleeding from both ears. And Isabel told me about a high school teacher she’d had who was spending his vacation in Puerto Escondido and was out walking on the beach one night when a freakishly large wave crashed in and swept him out into the water and drowned him. At night, in my hotel room, I lay in bed listening to those waves, which now sounded to me as if they were grinding bones. I didn’t go into the water again at Puerto Escondido until more than four years later, when Aura and I took a surfing lesson there during the three-day weekend trip when I proposed. A wave that caught me by surprise as I was on the board trying to push myself up onto my knees drove me off the front and my head
struck the sandy bottom with a force that stunned me, sending a hard jolt through my spine; shaken and wobbly, I went and sat on the beach. The instructor laughed. He said that Aura was a more natural surfer than I was. She was stretched out upon and clinging to a board and the instructor, standing in the waist-high water, was pulling her around like a child on a sled and releasing her to ride in on the gliding foam of waves that had broken farther out. It turned out that he wasn’t an authorized instructor. He’d lied to us and borrowed the surfboards without permission from the shop of a friend who ran a legitimate surfing school. Our lesson ended when the friend’s mother ran onto the beach shouting at him that he was going to get us killed and to bring the boards back that instant.