Authors: Francisco Goldman
Odette and Fabis’s sister found an air ambulance service in Toluca, just outside Mexico City, that would fly to Huatulco. Time was short, it was already late afternoon, and the two of them were rushing to a bank branch that was still open to withdraw the twelve thousand dollars in cash that the ambulance service was demanding.
Inside, Aura said that her
nalgas,
her ass, hurt from lying on the surfboard. Clearly, that meant that she wasn’t going to be paralyzed. I whispered passionately into her ear that she was going to be okay and kissed her face until a nurse told me to step aside. It was strange to observe the nurses standing over Aura, working the manual respirator, watching the monitor, chatting away to each other about their everyday lives. But we were all cheered up now, because if Aura was complaining that her ass hurt, surely the sensation in her limbs must be returning—it was unthinkable that she wouldn’t recover. An air ambulance was coming for her. It was already past dusk. Supposedly a Red Cross ambulance was finally on its way, too. In Mexico City, Fabiola’s sister had found a spinal cord specialist, the father of a friend, who was one of the very best in Mexico City and who was waiting for Aura at the Hospital Ángeles, in Pedregal, one of the city’s wealthiest areas.
But there was a new problem: the air ambulance couldn’t take
off from Toluca because the Huatulco airport was denying permission to land—they were closing for the night.
The young doctor said that if Aura spent the night in Pochutla, she wouldn’t live.
The Huatulco airport official was named Fabiola, too. On her phone Fabis told her, If my cousin dies you’re going to have that on your conscience the rest of your life. Johnny Silverman, my lawyer friend in New York, was now applying pressure, too. His law firm had worked on corporate cases with one of the most powerful and connected lawyers in all Mexico, and he convinced this lawyer to call the Huatulco airport. After his call, the Huatulco Fabiola relented and said the airport would stay open until midnight.
The ambulance came at about nine, two hours later than arranged. The Pochutla hospital couldn’t relinquish its only neck brace so Fabis and I dashed out to a pharmacy to buy one. The Red Cross ambulance didn’t have a working respirator, either. The young doctor, who was actually an intern from Guadalajara recently assigned to the hospital, volunteered to accompany us, with the manual respirator. Finally Aura, wrapped in a bedsheet, was lifted off the surfboard onto the ambulance gurney. Whoever owned that surfboard had apparently given it up for Aura.
The airport at Huatulco was about twenty miles away on a slow, winding road. It took us nearly an hour. We came into the airport through a back entrance, amid vapor lamps and steamy tropical air, and I heard the whine of an idling jet engine. We were back in the twenty-first century, or had even leapt ahead to the next one, because the air ambulance looked to me like something out of a sci-fi movie; in my memory its crew of young medics wore shiny flight suits, though I doubt that’s true. The lead doctor was a beautiful young woman with the cheerfully reassuring manner of the Good Witch of the North. The young doctor from Pochutla wouldn’t even accept money from Fabis for a taxi back to Mazunte; off he went, after a round of heartfelt and hopeful good-byes, carrying the manual respirator, to stay at the house of a friend. Aura
was transferred to a new stretcher and covered snugly in a silvery thermal blanket. The beautiful doctor said that Aura’s vital signs were good and that she was sure she was going to be fine. Once we were in the air, she said that Aura didn’t even need a respirator. It was true: she was managing to breathe on her own. Aura looked at me and asked:
Mi amor, ¿me puedo dormir un poquito? Can I sleep a little bit?
That might be the last full sentence Aura ever addressed to me; I don’t remember any other. She slept awhile. So as not to wake her, I restrained myself from pouring whispered words of love and reassurance into her ear.
The last ambulance took us from Toluca all the way across Mexico City to Pedregal in the south. I rode in back with Aura, and Fabis sat up front with the driver. That last ambulance was austere and basic, with a metallic interior. Aura was back on a respirator. With us in back was a doctor who looked barely into his twenties, quick and sure in his movements; he seemed alert, serious and capable, pale, with delicate sharp features and glasses, Jewish probably. He was intently watching the monitor, reading Aura’s vital signs. Then he said, his voice abrupt and tense, I don’t like how this looks. The optimism of the air ambulance—such a mystery to me now—was gone. Now I can’t say whether I am grateful for those last moments of hope and relief, or feel that we were cruelly deceived. Neither, I suppose.
Juanita and Rodrigo were waiting for us outside the hospital emergency entrance. Some of the tías were there, too. It was about two in the morning. Juanita, arms folded, glaring at me, spoke her accusation. This was how I’d brought her daughter back to her, the daughter she’d given away to me to protect in marriage, as I’d vowed to do. This was how I’d returned Aura to her mother.
Aura was awake. It was as if she’d saved up all her energy to be able to give her mother this last cheerful-plucky declaration: Fue una tontería, Mami. It was a stupidity, Mami.
I think the renowned surgeon-specialist and his team of
doctors knew almost right away. I don’t remember how long it took before they came out to speak with us in the waiting room. The surgeon-specialist was a tall, corpulent man. He told us that Aura had broken and dislocated the second, third, and fourth vertebrae of her spinal column, and that they had pressed into her spinal column and severed the nerves that controlled her breathing and her torso and limbs. It was probable that she was going to be completely paralyzed for life. They were trying to stabilize her spinal cord so that its swelling might go down. Then they would decide if there was any way to operate. She’d ingested ocean water, too, and they were working to clear it from her lungs. I pleaded with the doctor. I told him that Aura had had sensation in her limbs off and on throughout the day, that in the air ambulance her vital signs had been fine and that she’d even breathed on her own. I told the doctor that she was going to be fine, and that he had to believe me, and I remember his stricken eyes helplessly observing me—me in my dirty, sweaty T-shirt and bathing suit.
None of us were allowed into the intensive care unit to see Aura. The medical teams needed to work without interruption. Fabis went home with Juanca to sleep. I don’t remember anyone else in the waiting room other than Juanita and Rodrigo. They weren’t speaking to me. They sat on one side of the waiting room, on the vinyl couches, and I sat alone on the other. The light in the room was very dim. We were on an upper floor. I couldn’t phone anyone because I had no charger. Juanca had promised to bring me one in the morning. At one point I went out and walked in the long empty corridors and stopped into a little chapel to pray. I swore that if Aura survived I would live a religiously devout life and show my gratitude to God every day. Besides noticing it, I don’t remember having any thought about Juanita and Rodrigo keeping their distance from me. My thoughts were only about Aura. If she was going to be paralyzed for some time, I would find a way to get her into the best rehab facility in the United States. I would read to her every day and get her to dictate her writing
to me; those were the kinds of thoughts I was having. Now and then I got up and went to the shuttered window of the intensive care unit, picked up the receiver, pressed the button, and asked if I could come inside to see my wife, and every time I was told that visitors weren’t allowed until the morning.
28
What did you think about that long night, my love, as you lay there dying, as horribly wounded as any soldier in war, and alone?
Did you blame me? Did you think of me with love even once? Did you see or hear or feel me loving you?
29
It wouldn’t be until the next morning, when Aura was in a coma, that I was finally let in to see her. The eminent surgeon’s assistant, a bulldoggish woman, told me that during the night Aura had had two heart attacks. I finally had a chance to press my lips to Aura’s beautiful ear to thank her for the happiest years of my life, and to tell her that I would never stop loving her. Then the assistant surgeon brusquely ordered me out again. Ten or fifteen minutes later, stepping back in through the white curtain, I instantly sensed a vacuumed-out stillness around Aura’s bed, a nuclear-blast brightness, and the assistant surgeon told me that Aura had died minutes before. I went to her. Her lightless eyes. I kissed her cheeks that were already like cool clay. My sobs must have been heard throughout the hospital.
30
Juanca missed the funeral because he went with a friend out to Mazunte to bring back our things. They found the house just as we’d left it. They packed up everything, even Aura’s shampoo. Aura always just closed the lid of her laptop when she was done working for the day, so when I opened it later, I found the screen as she’d left it. There were two open documents, the latest version of her story about the schoolteacher, and something new, probably the start of yet another short story, titled “
¿Hay señales en la vida?”
or Does Life Give Us Signs?
31
At first the district prosecutor seems to misunderstand why I’ve come, and why my lawyer made this appointment. He seems determined to defend himself against, I realize, accusations of a negligent or mishandled investigation. In his little office, in the gnashing light caused by that maladroitly hung fan, he insists that he and his assistants have thoroughly investigated Aura’s fatal injury at Mazunte. They’ve interviewed witnesses—the owners and employees of restaurants on the beach, the medical staff at the hospital in Pochutla—and have found nothing to indicate that it was anything but an accident. I tell him that I know it was an accident but that I’m here to give my required legal statement. I want to tell him my story, the one that, over the last year, I’ve ceaselessly refined into a narrative in which my own actions and lack of action, too passive, too assertive, too intrinsic to my character, all weigh as evidence. There is much else that I don’t tell him about—the premonitory signs, the adolescent and later fixations on death in Aura’s diaries, the mysterious pull that that stretch of beaches on the Oaxacan coast exerted on Aura as if her destiny were somehow foretold in its geography. What was I doing, at my age, bodysurfing in those waves? I should have known how dangerous it was. I knew the counterarguments to this, that had I been the kind of man who “acted his age,” then I would have been a different person, one Aura wouldn’t have fallen in love with. True enough. She’d broken her neck in the waves as a direct result of my being myself. In that sense, I
was
the wave.
But what about free will? Aura was a better swimmer than me, she chose to bodysurf, she chose to try to ride that wave; it was
her
impulse. Her whole adult life and even earlier she had struggled against the attempts of other people to control and to define her. So do you or I have any right to try to control her in death? All of that is true, but the fact remains, if I hadn’t joined her in the water when I did, if I hadn’t surfed a wave first, if I hadn’t been there being myself, she wouldn’t have flung herself into that wave.
There are dangerous beaches on this coast, says the district prosecutor. Zipolite is called la Playa de la Muerte because every year there are so many fatalities there. Puerto Escondido, Ventanilla, even San Agustinillo can be dangerous. But not Mazunte. Oh sure, you can get rolled and banged up in the waves and get hurt. But Aura is the first fatality at Mazunte in years. It was incredibly bad luck, what happened to your wife, says the prosecutor, well, that’s how it seems to me.
He has the numbers. The district prosecutor goes down the list of beaches and notes how many have died at each one in recent years—I don’t remember the figures, except that at Zipolite there’d been a lot, and at least a couple fatalities at every other beach, except Mazunte, where there were none, until Aura.
An accident so freakish it has happened to only one person, Aura, and to not one other of the countless swimmers who’ve bodysurfed at Mazunte for years and years, day after day. Aura has been most unfortunate. She died because I was being myself, an eternal adolescent, a
niñote.
She died because, bursting with love, I decided to join her in the water. But all of that is also an evasion of the TRUTH, against which my diligently constructed narrative collapses like a huge wave of nothing. My being myself shouldn’t have been enough to kill Aura. Aura’s being herself, launching herself into that wave for
whatever reason,
also should not have been enough to kill her. The utter freakishness and meaninglessness of it—there is the TRUTH. That day, after I leave the district prosecutor’s office, that seems even harder to bear than my own responsibility.
It turns Aura’s death into something that will never stop happening, as if the ludicrous fan in the district prosecutor’s office is always blowing her death out into the universe, as if the sun and light of the world are now like the light in that office, frenetically gnashing at the earth, at the night, at my sight whether my eyes are open or shut.
32
The front steps of our building in Brooklyn were unusually steep, and because I have a gimpy knee from an old high school football injury, I’d take every step going down with that leg first, keeping it stiff, lowering it like a crutch. Descending at my side, Aura would imitate me, exaggerating, lurching like a cripple, her face turned up at me with a funny look of strained concentration. On cold damp days, when my knee ached, I’d limp a bit, and Aura, walking next to me, would imitate my limp, matching her steps precisely to mine. To people behind us on the sidewalk we must have looked pretty comical.
All my life I’ve been a tripper and stumbler. Frankie, lift your feet when you walk, don’t drag your feet—when I was a boy, my father was always on me about that. But Aura thought it was hilarious whenever I stumbled against a curb or a raised crack in the sidewalk; she’d laugh like I’d performed a clown pratfall just for her. One reason she found it so funny, I thought, was because she never tripped. She was so light on her feet. Icy sidewalks did give her trouble, though, and then it would be my turn to giggle. I tripped and stumbled but I never fell: I always quickly regained my footing, like a halfback bouncing off a tackle, I was at least still limber enough for that.