Say Her Name (37 page)

Aura said, I’m only here for one reason, to help my mother. If Papi leaves her now, when she’s so vulnerable, it will destroy her. If there’s a way to repair our situation and that will help Papi want to stay, then I have to try to ask for your help. But if you know my mother at all—she looked directly at Katia—then you know she is never going to apologize first.

Katia and her husband agreed to continue our negotiations when we came back from New York that next summer. In the end it was all for naught. In the spring, about a month before Aura’s
thirtieth birthday, Rodrigo left. One late morning while Juanita was at work and he was supposed to be, Rodrigo came back into the apartment, hastily packed his things in boxes, carried them out to the car, and drove away. He snuck out like a rat, said Ursula, the housekeeper, on the phone to Aura. It wasn’t even his own car that he escaped in; he took Aura’s little red Chevy, which he’d lately been driving as if it were his own. Where is he going to live, scoffed Aura, under a bridge? That joke became her way of making light of the loss. I hope Rodrigo is sleeping comfortably tonight, under his bridge. We didn’t know where he was living; probably with Katia, we reasoned. I was surprised at first that this second paternal desertion hadn’t affected Aura as I’d feared it would, stirring up old trauma, but what Aura had always insisted on turned out to be true: only one Dad narrative ran through her life. To her, Rodrigo was first and foremost “the husband,” and now he wasn’t going to be. A few days after he moved out, we flew down to Mexico, the first of two such trips we made that final spring, leaving Friday afternoon after Aura’s last class. On those weekends, instead of going home to our own apartment in Escandón at night, we stayed with Juanita. I slept alone in the foldout couch in the study and Aura slept with her mother in her bed.

Though supposedly nobody had stayed in our Escandón apartment since I’d been forced by Juanita and her lawyers to vacate it, Fabis, who lived across the corridor, told me in an e-mail that there’d been a few nights when she’d seen the light on in our bedroom. Coming home late from a night out with Juanca, her boyfriend, when she’d stood outside the door sentimentally scratching at the steel panel alongside it with her key—that was how she and Aura used to summon each other—and saying Aura’s name, the lights, she said, had flickered on and off. Spirits in the electricity, signaling by turning lights on and off, wasn’t that a cliché of ghost stories? That last summer, Aura and I had flown down on July 3. A year later,
when I flew down to Mexico alone for the first anniversary, I again left on July 3, on that same evening flight from Newark, and went directly to Fabis’s apartment.

Our apartment had a long horizontal window of frosted glass facing the corridor and, upstairs on the sleeping loft, a vertical window covered by a curtain. The lights were off when I got there but I stood outside our door, stroking it with my hand, whispering to Aura. No lights flickered on and off. Fabis said that she’d last seen the lights on only about a month before. It was hard to believe that Juanita might have come and slept there, in our bed, which I’d left behind. But sometime during the last few weeks someone had disconnected the telephone answering machine. I’d been phoning from Brooklyn for months, to listen to Aura’s hoarse-chipper greeting, until one day it didn’t pick up, and then it never did again. But Fabis had already found out, from one of the tías, what had happened. Rodrigo had taken the answering machine to use in the new apartment he was renting somewhere in the city. He was still driving Aura’s little red Chevy, too. In the weeks after Aura’s death, Rodrigo had stayed by Juanita’s side; he’d been there for Juanita, as much as he could be, but that hadn’t led to their getting back together. Before he found his own place, had he been sneaking into our apartment to sleep?

A wall of industrial concrete about eight feet high separated the rear of the parking garage from our apartment’s little garden patio. I could see our bamboos rising high above it, covering the flank of the old factory building next door. The bamboos had grown to a height parallel with the apartment above ours, which also had a glass wall on that side, but no patio. So their view was of our bamboos, of the soft dense foliage of those enormous green plumes, shimmering or pulled sideways in the rain and wind, delicate long shoots protruding like praying mantises waving their legs in the air. I didn’t know our upstairs neighbors, but I’m sure everybody in that building knew about the dead girl on the ground floor. I wonder if they ever thought of Aura when they contemplated our bamboos.

* * *

At Aura’s funeral Mass, in the chapel of the funeral home, Katia stepped firmly into the sister role, at least for me. We practically clung to each other; or rather she let me cling to her. While the priest at the flower-heaped white coffin was rotely telling us how at peace and happy Aura was now that “her suffering has ended and she is finally at the side of the Lord,” Katia stood beside me, her arm hooked tightly into mine. She led me into the line of people waiting to take communion and I knelt, opened my mouth, and let the priest drop the tasteless, airy wafer onto my tongue for the first time in decades. Later, I felt foolish about that, but it had hardly been an act of volition; I was led, had wanted to be led, could easily have been led off a cliff. When my mother, on the phone, also said that Aura was at peace and happy at the side of the Lord, it made me so angry I didn’t speak to her again for months.

Two years before, after my mother had broken her hip, my sisters had sold the house in Namoset and my mother had moved to an assisted living residence in Florida, where she had her own little apartment. When we visited, my mother would rake her frail hand through Aura’s mane—this was when she’d grown it long—and say, But why don’t you ever comb your hair, Aura? Why do you like having it in your eyes? Here, give me a hairbrush. And my mother would make Aura lower her head, and with a look of almost baffled concentration and exertion would slowly pull the brush through Aura’s hair. After a few strokes, she’d give up, as if exhausted, and hand the brush back to Aura and say, with a titter, Well, you can brush it, can’t you? Or my mother would say, But why do you dress like that, Aura? Who has ever heard of wearing blue jeans under a dress?

Later, Aura would say, Ay, Francisco, your mother, she’s not the dainty little dama everyone makes her out to be. Ohhh, she likes to
joder
!—
screw around with me,
more or less. Aura always called my mother “Señora.” I’d tell her not to, that it made it sound like my mother was her boss. I don’t call your mother Señora, do I? Call
my mother Yolanda, or Yoly. Aura would promise to, but the next time she spoke to my mother, she’d go right back to “Señora.”

When was Aura’s hair long? When was it short? Why can’t I remember this? That’s something I ought to be able to track in my memory the way I can follow Aura’s travels by looking through her passport at the stamps: June 2005, short; February 2007, long …

My plan was to be in Mazunte on the first anniversary and then, that same afternoon of the twenty-fourth, fly back to Mexico City. I’d paid for a memorial Mass to be said the next morning at a church in the Condesa. When Juanita and Leopoldo had begun to threaten me with lawyers right after Aura’s death, some of my friends had set me up with a lawyer as well. His name was Saúl Libnic, and he had a practice, with another partner, near the U.S. embassy. They usually handled white-collar criminal cases, but also specialized in U.S. clients with legal problems in Mexico. For this summer of the first anniversary, I’d subletted a studio apartment in the Condesa. Libnic lived in the neighborhood, too, and whenever he wanted to talk to me, we’d meet for an early breakfast at a juice bar on Amsterdam. He was in his early thirties, about my height, trim, with a shaved head and earnest, watery eyes. That morning Libnic explained that as a case had been opened and I was going to the coast anyway, I should make an appointment to see the district prosecutor in Puerto Ángel. The case had originated in Mexico City, he said, but had then been sent to Puerto Ángel. What did that actually mean, I asked, that a case had been opened? It meant, he said, that it had fallen to the district prosecutor in Puerto Ángel to open an investigation into Aura’s death. We could assume, of course, that no evidence had turned up against me. There was no outstanding warrant. As a formality, though, I should testify, because I never had. I did testify, I reminded him, it just wasn’t accepted because I didn’t have my passport. Yes, he said, but in order to get the case
closed, I should testify. Taking into account the prior behavior of Aura’s uncle and mother, said Libnic, I should want to get it closed. He recommended that he come with me to Puerto Ángel. I would have to pay all the expenses, along with the legal fees. When he told me how much that would cost, I asked if it was absolutely necessary that he come, and he said, No, not absolutely. I said that I couldn’t afford to bring him. Libnic said he’d make the appointment for me and sound out the district prosecutor about where the case stood. Also, he needed to be paid for his work so far, in cash. Of course, I said. Saúl, I asked, do you think there’s any chance of my falling into a trap? Oaxaca State was governed by the PRI. Through the influence of Aura’s uncle or those university lawyers Juanita had mentioned, might the district prosecutor be ordered or bribed to arrest me? Could they plant false witnesses? Libnic said that he doubted that would happen, though taking into account the reality of Mexican justice, it wasn’t impossible; that was why he’d suggested that he come with me, as a precaution. I’ll think it over, I said, but I really can’t afford that. He said that I shouldn’t worry about it too much; it did seem like the worst had blown over. I suppose I could have afforded to bring him, but I didn’t want a lawyer with me in Mazunte on the first anniversary of Aura’s death.

Fabis’s parents arranged a dinner in their home and invited both Rodrigo and I. We hadn’t seen each other since the funeral though we’d been in contact a bit by e-mail. We went into Fabis’s father’s study to talk in private. Yes, Rodrigo told me, Juanita was still blaming me for Aura’s death. But, he said, she wasn’t suggesting that I’d committed a direct crime anymore. According to Juanita, said Rodrigo, I’d failed to protect Aura from her own impulsiveness. What she was accusing me of now was of a fatal irresponsibility.

I just nodded. I knew that Rodrigo didn’t want to debate with me whether or not that was true. Anyway, I thought, there’s no way to say that I
did
protect her. I certainly did not protect her. All of Aura’s life, her mother had worried about, had tried to protect Aura
from her impulsiveness. Had I ever thought of Aura as especially impulsive? Would I ever have described her as impulsive?

Juanita was no longer in touch with the tías or Vicky. The reason, Vicky had told me in an e-mail, was that Juanita had cut off communication with anybody who did not agree that I was to blame for Aura’s death, or who dared to suggest, as Vicky put it, that I had been “the love of Aura’s life.” But Juanita, I thought, surely needs to regard our marriage as an insignificant episode in Aura’s life; something like a back door carelessly left open, through which her killer entered. Juanita had more than twenty years of memories of Aura in which they’d been at the center of each other’s lives. What was that compared to my and Aura’s four years? I’d heard from an old friend of Aura’s who was still at the UNAM that Juanita was now going around saying that Aura—rather her ghost or spirit I presume—was living with her in her apartment. There was nothing odd about that. For a few weeks, at least, I’d been convinced that Aura was in the tree at the end of our block, and ever since I hadn’t been able to walk past that tree without feeling guilty, as if I’d betrayed Aura by not trying hard enough to keep that belief alive, and by no longer stopping to kiss the trunk, or even to whisper to it.

Juanita hadn’t done anything with Aura’s ashes yet, as far as Rodrigo knew.

I told him that if he ever thought my speaking to Juanita could in any way be of help to her, I would do it.

He said that he was sure Juanita did not want to speak to me. If
I
had a need to speak to her, then I could send her an e-mail and ask her, he suggested. He gave me Juanita’s new e-mail address: it was Aura’s name, with numbers. I was using a new e-mail address, too, AUFRA, with some numbers. How alike we are, I thought; in some ways, totally, pathetically alike.

I have no need to speak to Juanita, I said. If it would help her for me to speak with her, I will, that’s all, because Aura would want me to.

But what would I say if I did speak to her? I didn’t kill your daughter. She doesn’t even want to hear that. I did kill your daughter,
I’m sorry. I’m to blame. You were right to accuse me. Would that lighten her suffering?

Is there anything I can say to you, Juanita, that will free you from having to think of me, and from your consuming blame, assuming that is what you do and that it is consuming, and that you do want to be freed from it? Maybe you don’t. Some people need somebody else to blame, as if that’s their one key to sanity, or an incitement to stay alive. But likewise, Juanita, is there anything that I can say that will free me from always having to think about you, that will stop you and your blame from getting between me and Aura, from invading every corner of my mourning?

Every night I go to bed hoping that this will be one of the nights when I dream about Aura, but sometimes I have nightmares about Juanita instead.

At dinner, Rodrigo let us pass around his cell phone so that we could see pictures of his new girlfriend. She was blonde, maybe a dyed blonde, and looked quite a bit younger than him; in one shot she was entwined in bedsheets, her shoulder bare. He watched us pass his phone around with an expression of priestly solemnity. Good for him, I thought. It’s what a man should be doing after a divorce. He’d scanned and downloaded a few photographs of Aura as a little girl onto his telephone, too, and the next day he e-mailed them to me.

For three summers in a row, Aura and I had given a weekend barbecue on our patio for family and friends. About a hundred burgers each time, plus sausages, ribs, and hot dogs for kids. I did the barbecuing, and Aura and Fabis made everything else, the salads and the fideo seco. Three summers in a row—enough to have established a family tradition of our own, I think. Now, this summer, I would do it on Fabis’s patio, after the memorial service. I invited Rodrigo and Katia. I actually told him to invite Juanita, too, knowing that there was no chance that she would come. He told me that Leopoldo was taking Juanita out of the city for those days.