Free Say Her Name by Francisco Goldman

young. You really have to forget about her.
    Aura had first hooked up with Borgini the previous spring, at a literary conference at Brown in honor of the fortieth anniversary of the publication of Carlos Fuentes’s magical realist ghost story, Aura, cohosted by her nemesis professor, who wasn’t yet her nemesis. “Here we are, honoring Aura,” ad-libbed Borgini, during his talk at the conference, “and I have found my own Aura.” That created something of a sensation; Professor T__ may even have felt that the conference had been somehow hijacked by this too public romance between the glamorous young writer and the cute grad student with purple in her hair. Of course, he took it out on Aura. That’s probably what turned him against her. Even five years later, all you had to do was mention Professor T__ in Aura’s mother’s presence and her anger would reignite. Furiously, she’d recall how she’d wanted to fly up to Providence to confront and even assault him. Juanita was a good-looking woman, but in her wrath her face was almost unbearably vivid, as if her features were being reflected and magnified in a smashed mirror’s swept-up shards. She liked giving this kind of performance, taunting and slurring like a Mexican street thug, displaying the protective ferocity of her love for her daughter. And it wasn’t just an act. Juanita regarded Aura’s accomplishments—her success in school, her scholarships to U.S. universities—as her own accomplishments, too. She’d worked hard, double-time, triple-time, year after year, so that her daughter could have the same educational opportunities as any girl born into the Mexican upper class. When Professor T__ called her daughter a frivolous rich girl, he was uttering a blasphemous negation of Juanita’s entire life—that’s how Juanita took it, rather than as she might have, as a backhanded recognition of how well she’d succeeded.
    Juanita wasn’t a reader of fiction, but Fuentes’s Aura— that story’s beautiful young Aura is the mystical ghost of her hundred-year-old aunt who, succubus-like, inhabits her niece’s body for sex—was a touchstone book for her generation in Mexico.
    “My mother named me for your book, Maestro Fuentes,” Aura told Carlos Fuentes at the conference. Aura had him autograph a copy for Juanita. She and Borgini posed for a picture with him.
    In the diary Aura kept when she was at Brown from April to December, she mentioned only once, briefly, though in a tone of regret, the apparent end of her relationship with Borgini—JB, she called him there; almost everybody in her diary writings was referred to with initials, as if out of considerate discretion. She wrote very sketchily about her trip to New York, not even mentioning Borgini’s book event or her dinner with Salman Rushdie, nor did she even allude to having met me, or to the book I’d sent her—there is no suggestion in that diary that our meeting made any impression on her. She cryptically recorded another visit, later that same fall, from another boyfriend from Mexico, who she referred to as “P.”
    On several pages she described the quiet and boredom of Providence, which she felt suited her for the time being—she liked the long days of cold autumn rain spent holed up in her room with her books, or in the library. In one entry, she criticized herself for finding it so easy to write out of introspection while never having trained herself to be able to describe with precision how, on a sunny, windy day, Providence’s grid of streets filled and swirled with yellow, orange, red leaves. “Have spent much of this day thinking about my mother” — there was more than one entry like that. “Am worried about Ma.” “I miss my mother.” She wrote about the progress of her thesis with anxiety, but also with growing excitement and pride. She wanted that thesis to make her stand out, to provide proof of a destiny. She wanted it to show Professor T__ how wrong he’d been