Free Say Her Name by Francisco Goldman Page A

about her. She described the reliable sense of lonely refuge she found in her reading and in her books:
… those lands are the only ones, it seems, that I can visit without ruining. But maybe that will help me, someday, to find a way to escape from this little piece of land that I’ve already ruined. I was born ruined, by a past I know nothing about.
    That might sound like a pretty typical expression of postadolescent angst and self-absorption. It sure was typical of Aura. Her insecurities and fears, her obsession with the mysteries of her early childhood and of her birth father’s abandonment of her and her mother when she was four fill so many pages of her notebooks and diaries that it’s impossible to read through them without feeling distressed for her, and puzzled over how relentlessly she punished herself. Was she really so unhappy and lonely, or was it just the exaggerated diary rhetoric of a young woman to whom, as she herself had observed, this kind of writing came too easily?
    In an entry later in the diary, dated April 24, the day she turned twenty-six, she wrote that her father had phoned her to wish her a happy birthday for the first time in more than twenty years. The conversation was brief, she tersely reported, and he’d sounded nervous.
    That was the last time Aura ever spoke to her father.

5
Every so often, I dream of a picture taken of me at age 5. I’m sitting on the edge of a wooden fence. Behind, a humungous tree gives me shadow from a sun that can’t be seen.
    That’s the entire content of a document, written in English, saved as Toexist.doc in Aura’s computer. Every day I found something in her computer that I’d never read before. It was moving to discover that she used to dream about that photograph because it haunted me, too; I’d already switched it from her desk to mine. In the picture,five-year-old Aura is wearing wrinkled denim overalls and a pink T-shirt. Her black hair, shining glossily with light from that sun you can’t see, is cut in ragamuffin bowl style, jagged bangs falling over her eyebrows, and the lower halves of her ears stick out. Aura had big ears; I do, too. Our child was definitely going to have “humongous” ears. The fence is tall enough so that to have crawled up and settled onto her perch atop it must have felt like a small triumph, at least. So the look on her face, the close-lipped smile, the direct gaze toward the camera, could be one of quiet satisfaction. But her expression also seems so sweetly trusting and unknowing that you can’t help but reflect on the little girl’s solitude and vulnerability, a mood amplified by the darkened mass of foliage and thick snaking branches above her.
    It seems like just another unfairness to Aura to analyze her every childhood photograph for signs and portents of doom. But even when she was alive, every time I looked at that picture, I felt a new surge of protective feeling for her. I’d imitate the tight little smile that made her cheeks bulge, the blankly trusting gaze. I’d tell her she still looked like that.
    How do I look? she’d sometimes ask, and I’d imitate that look, and she’d say, Noooo, I don’t, and we’d crack up.
    I found another paragraph saved as Elsueñodemimadre.doc:
    My Mother’s Dream
My mother’s dream, which growing up I made sure to gradually and systematically crumble, was to see me installed as a French Academic. The fact that my origins were in the Mexican Bajío and that I lacked all dexterity with the language of my great-grandfather never gave her any pause. Because of that, when I told her that I wanted to go to New York City to pursue a degree in the department of Hispanic languages, the glass of red Bordeaux wine she was sipping from went crooked in her hand and she made a scandal in the restaurant we were in, dining on crepes filled with four cheeses.

6
I’m an air balloon, circling the earth, hardly ever touching down, and nobody ever takes hold of my rope to pull on it