Free Say Her Name by Francisco Goldman Page B

and draw me close. It’s hard for me, listen, it’s so hard, it costs me everything, to touch down on earth. Sometimes I think it has to do with eating so little. At Brown I met a girl who told me that she’d been diagnosed as anorexic—she told me all about herself, and I realized she was like my double.
I’m back in Mexico. In my mother’s new apartment. A difficult year awaits me. Uncertain in more than one respect.
    Aura had returned to Mexico City at the beginning of December, after her final semester at Brown, when she wrote that in her diary. She was lonely, feeling a little lost and fearful of the future. Up there in Brooklyn, I wasn’t exactly thrilled about my life; it had been five years since I’d last had a girlfriend or any even briefly steady lover. In Aura’s diary I can follow her innocent trek across that stretch of months, from when we first met in New York right up to where, turning the page, you’d expect to find us falling in love, except that’s where it ends, as if not even she could believe what happened next and abandoned her diary like a novel with a too far-fetched plot. During the years we were together, Aura didn’t keep a regular diary, so that notebook was the last of the dozens of diaries Aura had kept from the time she was six or seven, back when she used to write in her diary at all hours of the night, often under the covers with a flashlight while her stepsister Katia slept in her nearby bed.
In a few hours we’re leaving for Guanajuato for Christmas.
It’s still dark out, but down below on the Periférico, the all-day traffic jam is already underway, sounding like squawking plastic trumpets, pounding drums, and crazed roars in a crowded fútbol stadium buried under the earth.
    Juanita’s new condominium apartment was on the ninth floor of a building abutting the Periférico, the intracity north-south express-way. It must have been about five in the morning. Aura’s bed was the foldout couch in the study. She was probably sitting up, floppy leather-bound notebook pressed against her upraised thighs, sleep-tousled hair, the soft pucker of her mouth, the twitching pen in her fist, eyes fixed on the page with a liquid stillness of concentration, like perfectly aligned bubbles in a carpenter’s level. In the future, Aura and I would spend more than a few nights on that same couch, though if her stepfather Rodrigo was away when we visited, which he frequently was, I’d sleep there alone while Aura slept with her mother. Aura, when speaking or writing about her stepfather, tended to refer to him only as “the husband.” And Juanita rarely held herself back from belittling her husband with her famous sarcasm, whether about money (his lack of), politics (left-wing), ambition (missing), or even intelligence (lower than mother’s and daughter’s). Rodrigo was famous for taking it: a disciplined rocklike impassivity, though often seething inside and capable of eruption. But I could tell that he loved Aura, that he was proud of her, and he was always kind to me. We often talked about American football. He was a big Colts fan, for some reason. One Sunday we watched a Colts-Patriots play-off game at the Hooters on Insurgentes, where Aura and Juanita joined us later for burgers and beers, the two of them bemusedly observing the agile young waitresses in hot pants Rollerblading around the restaurant with loaded trays balanced on their shoulders beneath the luminous football-filled big screens, and that launched Juanita into a reminiscence about what a Rollerblading dervish Aura had been as a girl; she described her twirling and jumping around theCopilco parking lot like an Olympic star—what I remember is just the deeply contented sense of belonging to an ordinary family that I had that afternoon, a feeling I’d hardly ever known in my life.
    But I wasn’t on the scene yet that predawn morning, days before Christmas, when Aura, just home from Brown, was in bed writing in her diary.