FICTION: Say Her Name,By Francisco Goldman, Grove Press, 350pp. £12.99
IN JULY 2006, the Mexican grad student Aura Estrada died in an accident while bodysurfing on a beach in Mexico. A freak wave threw her down headfirst, breaking her neck. She was 30 years old.
Her husband, the acclaimed American writer Francisco Goldman, was in the water with her when it happened. They had been married just shy of two years, and been blissfully in love for a full four. The horror of Aura’s death left Goldman hallucinating with grief – hearing her voice, spotting her sitting in trees, waking to sense her in the room. He describes these interludes – the stations of his mourning – very movingly. Before Aura’s death, he’d had his body tattooed with the date they’d imagined their first child – a girl, they felt certain, Natalia – would be born, some years into the future. After the accident, Goldman has to face that date alone, contemplating all that he has lost, and all that the world has lost in losing Aura. (She had published a number of short stories, and was making notes toward her first novel.)
Goldman's novel – for Say Her Nameis described as a novel rather than a memoir, despite a plot and characters that are factual, not fictional – moves with grace back and forth through time, oscillating around this all-defining central event. Thus the accident is either impending, or else Goldman is reeling in its aftermath. He states that he "always wished that I could know what it was like to be Aura", and his love of and infatuation with her imbues every page. Each perspective illuminates her from a fresh angle, presenting the reader with a portrait of a vibrant and brilliant scholar who moved from Mexico to New York to pursue the writing life. Goldman describes her as his "brainy superliterary grad student young wife", an elfin beauty, "a Mexican Björk".
The couple met at one of Goldman’s readings. Goldman was 47; Estrada, 25. He was a professor of literature who had published three novels and been shortlisted for several literary prizes (including the Dublin Impac Award). Estrada was a literature postgrad who aspired to be a novelist herself. Despite the disparity in age and station, Goldman invited her to the post-reading dinner with Salman Rushdie. And there the love story begins.
Aura’s mother, Juanita, was unimpressed with Goldman as a suitor. He was too old, financially improvident, unable to protect her daughter, she felt. Juanita raised Aura as a single mother, working two, and occasionally three jobs “so that her only daughter could have the same educational opportunities as any girl born into the Mexican upper class”.
The invasion of Juanita’s privacy makes for uncomfortable reading. Her first marriage fails, and to preserve their dignity in a conservative Catholic society, Goldman tells us, Juanita takes her child to Mexico City to start again. But something bad happens there, something so bad that Juanita refuses to tell her daughter about it. “Maybe it was by the Dumpsters where it happened,” Aura confides to her husband, “not in a stairwell like I’ve always thought . . . I don’t think she’ll ever tell me the whole truth about what happened. Not even when she’s on her deathbed.” Although the victim of the crime remains unable to speak about it, Goldman feels no such compunction in putting it out there.
He goes on to chart the breakdown of Juanita’s second marriage, and the meetings that Aura held with her stepsister behind her mother’s back in an attempt to salvage it. Aura, who loves her mother dearly, feels that she is betraying her by attending these clandestine meetings. It’s hard not to wonder what she would make of seeing them recorded in a book that is destined to receive international attention.
After the accident, it gets truly nasty. Juanita and Aura’s uncle, Leopoldo, accuse Goldman of being responsible for Aura’s death by failing to protect her from her natural impulsiveness. Juanita instructs Goldman to vacate the apartment that she had bought for her daughter. Goldman reluctantly does so, adding that “I took everything in the apartment with me. That must have surprised Juanita. She probably expected me to leave most of Aura’s stuff behind, including that old steamer trunk in which she kept her childhood diaries and her old school papers and such”.
Juanita asks for her daughter's laptop and diaries; Goldman refuses. He asks for Aura's ashes; Juanita refuses. Goldman includes within Say Her Namehurtful extracts from these childhood diaries in which Aura criticises her mother. Is this public humiliation of Juanita Estrada – who hasn't the access to an audience that Goldman enjoys – really what Aura would have wanted?
Goldman – also a journalist of international renown – proceeds to interview Juanita’s first husband, Aura’s errant father, and gets a different version of the marriage break-up, one which, if true, casts Juanita in a very negative light. This version, too, is published in the novel.
“From now on,” the reader is told on the first page, “if you have anything to say to me, put it in writing – that’s what Leopoldo, Aura’s uncle, said on the telephone when he told me that he was acting as Aura’s mother’s attorney in the case against me. We haven’t spoken since.”
In Say Her Name, Goldman puts it in writing. It is a shame, because his twisting of the knife detracts from an otherwise tender memorial to a vivacious, loving spirit.
Claire Kilroy's most recent novel, All Names Have Been Changed, is published by Faber.
Francisco Goldman will give a reading at the Kilkenny Arts Festival today at 2pm (Kilkenny Castle Parade Tower)
