Aura died July 25, 2007. Returned to Mexico for the first anniversary because I wanted to be where it had happened on that beach in the Pacific coast. Now, for the second time in just one year, I'm going without her home in Brooklyn.
Three months before his death on April 24, Aura had turned thirty. We would have completed two years of marriage, if only because we lacked twenty-six days. The mother and uncle Aura accused me of his death. Not that I consider myself innocent. In place of Juanita, I know that I would have liked to put me in jail. Although not for the reasons she and her brother were given.
From now on, if you have anything to say, type it, this is what Leopold, Aura's uncle, told me by telephone when he assumed the representation of Aura's mother in the lawsuit against me. We did not talk since then.
Aura.
and I
Aura Aura and her mother
Your mother and I
A love-hate triangle, or do not know
My love, is this true?
Où sont les axolotls?
Every time I said goodbye to his mother, either at the airport in Mexico City, or just the time he left his mother's apartment at night, or even when they were leaving after dinner a restaurant, her mother raised her hand to make the sign of the cross and whisper a short prayer to the Virgin of Guadalupe to protect his daughter.
The axolotl is a type of salamander that never metamorphose beyond the larval stage, something like that never become tadpoles into frogs. There used to be in abundance in the lakes of the ancient city of Mexico and were the favorite food of the Aztecs. Until recently, it was said that axolotls live in the brackish canals of Xochimilco, in fact, they are practically extinct and now only survive in aquariums, laboratories and zoos. Aura
loved a story by Julio Cortazar about a man who is so mesmerized by the axolotl in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris who becomes an axolotl. Every day, sometimes three times a day, the anonymous man in this story visit the agglomerates of the Jardin des Plantes aquarium to stare at these strange creatures in their milky and translucent bodies, in the delicate lines of lizard, in pink Aztec faces flat and triangular in the tiny feet and toes almost human, in the strange red twig springing from their gills, in the golden glow of their eyes and how they almost never move, only very occasionally when they shake their gills or suddenly swimming with a simple undulation of their bodies. They seem so from another planet that man is persuaded that they are not just animals and that have some mysterious connection with him somehow mutely are enslaved within their bodies and their pulsating golden eyes are pleading to save them. One day the man is looking at the axolotl as usual, his face pressed against the glass of the aquarium, but now, in the middle of the paragraph, the "I" is expressed from within the aquarium, watching the man's face against the glass, so the transition occurs. The story ends with the axolotl longing to have succeeded in communicating something to the man and have managed to bridge both silent solitude. The man did not visit the aquarium because it is somewhere outside, writing a story about what being an axolotl. The first time
Aura and I went together to Paris, some five months after she came to live with me, Aura wanted more than anything else, go to the Jardin des Plantes to see Cortazar axolotl. She had previously been in Paris, but he had discovered Cortázar's story recently. You might think that the only reason we had flown to Paris was to see the axolotl, although in reality Aura had an interview at the Sorbonne, because she was considering the transfer from Columbia. The first evening, we went to the Jardin des Plantes, and pay to visit the small zoo in the nineteenth century. At the top of the entrance to the building of amphibians, or vivarium, had a poster in French, with information about amphibians and endangered species, which displayed the image of a red-golden axolotl taught her happy extraterrestrial profile, their arms and hands, similar to those of an albino monkey. Inside, the glass aquaria gave all around the room and illuminated rectangles placed on the wall indicated the habitat for each moisture condition: mosses, ferns, rocks, tree branches, pools of water. We went from one tank to another reading the signs: several species of salamanders, newts, frogs, but not the axolotl. We went around the room again, just in case we would have skipped us. Finally, Aura was up to the guard, a middle-aged man in uniform, and asked where were the axolotl. He knew nothing of the axolotl, but something was in the expression of Aura who began to think, and he replied that he expected, left the room and a moment later he returned with a woman, somewhat younger than himself, wearing a gray lab apron. Aura her and talked quietly, in French, so I could not understand what they were saying, but the woman's expression was animated and friendly. When we left, Aura stood for a moment, stunned and silent. Then she said she remembered the axolotl and told him that even surprised. But a few years before had been removed and were in a University laboratory. Sacone Aura had a dark gray wool and woven with different wool scarf clear. A lock of her straight black hair fell over her cheeks marked, which were lighted as if they burned in the cold, though not particularly cold one day. Tears, but a few, not a flood, warm salty tears spilled from the Aura watery eyes and slid down her cheeks.
Who cries for something?, I remember thinking. I kissed the tears, breathing in that salty heat of Aura. Whatever it was that produced the axolotl in Aura, not being there, seemed part of the same mystery waiting to be revealed to man the axolotl by writing a story at the end of the story of Cortázar. I always wanted to know what it meant to reach that absence for Aura. Où sont les
axolotls? she wrote in her notebook. Where are they? Fragment
start Say her name, Francisco Goldman, Publisher: Grove Press.
Note translation: the formation of the plural of "axolotl" respects the story of Cortázar.
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