Aura Rodríguez. Among her surnames were an Aljure and a Hadad, and that Lebanese blood showed in her deep eyes and in the bridge of her thick eyebrows and the narrowness of her forehead, a combination that might have given the impression of seriousness or even bad temper in someone less extroverted and affable. Her quick smile, eyes attentive to the point of impertinence, disarmed or neutralized features that, as beautiful as they might be (and yes, they were beautiful, they were very beautiful), could turn hard or even hostile with a slight knitting of her brow, with a certain way of parting her lips to breathe through her mouth at moments of greatest tension or anger. I liked Aura, at least in part, because her biography had so little in common with mine, beginning with the uprootedness of her childhood: Aura’s parents, both from the Caribbean coast, had arrived in Bogotá with her a babe in arms, but they never managed to feel at home in this city of sly, shrewd people, and as the years went by ended up accepting an opportunity to work in Santo Domingo and then another in Mexico and then another very brief one in Santiago de Chile, so Aura left Bogotá when she was still very young and her adolescence was a sort of itinerant circus and, at the same time, a permanently inconclusive symphony. Aura’s family returned to Bogotá at the beginning of 1994, weeks after Pablo Escobar was killed; the difficult decade had just ended, and Aura would always be ignorant of what we who lived through it had seen and heard. Later, when the rootless young woman showed up at the university for her admissions interview, the dean of the faculty asked her the same question he asked all the applicants: why Law? Aura’s answer swerved back and forth, but eventually arrived at a reason less related to the future than to the recent past: ‘To be able to stay in a single place.’ Lawyers can only practise where they’ve studied, said Aura, and she no longer felt able to postpone that kind of stability. She didn’t say so at the time, but her parents had already begun to plan the next trip and Aura had decided she wouldn’t be part of it.
So she stayed in Bogotá on her own, living with two girls from Barranquilla in an apartment with a few pieces of cheap furniture where everything, starting with the tenants, had a transitory quality. And she began to study Law. She was a student of mine in my first year as a professor, when I too was a novice; and we didn’t really talk again after the course finished, in spite of sharing the same corridors, in spite of frequenting the same student cafés downtown, in spite of having said hello in the Legis or the Temis, the legal bookshops with their public-office air and bureaucratic white tiles smelling of detergent. One evening in March we met at a cinema on 24th Street; it struck us as funny that we were both going to see black-and-white movies on our own (there was a series of Buñuel films, that day they were showing Simon of the Desert, and I fell asleep fifteen minutes in). We exchanged phone numbers to meet for a coffee the next day, and the next day we left our coffees half finished when we realized, in the middle of a banal conversation, that we weren’t interested in telling each other about our lives, but just wanted to be somewhere we could go to bed and spend the rest of the afternoon looking at the body we’d each been imagining since our paths had first crossed in the cold space of the classroom. I already knew the husky voice and the prominent collarbones; the freckles between her breasts surprised me (I’d imagined clear and smooth skin like that of her face) and her mouth surprised me too, as it was, for scientifically inexplicable reasons, always cold.
But then the surprises and explorations and discoveries gave way to another situation, perhaps more surprising, because it was so unexpected. Over the following days we went on seeing each other constantly and realizing that our respective worlds didn’t change much after our clandestine encounters, that our relationship didn’t affect the practical side of our lives for good or ill, but coexisted with it, like a parallel highway, like a story seen in the episodes of a television series. We realized how little we knew each other; I spent a long time discovering Aura, that peculiar woman who went to bed with me at night and came out with anecdotes about herself or others, and as she did so created for me an absolutely novel world where a friend’s house smelled of headache, for example, or where a headache could quite easily taste of guanábana ice cream. ‘It’s like living with synaesthesia,’ I told her. I’d never seen someone hold a gift to her nose before opening it, even though it was obviously a pair of shoes, or a stuffed animal, or a poor innocent ring. ‘What does a ring smell like?’ I said to Aura. ‘It doesn’t smell of anything, that’s the truth. But there’s no way to explain that to you.’
And so, I suspect, we could have gone on all our lives. But five days before Christmas Aura appeared dragging a red suitcase with tiny wheels, with pockets in every part of it. ‘I’m six weeks pregnant,’ she told me. ‘I want us to spend the holidays together, and then we’ll see what we do.’ In one of those pockets there was a digital alarm clock and a case that didn’t contain pencils, as I thought it did, but make-up; in another, a photo of Aura’s parents, who by then were well settled in Buenos Aires. She took out the photo and placed it face down on one of the nightstands, and only turned it over when I said yes, we should spend the holidays together, that’s a good idea. Then — the image is very much alive in my memory — she lay down on my bed, on top of my made bed, and closed her eyes and began to talk. ‘People don’t believe me,’ she said. I thought she meant about her pregnancy and said, ‘Who? Who’ve you told?’ ‘When I talk about my parents,’ said Aura. ‘They don’t believe me.’ I lay down beside her and crossed my arms behind my head and listened. ‘They don’t believe me, for example, when I say I don’t understand why they had me, when they already had enough in each other. They still have enough. They’re enough for each other, that’s how it is. Have you ever felt that? Have you ever been with your parents and all of a sudden you feel superfluous? It happens to me a lot, or at least since I’ve been old enough to live alone, and it’s weird, being with your folks and they start looking at each other with that look that you’ve already identified and they’re laughing over something that’s just between them and you have no idea what they’re laughing at, and worse, you feel you have no right to ask. It’s a look I learned by heart a long time ago, not complicity, it’s something way beyond that, Antonio. More than once it happened to me as a little girl, in Mexico or in Chile, more than once. At a meal, with guests they didn’t like much but invited anyway, or in the street when they met someone who said stupid things, suddenly I could fast forward five seconds and think: here comes the look, and sure enough, five seconds later their eyebrows moved, their eyes met, and I’d see on their faces that smile that no one else saw and that they used to make fun of people the way I’ve never seen anyone else make fun of other people. How do you smile without people seeing you smile? They could, Antonio, I swear I’m not exaggerating, I grew up with those smiles. Why did it bother me so much? It still bothers me. Why so much?’