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with rock-star strikers in the graffiti-coated, barricaded buildings. Bored with being out of school, Aura had totally turned against both strike and strikers anyway. Juanita and two of Aura’s professors,who were also her godparents, pulled some strings with some old Mexican colleagues who were now professors at the University of Texas to get her admitted there on a foreign student scholarship.
    In Austin at UT, Aura lived in a dorm at first, and then shared the floor of a house with three other foreign students: two Panamanian girls and Irina, from Romania via Israel, a long-limbed, waifish beauty, a local kickboxing champ and a drummer in a rock band as well as a poetry-writing literature student. Smart young women with strong accents who learned to look after themselves and each other, and who didn’t care that the gringa college and sorority girls never included them in anything from day one. Harder to deal with were the predatory preconceptions of white boys who believed all brown females must be just like the ones selling dirty sex so cheaply across the border, or that it was practically obligatory, a sort of reversed chivalry, to treat them that way. But this was my way of talking, not Aura’s—she didn’t use words like “white boys,” and thought it pretty ridiculous whenever I did. She would refer to gringos or los blancos, never sneeringly, though sometimes indignantly. Here’s a poem Aura wrote in one of her notebooks during her Austin days:
Me vuelvo sucio
Y leo Bukowski aunque lo odie
Parece quisiera ser hombre
Para quitar a las mujeres del camino
Que nadie se escandalice
Esto es privado
Esto es mentira
La poesía es ficticia y no salva a nadie 1
    Nevertheless, those were wild times. There’s hardly a photograph of Aura and her housemates where they aren’t holdingbeers, or looking totally stoned, or like they’ve been up all night: muss-haired, girl grimy, and pretty delicious. But Aura studied hard, wrote a paper in English on Raymond Carver that her professor read out to the class, and worked relentlessly on what she would submit as her baccalaureate thesis at the UNAM when the strike was over, on W. H. Auden. And for all the supposed craziness, she had only one boyfriend there, a Jewish kid originally from Houston, a musician in the Austin country-rock-hippy mode. One of the Panamanian girls, green-eyed Belinda who was three or four years younger than the other three, told me it was Aura who kept her out of trouble in Austin, guiding her through several crises; she said that Aura was like a surrogate mother to her. But Aura had a surrogate mother of her own in Texas, Irina. Though actually Irina was more like an antimother. She used to encourage and even intoxicate Aura with the idea that she should defy her mother’s expectations that she pursue an academic career, which Aura would at least seem to go on dutifully fulfilling for nearly the rest of her life. But some of Irina’s style and daring rubbed off on Aura, at least as a kind of ideal. In New York, Aura took kickboxing lessons for a few months at a gym near Penn Station, traveling the subways between Columbia and Brooklyn with scarlet boxing gloves dangling from her backpack. Later, Irina would be one of Aura’s three bridesmaids at our wedding, along with Valentina and Fabiola, who came to the beach with us that last summer. The book fair in Austin, where I gave the usual sparsely attended reading, was a reunion weekend for Irina and Aura, a chance for them to girl talk for hours like old times and catch up on everything, including the surprise news of our engagement.
    When the weekend was over, Irina came to our hotel to drive us to the airport, and we were almost there when Aura realized that she wasn’t wearing her ring. She was sure she’d left it at the hotel. We had to go back for it. At the front desk they gave us another key card. There was no sign that anyone had been in the room since we’d left. The tray piled with