Last Thursday night, the author Francisco Goldman put on a dark-blue tie with a print of entwined light-gray ovals. It was the tie he had worn when he married the Mexican writer Aura Estrada, who died last year at the age of thirty, in a swimming accident. Goldman had established a literary prize in his wife’s memory, to support young Mexican women writers, and that evening he was hosting an event that was part fundraiser, part memorial.
“Someone told me it’s a cliché thing to do—if your loved one dies and was in the arts, you say, I’m going to found a prize,” Goldman, a compact man with wet eyes and tight salt-and-pepper curls, said as he sipped tequila on the roof of the Fourteenth Street loft where close to two hundred guests had gathered in his wife’s honor. “Once I opened my mouth, though, there was no backing down.” His success thus far—raising a hundred and forty thousand dollars and receiving commitments from Paul Auster and Gabriel García Marquez—seemed to both delight and bewilder him; triumph was a strange new stage of grief. “Instead of feeling like the president of a small, unstable nation, I feel like the unstable president of a small nation that actually works,” Goldman said. “Why are we doing this, really? It’s not as though it provides solace. It doesn’t.” He paused. “It was just a way to keep loving Aura.”
In the loft, Calvin Baker, Rivka Galchen, and Gary Shteyngart mingled while the band played a rousing version of Mexican folk music. The windowsills were crowded with signed editions of books by García Marquez, Jorge Luis Borges, and Henry Miller. Pamphlets advertised auction items: Tom Stoppard had donated an original, handwritten page from a draft of his play “Rock ‘n’ Roll”; Joan Didion, a typed page from the manuscript of her novel “Democracy,” with handwritten notes. For a bit of dough, you could break the baked variety at a meal with Junot Díaz, Colm Tóibín, or Jhumpa Lahiri.
The choreographer Adrienne Truscott performed, dressed in a paper bikini. (Estrada had once told Goldman that she wanted her first novel to resemble a dance by Truscott.) She was accompanied by two male dancers, one shirtless and the other clad in approximately sixteen layers of T-shirts, which he proceeded to remove, one by one.
According to Goldman, “What do you want me to do for you today?” had been his long-standing, half-joking greeting to Aura. When she asked for Paul Auster’s autograph on a friend’s book, Goldman got it, although he had never met Auster. After she died, he convinced Auster to give a reading in her memory—and to fly to Mexico to do it.
Oswaldo Zavala, a professor and friend, said that a trademark of Estrada’s fiction was “a central character who will embark into an unknown land, happily.” Monica De La Torre, a close friend of Estrada’s, described her stories as “unpredictable, specific, arcane,” full of old-fashioned words such as “acicalarse,” which means “gussied-up.” The first time that De La Torre saw Estrada was at Columbia University, where Estrada was a Ph.D. student. “I knew two things right away.” De La Torre said. “One, I wanted to know her. Two, I knew she was from Mexico City.” De La Torre even correctly guessed Estrada’s Mexico City neighborhood. It turned out that the two of them had shared a dentist back home.
Late in the evening, under a swinging, flickering lamp, Salman Rushdie and Peter Carey, among others, read selections from Estrada’s fiction. Estrada’s first collection of short stories, as yet untitled, is due out from Mexico’s Almadía Press next year, but little of her work has been published in English, so the readings had an air of revelation. The stories proved to be unpredictable, as promised, and intelligent, hilarious, and sad. One piece imagined the start of the Third World War, another the inner monologue of a transsexual harpist.
De La Torre closed by reading a letter from Aura, in Spanish and then in English. Addressed to “Nomica,” the letter, equal parts jest and concern, encouraged De La Torre to be ambitious and brave. “We’re so young,” Aura wrote. “We have a long journey ahead.”
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