A few months ago, I read a novel by Francisco Goldman, which is actually his memoir of his life with his late wife, Aura. Aura was a young Mexican student and writer, who in every sense had her whole life ahead of her before she died tragically in a freak accident at the age of thirty.

There is a passage in the beginning of the book where Mr Goldman describes Aura’s love of a short story by Julio Cortazar, about a man who visits the axolotls (a type of salamander) in the zoo at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. Mr Goldman and Aura find themselves in Paris as she has an interview at the Sorbonne, where she was thinking of transferring from Columbia University. Aura’s priority is to go to the Jardin des Plantes and visit the axolotls that Cortozar wrote about in his story. They do venture out, but they do not find the axolotols in the zoo, and even go to the trouble of asking some staff members where the axolotls may be. This passage is from the book:

“(Aura) told me that the woman remembered the axolotls; she’d even said that she missed them. But they’d been taken away a few years before and were now in some university laboratory. Aura was in her charcoal gray woolen coat, a whitish wool scarf wrapped around her neck, strands of her straight black hair mussed around her soft round cheeks, which were flushed as if burning with cold, though it wasn’t particularly cold. Tears, just a few, not a flood, warm salty tears overflowed from Aura’s brimming eyes and slid down her cheeks. Who cries over something like that? I remember thinking.”

I had never heard of the Jardin des Plantes in Paris until I read this book. It was a difficult read, because though Mr Goldman really succeeded in writing what is essentially a tribute, a love song, to his young wife,  her brief life and the tremendous achievements she made in such a short time, there is also a powerful theme of life-altering loss and profound grief that dominates this story. If you have ever loved anyone, even briefly, you must read this book. It is called “Say Her Name” by Francisco Goldman (Grove Press, New York).

So today, in my own tribute to Aura Estrada, I visited the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, alone. I found the little zoo (ménagerie), and headed straight for the amphibian house (vivarium). You enter the small building on the left side of the door, and start your visit on the left, making your way around the exhibits clockwise, with the aquariums lining the walls. They contain all manner of snakes, toads, frogs, geckos, and salamanders. I expected the axolotls to be gone, still in the same lab they were placed in when Aura and her husband tried to visit.

But there, in the very last aquarium that I examined, hiding in the greenery, stood a lone axolotl. Aura’s axolotl.