Monkey Boy by Francisco Goldman (free ebook reader for pc txt) 📗

for Ignatz, meets a lively cat with amorous eyes named Pabla in a tree. They frolic like squirrels in the nearly bare boughs, but suddenly Pabla slips from a branch and instead of plummeting drifts down into a pile of raked leaves. Krazy follows, leaping into the pile, at first playfully searching it for Pabla but then more frantically, snatching up leaves one by one and flinging them aside until not a single leaf is left. No sign of Pabla. Alone again, wails Krazy, natch-roo-lee.

When I wasn’t even a year old, my mother split from my father and took me back with her to live in her parents’ house in Guatemala City. She’s never told me a reason why. All my earliest memories are set in my abuelos’ house, the same one Mamita and her brother, Memo, had grown up in, an old-fashioned Spanish colonial with a stone patio in the middle, dark cool rooms with polished tile floors, and usually shuttered, barred windows facing the street; heavy dark furniture in the living and dining rooms, the Virgin and saint statues in glass cases, the caged finches and canaries Abuelita kept in a small side patio; the thick, woven cloth huipiles always smelling of tortillas and soap that the servant women wore, the older one with a wrinkled face and the young one I spent most of my time with, the recollection of her ebony Rapunzel hair seemingly coterminous with her enveloping kindness and quiet giggles; the memory of sitting in my bedroom’s window seat and passing my toy truck out through the bars to an Indian woman who took her baby boy out of her rebozo and set him down on the patterned old paving stones of the sidewalk so that he could play with the truck and my astonishment that he was naked. A memory like the broken-off half of a mysterious amulet that can only be made whole if that now-grown little boy remembers it, too, and we can somehow meet and put our pieces together. I don’t even remember if I let him keep the truck or not, though I like to think I did. Not all that likely that he’s even still alive, considering what the war years were like for young Maya men of our generation. Who knows, maybe he’s up here somewhere and even has children who were born here.

Mamita must not have loved my father enough anymore, or must have convinced herself that she didn’t, to want to live with him and raise a family. It’s not like Bert was cheating on her and that’s why we left. That seems like the kind of thing she would have told us or at least told my sister and Feli; they sure wouldn’t have kept that a secret all these years. We were going to stay in Guatemala and make our lives there. But what misery and humiliation my father must have endured over those two years plus, a long time to be separated from his family; he couldn’t really have been expecting us to come back. Then what large-hearted forgiveness he displayed when he found out that his truant wife and tubercular three-year-old son were returning to him after all. In Boston, I’d at least get better medical care; that was really why we came back, I understood later. My father rolled the dice and decided to move his shaky family out to that idyllic-seeming town off Route 128, where he purchased a ranch house in a neighborhood so brand-new it looked just unpacked from its box, set down between steep hills and ridges, and comprised of only two intersecting streets, straight Sacco Road, where we lived, and bending Enna Road, together running along three sides of a large weedy-thistly rocky field called Down Back. That was the house, already partly furnished, that my mother and I came to live in around Christmas. My father must have met us at Logan Airport and driven us to our new home, where he’d put up a Christmas tree down in the basement, right in front of the furnace, a dangerously flammable spot, instead of in the living room, as if he didn’t want the neighbors to be able to see it through the picture window, worried that at the last minute we wouldn’t come back after all, and the neighbors would wonder about that solitary Jewish man who made false teeth for a living and had a Christmas tree in his living room. His older sister, Aunt Hannah, married to a Russian Catholic, Uncle Vlad, had decorated it. Underneath the tree, an orange toy steam shovel awaited me. But I was afraid of my daddy and instinctively rebuffed him, this enthusiastic, grasping man whose marriage and family I’d saved by getting sick. On a recent visit to Green Meadows, my mother told me that. You didn’t like your father, she said. You were afraid of him. Really, Ma? I was afraid of him? And you could tell? Because I don’t remember any of it at all.

A hemorrhaging relapse while playing outside on a hot sunny afternoon that made me vomit sloshing wallops of blood onto the sidewalk—I remember that—my father wrapping me in a blanket and rushing me into his car and also that I got to stay in the Boston Children’s Hospital. Mr. Peabody and Sherman came to visit us in our ward, and my father sat by my bed performing the magic tricks he’d bought at Little Jack Horner on Tremont Street. One was a shiny black top encircled by white flecks, but when my father made the top spin on its special stick, the flecks became a rainbow blur before turning into a row of flying scarlet birds that he said were called ibis.

That’s how these visits with my mother go now, but her occasionally blunt, unguarded way of speaking is a new trait. She’s almost comically the opposite of how she used to be, after all those years of keeping her