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

mothers of the learning sanctuary kids work as housekeepers in Manhattan, the fathers at various blue-collar jobs in the boroughs and even Long Island or New Jersey. In the evenings when the classes end, the mothers, sometimes fathers, or other relatives, come to take the children home; only the older teens head out on their own. The mothers are mostly Mexican or Ecuadoran. There’s one Guatemalan boy, a nine-year-old, diminutive even for his age, with close-cropped black hair and an owl-like face, who is always picked up by his grandmother, a husky Maya woman who wears a traditional corte under her winter coat and a gray cloth bomber hat with long furry earflaps.

The first time I saw the woman who came for Marisela I thought she might even be one of Angie’s writing students. But no, her clothes seemed too refined, and she really didn’t look like a teenager. That night it wasn’t that cold and she was wearing a chic tan raincoat with black buttons. She was taller than most of the other mothers I saw come by that evening, slenderer, too, with a noticeably erect posture. Elongated teardrop black eyes in an oval face, high cheekbones, a pretty, pursed mouth, hair a very dark brown, a bit coarse and wavy, loose locks curled in over her cheeks, her complexion a shade lighter than her hair. When she turned her head sideways, I saw her classic Mesoamerican profile. It turned out she’s Marisela’s mother’s cousin and lives with them. Marisela’s mother, Stephen told me after they’d gone, works a night shift as a waitress, so it’s always her cousin who comes for her. She works, too, he said, in Manhattan, as a daytime nanny.

The next time she came to pick up Marisela it was colder out, and she was in one of those puffy parkas and a thick, knitted blue wool cap and sneakers. I walked toward the door with Marisela, who said, Lulú, isn’t it true that Mami and I crossed la frontera on a cow? I realized that Lulú had probably been in the country less time than Marisela had when she, with a bashful smile, answered in a low, accented voice I could barely hear: Oh yes, that is the true.

The next week I left the sanctuary when they did, falling into step beside Lulú and Marisela as we walked up the sidewalk past the Hindu temple with its mural of a blue-skinned goddess floating in the winter darkness, the street otherwise lined with plain three- and four-story walk-ups. Mostly Latino immigrants live on those streets, though gentrification, as Stephen often scornfully remarks, is underway all around there. Corner tiendas where neighbors like to gather to chat and gossip are being replaced with coffee bars where bearded blanquitos in eyeglasses sit on stools behind laptop computers at long front windows staring out at the street. With those words my seven- and eight-year-olds have described it to me; it seems to be the emblematic image of what’s going on in their neighborhood. Staring out from behind their eyeglasses at the street that one day will be all theirs. What will Stephen do then, when all the children in the neighborhood are the sons and daughters of hipsters and young couples who’ve purchased their Bushwick starter homes with mommydaddy money? His educational vision is partly about erasing the privileges and advantages those kids are born with, not about helping them get even further ahead of poor and immigrant kids. I don’t see Stephen keeping the learning sanctuary open for rich kids, motivating them to read Paradise Lost at age seven.

That first evening, as we walked up the sidewalk, Lulú and I made small talk about how crowded the subways are at this hour. The subways in Mexico City are faster than the New York trains and much quieter. They’re chido. Yes, they’re definitely chido, I agreed. You never have to wait so long between trains like here. And the Distrito Federal metro is not, she said carefully, a refuge for homeless people who have nowhere else to get out of the cold or heat and crazy and unstable scary people. Well they seem crazy to me. That’s true, I said. But in New York there are plenty of crazy and unstable people aboveground, too, even riding around in limos. And the DF and New York subways both have gropers and perverts, but which do you think has more, I asked. And she said, Oh, definitely Mexico. In New York you worry about a terrorist attack on the subway, but in Mexico you worry about earthquakes, she exclaimed with widened eyes and a helpless shrug that made me laugh. At the L train stop on the corner of DeKalb I said goodbye and descended the station steps, headed back to Carroll Gardens. Lulú and Marisela live only two blocks ahead and one over, on Wyckoff.

We walked together again the next week and the one after. I learned that Lulú’s given name is Lourdes, and she takes care of three-year-old Tani for a Mexican couple who live on the Upper West Side. The father, el señor Juan Carlos, is an opera singer, un baritono, who sometimes has to go away for weeks or even months to perform in an opera somewhere else, and the mother, whom Lulú always refers to as Verena, is a financial analyst who advises rich Mexicans about where to invest their money and usually works from home or meets clients in their homes or for lunch. She sometimes travels, too, though on much briefer trips than her husband’s. They have a dog called a Pomeranian, Lulú explained, and when the opera singer has to be away for more than a few days, he takes the dog with him. Last month the dog traveled to Vienna. As if she were sharing a remarkable piece of information, Lulú exclaimed in her characteristic way: When Verena was in university she studied linguistics! She speaks four languages and Spanish and