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

about what that actually means—for the very first time at age forty-nine, can anybody believe in such a fairy tale? When I came out of the subway station on Smith Street and had internet service again, my phoned buzzed in my pocket, and I pulled it out and there was a message from Lulú, in English:

“Panchito, have fun but hurry back. We can ride bicycles in the park. Here comes the spring weather!”

I immediately thumbed back: “Yo más puesto que un calcetín,” a saying that has always kind of annoyed me. But Lulú, like Gisela, loves those old abuelita sayings and expressions, too, and that was the one that came to mind. Not even sure what the equivalent of being más puesto que un calcetín would be in English: More pulled on than a sock, I’m so ready. My calcetín message she answered right away with a smiley face. Of course she did.

Right now I’m thinking that her hurry-back message didn’t merit that surge of optimism. It could have just been a you-can-probably-tell-this-is-over-but-just-in-case-I-change-my-mind message. We’ll go for a bike ride. Panchito. If the weather is good. Probably be a blizzard.

Right now, staring at my blank phone screen, I find myself marveling that any second incoming words might change my day, possibly even my life. That’s what having even a little love in your life, after none for years, brings, so long as you own a mobile phone. But Lulú isn’t a big texter. I’ll go days and nights without hearing anything, then there’ll be a flurry.

Proust wrote in his novel that a man, during the second half of his life, might become the reverse of who he was in the first. When I first read that a few years ago I liked the line so much I wrote it down on a piece of paper and put it into my wallet. Then I found a similar one in Simenon’s The Prison: “Alain Poitaud, at the age of thirty-two, took only a few hours, perhaps only a few minutes, to stop being the man he had been up to that time and to become another.” I decided to fill a notebook with quotes conveying that sense of the possibility of a seemingly magical personal metamorphosis, but then I didn’t come across many more. But I did find this one by Nathaniel Hawthorne that’s like the others but with an intriguing twist: “In Wakefield, the magic of a single night has wrought a similar transformation, because, in that brief period, a great moral change has been affected. But this is a secret from himself.” Something, even overnight, has changed you for the better, but you’re not even aware of it. But can’t it be something that has been building for years and that finally gathers enough weight, even from one day to the next, to tip over from bad into better or even into good? How will you know? Because someone will love you who wouldn’t have yesterday.

The train has just crossed from Rhode Island into Massachusetts. Along this stretch, it’s been like watching our town out the window sliced into views and arrayed along the tracks: thick pine forest, sparse winter woods, low stone wall, cold dark pond, fen of gray-green water in which dead tree trunks stand like ancient stone columns, fallow farm fields, yellow-brown meadows. We’re inland now, the land stretching away into the southeast corner of the state, toward Buzzards Bay and New Bedford, where Lexi lives. These are the old Wampanoag lands of King Philip’s War, and of Weetamoo, revered squaw sachem of Pocasset, entrusted by her brother-in-law, the warrior chief Metacom, aka King Philip, with the care and safekeeping of the famous captive Mary Rowlandson, who was taken along by Weetamoo when she led her tribal followers, mostly women, children, and elders, on a march deep into the wolf-infested forests to escape the Puritan colonial troops who would have killed or enslaved them. They were internal refugees, just like the Maya CPRs in the mountains and jungles of Guatemala. All around here there must be so many people who wouldn’t exist today if it hadn’t been for Weetamoo leading their ancestors to safety; maybe there are still descendants of Mary Rowlandson out there too. The Puritan soldiers finally captured Weetamoo a few years later, cut off her head, and stuck it on a pole for all to see.

Beginning around when Feli left to get married, day after day, from after school until dark, I used to disappear into our town’s forest, woods, and swamps, roaming alone for hours. Alone out there in the forestland I could escape the ordinary self that seemed unable to do anything right. If I went slow, picking my way through thorny underbrush, I could imagine I was going fast, outrunning my pursuers. Hopping from hummock to hummock to cross a stretch of swamp, I could lose my balance, plunge a sneakered foot into ice-cold mud up to a knee, and still tell myself nobody was a nimbler hummock jumper than I was. The forests in our town were a remnant of the same vast unbroken evergreen and deciduous wilderness that had once covered all New England and in its deepest parts still seemed as majestically primeval. Those hours of freedom were often paid for when I got home, especially if I was late for dinner or if my clothes were muddy or torn or full of burrs, bloody scratches on my skin. Any of that could set my father off. But it was still mostly shouting or a cuff to the side of the head, the real beatings hadn’t quite started yet; those were waiting just around the next bend.

They always come back though, making the muscles around my spine contract, forcing me to sit up straighter: my father shoving me down onto the floor with hand clamped around the back of my neck, my mother chirping: Bert! Bert! Not in the head! Don’t hit him in the head!