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

I met Gisela at a party within days of having moved to Mexico City. A love-at-first-sight thing, like I’d been torn open, gutted, and refilled with pure yearning I could hardly bear. Her Picasso harlequin girl expressiveness, the straight line between her lips that when bent downwards at the corners and pulling her face down with it could make her look so tragic and so childishly gleeful when stretched out, deepening her dimples. Her jittery overcaffeinated Audrey Hepburn lissomness and poise. Her rich-girl-gone-wrong haughty moodiness. Her aloof air of cool, of pertaining to a world I’d envied from afar while claiming to disdain it. I must have had a class fixation, one like a secret devotion, because my last two relationships (Pénèlope, Camila) had been with rich girls who came from other kinds of exclusive worlds, both, in different ways, essentially rebels against their upbringings. Gisela, my friend told me, was twenty-eight, a talented photographer, her work published in some of the Mexican art magazines, displayed in group shows. I didn’t get to talk to her much that night. She left early with the young man my friend predicted she’d soon be breaking up with, and she did. Within a week she was dropping by my apartment nearly every afternoon. She used to tell me stories about her life in her funny breathless way, skipping over what seemed like the important and even crucial parts as if it bored her to have to slow down to describe them, so I always had to listen extra carefully, cast backward to fill in blanks, use my imagination a little, which I liked. Conversations like the scenes in a movie where the beautiful damaged ingénue discovers that she’s found someone who truly listens to her instead of only lusting after her. Somehow I managed to be patient, didn’t panic that I was being trapped into a “just friends” relationship. We were on my bed watching one of those Golden Age Mexican movies she adored the first time we kissed and within moments were having sex in what was like a secret language I hadn’t even known I could speak and had been waiting to use all my life; it had a smaller vocabulary than Pénèlope’s but struck deeper, the punctuation marks having a subtly startling poetry of their own, maybe love, the true experience of being deeply seized by love was what that was.

Gisela was extreme, hermetic, even strange in her individuality in a way that riveted me. She’d warned me: Soy una a niña perversa. One morning she threw me out of her apartment because she didn’t like the way I’d hung up a towel in her bathroom, an obsessive-compulsive control freak to boot. Photography, the stillness it imposed, was one way she calmed her nerves and frenzies, as was any form of intricate beauty that drew her into its circuitry and patterns, absorbing and sustaining her attention: a fascination with Arab calligraphy, ceramics, and the hand tattoos of Berber women; with Mexican prison tattoos; with any unique object, the more eccentric the better, that she considered beautifully made. She fantasized about owning a shop that would consist of only one window in a narrow wall where she’d display and sell one object at a time, mostly lost and degraded treasures she’d buy in the Lagunilla flea market and carefully restore. She had a stray-cat knowledge of Mexico City, knew how to converse with all kinds of people, especially those others might callously overlook or be frightened by. Gisela was a master shoplifter too. She had tales of mind-boggling shoplifting feats, she’d been at it since she was about twelve and had never been caught. To this day the best kitchen knife I own is a Wüsthof that she stole for my birthday from the Palacio de Hierro on Avenida Durango, where the expensive kitchen knives are displayed in locked glass cabinets; whenever I move, I take it with me.

Any small disagreement or clumsy verbal slip could start a fight. We were always breaking up. All those hours spent phoning Gisela—it was still a few years before the masses started using cell phones—standing on Mexico City street corners even in the rain, sliding my phone card into payphones, the phone ringing and ringing or her answering machine coming on or else, finally, when she did pick up, she’d hear it was me and hang up.

I see now what I didn’t then: back then, at least, I was some kind of emotional masochist, though not a sexual one, I’ve never been drawn to that kind of pain. Cruelty was something I didn’t need to fetishize because I knew it too well, almost like a first language. He likes damaged girls, it could have been said about me. But is he himself too damaged to be able to help them or even to be loved by them?

During one of our breakups, one that lasted longer than usual, I did finally manage to tell Gisela on the phone that my birthday was coming up. She’d come out to dinner with me to celebrate my fortieth birthday, wouldn’t she? My fortieth! I knew that would soften her. She was a good person at heart, sentimental in that way, she wouldn’t want me to spend my fortieth birthday alone. I took her to Maxim’s, in Polanco, the froufrouness of the place would be campy romantic fun. She wore the most beautiful vintage lacy white blouse and sat in the back of the taxi like Thumbelina going to the ball with her New Yorky toad. We drank a couple of bottles of champagne, had a fun night, and I suppose the several months that followed were our happiest, our least rocky.

The lie that would deform our relationship was exposed at Mexico City airport as we stood in the security line, our luggage already checked to Madrid, where the translation of my second novel was about to be published. Now it was Gisela’s