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

looked covered by a thick swarm of flies. It’s a good example, I think, of the peculiar uniqueness any small country can possess. When my mother was a girl, German Guatemalan National Socialists held marches in Guatemala City and vilified the country’s tiny Jewish community, including her piano teacher, Señorita Rosenberg. Guatemala’s military dictator unexpectedly took the side of the Allies in World War II, which allowed him to deport Germans and expropriate their coffee plantations, which were divided among the dictator and his cronies. Ten years after the war ended, when my mother’s wedding to my father in Guatemala City was only days away, Archbishop Rossell personally ruled that she couldn’t marry a Jew in a Catholic church in Guatemala. That belated gust from the Nazi tornado was strong enough to expel my parents’ wedding across the border. In Mexico City they had a small wedding in a side chapel of the cathedral, attended by half a dozen rented bridesmaids who must have been genuinely nice, friendly young Mexico City women, because Mamita forever after spoke fondly of them. My grandparents came from Guatemala for the wedding. My mother’s brother, her aunt Nano, but none of my father’s relatives or friends were there. Maybe he rented a best man, but no one ever mentioned it if he did. Still, my mother wore the splendid ivory wedding gown and almondine French lace mantilla that she’d planned to wear in Guatemala, where she was supposed to have had a religious wedding in the Church of San Sebastián, followed by a party at the Club Guatemala. By rough calculation I was conceived in the Hotel María Cristina in Mexico City, where my parents stayed during that wedding week. Anyway, fast-forwarding a bit, Hodge, when I was in the fourth grade, I checked out The Rise and Fall of Adolf Hitler by William Shirer from the public library, the abridged Landmark Books version published for children, but my mother secretly returned it to the library, and when I went and checked that book out again and hid it in my room, she found it anyway and once more returned it to the library. That does seem funny now, sweetly touching, yeah. But, seriously, what did she think she was shielding me from, not letting me read The Rise and Fall of Adolf Hitler, and did she really believe she could protect me from that? I did eventually read the adult version, years later, well, not all of it, to be honest. Back then my mother probably would have done better by not letting me read Landmark’s Remember the Alamo!, written by none other than Robert Penn Warren. Of course I totally hero-worshipped Davy Crockett and all the rest who were massacred by General Santa Anna and the barbaric Mexicans.

Mr. Monk has just recommended his Meditation Mantra Number Three: What is it about sensual desire that we desire? During this break, public radio listeners across the land are meditating on what it is they desire about sensual desire. Yet shortly they’ll be hearing about General Cara de Culo, who could douse even Walt Whitman’s desire for desire. I was told my segment would be fifteen minutes. Maybe it won’t even be that long, the monk seems to be getting on a roll.

On many Sundays, Mamita and Mrs. Lucas, little Marianne beside her in strap shoes and ankle socks, must have attended the same masses at the Church of St. Joseph. There’s even a good chance the Lucases were there the Sunday that Father John Doyle gave his sermon that led to my mother’s vow never to set foot in St. Joe’s ever again. Father Doyle said that no Jews can go to heaven because from birth to death they are outside of the church. Jews are born in sin, and they die in sin. That’s why it’s a thousand times better, a million times better, infinitely better—Father Doyle, according to my mother, told his congregation—to be a bad Catholic than to be any Jew on earth, even the best Jew. That offended my mother. Father Doyle was baroquely bulky, with a ruler-straight part in his thin brown hair, narrow eyes that looked scribbled in with a pencil, a long sloping nose, lips like jelly candy. It was the Jews’ fault, he went on, that there were now theaters in Boston showing pornography, just like in the heart of the most Jewish city on earth, Times Square, New York. Father Doyle spoke as if what he was saying couldn’t be more obvious. The Jews hate that Boston is still a Catholic city, said the priest. Boston is and will always be the most Catholic city in the United States of America, the priest went on. But the Jews want Boston to be a Communist city, especially all those immigrants from Russia. That was sweetly funny, to see my mother’s chagrined little smile when she recounted that part, because she knew that my father’s father, Grandpa Moe, had been a dedicated Socialist and would have loved nothing more than for Boston to become a Communist city. Grandpa Moe had had the rotten luck to immigrate before the Bolshevik Revolution, and afterward he couldn’t get over what a great time he was missing out on. He was constantly threatening to take his family back there, which infuriated his Americanized children, especially his son, already a loyal citizen of baseball. Instead of going back to Russia to help build Communism, Grandpa Moe became founding head and president of the Boston Jewish Socialist Bakers and Pickle Makers Union, which at its height had a membership of about five Red bakers and pickle makers.

When Mass was finally over, Father Doyle and his altar boys proceeded into the vestry. My mother went to the deacon and told him that she urgently needed to speak with the priest. That scalding stare Mamita gets when she’s angry or frightened or both, her witchy beauty exacerbated by the black lace mantilla she