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

experience it. The Wooded Hollow Road housewives snubbed her; even Connie Sacco had been nicer. I knew that my mother resented being the object of comments or attitudes that people thought they were directing at a Puerto Rican or Cuban woman, but it wasn’t as if being identified as a Guatemalan by a white citizen of the Commonwealth promised nicer treatment. I remember that traffic cop outside Shoppers World where she’d bumbled into an illegal turn grinning up from her driver’s license and asking where she was from, and after she answered, he said, Oh yeah, Yolanda? So where’s ya Chiquita Banana hat? And he emphatically winked. That was one historically literate cop, though, to make that connection between my mother’s country and the originally Boston-based fruit company that gave birth to Chiquita and helped bring years of military dictatorship and slaughter to her country. But Mamita was always so proud of being Guatemalan, and I thought this pride was behind her refusal to become a US citizen too. She’d been eligible for citizenship for over four decades, but she’d always refused to take that step, insisting that she only wanted to be a citizen of the glorious republic of Guatemala. I’d always assumed, considering how much money she’d regularly taken and finally inherited from Abuelita, that there must be a tax reason behind her refusal too.

But even a Guatemalan can win a Nobel Prize, like Miguel Ángel Asturias did, or win the Boston Marathon like Doroteo Guamuch Flores, or become the Iraq invasion’s first US casualty. Though the frontline combat death of Marine Lance Corporal José Gutiérrez, an undocumented immigrant raised like Feli in a Guatemala City orphanage, was still a few years in the future on that day, about twelve years ago now, when my mother and I were in Washington, DC, because even a book by the son of a Guatemalan immigrant can become a runner-up, like my first novel was, for a national literary prize of not exactly earthshaking significance unless you win it, which I didn’t. That’s the same novel that had brought newspaper reporter Fred Tarrell out to the Congress Street Bridge. My mother had come alone to DC. The event was held in an elegant old theater, guaranteed to impress the parents of the nominated finalists and make them feel proud, and afterward, as people were filing out into the wide lobby, the director of the prize organization, a gracious lady with friendly freckles all over her face, came over to greet us. That’s when my mother, just like that, came out with probably the most surprising thing I’ve ever heard her say. The ceremony, she told the prize director, at which the judges had spoken so beautifully about all the finalist’s books including her son’s, had made her decide to finally become a US citizen. Mamita explained: Seeing my son honored here in the capital of this country made me feel that finally my family and I are accepted here, and that’s why I decided that I can forgive this country and can become a citizen. It was almost as if it were the prize director my mother was forgiving. Mom, this is just nuts, I said, putting my arm around her and feeling my own weird mix of embarrassment, tender pride, and a little disappointment, because I liked boasting about my mother’s stubborn refusal to become a citizen. It seemed totally unlike Mamita to have opened up like that to a stranger. That conversation in the lobby outside the theater exit was followed by cocktails and a fancy dinner in the wood-paneled hall where literary and New York publishing people mixed with the Washington, DC, political and media types for whom the prize ceremony was a springtime social event, and then it was off to get drunk in a nearby bar with the other nominated writers, including the winner, his big-clout agent, the jury, spouses, prize organizers, editors, publicists, and a critic or two all clumped around the bar on that sweltering night like glistening pork dumplings scooped from a roiling pot inside a big mesh strainer. After the dinner my mother had gone back to her hotel.

It was only late the next morning when, hungover, I met her for lunch in the coffee shop of the boutique hotel we’d been put up in that I asked, Forgive the US for what, Ma? She clucked her teeth as if she’d already changed her mind. Ay, Frankie, people like me, from Guatemala, Hispanic people, we aren’t treated with respect in this country. But seeing my son honored, she said, her voice going dreamy again, by all those important people, I felt we are accepted now, so now I can become a US citizen.

I thought, You know what, Mamita? Even if I’d written Don Quixote and won that prize, that wouldn’t have been enough to merit your monumental act of forgiveness. Originally my mother hadn’t been so thrilled about my book. It featured a family that resembled ours in obvious ways, except the father was earthy, kind, and nurturing, and the mother character was brassily seductive and obliviously but comically assertive about her prejudices. Of course she’s not you, Mamita, I’d explained countless times. I made her the opposite of you so that you couldn’t say I’d written about you. But now people think I’m like that! my mother insisted. She photocopied the tiny paragraph in the book’s copyright page that states: “This is a work of fiction, the product of the author’s imagination, any resemblances to any actual person is entirely coincidental.” Then she had it blown up and framed and hung it on the wall inside the front door so that it would be the first thing any visitor to our house saw.

That afternoon in DC my mother and I sat talking, in Spanish like we do when it’s just the two of us, in the hotel coffee shop by a window with yellow daffodils growing outside, until it was time