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

while I probably did try to find her, all I remember for sure is that I never saw her again.

During that call from the florist shop, I’d given my mother the phone number of the apartment I was living in. The young couple who lived there, Gail and Blake, had rented me a tiny bedroom with one window that opened on a narrow airshaft. Gail had two mongrel dogs she’d found abandoned on the city streets that were always fighting each other. I hated walking those dogs that always wanted to attack every other dog and old person walking with a cane they passed. She also had a hyperactive orange cat she’d gotten from a shelter. Blake had a late-night jazz show on an obscure radio station and dealt pills. Once, when my father phoned, I managed to hang up after a few words and left the phone off the hook intentionally and then forgot, which infuriated Gail, who’d been trying to reach the apartment for hours from the restaurant where she worked. She was bad-tempered anyway, at least partly because of all the speed she took for her waitress double shifts and because she and Blake were always broke. He was always shouting: Well, if you weren’t spending so much on dog food!

Tío Memo phoned me there that same February. He’d come up to New York City like he did every year for the American International Toy Fair, and he took me to an Italian restaurant in Greenwich Village, where we had a long talk, by far the longest we’d ever had. When I’d come into the restaurant with straightened hair down to my shoulders, my uncle had watched me walk to our table with an expression of hawk-like stern astonishment. Two weeks had passed since the earthquake; the death toll was over twenty thousand. No one in our family had come to harm, and while the stores’ employees had all survived, some of their homes had collapsed; relatives had been killed or badly hurt. On the night after the quake, while the aftershocks continued, Abuelita and Tía Nano had slept in their car after their chauffeur, Chepe, had backed it out of the garage and into the empty lot across the street. Chepe, elderly himself and armed with a pistol, had stood guard. We didn’t know yet that Abuelita had cancer and was only going to live less than two more years. When the end was near, poor Mamita would cancel her last week of classes leading into the Christmas break to be able to spend more time with her in Guate; when she had to fly back home in late January to start the new semester, Abuelita was still alive. One evening a month later, after her separation from Bert, all alone in the house, Mamita got the telephone call from her brother that she’d been dreading.

In the Italian restaurant, I was still taking bites out of the bread sticks before anything else had been served when I told Tío Memo about having found my mother sobbing in the hotel room. I could see I’d instantly made him uncomfortable. My father makes her really miserable, I said heatedly, the way he makes everyone miserable, but my mother has gotten the worst of it by far, and because she never complains, nobody notices or does anything.

Ahh la gran, sighed my uncle, stretching out the sides of his lips and inhaling through his teeth the way he does. Qué pena, pobre la Yoli. I don’t like to hear this. He paused and said, Maybe it was just a bad day. All women are emotional, Frankie.

Rather than give a direct opinion on his sister’s marriage, Tío Memo started in on a story about my mother in her youth, as if hiding a clue inside of what initially seemed a tale of affectionate reminiscence. But to this day, I’m confused about the story Tío Memo told me that night. As a rule, we avoid discussing unpleasant topics in the Montejo Hernández family. My uncle especially is always looking for the next chance to say “ala, qué alegre” or “qué alegre, vos,” nice words to pronounce. I like saying them, too, in irony or sarcasm but also in goofy joy: Oh, what happiness! But what else is a lifetime of selling toys devoted to, if not getting people to exclaim, Qué alegre!

In their adolescence, said Tío Memo, he and Mamita used to share the same friends, a group of high-spirited ala, qué alegre youths. They’d go out to our family’s little chalet on the small lake near the city, Amatitlán, to waterski, or to their friends’ coffee fincas for horseback riding and picnics, and it was always so alegre. But my mother became especially close to one joven, said Tío Memo, who was a good student, an intellectual even—I sensed that my uncle calling him an intellectual was like that Chekhov rule about introducing a pistol in the first act—from a good family, a good family that employed the joven’s mother as a servant. Because the boy was so clever and had inherited his father’s light complexion, he’d always been allowed to live in that household and was eventually recognized by the father and given his surname. The joven’s mother went on working in the house and living in the maids’ quarters with her little son during his preschool years, then the father bought her a small home in the rough working-class barrio of La Limonada and gave her a monthly pension. The joven liked spending weekends and school vacations with his mother in La Limonada, where he was the only boy around with fair skin and hair. Tío Memo said that was probably the source of the joven’s societal resentments, feeling so torn between opposite worlds. The mother died when the joven was still in adolescence. My uncle and mother attended the funeral, where the coffin was carried to the grave atop a small wooden cart painted yellow, piled with