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

those were the correct terms. “A mix of science and art,” once you start doing some research into the field you repeatedly come across that description. Bert was a chemical engineer but also a color scientist or a color chemist. I’ve also learned from the scientific histories that modern ceramic artificial tooth production has its origins in the methods and discoveries of the European alchemists and Kabbalists. So does the story behind Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. (How did Frankenstein get his “pearly white teeth”?) Bert the alchemist, a contemporary practitioner of that ancient sacred craft of the Kabbalists. I only need to slide my laptop out of my backpack like this, set it on my lap, and open the desktop file titled (sorry Dad) FalseTeeth to find these notes copied from a journal:

“Light passes through porcelain in a manner that makes it seem both luminous and internally lit. An artificial tooth formed from porcelain materials, containing finely divided opacifying particles, including refracting pigment particles, can refract and transmit light in a manner exactly resembling the opalescence of a natural tooth.”

Mamita, smile again, please, I say. Just hold that smile a sec. I pull my phone from my pocket and take a picture of my mother’s smile.

I was a year out of college when I did go to live in Tío Memo’s house in Guatemala City. Most days I holed up in my cousin’s bedroom—Freddy was studying at Texas Tech—on the side of the garden opposite the main house, trying to write the three short stories required for my MFA school applications, and spent most of my free time hanging out with the primas, my two teenage girl cousins, and their friends. On a whim, I also submitted those stories to the fiction editor of a magazine in New York whose name, whenever my primas tried to pronounce it, came out sounding like Er-squirrel. A few months later I was back in New York, living in a rented loft over a vacuum cleaner shop on Fourteenth Street with three roommates, including Frecky Papperman, and was still half-asleep the morning that he brought the phone with the long cord into my little plywood alcove down at the loft’s noisy street end: A Mr. Rust, said Frecky, is on the line. It turned out that Er-squirrel’s venerable fiction editor was phoning to tell me that he wanted to publish two of the three short stories I’d sent to the magazine. One of those stories was inspired by Space Cavanaugh’s toolshed, the other was partly about Gail and her dogs and the flower shop. Afterward, I lingered in bed trying to absorb that news and finally chose a book from the pile next to my mattress that seemed appropriate to this life-changing moment, a paperback of the Carlos Baker biography of Ernest Hemingway, and opened it at the index, found my name, and turned to the page where I read that on a November morning in 1981, Francisco Goldberg learned that he’d become a published writer too. HaHaHa, our Hemingway here, you don’t have the character, the guts …

The young editorial assistant in charge of the slush pile told me later that it was the anomaly of receiving a manila envelope covered with Guatemalan airmail stamps that made her curious to read what was inside. Thanks to that stroke of luck, I was earning my living as a writer—I’d sold my stories for a thousand dollars each—and so I decided not to accept the offer of a scholarship to an MFA program and spend the next few years in the middle of cornfields working on In the Toolshed and Other Stories. Instead, I wrote my first “war correspondent” article for Er-squirrel—its new owners said they wanted to bring “new blood” into the magazine’s journalism—about what was going on in Guatemala, as depicted, mostly, through the eyes of my primas and their friends. “My father says that every morning now when he goes for his jog he runs past at least one dead body flung onto the side of the road.” “People are saying it’s going to be a Black November, that the Mayas are going to come down from the mountains into the city with their machetes and slaughter us all!” When Bonzo was elected president, Tío Memo and Tía Meche were ecstatic, they scorned the previous US president as Jimmy Castro. Human rights only meant rights for Communists. In my article I didn’t only describe life inside those upper-middle-class high walls that shut out so much of the annihilation going on beyond them, but I also tried to portray my own guilt and confusion over being trapped behind them too. A striking thing is that Tío Memo never said a negative word about my article, at least not to me, even though so much of it drew on what I’d observed while living in his house.

One evening during that year in Guatemala City, my aunt and uncle had thrown a cocktail party, which is where I’d met Ursula, who’d come with her parents. She was around my age, maybe a year or two younger, a skinny girl in an unfashionable yellow dress that I guessed her parents had made her wear since she seemed so uncomfortable in it. Her father was a lot older than Tío Memo yet seemed to defer to him. It turned out that Ursula was a medical student at the public university, San Carlos. Holding our weak scotch and sodas, served in glasses neatly swaddled in paper napkins, as is the genteel custom down there so that your fingers won’t get cold, we began our obligatory conversation. Whatever we were making small talk about was swiftly subsumed by the urgency in her pale-brown eyes, magnified by her eyeglass lenses, and her determined voice. Once a week, Ursula told me, she had a forensic medicine class in the Hospital Roosevelt morgue. Some days, when she got there, there were so many bodies they had to be stacked like firewood