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

on the floor. I remember her exact words: And you should see the condition they arrive in.

I should see. Well, probably, I should, but … In a small staff nook in that hospital a few days later, I pulled on, over my clothes, the doctor’s robe Ursula had handed me. She tucked a pair of examination gloves into its pocket and hung a stethoscope around my neck, an odd instrument for where we were going. We went into the morgue. There weren’t bodies stacked like firewood that day, but there were corpses laid out on three of the concrete autopsy tables. The cement floor had a wet sheen, as if just hosed. Up until that day, the only dead person I’d seen, a peek into the open coffin, was shrunken Grandpa Moe in a suit and tie and white yarmulke. On the autopsy table closest to us lay the corpse of a young man with a trimly muscular body, a handsome face with Amerindian features, eyes serenely closed, skin youthfully toned and damp, a black mustache, soft-looking instead of bristly, and wisps of chin hair. His torso and arms were speckled with brownish dots. Ursula whispered, Those are cigarette burns. What looked like a popped blister, circular and pink, was where his penis should have been. His smooth feet were unblemished and melancholy looking, pointing up as if gazing back at his face. What we were doing was risky, and I suppose other things besides risky, and we quickly left. As soon as we got into her car, one of those little hatchbacks, she asked if I’d noticed that his throat had been slit. I hadn’t. They’d already cleaned him, she said, and washed away the blood.

Afterward we went to a restaurant in la Zona Viva, owned by a Belgian, where we ordered quiche and salad and tried to have a normal conversation. Over the years, I’ve often described that visit to the morgue as “the day I became a journalist.” As if just asking the inevitable questions—who was he, who did this to him, and why?—sent me tumbling down a rabbit hole that I came out the other end of changed into a journalist. Probably all of Guatemala knew who was doing that, to young men and women especially, and why. Then what difference could it make to see it for yourself? Because to witness something like that implicates you, it allows that reality to go on living inside you, growing darker, more impenetrable, unless you accept the challenge of living with it and trying to make it clearer instead of ever darker and more confusing. Though, of course, you can also try to run from it. But could even the most astute and veteran journalist explain to me how the murdered torture victim in the morgue and having quiche for lunch in the Belgian’s restaurant fit coherently together inside the same hour—or even inside the same life? I remember our lunch, the quiche and salad, as vividly as I do the morgue. We didn’t eat in complete silence, but I don’t remember anything we said, just an impression of Ursula’s eyes like small wet leaves stuck to the inside of her eyeglass lenses. I wondered what came next. It didn’t seem possible that all that was going to happen after lunch was that she was going drive me back to my uncle’s house, but that was all that happened.

I left that story about the morgue out of that first magazine journalism piece so as not to expose Ursula to any danger. Later I heard that her parents had sent her to live in California.

Before I leave the nursing home today, I’m going to show my mother that photograph of her maternal grandfather posing with her mother, Abuelita, when she was young. I have the photo in my backpack. I brought it last visit, too, though that time I didn’t take it out in the end. I didn’t want to upset her, even though I do think it’s only right that she see it. Like el joven, my mother’s father was an illegitimate child, but that was never a secret. My mother always told us about her grandfather Colonel Montejo, who’d recognized Abuelito as his son. My mother knows the names of both her grandfathers, but she’s never been able to tell me who her grandmothers were.

Mami, I’d insist, it’s impossible that your father never spoke to you about his own mother. He never did, she’d respond, like that was normal. The few times I’d asked Tío Memo, he’d answered pretty much the same: Ay Frankie, a saber, who knows. Maybe my abuelo’s mother was a prostitute or a beautiful concubine. Maybe she was a servant, like el joven’s mother.

Abuelita’s father, Luis Hernández, emigrated from Spain and became a rancher, Mamita always had stories to tell about her maternal grandfather. His true calling as a cattle rancher came to him late in life, after years of failing to strike it rich, that’s how that gachupín-in-the-tropics legend went. In some versions, he started out as a cattle rustler, riding with his outlaw cowboys into El Salvador to steal his first herds. In Guatemala, those herds prospered and multiplied, as did the number of his ranches. He became mayor of his pueblo and married the prettiest niña living there. In the family history that my mother and uncle shared, that girl, their grandmother, was always an adolescent, and Luis Hernández was always around fifty. She gave him six children, four boys and two girls, but she died giving birth to Tía Nano, Abuelita’s little sister whom Mamita always loved like a second mother. What was the name of that prettiest girl in the pueblo, Mamita, who gave birth to the Spanish rancher’s six children, including your own mother and aunt? My mother didn’t know her name or anything else about her.

You mean you don’t know the names of either of your grandmothers, and that doesn’t bother you. You were never