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

After my great-grandfather the Spanish rancher died, his four sons inherited ranches, and his two daughters, Abuelita and Tía Nano, came to the capital with their dowry trunks to live in a boardinghouse, a finishing school–type place run by twin sisters from France. Abuelito managed one of the big general stores on Séptima Avenida in the center, and on weekends he sold imported toys from Germany and France from a pushcart in the city’s Parque Central, in front of the cathedral. On one of those Sundays in the park, he met Abuelita.

Two nameless great-grandmothers, like two holes in the head. The missing identity of the Spanish rancher patriarch’s wife, my great-grandmother, was the most perplexing family mystery. Until, about a year ago, when a letter from Guatemala arrived for me at my publisher’s in New York by regular post. How easily that envelope could have been mislaid had that young editorial assistant who opened it, recognizing its potential importance to me, not express mailed it to Mexico City. Inside that envelope was a private letter and a photograph. The letter was from a woman named Sandra Hernández, who wrote that we were related through the Hernández family. We must be close in age. She’d been meaning to write to me since reading an interview in a Guatemalan newspaper in which I’d mentioned not knowing anything about either of my two great-grandmothers. “First of all, I can tell you that our great-grandparents hailed from Los Esclavos, Santa Rosa, on the Costa Sur,” Sandra wrote. “Our great-grandfather’s name was Luis Hernández, by profession a farmer and cattle rancher, and our great-grandmother was named Francisca García. Everyone called her Panchita. As the color of her skin demonstrated, she was of African origin. Your great-grandmother Panchita was beloved by all for her lively personality, the strength of her character, and for her kindness. She died in childbirth, to her infant daughter, María, who became known as Nano. That, Francisco, was what was passed down from my abuelo to my father and to us, about our great-grandmother.” That’s the part of the letter I know by heart now, though it was several pages long, telling the whole story of the Hernández rancher clan, generation by generation, down to Sandra and her own children. When Luis Hernández died, his ranches were left to his oldest son; orphaned Abuelita, exiled by her brothers to the city with her baby sister and their meager, landless inheritances, severed relations with the family forever after. Sandra Hernández is now a professor of women’s studies and feminism at the Universidad de San Carlos in Guatemala City. “About your family on the Montejo side,” she wrote, “all I know is that your grandfather committed suicide.”

Abuelita’s mother was black, so that was the big family secret. On the Costa Sur, mostly to work the sugar plantations in the lowland heat that so many highland Maya couldn’t endure, the Spaniards had brought in African slaves from the Caribbean plantations. That Abuelita was a mulatta, with her flat nose and wide nostrils, her broad cheeks, even her heavy-lidded eyes, now seemed obvious in her photographs, though that had never occurred to me before. Mamita, with her orange kinky hair, was what used to be called, in a city like New Orleans, a quadroon. What Sandra wrote about Abuelito having committed suicide was also new to me. I assumed he must have been bipolar, maybe schizophrenic, but I’d always understood that it was being struck by a bus in downtown Guatemala City that had killed him. After all, Don Paco was known to be always in a hurry, speeding along the sidewalks with the shiny dome of his bald head lowered while pedestrians parted to make way. It seemed believable that he’d accidentally collided with a bus, I still consider that the likeliest version. But I also understand that if Abuelito did commit suicide, even by intentionally ramming his head into an oncoming bus, it would have been kept secret from my sister and me and our cousins. When I was a boy, my mother had let slip some stories about her father’s “colorful” manic episodes, really bouts of full-throttle madness. On random mornings, inexplicably singing Verdi arias at the top of his lungs, Abuelito would bolt from the house out into the city, inevitably ending up in a brothel and giving away family money and properties to whores. He only sang Verdi arias during his attacks of madness. Abuelita managed to get all their banking accounts and properties put solely under her own name, an unprecedented maneuver for a woman in those days, but the rough cattle rancher’s mulatta daughter with the French finishing school polish, if that wasn’t a fiction, too, always had friends where it counted. Tío Memo used to have to chase his father down and get him into a straitjacket. Then they’d take the slow United Fruit Company train with its open-air wooden carriages that ran through the heart of the banana plantations, a tunnel of emerald green with stops named for Ivy League colleges, to Puerto Barrios, where they’d book a cabin on a banana boat—some of the human passengers were also bananas!—to New Orleans so that Abuelito could receive electric shock therapy. After I included some of those stories in my first novel, my mother reacted as if from now on everywhere she went people were going to say, There’s that poor woman, insanity runs in her family. Nobody should risk marrying her children. Whether anyone ever reacted in the way my mother feared isn’t the point, I’d violated her ingrained discretion and decorum. From then on, she hardly ever passed up a chance to say to her Guatemalan relatives and friends: Don’t tell Frankie anything. He’ll put it in a book.

The photograph that my distant cousin Sandra Hernández sent with her letter was a copy of an old-fashioned studio portrait of great-grandfather Luis