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

chair’s arm, raises her chin, a look like calm satisfaction in her eyes and an avid glint behind, like the very tip of a new memory rising. Something in her posture and poise reminds me of that oil portrait of her in her evening gown that hung in our living room. Now she looks down at the floor.

Well, I’m proud of you, Mami, I say. That you were brave enough to do that, to have your love affair.

Yes, Frankie, she says. She looks up again, slightly furrows her brow for a moment, then reaches her hand out for another cookie, and I hold the tin out to her.

I feel like a burglar who’s broken into her memory. But I also have this thought, which doesn’t exculpate me: Besides that warning, this is another reason that I came back from Mexico, to visit my mother at Green Meadows and ask all the questions that finally led to this one. It’s as if I’ve been slowly making my way through the dark narrow streets of her fading memories to finally discover this one room of light and calm where she keeps, instead of cardboard boxes filled with heels and soles, her most precious secret.

Where was my mother sitting within herself, what did she see around her, as she spoke to me? Maybe the past or a dream state or a fantasy had displaced the present. Was she really aware of what she was sharing with me? By tomorrow she might not even remember we had that conversation. But I also sense that she won’t have forgotten Miguel, that even if she sometimes loses her way trying to get back to the room, she goes there regularly.

Mamita didn’t go to Cuernavaca that summer. Someone, Mamita or Miguel or maybe both together, decided that she shouldn’t. But during several summers when we were small children, into at least our middle school years, she did sometimes go abroad to take courses of at least a few weeks’ duration. The courses qualified her to teach rudimentary literature classes rather than only give language instruction. She went to Mexico City, to the UNAM, more than once to Spain. In Madrid one summer, she studied golden age literature in a program also attended by students from the University of Havana and came home from it with an adamant dislike of Cuban men. Los Cubanos son muy groseros, no son caballeros, son tremendos, she was always saying things like that and also that they were loud. At first I thought it was that they were loyal Fidelistas and Communists who’d mocked her for being from Guatemala, a servile, humiliated American colony, the country that had let its territory be used to train the soldiers who went on to take part in the Bay of Pigs invasion, where they were soundly routed. Only a few years ago, it dawned on me that there was probably another reason Mamita always looked so perturbed whenever I brought up Cuba and Cubans, whether telling her about my own trips to the island or even asking her again to tell me about those Cubans she’d studied with years ago in Madrid. Son tan groseros, Frankie. No tienen respeto. In what ways, Mamita? I asked, and she twisted her face into a grimace, clucked her teeth, and said, You know, they’re so aggressive and rude. How, you mean about politics? Ay no, Frankie, ya. Mami, I said, laughing, I know what it is. They used to come on to you and openly flirt with you, right? I bet they teased you about what a prude you are. What did you expect, I said. A beautiful chapina all by herself in Madrid, and everyone knows what Cuban men are like. And she tightly pursed her lips and turned away, and I could tell she didn’t want me to see the amusement in her eyes or even that she was stifling a laugh. But that’s also how I knew that it wasn’t anything truly horrible that had happened to her with those Communist literature student Cubanos in Madrid.

I get it, Mamá. Geeky hippie-ish romantic intelligent Miguel, something of a free spirit, his enthusiasm for those peyote mysticism books, his gentle Mexican manners and awkwardly seductive, yet gently forthright ways, after two decades of dealing with Bert, it’s easy to imagine what you found so attractive about him. When you’re in Cuernavaca, Yolanda, we’ll escape to San Luis Potosí for a few days and with a shaman to guide us, we’ll take magic mushrooms or peyote. Yolanda, your life will never be the same. Mamita’s fantasies of what that will be like, God knows, make her eyes glow. She laughs with excitement. Yes, Miguel, we will, yes.

I’ve booked a room in a chain hotel out on the highway. Waiting out in the Green Meadows parking lot for a taxi, I think, How you answer Lulú’s message about Ayahuasca Bro and his hipster housewarming party could turn out to be really important, Frankie Gee, even decisive. But answer her later, at the hotel. Have a drink at the bar and think it over. You don’t want to mess this up.

But at the hotel, after I’ve checked in and gone into the lobby bar that I don’t want to spend another minute at, crowded with boisterous lower-level corporate types, “artistic” prints of iconic Boston athletes on the Irish green walls, I shout to the bartender through heads and shoulders for a double Maker’s on the rocks, then carry it up to my room with my luggage. From room service, I order a French onion soup and a Salisbury steak with mushroom gravy and another bourbon, this one straight. When I’m ready to drink it, I’ll get ice from the machine down the hall. I used to like Salisbury steak TV dinners when I was a child, this one will probably be no worse than those.

That first morning with Lulú in my apartment, fresh snow coating the