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

try to compose my face and as calmly as I can say, I mean, I’m really glad you told me. I’m just wondering why today.

Frankie, Doña Yoli made me promise to her that I would never tell you or Alexandra about this, says Feli in a firm tone that suggests that as we both know my mother, that should be obvious. And yes, she says, so many years have passed since your mother has talked about this with me. But the last time I saw you, Doña Yoli had not been in her nursing home for very long. Her memory is going to get worse. Maybe there is not so much time left for you to talk to her. I don’t know if you ever will or not. But I decided it is not right, Frankie, that you don’t know anything about what your mother had to go through, after she came back to Mr. Goldberg.

You mean Lexi doesn’t know about this? I ask.

I did not tell her, Frankie, she says. You know, Lexi never calls me.

Do you think that’s why my mother left Bert that first time, after I was born and we went back to Guatemala? I ask.

I wasn’t living with you yet, so I don’t know, says Feli. But Doña Yoli told me a little about it. Your father was who he was, Frankie. But he got worse after you came back, after Lexi was born. Abuelita made Doña Yoli come back because of her religious beliefs. Also, when you got sick, she made your mother feel too guilty over that. It wasn’t because your mother left Mr. Goldberg that you got sick, it wasn’t right that Abuelita made her feel to blame. But to your mother, Abuelita could never do anything wrong.

On the way into Boston, the subway stops at Longwood. Out the window I see the massive brick edifice of Longwood Towers, the familiar green awning outside the entrance of the former luxury residential hotel, by now pricey apartments or condos. The bridge club my father belonged to was in the basement, down at one far end. I went there a few times, once with my sister to caddy at a weekend bridge tournament: we brought new racks of cards to the tables and collected the played ones and scorecards. Lexi was better at it than I was, arriving promptly at each table when she was supposed to—one cardplayer crabbily asked me why I looked so sleepy—and at the end of the tournament, Lexi was given more in tips than I was. The atmosphere at the bridge club was a mix of library-like concentration and cantankerous outbursts inside a constant cloud of cigarette and cigar smoke, of complaints, wisecracks, howls of histrionic disillusion and defeat. So that I could repeat it at school, I memorized this exchange between two men playing as partners for the first time. Player One: Stop calling me Fuck, my name’s Fuch [fewk]. Player Two, later that afternoon, angrily throwing down his cards: Aww go fewk yourself. Most of the bridge players were middle-aged Jewish men, though some were young, students from the Boston-area universities, unshaven chain-smokers, shirts pulled taut by rolls of flab. My father wasn’t particularly funny, but he laughed at the bridge club like he never did at home. A grand master, a onetime New England champ, Bert was a revered figure there. Your father is good at games, any game, my mother used to say.

Will I ever talk to my mother about what Feli told me? I don’t know. I need to think about how I’d bring it up or under what circumstances. Does Lexi really not know about it? I mean, if it’s something she and Lexi have already talked about, I’d like to know that. I’ve been away for so many years. I’m an outsider, at least regarding Lexi and Mamita’s shared secret world.

I wish I could remember every single second of my entire life so far, in full 3-D Technicolor and surround sound, and at every past scene reinhabit myself exactly as I was.

I check back in to the same hotel I stayed in the night I had dinner with Marianne. No messages on my phone. Maybe I should go out and get a cheeseburger at a nice bar somewhere, but no, the Saturday night Boston bar crowds, forget that. I order an individual pepperoni pizza and what the room service menu calls the Healthy Kale Caesar and a bottle of red wine. I turn on the TV to SportsCenter. Have to admit, I’m feeling just incredibly desolate.

So what is loneliness, really? Doesn’t it have to ache night and day, to weigh you down at least like a ceaseless low-grade sorrow, to be the real thing? Otherwise how could it be true, like I read in the newspaper, that loneliness is a marker for early death as much as high cholesterol. I’m not depressed, I don’t even think I’m all that lonely. I’ve just been alone longer than I would have liked.

And I’m on that filthy Tangiers beach yet again, struggling along under the weight of our bags, which are laden with all the beautiful objects, fabrics, and bags of spices and tea Gisela bought in the stalls and cave-like shops of the Fez medina and trying to see as far as I can down the length of the beach, into the blue seaside fog into which she’s disappeared, chasing the receding silhouette of a camel that she’d spotted far ahead or maybe two camels close together. At the ferry office, after Gisela had shared her disappointment to be leaving Morocco after only six days—and on her birthday no less—without even getting to ride a camel, the sympathetic ticket clerk told her that she could get a camel ride at the beach. There was still time if she hurried over there; our ferry to Spain was leaving in two hours. The tide is out but just beginning to come