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

the shoulder, says, Okay, I’ll go get to work and leave you alone. She turns and hurries back to the counter. What a nice girl, I say to María, who now has her face tilted up to me, her expression almost distraught. She says, Frankie, when I said I had to tell you something important, it was because I spoke to a woman. Her name is Zoila, who escaped Guatemala before the bad people could kill her. I think it is a terrible story, yes, there are too many. But when I heard you on the radio, I thought, I have to speak to Frankie. Zoila’s story will be a new chapter in his book about the murder of our monseñor. If you can write it before the elections, I know you can stop this general Puño de Piedra from being president.

Puño de Piedra is General Cara de Culo’s new campaign nickname, for his rock-hard law-and-order fist. But María, I say, the elections are only a couple of months away. I’m not sure I even want to hear what she’s about to tell me. But of course I do. This trepidation is probably in anticipation of what María might expect me to do about it.

María is explaining that in her church there is a basement office where help is provided to immigrants. Help with the immigration laws, taxes, or a mortgage, all those things, she says, and even to find a lawyer. An elderly priest, Padre Lorenzo, had run the office for years, but he has gone now to the home for very old priests. Padre Rolando, a very young priest, Uruguayan, has taken over. Rolando is the son of a Tupamaro guerrilla who was killed when he was a small boy, María explains. And his mother was imprisoned for many years; he was raised by his abuela. But the padrecito does not know so much about Guatemala, she says. That’s why when Zoila went to tell him her story, he was not sure what to think. So he asked me: María, can you come and speak to your paisana and tell me your opinion?

So on a very cold day in February, just weeks ago, María went to meet with her in the church early in the morning before she had to open the laundromat. Zoila, she says, is young but not so, so young. But you can see the suffering has made her older, she says. Her black hair is filled with silver, and she is so delicada, Frankie, and her eyes so full of fright and sadness, how did she ever survive such terrible things? How did she make it alone through Mexico and all the way to Boston, where she came to live with her cousin? I am a small woman, too, says María. I am a K’iche’. Zoila is mestiza, but we small women from Guatemala are always much stronger than the men think. Isn’t that true, Frankie? But when Zoila began to tell her story, María says she was confused, because she thought it must be a story from my book about the bishop’s murder that she’d somehow forgotten, because she mentioned so many people who are in the book. María says, Even that friend of the capitán, Ulíses, who near the end is found murdered in the trunk of a car, he was in Zoila’s story, too.

Ulíses was probably Capitán Psycho-Sadist’s closest friend at the time of the bishop’s murder and later his top lieutenant in the narcotics street trade. It was just assumed that Psycho-Sadist had ordered his murder from prison because of how much Ulíses knew or because he’d run afoul of the dreaded capi in some way or for both reasons. It was one of those murders that barely gets investigated, if at all, because they seem so inevitable, and I’d felt frustrated to be unable to find out more about it. Now María is saying that Zoila had a novio, in whose desk at home she found several receipts for weapons purchases, signed by Ulíses. Arms to bring into the prison for the capitán, she was sure. Zoila’s boyfriend was a warden of the prison where the three military men convicted for their roles in the bishop’s murder had been sent. And now María is saying that Zoila overheard the warden and the capitán talking about and planning a murder in the prison on the orders of General Cara de Culo.

Whoa, what? I interrupt. María, what do you mean Zoila overheard that? How? Who?

We’re sitting in plastic chairs now, facing each other. In her seat, María turns her head and torso, first one way and then around the other, as if to make sure that no one is eavesdropping on us or maybe just to affirm to herself that she is still here in her laundromat, where everything is running smoothly on a busy Sunday.

The warden worked at the prison in two-week shifts, she explains. Two weeks there, two weeks at home. Zoila stayed with the warden when he was at home, and though she’d kept her room in a little house she shared with a friend in another part of the city, he’d recently asked her to live in his house when he wasn’t there too. Zoila assumed that before long they’d be married; for a while it was what she wanted. In the days, Zoila worked in a day care nursery. But when the warden was in the prison, she’d go there almost daily, bringing him food, usually some Pollo Campero, which he’d be happy to eat every day of the week, and she’d pick up his laundry too. That’s what she was doing in the warden’s bedroom at the prison, gathering his dirty clothes, when she heard the capitán come into the warden’s office in the adjacent room. From there in the bedroom, Zoila could hear the capitán and the warden in the office discussing and planning a murder. Several times in the conversation, General Cara de