Any small disagreement or clumsy verbal slip could start a fight. We were always breaking up. All those hours spent phoning Gisela—it was still a few years before the masses started using cell phones—standing on Mexico City street corners even in the rain, sliding my phone card into payphones, the phone ringing and ringing or her answering machine coming on or else, finally, when she did pick up, she’d hear it was me and hang up.
I see now what I didn’t then: back then, at least, I was some kind of emotional masochist, though not a sexual one, I’ve never been drawn to that kind of pain. Cruelty was something I didn’t need to fetishize because I knew it too well, almost like a first language. He likes damaged girls, it could have been said about me. But is he himself too damaged to be able to help them or even to be loved by them?
During one of our breakups, one that lasted longer than usual, I did finally manage to tell Gisela on the phone that my birthday was coming up. She’d come out to dinner with me to celebrate my fortieth birthday, wouldn’t she? My fortieth! I knew that would soften her. She was a good person at heart, sentimental in that way, she wouldn’t want me to spend my fortieth birthday alone. I took her to Maxim’s, in Polanco, the froufrouness of the place would be campy romantic fun. She wore the most beautiful vintage lacy white blouse and sat in the back of the taxi like Thumbelina going to the ball with her New Yorky toad. We drank a couple of bottles of champagne, had a fun night, and I suppose the several months that followed were our happiest, our least rocky.
The lie that would deform our relationship was exposed at Mexico City airport as we stood in the security line, our luggage already checked to Madrid, where the translation of my second novel was about to be published. Now it was Gisela’s birthday coming up, and I’d promised to take her from Spain to Fez, Morocco. It was her dream to go there. She was fixated on the notion that she should get to ride on a camel on her birthday, and I’d promised her that too. She lightly lifted my passport out of my hands, opened it, her eyes intensely focusing on what she was reading there for a few seconds. She handed it back and said, Enjoy your trip to Spain, lying pinche cabrón, but if you come back without my suitcase, te la voy hacer de jamón. I’d never heard that phrase before, which I mistranslated as a threat to make me into a ham. I followed her out to the sidewalk near the taxis. We lit cigarettes. She smoked Faros, of course she did, carried them in an antique silver case. I smoked whatever, several in succession, shaking fingers shoving them into my lips. What are you talking about, what lie? She told me, and I was flooded with shame. That lie. When I’d asked her out to dinner by telling her it was my fortieth birthday, it was really my forty-first. I’d said forty, I confessed, because I’d thought that if I told her I was turning forty-one that wouldn’t have seemed a special enough occasion to get her to come out to dinner. Hadn’t we made up that night? If I hadn’t told that lie, would we be here now, at the airport, about to fly to Spain and Morocco? So long as we hurried back to airport security instead of arguing out on the sidewalk, we could still catch our plane. Hijo de la chingada, don’t try to blackmail me. Martí called lies the despicable siblings of guilt, but what was I guilty of besides lying? Of stupidity, callow character, of not understanding that a silly lie wasn’t just a silly lie. Sure, it wasn’t like I’d tried to pass myself off as thirty, it hadn’t been that kind of lie, but what did that absolve me of? I swear, I pleaded, I’ll never lie to you again. We did manage to make our flight. And then throughout every day and night in Spain, she punished me. Anything that came out of my mouth was to be doubted, was worthless, because I was a liar. Even now, remembering it as I pace around in this hotel room, I feel sadness and regret weighing me down. You could argue that I ended up wasting a decade of my life because of that lie, unable to relinquish what I’d fatally ruined. We had almost three weeks before our return flight to Mexico. I’d told her it was going to be just a few days of publicity in Madrid, but I’d misunderstood or else nobody had remembered to tell me that the cultural section of the US embassy had decided to help sponsor my tour, sending me to Barcelona, Zaragoza, Bilbao, Toledo, Sevilla, press, bookstores, universities, even a high school. Gisela fought with me the whole way, was always going off to sulk, to wander the streets and have meals on her own. The book events she came to she walked out in the middle of. Later, back in Madrid, I learned from a Mexican writer friend who was living there that the chic Spanish publicist who’d accompanied us had begged the publisher to never publish me again. By the end of the tour and a couple of days resting up and exploring Madrid, we only had a week left for Morocco. I’d promised two weeks, another lie. But still, we did get to go. I was carrying all our luggage, several yards behind her, through the Algeciras ferry port when a Spanish policeman stopped her, gestured back at me and warned that a moro was following her. That kind of thing has always happened to me in Spain. That’s not a moro, Gisela answered the ferry port cop, that’s my boyfriend. She was sure that was the funniest sentence she’d spoken in her life: not a moro, my boyfriend, jajaja, it cheered her up. Thanks to that racist ferry port cop, we crossed the Mediterranean to Africa in a pretty good mood.
I can’t believe what I just heard, here in this public radio station green room, listening to the piped-in interview with the guest who’s gone on before me, a Buddhist monk who wrote a book called Mindful Loving about how to cultivate your ability to love through mindful living, meditation, yoga, healthy eating, don’t you know bananas are a virility super food? Eat your banana, son! Then I heard the monk say, If our parents didn’t love each other, if they didn’t understand or care about each other or try to make each other feel loved, then how are we, their children, supposed to know what love is or looks like?
Really, what a coincidence. I, too, never once in my life saw my parents kiss, never saw one lightly caress the other in a loving or even passingly sensuous way. Radio interviewers never ask me to talk about such subjects; I wonder how that would go if they ever did. Welcome back to Hodgepodge Afternoon Radio. Our guest this afternoon is Francisco Goldberg, here to talk with us about his Guatemalan immigrant mother and some of the challenges she faced, devoutly Catholic herself yet married to a Jewish man and raising a family here in the Boston area. Sure, Hodge, like I was saying before the break, my mother grew up in a country with a strong German Nazi presence. No other country in the Western Hemisphere was so infested. Once I was shown an archival copy of a US intelligence map from the late 1930s that counted the number of coffee plantations, or fincas, owned by German Nazis in Guatemala, each finca marked with a tiny black swastika, so many swastikas that the central portion of that map, all the way up to Mexico, looked covered by a thick swarm of flies. It’s a good example, I think, of the peculiar uniqueness any small country can possess. When my mother was a girl, German Guatemalan National Socialists held marches in Guatemala City and vilified the country’s tiny Jewish community, including her piano teacher, Señorita Rosenberg. Guatemala’s military dictator unexpectedly took the side of the Allies in World War II, which allowed him to deport Germans and expropriate their coffee plantations, which were divided among the dictator and his cronies. Ten years after the war ended, when my mother’s wedding to my father in Guatemala City was only days away, Archbishop Rossell personally ruled that she couldn’t marry a Jew in a Catholic church in Guatemala. That belated gust from the Nazi tornado was strong enough to expel my parents’ wedding across the border. In Mexico City they had a small wedding in a side chapel of the cathedral, attended by half a dozen rented bridesmaids who must have been genuinely nice, friendly young Mexico City women, because Mamita forever after spoke fondly of them. My grandparents came from Guatemala for the wedding. My mother’s brother, her aunt Nano, but none of my father’s relatives or friends were there. Maybe he rented a best man, but no one ever mentioned it if he did. Still, my mother wore the splendid ivory wedding gown and almondine French lace mantilla that she’d planned to wear in Guatemala, where she was supposed to have had a religious wed
ding in the Church of San Sebastián, followed by a party at the Club Guatemala. By rough calculation I was conceived in the Hotel María Cristina in Mexico City, where my parents stayed during that wedding week. Anyway, fast-forwarding a bit, Hodge, when I was in the fourth grade, I checked out The Rise and Fall of Adolf Hitler by William Shirer from the public library, the abridged Landmark Books version published for children, but my mother secretly returned it to the library, and when I went and checked that book out again and hid it in my room, she found it anyway and once more returned it to the library. That does seem funny now, sweetly touching, yeah. But, seriously, what did she think she was shielding me from, not letting me read The Rise and Fall of Adolf Hitler, and did she really believe she could protect me from that? I did eventually read the adult version, years later, well, not all of it, to be honest. Back then my mother probably would have done better by not letting me read Landmark’s Remember the Alamo!, written by none other than Robert Penn Warren. Of course I totally hero-worshipped Davy Crockett and all the rest who were massacred by General Santa Anna and the barbaric Mexicans.
Mr. Monk has just recommended his Meditation Mantra Number Three: What is it about sensual desire that we desire? During this break, public radio listeners across the land are meditating on what it is they desire about sensual desire. Yet shortly they’ll be hearing about General Cara de Culo, who could douse even Walt Whitman’s desire for desire. I was told my segment would be fifteen minutes. Maybe it won’t even be that long, the monk seems to be getting on a roll.
On many Sundays, Mamita and Mrs. Lucas, little Marianne beside her in strap shoes and ankle socks, must have attended the same masses at the Church of St. Joseph. There’s even a good chance the Lucases were there the Sunday that Father John Doyle gave his sermon that led to my mother’s vow never to set foot in St. Joe’s ever again. Father Doyle said that no Jews can go to heaven because from birth to death they are outside of the church. Jews are born in sin, and they die in sin. That’s why it’s a thousand times better, a million times better, infinitely better—Father Doyle, according to my mother, told his congregation—to be a bad Catholic than to be any Jew on earth, even the best Jew. That offended my mother. Father Doyle was baroquely bulky, with a ruler-straight part in his thin brown hair, narrow eyes that looked scribbled in with a pencil, a long sloping nose, lips like jelly candy. It was the Jews’ fault, he went on, that there were now theaters in Boston showing pornography, just like in the heart of the most Jewish city on earth, Times Square, New York. Father Doyle spoke as if what he was saying couldn’t be more obvious. The Jews hate that Boston is still a Catholic city, said the priest. Boston is and will always be the most Catholic city in the United States of America, the priest went on. But the Jews want Boston to be a Communist city, especially all those immigrants from Russia. That was sweetly funny, to see my mother’s chagrined little smile when she recounted that part, because she knew that my father’s father, Grandpa Moe, had been a dedicated Socialist and would have loved nothing more than for Boston to become a Communist city. Grandpa Moe had had the rotten luck to immigrate before the Bolshevik Revolution, and afterward he couldn’t get over what a great time he was missing out on. He was constantly threatening to take his family back there, which infuriated his Americanized children, especially his son, already a loyal citizen of baseball. Instead of going back to Russia to help build Communism, Grandpa Moe became founding head and president of the Boston Jewish Socialist Bakers and Pickle Makers Union, which at its height had a membership of about five Red bakers and pickle makers.
When Mass was finally over, Father Doyle and his altar boys proceeded into the vestry. My mother went to the deacon and told him that she urgently needed to speak with the priest. That scalding stare Mamita gets when she’s angry or frightened or both, her witchy beauty exacerbated by the black lace mantilla she wore over her head, her chin and spine lifted to help her draw strength from pride, both of her delicate hands clutching her purse in front of her waist, that’s how I see my mother waiting, in the post-Mass silence and shadows, rehearsing to herself what she was going to say. The anti-Semitic priest reappeared, still in his long, white vestments. My mother knew she had a chirpy, accented voice that made some people not take her seriously, but her English was nearly flawless. She launched right in and said, Father Doyle, I come every Sunday to Mass in this church. Sometimes I bring my children, but I am glad that today I didn’t. My husband is Jewish, as I think you know, and he is a good man. I prefer for the father of my children to be a good man, not a bad man. Whatever is his religion is not more important. Speaking as a mother I can tell you, Father Doyle, you are wrong about that. I’m sorry to say this, Father, but it is wrong to teach prejudice in church, to try to make people not like the Jews. Father Doyle, I think you should apologize for what you said.
More than once I’ve asked my mother to repeat what she told the priest, and her words always come out the same. This was one of the bravest moments of her life, probably replayed in her memory countless times. It happened during the years of Boston’s Archbishop Cushing’s Jew-friendly, interfaith brotherhood initiative, but Father Doyle was old-school, a former follower of the radio priest Father Coughlin and a staunch ally of the Harvard-educated anti-Semitic madman Father Feeney who until just a few years before had preached on Boston Common, drawing thousands.
The priest was totally unmoved by the tremolo-voiced, clearly tropical young parishioner Yolanda Montejo de Goldberg and the beseeching sincerity of her speech. He gazed down on her and enunciating forcefully and slowly, as if to somebody who barely understood English, though she knew that the priest knew perfectly well that she did—that old trick—he defended his sermon as “not prejudiced at all, Mrs. Goldberg.” On the contrary, what he’d said was established Catholic Church doctrine, upheld by Vatican scholars, and so no, Mrs. Goldberg, I’m afraid that I am unable to apologize for a word of it. In fact, Father Doyle went on, his voice becoming choleric, it is you who should seek forgiveness, and not from me, for scorning church teachings, and it is you who need to look after your own soul and after the souls of your family. Don’t you consider it a duty, Mrs. Goldberg, to enroll your children in our Sunday Bible classes, as all the other parents of this parish do? And don’t you ever try to convince your husband to seek salvation, Mrs. Goldberg? I’m sure Father Doyle felt he’d crushed Mamita. But now she raised her chin and vowed with shaking voice: Father Doyle, I will never come to this church again. She turned and left, high heels clicking down the long stone aisle. From then on, my mother drove alone on Sundays into the much wealthier town next to ours to go to Mass at St. John the Evangelist. She didn’t set foot in St. Joe’s again for about another fifteen years, until Feli’s oldest daughter had her First Communion there. By then Father Doyle was long gone, and the old blackened stone Gothic edifice of the first St. Joe’s had been razed and replaced by a pristine, modern church that looked bought from IKEA, with brilliant new stained glass windows radiating restored brotherhood and love.
He is a good man, she says she said. Whatever is his religion is not more important than that. Well, this was still when we were small children. The thing is, no matter what, Mamita never really stopped believing that a part of Bert really was that good man. At least regarding any situation not directly involving me or my sister or their marriage, she trusted Bert’s judgment, saw him as a kind of expert on moral principles she could count on to know right from wrong in any situation where she wasn’t so sure herself. Bert, Bert, she’d chirp at him at the dinner table, trying to get his attention while he chewed like some ravenous Ukrainian peasant, as if the sound of his mucky gnashing in his own ears made it easier to ignore us and suppress the irritation we caused him. Bert, how should she vote at the faculty meeting? It’s never wrong to stand up for yourself, Yoli, but what’s just is not always fair. That’s the kind of answer he gave. So she didn’t want to vote in a way that was going to irritate the school president, he’d elaborate, no m
atter what tenured faculty wanted her to do, when she was only a Spanish instructor on a renewable contract. You mean, my mother said, if I lost my job, it would be unfair to me, whatever happens to the campus workers. She looked relieved to have understood. What? my father sneered incredulously. Oh no, no, Yoli, that isn’t what I meant. My sister and I would look at each other with expressions of: Huh? Later it would turn out that that was what he’d meant, but he’d been feeling too ungenerous to acknowledge my mother getting it right the first time, while also flinching against how baldly she’d exposed, without any nuance or irony, the perhaps amoral or pragmatic harshness of his reasoning, so he had to complicate it a little more.
I could always persuade my mother to repeat that story about how she’d stood up to the anti-Semitic priest. But I’d never heard Mamita complain about racism or prejudice against herself when I was growing up. She’d never given racism as the explanation for any unpleasant experience she’d had or blamed it for any other problem, though that doesn’t mean she didn’t regularly experience it. The Wooded Hollow Road housewives snubbed her; even Connie Sacco had been nicer. I knew that my mother resented being the object of comments or attitudes that people thought they were directing at a Puerto Rican or Cuban woman, but it wasn’t as if being identified as a Guatemalan by a white citizen of the Commonwealth promised nicer treatment. I remember that traffic cop outside Shoppers World where she’d bumbled into an illegal turn grinning up from her driver’s license and asking where she was from, and after she answered, he said, Oh yeah, Yolanda? So where’s ya Chiquita Banana hat? And he emphatically winked. That was one historically literate cop, though, to make that connection between my mother’s country and the originally Boston-based fruit company that gave birth to Chiquita and helped bring years of military dictatorship and slaughter to her country. But Mamita was always so proud of being Guatemalan, and I thought this pride was behind her refusal to become a US citizen too. She’d been eligible for citizenship for over four decades, but she’d always refused to take that step, insisting that she only wanted to be a citizen of the glorious republic of Guatemala. I’d always assumed, considering how much money she’d regularly taken and finally inherited from Abuelita, that there must be a tax reason behind her refusal too.
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