Monkey Boy

by Francisco Goldman

  That same fall, after she’d been the Latin American Society of New England’s most dutiful rank-and-file member for two decades, my mother was elected its treasurer. The society regularly hosted literary events in its philanthropic Boston Brahmin brownstone in the Back Bay, and it was Mamita who told me that Latin American literature had become such a big deal in the world that it was called a Boom. When Carlos Fuentes came to give a lecture at the society, she sat next to him at the luncheon, they talked about Jorge Negrete, and Fuentes even sang a snatch of the song that goes: qué lejos estoy del suelo donde he nacido, and Mamita joined in. She loved to sing despite her tuneless little voice; ever since she’d stood too close to exploding birthday firecrackers as a little girl, she’d been deaf in one ear. The urbanely affable Argentine MIT professor who was the Latin American Society’s president and my mother’s close friend was also a friend of Jorge Luis Borges and gave him science advice for his stories. That year it seemed like my mother was always carrying around a Carlos Castaneda book about Don Juan, the Yaqui Indian peyote shaman. The Teachings of Don Juan was a famous Boom book, too, I thought. The first Boom book I read was No One Writes to the Colonel, a bilingual paperback edition Mamita used in one of her Spanish classes. On the new-books shelf at the public library I found Heartbreak Tango by Manuel Puig, set in a small town in Argentina whose mean-spirited mediocrity, along with the secretive sexual misbehaving of its adolescent girls, resembled our town even more than the New England one in Carrie did. Mamita always said that Gabriel García Márquez’s books brought back to her the sad pueblo our family was from on Abuelita’s side, situated among the sugar and rubber plantations and ranch lands of the Costa Sur. That spring, the ophthalmologist whom Carlota met at my cousin Denise’s wedding in Framingham told her she reminded him of his favorite female character in One Hundred Years of Solitude. He wouldn’t say which one and challenged her to read the book and figure it out.

  During those first weeks when Carlota was living with us, my father managed to keep his temper in check, but soon enough he was back to his ranting goddamned this, goddamned that along with his bawling: Yoli Jesus Christ Almighty get off my goddamned back. Sometimes Lexi had tantrums too. I wondered if Carlota was sorry she’d come to live with us.

  That fall I discovered that I didn’t really have friends anymore. Some had dropped me even before senior year or drifted away, or, like Space, they’d already disappeared into their own lonely disasters. Some had serious girlfriends or lovers. I hadn’t even tried to kiss a girl since Arlene Fertig.

  When Carlota had finished cleaning up after dinner, we’d sit at the Formica kitchen table doing homework after everyone else in the house had gone to sleep. She’d lean over whatever textbook she was studying or the notebook she was writing in, her concentration a plumb line, silky black hair curtaining her face, her smooth, brown forearm and hand, fingers loosely curled underneath, resting on the tabletop while the pencil in her other hand quickly slalomed down a page doing algebra. Sometimes she’d ask me how to say or spell this or that in English. She’d get up, go to the refrigerator, open it, and stand staring into it as if mesmerized, and I’d look at the shape of her thin shoulders under her black cardigan, and if she was wearing a skirt, at the backs of her knees and her calves like little owls poised atop the slender trunks rising from her socks. When she came back carrying a bowl of Jell-O or a tin of supermarket blueberry pie, setting down small plates, handing me a spoon or a fork, I’d say thank you and eat, hardly glancing at her. Now it was me who always felt flummoxed.

  One night Carlota looked up and said, Our war in Guatemala is going to become a bigger war than Vietnam, you know. You’re Guatemalan, too, Frankie, she said. Which side will you be on? She was wearing a striped cream-and-pink sweater, an elastic orange headband pushing her hair back over her forehead; just minutes before I’d been about to tease her that she looked like a Creamsicle, but now she looked like a boy who wants to pick a fight. I can’t go to war against the United States, I said. That’s because you’re like all the other children at your school who don’t know anything, she said, lifting her chin, her nostrils flaring a little. But you should know, because you’re not just from here. I stared into a corner of the floor, trying to grasp if this was serious. I’d thought that war was over now, during those last summers in Guatemala, nobody in my family had said much about any war, though you saw soldiers everywhere, trimly muscular, stern-looking Maya youths riding by in troop trucks or jeeps with machine guns mounted in back. Reverting to her good-girl Minnie Mouse voice, she said, I am grateful to be in this country, learning English, making new friends. In this town even a mailman, like the father of Chip, owns a house, a car, and nobody ever is hungry, and this country is a great maravilla, I know. But, Frankie, she said, we have to be ready to fight for the people who don’t have anything but who are our people, God tells me this in my heart. I wanted to ask who Chip was, but instead I blurted: You’re wrong about me. I just don’t want to be some whiney hippie protester, I want to fight for real. And I tried to make my eyes burn like hers. Before he became Comandante Che Guevara, said Carlota, he was a doctor in Guatemala. Did you know that, Frankie? She told me about how the young Che had come to Guatemala to treat the poor but instead witnessed the United States overthrow of our country’s democratic revolution in 1954, the bombing raids over the capital, the babies blown to bits in their exploded houses, and how the president surrendered without arming the people who wanted to fight back. After that, said Carlota, Che understood there is no peaceful way to defend a revolution against the Yankees, just look what happened last year to Chile. I remembered the photographs in Life magazine I’d seen as a boy of Che’s half-naked speckled corpse stretched out on a wooden bench, soldiers standing around him, poking him, pulling on his hair. Carlota returned to her homework, and I tried to. A bit later, before we went to bed, she asked if she could sign my cast, which was smudged but still legible where I’d wiped off what kids had written there: “Eat lots of bananas, Gols!” and such. With a red marker she wrote hasta la victoria siempre over her name, and she drew and colored in a red star. As I watched her leaning over my cast, listening to the squeak of her marker against the plaster, a warmth went through me like a wave, one that carried me all the way to that locked room where emotions are stored like bicycles that have never been ridden.

  My social studies teacher, Miss Mahan, was kind and soft-spoken, with an out-the-side-of-her-mouth giggle punctuating anything lefty political she said. She’d dedicated some classes to César Chávez and the United Farm Workers and wore a UFW pin on the jean jacket she kept on in class. Once when I went to her desk to ask a question, her glazy eyes were bloodshot, and I smelled liquor mixed with breath mints. I was stumped about what to write my final fall term paper on for that class. Carlota suggested I write about Thanksgiving: A very interesting holiday that we don’t have in Guatemala. Then I remembered what Jim Cerullo had said back in tenth-grade Spanish, the same class where Joe Botto got his name Hose-A, and Jim, whose father owned Cerullo Farm and Nursery, was Jaime. He told our teacher, Señora Hogan, that he was taking Spanish so that he could communicate with the migrant farmworkers who worked for his father. Not “communicate,” he corrected, “boss around.” If I went and interviewed those migrant farmworkers who were right here in our town and wrote my term paper about it, Miss Mahan would probably give me a good grade. Carlota wanted to come and translate, but I said I didn’t need a translator. She said, Maybe they speak K’iche’; she could speak that Maya language because she’d grown up on a coffee finca. I’d never even asked Carlota about where she’d grown up, I didn’t know why her family was Mormon or even what that meant. Your father picked coffee? I asked. No, he was the plantation’s bookkeeper, she said. I pictured Bob Cratchit laboring over his ledger by candlelight in a hot, dark room filled with burlap sacks of coffee, mosquitos, and moths. Cerullo says the workers speak Spanish, I told her. I went alone to show her that I could. My cast had
just been taken off and, gimpy leg swinging, I propelled myself down Parish Road on my crutches. A dirt road lined with tall pines on one side and browning thickets on the other led to a short row of brown wooden cabins. But I didn’t see any farmworkers around and rested on my crutches, listening to the work sounds coming from the other side of the pines, iron sporadically striking or pinging. The air was spiced with scents of conifer, cold earth, withered leaves and brush, something like nutmeg or cloves, and a smokiness suggesting that winter was coming closer, as if on the far side of South Hill it might already be snowing. I’m never going to live in a city, I remember telling myself, always near forests. Eventually a group of men turned onto the road through the pines and came walking toward me. They wore jeans, baseball caps, sweatshirts. One, wearing a frayed corduroy trucker jacket, seemed to be their leader. He was the shortest, also the oldest, with a pepper-and-salt beard, skin like an old baseball mitt, deep eyes inside soft craters of rake-like wrinkles. I explained in Spanish why I was there, and when I told them I was a classmate of Jaime, they looked at me blankly. The son of the owner of the farm, I clarified. El joven Jeem? the older man asked gruffly. In our Spanish class his name is Jaime, I explained. The older man chortled and emphatically repeated Jaime, and the others laughed too. I pulled my notebook from my back pocket and started in with my questions, and to almost every one—Do you feel that you’re being exploited? Does Mr. Cerullo steal your wages?—they answered no. But to a few—Do you miss your countries? Do you enjoy farmwork?—they answered yes. I asked, Do they give you enough to eat here? And the older man barked, Con una comida comen tres. I didn’t know if he meant that one meal was so big it would feed three workers or that three had to share a meal big enough for one, but I nodded like I got it and a favorite phrase of Uncle Memo’s came to me. I exclaimed, Ala gran chucha! and everyone exploded in laughter. The older man, whose name was Eugenio Pérez, was from Mexico. That first afternoon, I didn’t meet the three women migrant workers because they were baking pumpkin pies in the farm store kitchen. Eugenio pronounced it pum-keen, the way my mother and Carlota did. The workers were headed down to farms in Florida soon for the winter. I spoke to Eugenio the most, especially during subsequent visits. He’d first come to the United States with some other Mexicans, driven in a truck in the middle of the night from Tijuana to a bell pepper farm in California. They arrived around three in the morning and by four, said Eugenio, they were already at work in the fields. After three more weeks of hard work, they were told that they’d paid off what they owed in transportation, room, and board, and a few days later, the pepper harvest ended and Eugenio found himself stranded in America with only a few days’ wages in his pocket. “The green peppers on the sausage and pepper submarine sandwiches and pizzas at Dino’s, in our town square, come from the farms in California that Eugenio worked at,” I wrote in my term paper, and in the margin alongside Miss Mahan drew a row of exclamation points and a yes! If that insight, which I owed to Eugenio Pérez, is what hoisted my grade to my first-ever A+, it also directly helped me get into Broener College on the shores of Seneca Lake, in Wagosh, New York.

  One night a month or so later, having forgotten her keys, Carlota rang the doorbell after everyone but me had gone to bed, and I opened the door and found her outside on the stoop with the boy who turned out to be Chip. Cold clouds of boozy breath puffed from their mouths, their freezing faces and smiles practically incandescent. Chip, on the short side, had long orange sideburns, and he held his ski-gloved hand out to me and, looking me in the eyes, smiled like a square-jawed Disney prince. I’d hardly noticed him at school. I think he was on the soccer team. I braced myself, waiting for Carlota’s whisper that she was going to sneak Chip down into her bedroom. Instead they shared a quick kiss on the lips, she came inside, and I closed the door on Chip. She yanked her boots off, toes to heel like an expert New England girl, and with a bashful flash of a smile that made me feel like a stranger whispered, Buenas noches, and bounded down the stairs in her wool socks to her room.

  That spring, my cousin Denise had her wedding in Framingham. In the parking lot of the restaurant and banquet hall where the wedding was happening, a fight erupted between my parents in the car that rapidly escalated into vicious mutual loathing. I was used to Bert’s accusing shouts, his blame and complaints, but now they had a frantic, pleading edge. And my mother, who almost never raised her voice, was bleating her long-pent-up outrage and pain at my father in a way I hadn’t heard before, that sounded both newborn and ancient at once. That was the year I first became aware of my mother’s unhappiness, a gradual but disorientating recognition that would culminate months later during my freshman year at Broener on a December weekend just before our Christmas break when I came from Wagosh upstate to New York City to accompany my parents to some other distant relative’s wedding out on Long Island. Lexi had started going to a private boarding school for girls that fall, one in the next town near the women’s college, and she didn’t want to spend any weekend away from there. I went out by bus to the horrible hotel by LaGuardia airport where my parents were staying, and when I let myself into the room I found my mother alone, sobbing facedown on the bed. Ma, what’s wrong? I asked and then asked again. Finally her small smothered voice said into the pillow: Oh, Frankie, it’s nothing. Her posture didn’t shift. There was a cot at the foot of the bed, put there for me to sleep on. Where’s Daddy? I asked. She didn’t answer. He was probably somewhere watching a football game he’d bet on. Ma, have you been drinking? I asked. Ay, Frankie, no seas baboso, she said into the pillow; she even made a weak attempt to laugh. Why didn’t you call up first? she said a moment later. Frankie, leave me alone for a few minutes, please, so I can compose myself. She was crying softly again. Okay, Mami, compose yourself, I said and let myself out of the room. For a moment I stood out in the hallway wondering if I should go back in. I felt helpless but also hurt. I probably would have fled back to the city whether my mother had been crying or not, because there was no fucking way I was going to sleep on that cot like a dog at my father’s feet.

  I’d asked my mother if she’d been drinking because that same spring as my cousin Denise’s wedding and the fight in the car, I’d come home one evening and found her passed out on the kitchen floor. Mamita had never been a drinker, though she liked her glass of sherry after dinner in the evenings with a bowl of salted peanuts as she sat with feet up in her reclining armchair to watch an I Love Lucy rerun or Carol Burnett on TV, Mary Tyler Moore too. Now she was drinking sherry before dinner. It took little to get her smashed; three small glasses were enough to put her on the floor, hands folded on her tummy.

  Not long after my first year of college my parents would finally separate, as my sister had been urging my mother to do. My sister’s world was opening up in a way it couldn’t have if she were going to our high school. Mamita, determined to spare Lexi that ordeal—she’d had a rough enough time in middle school—had persuaded Abuelita to pay for her to go to the fancy private girls’ school and even board there, though it was so close to home.

  In the parking lot outside Cousin Denise’s wedding that day, it was as if my sister and I felt obligated to remain in the back seat of the car while my parents rabidly bickered, as if we were keeping vigil in a hospital they’d been taken to after an accident. Finally, as the fight began to subside, the silences between agonized outbursts growing longer, Lexi and I traded looks, and we got out of the car. We crossed the gravel parking lot and went through an arched entrance in the faux old Colonial New England brick wall into the tree- and tent-shaded yard where the wedding was being held. Carlota had come hours earlier to help with the wedding preparations. Aunt Milly was paying her, of course. But what if Carlota had said she didn’t want to work that day? Would Aunt Milly have invited her anyway? I spotted Carlota standing alone in a walled-in corner by forsythia in frothy yellow bloom, arms crossed to clasp each elbow, repeatedly lifting the cigarette held in one hand to her lips. I’d never seen Carlota s
moke before. Smoking, drinking, Communism, maybe screwing Chip, she wasn’t such a good Mormon girl anymore. Eyeliner ran in dried dribbles down her cheeks. They’re treating me like a fucking maid, she answered when I asked what the matter was. I’d never heard her say fuck before either. Who is? I asked. Them, she said, your aunt, the people in charge, the flower lady, púchica, everyone.

  How are they treating you like a maid?

  The flower lady made me pluck thorns off roses, look. And Carlota held up her fingers, but her fingers looked normal. They were still bleeding a few minutes ago, she said with a pout. They don’t even know my name, she said, taking a deeper draw from her cigarette and blinking rapidly. Mees, Carlota mewed caustically, come here to iron these tablecloths. She exhaled smoke again and said, But the flower lady’s son helped with the roses. At least he is nice.

  She meant the ophthalmologist. He’d come early, too, to help his mother, the florist, an old friend and neighbor of Aunt Milly. At a table where the florist and her two assistants had done their work, that love scandal’s first course had been served. As they plucked thorns, had he told Carlota that she reminded him of his favorite female character in One Hundred Years of Solitude? I don’t remember noticing the ophthalmologist at the wedding, but he and Carlota started going out right after. He was in his late twenties, tall with long, muscular arms, a mop of soft black curls on his head, swarthy, and he drove a dark-green MG, often with a kayak strapped to the roof. As far as I know, the florist never forgave my aunt for having brought Carlota to the wedding, where that Guatemalan girl, surely described to her as Bert and Yoli’s maid, had stolen her only child’s heart. Because of the florist’s opposition to the romance, I heard my mother say later, the ophthalmologist stopped talking to his mother too. True outlaws of love, Carlota and the ophthalmologist. Carlota was supposed to be going back to Guatemala at the end of the summer. One muggy evening, after walking home from the train stop after work, I found her in our backyard standing next to my father’s twined tomato plants. She was in gym shorts, a T-shirt, and white socks, hair sweat-pasted to the side of her face. The back door to her bedroom, which she’d left ajar, opened almost directly onto the vegetable garden, and her sneakers were in the grass just outside it. Why are you standing out here staring at the tomatoes? I asked. She looked at me as if startled from a trance and said she’d been jogging. Jogging? Why? Because the ophthalmologist had told her she was out of shape and a little overweight. Come on, you’re not overweight at all, I said. No, he’s right, I’m a weakling blob, she said. Lips screwed in disgust, she held out her arm and pinched her fingers into her bicep to show me how flabby it was. It was unsettling that being in a serious love had made Carlota feel discouraged about herself like this; it was like one of those moments in a novel or movie when you understand a favorite character’s childhood is over. She was saying: But it’s not like when I go to college I want to be a rower on Charlie’s Reever too. You’re going to college up here? I asked. This year in school I had only A’s and B’s, she said. Her SATs hadn’t been that bad, but her English was much better now, so she was going to retake them. The ophthalmologist was encouraging her to apply to colleges she could commute to. She said she couldn’t decide if she wanted to study art history or premed. The ophthalmologist had taken her to art museums. Her visit to the Isabella Stewart Gardner, she said, had made her realize she would be happy to spend the rest of her life studying beautiful paintings. But if she went to college in Boston, I asked, where would she live? She responded with a listless shrug. Maybe my mother will let you stay here, I ventured. Three weeks later, Carlota announced that she was moving out the next day, she was going to live with the ophthalmologist. I was the only one from our family out on the sidewalk to see Carlota off. She gave me a peck on the cheek and a hug, promised to stay in touch, and the lovers got into the MG and drove away. I haven’t seen or heard from Carlota since.