Monkey Boy

by Francisco Goldman

  Mamita shares her room with a long-widowed and retired schoolteacher from Worcester named Susan Cornwall, who lies perpetually like a log cake under her beige blanket, mannish wax-pink nose and myopic-seeming eyes aimed up at the ceiling, her silver hair like a wrung mop on the pillow behind her. She only seems catatonic, because she hears everything and does in fact speak. One morning soon after my mother came to live there Susan Cornwall interrupted my mother’s friendly chatter to shout at her: Will you shut up, please just shut up. I cannot stand the sound of your voice one more second, shut up!

  My mother has never forgiven her roommate for that outburst, hasn’t spoken one word to her since, not a single “good morning” or “good night” or “bless you,” responding to her rare utterances with silence.

  So far as I’ve noticed, anyway, Mamita is Green Meadows’ only resident who isn’t a white person. But the staff seems to be mostly Caribbean, Brazilian, and Asian, and many of those people seem genuinely fond of my mother. They recognize the tropical gentility of her manners; a few speak to her in Spanish. Lexi insists Green Meadows isn’t merely the best place she could find for our mother on “our” budget. She’s sure people pay much more elsewhere without getting the kind of personal care that Mamita gets here. We really lucked out. Plus, it’s a relatively easy drive from New Bedford. Mamita does stay busy enough. She likes the Bingo games and sing-alongs, she has her physical rehab sessions, and a Catholic priest comes once a month to celebrate Mass in the chapel; otherwise a church layperson leads the Sunday prayer service and also a midweek Bible-reading group my mother has joined. In the downstairs dining room, Mamita used to have to sit at the same table for every meal with three other women, one a Boston policeman’s widow with a florid, knobby face and eyes like violet marbles. During one of my first visits, I was sitting next to Mamita at dinner when the policeman’s widow, aiming her vitreous stare across the table, snapped: It’s rude that you don’t speak in English. It distracts us. She was always bullying my mother, Lexi told me, but finally my sister took care of the matter, and Mamita was moved to a table with nicer ladies.

  The door to the stairwell off the entrance lobby is kept locked, so I ride the elevator up one floor to the dementia and Alzheimer’s patient wing, called Golden Meadows, and head down the hall to my mother’s room. The first thing I notice is that Susan Cornwall’s bed, the one closest to the door, is empty. I step back to check the name tag over the door frame. Susan Cornwall still there over Yolanda Goldberg. Danielle, the Haitian nurse, is in the room; she must have come in just before me to take my mother to the bathroom. Mamita is next to her, in her wheelchair, smiling at me with her lips together, making her cute axolotl face. She always gets her hair done when she knows I’m coming, and it’s arrayed over her head in ringlets that resemble threadbare reddish-orange Christmas ribbons. I bend to kiss her pale cheek and show her the tin of cookies and ask about Susan Cornwall. Danielle says that she was taken to the hospital for some routine tests. I set the cookies down on the sill by Mamita’s window, alongside the framed photographs there; that one with my mother and sister and Bert with cardboard taped over his face, I remember now, was taken at Yolandita’s wedding with Richard the Vietnam vet and Sears manager. When we speak over the telephone, does Mamita visualize me as I am now or as I was when I was a boy? Leaving the bathroom door open to give herself room to maneuver, Danielle expertly lifts Mamita from her wheelchair onto the toilet, and I step out into the corridor to wait. The day will come when either my mother or Susan Cornwall will outlive her nemesis and find herself sharing a room with an empty bed and a cleaned-out closet, until a new roommate is moved in and a new name tag is put up. The survivor won’t feel a twinge of grief but instead will feel like a soldier numbed by a long war. Lexi once told me that Susan Cornwall never receives visitors, that her only son lives in Wisconsin and hasn’t come to see her in five years.

  Mamita, I ask her, what was the name of that boardinghouse you and Dolores Ojito lived in? It’s like restarting the same conversation we had last visit. She’d told me the name. I’d even written it down, but I lost that notebook; so often they fall from my pocket. She must have moved into the boardinghouse during the spring of 1952, because that’s when Doroteo Guamuch Flores won the Boston marathon, and I know Abuelita was up here with Mamita, because she always liked telling about how together from somewhere along the course they’d cheered their compatriot on.

  My mother’s gaze withdraws back in time, her rust-hued lashes quiveringly lowered. Our Lady Gih … gih … she stammers, Ay no, Frankie, no se. Then she quietly pronounces as if under a spell: Our Lady’s Guild House. That’s it, I’ve looked it up before, a rooming house attached to a convent of cloistered nuns, the Daughters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, still in operation, a brick-and-granite building on an exposed corner of Charlesgate Road and the Pike, only blocks from the Berklee College of Music, where my mother would spend the last fifteen years or so of her working life.

  Mamita, isn’t it true that you were distinguished professor of marimba at Berklee.

  Ay, hijo, and laughter trills out of her, her soft body shaking in her wheelchair. As a son, I have countless failings, but I’ve always been good at making Mamita laugh.

  Back when she was a Guatemalan working girl in Boston, a bilingual secretary, in her twenties, boarding at Our Lady’s, what would she have thought if she could have glimpsed her future, a professor at Berklee, teaching Spanish, not marimba, to some of the world’s most gifted student musicians? Would it have seemed the fulfillment of a dream or did she dream of something else? Now, even mundane questions can seem to task her mind the way a perplexing riddle might, and her eyes flood with anxiety.

  You don’t remember what your dream for the future was back then, Mami?

  No, Frankie, she says firmly, I don’t. I’ve also noticed how her anxiety eases whenever she can respond to a question with an answer she feels sure of.

  You were just happy to be in Boston, probably, I say. Having fun, you and Dolores Ojito going out on dates with those Harvard foreign grad school muchachos, Zbiggy Brzezinski, no less, right Mami?

  That makes her smile. One evening when I was home from college and we were watching the news on the portable TV in the kitchen, President Carter introducing new members of his cabinet, my mother’s eyes went wide and she exclaimed, Zbiggy! She knew him from her single working-girl days in Boston, it turned out, when she used to get invited to foreign grad student parties. After one of those parties, Zbigniew Brzezinski had carried her in his arms across a muddy Harvard yard. I asked her what he was like and she responded: Zbiggy was like a lion! Liiii-yun, she pronounced it.

  Ay, Mamita, how did a niña bien from the tropics like you ever end up in a joint like this? That’s another of our routines. Whenever I visit her at Green Meadows, I ask her that, and she always answers the same way: Ay, no sé, hijo, and that deep giggle that rolls on into helpless yelps of laughter.

  From grade school through high school, Mamita attended Guatemala’s first bilingual school, the all-girl Colegio Inglés Americano. At home she had a pet spider monkey named Coco whom she spoke to only in English, so that by the time she was ten she could translate for American customers who came into her parents’ stores. One morning Mamita found Coco curled up in a corner of the patio, his head slumped forward with a coffee cup wedged over it. Coco, awaken! she commanded in her Inglés Americano English. This is not amusing! Her monkey’s accidental death by suffocation so affected her that even a year later, whenever anyone asked, What’s new, Yoli? she’d respond, Coco died. He no longer exists. That’s why, she told Lexi and me, she never allowed herself to become attached to our pets. It’s true my mother never liked our pets. Fritzie was sent away to live in Maine, and within days of our having moved into the new house on Wooded Hollow Road, furnished with brand-new furniture and powder-blue carpeting, Beaker, half-beagle, half-cocker spaniel, somehow escaped his backyard leash wh
ile Lexi and I were at school, and he never came home. It’s practically a game of ours now. I tease my mother that I’ve always suspected she gave my dog away so that no muddy paw would besmirch her new sofa and carpets, she always denies it, and we end up laughing, Mamita in her helpless hilarity mode. The possibility that her denial really is a lie that she’s forced herself to keep up all these years, as if she fears I’d be as devastated now to learn the truth as that ten-year-old boy would have been, is what cracks me up, but I don’t get what my mother finds so funny. After her graduation from the Colegio Inglés Americano, Mamita went to college in California, at San Jose State, so that she could be near her brother, who was in his third year at UC Berkeley. Memo had been sent there by my abuelos to study business administration so that when he got out he’d be ready to capitalize on the money-making opportunities that the booming postwar US economy was bringing even to Guatemala. When her brother graduated, Mamita went home too. A year or so later, Abuelita again whisked her out of the country, this time to New Orleans, the US city most accessible to Guatemala during the decades when the Great White Fleet of the United Fruit Company was plying the Gulf between New Orleans and Puerto Barrios, carrying passengers as well as bananas. Even during our childhoods, Lexi and I had somehow picked up on the fact that in her youth Mamita had had a tragic love, which had something to do with how she’d ended up living in Boston, where she became our mother. I don’t recall our having any idea what exactly made it so tragic. All we knew was that this suitor, or novio, was a handsome Italian with no money and Abuelita wasn’t going to let my mother marry someone who was poor no matter what. Then she married my father, who was far from rich.

  During one of those earlier visits to Green Meadows, when my mother had surprised me with her new candor, she said, Abuelita saved me from throwing my life away. When talking to me and my sister, Mamita always refers to her own mother as Abuelita. That was the first time I ever heard the name Lucio Grassi, though I’m sure Lexi has long known it. Ay no, Frankie, the way he took advantage of me, he lied and stole my savings! my mother exclaimed, her voice girlishly welling with disbelief. I knew that in Guatemala and California she’d been friendly with plenty of young men, that she’d had boyfriends, yet here she was almost sixty years later, feeling it as a fresh shock that somebody who professed to love her could have treated her with such calculated dishonesty.

  Lucio Grassi had turned up in Guatemala one day and talked his way into certain youthful social circles. Blondish, green eyed, freckled, strong and graceful as a circus horse, Mamita’s friends said he was the handsomest man they’d ever seen. One day Lucio Grassi told her it was his ambition to open a European-style hotel on Lake Atitlán, back then still considered an unexploited paradise. He’d found partners eager to invest but needed money for his own share. His grandfather had managed a seafront hotel in Genoa that had been destroyed by bombing in the war; the hotel business was in his blood. Mamita lent Lucio Grassi all her savings. Then she found out there was no planned hotel, no partners. He just needed money to live on, even to lavish on her and not only on her; it turned out she wasn’t the only damita he’d borrowed money from. Of course, after that, she was done with Lucio. But I was afraid he was going to keep chasing me, Frankie, she told me. I’ve seen photographs of my mother from back then, her witchy eyes and girlish smile in lipstick, the effulgent fall of her then-wavy hair, the off-the-shoulder dresses and blouses she wore. In a different society or time her relationship with Lucio Grassi could probably have run its enthralling course without life-altering consequences until she woke up: But you don’t have any money, mi amor. I can’t marry you. What was I thinking?

  Considering that she came from a family of fairly prosperous shopkeepers, not of coffee plantation owners or magnates like the family that produces all the country’s cement or the one that makes all the beer, Mamita really wasn’t great fortune-hunter prey. She must have been the one feeling pressure to convert her beauty and respectable upbringing into a fortune. And Lucio Grassi did keep chasing her, full of apologetic justifications and arguments. He even wept at her feet. That’s what my mother blurted out in Green Meadows during my last visit, seeming dazed by the memory. Like the overwrought leading men of so many Italian movies, like Giovanni groveling before his callow gringo lover, Lucio put on his show. He couldn’t live without her; he tore at his hair. But he never paid her back the money. Sitting there in the nursing home I was suddenly so sure that my mother cherished this memory of the grand passion she’d inspired that I felt like getting up from my chair and shouting at Lucio Grassi: Ridiculous fool, get off your fucking knees and leave my mother alone!

  No one has ever accused me of being a cool cucumber, that’s for sure, but I’ve never wept over a woman like that. I can only imagine Gisela savoring the spectacle of me weeping at her feet and tearing my hair, I can see her pitilessly amused smile.

  When Mamita said that Abuelita, by spiriting her out of Guatemala, saved her from “throwing my life away,” I understood that to mean “in the nick of time.” A few years later Lucio Grassi married an old school friend of my mother’s, “not a beauty pero siempre bien simpática,” Beatriz Oiza, from one of those extremely wealthy coffee plantation families. Lucio and Beatriz had seven children and raised them in Vista Hermosa, then a fashionable neighborhood, where they led quiet lives; they bought property in Italy, too, and stayed there during the worst of the war years because their wealth made the family obvious targets for kidnapping. But Lucio and his wife, even before the 1996 peace accords, began spending a few months every year in Guatemala because it wasn’t wise to always be so far from their coffee farms, and not one of their now-grown children, studying, marrying, settling down in Italy, still asking for money, wanted any of that responsibility. I doubt my mother ever envied Beatriz Oiza. She’d never wanted the idle Latin American rich wife life that might have been hers. As attached to her family as Mamita was, she never envisioned herself working in the toy and baby clothing store that was the family mainstay. Instead, she took the path she did, Boston, Sacco Road, a nearly forty-year career as a Spanish teacher, now Green Meadows.

  But first Mamita went to New Orleans, where maybe the Italian sprang a banana boat visit, because something sent Abuelita up there in a hurry, on a Pan Am flight, to escort Mamita to Boston and into Our Lady’s Guild House. Abuelita, or Doña Hercilia as she was widely known, always had good government connections, whether during the Ubico dictatorship or after the October Revolution brought democracy, because politicians and bureaucrats of every party needed to buy toys for children or grandchildren during Christmas and Tres Reyes. Abuelita’s connections most likely had something to do with Mamita so quickly landing a job as a bilingual secretary to the Guatemalan consul in Boston. Dolores Ojito, from Guatemala City, too, though they hadn’t known each other there, was my mother’s roommate at Our Lady’s. Dolores, or Lolita, worked as a bilingual secretary, too, at the United Fruit Company’s headquarters on State Street. But I’d never heard, or registered it if I had, anything about my mother’s friendship with Dolores Ojito and their respective places of employment until after my mother went to live at Green Meadows. When she told me, it seemed too good to be true: a John le Carré Cold War spy novel mixed with a Latin American version of Muriel Spark’s novel about women living in a London rooming house after World War II. Mamita and Lolita, two young secretaries from Guatemala City, who’d come to find their futures in the so-called Hub of the Universe, though if not really of the universe, indisputably of the global banana trade. Before the overthrow of President Jacobo Árbenz in June 1954, Mamita, working at the Guatemalan consulate in Boston, was essentially in the employ of his government, while her best friend and roommate, Lolita Ojito, worked for the United Fruit Company; though the CIA organized and carried out the coup against Arbenz, the Boston-based banana company was notoriously its instigator.

  But what does that have to do with Mamita and me, half a century later, sitting down
here in the visitors’ nook at Green Meadows, playing Scrabble and talking? I brought her down in her wheelchair. The air is fresher here, wafting in through the pneumatic doors that open off the lobby onto a pine-lined parking lot. The well-lit, drably pleasant dining room, where Mamita still usually has her evening meals, is situated between the visitors’ nook and Lilac Meadows, the tranquil assisted living wing where she lived during her first year. When the weather is warmer, I take her outside to the garden in the middle of the complex and sometimes wheel her out onto the sidewalk and into the adjoining neighborhood, down Codman Road, so like Sacco Road with its small ranch houses and yards. Pushing her along, I’ll break into a run, singing out “Georgy Girl” or some other song I remember Mamita liking, though instead of singing along or laughing she just widens her eyes.

  The Scrabble board on the table between us, Mamita sits in her wheelchair, maroon quilted jacket worn over her shoulders like a cape, pink fleece cardigan zipped up to her neck. By our rules, she can form words in either Spanish or English, but I’m only allowed to use Spanish, despite the absence of ñ tiles. Two years ago, Mamita was better at Scrabble. Now her arthritic fingers tremble as she nudges a tile into place, spelling out words like “si” or “no” or “que,” maybe even a “mama” or a “casa.” A year ago she could still manage a word like “maestra.”

  If the coup had never happened, if her country had still been a democracy instead of a right-wing military dictatorship, might my mother’s life have taken another direction? After a few years of being a single, foreign working girl in Boston, would the novelty have worn off, and with her and Abuelita no longer needing to be on guard against Lucio Grassi, might she have gone home? Or would she have stayed and married Bert Goldberg anyway?