Monkey Boy

by Francisco Goldman

A few days ago, when I phoned to let Mamita know I was coming to visit, she said, in English: I miss the sun in Guatemala, the sunheat, you know? Here they won’t let me go outside. I couldn’t remember her ever complaining on her own behalf before, not in recent years, certainly not about Green Meadows, guarding against saying anything I might construe as a criticism of Lexi, who makes every decision regarding our mother’s care. Sunheat as one word, lovely. No, Mami, I said, you can’t go outside. It’s still winter, I know it’s been a long one. Would you like to go back to Guatemala, at least for a visit? That’s something else she never admits to wanting. But she answered, Yes, but I can’t. Something happened to my legs. I’m in a wheelchair. Lately she often tells me about her wheelchair as if it’s a recent development. I played along: Oh no, Ma, how’d that happen? I don’t know, she said. Lexi doesn’t want to live in Guatemala, said my mother. She’s happy here, she has her life here.

  Well, I said into the phone, maybe we can find a way to go back for a visit soon.

  You know, Frankie, says my mother across the Scrabble board, Lexi is an important person in New Bedford.

  Really, Ma? I ask. Important how?

  She’s married to a policeman, says my mother. And she has children.

  But wouldn’t Lexi have told me, I wonder. When I last saw her two years ago she didn’t mention a husband or children, she didn’t seem like a woman married to a policeman, much less a woman with children. Are Lexi and I estranged? I know I’m a distant, neglectful brother, but we’re not estranged, are we? She wrote me those emails before Christmas, inviting to me to her house.

  I ask, Do you mean the policeman’s children from an earlier marriage?

  Now my mother’s expression seems both blank and consternated.

  That’s great, Ma, that things have worked out so well for Lexi, I decide to say. It was a brave thing she did, buying that house in New Bedford. How many children does she have, anyway?

  Memo, says my mother, and she wanly sighs. I don’t remember how many children.

  I’m Frankie, I tell her, not Memo. Even before, Mamita had a propensity for mixing up names in what seems like a verbal echoing of a mental stutter, so that when she means to address me she says, BertMemoLexiFrankie … To my sister she might say, FrankieConyYolanditaLexi … But more recently she really does seem sometimes to mix me up with her brother. Well, people have always said there’s a resemblance, that when I was young I supposedly looked like Tío Memo when he was young. Maybe when I’m old I will too. Memo’s a handsome old gent, a dapper dresser.

  Lexi went to see a brujo, says my mother.

  A brujo? I repeat. You mean like a Maya shaman?

  I don’t know, she answers, her laugh mixing mischief and embarrassment.

  Even if she was once a reader of the Carlos Castaneda books about the Yaqui shaman Don Juan, my mother has never believed in that sort of witchcraft, probably not even when she was a girl, and I ask, Ma, what are you talking about? Why did Lexi go to a brujo?

  Frankie, Lexi asked the brujo to help you find a wife so that I can have a grandchild, she says. Don’t you think that was thoughtful of her? She grins expectantly at me.

  But Ma, I say, you just told me that you’re already a grandmother. You said that Lexi has children.

  They’re not Lexi’s children, she responds, so they’re not my grandchildren. Oh, Frankie, I don’t know, she says plaintively. Lexi told me she asked a brujo to help you, pues, ojalá, verdad?

  Mami, I say, I hope you’ll find yourself becoming a grandmother one of these days or years, but if that kid is mine, it won’t be because Lexi went to a brujo.

  What I was thinking was, if Lulú and I somehow end up married, Marisela will become my mother’s granddaughter. But she won’t, of course. Marisela is Lulú’s second cousin.

  Above the i in my mother’s “si” on the Scrabble board, I set down a p tile and an s and below it, a c, an o, an s, another i, another s, “psicosis.” Pretty nifty, though we don’t keep score. I choose seven new tiles and say: Psicosis, Mamita. Your turn.

  In front of that last s, my mother drops another i.

  I say, “Is” instead of another “si,” muy interesante, Mami.

  During that year or so leading up to the coup, what did Yoli and Lolita, one working for her country’s consulate, the other for the powerful banana company, know or notice? Did one pass along information, whisper an overheard secret, or carry a sheaf of pilfered documents or an intercepted telegram to the other? Wouldn’t they have at least known that something was up? I’ve tried to excavate whatever connection my mother and Dolores Ojito could have had to the coup or whatever memories she might still have about it. And I’ve forced myself to read at least part of every book I can find on the coup—which I first learned about in high school from Carlota Sánchez Motta, who didn’t have all her facts right but whose indignation was on the mark—searching for a reference to any even minor or accidental role my mother and Dolores Ojito could have played or to their proximity to the men helping to scheme the calamity or maybe trying to prevent it, hoping always for at least a glimpse in printed words of their shadows in wasp-waisted dresses or skirts passing through a Boston murk of boardrooms, offices, private gentlemen’s clubs, and cocktail lounges.

  In case bananas should someday be wiped from the earth by an ineradicable plague, forcing the Boston Banana Brahmins to find another fruit to grow down there or even to develop a new one like the grapefruit more or less was, the United Fruit Company had prudently kept much of the land it owned in Guatemala fallow. The land expropriations of President Árbenz’s agrarian reform included those fallow acres. Something like one out of every six Guatemalans got some land. The DC wise men asked, What if every other government in Latin America does what Árbenz did? Those peasant farmers will clamor for more and more land, and next thing you know … One of the venerable Boston Banana Brahmins who’d founded the Latin American Society of New England was also the US ambassador to the United Nations, and Mamita got to meet him. Mr. Ambassador, I imagine someone saying, this is Señorita Yolanda Montejo, a secretary at the Guatemalan consulate. She comes to every one of our events. Wouldn’t Yolanda’s place of employment have made her kind of suspicious to the ambassador? Or else maybe Yolanda’s boss, the consul, was in fact known to the ambassador as a reliable secret collaborator. Don’t have a clue which, if either. The ambassador’s speeches in polished Yankee dudgeon attacking Árbenz’s Moscow puppet regime were a recurring high point of the era’s UN sessions, like Cold War Shakespeare. But it wasn’t true that Árbenz was hiding Eastern Bloc weapons of mass destruction inside volcanoes. “Such lies are not lies, rather they should be understood semiotically as seraphic incantations for doing good” is how the United Fruit Company’s famous Vienna-born public relations man, who happened also to be Sigmund Freud’s nephew, explained this new form of propaganda in one of his pioneering books. The coup plotters perceived that in so pious and backward a country as Guatemala, the most powerful force for good they could wield would be the archbishop, who did begin to energetically preach against the Communist atheist president. This was the same archbishop who two years later would prohibit Mamita from marrying a Jew in Guatemala, forcing her at the last moment to move her wedding to Mexico City. Though bananas had nothing to do with that decision, it can at least be said that Mamita was directly connected to the coup by marriage.

  Did the United Fruit bilingual secretary, Lolita Ojito, ever filch a note or diary page in which Freud’s nephew had scribbled something like “if this is gonna work, boys, we gotta get that archbishop on board, and pronto” and bring it to her best friend in Our Lady’s Guild House, so that she could give it to the consul, who would pass it directly to President Árbenz, maybe in time to save the day? Doesn’t seem so. At any rate, the day was never saved. Questioning Mamita about the coup has turned out to be pretty futile. If only I’d thought to ask her about it years
ago. If only.

  Mamita, that consul you worked for, I ask, what was his name? She confidently answers, I don’t remember, Frankie. She never remembers that guy’s name. The Guatemalan consulate was located at 72 Liberty Street, an old office building no longer standing, I found the address on my last overnight visit when I spent the morning in the Boston Public Library scrolling through blurry microfilm of 1950s Boston telephone books with a librarian-lent magnifying glass held to the smudgy columns of print on the screen. It took hours to find. I ended up having to hobble-run to Back Bay Station to catch my train back to New York and didn’t have time to stop into the Italian deli to get the submarine sandwich I’d been thinking about all morning. But at least now I can say, Seventy-Two Liberty Street, that’s where you worked. Does that ring a bell, Ma?

  While my mother gazes sleepily at the Scrabble board, I pull out my phone. Lulú hasn’t answered my message about children and windows. Might it have gone missing? Should I resend it? No, better wait.

  Mami, I say, I know the consul was allowed to run his own business out of the consulate. He imported shoes from Italy, didn’t he?

  As if she had this answer ready and was just waiting to give it, my mother says, No, not shoes, Frankie. Heels and soles.

  Tacones y suelas in Spanish, such pretty words, it could be a song title. The consul only imported tacones y suelas, Ma?

  Yes, she says, in one room at the consulate, he kept cardboard boxes full of tacones y suelas.

  Whenever we talk about her years at the consulate, my mother never alludes to the coup, yet she never fails to mention that room and the cardboard boxes packed with heels and soles. What is it about that room that keeps it so present in her memory when so much else has faded? Maybe it was the daily drudgery of filling out invoices and other forms for the importation of heels and soles from Italy and their shipment to shoe factories and cobblers elsewhere in the United States that imprinted an inky stamp in her memory. When I’m very old and someone says pelícano and I brighten with recognition, will I remember why I do?

  On the Scrabble board I’ve just spelled out “chumpa,” a word only used in Central America. Do you remember what a chumpa is, Ma? I ask.

  A jacket, she answers with a note of resentment, as if she’s thinking: You think I’m so far gone that I don’t remember what a chumpa is?

  Can you make a word with an a in it? Calamidád? Calambre? Cat?

  No, no puedo, she says.

  How about the p? Chompipe.

  With quivering gnarled hand she slowly slides the a under the p.

  See? You can do it, Mamita. “Pa” is a perfectly good word.

  After the overthrow in Guatemala, didn’t Yolanda Montejo and Lolita Ojito realize what they’d been perhaps uncomprehending witnesses to? Growing up, I never heard my mother say anything that would have made me think she didn’t share her family’s politics, regarding Guatemala, I mean, though she never expressed those opinions with the usual family vehemence. The year after I was born, after she’d left my father and taken me to live with her in my abuelos’ house, Eisenhower’s veep came to show support for the postcoup dictatorship, and Mamita got to meet him—or at least see him close up—at a reception at the Club Guatemala. Ay, no, that Nixon, she’d say, recounting it years later, and she’d stick out her lower lip, crunch her eyebrows together, hunch her shoulders, and say, Que hombre más feo.

  If I’m remembering right, Madame Chiang Kai Shek, who’d studied at the women’s college in the next town, was her favorite political figure. Ma, I ask, who did you admire more, Madame Chiang Kai Shek or Jackie O?

  Madame Chiang Kai Shek, she says without hesitation. She warned the world about the Communists.

  My expression must be a bit surprised, because she smiles as if embarrassed and lets out one of her little yelping laughs. I feel a start of tears in my eyes and forcefully blink to make it go away.

  When Lexi was in the fifth or sixth grade, she had a friend at school, Caroline Biddle, who lived out near Riverbend Street, in a remote corner of town even more exclusive than the Ways. Caroline, like my sister, was tall, with wide shoulders, heavyset. Her ginger hair dangled in springy curls to her shoulders, and her blue eyes had a teasing shine that could quickly turn querulous. My sister’s other friend, Bonnie, even taller, long hair, strikingly pretty, played the guitar. All three girls would shut themselves into my sister’s bedroom and sing along to records by the Cowsills and the Troggs. Through the closed bedroom door, their voices sounded as if they were emanating from frail children. They were going to form a rock group, they said, Bonnie on guitar, my sister, who had easily learned some guitar, too, and Caroline, who would play tambourine and be lead singer. Lexi invited Caroline and Bonnie to sleep over one Saturday night so that they could practice during the weekend. Caroline said that she wanted to but that her mother had to give permission, and for that to happen, her mother would first have to come to our house and meet my mother.

  Mrs. Biddle, a housewife, with Caroline, must have come to Wooded Hollow Road on an afternoon when my mother didn’t have to teach. She wouldn’t have canceled a class just to receive Mrs. Biddle. The two women had coffee or tea and lemon cream–filled cookies, sitting on the sofa in the living room, facing the oil paint portrait in an ornate white frame with gilded trim on the opposite wall of my young mother in a silvery-blue evening gown, her shoulders bare, an orchid on one side of her cleavage, against a cerulean backdrop; my father’s boyhood friend, Herb, who became a Boston portrait artist, had painted it. Mamita would have brought out her best silver and china, put on a nice dress, arranged her unruly hair into the usual dyed black loaf. Lexi and Caroline sat in some chairs eating cookies, too. During that tête-à-tête, as years later Lexi recalled it, Mrs. Biddle pointed more than once at one or another of the Guatemalan folk objects displayed among Hummel and porcelain ornaments on the side tables and said something like: That’s an interesting piece, Yolanda. To which my mother would respond: That is a wood carving of a Mayan Indian man carrying a load of firewood on his back. Or: That clay figurine is of a Mayan woman selling her wares at the market. Often when people who didn’t know anything about Guatemala came to our house, Mamita would launch into the same speech that she surely gave Mrs. Biddle, about how the country was famous for the native Maya who lived in the mountains, keeping their ancient traditions, so picturesque, but also, you know, backward. The capital, Guatemala City, where she was raised, was a modern city, with tall buildings and shopping centers, like Miami. She would also have told Mrs. Biddle about the family stores, especially the flagship toy store on Sexta Avenida downtown, and her brother’s weekend morning children’s show on Guatemalan television, which featured Jingle Hop, yo-yo, and Hula-Hoop contests. He’d even made a television commercial with children and teenagers Hula-Hooping on the steps of an ancient Maya pyramid at Tikal. Those were the same spectacular ruins that Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge had visited. The ambassador had been so impressed by Guatemala. She knew the ambassador and some of the other Cabot Lodges and Boston Brahmins from the Latin American Society of New England. Of course, she also would have told Mrs. Biddle about how she’d become a college Spanish teacher, about her studies in Boston and abroad, and also, with pride, about how the women’s junior college in Brookline where she was on the faculty sent her on trips to South America, to Buenos Aires, Bogotá, Santiago, to recruit students. She must also have told Mrs. Biddle that her husband, Bert, a chemical engineer, was in charge of dental prosthetic tooth production at the Potashnik Tooth Company in Cambridge.

  Mrs. Biddle seemed satisfied with what she’d heard. Why wouldn’t she have been, said Lexi, recounting the story years later. Mom was warm and gracious, and Mrs. Biddle must have realized how exceptional she was, a woman from Guatemala who’d made herself into a college Spanish teacher and the treasurer of the Latin American Society of New England.

  So, Caroline can sleep over then? asked my mothe
r, posing the question as a polite formality.

  No, I’m afraid not, Yolanda, Mrs. Biddle answered. I’m sorry.

  Mamita gaped at Mrs. Biddle, truly at a loss for words. After an agonizing moment, Mrs. Biddle said, Well, I guess there isn’t anything else for us to talk about, Yolanda, so Caroline and I had better be going. My mother remained rigidly seated, still speechless, as Mrs. Biddle got to her feet. Lexi has told me she has never forgotten the look on my mother’s face, that it has troubled her ever since. Caroline and my sister never spoke again. Years later, Lexi found out, Mrs. Biddle had a nervous breakdown. So the incident wasn’t what it seemed. Mrs. Biddle was “unstable.” Sure.

  As the Latin American Society of New England left its 1950s Cold War heyday behind, the surnames of philanthropic banana cronies resonated less and less, until there was hardly any reason to name-drop them anymore. By the time Mamita was elected the society’s treasurer, the new president was Bruno Irigoyen, the MIT astrophysicist and telescope expert from Argentina who was a friend of Borges. Now the society invited people of opposing viewpoints to speak, and they furiously argued over such issues as the coup and military dictatorships in Chile and Argentina, and there was almost always weeping in the audience, or, afterward, glasses of wine contemptuously tossed on shirtfronts or even folding chairs hurled, Bruno threatening to summon the police and insulting people for being “incivil stupids.” My mother and her friends were always describing this or that event as “eye-opening.” Around that time Mamita was also going around quoting Yaqui peyote shaman wisdom from The Teachings of Don Juan. “I am a controlled warrior” is the one I especially remember.

  My mother, like so many other immigrants, has lived her life between two cultures and countries; after enough years had passed, she may have felt that she didn’t quite fit in either, never the United States, no longer Guatemala. One of the strangest things I’ve done with my own life has been to follow her path, in a sense willfully divesting in order to pour myself into that mold of divided, not quite belonging anywhere.