Monkey Boy

by Francisco Goldman

  The place is nearly empty. Separate or together? asks the young woman working the counter.

  Together?

  Oh my God, she exclaims, clapping a hand over her mouth. I could have sworn you were with a woman! She’s college-age, friendly button-nosed Irish face, hedge of curly hair down the middle of her head, shorn closely at the sides.

  I look over each of my shoulders and back at her and pretend to look spooked. It’s just me, I say. I’ll have a cup of coffee, please. Black.

  Believe me, sir, she says with a giggle. I’m not on drugs. I know this sounds weird, but the woman I thought I saw standing next to you looked like the French actress in that movie Amélie. You know who I mean?

  I’ve seen the posters, I say. Well, I wouldn’t complain.

  No, you sure wouldn’t, she says cheerfully, going to pour my cup of coffee.

  I sit by a window with my coffee. Feli’s, what, sixty-one now. Whenever I tell anyone about Feli and the life she’s made with her husband here, the respect I feel makes me reluctant to pronounce “American Dream” with overt irony. But I do anyway, partly because I think the only part of anybody’s life that’s a dream happens when they’re asleep. Feli’s second husband, Giorgio Montolivo, is Argentine, from an Italian family that emigrated there after World War II. He’s the head mechanic at a garage that specializes in repairing European luxury cars in Brookline. He and Feli bought a small house in our town, at one edge of the wooded swamp that we lived on the other side of, near the pond and where the rubber factory used to be. Their two daughters, both taller than their parents, went to high school in our town and to good colleges. Clara is a business technology analyst for a company in Waltham, and married a young man from a prosperous family that owns several locally famous seafood restaurants. Younger Jenny became an investment banker married to an investment banker; they live in Dover. They’ve given Feli and Giorgio five grandchildren so far.

  Through the window, I see Feli drive into the parking lot in her blood-orange Jaguar, a late-1970s model that Giorgio rescued at his garage and beautifully restored, using all his expertise. She crosses the parking lot, spritely as ever, pixie hairdo dyed a dark reddish hue, big sunglasses of a coppery tint, magenta lipstick, tight maroon corduroys, a waist-length leopard-print jacket. When she comes in through the front door and sees me, she puts her fists out by her sides and sways her hips like she’s inviting me to dance and exclaims: Frankie! Her caramel features are a bit sharper, more drawn, but she’s the same. When we go up to order, the counter girl’s grin is rakish as she says, Separate or together, sir? She thinks Feli is my wife or partner. I give a wink, answer: Together, and I order the meatloaf sandwich special and a bottle of Snapple. Feli has an apple spice muffin and a chamomile tea. Back at the table, Feli explains that she wanted to meet out here instead of in the square because she’s fed up with the way even the young mothers in our town stare at her. The other day she was in Walgreens and speaking on her cell phone when, as she approached the checkout, she was so provoked by a woman’s stare that she erupted, Excuse me, do you know me? Have we met? Then why you look at me like that? It bother you that I am speaking Spanish? It’s not illegal, right? Because Feli laughs, I do too. Ay no, Frankie, she goes on. Every year this town get richer, and the people get worse, and she puts two fingers under her nose and lifts it. I don’t doubt the truth of that or that the town is as white as ever, but I also think that those young mothers mostly see other adults who resemble themselves day after day and never encounter anyone like Feli, driving around in her magnificent old Jaguar. She clearly isn’t somebody’s nanny.

  We’ve been talking about her family, how proud she is that her eight-year-old grandson, Colum, is fluent in Spanish as well as English. She says that she never hears from Lexi in a tone meant to let me know she’s a little hurt by that. But they were never as close as Feli and I were. Lexi was a newborn when Feli came, whereas Feli and I immediately, in our shared solitudes down there in the basement, bonded. I’ve finished my sandwich, but Feli has only eaten some pinched morsels of her muffin. I ask her about my parents’ marriage, back during those first years when she was living with us. Did they at least get along a little better than they did later? You know, just doing some research for The Newlywed Game’s special fifty-year anniversary show, I joke, but Feli doesn’t even seem to hear me. Her expression, the way she takes off her sunglasses, brings me to a stop.

  Her smallish amber eyes, rimmed in black, shift inside a second from unsettled to resolved. With a surge of emotion, she says, Oh Frankie, no child should ever have to see and hear what you and your sister did in that house. Lexi was too little to understand, but you were so frightened. You were always crying, ay no.

  I don’t know what she’s talking about. I don’t remember being frightened in the way she’s suggested. I remember during that first winter in our town when I was recovering from tuberculosis standing on my green sofa by the picture window to look out at the other neighborhood children who came into our snowy yard in their snowsuits and hats to look at me on the other side of the pane. I remember raucous crows streaming across the gray winter sky like the flying monkeys in The Wizard of Oz. I remember wrists seared by ice-stiffened mitten cuffs and how icicles dangled from the eaves of the house and over the doorstep, silvery and transparent, narrowing into long sharp points that as I stood ringing the doorbell, desperate to come inside to pee, might break off and stab through my skull, down into my brain. I could sit back if I wanted to and immerse myself in a kaleidoscope of childhood memories. But I have no memory of what Feli begins to tell me about my parents.

  Twice your mother tried to leave your father in those years, she says.

  Twice Mamita had her luggage packed and set out in the living room, ready to flee back to Guatemala again and to her parents’ house. The first time she packed for my infant sister and me, too, but if I understand Feli correctly, that second time she was going to flee without us. Both times, Aunt Milly, summoned by my father, rushed to our house to tell my mother that she wouldn’t allow her to abandon her husband, wouldn’t allow her to destroy her brother’s family and ruin his life.

  Feli says, Mr. Goldberg sat in his chair doing this with his hands, and she puts out her hands, wringing them. But ohhh, she says, Aunt Milly scolded Mr. Goldberg too. She told him that he had to change or he was going to lose his wife and family. Doña Yoli was all packed and ready to go to the airport, but Aunt Milly convinced her to stay. Two times I saw that, Frankie. At your father’s funeral, says Feli, Aunt Milly came from Florida in her wheelchair, so old now, and she apologized to Doña Yoli. I heard your aunt say, I am sorry, Yolanda, for how you suffered with Bert all those years. I feel responsible, because I forced you to stay.

  Your tío Memo didn’t like to visit your mother here, says Feli. That’s why when he came, he would stay at the Holiday Inn in Dedham. Memo knows how your father treated Yoli; he always knew. Because of that he couldn’t stand to be with Bert.

  I didn’t notice that conversation between Aunt Milly and my mother at the funeral. As a boy, I wasn’t aware of Tío Memo’s hostility toward my father. I was deaf to the icy notes in the forced bonhomie with which Tío Memo spoke to his brother-in-law.

  My mother sobbing in bed with her nightgown ripped off her shoulder, her skin scratched and bruised, scratch marks that bled, Feli seems to think I saw that too. Bloody claw marks on my mother’s soft bare shoulder, how could I not remember? My father, Feli tells me, sat on the edge of the bed, face in his hands, then got up shouting at my mother and went into the bathroom, slamming the door. That didn’t happen just once, Frankie, she says. Maybe I saw it or maybe hearing the commotion, I ran to the bedroom door, but if I did, I don’t remember. When Mr. Goldberg tried to make love to Doña Yoli, says Feli, he couldn’t. Then he would be enraged and that’s when he would hit her. Mr. Goldberg was impotent, she says. My mother would tell Feli to take me downstairs. Your mother, she
told me everything, says Feli. Because in those days, Frankie, she had no one else.

  Her uncle, by whom she meant Rodolfo Sprenger Balbuena, the Guatemalan army colonel who eventually rose to general, who she always says was like a father to her, told Feli that she should leave our house. She had no obligation to us or to anyone to endure such ugliness and sadness, her powerful military relative said. She was young and had to look for her own happiness. But I couldn’t leave your mother alone with your father, she says. Or abandon you and Lexi. I couldn’t, Frankie.

  Feli tells me that Tía Meche used to phone from Guatemala to thank her for taking care of my mother and of me and Lexi. Tía Meche was right to thank Feli, I think. Because of Feli I was happy, shut away, as much as was possible, in our own world in the basement, out playing Down Back, walking with her to the town square to buy penny candy, sometimes even going into Boston with her on her day off to see a matinee movie and eat pizza in the North End.

  I used to find your mother shaking, Frankie, shaking like this. And Feli puts out her hands and makes them shake. He was brutal with her, Mr. Goldberg was, says Feli. Oh, she suffered, Frankie. Your mother suffered and she couldn’t talk to her family. Your abuelita was such a strict Catholic. You could never divorce. You were supposed to accept your fate. Doña Yoli was always telling her mother that everything was fine so she wouldn’t worry. I felt like I was responsible for your mother, says Feli. I wasn’t afraid of your father. God gave me strength to stand up to him. I would get between them and say, I’m going to tell them in Guatemala what’s happening, and that would scare Mr. Goldberg. That’s when he’d turn and go away. Doña Yoli used to call me her salvation. Cony, tu eres mi salvación, she’d say. Her studies and then her teaching, that saved her, too, says Feli. That was your mother’s escape. Her Latin American Society too.

  I do remember being left at home with Feli almost every day because my mother would drive off in her car, whatever car it was that came before her Rambler. Some adults remember the terrible things they saw as small children and can be powerful witnesses at war atrocity trials; others forget or block it all out. But war atrocities, come on, that’s a bit much. Lexi’s memories of incidents like that one when I was “almost murdered” are much better than mine; it seems she even remembers Bert’s beating me more vividly than I do. Yet my memories are detailed, even pristine, of so many other long-ago things. It sure doesn’t seem like Feli is making all this up.

  The Jaguar’s door shuts with a neat click, and I slouch down into the seat’s plush red leather, and the engine ignites with a smooth purr. This is class, I say, as if it’s what you’re required to say when getting a ride in an old Jaguar. Feli drives me to the Newton Highlands T stop. So Mamita used to tell Feli: Cony, tu eres mi salvación. But she was my salvation too. Feli has always loved to talk and gossip about my mother, about our whole family, but she’s never before told me what she did today about my parents, about my mother wanting to leave again, about my father becoming violent with her, about his problemita. Why now? Maybe she’s wanted to tell me for years and today sensed or decided it was time. Sometimes people like to hear family horror stories from their own distant past because they can seem to excuse and explain so much. But I would never have wished to be told what Feli just told me about my father. I concentrate on this new knowledge of my mother as a woman who suffered that violence, a young woman alone in this country, trapped with him, and a kind of panic fills me. I practically need to restrain myself from throwing my arms around Feli like a frightened boy. We’re parked by the T stop now, near where the sidewalk leads down to the tracks. I have my hand on the door handle, and I’m about to say goodbye and get out, but instead I turn to Feli and ask, Why did you decide to tell me what you did about my parents today, Feli? Why now and not years ago?

  Feli, both her hands high on the wooden rim of the wheel, looks a little frightened. Maybe I seem too agitated. I try to compose my face and as calmly as I can say, I mean, I’m really glad you told me. I’m just wondering why today.

  Frankie, Doña Yoli made me promise to her that I would never tell you or Alexandra about this, says Feli in a firm tone that suggests that as we both know my mother, that should be obvious. And yes, she says, so many years have passed since your mother has talked about this with me. But the last time I saw you, Doña Yoli had not been in her nursing home for very long. Her memory is going to get worse. Maybe there is not so much time left for you to talk to her. I don’t know if you ever will or not. But I decided it is not right, Frankie, that you don’t know anything about what your mother had to go through, after she came back to Mr. Goldberg.

  You mean Lexi doesn’t know about this? I ask.

  I did not tell her, Frankie, she says. You know, Lexi never calls me.

  Do you think that’s why my mother left Bert that first time, after I was born and we went back to Guatemala? I ask.

  I wasn’t living with you yet, so I don’t know, says Feli. But Doña Yoli told me a little about it. Your father was who he was, Frankie. But he got worse after you came back, after Lexi was born. Abuelita made Doña Yoli come back because of her religious beliefs. Also, when you got sick, she made your mother feel too guilty over that. It wasn’t because your mother left Mr. Goldberg that you got sick, it wasn’t right that Abuelita made her feel to blame. But to your mother, Abuelita could never do anything wrong.

  On the way into Boston, the subway stops at Longwood. Out the window I see the massive brick edifice of Longwood Towers, the familiar green awning outside the entrance of the former luxury residential hotel, by now pricey apartments or condos. The bridge club my father belonged to was in the basement, down at one far end. I went there a few times, once with my sister to caddy at a weekend bridge tournament: we brought new racks of cards to the tables and collected the played ones and scorecards. Lexi was better at it than I was, arriving promptly at each table when she was supposed to—one cardplayer crabbily asked me why I looked so sleepy—and at the end of the tournament, Lexi was given more in tips than I was. The atmosphere at the bridge club was a mix of library-like concentration and cantankerous outbursts inside a constant cloud of cigarette and cigar smoke, of complaints, wisecracks, howls of histrionic disillusion and defeat. So that I could repeat it at school, I memorized this exchange between two men playing as partners for the first time. Player One: Stop calling me Fuck, my name’s Fuch [fewk]. Player Two, later that afternoon, angrily throwing down his cards: Aww go fewk yourself. Most of the bridge players were middle-aged Jewish men, though some were young, students from the Boston-area universities, unshaven chain-smokers, shirts pulled taut by rolls of flab. My father wasn’t particularly funny, but he laughed at the bridge club like he never did at home. A grand master, a onetime New England champ, Bert was a revered figure there. Your father is good at games, any game, my mother used to say.

  Will I ever talk to my mother about what Feli told me? I don’t know. I need to think about how I’d bring it up or under what circumstances. Does Lexi really not know about it? I mean, if it’s something she and Lexi have already talked about, I’d like to know that. I’ve been away for so many years. I’m an outsider, at least regarding Lexi and Mamita’s shared secret world.

  I wish I could remember every single second of my entire life so far, in full 3-D Technicolor and surround sound, and at every past scene reinhabit myself exactly as I was.

  I check back in to the same hotel I stayed in the night I had dinner with Marianne. No messages on my phone. Maybe I should go out and get a cheeseburger at a nice bar somewhere, but no, the Saturday night Boston bar crowds, forget that. I order an individual pepperoni pizza and what the room service menu calls the Healthy Kale Caesar and a bottle of red wine. I turn on the TV to SportsCenter. Have to admit, I’m feeling just incredibly desolate.

  So what is loneliness, really? Doesn’t it have to ache night and day, to weigh you down at least like a ceaseless low-grade sorrow, to be the real th
ing? Otherwise how could it be true, like I read in the newspaper, that loneliness is a marker for early death as much as high cholesterol. I’m not depressed, I don’t even think I’m all that lonely. I’ve just been alone longer than I would have liked.

  And I’m on that filthy Tangiers beach yet again, struggling along under the weight of our bags, which are laden with all the beautiful objects, fabrics, and bags of spices and tea Gisela bought in the stalls and cave-like shops of the Fez medina and trying to see as far as I can down the length of the beach, into the blue seaside fog into which she’s disappeared, chasing the receding silhouette of a camel that she’d spotted far ahead or maybe two camels close together. At the ferry office, after Gisela had shared her disappointment to be leaving Morocco after only six days—and on her birthday no less—without even getting to ride a camel, the sympathetic ticket clerk told her that she could get a camel ride at the beach. There was still time if she hurried over there; our ferry to Spain was leaving in two hours. The tide is out but just beginning to come back in, and the wide beach is crowded, mostly with men and boys in their long djellabas, sitting in the sand, playing soccer, standing in small groups talking, smoking, walking with companions or alone. The many stray dogs mimic the humans, sitting in the sand, scampering after the soccer players, milling in groups or loping along alone. If she gets her camel ride, she’ll forgive me; my lie will be erased. She’ll never cut me any slack but she won’t for anyone else either. She’s a hydra of explosive nerves; the key to being with her is learning how to avoid lighting those fuses. I want to explain to her how well I understand her, but I know it’s impossible, she doesn’t really know how to assimilate and respond to what I usually don’t know how to express anyway, not on the spot, when it’s the moment such things need to be expressed. You can’t make Gisela feel loved without also making her feel that you’re trying to change her in some unacceptable way, and somehow I’m the same; we’re unlovable. Nevertheless, that hasn’t stopped her from letting me try to love her and even hoping I’ll succeed. I say to her: Trust me, I’ll protect you. But she answers: And who’s going to protect me from you? We still have a little more than an hour. The air is warm, sticky, and fetid with smells of fish rot, garbage, excrement. What seem like sewage pipes abruptly emerge here and there from the sand, releasing fluids that run through shallow narrow ditches to the sea. I can’t leap or skip over them the way Gisela must have, I’m too weighed down with luggage, so I take zigzagging detours. The light is darkening; our ferry is leaving in an hour and ten minutes. I keep my eyes fixed on the mist-blurred horizon for some sign of a camel or of the bright white of her blouse. Now it’s an hour. If we miss the ferry, we’ll have to stay the night in Tangier, and we’ll lose our flight home from Madrid too. Tangier’s cosmopolitan bohemian glamour seems far in the past, though the old tourist guidebook she once bought in a Mexico City used bookstore says to keep an eye out for Jean Genet. On the avenue separated from the beach by a long wall, streetlights have come on, and I can see the tops of illuminated busses passing. Evening is falling fast now; people are streaming off the beach. Forty-five minutes. If we run all the way, we can make it to the ferry dock in ten. She must have been unable to catch up to her camel and will soon come walking back alone, crestfallen. I strain my eyes for any white speck that might be her blouse. Reality, to Gisela, is a symbolic tapestry that unspools in time, the image of a girl walking alone on a dark beach to be interpreted by herself like a tarot card just flipped over. Her not getting her camel ride today, on her birthday, will be the fatal last judgment on our relationship.