Monkey Boy, Francisco Goldman [best story books to read .txt] 📗

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