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

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.

That same summer, often reading on the Boston Common in the mornings before I had to be at work on the Tea Party ship, and on the train home after, I finished One Hundred Years of Solitude, making my way through as if it were simultaneously a thronged maze and a picture illusion game where you try to find the hidden face, but none of the characters reminded me much of Carlota. When she’d left our house, Carlota still hadn’t read the novel. Aunt Milly soon after moved with Uncle Lenny to Florida. In the coming years, if she ever had any news about Carlota and the son of the florist, she never mentioned it. One hot, soggy night in Managua a friend who’d been a teenage Sandinista fighter took me to a sanctuary house for wounded Guatemalan guerrillas because he was thinking of bringing his combat skills to Guate and wanted to talk to a comandante who was recuperating from a leg wound. The sanctuary was in practically the shell of a house among the earthquake and war ruins of the old center. The grizzled comandante was sitting in a chair just outside the doorway to get some air, and as he and my friend solemnly conversed, I saw a woman inside on a cot against the rear wall raise herself up on one elbow, gauze bandages wrapped around her head and over one eye, and peer at us with her other eye through the murk of that stifling room lit only by a few candles. It didn’t even occur to me to wonder until later: Wait, could that wounded guerrilla have been Carlota?

For most of that spring on mornings when I had to be at the Tea Party ship, my father insisted I drive into Boston with him, detouring in his usual route to let me off by the Common. We’d leave the house just past dawn though I didn’t need to be at my job until nine. He’d probably thought we were going to have conversations and repair our relationship a little before I went away to college but then realized he had no more to say to me than I did to him. He always had the car radio tuned to a Boston station with news and sports; on one of those mornings we heard about the fall of Saigon. Throughout my childhood, Bert had been in a rage over the Vietnam War, screaming at the TV: I spit on this country, I spit on this country! On weekend mornings in the Stop and Shop parking lot there used to always be middle-aged and old men in VFW hats, oddly mild yet mean mouthed, with their clipboard petitions to put Hanoi Jane in prison or demanding a new escalation or bombing campaign or a pardon for Lieutenant Calley or something about the MIAs, and my father would snarl at them: Get out of my way you warmonger you, and he’d stomp into the supermarket to buy his smoked mackerel and bagels. At the same time, he regarded hippies, even hippie war protestors, with rabid disgust and loathing. Now here I was sitting alongside him with a freaky bush growing atop my head.