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

spaniel, somehow escaped his backyard leash while 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