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

old school friend of my mother’s, “not a beauty pero siempre bien simpática,” Beatriz Oiza, from one of those extremely wealthy coffee plantation families. Lucio and Beatriz had seven children and raised them in Vista Hermosa, then a fashionable neighborhood, where they led quiet lives; they bought property in Italy, too, and stayed there during the worst of the war years because their wealth made the family obvious targets for kidnapping. But Lucio and his wife, even before the 1996 peace accords, began spending a few months every year in Guatemala because it wasn’t wise to always be so far from their coffee farms, and not one of their now-grown children, studying, marrying, settling down in Italy, still asking for money, wanted any of that responsibility. I doubt my mother ever envied Beatriz Oiza. She’d never wanted the idle Latin American rich wife life that might have been hers. As attached to her family as Mamita was, she never envisioned herself working in the toy and baby clothing store that was the family mainstay. Instead, she took the path she did, Boston, Sacco Road, a nearly forty-year career as a Spanish teacher, now Green Meadows.

But first Mamita went to New Orleans, where maybe the Italian sprang a banana boat visit, because something sent Abuelita up there in a hurry, on a Pan Am flight, to escort Mamita to Boston and into Our Lady’s Guild House. Abuelita, or Doña Hercilia as she was widely known, always had good government connections, whether during the Ubico dictatorship or after the October Revolution brought democracy, because politicians and bureaucrats of every party needed to buy toys for children or grandchildren during Christmas and Tres Reyes. Abuelita’s connections most likely had something to do with Mamita so quickly landing a job as a bilingual secretary to the Guatemalan consul in Boston. Dolores Ojito, from Guatemala City, too, though they hadn’t known each other there, was my mother’s roommate at Our Lady’s. Dolores, or Lolita, worked as a bilingual secretary, too, at the United Fruit Company’s headquarters on State Street. But I’d never heard, or registered it if I had, anything about my mother’s friendship with Dolores Ojito and their respective places of employment until after my mother went to live at Green Meadows. When she told me, it seemed too good to be true: a John le Carré Cold War spy novel mixed with a Latin American version of Muriel Spark’s novel about women living in a London rooming house after World War II. Mamita and Lolita, two young secretaries from Guatemala City, who’d come to find their futures in the so-called Hub of the Universe, though if not really of the universe, indisputably of the global banana trade. Before the overthrow of President Jacobo Árbenz in June 1954, Mamita, working at the Guatemalan consulate in Boston, was essentially in the employ of his government, while her best friend and roommate, Lolita Ojito, worked for the United Fruit Company; though the CIA organized and carried out the coup against Arbenz, the Boston-based banana company was notoriously its instigator.

But what does that have to do with Mamita and me, half a century later, sitting down here in the visitors’ nook at Green Meadows, playing Scrabble and talking? I brought her down in her wheelchair. The air is fresher here, wafting in through the pneumatic doors that open off the lobby onto a pine-lined parking lot. The well-lit, drably pleasant dining room, where Mamita still usually has her evening meals, is situated between the visitors’ nook and Lilac Meadows, the tranquil assisted living wing where she lived during her first year. When the weather is warmer, I take her outside to the garden in the middle of the complex and sometimes wheel her out onto the sidewalk and into the adjoining neighborhood, down Codman Road, so like Sacco Road with its small ranch houses and yards. Pushing her along, I’ll break into a run, singing out “Georgy Girl” or some other song I remember Mamita liking, though instead of singing along or laughing she just widens her eyes.

The Scrabble board on the table between us, Mamita sits in her wheelchair, maroon quilted jacket worn over her shoulders like a cape, pink fleece cardigan zipped up to her neck. By our rules, she can form words in either Spanish or English, but I’m only allowed to use Spanish, despite the absence of ñ tiles. Two years ago, Mamita was better at Scrabble. Now her arthritic fingers tremble as she nudges a tile into place, spelling out words like “si” or “no” or “que,” maybe even a “mama” or a “casa.” A year ago she could still manage a word like “maestra.”

If the coup had never happened, if her country had still been a democracy instead of a right-wing military dictatorship, might my mother’s life have taken another direction? After a few years of being a single, foreign working girl in Boston, would the novelty have worn off, and with her and Abuelita no longer needing to be on guard against Lucio Grassi, might she have gone home? Or would she have stayed and married Bert Goldberg anyway?

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