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

about her wheelchair as if it’s a recent development. I played along: Oh no, Ma, how’d that happen? I don’t know, she said. Lexi doesn’t want to live in Guatemala, said my mother. She’s happy here, she has her life here.

Well, I said into the phone, maybe we can find a way to go back for a visit soon.

You know, Frankie, says my mother across the Scrabble board, Lexi is an important person in New Bedford.

Really, Ma? I ask. Important how?

She’s married to a policeman, says my mother. And she has children.

But wouldn’t Lexi have told me, I wonder. When I last saw her two years ago she didn’t mention a husband or children, she didn’t seem like a woman married to a policeman, much less a woman with children. Are Lexi and I estranged? I know I’m a distant, neglectful brother, but we’re not estranged, are we? She wrote me those emails before Christmas, inviting to me to her house.

I ask, Do you mean the policeman’s children from an earlier marriage?

Now my mother’s expression seems both blank and consternated.

That’s great, Ma, that things have worked out so well for Lexi, I decide to say. It was a brave thing she did, buying that house in New Bedford. How many children does she have, anyway?

Memo, says my mother, and she wanly sighs. I don’t remember how many children.

I’m Frankie, I tell her, not Memo. Even before, Mamita had a propensity for mixing up names in what seems like a verbal echoing of a mental stutter, so that when she means to address me she says, BertMemoLexiFrankie … To my sister she might say, FrankieConyYolanditaLexi … But more recently she really does seem sometimes to mix me up with her brother. Well, people have always said there’s a resemblance, that when I was young I supposedly looked like Tío Memo when he was young. Maybe when I’m old I will too. Memo’s a handsome old gent, a dapper dresser.

Lexi went to see a brujo, says my mother.

A brujo? I repeat. You mean like a Maya shaman?

I don’t know, she answers, her laugh mixing mischief and embarrassment.

Even if she was once a reader of the Carlos Castaneda books about the Yaqui shaman Don Juan, my mother has never believed in that sort of witchcraft, probably not even when she was a girl, and I ask, Ma, what are you talking about? Why did Lexi go to a brujo?

Frankie, Lexi asked the brujo to help you find a wife so that I can have a grandchild, she says. Don’t you think that was thoughtful of her? She grins expectantly at me.

But Ma, I say, you just told me that you’re already a grandmother. You said that Lexi has children.

They’re not Lexi’s children, she responds, so they’re not my grandchildren. Oh, Frankie, I don’t know, she says plaintively. Lexi told me she asked a brujo to help you, pues, ojalá, verdad?

Mami, I say, I hope you’ll find yourself becoming a grandmother one of these days or years, but if that kid is mine, it won’t be because Lexi went to a brujo.

What I was thinking was, if Lulú and I somehow end up married, Marisela will become my mother’s granddaughter. But she won’t, of course. Marisela is Lulú’s second cousin.

Above the i in my mother’s “si” on the Scrabble board, I set down a p tile and an s and below it, a c, an o, an s, another i, another s, “psicosis.” Pretty nifty, though we don’t keep score. I choose seven new tiles and say: Psicosis, Mamita. Your turn.

In front of that last s, my mother drops another i.

I say, “Is” instead of another “si,” muy interesante, Mami.

During that year or so leading up to the coup, what did Yoli and Lolita, one working for her country’s consulate, the other for the powerful banana company, know or notice? Did one pass along information, whisper an overheard secret, or carry a sheaf of pilfered documents or an intercepted telegram to the other? Wouldn’t they have at least known that something was up? I’ve tried to excavate whatever connection my mother and Dolores Ojito could have had to the coup or whatever memories she might still have about it. And I’ve forced myself to read at least part of every book I can find on the coup—which I first learned about in high school from Carlota Sánchez Motta, who didn’t have all her facts right but whose indignation was on the mark—searching for a reference to any even minor or accidental role my mother and Dolores Ojito could have played or to their proximity to the men helping to scheme the calamity or maybe trying to prevent it, hoping always for at least a glimpse in printed words of their shadows in wasp-waisted dresses or skirts passing through a Boston murk of boardrooms, offices, private gentlemen’s clubs, and cocktail lounges.

In case bananas should someday be wiped from the earth by an ineradicable plague, forcing the Boston Banana Brahmins to find another fruit to grow down there or even to develop a new one like the grapefruit more or less was, the United Fruit Company had prudently kept much of the land it owned in Guatemala fallow. The land expropriations of President Árbenz’s agrarian reform included those fallow acres. Something like one out of every six Guatemalans got some land. The DC wise men asked, What if every other government in Latin America does what Árbenz did? Those peasant farmers will clamor for more and more land, and next thing you know … One of the venerable Boston Banana Brahmins who’d founded the Latin American Society of New England was also the US ambassador to the United Nations, and Mamita got to meet him. Mr. Ambassador, I imagine someone saying, this is Señorita Yolanda Montejo, a secretary at the Guatemalan consulate. She comes to every one of our events. Wouldn’t Yolanda’s place of employment have made her kind of suspicious to the ambassador? Or else