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

That night in the Greenwich Village Italian restaurant, when Tío Memo was telling me about the intellectual joven and my mother, he must have told me his name. Later I vaguely recalled it being either René, Ramón, or Raul, though I always mix up those names, often to my own embarrassment; whenever I’m introduced to a René, I’m bound to call him Ramón or Raul the next time we meet. That’s why I always think of him as el joven. As adolescents, Tío Memo and this youth, el joven, had participated in the student movement—Chiquilines de la Revolución the young people were called—that sparked the peaceful 1944 October Revolution. Everyone was so excited and proud that Guatemala was going to be a democracy. Even my mother, at twelve or thirteen, stood in front of the store handing out campaign leaflets for Arévalo. A couple of years later, Tío Memo went off to college in California and two years after that, my mother followed; the youth went to San Carlos, the public university in Guatemala City. After we came back from California, said my uncle, we didn’t see him again. My uncle said that el joven was the type who likes to stay in school forever. A few years later I would learn that people like my uncle liked to describe leftist militants as perpetual students, meaning that the universities were where they could sit around plotting the coming of the workers’ and peasants’ revolution instead of having to work.

Now I know, though I didn’t then, that it was after California and before she went to Boston that Lucio Grassi came into my mother’s life, but Tío Memo didn’t even mention the Italian. The restaurant was an old-fashioned Venetian trattoria, with white tablecloths and older male waiters in bow ties, most with mustaches. It was a favorite of my uncle’s. Over the next twenty years, when Tío Memo came up for the toy fair as he did every February, if I was in the city, too, we’d go back to that restaurant. I always ordered the Venetian-style spaghetti Bolognese.

Yoli always had so many friends, said Tío Memo cheerfully. She was the soul of any party. He let out a blast of laughter and said, But the family never thought her friendship with that joven was good for her. Do you understand what I mean, Frankie, when I say that he was not even good for himself? After a pause, I said, You mean he was self-destructive? Yes, Frankie, self-destructive and destructive, said my uncle. That patojo always did what he wanted and never considered how his actions could affect other people. Now I get it, I thought. Tío Memo was pushing the conversation in a direction meant to be instructive for me, who was also behaving, he must have thought, in a self-destructive way, doing whatever I wanted, not taking into consideration how my actions affected my parents.

Suddenly Tío Memo jumped ahead in his story. My mother had already been in Boston for a year or two, the coup happened, and the joven destructivo was one of the hundreds of Guatemalans who fled to the Mexican embassy. Three months would pass before the new government would allow those refugees to go into exile, most to Mexico.

You mean he was in the Árbenz government, I said.

Not that I know of, said my uncle. He was more what they call a fellow traveler. Do you know that term?

I’ve heard it, I said. People were always being smeared with it back in the fifties, right? Okay, so this self-destructive lefty guy was friends with my mother. But what do you mean, Tío? How friendly were they? Was my mother a fellow traveler too?

My uncle seemed to find that genuinely funny; he sat back and enjoyed a hearty laugh. No, Frankie. Yoli wasn’t interested in things like that, he finally said. They were just good friends, you know, the way young people are, joking and laughing about any silly thing.

What kinds of silly things, I asked. Do you remember an example, Tío?

My uncle did seem to think that over for a while, which I assumed was for show. But then he said, One time three of us went to the movies together, and maybe because the joven was hungry or had indigestion, his stomach kept growling, loudly enough so that if you were sitting nearby you heard it. And Yoli leaned her head close to his stomach and said, Shhhh, naughty stomach, we’re trying to watch the movie! Well, that joven’s stomach answered her with its loudest growl yet! I don’t know how he did it, like a ventriloquist. Now they did have to leave the theater, because they couldn’t stop laughing. Ala, qué alegre, Frankie.

My uncle’s story made me laugh, too, even though it didn’t seem to have anything to do with the subject of my mother’s unhappiness. But Mamita wasn’t all we talked about in the restaurant that night. Tío Memo had his mission, to find out what was really going on with me and convince me to go back to college. Wasn’t it true, he asked, that I’d gotten all A’s for grades? That was true, I admitted. Then why didn’t I want to go back? Was college too easy? There’s a jovencita behind this, verdad, Frankie? My uncle leaned forward, like now we were getting down to the truth. No, really, there isn’t, Tío, I said. I wish, but no, no girl. I saw alarm in my uncle’s eyes. Maybe he was thinking, Frankie ran away from college because he was upset about Yoli? And now here he is, with his girlish straightened hair. What a strange boy my nephew is.

Even before I’d started working in the flower shop, with some of the money my college friend had lent me I’d had my hair straightened again by a super cute, chatty boricua lesbian with hair dyed glossy pink at a unisex hair salon up on Amsterdam,