Monkey Boy
Also by Francisco Goldman
The Interior Circuit
Say Her Name
The Art of Political Murder
The Divine Husband
The Ordinary Seaman
The Long Night of White Chickens
Monkey Boy
A Novel
Francisco
Goldman
Grove Press
New York
Copyright © 2021 by Francisco Goldman
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or [email protected].
Jacket design by Gretchen Mergenthaler
Jacket photograph © Jean-Marie Simon
FIRST EDITION
Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in Canada
First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition: May 2021
This book was set in 12 point Adobe Garamond Pro
by Alpha Design & Composition of Pittsfield, NH.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.
ISBN 978-0-8021-5767-6
eISBN 978-0-8021-5769-0
Grove Press
an imprint of Grove Atlantic
154 West 14th Street
New York, NY 10011
Distributed by Publishers Group West
groveatlantic.com
For Jovi and Azalea Panchita
For Binky Urban
&
In memory of my mother
“Why you monkey,” said a harpooner …
—Herman Melville, Moby Dick
“And now I want you to tell me,” the woman suddenly said with a terrible force, “I want you to tell me where one could find another father like my father in all the world!”
—Isaac Babel, “Crossing the River Zbrucz,” Red Cavalry
When someone goes on a trip, he has something
to tell about …
—Walter Benjamin, The Storyteller
Thursday
Five days a week and sometimes on Saturdays, too, my father used to get up at 5:45 a.m. to go to work at the Potashnik Tooth Corporation in an industrial pocket of Cambridge, a half hour or so drive from our town if you knew how to avoid the traffic. Moving around this apartment at that same predawn hour all these years later, hurriedly packing for my trip to Boston, I remember how his moving around the house always woke me before I had to get up for school: bathroom noises, heavy tread on the stairs, the garage door hauled up like a loud ripping in the house’s flimsy walls. My father kept his Oldsmobile in the driveway but always came into the house through the garage. Late school-day afternoons and evenings, I especially dreaded that garage-door sound. Unless what I heard next was my mother’s Duster coming inside, the flinching chug of her light nervous foot on the brake, it meant Bert was home and would soon be coming up the stairs. If I was listening to music on my little stereo I’d turn the volume way down or snap it off to be sure to hear his footsteps outside my door. Sometimes, if he was really angry at me over something or other, he’d burst into my room without knocking.
I remember no part of life inside the house on Wooded Hollow Road, which we moved into when I was in fifth grade, more vividly than my fear of my father. It seems now like years went by without a day when he wasn’t angry. But that must not be true, not every day; it’s not like there weren’t things in his life that didn’t bring my father joy or a kind of joy. Bringing home a new sapling or bush from Cerullo Farm and Nursery to plant in the yard on a weekend morning or winning his football bets and collecting from his bookie, joy.
But what a shitty start to the day, thinking about old Bert, feeling like his shadow is falling across the decades into my apartment as I get ready to head out the door doesn’t seem to augur too well for the trip ahead. But I’m not like my father, am I. He’d let any little frustration enrage him. Right now he’d be stomping from room to room noisily seething: God damn it to hell, where’s that goddamned Muriel Spark. Even in the most berserk moments of some pretty overwrought relationships, I’ve never even once screamed at another person the way he used to when he’d really lost it. Okay, here it is, on the sofa facing the TV, hiding underneath the Styrofoam tray last night’s beef chow fun came in, The Girls of Slender Means. I left it out to read on the train, a bit of homework before I see my mother tomorrow. The novel, according to the back cover, is set in a London boardinghouse for single young working women right after World War II, and Mamita lived in one of those, though in Boston, and in the 1950s.
Five months ago, in October, after I’d moved back to New York from Mexico City, I rented this parlor-floor apartment in a brownstone in Carroll Gardens. I still had stuff in storage from when the city had last been my home, nearly ten years ago. But I’ve only visited since, coming up to New York once a year, sometimes staying as long as a few months. I didn’t want to move back but felt forced to by a warning I received in Mexico that I probably could have ignored. But it didn’t feel that way at the time, so I fled. The warning was the result of my journalism on the murder in Guatemala of a bishop, the country’s greatest human rights leader, including the book I published less than two years ago. Maybe in some unacknowledged way I wanted to come back to New York. Thirty years ago, the first time I ever came here to live, I was also fleeing, looking for a refuge from humiliation, a new start. I don’t buy that myth of New York City as a place to come and begin your ambitious climb. Better to arrive humbled, self-embarrassed, it kind of de-hierarchizes the city, spreads it out, offering you more places to hide and also more room to move, to discover yourself in obscure corners, inside shadows and murk. In the past, not wanting to miss out on the chance for some ever-elusive apotheosis, clinging to a relationship or some romantic delusion, I wouldn’t have taken the time for all these trips home to Boston to see Mamita.
When I visit my mother tomorrow in Green Meadows, her nursing home, it will be for the fourth time since I moved back, this after a decade of sometimes seeing her only once a year. My sister, Lexi, visits a couple of times a week and speaks to her on the phone at least once a day. After all those years of living abroad when I often couldn’t remember to phone her even once a month, I do try to talk to my mother every week now. She hasn’t felt so present in my life since I left home for good at eighteen. It seems now like she’s always just a quick thought away, and I like to picture her in her room at the nursing home with her patient rabbit smile, waiting to resume our conversations. I was a little puzzled when I noticed that I’m not in any of the framed photographs on her windowsill and wondered what the reason was; really, I should just bring her a picture now. Two photos of Mamita with her own mother are displayed there, one from when she was in her midtwenties and Abuelita came to Boston to help her move into that boardinghouse and get her settled; the other is from a few years before Abuelita died, when she looked quite a bit like my mother does now, puffy around the eyes, eyelids drooping. There’s a photograph
of Lexi from when she went to Guatemala during a college summer vacation: she’s standing on the rough stone steps of the famous old church in Chichicastenango, smiling zestily, surrounded by the usual kneeling Maya shamans with their smoky incense censers, lighting candles, beseeching and casting spells for their clients. Another from about a decade later shows Lexi and our parents in a familial pose, standing close together, mother and sister in flowing dresses for who knows what occasion I wasn’t at, my father in jacket and tie, but you can’t see his face because of the piece of cardboard taped over it. Only Lexi could have decided to do that, though apparently without much opposition from our mom. When I asked Mamita about it, she looked blank for a moment, then there was a flicker of recognition in her eyes and she dismissively clucked her teeth like she does and said, Ach, no se, Frankie. I wonder if the nurses and other staff laugh to themselves over that photo, some even thinking: Oh yeah, I know about husbands and fathers like that.
Usually on these visits I spend at least a couple of nights in Boston hotels and sometimes a night at a highway hotel near the nursing home, located in a town nearly at the end of a commuter train line out to the southern suburbs. If I have to live up here again, for however long it turns out to be, this seems as good a time as any, when my mother has obviously started her mental and physical decline but for the most part is still lucid enough to have good conversations and giggles with. Ay, Mamita, we make each other laugh, anyway, don’t we?
I head down the sidewalk in the cold March, just predawn dark, feeling half-awake and half-asleep, pulling a wheeled carry-on. I forgot to take the locker padlock I use at the gym out of the backpack hung over my shoulders, and the lock knocks against my back in rhythm with the fall of my boot soles on the pavement, a muffled clanking the quiet seems to amplify along with the suitcase’s clacking wheels: clackclack clink clackclack clink.
The subway ride into Manhattan doesn’t fully belong to the awoken world either. There are grim-faced, sleepy-eyed early commuters, some with heads heavily nodding down as they sit, and a few homeless men sleeping across the seats, blankets so blackened they look made of cast iron; it’s like this train is transporting exhausted spirit miners out of a supernatural mine.
I still always call it going home to Boston, though I haven’t lived in that city since I was an infant, back when my newlywed parents had an apartment somewhere on Beacon Street. But this year I didn’t go home to Boston to spend any part of the Christmas holidays with my mother and sister. In early December I flew to Buenos Aires to report a magazine article on the search for the missing and stolen children of parents disappeared in the Dirty War years and stayed until just after the New Year. Then I’d only been there a few days when I got an email from my sister saying how happy she was that we’d be able to spend Christmas together for the first time in so many years. I hadn’t told Lexi I’d be in Argentina for the holidays, though I had told our mom, but she’d probably forgotten to pass that on. Instead, I was invited for Christmas Eve dinner with one of the Abuelas de la Plaza de Mayo and her recently recovered grandson, the only son of her only daughter, who’d given birth while a secret prisoner of the military dictatorship twenty years before, after which she’d “disappeared” forever, most likely rolled from the bay of a plane into the South Atlantic. Her son’s identity had been confirmed by DNA testing only a few months before. For my piece, I only had to try to describe that Christmas Eve just as it was in order to transmit an appropriate sense of the sacred, of the mystical presence of the missing mother-daughter—Paulina was her name—her blessing and love in the new bond between a grandson and grandmother who until recently had been strangers. Later, I got mail from readers who were moved by that scene especially, a few who had stories of their own to share about lost or missing mothers, even of ghostly visitations during holiday family gatherings and weddings.
In her email, Lexi wrote that we could hire a caregiver and take our mother, in her wheelchair, from the nursing home to have dinner in a restaurant, or else we could even have Christmas at her house in New Bedford. “I can’t think of a better occasion for you to finally come to my house and see how I live here,” she wrote. I’ve never been to the house Lexi bought a few years ago out in that old fishing port and now mostly defunct manufacturing city. She bought it as an investment, she says, with the money she got from our parents. An old gabled New England manse-looking place, originally built supposedly for a whaling captain back in the Melville time. There are plans to finally bring commuter rail service out to those South Coast communities that are a little closer to Providence than to Boston, and when they do, all those old Victorian sea captains’ and textile magnates’ houses are going to be coveted by yuppies who work in one or the other of those cities, and the house she bought is going to quintuple in value, so says Lexi. She’s always considered herself a sharp businesswoman and has been waiting all these years to prove it. Regarding his daughter’s self-proclaimed acumen, my father tended to be bluntly derisive. It’s a shame Bert won’t be around to get his comeuppance if Lexi’s real estate gamble pays off. Our parents signed over all their savings and property, everything they had, to Lexi. During those last years when my father was constantly in and out of the hospital, they did need help keeping up with their bills and various other such obligations, and they both knew that after my father was gone, my mother would never be able to handle those tasks alone, so Bert had to teach Lexi how to do it. I know Mamita, especially, was worried about my sister’s sometimes unstable employment and life situations and was determined to give Lexi some security but with responsibilities too. Those decisions freed me to be an aloof son and an even more aloof brother, almost always living far away, in Mexico, Central America, stints in Europe. Meanwhile Lexi has taken care of our parents, often a full-time job, first our father, whom she says she hated through his last years, and now our mother, whom she loves with what it’s no exaggeration to describe as “total devotion.” Look, Lexi deserves everything my parents have given her. I don’t resent her for that, not even a little, possibly for some other things but not that. I wouldn’t have traded the freedom with which I’ve been able to live my life for nearly anything.
As I emerge off the Penn Station elevator into a lightening gray dawn, the giant Corinthian colonnades of the post office building create the illusion of a grand boulevard, and an invigorated optimism floods me, like it’s the first morning of a long-awaited trip to Paris. Even with the time I lost looking for the novel, I’m early enough to walk up Eighth Avenue a few blocks to the salumeria to get a hero sandwich for the train. The trip between New York and Boston is almost five hours long, as long as a flight from JFK to Benito Juárez, and traveling with a good sandwich makes all the difference. Hombre prevenido vale por dos, Gisela Palacios always liked to say. She loved those old-fashioned country grandma sayings, though she could barely cook a quesadilla. Whether it made him worth two men or not, planning ahead like this is just the sort of thing my father, both a scientist and a sandwich man, always did, though he would have found an old-style Jewish deli, corned beef on a bulkie or else tongue. Bert always drove, I can’t even picture him sitting on a train or a subway. He only flew when he had no choice. The last time he made that end-of-winter drive from Florida back to Massachusetts, he was eighty-seven. He was passing through one of the Carolinas when, before pulling into a motel for the night, he stopped for dinner in one of those highway national chain steakhouses and only discovered the unpaid restaurant bill in his pocket when he got home. He mailed the bill with a check to the steakhouse along with a note of apology, explaining that the reason he’d left without paying was that he’d been tired from a long day of driving; he had to admit that at his age he no longer had the same stamina as when he was younger. Barely a week later a letter came in the mail from the restaurant’s manager, who wrote that nowadays it was rare to encounter such an honest American traveler, and he included a certificate that would let Bert eat for free in that steakhouse in perpetu
ity. Free steak for the rest of his days! But he’d already sold his little Lake Worth condo so that he could live year-round on Wooded Hollow Road. My father would never drive through the Carolinas again. He wasn’t always that honest, either, though he had a way of giving the impression that he was, with sort of an Abe Lincoln look of homely integrity, dangling rail-splitter arms. So Mamita took him back for that last time, and though she was nearly twenty years younger, the repercussions on her own health of those next six years of looking after and having to deal with Bert every day would be dire.
While the counterman prepares my sandwich, I sit at a table, quickly downing a small cup of coffee and a cup of yogurt, getting a healthy start to what’s going to be a long day, and open the Muriel Spark novel to the first page: “Long ago in 1945 all the nice people in England were poor, allowing for exceptions.”
Yesterday evening I thought it was already over with Lulú López. Even though we’ve only gone out a few times, it’s the closest I’ve come to any kind of romantic relationship in five years, since things ended once and for all with Gisela. But then last night Lulú sent that maybe-it’s-not-over text message: Hurry back, we’ll ride bicycles, etcetera. I can’t pretend I don’t care what happens between us, but I do try to keep up a fatalistic interiority. But I’m excited about this trip to Boston, in fact, I’ve started out a day earlier than originally planned just so I can meet Marianne Lucas for dinner tonight in the South End. When she wrote to me out of the blue a couple of weeks ago on Facebook, we hadn’t spoken, or had any kind of communication since tenth grade, thirty-four years ago. She’s a family and divorce lawyer now and divorced herself. In one of her FB messages, Marianne wrote that she’d decided to try to contact me after hearing me on NPR. I was talking about José Martí and his years living in New York City, the focus of the novel I’ve just finished, which is not a strictly biographical novel. The House of Pain I’m calling it. No argument from me that it might make a suitable title for the biographies of so many of us out here on the sidewalk this morning coming out of and headed down into Penn Station, who’ve also spent consequential time in a house of pain. It’s not a title anyone would ever use for an actual biography of José Martí, those always have to evoke heroism, martyrdom, literary and political genius, or strike the “Yo soy un hombre sincero” chord. But The House of Pain is a perfect title for my novel, the major part of which takes place inside a boardinghouse during a couple of the sixteen years Martí lived in New York City, back when he was a poor immigrant exile, tirelessly hustling freelance journalist, translator, private Spanish tutor, poet, and revolution plotter, all this over a decade before he finally found his martyr’s death on his one-man, one-horse charge against Spanish troops on a beach in Cuba. I handed the novel in to my publisher just before I left for Argentina. It’s only 182 double-spaced pages long, but it took five years to write. It required a lot of research, I even went to Havana and spent a few weeks in archives there. I needed to learn everything I possibly could about Martí in order to identify the gaps where there was no historical or written record, and let my imagination go to work inside those. One draft was 500 pages long. That was followed by another of 278 pages that I handed in, but it was a botch. My editor, Teresa Fijalkowski, was hard on it; that is, while she was fine with latter parts of it, she stuck it to me about the first third. So many voices and who’s talking and whose thoughts? Look, Teresa, it’s simple, I explained. The narrative spine of that opening section is Martí on a long walk through the city streets to his boardinghouse, where his wife, small son, and the boardinghouse owner’s wife, secretly pregnant with Martí’s child, are all waiting for him to come home. He’s trying to work out in his thoughts how everything in his life has gotten so completely fucked up, and inside his head he’s talking to his wife and to his lover and to other people, and he’s even trying to imagine what they’re saying about him. All of that trails after Martí on his walk back to the boardinghouse like clouds of consciousness that settle onto the page as if into wet cement as fragments of narrative and story. Teresa cracked a half smile, gave me one of her steady ice-cave stares, and finally, with perfect dry comedy, cracked: The dubious gift of consciousness, now I get what Blanchot meant. I said, And it’s just my luck to have the only book editor in New York with a PhD from Oxford in critical theory. I wrote my thesis on Auden, said Teresa. But of course we read theory, so what? Frank, there’s a lot of turmoil, a lot of pain in that boardinghouse, I get that, said Teresa. But I’d like to sense how they’re experiencing it, one character at a time, right from the start. Martí was a hyperconsciousness, I argued, so voluble he was nicknamed Dr. Torrente, and he had more going on in his brain, in his life, than maybe anyone else living in New York City at that time. I spent another relatively monkish year in Mexico City working on the novel. I needed to fasten my prose not only to Martí’s heartbreak and torment but also to his wife’s, her life obscured by over a century of blame. You think Yoko Ono had it bad, imagine having Fidelista Communists and Miami Cuban right-wing fanatics all blaming you for the Cuban Apostle’s failed marriage, separation from his son, and years of complicated private torment. It’s my lost skinny ugly beautiful book that lived with me through my own most trying years and finally found its way home, my best book, The House of Pain. In about nine months maybe it will be displayed over there in the train station bookstore, facing out on the new-books table, ideally positioned between Zaro’s bagels and the men’s room. Maybe someone will buy it to read on a morning train to Boston a year or so from now, and I’ll be taking that train again, and for the first time in my life I’ll get to see someone reading a book of mine in public.
Monkey Boy Page 1