Monkey Boy

by Francisco Goldman

  But I can stop worrying about that because here she comes, yay. Even through the fog I can make out the distinct shape of a camel, its Q-tip risen head and neck. And isn’t that a rider? If I can’t see the white of her blouse, that’s because it’s too dark now, the mist too thick, and they’re probably still too far away. The camel’s owner must be on foot, leading it by a halter or leash. I’m so relieved, so happy that she got her camel ride that I don’t care if we miss our ferry. Maybe there’s a night flight from Tangiers to Madrid. But wait, why is the camel diagonally crossing the beach, toward the city side, seemingly headed toward an exit in the wall? I can make out the camel’s undulating neck and bobbing head as it mounts the balustraded tiled steps leading off the beach, and even though I’m loudly shouting Gisela, the camel proceeds through the gate into the city and its noise, out of sight. Are they taking a shortcut to the ferry port? Does she think I’m waiting for her there? Twenty-five minutes. Under the weight of the loaded backpack, a heavy bag in each hand, I run through the sand toward those steps. A squalid moat of rank water separates the bottom step from the beach. The people leaving the beach splash through, some hiking the hems of their djellabas. I roll up my pants and wade through in my boots, holding our bags high, and scramble up the steps to the well-lit sidewalk and look both ways up and down the avenue at busses, cars, taxis, pedestrians—no sign of a camel. I frantically ask passersby in Spanish and English if they’ve seen a woman in a white blouse atop a camel. Nobody has. From the sidewalk the beach below is a vast blackness. I carry our bags back down to the bottom step. From there you can still see across the beach to the silver-flashing waves, moonlight and the streetlamps above infusing the fog with a nearly purplish glow. Twenty minutes. I go back up the steps, back down. Less than fifteen minutes now. Coming toward me through the fog, swiftly as if in speeded-up film, are three camels. They look covered in gold dust. She sits atop her camel, grinning ear to ear, looking so happy and proud. The owner of the camels dismounts, lifts our luggage onto the back of his camel, and helps me seat myself atop the third camel, and we go galloping over the sand to the ferry port and back into our scheduled future.

  About three years ago in the Condesa, in El Centenario, on a night when the cantina was booming with drunks, a friend of Gisela’s spotted me from her table and gestured for us to step outside for a smoke. Did you know that Gisela is in Iran? she asked me, out on the sidewalk. Her new boyfriend, a Spanish photojournalist and war correspondent, had invited her on a long reporting trip to Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Her friend said, Gisela’s always dreamed of a trip like that. It’s just what she needs. It will be life changing for her … If she survives! Oh, she’ll survive, I said. She’s like a lobster that can live in boiling water. That’s true, it’s the Spaniard who might not survive Gisela, she said, and we both laughed. A knowing laugh, I thought. Though I told myself to be happy for Gisela, it hurt to be reminded that she hadn’t found the partner she wanted or needed in me, like she must have with this Spaniard.

  About two months later I ran into Gisela’s friend again, this time in the Superama by Calle Amsterdam. When she saw me, she let go of her shopping cart and came practically bounding over to me, an excited look on her face, and she exclaimed, Weyyyyy, you’re not going to believe what’s going on with Gisela in Iran. In Tehran, she told me, where Gisela and her boyfriend’s trip began, the Spanish photojournalist and war correspondent had been too terrified to even leave his hotel room. That gachupín turned out to be a fraud. He’d never covered a war in his life. He sometimes took pictures of beach resorts for Spanish travel magazines and lived on family money. He literally wouldn’t leave their hotel room! Wey, he was afraid of los iraníes, that’s what Gisela wrote in her email. Ay no, poor Gisela, her friend went on, she’s always had the worst luck with men. But you know what she’s like when she’s angry. Gisela and the Spaniard almost got thrown out of their hotel; the owner threatened to call the police. Gisela went off by herself with her camera and a knapsack but not just to go and walk around until she calmed down. Her email had been sent from some holy city, weeks after she’d left Tehran. The friend said, Gisela is traveling around Iran by herself, wearing a chador! Neta, wey, Gisela in a chador. That girl is crazier than a goat, but she says she’s never been happier. I decided to write to Gisela, too, just to ask if she was okay. I still wrote to her every year on her birthday. Geronimo Tripp was continuously in and out of that region, and I passed on his email address and urged her to write to him. He’d be happy to hear from her and would lend a hand however he could. Around three weeks later, when she answered, I opened her email and it was empty. I wrote back and told her that her email had arrived empty and to please resend it, and about three weeks after that, I got another one from her. She wrote, “Why did that email arrive empty? It took me a long time to write. It was a very long email.” That very long, very lost email haunted me for years. Typical of her to accept the loss of those words as a sign of fate that it would be impious to defy by trying to re-create them. In this new email, which I read over hundreds of times, she wrote that she’d spent six weeks in a city called Isfahan, going around covered head to toe in black, but it didn’t matter. All the men were dogs. She’d never been anywhere else with so much sexual harassment. They shouted out gross things to her in the streets, followed her on foot and on motorbikes, spied on her. She was having just the best time anyway; she had lots of stories. Now she was in Yazd and was “in love” with it, one of the oldest cities in the world, super cosmopolitan but with afghanis, paquistanis, and nomads, a ferocious place. Yazd was like some of the towns we’d been to in Morocco, she wrote, but with no one out walking in the streets; the heat was insupportable. She was looking for a place to rent. She wanted to lose herself in the desert.

  More than a year after that, Geronimo Tripp one night in Baghdad heard some journalists talking about a Mexican woman living in Kabul, on Flower Street, in a house shared by foreign aid workers. When she was described as beautiful but difficult, he had a hunch they were referring to Gisela. One of the journalists, an Italian, seemed badly hung up on her. Gero had lost all track of her since. A year ago I ran into her friend again, who told me Gisela was back in Mexico, living in the Sierra Tarahumara with her husband, a Bulgarian doctor without borders she’d met somewhere in Afghanistan, and their children, twin boys. Her friend had had lunch with Gisela when she was in Mexico City for the day to catch a flight to Paris later that same night. I’d run into the friend not even a week later. Gisela was having a show at a gallery in Paris of photographs she’d made during her first year in Iran, when she was living alone in some desert town.

  We can leave what made us unlovable behind. We can grow or evolve or determinedly slog our way out and become lovable.

  The clock reads 4:03 a.m. I just woke again wondering: Could Lexi actually be el joven’s daughter? Tío Memo gave the impression el joven was blond, didn’t he? That’s preposterous, don’t be preposterous.

  Aunt Hannah was at least blondish too. Lexi even resembles Aunt Hannah, doesn’t she? Aunt Hannah who passed away something like twenty-five years ago. I reach for my phone, maybe a message from Lulú came in and I didn’t hear the buzz … Zip, nada.

  Sunday

  A few years ago, during a time when I was researching the science and history of artificial teeth, thinking it would help me to understand Bert better should I ever want to write about him, I came across a few technical publications in which Leslie Potashnik and the Potashnik lab were cited in footnotes and knew that was the lab my father had run. Finally I did find what I’d hoped against hope to find, a mention of my father by name. In a prosthetic dentistry journal article titled “Sourceless Illumination and Color Measurement,” by Dr. Rishi Kamble of the University of Connecticut School of Dental Medicine, there were several sentences dedicated to Bert Goldberg’s work and expertise. I wrote to Dr. Kamble, and he invited me to Storrs. It turned out Rishi had been one of Bert’s five appr
entices during those five years when he was kept on by Potashnik’s new management to train his own replacements; he was only a few years older than me. Introducing me to the grad students in his lab, Rishi said, This is Bert Goldberg’s son. Bert made the porcelains at Potashnik, remember? Your father’s teeth, Francisco, had a very recognizable style.

  We were having lunch later in an Italian restaurant not far from the dental school campus when Rishi said, Bert Goldberg was a scientist, but he was an artist too. He compared the techniques pioneered by my father and a handful of his contemporaries around the world to those used to produce the famous glass flowers at Harvard, though, of course, within a much narrower range of colors. Between the brownest feasible tooth and the pearly whitest, Rishi explained, exists an infinity of hues and shadings, and that’s where Bert worked his mastery.

  I said, You mean a bound in a nutshell but king of infinite space kind of thing. And Rishi said, Exactly, and we laughed nerdily.

  But, gotta say, Daddy-O, not really buying that whole artist thing.

  Sure, Bert suffered, but he always had the consolations of his art. No, it was his fate to suffer on account of who he was, and though he got away with a lot, it was never art that provided his escapes.

  Is it true that the son is the father and the father is the son? People like to say that, but is it true? People say that daughters turn into their mothers, but is that true? I don’t think any of that is true. Not necessarily true.

  I was eighteen when I got out of that house and out of that town, so don’t feel sorry for me, I tell myself, sitting here in this Starbucks on a corner by the Common. But my mother and her devoted daughter never did escape, or whenever either did it was never for long enough or far enough away.

  Walking over here from the hotel, I crossed the Common. Frozen crunchy grass, hard scraps of snow, a late-winter cold deadness in the air, everything tired of being dead. A squirrel hopping across the frozen ground with a scrap of snow in her mouth; no, it’s a piece of plastic spoon. I remember coming here once when I was about six with my mother to feed peanuts to the squirrels. It was one of those weekend afternoons when she would bring me into the city to see a Cantinflas movie in the basement of an old Boston church, Lexi, still a toddler, left at home with Feli. Mamita had been summoned into our elementary school and told to speak only English with me at home, and once a week I was taken out of the classroom for pronunciation tutoring in order to rid me of my stubbornly persistent un-American accent. Maybe the Cantinflas movies had something to do with it, but we spoke Spanish on those Sunday afternoons in Boston, and I loved how that made me feel so close to Mamita, like we were alone in a foreign city. Near us on the Common, an old woman in a long, dark fur coat, with a pale, round face was feeding walnuts to squirrels, walnuts as large as the squirrels’ heads. The woman smiled at me and said, Well, young fellow, you don’t think a squirrel can eat a whole walnut? She spoke in what I thought of as a public television voice, like that woman in The French Chef. Her underhanded toss made it look like the walnut was as heavy as a bowling ball, but it rolled into the proximity of a fat squirrel. Spanish for squirrel is ardilla, a feminine noun. The squirrel plucked the walnut up in her front claws, transferred it to her mouth, and ran with it up a tree trunk where she hung upside down, hind talons sunk like iron hooks into the bark, splayed legs elastically stretched, and turned the walnut over and over in her hands, gnawing on it. When her teeth broke through the hard shell, we heard it. The old woman smiled at us and said, Isn’t that marvelous? Oh yes, it is, said Mamita. We were all smiling at each other.

  In a little while I’ll take the subway to East Boston to see María Xum in her laundromat. She has something urgent she wants to tell me. Not expecting any Feli-like revelations about my parents from María, though. She wasn’t with us that long, for one thing, and didn’t have nearly that degree of emotional closeness with us.

  At Bert’s funeral, held at graveside in a cemetery in a town near ours, with an officiating rabbi who despite his benign huff and prattle clearly didn’t know anything about my father—a member of the Greatest Generation, the rabbi called him, that’s a good one—I read the eulogy I’d written in a notebook on the flight up from Mexico. It was a story about visiting Bert in Florida. We’d gone to one of those offtrack horse-betting places where mostly retired people sat in a room at tables and folding chairs watching the Hialeah or Gulfstream races on a closed-circuit television screen. At a counter in an adjoining room, you placed your bets. My father was a superb horse better, and as he sat studying the racing form, other old people, men and women, would come and stand behind him, trying to peek over his shoulder to decipher which horses he was circling with his stub of a pencil on his racing form or marking on the betting tickets. I don’t recall him ever having a losing day, but, at least in front of me, he bet only small amounts. That day in the offtrack betting place there was a guy there, hulking and glowering, tousled black hair, swarthy cheeks and chin, older than me but young for that place, who I assumed must be visiting family in Florida too. During every race, he shouted and flung his arms around and kept getting up and blocking everybody’s view of the screen. He looked like Bluto. The old people there were too passive or polite to reprimand someone else’s misbehaving son, but a few times I’d shouted at him to sit down, and he’d shot threatening looks back at me. As four tightly bunched horses, including the one my father and I had bet on, rounded the last bend, he stood up in front of the screen again, waving his arms and screaming his horse’s name, and I shouted out: Sit down! We want to see the race, not your fat ass! During my eulogy, I shouted out those words just as I had in Florida: Not your fat ass! When he heard me—though he’d probably heard me all along, this was just the first time I’d mentioned his fat ass—Bluto turned and charged through the tables, meaty fist raised and elbow cocked, with a speed that stunned me. He was massive. I rose from my chair and put my hands out to ward him off and just as he was about to throw a punch that was going to split open my face, eighty-something Bert was standing between us, shouting: Go back to your chair, you goddamned bully. Leave my son alone. You’ve been asking for trouble all day. Go back to your chair, and sit there so we can watch the races, you bully, you!

  I finished my eulogy blubbering away: Oh Daddy, Daddy, best Daddy. Yes, I did. My sister, standing next to me, read the eulogy she’d written next but couldn’t even get through its first paragraph. She stood there sobbing and bouncing her sheaf of printed papers off her thigh like a tambourine, and I put my arm around her. There were times he’d loved us as we’d wished he always would have; maybe it took the shock of death to remind us. I haven’t been back to that cemetery since and wouldn’t know how to find it, don’t know its name or even what town it’s in—Norwood, Canton, Dedham—though my sister must. That last time we saw each other, a couple of years ago, when we took my mother out to dinner, we’d talked about how none of us had been out to my father’s grave since he’d died. Reap what you sow, said Lexi.

  Teddy Feinstein, whom my father guided into a landscaping career, spoke at the funeral too. He told how when he was growing up his own father used to work all the time, even Saturdays, but Bert always had time for him. He was only three when he began spending time with my father in our yard, nearly every day and weekends when the weather was warm, helping with the rosebushes, the vegetable garden, the lawn. Bert had even taken him to Sarah Hancock Pond and taught him to skip rocks. Teddy started to cry then and, embarrassed, finished by saying that he only wanted to thank my father for everything, and he went and sat down.

  Bert never took me to the pond to skip stones. Your father likes everyone’s else’s children more than his own, I remember my mother saying. I remember lying awake in bed the night after the funeral, asking myself what I could have done as a boy to make my father like me as much as he did Teddy.

  During those first years that my parents were separated, when he had his own condo in Walpole and was still
working at the tooth factory, Bert was always returning to mill around the yard and would even come inside to sit in his armchair. Mamita, having trouble handling the responsibilities for the house all alone, summoned him home more and more. After he retired, Bert spent his winters in Florida, but when he came north in the spring, driving himself in his Oldsmobile, eventually it was Wooded Hollow Road he returned to. Finally, he sold his Florida condo.