Monkey Boy

by Francisco Goldman

  It’s only a little past midnight. Outside it’s still snowing. The dark shapes of pigeons on the sill of my hotel room window. I fell asleep with the Celtics game on. It’s over, but the postgame show is still going; they won in double overtime.

  The bar downstairs must be still open. I get out of bed, pull on clothing. No messages on the phone. I bring the book of Jane Bowles stories I’m rereading. It’s a small bar, off the vestibule inside the front door. I’m the only customer. The bartender tonight, in a white shirt, wool vest charcoal gray with green lozenges, a black bow tie that seems to press painfully into his soft, tawny neck, wears a name tag that reads mustafa. I order a double Knob Creek on the rocks and say, Thank you, Mustafa, as outgoingly as I can, though after serving me he goes back to leaning against the bar, lost in his own thoughts. The first time I went into a bar for some drinks with Lulú in Brooklyn, the bartender, a woman in her thirties with bare, thoroughly tattoo-covered, pale arms, asked Lulú for an ID. Lulú didn’t have one, and so she refused to serve her. Lulú said that it was okay, she’d just have a mineral water. But I was indignant. This has never happened to us before, I insisted loudly to the bartender. She’s twenty-eight, for God’s sake! I bet if she were a white hipster girl you wouldn’t have asked to see her ID, am I right? I’m right, aren’t I? The bartender coldly told me that if I didn’t lower my voice, she’d ask us both to leave. What a bitch, I said under my breath after she’d turned away but loudly enough at least for Lulú to hear. We left anyway. Out on the sidewalk, Lulú was furious. She’s just doing her job, Lulú seethed at me. She doesn’t deserve to be insulted for doing her job, and you have no right to call her a bitch. I defended myself: That’s just a word everyone uses here, it doesn’t mean anything. Not when a man uses it, she said. I only said it under my breath, I said. And I think her refusing to serve you a drink had nothing to do with just doing her job. I don’t care, Lulú said, standing on the sidewalk, her eyes stormy; she looked as if she were about to turn and walk angrily away. I apologized, told her she was right. Of course she was. Lulú said that if I ever spoke with such disrespect to any person who was just doing their job, woman or man, she’d never speak to me again. She said I was no different from the rich white “bros” I was always mocking. That made me angry. I said vehemently: I’m not like them, and you know I’m not. Then don’t act like them, she said. You have to respect people no matter how little money they have or what they work at. I promised never to behave like that again. Finally we were okay, and we went into another bar, where coincidentally the bartender was another white hipster woman with tattoos covering her arms, shoulders and neck, but friendly, and she served us both without any problem.

  I open the Jane Bowles book to where I left off and stare blankly down at the page.

  Of course, like Lexi says, our mother isn’t always in touch with reality these days, I say to myself. And I don’t doubt that she mixes up fantasy and reality. But what explanation could there be for Mamita suddenly having been so into The Teachings of Don Juan other than a mother in love, idolizing her lover’s enthusiasms?

  Whiskey like a glowing potbellied stove inside me, I didn’t feel like getting into bed and trying to sleep, so I put on my coat and went back out to the elevator without even thinking about it. My footsteps carried me over here, to Arlington Street, along the Public Garden. The old Boston Banana Brahmin nahuales are out tonight, up there in the icy branches and treetops, hunched down inside their black feathers against the cold, lifting a claw to take a puff from an ice cigar and blowing smoke out into the drizzling ice-grained snow, if you can call it snow. It ticks and patters off the sidewalk that’s more like a snow-sludged shallow river. Somewhere around here in the Back Bay, on one of these streets, Newbury, Marlborough, Beacon Street, or Commonwealth Avenue, there must have been the gentleman’s club with its old New England WASP clubby décor and feel where the Banana Brahmins went to relax in the evenings, sometimes inviting their pretty young bilingual secretaries along. Hello Mr. Ambassador, hello Mr. Dulles, says Dolores Ojito. How nice to see you again. This is my friend, Yolanda, she’s—Dolores lowers her voice—the secretary of the Guatemalan consul here in Boston. Oh, I certainly do know el señor consul, says CIA chief Mr. Dulles, but please, call me Allen. And how are you enjoying Boston, Yolanda? Very much, Allen, yesterday we went to the Boston Common to feed walnuts to squirrels. Offering her a cigarette, lighting his own, Dulles, lowering his voice like a practiced spy, says through his cheerless grin: Wait until you see what we’re going to do to your country, Yolanda.

  The Latin American Society was here on this block, pretty sure in one of these two adjacent brownstones, but it’s hard to tell at this nearly 2:00 a.m. hour, with every shop, restaurant, and business on the block shut, windows darkened. There’s a realtor’s sign now in the parlor-floor window of one, and next door, in a building that has been renovated so that its front window is almost at sidewalk level, there’s an upscale optometrist and eyeglass shop. As I stand staring into my faint reflection in the somewhat fogged glass of that window, I see transparent hands rising from behind me to place a pair of designer specs over my eyes. They fit perfectly, and in the reflection I look transformed, even my smile looks urbane, intelligent, rakish. Over my shoulder, the transparent optometrist nods approvingly, a flirtatious curl to her smile, and she whispers: These are like the glasses Marcello Mastroianni wore in 8½. They make you look a little bit like him. And I chortle and say, Oh yeah, just a little like Marcello, and that’s when I realize who she is—Carlota Sánchez Motta—and now her eyes widen and her lips part in surprised recognition too. Ay, Carlota, long-lost adoración, of course this is what you turned out to be, a spectral Boston optometrist.

  Lulú likes to say that all the young white dudes in New York look the same to her, that she can’t tell one from the other. That’s pretty funny, Lulú, I tell her, because I bet that’s what they say about you and all the other pelicanitas, and we share a laugh over that. Let it go, man. You promised to let Lulú go. Somewhere around here, too, though on what street I also don’t know, was the more comfortable rooming house for single working women that Bert convinced Mamita to leave Our Lady’s Guild House for.

  Heading down Exeter Street, I look down a public alley running behind businesses and residences and see a door opening. It must be connected to the TGIF on the corner, which probably closed for business about an hour ago, and a man with a short, compact build in kitchen whites comes out, dragging garbage bags that he hoists one at a time into a dumpster. Then he goes back inside without closing the door and comes out again with more garbage bags. This time I get a better look as he passes through the snow-blitzed light radiating through the door: black curly or bushy hair and maybe that’s the long half-isosceles triangle of a male Maya nose. The Witness—if that’s who the restaurant worker in the alley is, or wherever else he might be in the world—is thirty-three now, because it’s been nine years since the night in 1998 that the bishop was murdered. He’s that old if he’s still alive, that is. The prosecutor in Guatemala who has the case now told me over a year ago that he and his assistants had lost all track of the Witness and that the UN refugee commission in Mexico had too. They had to accept the possibility that through their own negligence, General Cara de Culo and Capitán Psycho-Sadist’s assassin, or assassins, had finally tracked the Witness down. The prosecutor said it was also possible that the Witness had crossed the border into the United States, like so many others running for their lives. For once, I’m hoping the prosecutors are hiding the truth, that they’ve moved the Witness to some secret place and are getting ready to launch the next round of arrests and don’t want him talking to a journalist. But I’ve been looking out for him ever since I moved back to New York anyway. Whenever I see but don’t really get a good look at any man who could be Central American, who has that same build and thick curly hair as the Witness, a kitchen worker, a guy selling flowers in the stall affixed to a Korean deli, that kid
pushing a peanut cart up ahead of me in Central Park who when I caught up to him turned out to be Chilean—I bought a bag of peanuts—or even that man I saw walking along Lower Broadway in a too-long, black winter coat and carrying a briefcase who, despite eyeglasses, clearly possessed those features until I drew even on the sidewalk and saw that he didn’t, every time I see someone like that I get excited and think that maybe he’s the Witness.

  It was the Witness’s testimony that led to the conviction of the three military men including Capitán Psycho-Sadist and trained suspicion on Cara de Culo. Later he became a refugee in Mexico because no other country would grant him asylum. That was because the Witness, testifying, had had to admit to having a role, however minor, in the crime, and then to have kept secret what he knew until finally, three years later, when the case was going to trial, he didn’t. It was his confessed complicity, not just his being a poor indio who’d lived on the streets, that made him ineligible for asylum in the United States or Canada or Sweden or anywhere else. He was a homeless ex-soldier living in the park outside the bishop’s church, supporting himself washing parked cars, when he was first informally hired by army intelligence operatives to spy on the bishop, and he was outside the church on the Sunday night when Monseñor pulled his car into the parish house garage and was beaten to death. According to what the Witness was willing to declare at the trial, he was ordered by Capitán Psycho-Sadist and another soldier, the sergeant, who arrived on the scene in a black Cherokee presumably minutes after the murder, to alter the crime scene, to drag the bishop’s heavy corpse by the wrists for a few feet, painting a wide streak of blood with his jean-clad buttocks on the cement floor, to crumple newspapers and spread them around to make it look as if there’d been a wild struggle, and to toss a sweater into a corner of the garage so that it would look as if someone in the heat of homosexual passion had pulled it off and left it behind. And then the Witness had carried in the chunk of jagged concrete and put it down on the blood-swampy floor, which allowed the first complicit prosecutor to claim that the concrete chunk was the murder weapon used in that crime of passion, rather than the steel pipes and brass knuckles that were more likely used by the killers, who afterward fled through rear exits of the church. Capitán Psycho-Sadist and the sergeant were careful to not leave behind any traces of their own presence; it would be the Witness who left a bloody sneaker print, the light brush of a bloody fingertip against a wall. But the Witness knew he only had to obey, follow orders, keep quiet, for that evidence to be ignored, and he understood what would happen if he disobeyed. He understood why murder cases like this one never had witnesses. After his army service, he’d taken a course to enter Military Intelligence, which in the end he’d flunked. But he did learn there about how the unit known as El Archivo sent its white vans out to abduct people off the streets, and he’d been taken with some other students to see, in a secret dungeon-like wing of the same military base where the intelligence course was held, the deep pits filled with rats, mud, and feces in which some of those abducted prisoners were kept. The Witness was terrified of ending up like one of those prisoners.

  I wouldn’t be standing here right now in Boston staring down this alley and wondering if that restaurant worker is the Witness if it hadn’t been for the Witness in the first place. He’s incredibly important in my life, though I’ve spent no more than a few hours talking to him. Maybe nobody still alive, assuming he’s still alive, has had a more direct influence on how my life has turned out, recently at least. The prosecutor who’d won the convictions at the trial had had to flee with his family into exile, to a secret destination. But the prosecutor who inherited the case gave me the Witness’s address because I lived in Mexico City, where the Witness was then in hiding; there were questions the prosecutor and his assistants wanted me to ask on their behalf. This was about two years ago.

  We spoke in his small, windowless room in a boardinghouse for prostitutes across the street from the taco stand he worked at, a street like a forgotten neorealist film set where the same prostitutes had been standing night and day in the same doorways and on the same sidewalks for years, while the miserly trees along the curb held out the same few leaves glowing yellow green in the sun. In his halting but dogged voice, so familiar from his testimony at the trial and the videotapes of it I’d obsessively watched afterward, the Witness said, To them, I was expendable and as easy to dispose of as trash, but we all are to them, every one of us. (Me too, then, and Zoila, expendable as trash.) During a pretrial evidentiary hearing, Capitán Psycho-Sadist had managed to get close enough to the Witness to vow in a whisper that no matter what happened at the trial or wherever the Witness ended up, they would never stop looking for him. The Witness lived his life between his depressing little room and the taco stand. Even for a taquero, he seemed a little incongruous, short and foreign, a mouth full of broken teeth, with a furtive yet self-possessed, even decorous air. People on the block had seen the heavyset men in loose-fitting dark suits, Guatemalan prosecutors who’d arrived with him when he first moved in across the street from the taco stand and who, during that first year or so especially, occasionally came by to check up on him. Those neighbors kept an eye out on his behalf and knew never to answer questions from strangers such as the one who turned up one morning at the newsstand at the end of that block inquiring about a curly-haired chaparrito guatemalteco and speaking in an accent that wasn’t Mexican, that sounded more like the mysterious taquero’s. But it was the kind of neighborhood where nobody would ever give answers to any stranger who came around with those kinds of questions about anybody. After that, the Witness didn’t leave his room for a few days. He was alone in this life, a poor indigenous man with warty hands who boasted to me that he’d been taught how to use those hands for strangling people during the military intelligence course he’d failed, and who almost never had a night of sleep that wasn’t disturbed by nightmares and insomniac terrors. The problem of staying alive consumed him.

  The Witness told me in his careful, slowly enunciated manner: They considered me somebody of no importance, disposable as trash, a homeless indio without worth as a human. Yes, I was poor, he said, but I was never a dirty vagrant like they said. I took care of myself. I washed myself and my clothes in the park fountain and bought new clothes and sneakers when I needed to. I deserved as much respect as a human being as any one of them. That was why he’d become a witness, I understood, to affirm that point. As a result, he’d had to come to another country to live alone in the shadows. He didn’t regret any of it. He told me he’d do it again. What he’d won for himself by becoming a witness they could never take away. On his block, there were a very few people, including the taco stand’s owner, who knew just a little more than the others about why he was in danger. But whenever the Witness went off that block into surrounding ones, people saw only an anonymous indigenous man. Even on his block, nobody really understood that the diminutive, quiet, boyish-looking taquero had altered the course of many lives and had even changed and made history, because his country’s first-ever courtroom convictions of military officers for an extrajudicial execution, one conviction among a possibly unknowable number of such executions, could never have happened without his testimony. If it hadn’t been for the Witness, those military men would never even have been arrested. I wouldn’t have published my book on the case. I would never have fled Mexico City to come back to New York. I never would have volunteered at the Bushwick learning sanctuary and met Lulú. María Xum wouldn’t have heard me on the radio. I wouldn’t be out walking in the Back Bay at this hour with an arrowhead in my pocket, in these streets full of emanations in the cold dark. Take the Witness out of my life, and who am I? It’s like the Witness is my spirit guide, my soul’s humble but heroic companion. But is my life fully my own if its course could be so altered by the Witness? Well, I could have not written the book.

  Just before going back inside and closing the door, the kitchen worker looks back at me standing in the mouth
of the alley, and no, his face is too narrow.

  Standing on this corner under a streetlamp, I take out the arrowhead, feel the snow like icy sand pelting my palm around it. A brother is missing, not this arrowhead. Can’t really deny it. Somewhere I once read about Wampanoag walking along old Newbury Street, coming in from the forests to sell huge wild turkeys to the Puritan colonists for hardly more than nothing. A dun light cast by the streetlamps and the weather fill Marlborough Street, through which the rows of facing residential Victorian brownstones on both sides of the street stand dimly outlined and sketched as if with charcoal chalk, black bay windows like black rockface protruding through the wintry murk. Walking down the street, without even any lights on in these brownstones I’m passing, I think that this can’t look much different than it did when Henry James walked down it. And that’s when I see, ahead and high up through the dark, the only lamp-illuminated window on the block and inside that window a geometric shape of a cerulean blue, part of a rectangle, a standing screen, a jutting wall, or maybe a portion of a large painting hanging on that wall. The same cerulean or blue-green silk background of John Singer Sargent’s famous portrait of Lady Agnew of Lochnaw. Herb Felman kept a magazine reproduction of that portrait taped to the top corner of his easel when he was painting his portrait of Mamita, in which he made the backdrop an impressionistic version of the one in the Lady Agnew. Lexi has the original, so that one up there is the copy Herb made for himself, still hanging in his old painting studio. When he went to live in Morocco, Herb left the brownstone house to be looked after by his sister’s daughter, Beth, a pretty girl my own age with sunken dark eyes who came with Herb, my father, and me to the Garden for a Celtics game one winter Sunday afternoon and to Durgin-Park for dinner after. I remember how worshipful Beth was toward Herb, a war hero and a successful Boston society portrait painter in the not-yet-extinguished Sargent tradition. Haven’t really thought much about Beth in ages. This was in about sixth grade, when I was still an emaciated simian boy. She wrote me a letter, but all I remember about it was how polished and sophisticated it seemed and for a while I kept the letter under my pillow. Beth lived with her family above her father’s bakery in Quincy. I must have written back, but I don’t recall what. Twelve sittings in all, three a week, I remember Mamita telling me, before Herb finished the portrait. To get to Herb’s studio, she took the subway. The weather during any of those sittings could have been the same as tonight, icy snow lightly scratching at the window. Mamita is the same age, twenty-six, that Lady Agnew was when she sat for Sargent.