Monkey Boy Francisco Goldman (best ereader for students .txt) 📖

posing with his adolescent daughter, Abuelita. With his wrinkled dark suit, dusty shoes, thick double-buckle belt, splendid white mane, self-assured posture, and hard-ass expression, though I sense an underlying sadness, too, he did look like a ruthless cattle rustler who became a prosperous, no less ruthless rancher and mayor. But no way was he a Spaniard.

Now I take the photograph out of my backpack, pull it from its envelope, and lay it down atop the Scrabble board for my mother to see. I tell her about the letter from her distant relative, Sandra Hernández, a professor at San Carlos. Your abuela’s name was Francisca, I say, but everyone called her Panchita. Panchita had African ancestry, I say lightly. She was black.

My mother giggles and clucks her tongue, says, Ay Frankie, that’s not true.

But your abuelito looks like an intimidating rascal, I cheerfully press on. Doesn’t he? Ma, really, what an impressive-looking man. You should be proud. I can’t help adding: But he sure wasn’t a Spaniard.

My mother stares down at the photograph, white scalp showing through her orangey curls. This is too much for her to process now. All those years that my mother stood over the sink straightening her hair and dyeing it from orange to black, was she fully aware of what she was hiding and why? Did my father even know, suspect, or have any opinion about it?

Though my abuelos aren’t here to explain themselves, it seems obvious they made their own mothers disappear in order to protect their children from knowing the truth about their own forebears and from the social repercussions of others finding out. In the case of great-grandma Panchita, at least, it was racial shame.

Abuelita looks so lovely, I say. Doesn’t she? Isn’t it wonderful to have this photo of Abuelita when she was so young?

A slight smile forms on my mother’s lips, and her expression is rheumy-dreamy. My heart clenches. Mamita so loved her mother. I put the photograph away. It’s not as if some major injustice has been righted, not even the injustice committed inside one family. But I’m glad to have this photograph. I’m happy to have found out that my great-grandfather Luis Hernández looked like such a Don Cabrón and that he wasn’t a Spaniard. I’m even happier to have an idea of who my great-grandmother was. I love that she was named Panchita. If I ever have a daughter, I’ll name her Panchita.

Yolandita was an angel, exclaims Mamita. She was like a little doll! I told her I’m seeing Feli tomorrow, and she started going on about Yolandita like she always does whenever I mention Feli. She holds her hands out imploringly and says, Did you know that two days after Yolandita passed away, her husband, Richard, went jogging and had a heart attack and died? Frankie, he died of a broken heart.

My mother’s feelings toward Feli are more complicated than her feelings toward Yolandita, deeper, harder for her to express. Feli’s second marriage has been happy and solid, and she has raised daughters who went to university and have their own careers, both married to successful husbands too. Feli studied the stock market and made smart investments with her husband’s earnings. She is also a straight talker whose directness at times must have offended my mother or punctured illusions.

I’m going to see María Xum, too, I tell my mother. Remember María Xum, Mamita? She barely spoke Spanish when she came to live with us. K’iche’ or Kaqchikel or one of those was her first language, remember? My mother seems to be trying to recall María Xum but not succeeding. Remember that time you caught María eating a stick of butter with a knife and fork in the middle of the night? I ask. You had to explain to her that it wasn’t that kind of food.

My mother is staring down at the Scrabble board, and with what seems a slightly effortful lifting of her hands, she plucks up two tiles and pushes them into place beneath the m in MUSA.

M

U

X

Mux, I say. Qué bueno, Ma. Xum backward. Or is that a Maya word?

My mother looks back at me. She even looks a little guilty, and I have to squeeze the muscles inside my cheeks not to laugh.

Soon after the coup, but before my mother met my father, Dolores Ojito’s parents sailed with friends on a yacht from Izabál and the Río Dulce to Miami, from where they were going to fly to Boston to visit her. But the yacht disappeared in a storm, no survivors. Lolita changed overnight, said Mamita that time when she first told me the story. She retreated into her relationship with a Boston College grad student in philosophy and within months they were married. He became a professor and later an administrator at the college. Though Dolores used to occasionally come to events at the Latin American Society of New England, it’s been years since my mother last saw or heard from her.

Maybe the Guatemalan consul in Boston was replaced by a new consul after the coup, and maybe Mamita was replaced, too, or else decided to leave on her own. But her next job was as a bilingual secretary at the Potashnik Tooth Company, and the way she always told the story of how she met my father is that she was habitually late for work, something the consul must have tolerated but that her new boss didn’t. The day she was fired, Bert Goldberg, head of Potashnik’s artificial teeth lab, found her weeping by a drinking fountain in a corridor and asked her to dinner. Despite his unglamorous-sounding job and his being almost twenty years older, he was an athletic bachelor about town with colorful friends: rakish sportswriters, crusty gamblers, wisecracking World War II veterans from his boyhood Dorchester neighborhood, including one who was now a Boston portrait painter, even a blind coin collector. In his forties, Bert Goldberg, playing for the University Club, had been state