Monkey Boy by Francisco Goldman (best self help books to read .TXT) 📕

birthday coming up, and I’d promised to take her from Spain to Fez, Morocco. It was her dream to go there. She was fixated on the notion that she should get to ride on a camel on her birthday, and I’d promised her that too. She lightly lifted my passport out of my hands, opened it, her eyes intensely focusing on what she was reading there for a few seconds. She handed it back and said, Enjoy your trip to Spain, lying pinche cabrón, but if you come back without my suitcase, te la voy hacer de jamón. I’d never heard that phrase before, which I mistranslated as a threat to make me into a ham. I followed her out to the sidewalk near the taxis. We lit cigarettes. She smoked Faros, of course she did, carried them in an antique silver case. I smoked whatever, several in succession, shaking fingers shoving them into my lips. What are you talking about, what lie? She told me, and I was flooded with shame. That lie. When I’d asked her out to dinner by telling her it was my fortieth birthday, it was really my forty-first. I’d said forty, I confessed, because I’d thought that if I told her I was turning forty-one that wouldn’t have seemed a special enough occasion to get her to come out to dinner. Hadn’t we made up that night? If I hadn’t told that lie, would we be here now, at the airport, about to fly to Spain and Morocco? So long as we hurried back to airport security instead of arguing out on the sidewalk, we could still catch our plane. Hijo de la chingada, don’t try to blackmail me. Martí called lies the despicable siblings of guilt, but what was I guilty of besides lying? Of stupidity, callow character, of not understanding that a silly lie wasn’t just a silly lie. Sure, it wasn’t like I’d tried to pass myself off as thirty, it hadn’t been that kind of lie, but what did that absolve me of? I swear, I pleaded, I’ll never lie to you again. We did manage to make our flight. And then throughout every day and night in Spain, she punished me. Anything that came out of my mouth was to be doubted, was worthless, because I was a liar. Even now, remembering it as I pace around in this hotel room, I feel sadness and regret weighing me down. You could argue that I ended up wasting a decade of my life because of that lie, unable to relinquish what I’d fatally ruined. We had almost three weeks before our return flight to Mexico. I’d told her it was going to be just a few days of publicity in Madrid, but I’d misunderstood or else nobody had remembered to tell me that the cultural section of the US embassy had decided to help sponsor my tour, sending me to Barcelona, Zaragoza, Bilbao, Toledo, Sevilla, press, bookstores, universities, even a high school. Gisela fought with me the whole way, was always going off to sulk, to wander the streets and have meals on her own. The book events she came to she walked out in the middle of. Later, back in Madrid, I learned from a Mexican writer friend who was living there that the chic Spanish publicist who’d accompanied us had begged the publisher to never publish me again. By the end of the tour and a couple of days resting up and exploring Madrid, we only had a week left for Morocco. I’d promised two weeks, another lie. But still, we did get to go. I was carrying all our luggage, several yards behind her, through the Algeciras ferry port when a Spanish policeman stopped her, gestured back at me and warned that a moro was following her. That kind of thing has always happened to me in Spain. That’s not a moro, Gisela answered the ferry port cop, that’s my boyfriend. She was sure that was the funniest sentence she’d spoken in her life: not a moro, my boyfriend, jajaja, it cheered her up. Thanks to that racist ferry port cop, we crossed the Mediterranean to Africa in a pretty good mood.

I can’t believe what I just heard, here in this public radio station green room, listening to the piped-in interview with the guest who’s gone on before me, a Buddhist monk who wrote a book called Mindful Loving about how to cultivate your ability to love through mindful living, meditation, yoga, healthy eating, don’t you know bananas are a virility super food? Eat your banana, son! Then I heard the monk say, If our parents didn’t love each other, if they didn’t understand or care about each other or try to make each other feel loved, then how are we, their children, supposed to know what love is or looks like?

Really, what a coincidence. I, too, never once in my life saw my parents kiss, never saw one lightly caress the other in a loving or even passingly sensuous way. Radio interviewers never ask me to talk about such subjects; I wonder how that would go if they ever did. Welcome back to Hodgepodge Afternoon Radio. Our guest this afternoon is Francisco Goldberg, here to talk with us about his Guatemalan immigrant mother and some of the challenges she faced, devoutly Catholic herself yet married to a Jewish man and raising a family here in the Boston area. Sure, Hodge, like I was saying before the break, my mother grew up in a country with a strong German Nazi presence. No other country in the Western Hemisphere was so infested. Once I was shown an archival copy of a US intelligence map from the late 1930s that counted the number of coffee plantations, or fincas, owned by German Nazis in Guatemala, each finca marked with a tiny black swastika, so many swastikas that the central portion of that map, all the way up to Mexico,