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

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