Monkey Boy. Francisco Goldman

open the Muriel Spark novel to the first page: “Long ago in 1945 all the nice people in England were poor, allowing for exceptions.”

      Yesterday evening I thought it was already over with Lulú López. Even though we’ve only gone out a few times, it’s the closest I’ve come to any kind of romantic relationship in five years, since things ended once and for all with Gisela. But then last night Lulú sent that maybe-it’s-not-over text message: Hurry back, we’ll ride bicycles, etcetera. I can’t pretend I don’t care what happens between us, but I do try to keep up a fatalistic interiority. But I’m excited about this trip to Boston, in fact, I’ve started out a day earlier than originally planned just so I can meet Marianne Lucas for dinner tonight in the South End. When she wrote to me out of the blue a couple of weeks ago on Facebook, we hadn’t spoken, or had any kind of communication since tenth grade, thirty-four years ago. She’s a family and divorce lawyer now and divorced herself. In one of her FB messages, Marianne wrote that she’d decided to try to contact me after hearing me on NPR. I was talking about José Martí and his years living in New York City, the focus of the novel I’ve just finished, which is not a strictly biographical novel. The House of Pain I’m calling it. No argument from me that it might make a suitable title for the biographies of so many of us out here on the sidewalk this morning coming out of and headed down into Penn Station, who’ve also spent consequential time in a house of pain. It’s not a title anyone would ever use for an actual biography of José Martí, those always have to evoke heroism, martyrdom, literary and political genius, or strike the “Yo soy un hombre sincero” chord. But The House of Pain is a perfect title for my novel, the major part of which takes place inside a boardinghouse during a couple of the sixteen years Martí lived in New York City, back when he was a poor immigrant exile, tirelessly hustling freelance journalist, translator, private Spanish tutor, poet, and revolution plotter, all this over a decade before he finally found his martyr’s death on his one-man, one-horse charge against Spanish troops on a beach in Cuba. I handed the novel in to my publisher just before I left for Argentina. It’s only 182 double-spaced pages long, but it took five years to write. It required a lot of research, I even went to Havana and spent a few weeks in archives there. I needed to learn every­thing I possibly could about Martí in order to identify the gaps where there was no historical or written record, and let my imagination go to work inside those. One draft was 500 pages long. That was followed by another of 278 pages that I handed in, but it was a botch. My editor, Teresa Fijalkowski, was hard on it; that is, while she was fine with latter parts of it, she stuck it to me about the first third. So many voices and who’s talking and whose thoughts? Look, Teresa, it’s simple, I explained. The narrative spine of that opening section is Martí on a long walk through the city streets to his boardinghouse, where his wife, small son, and the boardinghouse owner’s wife, secretly pregnant with Martí’s child, are all waiting for him to come home. He’s trying to work out in his thoughts how everything in his life has gotten so completely fucked up, and inside his head he’s talking to his wife and to his lover and to other people, and he’s even trying to imagine what they’re saying about him. All of that trails after Martí on his walk back to the boardinghouse like clouds of consciousness that settle onto the page as if into wet cement as fragments of narrative and story. Teresa cracked a half smile, gave me one of her steady ice-cave stares, and finally, with perfect dry comedy, cracked: The dubious gift of consciousness, now I get what Blanchot meant. I said, And it’s just my luck to have the only book editor in New York with a PhD from Oxford in critical theory. I wrote my thesis on Auden, said Teresa. But of course we read theory, so what? Frank, there’s a lot of turmoil, a lot of pain in that boardinghouse, I get that, said Teresa. But I’d like to sense how they’re experiencing it, one character at a time, right from the start. Martí was a hyperconsciousness, I argued, so voluble he was nicknamed Dr. Torrente, and he had more going on in his brain, in his life, than maybe anyone else living in New York City at that time. I spent another relatively monkish year in Mexico City working on the novel. I needed to fasten my prose not only to Martí’s heartbreak and torment but also to his wife’s, her life obscured by over a century of blame. You think Yoko Ono had it bad, imagine having Fidelista Communists and Miami Cuban right-wing fanatics all blaming you for the Cuban Apostle’s failed marriage, separation from his son, and years of complicated private torment. It’s my lost skinny ugly beautiful book that lived with me through my own most trying years and finally found its way home, my best book, The House of Pain. In about nine months maybe it will be displayed over there in the train station bookstore, facing out on the new-books table, ideally positioned between Zaro’s bagels and the men’s room. Maybe someone will buy it to read on a morning train to Boston a year or so from now, and I’ll be taking that train again, and for the first time in my life I’ll get to see someone reading a book of mine in public.

      Call it Pain Station, too, I think, having just taken my Louis Kahn memorial pee at one of the urinals in here, can’t think of a bleaker place to die of a heart attack like the great architect did than this always-stinking filthy men’s room. I always picture his final collapse onto the floor like Nude Descending a Staircase, a paroxysmal grandeur but with a short, elderly Jewish man clutching his chest and falling, white shirt stained with airline salad dressing and coffee dribbles—he’d flown into JFK and come to the station to catch a train—his final breaths witnessed by drug addicts and the homeless psychotics who’d be in federal or state mental hospitals instead of sheltering in train station bathrooms if such hospitals still existed. Kahn was on his way home to Philadelphia from Bangladesh, where he’d just built his masterpiece, the Bangladeshi capital’s National Assembly Building, ancient sacred monumental grandeur reformulated into rigorous vanguard modernist design. After creating one of the most beautiful, spiritually stirring public spaces of modern times, Kahn came home to die in one of the ugliest and most demoralizing.

      Here in Pain Station, passengers wait to board their trains in a grimy plastic-and-linoleum arena enclosed by numbered east and west gates while heavily armed soldiers in camouflaged combat fatigues and bulletproof vests stand guard or patrol the floor, bomb-sniffing dogs, too, all of us jammed together as if into a ravine. As our train’s scheduled departure time approaches, if we’re Pain Station veterans who know how it works, our eyes fix on the clacking departure board, waiting for our gate to be posted, white numerals and letters, 7W, 11E, 13E, west on the left side, east on the right. Because these are posted several crucial seconds before they’re announced over the station speakers, clued-in passengers get the jump and surge toward that gate; when it’s obvious the train is going to be crowded, it’s a stampede. There: 9W! In this split second my eyes drop from the departure board to the back of the hand that my mole is on and I start moving. In my dyslexia I rely on this mole to tell me which way is left. Trapped inside that instant of panic—turn left!—I only have to look for the directional mole in the dead center of the back of my left hand to know which way to go. That Francisco can’t tell his left from his right; oh, but he can, thanks to his directional mole.

      “The 8:05 Northeastern Regional Amtrak train to Boston is now ready for boarding, please proceed to gate 9W and have your tickets out.” But I’m already at the gate, near the front of the line.

      Coming off the escalator I walk quickly ahead, passing passengers proceeding single file alongside the train, clackclackclinkclacking all the way to the next to forwardmost train car. This cold March morning is probably not going to be a heavy travel day. Should have a seat to myself all the way to Boston.

      So Marianne wrote to me because she heard me talking about Martí on the radio. But why, really? When I discovered her message on the computer screen, my first reaction was that it couldn’t really be from that Marianne or that it must be a hoax. Then I felt like I’d been waiting for a message from her practically forever. But we were only close for a few months back when we were fifteen. “It’s funny,” she wrote in her message, “what survives for more than thirty years.” So what survives? She didn’t say. What about those few months could still matter to her? Maybe I’m making too big a deal out of it, and this, my excited curiosity, is just phantom-limb nostalgia for the reciprocated first adolescent love I never experienced. Does Marianne still recognize herself in that long-ago girl, and does she think I am still anything like that boy? Sometimes I wonder if it would have made a difference in my life, to have had a high school love. Back in tenth grade, it was Ian Brown who provoked our not even speaking anymore. It was