Lizard-Monkeys and Other Stories

Lizard-Monkeys and Other Stories

Roxanna Piedrafuette

Roxanna Piedrafuette

C.M. López International

Copyright © 2019 by Carmen M. López.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, email the author at the address below.

Roxanna Piedrafuette/C. M. López

roxannapiedrafuette@gmail.com

www.rantinella.com

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental. Historical and scientific data is provided for informational purposes only, and should be subjected to verification by recognized authoritative sources if citing.

Cover photos: Moon photo, PIA00405.jpg, courtesy of NASA.

All other photos by Dr. Carmen M. López

Cover design by Dr. Carmen M. López

Book Layout ©2017 BookDesignTemplates.com

Lizard-Monkeys and Other Stories/ Roxanna Piedrafuette.—1st ed. ebook

ISBN 978-1-386-89461-2

To my family on both sides of the Atlantic, and to the home of my heart: the green, fun, dystopian-yet-enchanting island of Puerto Rico.

What my beta-readers are saying:

It is like visiting the island. I am fan of the radio show [Flying Saucers over Puerto Rico], Jacobo and his guests are fantastic.

―N. BARTH, FRANCE

Reading these stories makes me crave to go to Puerto Rico.

―A. MAZZONI, ITALY

These stories are so funny! [Roxanna Piedrafuette's] love for her country jumps out of every page. [Ulla and Salman] is a modern fairy tale with a taste of The Arabian Nights.

―P. KUBIAK, FRANCE

A world of images of the Puerto Rico that was, invades you and invites you to remember.

―N. MARTÍNEZ, PUERTO RICO

Contents

Introduction

Lizard-Monkeys

Ismael from Caguas

Ulla and Salman

Mosquito Hunter

Adela's Walk

Christmas of the Chupacabras

I Wanna be Famous

There's no Perfect Man

First Kiss

Flying Saucers over Puerto Rico

Moon Born

Glossary

Introduction

Ispent many years overcoming obstacles and pushing myself to do hard things because, among other reasons, people told me that I couldn't do them. Ever since I was a little girl, I had been told many well-meaning, but limiting and misguided things. I was told that poor people had to be conforme , content with whatever they could get; that one should finish high school and get a job but one couldn't aspire to a college education. I was told that women's higher call in life was to make children and raise a family. And as an adult, I was told that I had a reputation for being different and wanting to do things my own way. —I laughed at that one; isn't that the very definition of a creative?— As the years passed and I struggled, experience taught me that what I was told was the conventional, the accepted way of living, and if I yielded to it, I would have a reasonably safe space, but if I tried to be myself people would not let me be. When I tried to be conventional; however, it was as if I was killing the essence of what made me the person that I was. I failed miserably, not only in trying to live like I was expected to, but also in trying to negotiate a middle way to follow my dreams. What was I to do?

This is it what most people that know me personally get absolutely wrong; some would say that I decided to turn my life around, completed my education—I currently hold a doctorare in chemistry— and sailed in triumph to do all the things that I have done so far, the latest of which is this book. But it is more complicated than that. The only thing that I can say that makes any sense is that I took time to re-evaluate my failures, and when people slammed doors in my face, I persisted in trying to look for the doors that other people were holding open. Lizard-Monkeys and Other Stories is my latest effort at persisting over negative outcomes imposed on my scientific career by various forms of sexist, racist, and cliquish discrimination. However, this little book is not a tome of complaints but a treatise on acceptance, celebration, and on the exuberant enjoyment of life.

This is one of the books of my heart, I have at least three of those lodged in my consciousness; together with the fifteen others which are simply amusing, they are waiting impatiently to be made manifest in the world. When I started to write this one, people would ask me what is this book about and I had a hard time answering. This book is not about one topic or a series of easily definable topics. If I have to give a reasonable answer to a big question, I would say that this book touches on three things: joy, love, and growth. It is also about forgiveness, about the past and the future, and about the choices that we all have to make, when we fall, in order to redeem ourselves.

I have always loved books, and I have always turned to books to find the answers that I couldn't find so easily in my environment. Whenever I felt tired and sad, one of the things that I loved the most was to loose myself in a story. But lately, the stories that I am finding are discouraging; they portray so much senseless suffering and violence, often against the most vulnerable people, and often in such excruciating detail that they made me want to curl-up into a ball and hide from the hateful world. I don't believe that the world is intrinsically hateful, or at least not completely so. It has other things, the things that make life worth living. Nothing is purely binary in reality except binary code, of course, and books have infinite space for all kinds of tales, but it seems to me that nowadays we vie to eliminate nuanced accounts in favor of easy, oversimplified answers that tend to exclude most of what is lovable and beautiful about being human. So I decided to write the stories that I wanted to read, and to prove that you don't have to glorify violence and despair to make an entertaining narrative.

My stories contain characters that are Puerto Rican, or the action takes place in Puerto Rico; I am Puerto Rican and I grew up in Puerto Rico, what else should I write about? But I have also lived, as my author bio says, in six different countries. Living abroad had given me a deep desire of writing for a broad, global audience, of investigating the meaning of cultural identity through story telling, because an honest story can be a telescope to observe distant worlds as well as a journey of self-discovery. When I meet new people, they ask me about my homeland, about my nationality, about my language and culture. Most of them had never met anybody like me before. Some are suspicious of my foreignness, but the vast majority are open, and friendly, and eager to learn more. To my global readers, please, take this book as an invitation to that small part of my culture that I can wrap in such short pages; I hope it makes you happy enough to come back for more.

Because this work contains a strong cultural flavor as reflected through language, I have included many pieces of Spanish in the English text. However, I really, really, want a broader audience to understand the short stories, so I have made a strong effort to embed the meaning of these pieces in the text, often repeating them in English right after the Spanish version, or enriching the context and the dialogue so people can understand the action without the need to look words up. I have also included a glossary at the end of the book, containing the definition of those expressions and terms that are more important for understanding the stories, that are typically Puerto Rican in usage, and which often cannot be translated literally to be understood.

I would like to acknowledge a bunch of generous people who helped me get through this project: my awesome husband and my cat who kept me sane, my proof readers Dr. Pierre Kubiak, Dr. Nicolas Barth, and Dr. Annamaria Mazzoni. My grateful recognition goes also to Mustrum Augustin Picamore, with whom I collaborated in the story Mosquito Hunter. Additionally, I want to thank: Carly-Jane Figgis, Ifath Sayed and the Doha Heat Podcast, and all the Beta-readers who visited my blog and offered their feedback, especially, Lic. Psic. Neftalí Martínez Rivera, Héctor L. López Andino, and Ireisa López Figueroa.

Roxanna Piedrafuette

February 2019

Lizard-Monkeys

Iwas eleven years old the first time I did laundry by myself; it was a Saturday morning at the end of May and the air was full of children's voices and neighborhood's sounds. The tropical summer had started for us with the last day of the spring semester and we children were wild with raucous freedom. We ran everywhere: we climbed over fallen logs, debris, fences, chicken coops, trees, and up the ladder into my grandmother's roof from where we terrorized the housewives in our side of the barrio. We got into fights, we made up and went to jump into the soft mud at the bottom of the ravine from which we crawled-out covered in grime and ravenous from all the jumping.

I told stories about space travel or about the jungles of Borneo to my cousins, as we descended upon and proceeded to raid the fruit trees in my aunt's garden. I hung upside down from the high branches of the guava bush; with seashells, I built the outlines of imaginary cities and farmland for my collection of plastic animals. When the afternoons were too quiet, I sang in my room; love songs the meaning of which I did not understand very well and would not really get until many, many years had passed. I guess that's why my mom decided I was old enough to do something useful.

We didn't have a laundry room in our house; laundry was always done outdoors, in a big wringer washing machine that looked like a metal tub con patas and made a noise like a distressed mechanical creature. There were no electrical outlets nearby; the closest one was in my brother's bedroom. We had to run an extension cable from the machine, about twelve feet away from the back of the house, and pass it through a half-opened window to be able to plug it in the only outlet in Papo's room. When it rained, my mother unplugged the machine and covered it with a plastic tarp; when it was time to do laundry again, she swiped dead leaves and detritus from the tarp and took it off. We filled the washer with a garden hose and when we were done, we emptied it on a trench that spilled into the nearby ravine.

Mami and I had started a load of clothes earlier that morning. As it swiped side to side with the motion of the washer's blades, I lost myself on it without a clear sense of the passage of time. I don't know if I thought of anything in particular, but I remember distinctly a creamy, yellow sun that was warm on my neck, a breeze that lifted the smell of laundry detergent from the washer's bowl and spread it around me like a ribbon of scent.

Lita!, I heard mami scream, "¿Estás sorda?" My mother's voice sounded frustrated; she might have already called me two or three times. I turned towards her, she was standing at the backdoor of the house with her arms full of dirty clothes.

At that time, mami wore her brown hair short; straight and wispy, it almost disappeared into the scrunchy that she used to keep it out of her face. She had on a cotton dress of a faded yellow hue with a pattern of tiny flowers; una bata. On her feet, she wore a pair of leather sandals that had obviously seen better times.—Mami her name? No, her name is Carmen, but everybody, including my dad, calls her Carmela. Some people call her doña, we call her mami, mom.

Here, take these, she said, handing me a bundle of clothes. I extended my hands up; for less than a second, we were—she bending down, I reaching up—negative images of each other.

Maybe I was a strange girl, but I always wanted to look like my mom. In some ways I did. Her brown eyes, her eyebrows, the general plan of her face, we share all of that. But we are not alike in the things that people notice first. She is brown as burnt caramel; I, pale and pink. My hair, curly; hers, flat. Her nose, straight, proud; mine round and broad in way that sometimes makes me feel ashamed.—I didn't appreciate it back then, but she always had a sort of indestructible and fantastic figure; I would have been grateful for that too, specially since mine has always tended towards pudginess.

Mami handed me a pile of clothes that was almost too big for my arms, I hardly managed to carry it to the washing machine. She climbed down and walked behind me picking up the fallen items of clothing that I hadn't be able to hold onto through the short walk.

I put the bundle of clothes on top of the plastic tarp. My mom switched off the machine and then we fished the clean clothes out of it, one by one, without discarding the used water.

"Todavía está limpia," she said. The water was clean enough to be used for the next load.

And probably the next two also; my mom didn't believe in waste and to her, wasting water was a particularly shameful sin. That was something that I couldn't understand; back then I thought that water was free.—Actually, I used to think that everything in our house was free except candy, chips, and soda, which were always in short supply and always reserved for visits and special occasions. I had, neither, any notion about paying for utilities or the cost of living nor of any of the other pesky things that constantly worried my parents and made them prone to bickering.

Here, mami said and fished out a t-shirt, put it through the wringer.

I did as I was told.

Be careful with your hands, she said when I let my fingers stray too close to the wringer's maw.

I obeyed her but just barely; those beige roll-pins were even more interesting than all the other parts of the washer. What was it about the wringer that I found so fascinating? I don't know. Perhaps it was because it reminded me of eating sugar cane, of mashing the fibrous stalks with my teeth and sucking the sweet juice before spitting out the chaff, el bagazo. Or because it was witnessing while I spent all this quiet time with my mom.

We worked together for a few minutes; she pulled wet pieces of clothing from the machine, wrung them by hand, and passed them to me so I could give them a more thorough squeeze through the wringer. The used suds felled back in the washer's bowl. Water was everywhere. She sang.

MY FAVORITE PART OF growing up in paradise? Uh, the beach. No. The garden. Nowadays it is the domain of my dad, back then, it was the kingdom of children.

We had all kinds of fruit trees and plants in our garden: mango, orange, guava, banana, acerola shrubs, and even some sugar cane; my favorite, was the big mango tree on the front of the house.

Have you ever climbed a truly old mango tree? Nothing to do with those puny greenhouse hybrids that people keep—stunted—in orchards or in sub-divisions. A real mango tree is a big tree, a strong tree, generous, solid; for us children, ours was good for everything and anything. Excellent as a tree house with invisible rooms wide open to the wind, even better as an airplane. Or maybe, Tarzan's house in the jungle, with all of us jumping from branch to branch like monkeys or scurrying down its trunk wriggling like so many lagartijos.

My favorite game was the airplane. We climbed the tree together and whoever got to the top branch first was the captain. Boy or girl, it didn't matter, the captain was always the one child, the lizard-monkey more agile and determined than the others. Whoever hung in the lower branches had to be the flight attendant, and if it was a boy, we made merciless fun of him. For a while I was the undisputed champion of that game, not once did I sit on a low branch. My girl cousins made a point of losing often; at that time, only women were flight attendants and they were always glamorous with their tiny, pert hats, and their pencil skirts and makeup. All the girls wanted to grow up to be a flight attendant. I wanted to be a biologist; in the meantime, I was OK with being captain.

That Saturday morning, my brother Papo and a few other boys were running around the garden screaming and chasing each other. There were no other girls around and a cluster of dirty boy's shoes was scattered around the base of our tree.—For these games we were always barefoot. Who can climb a tree with shoes on, anyway?

I still remember the time when I tried to do a flip over wearing sandals; I must have been about six years old and I wanted to do the same acrobatics that my older cousins where doing. Except, that I didn't get the technique completely right; I flew spectacularly over the branch I was holding onto and landed on my head with a dry thud. I laid there, stunned for a moment, the laughter of the other children sounded far away; humiliation, dirt, and dry leaves were stuck all over my body and one strap of my pretty dress was torned. I couldn't straighten myself, and because of it, I slithered home marching sideways like a lame crab and spent the next two days with my face turned left. Every time my mother touched my neck, I wailed so loud that several dogs in the neighborhood howled along with me. On the third day, they took me to my grandparent's house and my father went to fetch the santigüero.

I was sitting on my mother's lap on the balcony, a mosquito coil burned on the floor polluting the stagnant air of the evening. My mother and my grandmother were talking, I don't remember about what, and I was looking left towards the street when my father came down the hill accompanied by a strange old man. When they approached us in the balcony, I could see the man was carrying a big jar of a yellowish and greasy-looking substance. A smell of menthol surrounded the skinny old man who looked somewhat like my grandfather. He was wearing a faded but clean guayabera, and a bunch of plastic rosaries and saint's escapularios hung around his neck. Mami told me he was a faith healer and that he would pray for me to get better. She told me to sit still and held my arms a bit too tight. As I sat on her lap, the santigüero put a big dollop of the smelly, greasy ointment from the jar on my neck, and rubbed it in while he chanted. His voice was as skinny as himself, almost like a mosquito or a fly. His circular chant went on and on pleading for the merciful intercession of the Virgin Mary and all the saints. Soon, I dozed off...

Crack!

¡Ay! I yelped, surprised.

When he let go of my head, my neck was straight; my view of the world, back into a