Later Moya would tell me that in Cambridge he’d gone to see a doctor who told him that his “premature aging symptoms” (there were others less noticeable than his hair: inexplicable bouts of heavy fatigue, throbbing aches in the external parts of his ears) were a physiological reaction to constant anxiety and fear. He’d always understood this as the cause of an occasional tic in his right eye and the fragility of his stomach, but he’d never connected it to the other things. So he was relieved, even hopeful. Anxiety and fear might go away one day. And then maybe it will be like rain after a long drought? He’ll shave his head and watch it grow back black?
Moya met my mother in April, but I wouldn’t actually hear from him until May, and I wouldn’t go back to Guatemala until June.
Which is where I am now sitting, in fact, in Pastelería Hemmings, up on the mezzanine, at the very same table by the window where I was sitting five years ago when Moya spotted me on the day they reversed the direction of the one-way traffic, when he said, “Guatemala no existe ...” and so on. Which I kind of came to think of as his refrain, recalling it just like that even years later in Brooklyn (months before that April afternoon when my mother phoned) on the winter day that I first saw the Guatemalan knish vendor’s truck parked right in front of my building on Eastern Parkway, a refurbished ice-cream truck with a man sitting inside and looking right at me with eyes that were two black, narrow stones of Indian seriousness and gravity set into a fat, round face; the truck’s panel decorated with the too familiar symbols of Guatemalan kitsch: cartoony quetzal birds in unfurled flight, a grape purple volcano, a Maya pyramid, and the painted letters “KNISHES CHAPÍN”—chapín being Central American slang for Guatemalan. A post-Maya chapín selling Jewish knosh food in Brooklyn. I tried to stay away from that truck as if it were a joke aimed just at me, would literally cross the street to avoid it whenever I ran into it around my neighborhood in the year plus after Flor’s death. “Guatemala doesn’t exist”—I couldn’t have wished more that it were true.
It’s raining outside, though not heavily. Half an hour ago it was torrential, a delicious reverberation that seemed to come from the earth instead of the sky, going right through me. I’m drinking coffee, smoking filterless Payasos (a white-faced clown with the smile of a lighthearted idiot waving from every poinsettia red, thirty-five-centavo square little pack); I have a copy of yesterday’s New York Times, purchased this morning for the equivalent of two bucks at Palacio de las Revistas, the Palace of Magazines, just down the block, and this notebook in which I am trying to commence this chronicling of the investigation into Flor’s life and death that Moya and I have agreed to collaborate on. Moya already refers to this place as my oficina, though I sit nearly as often in the Picadilly on La Sexta—Sixth Avenue—or at the table closest to the sidewalk in the Fo Lu Shu. Moya and I met here in the pastelería this morning. Just a touch patronizingly, he warned me about government informers, who are everywhere, including, of course, his own newspaper office, too many of them eager and ignorant enough to misunderstand any kind of conversation. Orejas, they’re called—ears. I’m supposed to act from now on as if even the old women sitting at the next table—one of them plaintively monologuing, “. .. he’s a good son, a good son, he adores his mother, la adora, he puts his mother above everything”—might be orejas too. I’m to be a tumba: our secrets sealed inside me as if inside a tomb.
I yawn like crazy. This constant fact of paranoia, no matter how abstractly abided, tires me, I think. Every afternoon I feel just sapped. But it must be the altitude too and all the unfiltered motor fumes in the air and probably gastrointestinal germs working as silently inside me as this blend of excitement and fear and other more familiar emotions, which I try not to let my expression betray, (yawn, drink coffee, smoke, read newspaper, scribble in notebook, keep a quietly watchful eye, a tuned-in ear . . .) And the rain, and the afternoon light that looks washed through ashes. Guatemala City is a mountain city, and during the rainy season especially the sky couldn’t feel closer or heavier.
Across the street the dim blue neon is on in the window of a shoe store, spelling out LE PETIT CHALET. And just the dimmest hue of blue neon suffuses the soft rain and the drifting mists in front of the big, wet, black granite blocks of another building, and suffuses as well the drenched blue shirts of a trio of policemen walking by, their high black boots and sharp-featured Indian faces shiny from the rain. Bumper-to-bumper traffic, cars, Jeeps, vans, many with windows polarized black so you can’t see in and probably bullet-proofed too; schoolgirls in drably colored uniforms hurrying down the flooded sidewalk, books clutched to their chests or held over their hair, on their way to the avenues where the buses run; a peasant woman from the altiplano, the highlands, the woven colors and patterns of her traditional Indian traje darkened by rain, grime, and wear, her traje- wrapped torso immobile but her bare feet lightly trotting along under the ragged, soaked hem, an eye like a frightened bird’s peering out from under the lumpy cloth bundle she carries on her head. All of this, and something else absorbed like a mood along with just what you see—La Merced Cathedral’s dome and cross against the fuming sky and a shabby high rise of rust-streaked concrete; and even the tattered art deco furnishings of Pastelería Hemmings’s mezzanine here inside, the weak light from the electric candelabras set into the dull crimson walls and the dusty plastic plants in urns, the odors of cheap, rain-soaked fabrics, the elephant-footed old women sitting four to a table and the middle-aged clerk expressionlessly reading a newspaper while he waits for his plump and adulterous lover, the five-year-old girl in her yellow street urchin’s dress who has snuck up the stairs to beg from table to table with the melancholy, spurned self-possession of a veteran gypsy—all of this makes me think that Guatemala City, especially downtown in Zona 1, really must be something like Prague, the way you might imagine Prague if you’ve never been there, just what you might know and feel about Prague watching any random downtown street corner from a cake shop like this one on a rainy afternoon, people going about their subterranean business in the urban capital of a well-entrenched police state.
Now a short, portly man, his black hair gleaming with brilliantine and rain, is walking hurriedly down the sidewalk holding a flimsy umbrella, and under one arm he carries a long, rectangular photograph, wrapped in transparent cellophane, of a sweetly smiling young girl, dressed and crowned in immaculate white, kneeling to receive her First Communion.
That day five years ago, when the government changed the direction of the one-way traffic on the city’s major avenues, Moya was right here in Pastelería Hemmings, sitting at a table with three other student types, two guys and a girl, and they were huddled over a copy of the afternoon daily (the very same afternoon paper, El Minuto, that in less than two years Moya would find himself working for) that had just hit the streets, its headline announcing that so far that day ten people had died, either in traffic accidents or from getting run over. I hadn’t realized he was Moya yet—he would recognize me first—but I could hear them talking about it as I stared out the window, heard a bitterly deadpan voice (his) from their table saying in Spanish, Permit me to say that as a way of relieving traffic congestion I find this not bad. Eliminate the drivers, eliminate the pedestrians. And then the girl’s voice petulantly saying, Permíteme decir que no es cosa para chistes, vos, it isn’t anything to joke about . . .
About a week later my favorite cousin, Catalina, Catty to all of us, then a senior at the Colegio Anne Hunt, would tell how a teacher who had been particularly affected by the chaos of the traffic change that day, one of the perpetually young Señorita Something teachers, said, “This proves the government doesn’t care about the people.” Anne Hunt might have fired her for getting political in class that way, if it had gotten back to her. But what made Catty’s story funny was that this teacher was practically obsessed with her car, a brand-new red Toyota she’d won in a raffle only months before. Catty said this teacher couldn’t have been more exagerada in her pride over this car if s
he’d tried, always telling her class things like “Imagine how it improves the psychology to drive a car with all the windows down in the morning instead of riding the bus, to breathe fresh morning air instead of bus exhaust and the smells of all the people pressed against you, so many of them, let’s face it, very poor and unhygienic people.” Or she’d leave books and papers behind in the car just so she could make a show of saying, “Will someone volunteer to go out to my car and get them? It’s a red Toyota, and today it is parked just down the block, on the left side, right under that jasmine tree. If it rains today my car will be covered with jasmine blossoms, and if I drive home with the windows down, I’ll smell jasmine all the way!”
But this teacher had been so traumatized by the chaotic traffic that day that she’d started leaving her car at home and riding the bus, and in the days since had turned into a real melancólica in class, listless and distracted and constantly sipping hot lettuce tea from a thermos for her nerves. All of which culminated in the scene out in front of the school just after the siesta break one afternoon when a young lower-class man accosted this teacher as she came walking down the sidewalk from the bus stop. Through eavesdropped snatches of his tormented shouting and the teacher’s pleading whispers, Catty and her friends were able to piece together a puzzle revealing that for months her teacher and this man had been meeting in her parked Toyota during the siesta, but only when it rained and rained hard, which at the height of the rainy season was just about every afternoon, to kiss and maybe even make love with the rain protecting them from the danger of curious passersby, a curtain of rain closing them off from all the world in their cozy, black vinyl, made-in-Japan love nest. But this love affair was over now that the señorita felt too afraid to drive her car anymore. And how could it ever be resumed now that her lover’s outraged and indiscreet tantrum had let the students in on their secret? “Pobrecita,” poor thing, lamented my cousin Catty, while she sat facing me on the piano stool in Uncle Jorge’s study, where she was waiting with placid impatience for her boyfriend’s daily evening visit and telling me this story. “Why couldn’t he have waited? calmed her? helped her to feel confident about taking her carrito out in traffic again? But that’s how men are, verdad? They take everything personally! Pues sí.”
And later that same evening of the day they changed the direction of the traffic, when I went back to the furnished apartment in Zona 10 that Flor was already renting, carrying my own copy of El Minuto and its TEN DEAD headline, Flor had just washed her hair, had it turbaned in a towel, and was sitting on the couch, doing absolutely nothing apparently, which was not characteristic. (“You won’t believe who I ran into in Pastelería Hemmings. Moya! Remember Moya?”—it didn’t mean much to her, no reason that it should have then.) But it’s amazing how easy it is just to sit around doing nothing in Guatemala, or anywhere in the tropics perhaps—it isn’t the heat, because Guatemala City isn’t especially hot and in November, December it even gets cold. But day after day you can just sit around doing nothing and it doesn’t feel particularly wrong or even tedious. Back then I thought several times that maybe this was the reason Flor had returned here and seemed interested in staying awhile: that after so many years of balancing heroic overachieving with the more banal but just as constant demands of housework and, more recently, earning a living, not to mention what seemed to me years of unbroken and rather obsessive socializing, that Flor was finding it pleasurable to sit around being lazy and anonymous; that she even felt a perverse and paradoxically self-negating attraction to a place—her native country!—where everywhere you looked hard work seemed only one more aspect of a general futility it was easiest to escape by just not doing anything, but only if you could afford to, and she could. (But then, within two months, she would throw herself into her new job running Los Quetzalitos, and for the next three years plus work harder than she ever had before.) Anyway, I handed Flor the newspaper and she snapped it open like it was just what she’d been waiting for all day. And then seconds later tossed it aside on the couch and said sleepily and in her eternally childlike voice, “Oh well. Let them eat cake.”
Because what were ten more dead people that summer?
It was the General Lucas Garcia regime, recently embarked on its own three-year reign of unprecedented bloodiness. And it was just beginning to dawn on people that they were really into something now, that this was going to be quite a bit stranger and so much more horrific than even the previous twenty-five years of bloody enough military rule had been. But the guerrillas were strong then too, in the Indian highlands, the jungles of the Petén, and even in the cities, where businessmen were often targeted for kidnappings. Uncle Jorge would phone home just before leaving his office to alert the maids, and when he turned into the top of the street he’d honk three times and the maids would swing the steel-fortified double doors open so that he could glide the car in without having to stop, and then they’d pull the doors shut behind him. One of Catty’s Colegio Anne Hunt schoolmates was ambushed coming out of a party: he’d just gotten into his car and then he refused to come out and be kidnapped. He threw it into forward and slammed into his assailants just as they’d begun to unload their machine guns into his windshield. He ran right over them, killing two guerrillas, but he died too. Which was stupid, I think. He could have had a chance to live. His family could have paid the ransom. Instead he became a Colegio Anne Hunt martyr and a year later Anne Hunt’s husband, Scobie, became another. Everyone with money wanted to get their kids out of the country, and even my aunt and uncle sent Catty away to college in Montreal, Canada, that following winter, where, despite her little college being all women and Catholic, she ended up marrying the very first guy who set eyes on her. Literally, pretty much the very first one. He worked as a skycap at Dorval Airport, a half French-Canadian, half-Italian guy named Ronnie. It was love at first sight, for him anyway. He loaded Catty and Aunt Lisel’s luggage onto his cart and flirted Catty up all the way out to her taxi and learned where they were going from the driver, and then he really chased her. He was more than just a skycap, of course, I mean he had other ambitions. And Catty loved him. But it ended very badly, and now Catty is living in Guatemala again, in her parents’ house, with her two-year-old twin daughters, Rosie and Paloma.
Of course the people who the army and the police took or killed were rarely given the option of paying ransoms. And they took or killed thousands upon thousands.
The head of the National Police was named Chupina. One joke going around was, Did you hear Chupina had a twin brother in the womb?—Yes, stillborn, showing signs of torture and a tiro de gracia, a coup de grâce, in the head.
And in another Chupina and General Lucas are fishing, and Lucas catches a tiny fish and he’s about to toss it back but Chupina says, Wait, give it to me, and he takes the fish in one hand and starts pummeling its head with the other, saying, OK, talk, where are the big ones?
(In New York I worked as a bartender, a temperamentally good-natured if not particularly joky one. For years, whenever customers told jokes at the bar and etiquette seemed to require that I tell one too, these were the only ones that came to me.)
That was the summer that the Sandinista revolutionaries took Managua. Or, according to Uncle Jorge and many who agree with him, the summer that U.S. President “Jimmy Castro” let the Sandinistas have it. But in Guatemala, world-wandering international hippies were still filling all the two-dollar-a-night hotel rooms in Panajachel, the tourist town up on the volcano-ringed lake, and ordering the legendary or maybe apocryphal psilocybin mushroom omelets in the Café Psicodélico; you could always tell the Germans because they were the ones who most liked to show their esteem and solidarity with the culture by going around dressed up in Indian traje, much of it too small for them, chubby blond calves protruding like slabs of hairy suet from beneath striped Indian britches. Young summer travelers still crowded into Livingston’s reggae bars on the Caribbean coast and danced the night away under the bent palms on the pig-shit- and fish-stin
king, dark dirt beach, while the black Carib kids living in the shrimpers’ huts grouped around, jumping up and down and chanting “Sandinista!” to win the pretty European girls’ attention.
* * *
That afternoon in Pastelería Hemmings, at a table of people from the States, a man was waving a copy of that El Minuto with its TEN DEAD headline and yelling, in English, “I don’t believe it! The monkeys! What a bunch of monkeys! Does this say it all or what? I’m going to take this home and have it framed!”
People heard him, and some were offended. Heads turned. Guatemalans take offense easily and viscerally—you can feel it in a room, sense their breathing quickening, their tempers rising, sense a blackening rage even, when it’s really bad, when they’re about to lose it, utterly.
That’s when I noticed the guy who turned out to be Moya staring at me.
I looked away, out the window. Honest to God, chaos was as tangible as if the whole city had just been flipped upside down and back over again. Guatemalan traffic can terrify me even on slow Sundays, but that day, all over the place, people were turning the wrong way down one-way avenues. People were looking the wrong way as they stepped off curbs. Truckers were trying to bash their way through directionless traffic jams anyway. Bus drivers were slipping confusedly back into the routes they’d been following for years. People were being injured and killed. Guatemala City, a flat plateau city in the Valley of the Virgin, was echoing with bleating car horns. Not even the birds could have felt safe; they must have stayed up in the air. And the usual traffic sounds, ranging from the high, beady spitting of mufflerless motorbikes to the wall-shaking thunder of mufflerless buses, from the iron gnashing of ancient gearboxes to the smooth-shifting hum of expensive imports, the clanging of so many flimsy body parts as shockless ‘59 Pontiacs and trucks that are nothing more than loose piles of junk go banging over potholes and bumps, the artillery of so many backfires far away and nearby—all these sounds were accelerated and amplified that day; it sounded as if everybody was trying to get out, to flee the city all at once.
The Long Night of White Chickens Page 3