The Long Night of White Chickens

by Francisco Goldman

  We were in her hotel room in the Penta, across the street from Madison Square Garden, sitting on separate beds, passing a joint, MTV on with the sound low, Flor’s last visit, October of’82:

  “Oy vay, vos! They all go around with their shirts and flies open!” She giggled sleepily. Then putting on the eagerly measured-out drawl of some midwestern Peace Corps volunteer with just a month or so of Spanish, said, “Com-pren-do kay yo kyero de-seer ca-ra-jo?”

  Because I’d asked her if she was going out with any Guatemalan guys.

  I laughed, said, “Shirts and flies open, Jesus. Com-pren-do, nee-ña.”

  “No! They manufacture terrible zippers down there, it’s hard to keep them closed, y’know?”

  “Underdeveloped zippers. Well, that’s an excuse.”

  “As if they need excuses.”

  She had a really funny voice. She just did. It had hardly changed at all from the day she’d arrived in Namoset to be our maid, still had the same assertive, almost childishly piping pitch, though supplemented as she grew older by an adjustable breathiness that ranged from a confidingly whispered huskiness coming from somewhere damp between her chest and throat to the hilariously evaporating squeal of her singing along with the radio, trying to hit the high notes. And when she was angry or excited you could just about feel it yourself—feel her trying to blast air into her words, the frayed, thin reed of her voice bleating. Though her accent gave her English a lilting rhythm, counterpointed by occasional echoes of my father’s Bostonese and words she consistently mangled in her own particular way (“I gardner what you’re trying to say,” meaning “garner” of course, but who uses gamer like that in normal conversation anyway?), her convent and higher-education formality often mixed with the slang and even illiterate vulgarity of the Chiquimula desert and a Namoset adolescence.

  Flor, obliviously watching television, lightly ran two fingers down the shiny, thin braid in her hair.

  “I don’t know, some of them are OK.” She sighed. “But they have this tendency, you know, through sheer persistence and this awful, maddening, wholehearted generosity, to trap you into thinking that actually you’re rather sweet on them. When really you’re not! You’re just dazed. Like a boxer! Punched so much you just want to hug and lean on the man doing it so the fight can stop.”

  “What? You mean rich guys?”

  “Uh-huh. I mean some of them try, you know. I’m so exotic to them, a morenita peasant with too much education, imagínate?” Now she stubbed out the joint, lit a cigarette. “Then there are the guys who have something that isn’t money to be generous with. In fact usually they don’t have any—money. That’s the kind I really used to fall for. Until I realized the ones who seem to want to flatter you most with it are the ones who don’t actually have it for real, you know?”

  “Have what?”

  “. . . Ohhhhh. Beards, sad eyes, a master plan. They are the master plan.” She lightly shrugged it off. I hardly had any idea of what she was talking about, though I think I do now.

  “Course you can’t forget the place is basically the capital of mother-fuckers,” she said.

  “Yeah. I know.”

  “Not that even they, at times . . .”

  “Flor.”

  She laughed softly. “But to tell you the truth, sometimes it seems like all I do lately is hang out with little kids. And nuns.”

  “You hang out with nuns?”

  “. . . Well, not quite.”

  Then, in a sprightly unfolding of denim-clad legs, she was off the bed and at the window, looking out at New York. Coming from far below, the traffic sounded like an unbroken momentum of wheels tearing through puddles, though in reality the day was dry; the incremental pulsing of car horns evoked traffic lights changing from red to green all the way up a long, hazy avenue as far as the mind’s eye could follow. Flor’s luggage, a full suitcase open on each bed and the empty one she always brought for shopping on the floor, had the smell I’d associated since childhood with the visits of Guatemalan relatives to Namoset: mothballs and mildew and the cakelike sweetness of unvarnished tropical lumbers from closet storage during the rainy season. Even her sweaters had that smell, along with faint perfumes and smoke (I’d lifted a sleeve to my face): cigarette smoke and the copal incense and woodsy smoke of Indian towns, the tart dirt and damp grime of the highlands. It’s just about impossible to find a warm shower or bath in those towns, and so cold she would have slept with the sweater on in whatever dingy, bedbug-ridden cot she’d found herself spending the night in.

  I looked over at her, standing at the window with her arms crossed, in tight jeans and an untucked shirt, the air between us painted with tobacco and marijuana fumes.

  I knew from previous conversations with Flor that nuns sometimes had something to do with keeping war orphans out of the hands of the army and out of the strategic hamlets—model villages, they’re called—that Indian refugees displaced by the counterinsurgency campaigns are herded into. But they are not temporary, these model villages; the people are supposed to live in them from now on, even though they might originally be from different mountain areas, different tribes speaking different dialects, with different customs. It’s been one of the army’s masterstrokes: shatter and reorganize the hermetic patterns of four hundred years of post-Conquest highland life, bringing it all under military control. Or sometimes they take kids and keep them in their garrisons, dressing the boys in uniforms, little military mascots cleaning the latrines and growing up callous towards prisoners languishing in the tiger pits, screaming their last screams in the interrogation cells, raising the girls as military laundresses and even military whores. Or officers take them back to the capital to keep as their own children, or to sell them to other orphanages and baby-selling rings, a racket that Flor, of course, wasn’t supposed to have a thing to do with, though she did do legal adoptions. She’d told me that sometimes there were children whom the nuns wanted her to take, hiding them in their rural convents until Flor got there, driving her orphanage van into the death-scorched mountains. Or sometimes some anonymous Indian woman would just turn up unannounced at Los Quetzalitos with a kid or two in tow and a greeting from Sister Whoever.

  On one of her previous visits to New York Flor had said, “... An Ixil Indian girl, the army brought her down from the mountains. What happens sometimes is that until they get assigned to whatever model village they’re going to, the nuns in Huehue or Nebaj or wherever get put in charge of the children that get brought down; they feed them, try to treat their illnesses as well as they can, try to make them feel less afraid. And sometimes, well, now and then some of these kids end up with me, it’s kind of a mystery why, I mean I’m not the one who chooses. Anyway, I didn’t know much about this little girl, she’d just been dropped off at my door one day. So one afternoon I hear her singing, La bandera que llevamos, qué roja con sangre está. The flag we carry, how red with blood it is? Well, a guerrilla anthem, obviously. Obviously! So I take her aside and ask, Manuela? Who taught you that? I mean an Ixil girl, she barely spoke Spanish, and so she says, Padre Javier. Padre Javier! When? And she says, Oh, a few months ago. And I thought, Jesus. Padre Javier. He’s kind of famous. He’s this guerrilla priest who went up into the mountains ages ago but for a year I’d been hearing he was dead, even from the nuns.”

  “And now this girl’s in your orphanage.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Wow.”

  “She’s eleven,” she said. “And there’s a family from Stockholm just dying to adopt her. Father’s this pretty big-time sculptor, mother’s a surgeon. Pretty perfect, you know? But she doesn’t have any papers, no paper proof that her parents are actually dead, nothing. So for now, she stays, what can I do? I guess that’s OK. I mean, I always feel kind of bad about sending off a girl like that one anyway, one who has definitely seen a lot, is old enough not to forget it, and seems to be pretty well in control of herself besides. I mean, I’m very aware of the argument that a girl like that should stay, so
long as I can make sure she goes on in her studies and everything. But who’s to say it isn’t the other way around? That’s a tough one, you can argue it both ways. You know, she stays, grows up, eventually becomes competent and probably outspoken in some way, and maybe is killed for it, or else leads a life of total frustration and near poverty anyway. Or she grows up in another country, gets to have loving parents, goes to university, becomes supercompetent at something, doesn’t face the same kind of prejudice she would as an educated Indian woman here, but maybe she faces other prejudices there or other pressures and she has certain memories that complicate everything for her . . . Of course she’s bright and old enough to decide for herself, that one, Manuela. Though in her case it isn’t going to happen no matter what, not without a paper saying she’s really an orphan. Which I can maybe get, if I do the footwork, if I go up to her native village and try to find out or whatever. Which is just what I have to do sometimes. A lot, actually.”

  “It’s like being a detective,” I said.

  “Yeah. Sometimes it really is.”

  And that’s really the only full conversation we ever had on the subject of War Orphans, Guerrillas, and Nuns.

  But back then I was full of certainties. I thought Flor’s orphanage must be full of little girls like that one, forgetting about all the children orphaned by the more mundane calamities of poverty and urban life. The Orphanage of the Revolution. Crazy. But I fantasized it. Nuns rescuing children who were in some kind of danger, because they were the offspring or siblings of guerrillas or union leaders or university students murdered or gone underground, and so they needed protection and a special environment to grow up in where they wouldn’t be given away for adoption. And one day, who knew, in a Revolutionary Guatemala, they might even be reunited with their parents and relatives, or, if actually orphaned, then adopted by their parents’ old comrades in arms. Well even now, though it actually makes my ears burn a bit to say it, I wonder if some of it might not have been true anyway, believing it more than likely that Flor could have gone along mixing all sorts of brave and generous impulses and calculations in with whatever it was that finally brought her down. Nuns trusted her, I guess, and maybe she never gave them any reason not to.

  “Who would have thought,” said Flor, “that after all these years I’d end up such a champion of nuns. But they’re the only competent people in that country, I swear!”

  Minutes later the phone sounded, and when she’d crawled across the bed to answer and knew who it was, she laughed, and her piping voice said, “Cabrona!” So that I knew this was obviously a Guatemalan friend, a woman she must know awfully well to use a greeting like that, probably not a nun. “Aquí estoy con mi hermanito, vos, parrandeando.” She was with her little brother, screwing around, getting stoned on his mota, just like old times. He was looking at her bare brown feet curled under her thigh-swelled denim, a smooth, solid ankle, her tawny, potato-hued sole. She listened awhile, said she’d talk to her later, and when she hung up I asked, “A friend here in New York?”

  “Calling from Miami,” she said, and yawned.

  And she said later, suddenly, when we’d just been sitting quietly together on the same bed, a suitcase pushed all the way to the end and our feet propped against it, the television still on, the chilled bottle of white wine we’d ordered almost polished off:

  “Why is it always like this, Rog? I come back, and all the time I’ve been in Guatemala, it all suddenly seems like just some movie I saw.”

  “Whenever you come to New York?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Because it’s so different here. And you fall back into it so quickly.”

  She nodded just once, her expression perfectly still. And she kept on staring blankly at the screen, hardly ever having seen MTV before.

  “Now I am feeling too depraved,” she said. “I think maybe it is time to go buy some toys.”

  So we went to Macy’s, just down the block from her hotel. It felt like a staged adventure just getting there: navigating the crowded sidewalk without a word; riding the escalator up when suddenly Flor turned to me and listlessly remarked that she had no idea what floor toys were on; riding down and drifting around in the cosmetics aisles until we bumbled into the information desk; the elevator kept filling up with people we didn’t feel like being crowded in with, so we rode the escalator again.

  She was thinking ahead to Christmas in Los Quetzalitos. Of course she annually solicited toys from Guatemala City’s more prosperous stores, though not from Uncle Jorge’s Zona 1 department store. Flor preferred to avoid that sum zero equation: me Uncle Jorge’s nephew, she my “sister,” she his nada. My other uncle, Dr. Nelson Arrau, the one really open-minded Arrau, has always been something of a solitary outside his consuming medical duties and, since the stroke he’d suffered in 1978, hardly socialized at all. He’d married late in life, to a widow with grown children who is even more closed-minded than Aunt Lisel.

  So I think it’s fair to say that, on the whole, the Arraus have always found Flor too straining a phenomenon to deal comfortably with. And it wasn’t lost on Flor that during her first months in Guatemala they never once invited her to dinner, though she’d politely phoned them a few times, and occasionally ran into Uncle Jorge during his punctual morning coffee breaks in Pastelería Hemmings, and they kept saying they were going to invite her. But it wasn’t until I came down that summer that Uncle Jorge and Aunt Lisel finally did.

  In a sentimental way, Flor owed everything to my grandmother, simply because she’d turned up one day at the Hermanas del Espíritu Santo convent orphanage on the Avenida Simeón Cañas and picked an orphan to be our maid in Namoset. At dinner that night Flor was suddenly seized by a desire to pay homage to that fact, saying to my uncle, “If it hadn’t been for your mother, Jorge, why, who knows what would have become of me?”

  Frozen smiles at the adult ends of the long table, and my girl cousins peering wonderingly at her from heads bent over their soup bowls, and Cousin Freddie with a flat, idling look of goatish rutting in his eyes—What were they supposed to say, that maybe she would have ended up working in the family store? or else gone back to Chiquimula to marry the widowed Chinaman who owned the general store and who used to buy eggs from her and cacklingly give her arm a pinch?—the sort of story that always incited delighted smiles when she’d told it in the States, but which earlier at dinner had only put closemouthed, priggish expressions on Aunt Lisel and Mercedes and caused a green-eyed gape in Catty, seventeen then (entering her last year at the Colegio Anne Hunt) because she’d certainly never heard a “first-person” story about a little egg girl and a predatory Chinaman at the family table before.

  Now it was Catty who broke the tongue-tied silence, innocently and matter-of-factly reasoning, “Well, you probably would still be in Guatemala, verdad? Like you are now.” And everybody laughed, Flor most of all, as the irrefutable logic of Catty’s answer sank in.

  Flor’s accomplishments did not especially impress my relatives, though even they must have realized that, theoretically at least, it had so far been an impressive life. But to find success in the United States was the reason poor people flocked there—they assumed that for many the dream came true, or else why did they keep going? Unless a fantastic amount of money had been made, it wasn’t anything they especially admired or were even interested in, especially in a woman. A footloose brown girl-woman with a funny voice, an ex-servant, unmarried, inexplicably hanging around in Guatemala now, who’d so far gotten to live an eccentrically and remotely fortunate life thanks to her extremely coincidental connection to Mirabel Arrau de Graetz’s equally eccentric and remote and not so fortunate (they surely thought) existence in a United States becoming so undone now by rampant libertinism that they wouldn’t even think of sending their own daughters to study there (Mercedes never went anywhere, but the next year Catty would go to college in Canada and look what happened to her even there! She married the first guy who set eyes on her!)—that’s all they rea
lly saw. The only tangibly remarkable result being that now Flor was dining at the Arrau table and not in the kitchen with the other servants who had to come running in every time Aunt Lisel gave her little gold antique bell a shake. They didn’t at all begrudge it. They are friendly people, and appreciated that life sometimes turns out kind of cute that way. They made amusing small talk and tried with some success to keep attitudes they knew could offend Flor, and me, in check. And their familial affection for me was so obviously and spontaneously warm that I had no trouble at all returning it.

  Afterwards Flor felt a little depressed by it all. But we went to the Tropical Room, a small discotheque in Zona 4 that still stayed open late and was always crowded despite the escalating violence in the streets during those months, and she forgot all about the dinner in two seconds flat. People danced until dawn there as if they really feared they might not make it home alive, and I held Flor’s waist in a rowdy conga line that didn’t seem to want to ever stop.

  Anyway—Guatemala City stores usually donated cartons of cheap little toys manufactured in the Orient. Too many of these came with sharp tin edges, so that Flor couldn’t give them out anyway, not with so many orphans who were prone to hitting each other over the head with whatever might be at hand. Or else they donated more expensive and even absolutely marvelous toys that had arrived in port absolutely too damaged to sell. Which she said was fine, because the orphans broke everything anyway and always had too many jealous and smaller orphans swarming all over them to be able to muster the patience and concentration necessary for figuring out the workings of elaborate toys. But Flor always tried to arrange it so that each child received at least one nice, well-suited, brand-new toy for Christmas. And it was always important to have brightly colored, new-looking Fisher-Price crib toys in the infant wards, not just because it created a happy environment and what she called brain aerobics for babies who often arrived already well lost in the fatal fogs of severe malnutrition and who sometimes never made it out, but because it impressed foreign adult visitors and potential aid donators, giving the infant ward a well-cared-for look, dispelling some of the miniature barracks gloom of so many cribs laid end to end, the low-tide odors of unhealthy bowels, the cries and shrill screams, the grim distraction of harried nurses, niñeras, and Scandinavian volunteers rushing around on urgent missions of medicine and diaper changing. And of course it was cheaper to buy these toys in New York than in Guatemala, what with the import duties and the additional markups caused by the high bribes merchants usually have to pay just to get their shipments out of customs.