The three Espíritu Santo nuns my father and I spoke with when we went to Los Quetzalitos, only one of whom had known Flor when she had been a little girl under their charge, had stressed their own point of view that, if Flor had been doing anything illegal, then they were sure it had been under a misguided desire to do good. After all, it costs much money to run Los Quetzalitos and Guatemalans, lamentably, are not charitable—I already knew that from Flor, that even the annual Board of Directors’ Charity Ball never raised more than a few hundred dollars. Three nuns in lean-fitting not billowing brown habits, with weighty, ferrous-looking crucifixes hung from thick chain-link necklaces, with bad complexions and slim, almost insipid smiles of formal piety. Flor had never claimed that Espíritu Santo was one of the more activist orders: they taught their girls to read and write, to crochet and work a sewing machine, to cook over a modern stove, taught them all the ritualized constraints of the Roman Catholic Church—Espíritu Santo girls didn’t talk out loud in church to God (or gods) whenever they felt like it and so on. They were having a rosary mass in the convent chapel for Flor that night and invited us to attend. But it was later that same day that we went to meet with Ilya in the Swedish embassy, and by the time it was over the mass had already begun and all we wanted to do was go back to our hotel, phone my mother, and rest up a little before dinner at Uncle Jorge’s.
Ilya was the Swedish volunteer who’d stayed. Consul Simms had contacted her at our request and arranged for her to talk to us in the Swedish embassy because she’d felt too frightened to meet us in any public place, or even in the U.S. embassy. She was a blond, heavyset girl—not the Scandinavian volunteer in that picture taken at the zoo—with pale, delicate skin and a timid, musical voice. The rims of her eyes and nostrils were bright pink, as if she’d been crying a lot or suffering from allergies, and it accentuated her natural features in a way that made her look something like a big, diaphanous, gold-dusted hen.
Ilya said that Flor, only five months before, had had to go into hiding for three days because the newly appointed jefe de migración, Colonel Ignacio Malespín, had demanded a twenty-thousand-dollar bribe in return for an exit visa for a little Indian boy who urgently needed a kidney transplant and was being flown for the operation to Stockholm, where a Swedish couple were ready to adopt him should he survive. We hadn’t heard of this event? asked Ilya, with tremulous incredulity. No, we hadn’t. Coronel Malespín—“Ese salvaje bruto,” that stupid savage, said Ilya, her quick strike into stingingly enunciated, slangy Spanish interjecting an oddly show-offy note amidst the otherwise restrained, quietly beseeching manner in which she’d been speaking to us, in perfect English—had said that if Flor didn’t pay the bribe not only would he refuse to grant the dying child an exit visa but he would have her arrested for illegally trafficking in children, claiming he had the authority and proof to do so! Flor returned to the orphanage from her meeting with the colonel quite frantic. She told Ilya and the other volunteer all about it and then asked them to carry on without her and to not breathe a word of the whole mess to anyone. And then she went into hiding, Ilya didn’t know where. That very night just one policeman arrived at the orphanage on foot and knocked at the gate with a warrant for Flor’s arrest.
It was the Swedish embassy that finally resolved it, applying various discreet pressures and enlisting the help of other European embassies to save the child’s life, of course, and also to protect Flor’s health care abroad program, which the Swedish embassy had cosponsored at her behest. Flor came out of hiding and said, Thank God that nightmare is over! And then she refused to say another word about it. About a month later Flor flew up to New York on her annual toy shopping for Christmas trip—her last visit—during which she didn’t say anything to me about what had just happened!
But what could any of this have to do with a clandestine fattening house somewhere in the city? Well, even if any such place existed, Ilya had no way of knowing about it. Then Ilya turned sideways in her chair and lifted the back of her hand to her eye as if to hide from us what may have been oncoming tears. She was motionless for a moment, poised over her hand almost as if over a violin, and then she dropped her hand and turned to us again and dry-eyed blurted, “Oh Mr. Graetz, I am sorry, I am sorry, I do not know what to say, this country can make people so horrible, I do not know, I am so sorry. I trust no one here and am only remaining to be with my fiancé, Paolo, who is Brazilian and will be working here for Child Hope until the end of the year.” But night after night she and Paolo had been wondering this: Colonel Malespín, had he known of an arrangement between Flor and the previous jefe de migración? Was that part of his proof? Why did he think he could ask for so much money? Twenty thousand dollars! This seems like blackmail, no? “I tell you the truth,” said Ilya. “I have always defended Flor’s honesty, though not always her organizational methods. She liked so much to do everything herself and would be so surprised when the clinic ran out of a medicine that for weeks she had been warned about. But when the bothering stopped, we suspected that maybe she had found the money to pay this. The child made it alive to Sweden, but just barely! And Colonel Malespín caused her no more trouble.”
“Yes, that,” said Consul Simms, when we phoned him right after: “The incident with Malespín, I knew she’d tell you about that. But I’m not so sure that any concrete conclusions or suspicions can really be drawn from it now,” and, “No, I don’t think it would do much good to speak with Malespín, assuming he agreed to, which I honestly don’t think he would. He’ll just deny the incident ever took place. He was fishing for a large bribe, no doubt about that. But did Flor finally pay him something? Well, there was a life at stake, after all. Or was the diplomatic pressure enough to back him off? As far as I know, it was. Under the circumstances, going temporarily into hiding like that was probably a very sensible thing for Flor to have done.”
It was the previous night, after that excruciating first day of morgue, embassy, and funeral parlor, that I’d had the idea of checking out Lord Byron’s, the so-called “gringo bar” in Zona 10. Why is it called Lord Byron’s?—nobody seems to know; the long-gone original owner named it that, that’s all. The gringo community, that part of it that regularly hangs out at Lord Byron’s anyway, is tight knit. And they are not parsimonious with gossip. Many of them are alcoholics or borderline, the usual expat scene, I guess. I knew, or at least Flor said, that in the last two years she hadn’t gone there so much. But even back in ‘79 she’d spoken disparagingly of the place and the people there and liked to pretend she hardly ever went even though we were stopping in almost nightly, and she seemed pretty well liked by the regulars. I knew they’d be talking about Flor in Lord Byron’s, and thought they would have heard everything there was to hear. I thought that I should go and that they’d recognize me right away and that then, if I could show them that I was willing to listen to anything no matter how hard it might seem for me to bear, that they’d tell me.
My father didn’t want me going out by myself—Flor and even we had been villainized in the Guatemalan media, it seemed dangerous to risk provoking anyone with my presence. But I said that I’d take a taxi both ways, and that few Guatemalans went to Lord Byron’s anyway. The truth is that I was impatient, driven by fury to try anything.
“There’ll be U.S. Marines from the embassy guard there, Dad,” I said. “And people who liked Flor. Nothing will happen to me there. I couldn’t be anywhere safer.”
So he went out to dinner with my relatives that night, telling them that I wasn’t feeling well and had begged off. And I took a taxi the few blocks from our hotel to La Zona Viva, where Lord Byron’s is located in the basement mall beneath a twin-towered condo complex. It’s a very unelaborate bar. You walk down the stairs out of the pine-smoky air and into the bar’s saturated stench of stale draft beer and wet dog hair. The dog, a mastiff-sized mongrel, is always sitting on the floor just inside the door, its ugly flanks mottled with mange. A dart board, a bumper pool table; the bar refrigerator plaster
ed with bumper stickers (REAGAN-BUSH, U.S.M.C, M.L.N., names and logos of oil and oil exploration companies, et cetera); baseball or football betting pool schemes taped to the walls. It was a slow night, two women, three men at the bar, the tables all empty, when I walked in. No one recognized me, I didn’t recognize any of them—I realize now, having recently been back there several times, that the Lord Byron’s expats are the least likely to ever even glance at a Guatemalan newspaper or to watch Guatemalan news on television. That night the television over the bar was off, but in the last year they’ve had it hooked up to the satellite dish that brings American television to the condo towers: usually, these days, it’s tuned in to Chicago Cubs games broadcast by the Chicago superstation, or the Armed Forces Radio and Television Network, or to a cable sports channel (once, when I recently happened to be in there, Harry Caray, the famous Chicago sports announcer, even sent greetings to “The Lord Byron’s Cubs Fan Club in Guatemala City, Guatemala, all the way down there in Central America!”).
The night I went there hoping to learn something about Flor, the woman behind the bar was a tall, large-breasted, but otherwise masculinely lanky mulatta from New Orleans named Crystal Francis (I know now, though I didn’t then). She has tangled reddish hair, a honey-colored and freckled face, a wide mouth that is often friendly and extroverted when Wally, her oil company boyfriend, comes back to the city from the jungle, or deflatedly sullen when he doesn’t. She owns Lord Byron’s now.
Almost as soon as I stepped in I heard Crystal say to the other woman at the bar, “. . . Oh come on, Darlene, I’ve seen her be just as much a slut as you.”
Darlene, I know now, owns a Zona 10 haircutting salon and is Crystal’s best friend. She’s from England, wispy and pale, pretty in a washed-out way. She turned her head sideways like a wan Madonna, rolling her eyes and lowering her lids, placing her thin hand over her chest, and said, “Me? Pfhuh.”
“No one’s sluttier than Darlene,” said one of the men at the bar, middle-aged with balding hair and glasses, alcohol-ruined cheeks so pulpy and reddened they look violently scraped.
“Jake!” said Darlene, harumphing and swiveling in her chair, carrying on as if it were all joviality and idle flirtation though this Jake, a long-ago laid-off steelworker from Ohio, is a dour man, especially so since General Ríos Montt, an Evangelical Protestant, outlawed gambling. Jake used to own a large share of the poor people’s slot machines you used to see all over Zona 1 in grimy little one-room arcades, and they made him a rich man by Guatemalan standards.
One of the other men said, “Give me one of those hotdogs” and gestured at the hand-drawn sign advertising all-beef Ball Park Franks. “Just a second,” said Crystal, moving towards where I had just taken a seat at the bar. “Bway-nas no-chays. Coe-moe pway-doe seer-veer-tay,” she said. I felt the others looking at me, and, exaggerating my own Namoset accent, said, “I’ll just have a draft beer, please,” and watched her be mildly startled.
But I must have looked deeply disconcerted and disconcerting myself that night, like some kind of silent psycho, all my awry nerves showing. Crystal served me my beer without even a smile and popped a frankfurter into the microwave. What I’d instantly thought and been electrified by of course was that the “slut” they’d been referring to must be Flor. And I chugged my beer as if to drown out everything.
But then Jake said, “But I gotta say I wouldn’t want to be her husband.” And the other man said, “Zactly.”
Crystal said, “Maury the Mercenary says he fucked her in Pana once.”
Darlene said, “Maury says he’s fucked everybody.”
Jake said, “But not you.”
Darlene dryly said, “Everybody needs a psychiatrist, don’t you think?”
And Crystal exclaimed, “What!”
I sat there, my beer almost gone, my head spinning like a carnival ride.
A few moments later the man had his hotdog, and he took a bite from it and said, “Why don’t you have cabbage and guacamole on these like the ones they sell on the street?”
“These are American dogs,” said Crystal. “Go to the corner and buy one if that’s what you want.”
“There’s no meat in those,” said the man.
“Too bad,” said Crystal.
“Why can’t I have both?” said the man. “Cabbage and guacamole and meat. Like in Brownsville.”
I paid for my beer without meeting anyone’s eyes and left. Maybe their conversation would soon turn to Flor, maybe they’d already discussed her. I was there five minutes at most.
But one of the floral arrangements we received for Flor’s funeral in Namoset was signed “With all our condolences and respect and fondest memories of Flor de Mayo, from Crystal Francis and friends at Lord Byron’s.” Of course they hadn’t seen the request we’d had printed in the Guatemalan papers for donations to be sent to Los Quetzalitos instead of flowers to us. Apparently neither had the man who sent thirty-six red roses with a plain white card attached bearing a few lines of poetry in Spanish that Moya instantly recognized as being Rubén Darío’s after I’d been wondering about it, and trying not to, for over a year (which I here roughly translate):
. . . and beneath the window of my Sleeping Beauty,
the continuous sobbing of the running fountain,
and the neck of the great white swan that questions me.
“Sentimental, pues,” said Moya. “He thinks the swan is death or . . . something like this. There was no fountain under her window, vos. He thinks he is the fountain, but her window did not face the street.” It wasn’t Moya who sent those roses and the card. So it must have been the secret lover, the married one. Moya knows about him now, I told him, I had to, of course.
Moya had a brief love affair with Flor, one that ended, he says, about a month before her death. So all right, what am I supposed to say about it?
So maybe it was an inconsequential enough involvement, to her I mean, that she’d never thought it worth mentioning to me? Or maybe it would have embarrassed her to. Or she’d for some reason thought it would upset me to know. Whatever, Flor had every chance to tell me about it and she never did.
But his affair with Flor was just one of the things Moya came to Brooklyn to talk to me about, having decided that enough time had passed and that, for some reason, I really ought to know if I didn’t. Actually, it was the main thing, probably, because he thought I already knew the rest of it anyway. So of course I never really let Moya get going on him and Flor because not in fact having known the rest of it, that’s what I was excited to hear about. Now, I’m not holding back on that, Moya’s information, his “revelations,” for any reasons of suspenseful effect, as I think you’ll plainly see when we get there, which won’t be long from now. It’s just that things have to come in some kind of order and there’s so much else, like the funeral and the fifteen months after, to get through first, or at least to evoke, to establish as having occurred. There’s Flor, the living Flor, my main assignment, to tell about her as I always have, as if none of this had happened. This, Moya likes to exhort me, is not going to be a chronicle of what it’s like to be dead.
So “this” is another of the subjects Moya came to Brooklyn to discuss. He wanted my help, what only I, apparently, could give him. Who else if not me, vos? And this all began, Moya told me—if he had to point to the one moment when it really first came to him—one winter afternoon in Cambridge when, still sunk deep in his winterlong funk of gloomy, self-subverting thought, walking home from his nonfiction narrative class at Harvard, he happened to glance to his side and saw a child, a little Indian girl in a snowsuit, one of the orphans, he swears, from Flor’s orphanage, playing with some other children in a snowy yard.
Eventually I had to say, “Kind of an interesting coincidence, but really, so what? Flor would have liked adopting a kid out to a professor. A Harvard professor? Are you kidding? No matter what else, Moya, she did do legal adoptions. There are children like that, from her orphanage, all over the world!”
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br /> But Moya somehow saw mystery, portent, and possibility in that little girl. She woke something up in him, he says, some big but shadowy idea. And soon, everywhere Moya went in Boston, he felt as if his actual shadow was snagging on Flor’s shadow (his words), the actual and innocent shadow of her past. And her shadow seemed like a shadow of his big but shadowy idea as well. In pursuit of parallel shadows, he took out the newspaper article, never completed, completely unpublishable even in El Minuto, that he’d begun in Guatemala in a frenzy of private grief, fury, fear, and, I don’t deny it, even heartbreak almost exactly a year before: an article on the circumstances surrounding Flor’s death and the crime, which soon, in Cambridge, took on an ambitious but shadow-obliterating life of its own. Moya says his nonfiction prof was sympathetic to his overall aim, though totally put off by the shrill, overly subjective, hysterical, vulgarly generalizing slant of the thing. Where was Flor, her life? The prof found Moya’s brief portrait of Flor’s Massachusetts youth predictably allegorical: superficially and sardonically ridiculing of the United States, which of course was not how she really felt at all, and simplistically glorifying of her—apparently there was hardly any mention of me. Stranger yet, Moya says he didn’t mention himself in it at all either, though really, he admits now, it was all about him, thus its failure.
The Long Night of White Chickens Page 14