The Long Night of White Chickens

by Francisco Goldman

  In the newspaper today a photograph of an empty pair of loafers lying in a patch of weeds, left there during the night, no doubt, as if by a fairy-tale cobbler (not the ambulant one)—except that isn’t the story. The loafers belonged to a previously disappeared university student whose “cadáver manifestando señales de tortura” had just been found in that same weedy lot. And so one of the papers, as if seeking a new angle on the same old story, ran a picture of his shoes.

  PART TWO

  THE LONG NIGHT

  OF

  WHITE CHICKENS

  SEVEN

  “The Namoset police! They were such handsome, rosy-cheeked, blue-eyed, big, strong boys. Not like in Guatemala. I’d see them and remember our police in Guatemala, those poor little guys, so asoleaditos, so tiny and sun shrunken, just like raisins, ay no!”—and she’d smile like a primly mischievous Japanese girl, or like some slyly ditzy ingenue on a talk show, all the while watching her interrogator try to fathom (though sometimes they were pretty dim and just said, “Oh”) the surprising cleverness of her answer. Because that was how Flor liked to answer a question like “Well, what were your first impressions of life in the U.S. of A.?” And she had to answer that kind of question all the time.

  “My first year in Namoset, when I knew too few people, I used to love to drive into the square with Ira when he went to buy his newspapers and bagels. Just so I could see a policeman, you know. The policeman would smile at me and oh! My face would turn all red!”

  I was still in the last months of my quarantine for tuberculosis, back when Flor was first getting excited about the Namoset police. So much of my sense of that time comes from Flor’s stories and reminiscences, though there are some things I vividly remember on my own, even from before she came, when I still spent most of the time on that sofa in the living room. I used to imagine, or maybe I’d just been told, that the healthy little children playing outside were my friends. Looking through a toy catalog with my mother, I picked out a pedal-driven fire engine with a ladder on the side with room for two that Keith Cleary, the blond boy my age who supposedly lived down the block, would ride in with me when I could go outside. Almost a year in Namoset, and all of it indoors! Keith Cleary was my best imaginary friend. I remember standing on the sofa inside the picture window, looking out at Keith romping in the snow with a fascinatingly big dog, a golden retriever with an orange coat as thick and lustrous as a circus bear’s. My mother would tell me stories about Keith and me playing together: “Rogito y Keith have their own farm, the best and richest in Massachusetts, with all the prize cows and all the biggest pumpkins...” She was determined I not get too comfortable or accepting of my solitude. And she’d picked up somewhere the mythology of tuberculosis leading to a romantically morbid temperament: “What if he becomes a poet! Qué horror!” she has confessed to having feared, recalling the poets of her own youth, dissipated Rubén Darío imitators miming Parisian bohemian decadence, all spiritual opulence and spiteful wit, using cologne-scented verses and unspontaneous declamations to try to charm a generation of rich girls in love with Clark Gable or Pedro Vargas and then Frank Sinatra and whichever Guatemalan young men most looked like and best imitated them.

  So who’s to say? Maybe something like that really would have happened, if Flor hadn’t come, obliterating my obsession with Keith Cleary: a rapt dread of the world outside, a solitudinous melancholy . . . Because for a long time the fire engine wasn’t mentioned. And Keith Cleary wasn’t outside anymore either, though I don’t remember noticing. I didn’t forget the fire engine though, it was still something I wanted, but whenever I brought it up my mother would tell me to choose something else. Why? Choose something else, Rogito. Why?

  Then it was spring and I was allowed outside, and all the neighborhood kids despised me, because I was always clinging to Flor, because I was brown, chattery, spoke more Spanish than English, because I had then, I have to admit, the brattily effeminate and bossy nature of a Guatemalan rich boy spoiled by maids. But didn’t I used to have a promised friend out here, Keith Cleary?

  My mother sat me down at the kitchen table. I retain the impression of an overcast afternoon, with fresh air blowing in through the window, and no lights on but what natural light there was filling the kitchen like crystal-clear water in a shadowy pool, so that everything—oven, fridge, Formica table, linoleum floor—had the glow of big white stones at the bottom of that pool. My mother was telling me about going to heaven and the little angels who were so happy. Keith Cleary had, a few months before, fallen through the ice on Sarah Hancock Pond and drowned.

  Which is something that was always happening in Namoset: every year, it seemed, someone drowned, or died, or lost a limb playing on the train tracks. Anthony Borrelli, who lived fairly close by, lost a leg that way and was outfitted with an artificial one so that when he walked down the street, slapping his own thigh, he looked as if he was pretending to be a horse.

  Keith Cleary became an angel. It was his little sister, Gail, who became melancholy. And I was terrified of their romping, excitable dog, Rex.

  He, Keith, would have hated me anyway. At least at the beginning. To this day, though, whenever I hear the word angel or see choiring angels depicted on a Christmas card, I think briefly of that apparition, my first American friend. And I always hear myself saying his name, full of reverence and loyalty and pride and in a Latin accent, my tongue abruptly stopping against the hard th. I even used to feel like him, or have the vague sense of something never ending, when my parents bought me a German shepherd to help me over my fear of dogs, and we would romp together in the snow.

  It wouldn’t be until late spring that my toy chest, packed full, would be carried like a steamship trunk down into the basement, to that half of the wood-paneled room that would be designated my playroom, separated from your bedroom by an invisible line drawn across the tiled floor from the bottom of the stairs. The prettiness of your face hovering close by, my immediate addiction to your smile, cheeks, nose, eyes, your hair falling around me as I hugged you tight, your warm caramel smell, all of this is more of an eternal and safe sensation than it is a memory.

  Just as exciting to Flor as the Namoset police were her journeys into downtown Boston on her days off during that first year, before my father put her in school, when she was still, of course, basically just our maid. She had a crush on the Paul McCartney look-alike who used to pose against the fountain near the Park Street subway entrance, lounging on the concrete basin with his long legs out straight and his Beatle boots crossed and his arms crossed too, basking in the bedazzled admiration and longing gazes of an encircling crush of star-struck, giddily bashful Latin American housekeepers who came into Boston on their days off to see him. Anyway, that’s the way I’ve always pictured it from the way Flor told it and in memory have perhaps distorted it from the one spring day when, my quarantine finally over, Flor took me into Boston with her, and there he was, looking just like Paul McCartney, Beatle mop hair and the shades he always wore that must have been essential to the illusion, but he had the cheeks and nose and, most of all, that candied boyish smile. And it was his calling in life or something to lounge against that fountain being gazed at. I wonder if he even knew how to play the guitar, or if eventually, in the next few years, before he would have even had the chance to don Sergeant Pepper garb, he was drafted and sent to Vietnam—that would have been a strange twist in the life of a Paul McCartney imitator. Or maybe he was nuts. There must be thousands of people in Boston who remember him.

  Did Flor really think he was Paul McCartney? It must have seemed completely possible to her: even Guatemalans knew about the Beatles and that the United States was a place where they actually walked around if they walked around anywhere. Maybe the first few times she was confused, and then it didn’t matter. I was too young to comprehend celebrity, but I was quietly astounded, it expanded my sense of reality: here was the same fellow whose big face loomed from a poster on Flor’s bedroom wall, and it all had to do with the mu
sic she played on her radio. (Within a year Flor would own her own small, plastic record player.) That same spring of my liberation my mother took me on the “Big Brother Show,” I was part of the live, onstage audience, but when it came time to rise with Big Brother and recite the pledge of allegiance and raise our glasses of Hood’s milk in a toast to President Johnson’s portrait, I ran off the set crying to where my mother sat, shrieking in Spanish, not because I’d been instructed to just silently move my mouth along with the incomprehensible pledge but because I’d never in my life been able to drink a glass of milk without chocolate in it. All the rest of preschool New England, including Flor, witnessed this routing of my composure at home on television. I’m not sure that I even remember the incident, but Flor rarely missed an opportunity to bring it up, even in later years, laughing delightedly and then sticking her arms out like a sleepwalker’s and wailing, “Mamiiii Mammmiii no puedo sin chocolate!”

  “Really? Guatemala?”

  “Guatemala.” And she’d smile, sitting up straight on her stool or leaning a little closer to whatever Boston beer commercial guy or whoever, anyway some guy in a rugby shirt, was working his pickup lines in some Kenmore Square or Comm Ave singles bar. He wasn’t going to get anywhere though. But Flor liked attention. She liked telling her stories. The Irish like telling their stories too, so it wasn’t an unusual thing to do in a Boston bar, especially in response to strangers’ prying questions; it was Flor’s own kind of blarney. We’d both be home for Christmas and we’d just go out but she’d never even tell them she went to Wellesley or later that she’d gone there and now lived and worked in New York.

  “Wow, that’s wicked far. All the way from down there, gee . . . You look . . . you look kinda like Bianca Jagger. Isn’t she from down there?”

  “Nicaragua. Like Bianca Jagger? Oh no. She has a sour mouth.”

  “Well I’ve nevah tasted it hah hah hah ...”

  —and she’d be smiling even more like a Japanese girl. I used to hate watching guys hit on Flor and two or three times, in later years, infuriated her by losing my temper, which I very rarely do. Then she’d have to use all her cleverness and charm to keep him, along with the them who usually lurked somewhere behind that him, from beating the crap out of me. Boston, as the whole world supposedly knows, is infamous for racial intolerance, outside the sanctum of its prestigious universities of course. But Moya has told me that even the Somalian student he befriended at Harvard, a political “refugee” like himself, when out walking in Cambridge had to put up with drive-by carloads of teenagers shouting “nigger.” When some slightly more grown-up version of that sort of Boston boy finds himself thinking he might be on to an exotic lay, that’s when you get the flip side.

  “OK, you’re prettier than Bianca. What’d you say your name is?”

  “Purísima.”

  “Pooreesahma? That’s a pretty name. That’s neat.”

  “Let’s go to Spit,” I would probably interject here, talking just to Flor and referring to a rock club near Kenmore Square.

  “Geez,” the Boston boy would usually persist, dazedly shaking his invariably large head. “How long have you been living here?”

  “Where?”

  “You know, in the States.”

  “Fourteen years.”

  “So you’re practically American.”

  “I am American.”

  “But you still have your accent, you know.”

  “I do?”

  “So did you go to school here and everything?”

  She’d nod.

  “That must have been kind of tough, huh? Getting used to a new language and a new place and the snow and everything?”

  “Oh, not so hard. Not exactly the Helen Keller story, you know what I mean?”

  Not exactly the Helen Keller story, I must have heard that one a million times.

  So questions like that. Did you move here with your parents? She’d just shake her head no. What do you do now? And she’d say something like “Oh, I work for Star Market, in the accounting department.” And they’d say something like “That’s very impressive,” and then wouldn’t want to hear very much more about it.

  “What I always wonder is, OK—you’re from down there. And you come here. And you’re from that country and it’s—don’t get me wrong, OK?—it’s poor, right?”

  “That’s what you always wonder?”

  And he’d laugh, kind of shyly and kind of self-deprecatingly, this followed by an almost visibly surging inner determination, because he’s serious, and just a second ago he was really getting somewhere here, wasn’t he? But something in her attitude is beginning to rile him, because who does this squeaky beaner think she is, Bianca Jagger? Star Market, big fucking deal!—and his eyes briefly search out the jokingly glancing but envious eyes of his buddies at the end of the bar, and their eyes seem to say, Nice tits! Go for it, Sully!—OK, he will, he is, so she thinks she’s hot shit, he’s Sully, not a dope, not a wimp, not just some redneck. What’s behind that smile of hers? Foreigners, shit, like she’s Laotian or something . . . For some reason he has to swallow hard just once before going on . . . (And I’d be getting mad too, wondering why the hell you just couldn’t find a polite way of asking him to get lost and yet knowing why.)

  “So everyone wants to come here. It’s poor there, hey, it’s what it is, and there’s money, there’s work here. It’s the American Dream, right? Who can complain? But it can be hard here too, I know, racism and shit, stuff. But you’re here! But, like . . . What’s it like? What was the first thing that really blew you away, made you go, you know, Wow, the USA! Different, but it’s gonna be worth it. Or maybe not worth it, you know what I mean?” Phew.

  “Boy, let me think about that a second, the first thing that... I know! The police!” All the time smiling, in my opinion anyway, something like a Japanese girl, that is, with a certain distancing formality and a certain seemingly naive playfulness and a certain coldness or even cruelty or maybe loneliness behind that sunny and accommodating smile.

  Big disappointed nods, a sympathetic look, and he’d say, “The police, they hassled you—”

  “Oh no! Quite the contrary! They were great ...” Rosy cheeks, blue eyes, big strong not like raisins et cetera, he’d have to stand there and listen to the whole nutty thing, his own smile getting pretty frozen as he wondered if she was dumping on him or maybe he’d be thinking, Squeaky Weirdo, what the hell . . .

  One of her stories—a version of which I imagine that guy in the bar having to stand there and listen to all the way through, one I know even Moya heard—was about both the police and one of her first trips into downtown Boston. She’d only been living with us about six weeks. And a blizzard hit Boston that afternoon. It was one of those once or twice a winter storms that always leave behind at least five feet of snow, completely burying the little statues of the Virgin attended by even smaller statues of rabbits and deer that the O’Briens kept on their front lawn, and that I could see from my quarantine perch at the picture window in the living room.

  My father had already gone to work when Flor left the house that morning, and my mother had said nothing to her about blizzard warnings, though a light snow was already falling. Maybe my mother hadn’t heard about it yet. She certainly doesn’t remember having heard of it. She was treating it like any normal day, sitting with me in the living room, Flor could recall, doing her homework—my mother ended up not driving in to college that day, though. Her only class was scheduled for the afternoon, and by then . . .

  Flor had long ago ascended the steps out of Park Street station, where the snow was already falling so heavily that Paul McCartney had abandoned his daily arena. But instead of turning around and coming right home, she’d wandered around. Of course she had. It was beautiful, and what did she know? The trees on the Common were turning white before her eyes; snow streamed like an endless parade of gauzy banners between the tightly wedged buildings of the downtown shopping district; shoppers hurried along the sidewa
lks as if too euphorically energized by the cold, clean carnival in the air to bother going into Jordan’s or even into that bargain hunters’ inferno, Filene’s Basement.