The Long Night of White Chickens

by Francisco Goldman

  “Aluuumbre, luuumbre de aluuumbre, Luuuzbel de piedraluuutnbre, sobre la podreduuumbre.“

  Flor, of course, thought his behavior strange and just sat back, wonder-ingly looking at him.

  “Asturias,” she finally said. “So?”

  (Because Moya’s recitation had been from the opening paragraph of Our Chapín Nobel Laureate’s most famous novel, may that bilious old turtle everlastingly fart in bitter peace in his ambivalent exile’s grave in Paris.)

  So what had Moya meant? Why Asturias and lumbre de alumbre? Saber. Who knows! Love, which was already happening inside him, is this kind of dance, furiously fast, full of instant and instinctual decisions. But it really did have something to do with his sense that Flor had been speaking highly polished words (“Namosetpolice,” et cetera) that she’d spoken a thousand times in her life already, an impression confirmed when he got to know her better, however brief, and of course tragically ended, that relationship was. Then what was different about the Chicken Light of White Night? wonders Moya. Was it that no one had asked her to tell these stories, her whole life story in one night, for such a long time? Was it something in the way Moya had drawn it out of her? Something happening in her secret life at that time? Something in the wonton dorado and sweet and sour sauce? in the spectral Far Eastern mood of the Fo Lu Shu II? Why, on this night, did telling her life story leave her feeling so vulnerable to love and if not to love to what?

  Moya had phoned Flor to ask for an interview on the “orphan situation,” and though he’d come on a somewhat more disingenuous mission than even that, he had soon determined to seduce her, and was on the verge of having actually seduced her by listening to her stories, only, just when he’d thought he was about to succeed, the thing with the chickens. A week later he did succeed and then he had to wait nearly two months to succeed again, and by that time, vos, he really was in love with her. Five weeks later Flor broke off their relationship because, she said, she needed to be sure it was not inexplicable passion more than love because she had learned too painfully that the former never ended well and wasn’t ready to go through that again. All in all it was, for Moya, an alarmingly feverish and disorienting period, full of many betrayals of the rigorous standards he’d always held himself to. Almost nightly they spoke on the phone. He had never in his life employed such impassioned logic as he did during those harrowing and epic conversations. He was certain it was explicable love and accused her of fearing the brilliant truth though he would never beg. Flor seemed to be coming around. Three weeks later, on the very night she died, he spoke with her on the phone and she said:

  “Arrgh! I don’t believe it! You may be right.”

  “Yes. I am! I will be right over.”

  “Give me through the weekend. What are we going to do? This is crazy. You’re eight years younger than I am. I don’t think I want to stay here anymore. Even if we went to Europe, what could you do there?”

  “Go to a university.”

  “Yeah, right. And the first nubile little Parisian who comes along . . .”

  “No, no, mi amor ...”

  “Sí, sí, mi amor! You’re totally Guatemalan, Moya, you can’t change. And I don’t want to live like an exile-bohemian. You see? I can’t possibly be good for you. And I don’t see you giving up on this place for long.”

  “But I am ready to! I . . . surrender!”

  “I’ll tell you one thing, no matter how much things ever change here, I’d never want to be Guatemala’s first lady, that’s for sure. My gosh, what a fucking nightmare that would be.”

  “Cómo?”

  And then she had laughed so delightfully that optimism and a new kind of terror had concurrently flooded through him.

  Where was Moya the night Flor died? At the newspaper office, and then he went home and phoned her. Had he believed what the newspapers said, that her “partners” had done it? A difficult question to answer. But for at least a few days he considered it a possibility, because so much can happen in secret, vos, and what was that compared with the shock of death? As for the prior rumors about her involvement, yes, of course he had heard them, but these he had ascribed, within minutes of meeting Flor, to the extravagant cynicism, envy, hypocrisy, and paranoia that pervaded and poisoned nearly every aspect of Guatemala City life like some biblical plague of maddened depravity. As for the shock of death . . . well, it wasn’t the first time that someone he knew and even cared deeply for had died, or vanished, just like that, not that one is ever really prepared. Maybe one could never really be prepared, but a key to survival in that sad country was to live as if one always was for anything. Moya still quietly feels that after that ultimate shock he was never “quite the same” inside again, though of course he strove to hide and even to conquer this.

  Why did Moya wait more than a year to contact Roger? Well, vos, several good reasons! What little information Moya had about the case, he’d just assumed Roger and his family had it too. Anyway, it had been twelve full years since they had actually been school friends. (Though he had seen Roger, briefly, in the summer of’79.) He was frightened of the indignation, disgust, and suspicion with which the Graetz family, and Roger especially, might receive the news that for a short while he had been Flor’s lover. (Roger, in fact, when he did finally learn of it, was not thrilled, and fundamentally refused to hear any more about it.) And one thing more about Moya and Flor’s love: they had agreed to keep it secret for the time being, it had been “Un Amor Secreto,” like so many others.

  But Flor had loved someone else too, another Secret Lover, one she never told Moya about. Moya had to learn of the existence of this person from Roger. Flor was a mature woman, of course, in her thirties, free to do as she pleased, and Moya has striven, since his adolescence, to rid himself of the more childish aspects of machismo, though he has never stopped feeling that in love a degree of possessiveness is not out of place. But Moya had understood then, for the first time, why Flor had delayed the onset of their brief relationship for two months, and perhaps why she had broken it off five weeks later. Instead of in an uncharacteristic frenzy, he might have spent those two months allowing love to bring Flor de Mayo into such clear and persistent focus that he would have been able to prevent both the break and the murder—the murder that never allowed that break to reach its predestined resolution. In his heart of hearts, Moya believes this is not a farfetched supposition.

  * * *

  It all began that long-ago night in the Fo Lu Shu II; began, perhaps, at the precise instant when Moya noticed two small flames of incredulity in Flor’s eyes and knew then that she had definitely registered his intention. Behind the superficial veneer of a woman animating herself for a newspaper interview that she’d felt unsure about assenting to in the first place, sat the actual Flor, getting ready to respond, Moya sensed, with patronizing teasing or outright ridicule, or stormy boredom. So he had to be careful.

  He felt himself at several slight disadvantages, all but one of which he had immediately foreseen: the fact that he’d been an occasional friend of her “little brother” Roger was one, because wouldn’t this make her think of him as “just too young”? Her mature and nearly intimidating beauty, of course, was another, though he had dared that situation before. It was the disadvantage that he hadn’t foreseen that was unsettling: he’d anticipated that she might at first be distant, but that she would at least be respectful, that she’d have some idea of who he was, of his relative prestige. Instead it was as if no one had ever filled her in on the special dignity and worth of at least the Public Moya.

  All the other foreign women who came to Guatemala and inevitably sought out Moya always brought a dignifying and even reverential air to their first meetings and, vos, this gave him much to work with. (And Flor was like a foreign woman now.) For in great American and European cities, at solidarity and university conferences and in editorial meetings, and even once, it had been inferred in Moya’s presence, in the actual halls of Congress, Washington, DC, women (and men too, tho
ugh fewer, and not quite in the same way) who cared for Guatemala and had been there or were planning trips there, spoke of Moya, and apparently said things like “Well, you must look up this Luis Moya Martínez. It’s amazing, the things he gets away with in his newspaper, even despite the State of Siege! True, his paper is little read compared with others there. But he’s very brave, and quite brilliant; I imagine that much of what he writes probably goes right over the heads of the secret police, if you know what I mean. Still, it’s amazing he’s alive. When you think of how many journalists have already been killed or disappeared there ... So young too! Quite handsome in a funny way! Though his hair is turning white.”

  But Flor stabbed out her cigarette and turned off his tape recorder, then said she’d leave if he didn’t stop looking at her that way. She sat back in her chair, both hands grasping the armrests, coolly returning his stare. It was as if, to Flor, Moya was just another Guatemala City newspaperman, and one she was only talking to because in boyhood he’d known Roger Graetz, in whose house in Massachusetts she’d commenced her norteamericana life.

  At first Moya was too stunned to speak. Everything stopped, even the breeze that had been rusdling the trees overhead, gently rocking the pastel paper lanterns and sputtering the flames of the butane torches in the corners of the patio, flames that had been sending glowing shadows waving across her face in an infinite series of variegated masks all modeled on the same person. It was still early evening, there were few customers. The waiters, who were not Chinese, stood chatting quietly by the archway that was an immense scarlet, gold-paint-embroidered dragon; the dragon separated the patio from the brightly lit, scarlet and gold dining area inside. The restaurant’s sound system was tuned softly to a radio station playing Latin Caribbean dance hits, and, though Moya was not much interested in pop music or dancing, it seemed to him that every merengue ballad was telling something like an orphan girl’s feisty and luckless story in Flor’s own disturbingly thrilling voice. She was dressed in white white jeans and a loose-fitting white blouse that made the shadowy shapeliness inside almost unbearable. A violet sweater was draped over her shoulders. Her almond brown cheeks were sun reddened from the outing to the beach she said she’d taken her orphans on the day before. Vos, it was like this: even the so smooth skin in the slight cavities of her collarbones, even her naked hands filled him with an almost frenzied desire to look brazenly under the table at her ankles and feet, though of course he did not do this. Her powerful, dark, nearly black eyes glowed like a gypsy fortune-teller’s. And her dense, soft, meandering hair fell over her shoulders like, Moya suddenly thought, an Alice in Wonderland’s, but black (as black as Flor’s heart would have to have been if even one tenth of what they said about her after her death, or even before it, was true—).

  “Flor de Mayo of Chiquimula, transplanted to the Land of the Mayflower!” that’s what he’d said, and then he’d beamed a wide smile—a British woman had told him that even his teeth looked intelligent—and then widened it some more so that she would understand.

  And she had turned off his tape recorder. “Moya, if you don’t stop looking at me like that ...”

  Then, finally, she said, “All right. What is this?”

  “Rum,” said Moya. “Why don’t we order rum, and Coke, and just talk.” Though Moya rarely drank, he wanted to now. “And an order of wonton dorado. It is excellent here.”

  “I thought we were going to talk about the orphanage,” said Flor.

  Moya was used to a certain complicitous sympathy, and to being treated, frankly, as a kind of hero; and, truly, whether he fully deserved such treatment or not, he accepted it all gratefully. (There were many people far more heroic, and humbler, in his country, though not so many left in the city.) It provided him with an escape from deeper tensions, insecurities, doubts, obsessions. But it had given him new obsessions too, including an obsession with foreign women. Their eagerness to approve of Moya allowed him more easily to close himself, freed him to play. He played his role responsibly, he was helpful to his visitors, he dutifully exchanged bits of information with them, and often inspired them with daring and outspoken insights and analysis much blunter than anything he could ever actually get away with in his newspaper, where he was daring enough! He accomplished all this even while camouflaging his essential secretiveness with exaggerated eloquence and many pregnant pauses, during which he appeared to be making up his mind whether or not to go on, and then didn’t. And they always paid the check.

  But when this dynamic was absent, he felt cast out to sea. Did Flor even read El Minuto? Or any Guatemalan paper? She ran an orphanage; it wasn’t possible that she could be living obliviously. He’d guessed that, especially in the context of a newspaper interview, ostensibly on the subject of orphans, she would be relieved not to be badgered about what they both knew was best left unsaid and was unprintable anyway (such as the reasons there were so many orphans) and would at least enjoy the distraction of his company. And he thought of himself as an expert distracter.

  Wouldn’t she find his audacity rather moving? Find even his undisguised advances moving, even if she chose not to respond? His interest in the story of her whole life moving? Didn’t she know who he was, that there were people all over the world who were astonished that he was even alive! Death threats routinely came his way (over the phone, in the mail, slipped under his door, once a bloody handkerchief in a small black box). He endured that, and never released even a whisper of self-pity, and in fact didn’t feel very much; he took full responsibility for the choices he had made in life and was not sorry about anything. But he frequently had a fluttery tic in his once otherwise healthy right cheek, and a weighty, perpetual storm in his gut, and sudden, unprovoked urges to whimper, which he always successfully defied. His hair was turning white. He certainly found himself moving enough—it was legitimate to admit that. He was twenty-five then, and didn’t yet foresee going anywhere but Guatemala. But foreign women came here and sought him out and thought what he did was important. And he did his duty by them, and then let them breathe into him a sense of cosmopolitan dazzle, let them fill him with the teeming if temporary daydream that he could belong in such cities too, that someday, when he could be free from Guatemala for a while, he could go live in one of those urban paradises and be rewarded. But he’d begun to discover that when those women went home to their cities and left him behind, he often felt a bitterness, an unjustified contempt even, that he tried and mostly managed to subdue, though he carried a little bit of it, carried it one grain at a time in his heart, into his next encounter.

  He always asked to hear about their childhoods in these places, which often they liked to talk about, though just as often they did so guiltily. But he pressed them to talk about it, because, no matter how many times they did, he always found something new to try to understand. Who were they? How had they gotten from there to here and why? Who was this gringafied Flor de Mayo Puac? Why had Flor left Guatemala and then, so many years later, come back to run an orphanage?

  “Look, I know how it is with you guys, OK?” said Flor, suddenly pleasant, as if she were not chastising him but gently rebutting a point he had made in some high-minded discussion merely to prolong it. “You can’t even go to the bank without trying to prove, to yourself of course, how easy it would be to make it with the teller. Oh yes, I know, you ‘re not like that, you went to the Universidad de San Carlos, the compañeras made dog food out of you if you tried. So you didn’t pull this stuff on San Carlos girls anymore. Not pulling it became a new kind of game. Sexy stuff, right? So what’s changed now?”

  “. . . Cómo?”

  She laughed. “You’re all the same, exactly the same! You left the university and discovered that women liked the old way better, minus the more belligerent aspects. So now you overdo it, but there’s a wink in there, an element of self-parody which you think adds to the charm. Well, maybe it does. Except when we’re not interested. I came here to talk about what I do. I sent an editorial, oh, mont
hs and months ago, to your paper, to Celso Batres, did he tell you?”

  “No,” said Moya.

  “He wouldn’t publish it,” said Flor, “but he met with me for lunch about it. Nice guy, actually. Which is what I’d always heard. He said the time wasn’t right for my strong views, though he said he agreed with them.”

  “And what were these views?”

  “I wrote that if the people with money in this country are going to support a policy of massacres in the highlands as a way of preventing revolution, then they have an obligation to look after all the abandoned and orphaned kids that policy is causing. Oh I know, they say they don’t believe that massacre stuff anyway, they never go up there, it’s not in the papers here, it’s Commie propaganda, well, who are they going to believe, their servants? So they’ll adopt a baby parrot, a macaw, a monkey, a curlew, but an Indian orphan, olvídate, forget it. Not one Guatemalan has ever tried to adopt a kid from my orphanage. Not one.”

  Moya felt almost instantly heartsick over her naïveté: Why would any even middle-class Guatemalans adopt an Indian orphan when for the equivalent of thirty dollars a month they could have one as a maid, gardener, or houseboy?

  “A curlew!” he said, forcing a laugh. “Carajo!”

  “I know it sounds naive,” she said. “It’s meant to. It’s wrong in every way, right? Burgueses adopting Indians? It would even and probably especially infuriate the guerrillas. But, see, I do what I do, pues. Your boss Don Celso said that what I’m really asking for is for Jesus to come back and make everybody here act better. Well, my answer to that is, Isn’t this the Devil’s reign? His way must have sounded pretty farfetched too before he got control of everything. Think back to what it’s like to live in a relatively civilized country, even this place was one once, for a while.”

  “Celso is very religious,” said Moya.