The Long Night of White Chickens

by Francisco Goldman

  She said, “Do you think I have an obligation or something to hide myself somewhere along El Sed’s route and wait for him to come along some night? Hombre, imagínate, here comes my father’s ghost. Moya, what would I say? Papito, here I am, Flor de Mayo, all grown up and gringafied now? Oh, poor Papito, let me carry your pail. Won’t you tell me who my mamita was?”

  TEN

  Here is the other of Flor’s most significant two letters, which arrived postmarked from Guatemala one month after her final visit to New York, almost four months before that final seventeenth of February, 1983. It was the next to last written communication I received from her, not counting her annual Los Quetzalitos Christmas card. It began with a “Dear Roger” and then just plunged in:

  “Maybe you are never so involved with a lover, so full of a sense of dramatic discovery about your lover, as during the days when you are trying to work up the decisiveness to leave him. Sensing the end, you begin to pull away, and resent him all the more because he makes it so difficult for you to finalize the break. In a way, I have come to realize, you don’t live in a small country so much as with it, in a way comparable to how you might find yourself sharing your life with a not necessarily complex but completely involving and painfully demanding person. You pick up habits, gestures, and deeper attitudes. One day this relationship can end, and you will go your own way, but what you’ve picked up might remain a part of you forever, and no one who doesn’t know that country personally will recognize these traits in you at all. Thus, in New York, someone well might say, ‘Why, how very French of you’ or how German, Japanese, or Russian, but how many people there will ever say, ‘Flor, how very Guatemalan of you,’ when faced, for example, with my strangely caustic delight over a news story about a wealthy young Colombian bridegroom honeymooning in New York who, while his virgin bride prepared herself for the consummation of their marriage in the bathroom of their luxurious hotel suite, jumped up and down on the bed out of happiness and anticipation. Jumped up and down so much, you see, from so much happiness and anticipation, that he became dizzy, lost his balance, and fell through the window that he’d apparently pushed the bed up against so that they could bask in the drama of the imperial view during the consummation. Eighteen stories he plummeted, dressed only in his leopard-patterned bikini briefs, gold crucifix, and Cartier watch, to his death on Park Avenue.

  “Many guatemaltecos had the chance to laugh or sigh with caustic or lamenting delight over that story when it was picked up from a North American wire service and prominently featured in the country’s most popular paper. But that same day’s New York Times made no mention of it. I didn’t see the New York Post, of course, but I would guess that if they did report it they stressed the possible suicide or murder angle. Perhaps they would have discovered that the Colombian bridegroom came from a loutish drug cartel family and the bride from a distinguished one fallen on hard economic times and for that or perhaps other reasons would not have been as inclined as the Guatemalans to take at face value the bride’s story of how as she prepared herself in the bathroom she could hear the bedsprings bouncing. Perhaps this is simply a question of cultural aesthetics or even morality, the type of story each culture prefers. I happen to know that the North American wire service report not only made no mention of the social standing of the newlyweds’ respective families, they didn’t mention what the groom was wearing as he plunged to his death either, nor what the bride heard as she prepared herself or said later. In fact, there was no mention of the bride’s actual activities before the fatal free-fall at all. The wire service merely told that a young Colombian honeymooner had fallen to his death from the window of an elegant hotel in New York City, but an enterprising Guatemalan newspaperman had embellished those details in a way that his countrymen would especially appreciate. I am always surprised whenever a visiting foreigner expresses the opinion that we are a dour bunch with no sense of humor at all.

  “So you can end up hating a small country just as you would a person. You cannot hate the United States, can you, with that sort of intensity without seeming a blind demagogue or extremist or plainly maladjusted—isn’t the United States just too big, too full of situations and choices? (Needless to say, I have some not at all well-traveled Guatemalan friends who would disagree.) You live in the United States, amidst it, surrounded by it, and yet somehow always way off to the side with almost everyone else, spun out by a great centrifugal force, by that muscular, naked Idea of our Greatness holding the rest of us by the tail and spinning: the blur has become our nearsighted and so controversial focus. (Notice my slippery possessives: my Guate, my USA.) But isn’t it true that certain abstractly peripatetic French philosophers count among our blessings particularly what so many prominent Latin American intellectuals denounce? Our theoretically blissful amnesia, our nation of Mr. Magoos driving through our neon Mojave of perpetually new new. Is that really the world I dispatch some of my quite historically prefaced orphans into? Is that more harmful than what the other side of the ocean offers them? Who am I to pass such judgments? But don’t I remain here now because I trust myself to decide better than anyone else? Better to rely on the providential handshake and love springing to life in baby breath—charmed eyes than on eeny meeny miney mo, cacara macara there fue, you to Sweden, you to Ohio, ho ho ho ... ?

  “You cannot really love the United States with the same focused particularity and compassion you might feel towards a small country either. You would not ever sum up your understanding of the United States over a cup of coffee or two and then find yourself weeping over it. Directing a black bitter laugh at the United States, is this not like spitting into a rain cloud? Shouting I love the USA is not much more poignant than standing up and waving a big Stars and Stripes at a televised sporting event. Triste—this is much too flea sized a word to ever apply to the United States. Guatemala is bottomless grief in a demitasse.

  “That’s really all I’ve been trying to say.

  “Listen, the city is so silent tonight, and a cool steady wind, like a minstral”—I guess that here Flor meant mistral, the steady wind that blows out of North Africa across the Mediterranean, unless she meant minstrel, or else an intentional evocation of both—“is fanning the leaves outside. If the wind is headed in the right direction, then it might carry into hearing range the roars and growls of the jaguars and lions in the zoo, which is less than a mile away. The jaguars from our jungles, mythological to the Maya, the lions from Africa. They wake up in their cramped cages roaring for their breakfasts of raw horse meat or in grief over their shattered dreams of jungle empires, and sometimes the wind will carry it here. Some of the children, when they hear it, talk of nothing else the next day. I more quietly share their enthrallment. But we take them frequently to the zoo, where we hear and see these animals up close. So it is this wind, liberating and blending the roars of Guatemalan jaguars and African lions into ‘last night’s’ single enchanted tigre, that seems magical.”

  * * *

  Moya, glassy eyed as if from sleeplessness and his eyebrows raised, softly said, “Yes. This one. Excelente, vos. Muy poética,” when I confronted him with this letter in Pastelería Hemmings. His hand movements became a little jerky, touching saucer, cup, tabletop, teaspoon; he briefly and gingerly stroked his ear, straightened in his chair, and stuck out his chin, looking at me with pursed lips. I’d never seen him so disarmed.

  “It’s this bit about that reporter writing for the most popular newspaper that threw me,” I said. I’d thought that meant the obvious Guatemalan daily, and Moya writes for El Minuto, a low-circulation broadsheet of never more than twelve pages owned by the extremely respectable Batres family. But the family really makes their money from ¿Dónde? by far the most popular “newspaper” in the country, but it isn’t a daily, and the Batres name appears nowhere in its pages. ¿Dónde? comes out once a week and blankets the country at ten centavos a copy and to say that it’s a Guatemalan National Enquirer is definitely an offense to the editorial standards
of the latter. The paper specializes in the sensational, which isn’t to say it evades the everyday reality. HE RAISED HIS GLASS IN A TOAST AND THE ROOF CAME DOWN ON HIS HEAD—the headline of a story on a man whose housewarming party ended with a fatal roof collapse. Infants born with frog heads, doctored photos to prove it, lots of that kind of thing. Instead of running a picture of a dead student’s shoes, it’s more likely to offer a close-up of his torture-smashed face—the Guatemala City firemen whose job it is to drive around the city at dawn picking up bodies make money on the side selling photographs of these victims to ¿Dónde?—above hysterical prose lamenting yet another ola negra of violence sweeping over the country, further proof of God’s displeasure with the prevailing amorality of the nation or something like that, and blaming no one else. Whenever Moya finds himself in a difficult situation at El Minuto, whenever he’s written something that, however oblique, has still caused death threats like demented snakes to come slithering across the city to El Minuto’s door, or has merely provoked phone calls to Celso Batres from the usual hyperventilating chorus of irate or curious military officers and prominent rightists seeking clarification, Celso Batres protectively banishes Moya to a pseudonymous byline in the pages of the scandal sheet until things have blown over. It was in ¿Dónde? that Moya embellished the wire service report of the bridegroom’s plunge; it is during his stints there that he composes the prophecies of the Prophetic Rats of Barrio Prado Vélez, a regular ¿Dónde? feature . . .

  But Moya recognized Flor’s letter because she’d read an abridged version of it out loud to him. So it was that kind of letter, thus its might-have-been-written-to-anyone tone. She’d been proud of it, he said, full of somewhat pretentious college girl pride over it. “Her manifesto,” Moya called it, still unable to shake off his authorial sheepishness.

  Of course I’d originally assumed that the lover in the letter was the other one, I mean, if that wasn’t really all just metaphor for “the small country.” But now I couldn’t bring myself to ask Moya, So were you the guy she was trying to break up with? Some secrets you preserve by not really wanting to know, but if death seals more secrets than anything else, so does the will to keep them, and Moya certainly has that.

  “Manifesto of what?” I asked him.

  “I was never sure,” said Moya, with a small, rueful smile. “Her manifesto of her right to hold long monologues with herself.”

  “Nothing wrong with that,” I said. “I wish she’d done it more ... She was trying to break up with Guatemala like it was a person?”

  “Pues, we know she was thinking of leaving.”

  “I thought anyone doing what she was doing would talk about leaving, but that having stayed so long already was like a proof she didn’t really want to. I thought this letter was more about why she was staying.”

  “I have to admit, Rogerio, I received it in another manner.”

  “That you were the guy she was trying to break up with?”

  He looked at me expressionlessly for a moment, and then out the window.

  “Well, let’s face it, Moya,” I said. “Maybe that is what she meant. Or she meant both. She just wanted to get away from everything.”

  “Some days she wanted to go, and on others, to stay,” he said, still gazing at the drizzling outside. “I was ready to go or stay with her, Rogerio, but I don’t think I ever truly understood why one or the other. No, it is certain that I did not since I did not know, pues, that there was someone else.”

  “Yeah. Look, we were both in the dark about a lot of things.”

  Our silence felt like an extension of the dreary rain and view outside. Mingled with the usual traffic sounds was the faint, chugging music of the blind lottery-selling musician sitting on the sidewalk under the ledge beneath us, playing a cumbia on a cheap harmonica and supplying his own rhythm section with a coin-filled woman’s compact case in his other hand—he’s there almost every day and he’s really very good.

  Moya, I know now, lay at the heart of another of that letter’s mysteries. Because it hadn’t come to me in the usual Los Quetzalitos envelope with Flor’s hand-drawn graphic of six happy quetzal chicks perched along a peaked roof and rising sunbeams radiating out from behind. This one came in a snazzy envelope from the Hotel Biltmore Maya—the snazziest hotel in La Zona Viva; one of the hotels, by the way and yet not at all incidentally, that Scobie Hunt and his wife, Anne, had been original investors in—and Flor had merely written the initials F.P. over the hotel’s return address logo.

  I’ve seen Moya do that, post his own Biltmore Maya envelopes, pseudonymously initialed though, in the mailbox in the hotel’s lobby. Because ordinary Guatemalan envelopes are not usually addressed to such cities as Cambridge, Berkeley, West Berlin, or even London and so on, these can be expected to draw the at least slight attention of G-2 letter openers in the Guatemala City central post office. The hotel’s mail goes directly to the airport, where, hopefully, the G-2 agents there don’t sift through it, matching return address names and initials against a list of registered guests. No reason to trust in the integrity of the Biltmore Maya: the management there, says Moya, has collaborated with military intelligence in bugging the rooms for years.

  Which is why he’s always telling me to be careful of what I write in my own letters and of what I say over the phone. Moya says that even if you think the content of your correspondence is totally innocent, you never know how they might interpret it, because a lot of them must be real ignorantes, vos. What do I think, it’s like the CIA, with at least a hundred great universities to go fishing in for young patriots seeking entry-level positions? What class of human being do I think G-2 finds to open mail? To listen in on international phone calls? Once, during a collect call Moya was making to the States, he could actually hear his eavesdropper having his or her lunch, the crackling paper of a sandwich or whatever being unwrapped, then the openmouthed and sticky chewing, the sucking peasant tongue searching out morsels hidden in rotted tooth crannies—So, sure, apparently they’re not that hard to fool: “Aunt Irene” means Amnesty International, that kind of thing. But you don’t want to draw attention to yourself, and you have to remember that you can never be really sure what will.

  Moya’s mother still does seamstress work for Anne Widow of Hunt. And Moya often visits his mother—especially when he wants her to sew him a new shirt or pants copied from one of the glossy fashion ads that Moya says he covertly tears from European magazines in fancy Zona 10 hair salons, ducking in without an appointment precisely for that purpose, sitting down to wait his turn for the “it-will-never-happen-vos” hair-coloring session and trim—“‘I don’t need to spend twenty quetzales to have my nostril hairs clipped, vos”—picking up a magazine, sneezing violently like a movie detective to cover his filching tear of the Armani or whatever page, then jumping to his feet to announce the news conference at the Palace that he almost forgot about—“. . . Ah la gran! I’m late! Perhaps another time. Hasta luegito!”

  Apparently his mother can sew anything. All Moya has to do is turn up with the ad and the bolts of fabric he buys himself from the textile stores in Zona 1. “Guatemala produces famous textiles and cheaply, vos!” It was on just such an evening a few years ago, when Moya was at his mother’s for a triumphant fitting session, that Anne Hunt’s chauffeur arrived at their door in a pouring rain with an umbrella and an urgent summons. After all these years, his mother still has no phone. Anne Hunt needed last-minute adjustments to an evening gown. “Why don’t you come along?” said his mamita, whom I have never met. “It’s been so long since you’ve seen La Doña.”

  Moya was in a happy mood. His pleated, olive green, cotton twill Armani pants and pale pink shirt fit perfectly. No seamstress like a mamita seamstress. Over his new outfit he wore the tight-fitting black Italian sweater that Edith, a West Berlin Green Party Angel, had brought him on her last research trip to Guatemala.

  So he accompanied his mother to Anne Hunt’s house, the new one adjacent to her school in a walled-in
complex high atop an El Greco hill near the golf course—heavy rain, lightning, those walls glowing like a fortress of pink marble under the mercury vapor lamps as they rolled up the drive. He’d never been there, and was always eager for the rare chance to see how Guatemala’s wealthiest lived.

  “Oh Luis, what a lovely surprise!” said a smiling, fatter, flaccid-faced Anne Hunt when she finally came into the kitchen where he and his mother, having been let in through the service door, had been waiting at the servants’ table. “Or Don Periodista Moya, I suppose I should say”—Don Newspaperman—this spoken, says Moya, with a polite but unmistakably insinuating chill. Her eyes widened a bit as she comprehended the fact if not the subtle, melancholy meaning of his prematurely whitening hair. Moya realized he’d never seen Anne Hunt without her makeup on, or dressed so girlishly gringa, in running shoes, jeans, and a Georgia Tech sweatshirt. He’d risen to his feet. She looked bad, vos, sad eyed, mean lipped despite the smile. That woman has suffered. Was he to kiss her on the cheek, a social equal? Of course not. She did give him her wide, damp hand, at the same time as she laid her other hand on his proudly and giddily beaming mother’s plump shoulder. His mother then told Anne Hunt, would you believe it, that Moya had been just so happy and excited to accompany his mama for this chance of greeting his old headmistress, so dear to his heart. “I know that God decides what will happen to each of us, but that my son . . . the proudest moment of my life ...” Moya felt his scalp scald as his mother went on about the night of the Colegio Anne Hunt graduation ceremony, when the graduating class had marched single file down the aisle joined by a soft, fragrant rope of white flowers borne over their shoulders, each carrying a white candle that each but one cupped against the wind, all the girls in white dresses with tiaras of white flowers in their hair, and Moya, the only male in the class to graduate on time and the first in three years, in a cheap white suit and white rose in his lapel and his candle blown out, while the Indian chamber orchestra, dressed in the same white suits, played “Pomp and Circumstance” on the wind-whipped, torchlit stage.