The Long Night of White Chickens

by Francisco Goldman

  “Didn’t the consul recommend against it?” I said. While he had recommended against a public funeral and wake, he’d said nothing against a discreetly private service and burial in the General Cemetery.

  “He absolutely recommended against it,” said my father. He took a few steps towards me and spread his hands, then dropped them to his sides. “Sometimes your mother—Well, she gets things in her head.”

  “She has her own sense of proprieties,” I said. “They’re important to her.”

  “She is always so concerned about what people down here will think,” he said. “She’s under a lot of stress there, all by herself. She’s all by herself, Rog. And people who knew Flor have been phoning, and she has been telling them that the funeral’s down here ... It must be terrible for her. Maybe we shouldn’t have left her alone, but. . . ,” and he shook his head. “We had to do it, Sonny.”

  “I don’t think either of us could have handled it alone, Dad.”

  Minutes later the phone rang. Uncle Jorge was in the lobby, waiting to take us to dinner at his house. (“ . . . Ay, what a terrible event,” said Uncle Jorge. “This kind of thing is always bad, bad for Guatemala.” “Well, in fact, it isn’t clear, not at all, Roger and I are not convinced of.. .” “What about what the Swede said, Dad?” “He was just after a bribe, Rog, and maybe she paid it to save that kid’s life.” “But where’d she get twenty thousand if she did—?” “Roger, what are you saying? Maybe she didn’t have to pay anything in the end, because the diplomatic community came to her defense!” And Aunt Lisel interrupting, “Remember when pobre Chato, our guardián out at the chalet, was killed? He had a family, children . . .”)

  It was the previous afternoon that my father and I had gone to Funerales El Progreso to meet with Señor Acevedo, a portly, doll-faced man with recently sun-reddened cheeks and nose and a tiny, fastidious mustache. You wouldn’t say that his small button eyes were merry, exactly, but they didn’t even come close to achieving that butlerlike solemnity and discretion that you’d imagine would be instrumental to the demeanor of a highly successful funeral home owner, and Señor Acevedo was definitely that. Sharp and frank, that’s what his eyes were like. He assured us that his security guards, “trained by Israelis at a private academy in Panama,” were absolutely top-notch. Even if, before flying home, we wanted to hold a service so that people could come and pay their last respects, he guaranteed, money back, that there would be no troublesome intruders, either inside or out.

  My father repeated Consul Simms’s advice about how, in light of the uproar in the Guatemalan media, he did not think that would be best.

  “One thing we’ve all learned in Guatemala,” said Señor Acevedo, “is not to hold respectable families to blame for whatever their deceased might have done in life”—which I incredulously translated. “If this were not so,” he went on, “I tell you the truth, almost no one would hold funerals and I would be selling tamales and atol in the streets.”

  Even now I feel the same slow chill spread over my skin as I did when I had to turn from Señor Acevedo to my father and speak those words. My father gaped at me as if I’d thought them up myself.

  “No,” said my father. “No. If you could just prepare her for the flight to Boston.”

  Señor Acevedo nodded lightly and said, “Bueno,” and switched to adequate English, speaking details and dollars and cents: Guatemalan funeral homes don’t use embalming fluids as in the United States, so this costly process would have to be done in Boston, we’d have to contract a funeral hearse to meet us at the airport, you know at U.S. Customs they might open the casket, dogs will sniff for drugs, a funeral in Guatemala would spare us these expenses and difficulties, but as you wish. I sat there, in the funeral café, sipping my coffee and trying to work through a thought about Señor Acevedo being a kind of Guatemalan King Midas or maybe a younger King Cole the merry ole soul, ruling over his Kingdom of Violent Death with a necessary and frank good humor that his upper-class subjects had learned to emulate in order to make the transactions of daily life bearable and appropriately banal. (Just the other day when I joined Uncle Jorge and my cousins in Pastelería Hemmings during their morning coffee break, Uncle Jorge suddenly turned to my cousin Freddie and asked, “Isn’t it true that Beto Cambranes was assassinated a few years ago?” “Yes,” said Freddie. “Didn’t he used to rent a warehouse from us?” And Freddie nodded yes. “Well then he’s resurrected. Because he said hello to me when I was walking on La Sexta yesterday. Ah la granl”—and then his thunderous, jolly conquistador’s laugh.)

  My father said later, when we’d left Funerales El Progreso, “A funeral home with a cocktail lounge inside it, imagine! And he talks about selling food in the streets! That fat pimp.”

  Moya says (though somehow I already knew it) that Funerales El Progreso, in recent years, had expanded into a brand-new building capable of conducting eight funerals at once. From the outside it looks like the corporate headquarters of any midsized high-tech firm on Route 128 outside Boston, a streamlined but monumental design. And inside it does in fact have a café and cocktail lounge with appropriately subdued lighting and classical music playing. Gleaming light green marble floors and walls and dark hardwood finishings, airport metal detectors inside the front doors, and a sign politely but firmly stating that “Caballeros” are required to check their weapons in the coatroom. During the worst of the urban violence, says Moya, it was not unusual for all eight of the funeral home’s facilities to be in use on a single night. Many dutiful and well-connected people found themselves having to return there several times a week, or having to pay their respects to more than one family on the same evening, going first to stand briefly before the closed casket (or for as long as it took to say good-bye and then coolly flee the room without giving informers the chance to memorize faces or to report the telltale signs of suspicious bereavement, for example, overwrought and vicarious identification with the physical condition of the deceased, not despite but because the casket was closed) of the youngest daughter of a prominent family, a university psychology professor and volunteer social worker, reputedly tied to the left; and then next door for the wake of yet another assassinated wealthy Christian Democrat politician; and then, after an understandably relaxing cup of coffee or drink in the lounge, upstairs to where the young psychology professor’s second cousin, a coffee plantation owner, executed by the guerrillas, lay in state. Outside, security guards stood with their Uzis, while others patrolled parked vehicles, poking bomb detectors that resembled long-handled dentist’s mirrors under the fendors, exchanging hot-eyed stares with the personal bodyguards and chauffeurs of the mourners. In 1981, I’m sure, Señor Acevedo would not have bothered to solicit our business through the embassy. But in two years enough had changed in certain sectors of Guatemala City. Professors at the public university from prominent families and even not so prominent ones who had survived were living now in Paris, Madrid, Mexico City. Finqueros were no longer so defiant or foolish as to visit their own plantations, letting their administrators take the hits. The guerrillas’ clandestine networks in the capital had been decimated to the point where they no longer had the capacity to carry out “armed actions” there. And if it was still dangerous to be a very wealthy but moderate politician, they had become so expert in their own security arrangements that it would take at least a small military strike force with grenade launchers and even a helicopter gunship hovering over to successfully ambush one of those armed caravans in traffic—which, of course, remembering Mayor Colom Argueta, has been known to happen in just that way. But if Funerales El Progreso is not quite as in demand as it used to be, the funeral parlors that cater to poorer people have remained busy. You see them all over Zonas 1, 4, 7 . . . like cheap Las Vegas wedding chapels, their signs advertising that they stay open twenty-four hours and other amenities.

  Let Flor’s funeral wait.

  TWELVE

  The party hadn ‘t turned lively yet. Flor, Zoila the Cuban maid, Ingrid the
German, and Delmi Ramirez and the handful of other Cuban girls who’d been delivered by my father from the bus stop in Namoset Square hours before were sitting on folding chairs in the basement, playing records, eating potato chips, waiting—Flor, no doubt with my father’s encouragement, had persuaded my mother to let her have her own Friday night party in the basement as a substitute for the formal quinceañera, or sweet fifteen party, that of course my mother wasn’t about to throw for her anyway. It was late winter, and Flor’s sixteenth birthday was only a few months away. She’d already been jumped ahead to the fourth grade.

  Zoila, barely eighteen herself at the time, had introduced Flor to the once-a-month Sunday afternoon dances at the Cuban Institute in Boston, and even Ingrid would go with them sometimes and then Delmi, having come up from Guatemala to take the job as a maid for a very wealthy family in Chestnut Hill that Flor had found for her on the bulletin board at the Cuban Institute, always did.

  I heard car doors slamming and Latin male voices laughing, talking, and I ran to a window to see the boxy sedan pulled up in front of winter’s perpetual snowbank and the eight Cuban boys who’d just gotten out of it. Teenagers, most of them, maybe a few were already in their twenties. They came clattering up the icy driveway, still talking and laughing, the red points of their cigarettes zigzagging in the dark. They didn’t wear overcoats. They were dressed, every one of them, in sleek black suits, white shirts, and ties, their hair as exaggeratedly styled as their pointy, patent leather black shoes. Flor had heard them from the basement and was already waiting upstairs when they came in through the breezeway and into the kitchen on sixteen legs in a cold cloud of cigarette smoke and colognes, their hard heels dancing over the linoleum. And she stood there grinning ear to ear, in a white sweater and pink skirt, a pink barrette pushing back her hair.

  Then she introduced them one by one to my parents and me—Flor knew all of them by name. While those mysterious shoes kept moving, fourteen shoes at a time, kept tapping, sliding, jostling, making it seem illusory that two shoes at a time were actually still for the brief moment it took to stand at the front of that impromptu receiving line—where the shoes’ owners one at a time extended their hands in greeting:

  “How do you do. Polite kids. Very nice. Your friends are polite boys, Flor.” My father was chortling.

  Except Domingo, the wildest one, squat and hyper, was all forward motion like a soccer winger breaking for the goal; even his jelly-rolled black hair seemed to be moving forward—“Domingo!” Flor actually seemed to sing his name out as if that were the only way to make it keep up with its owner. Domingo kissed my mother’s hand while his shoes kept moving forward to the rhythm of the music playing on the cheap hi-fi downstairs, and before my mother knew it she was being mamboed across the kitchen floor. She let herself be led for a few startled steps and then exclaimed, “Ay no!” So that Domingo let her go. Klink, my German shepherd puppy, barked. My father chortled some more. My mother giggled. Domingo stood straight in the middle of our kitchen and, right there, began to applaud.

  And Flor said, “This is Antonio.”

  “Toño,” said a soft but manly voice. It wasn’t until later that Flor began to call him Tony. He was, of course, the handsomest, the tallest, the suavest, with soft gray eyes, smooth cheeks, and a cleft in his chin, his thick oat brown hair brushed straight back over his high, golden forehead. His shoes glided like shadows under his long legs as he stepped forward to take my mother’s, then my father’s hand. Then he smiled for just a second at Flor, swerved suddenly to notice me, seemed to straighten even more as he looked down at me, smiled, nodded, said, “Hola, caballero,” and then he looked back at my mother:

  “I’ve never before known what I know is true now, señora. Guatemalan women are the most beautiful in the world.” He was proud of his fluency in English.

  “You can say that again,” said my father.

  “Thank you,” said my mother. “But have you met so many?”

  “Flor, Delmi, and you, señora.”

  Flor blushed, his friends hooted. I gaped, for even I knew that this wasn’t such a great thing to have said.

  My mother’s laugh dropped from an ice tray. “I don’t think,” she said, pleasantly enough, “that that is really a large enough sample for such a strong opinion.”

  A split second later, led by Domingo’s war whoop, sixteen hard heels were stampeding down the wooden stairs to the basement. And Flor, like a Cinderella, what else, beamed at my mother as if unable to comprehend such excitement in her life and said, “Gracias, Doña Mirabel, ay gracias,” and then followed her friends down.

  I spent that night, until I was sent to bed, crouched on a step midway down watching, while Klink whined and yelped and pawed behind the shut kitchen door—he was still too excitable to be allowed into the middle of a party.

  Tony liked to wear the calm, serious expression of a discerning apprentice jeweler—he was nineteen and, back then, was working in a jewelry store in a shopping plaza in Watertown—but this was contradicted by his obvious high spirits. He danced with all the girls. But now and then he’d turn his gaze across the basement room at Flor, and whether she briefly returned the look or not he would smile the way you sometimes see someone smile just after they’ve received a shock that is about to make them cry. Then he’d spread his arms and shout, “Niña de Guatemala!” or “Girl Eh-Scout!” and stride towards her. Several times that night he seemed to relive that same epiphany of impulsive delight and delivery. And Flor, who hardly unclasped her hands from her belly all night, would look down at her shoes. So their conversations didn’t last very long.

  “I bet you are the only girl in kindergarten to have such a wonderful party,” I heard him say, in Spanish, from where I sat, though I would hear Flor recall this conversation often, fondly or in self-recrimination, in the coming years. Flor kept her eyes on her shoes and said, “Ay Toño! No seas tan malo!”—don’t be so awful!

  “Malo? Yo? Aren’t you in kindergarten? Or something like that?”

  “You know I’m not,” she bleated, glancing quickly from her shoes at me and then finally right at him. “But if you’re so sure, then there’s nothing more to talk about.”

  “You are a beautiful beautiful flower,” he said, cupping her chin in his hand. And then he went away. Minutes later he went through his act of discovery and exclamation all over again and came back. “Now I remember! Fourth grade! And what do they teach you in the fourth grade?”

  “A otro perro con ese hueso!” she nearly shouted—Take that bone to another dog! And Tony went away laughing out loud to dance with blond, bird-faced Ingrid, whose German father was soon to ban her from seeing or receiving telephone calls from Cuban boys. Flor smiled up at me on my perch and waved excitedly for me to come down, while I made a big show of shaking my head no.

  Flor didn’t know how to mambo then, or was too shy to. The others danced mambos, rumbas, salsas, and, after I was sent to bed, made a conga line and held a limbo contest. Flor owned Chubby Checker’s limbo single, and for weeks after we had to practice in the basement after school—the steps were pretty easy, you just had to bend backwards and walk-dance-stagger under the broomstick we suspended between the rungs of two chairs and kept lowering until we couldn’t approach it without falling backwards onto the floor.

  “—You must have had many boyfriends.” Moya beamed, when it was still fairly early during the Larga Noche de los Pollos Blancos.

  “No, I really didn’t,” said Flor.

  “This I cannot believe,” said Moya.

  “Well, not serious ones. I spent most of my adolescence in elementary school, what was I going to do, date the Pee Wee hockey star? I had one boyfriend.” And she looked at her watch. “Just one, really, when I was a girl. It’s getting kind of late.”

  In a panic that she would leave, Moya blurted, “I remember seeing you, sabes? You came to meet Rogerio at the Colegio Anne Hunt, and I saw you.” But maybe this was not a good tactic, because wouldn’t it
remind her of their difference in age? Yet he seemed to have recaptured her attention. “I thought you were so beautiful that I did everything I could to get Rogerio to invite me home with him so that I might have the chance of getting to know you better. But he never did. At night, I wrote you letters.” Moya did vaguely remember seeing Flor, but of course the rest wasn’t true, what he had really wanted was that electric train displayed annually in Arrau’s Christmas window.

  “Moya, gimme a break,” said Flor, smiling in such a way that he knew that his arrow of flattery had finally struck that covertly ticklish spot inside. “You were just a little boy, you were Roger’s age!”

  * * *

  Abuelita sent us Flor so that my mother’s Codrioli Road penance wouldn’t have to include housework too. But also because three Spanish ambassadors in a row had taken girls from the Las Hermanas del Espíritu Santo orphanage back with them to Spain—so claimed Abuelita anyway, scolding my mother in the tiny cement courtyard where she kept her caged canaries and finches during that one summer that Flor, seventeen, did accompany us down on our annual two-month visit.

  But Abuelita must have had her own interpretation of the nuns’ mission, because it really was as if she’d believed that God’s and the Communion of Saints’ and her own religious will, exerted and expressed through poor Flor, might somehow make us more like one of those families, like the family of one of General Franco’s ambassadors from Spain—as if my father would suddenly start making money hand over fist, convert, join the Knights of Malta, all just to live up to the willful expectations of an Espíritu Santo girl.

  Only my father, as usual, too coarse and unrefined a man to recognize his own offenses against dignity and order, had interfered in God and Abuelita’s plan and distracted Flor from her mission, to which the tedium of all-day housework and narrowest ambition were essential, by putting her in school. And then everything that came after. Eventually he even let Flor take an evening job dishing out ice cream in Brigham’s in Namoset Square. My mother said, “People will think we don’t pay her. I mean don’t give her money,” and my father said, “Mirabel, she should start saving for college.” And who was going to tell him any of it was wrong? Not even Abuelita, not to his face anyway.