She was a severe Catholic but an ebulliently severe one, one who seemed to take from her religion—especially in the years since my grandfather had died—a daily mandate to impose her ebulliently authoritarian nature on everybody else. But eventually she just had to resign herself to the fact that her mandate didn’t extend beyond the borders of Guatemala. I mean, if life wasn’t teaching Abuelita that, what was it? In Massachusetts the applauding company of her Saints died down. The spring that Abuelita came to visit us in Namoset, she saw what was going on, but what could she do? She pretty much just had to keep quiet about it.
That was a few months after Flor’s party. Flor was still diligent about her housework—Abuelita would have had to notice that—and her studies. She wouldn’t be allowed to date—that is, to let Tony or any other boy pick her up at home in a car and then go someplace in it—until she was seventeen. But by the time Abuelita came to visit, Tony and others were already phoning the house and even dropping by sometimes. And Flor was allowed to walk into the square with boys by then, to sit in a luncheonette or Brigham’s, as long as it wasn’t dark. Often my father had to go to the kitchen door leading to the basement and call down, “Flor honey. Someone else might need to use the phone.”
Which is exactly what happened that evening when Abuelita was standing in the middle of the kitchen—she was restless and something of an egomaniac, and often preferred to stand and orate if everyone else was sitting. But my father at the door, calling down to Flor in so fond and undisturbed a way, really got to Abuelita—she turned into a statue, a squirrel-jowled, somewhat hunched and rotund statue with a live person trapped inside, staring with baleful disapproval through wide-open eyeholes at my father.
“Teenage girls and telephones, I bet it’s the same in Guatemala, the same all over the world! Geez, the boys are crazy about her . . . ,” he said, sounding hearty at first and then slowly trailing off. Then he left the kitchen, the Statue’s eyes on him. Rolling Stones music was coming from the basement. My mother, sitting at the kitchen table, lit another Kent. I was there, on the floor and partly under the table, hugging Klink and feeling puzzled. Bounding steps on the wooden stairs: Flor’s penny loafers, and then she was in the kitchen, grabbing a Coke from the fridge and opening it, leaning against the counter, smiling at Abuelita and at my mother and then at me and back at Abuelita. Klink’s tail drummed against the floor.
“Did you buy anything nice today, Doña Emilia?” Flor asked brightly, in Spanish, referring to Abuelita and my mother’s afternoon excursion to Filene’s Basement in Boston. Abuelita’s eyes seemed to widen just a bit more. And I had the thought—it felt just like learning the name of something—that it was disrespectful of Flor to have asked Abuelita if she’d bought anything nice, and I felt sorry for Flor for not knowing this too. My mother singsongedly said, “Yes, we did,” but she seemed flustered. Flor said, “Ah bueno. Me alegro,” nodding, holding her can of Coke in both hands and staring down at the flip-top opening. She began to lift the can to her lips but then, as if she couldn’t quite figure out how to, didn’t. She headed back towards the stairs, whispering buenas noches, and, without kissing me good night, descended. Klink wrenched free, followed her down. Then the music in the basement was turned down a bit. “Roger, get off the floor,” said my mother. I sat in a chair. “Nothing is hidden between heaven and earth, mija,” said Abuelita. “Would you like a cup of tea, mamita?” said my mother; she was glad, as always, to have cinnamon tea from Guatemala in the house again. The phone rang, simultaneously, at all its outposts in the house: the living room, my parents’ bedroom, the basement. My mother shut her eyes. Mercifully it only rang that once. The music in the basement was turned down some more.
I perhaps didn’t quite get that what had really turned Abuelita into a statue, more so even than my father’s familiarity, was her specific realization that our “maid,” whose salary she still paid, had her own phone in her bedroom and shared the line with the rest of us. But this was not a transgression that my mother could have easily explained away by revealing that the reason Flor had a phone in her room was that it was what she’d wanted for Christmas.
“. . . and she took me aside,” said Flor, “and said, ‘I see that you are happy, Flor de Mayo. You kept that part of your promise anyway, and I am happy for you. But I notice that, to my grandson, God is not too important.’
“Oh Moya, that lady, I was on the verge of tears, I swear. I told her I’d tried. Well, I had! Kind of. Well then she said, Don’t worry, calm down, don’t blame yourself, the U.S. has been disorientated ever since Castro murdered Presidente Kennedy, the whole world knows that. She said if Roger were a girl, well maybe then she’d be worried, but boys will be boys, they take longer, that kind of thing. She said, ‘But I think I do see signs in little Roger of a spirit that one day might find its strength through faith. I mean to say when he is much older. After all, miracles have been known to occur in this family.’ Then she told me about her Spanish father the rancher who was never religious either until he cured one of her infant brothers of cholera by giving him a drink from some shithole his cows drank from too, and this was the Virgin of Lourdes. Well I said, Yes, of course, I said, There really is something in Roger that God must like a lot, Doña Emilia, because he always wants to feed bread to the pigeons and ducks. Hah! Imagine? But you better believe I dragged Roger off to mass with me that Sunday.
“I was terrified of her. And you know what? I really had every reason to be—”
It was only when Abuelita went with us to Wellesley Square to watch the Boston Marathon runners go by that she really came forcefully to life again, the whitish light that always filled her eyes when she was full of her mandate rekindled. She charged out into the street in her orthopedic shoes waving a plastic Guatemalan flag, shouting, “Andale! Andale, muchacho! Viva Guatemala! Viva Mateo Flores!” at the inconsequential Guatemalan runner slumping by, while I took a freshly cut orange wedge from Flor and ran out to give it to him. Mateo Flores is the Guatemalan who’d won the Boston Marathon over a decade before, the most celebrated event in Guatemalan athletic history since gourd-headed Hunahpu and his brother outwitted the Lords of Xibalba on the Maya underworld ball court in the ancient Popol Vuh. “Just a poor little Indian raised on tortillas and beans and he outran the world’s strongest men,” I remember Abuelita telling me, bursting and just about apoplectic with ecstasy. “It was a miracle, I’m sure. Because that’s what love of country can do, mijito, that’s what made it possible for Mateo Flores to draw on the strength of every heart and leg in his country, even the poor cripple’s! And when he came home, the government gave him a house. A modern house but with a dirt floor so that he could go on living like an Indian inside it, with his wife cooking his tortillas over the fire!”
It was the same government that had given Mateo Flores the house, the democratically elected but leftist government of Colonel Jacobo Arb-enz, that just two years after the runner’s victory, in 1954, Abuelita had personally helped to overthrow, defying the government-imposed blackout of the capital by lighting charcoal in a pit in her patio and fanning it while she stared up at the sky—waiting for the sound of Castillo Armas’s National Liberation invasion force airplanes following a glowing path of patriotic grandmothers’ anti-Communist fires through the mountains and over the darkened city to drop their bombs and strafe the National Palace, where Arbenz was shitting in his pants and preparing to flee the country.
Of course Abuelita had no way of knowing that those were CIA-provided and mercenary-piloted planes, that Castillo Armas couldn’t have had less to do with them if he’d tried—not that she would have regretted it much, or at all. Because it is also true that an Arbenz magistrate had once summoned my grandfather and Uncle Jorge into court because of something or other a disgruntled employee had claimed, and fined them and even threatened to confiscate the family business if the employee’s claims were not corrected. To which my grandfather had replied, “You’ll need bigger balls than mine to get awa
y with that, and I don’t think you have them, señorito mío,” and then had started undoing his pants to taunt the magistrate with his balls. But he was restrained at the very edge of exposure by a grinning policeman’s submachine gun perfunctorily leveled at him from across the courtroom.
The point being that Abuelita’s patriotism was as ebullient as her feeling for God and absolutely inseparable from it. There was a Guatemala that God approved of and all the other possibilities which He didn’t. And the Guatemala He approved of had everything to do with Order: orderly progress that was only possible through Order; and the indisputable degrees of respectfulness and deference due across the gradations of that order which kept the whole wholesome, law abiding, stable, positive, and right (and which made it inconceivable that any hardworking, dignified man would ever have to defend himself from unprecedented insults against family and property by threatening to display his balls in the atheist’s courtroom).
All of this she believed deeply, with all the feeling for beauty, piety, and healthy vitality she was capable of. None of it translated too well to my father’s USA, of course, though my mother in her very particular way has always believed in similar values and proprieties. This has found expression in her exaggerated fondness for Calvinist sayings such as “Idleness is the Devil’s playground” and in her quiet, incremental rejection of the local Catholicism in favor of her search for a more individual version of Abuelita’s symmetries and mandates. By the time I was in high school, for example, my mother was for a while quite seriously taken with the Carlos Castaneda books on the teachings of Don Juan, and though she never was about to ingest peyote in search of illuminating visions like the ones that Indian brujo and his scribe-apprentice had, she really loved the rhetoric of discipline and deference apparently expressed in those books, all that stuff about being a lonely Yaqui spiritual warrior, a controlled warrior in search of enlightenment in the modern world. “I am a controlled warrior,” she would actually say, fighting down her frustration over one thing or another, even having to cook dinner, which she’d never in her life had to do on a regular basis until Flor went away to college.
* * *
The one summer that Flor did accompany us down to Guatemala she paid her own way from money she’d saved working part-time at Brigham’s and the little bit on the side my father had given her for good grades. She was seventeen, and had just completed the sixth grade. Flor and my mother had agreed beforehand that in Abuelita’s house no one would say she was a maid or try to treat her like one, though she would help out a bit with the housework.
But as soon as we arrived Flor learned that she would have to sleep in the maids’ quarters. The explanation she was given was that I had my own room, my mother had hers, one room in the back had been converted into a temporary warehouse for thousands of Uncle Jorge’s unsold imported Hula Hoops, and there was no longer a bed in the other spare room because Aunt Lisel had claimed the old four-poster bed in there for the brand-new house that Uncle Jorge had just had built in Zona 10. So if Flor wanted to go out and buy her own bed, mandated Abuelita, she was welcome to. But the extra cot in the maids’ quarters was staying where it was!
So Flor went out and bought her own bed, and blew all her money on it and the delivery. And she pretty much stayed in that room from then on, reading and keeping the door closed, just going out now and then to check more books out of the Guatemalan American Institute Library, to visit old friends and mentors at the Espíritu Santo convent a few times, or to pick me up from the Colegio Anne Hunt, where, as always, I’d been enrolled for the summer.
Soon no one was speaking to anybody: Abuelita’s maids weren’t about to take this I’m-not-really-a-maid stuff from Flor, not when old Chayito and some of the others even remembered the day when Abuelita had gone to the convent orphanage to choose her. And Flor stopped speaking to them, not that she had much from the start anyway. And eventually the maids even stopped speaking to me, because they felt betrayed by my alliance with Flor. I stoked the bad feelings considerably by suddenly refusing to let any maid clear my plates after meals, carrying them into the kitchen myself as if instructively liberating them from their degrading labors.
Until Abuelita said, “You do that again and you can start shining shoes in the streets like any other ishto bobo, because I won’t give you a thing to eat until you can pay for it, mijito mío.” And when I did do it again she grabbed my arm by pincer claws and dragged me right out into the patio and sat me down in front of a pile of her black orthopedic shoes with polish, rags, and a brush and said, “Get to work and God give you strength because you’re not coming in until they’re done and then we’ll see, mijito mío, if you still think a servant’s work is something to be disrespectful of.”
My mother could barely bring herself even to pronounce Flor’s name anymore and sought any excuse to flee the house, her very existence on earth confirmed daily by the newspaper society-page photographs where her face was as ubiquitous as a postal stamp, always saying “cheese” at one baby or bridal shower baptism ladies’ club fashion show and evening gala after another. She accepted every invitation to spend weekends at friends’ coffee fincas, ranches, and beach houses, always bringing me along and leaving Flor alone at home with Abuelita and her maids to await the inevitable calamity of my return.
Because I always came back from those trips in bad shape, covered with mosquito and chinche bites, mottled with sunburn and rashes; limping from a fall out of a breadfruit tree, or with my hands swollen and on fire from the invisible spines growing all over a big green bamboo I’d grabbed onto as if it were a fire station pole; vomiting, dysenteric, and hallucinating with fever from the bad clams I’d eaten in Puerto San José, where I’d also been saved at the very last second from one of those implacable Pacific undertows by an anonymous German wearing just underpants who appeared out of nowhere and clasped my wrists when I was already vertical and rushing backwards on a long underwater journey—somehow those events along with my missing and worrying about Flor left alone with the maids and Abuelita always managed to reduce my emotional maturity to that of a five-year-old by the time we returned, to the endless annoyance of my mother and whoever we were traveling with. That was the summer I was endlessly being scolded to act my age, which was nine.
The long Sunday evening drives back from wherever we’d spent the weekend always became excruciating as soon as the highway winding down out of the mountains or up from the coastal plain began passing cliffsides painted over with political slogans and billboard after billboard standing in the roadside weeds advertising ladies’ underwear, aspirin, French restaurants; the city at night suddenly visible through breaks in the landscape, a vast, intricate net of lights spread across the bottomless night far below, Flor just down there but still an hour to go because of the traffic stacking up behind trucks inching along like a circus parade of decrepit, flatulent elephants.
But finally we’d get there and a maid would let us in and I’d rush through the parlor, where Abuelita always sat watching television or listening to Chayito read out loud to her from a Zane Grey cowboy novel, and into the covered passageway along the central patio to Flor’s room. Her only window faced the patio, light shining through the cracks in the old, flayed wood of the drawn shutters; I’d push the double doors open without even knocking. I was the only one admitted to the bare sanctum of that room—and the only one who wanted to go in anyway—where Flor passed her strange summer like a medieval princess awaiting the return of her promised one from a ten years’ crusade, reading, thinking about Tony, listening to the radio, her head full of the same inane jingles repeated every three minutes on every station. Against the pale green wall where the bed Aunt Lisel took away had been and beneath the plain wooden crucifix and the framed painted eye radiating rays in all directions into painted clouds, angels, and the gilded logo Dios lo ve todo, God Sees All, Flor had parked her own bed of profligate but I think supportable pride.
And then she lay there day after day, defiant
ly and brazenly; inwardly mocking Abuelita’s piety and striking some note of heretical triumph within herself; thinking scornful, wicked, hateful things and forbidden, frightening, intimate things; indulging herself in languorous daydreams to fill the hours when she wasn’t reading; at times even enjoying this summer of hermit’s hibernation from a more perplexing and complicated reality, and at other times bored out of her mind.
But those weekends spent alone in the house with Abuelita and her maids were Flor’s true punishment for being herself that summer. She spent them even more reclusively than she did her weekdays. The younger girl still left inside her was just plain furious over being left behind, but that wasn’t all.
Because the very first weekend that my mother and I had gone away, Flor had ventured out on her own that Saturday afternoon, and when she’d come home in a driving rain Abuelita’s maids had let her stand out there ringing the bell until finally she’d had to retreat down the avenue to the shelter of a little tienda, a one-room cave of a grocery store with a steel shutter that was pulled down over the front at closing time. And that was where Flor passed the two hours that became her story of the two hours of somewhat opaque self-discovery that she would forever tell to explain her side of what happened that summer, and what she learned from it.
In front of the counter in that tienda were two small tables with chairs, and Flor sat at one, ordering nothing since she had no money, her arms wrapped tightly around her drenched self, while the men drinking beer and licking salt off their palms at the other stared, hissed, and clucked at her in the violating and weirdly tormented manner of Guatemalan macho amorousness, calling her “little brownie” and offering her everything they owned and would ever own though she knew better than to let them buy her even an agua and a tamal.
The Long Night of White Chickens Page 26