The Long Night of White Chickens

by Francisco Goldman

  She sat there glaring through the rain and the thickening dusk, past the rectangular pastel facades of the simpler and smaller houses along the avenue at the higher, custard-colored and red tile–fringed walls of Abuelita’s much bigger house. And she asked herself how it was possible to have gotten into so stupid and humiliating a predicament, with Abuelita’s maids hating her so much that they wouldn’t even let her come in from the rain. And then she decided that although she felt more scorned and rejected than she ever had in her life, there was not one thing she would have done differently to prevent it. And she contemplated every stealthy, riotous, or prosaic act of revenge she could think of, and realized that every one of her schemes might very well accomplish nothing but provoke Abuelita into using all of her power and authority to terminate her life with our family in Namoset forever—especially with my father not around to protect her. She concluded that she was so hemmed in by pride and circumstance that there was nothing, not another thing in the world for her to do but control her anger and get back inside that despised house and into her room and onto that bed and then stay there even more obstinately and uncomplainingly than before.

  “That was the moment I became a United States citizen,” she would say in later years, after she actually became one. It was right there, at that little tienda, that Flor decided once and for all that once back in Namoset she’d get her U.S. citizenship as soon as she could, which would put her beyond the reach of Abuelita’s mandate forever.

  Sunday nights I’d push open the double doors to her room and see Flor, as if in overlapping images, lying prostrate and sulking on her bed and already springing up from it like a surprised and rescued Pocahontas in the forest, and I’d walk in to mad squeals and hugs, wet kisses all over my face like I hadn’t felt since we’d stopped playing Tunnel of Love in our basement in Namoset. If up in Namoset I was no longer the single most absorbing person in Flor’s life, if she’d begun to treat me there, at times, with a true big sister’s indifference and even impatience, that summer in Guatemala I must have seemed not only her one true friend on earth but her only reliable contact with the outside world as well.

  “Dame un beso,” she’d squeal. Give me a kiss. “Dame otro beso . . .”

  I’d lie on her bed beneath that All-Seeing Eye while she, thrilled at the diversion, rubbed lotions on my sunburns, jungle bites, and rashes, held ice wrapped in towels to my bruises and sprains, nursed my fevers—ran me, when I was really sick, to the toilet every few minutes and held her ear to my belly to reassure me that I didn’t have worms.

  “Dime muñeco.” Tell me, my doll.

  And I’d tell her about my weekend adventures and calamities, trying to get it all in before my mother came walking down the resonating tiles of the passageway to rap on the door and order me out to kiss Abuelita good night and then to my own bed. Flor held me even tighter, cooed, “Ayyy, mi precioso, Gracias a Dios,” when I told her about my salvation from the undertow in that Aryan archangel’s pair of outstretched hands. And then—after a few minutes of Should I tell you? You won’t tell your mother I told you? You promise you won’t have bad dreams if I tell you?—she told me, in a voice lowered to a damp whisper and unaccustomedly grave, about the Holy Week Saturday when the nuns had let the Guatemala City Lions Club take all the girls from the orphanage on an outing to that very same beach in Puerto San José, where a little girl named Petrona had been pulled out into that ocean forever, the endless rosaries for poor Petrona’s soul in the chapel, how every night for weeks the girls fell to sleep weeping at night in the dormitory where poor Petrona’s bunk stood heaped with flowers and a pile of penny candies on the pillow, and how every morning they’d find one empty candy wrapper and a wet, crumpled tissue which one of the older girls would hold to her own lips and then to all the other girls’ lips in turn so that they could taste how the tissue was soaked with Petrona’s saltwater moco.

  Flor wrinkled her nose and spooned milk of magnesia into my mouth on another Sunday night while I burped and told her about the hundred baby bulls lassoed one by one by their hind legs then laid out in the dirt and steamy muck of an infernally hot Pacific Coast cattle ranch corral while a veterinarian used a silver knife to slice them open down there and reached in bare-handed to pull their testicles out by long blue cords then scissored them off and stuffed the cords back in and used a paintbrush to coat the wounds with purple iodine and then another brush to daub them yellow between the ears while ranch hands ran out with branding irons hot off the fire to add the stench of scorched rump hair and flesh to that of bull and horse shit. The incredible thing was that when it was all done the baby bulls would get up like nothing significant at all had just happened to them and saunter back into the swirling herd while the cowboys who lassoed them rode around on horseback eating bloody, slimy, pink-and-blue-veined raw bull balls like they were apples! To be like a cowboy I’d taken a big, chewy bite out of one too. Flor scolded, “Bruto! Salvaje! Cochino! Qué grosero!” And she rolled over on the bed laughing while I lay next to her on my side as if lassoed, doing my imitation of a baby bull at the decisive moment it got its balls snipped off, one eye fixed on the ceiling in placid panic and then just the tiniest gasp and a quick blink, that was all, and knowing what I was doing since I’d watched it done a hundred times.

  And at a coffee farm on another weekend I’d driven off somewhere with my mother and a balding man with a thin mustache whom she called Pepe Ganús (rhymes with caboose) to look at a property he was interested in. But they left me alone in the car, parked on a jungle-banked, dirt road. And so there I was, sitting there, when suddenly a huge black tiger padded silently out of that jungle and then stood in the middle of the road staring at the car with mesmerized yellow eyes, a panther, it must have been, or maybe a jaguarundi. But it was there. In panic, my heart pounding, I rolled up all the windows, and when I looked back the tiger was gone. When my mother came back with Pepe I was crying, I swear out of fear that the tiger had eaten my mother and for no other reason, but Pepe didn’t even believe that I’d seen a tiger at all and said I was too old to cry like that just to get attention, while my mother hugged me to her with her lips in my hair and said not a word.

  Flor’s face loomed over me, astonished, as I finished telling her about this. She’d pushed herself up on hands and knees beside me on the bed and, motionless now, seemed to be gaping at the green wall. Until I said, “A tiger, I saw it,” and then she came out of her startled trance, smiled funny, kissed my brow, and said, “Of course you did,” and then she sat cross-legged on the bed, almost pouting at that wall again, oblivious of me, her breathing charged with something slow moving but heavy, like private and quiet anger or deep revelation. And of course I realize now what Flor was probably thinking and getting so worked up about. Well, probably—I don’t really care, to tell you the truth, I mean, I’m not at all surprised. But my poor mother, what a guy to pick, because that Pepe was really a sleaze.

  Another time, at another farm he owned, Pepe was there, dressed as always in black trousers and a white guayabera shirt and a gold wristwatch and shiny black shoes that looked oddly tiny, like ballet slippers almost, on such a relatively tall, bulky man. But I got to go off two afternoons in a row with the campesino kids to wait in a sorghum field for the parakeets that came like clockwork at the same hour every afternoon to feed. The parakeets filled the big empty sky all at once, bursting from the faraway, spreading black branches of the banyanlike trees on the horizon, their reverberating chatter filling the air until suddenly they were plummeting all around us like an endless shower of gold and green arrows. Then it was the campesino boys’ job to run through the sorghum lighting firecrackers from the cigarettes they dangled from their mouths and tossing them into the air—hundreds of firecrackers, gunpowder smoke and shattered paper bits and earsplitting explosions all over the place, until the parakeets finally moved off like the vastest, noisiest, green and gold magic carpet you ever saw. My mother had ordered me to just stand by and watch so I
wouldn’t blow off my fingers, but the second day one of the kids gave me one of his cigarettes—my first cigarette!—and a fistful of firecrackers, and I ran into the sorghum frantically lighting and tossing firecrackers up at the parakeets too until I tripped and the cigarette fell from my lips and I fell with my palm on top of it and got scorched. By the time I had it lighted again, the invasion was over.

  That story made Flor jealous. She wished she’d seen it too. She sat on the bed looking as if the reason she hadn’t gotten to see it was a very deep and perplexing mystery, but one that it was not beyond her capacities to solve if she concentrated really hard. Her lips quivered, she actually blinked back tears. And then she got off the bed and walked several caged circles, her hands fisted. She came back and sat down and gaped at me for the briefest second, then fell over with her face in the pillow.

  “This,” she said, softly and deliberately into the pillow, “has absolutely been the worst summer of my life.”

  It all finally came to a head because of the spider monkey Flor had always told me about, the one that could ride a unicycle and eat bananas off a plate with a knife and fork and that she remembered from her own childhood visits to the zoo with the nuns.

  “Flor told me about that monkey, vos,” said Moya, excitedly, when we were talking about all this. “Un mico sumamente dotado!” A very talented monkey. And he laughed affectionately.

  “Soom-ah-men-teh,” I echoed, laughing a bit too, because that really is the way she used to say it.

  But even back then Moya must have known all about Flor, because we were already friends at school and I would certainly have told him about her; though I was still too young then to be allowed to ride the bus home alone or with Moya. And he must have seen her too, when she would turn up in front of the Colegio Anne Hunt sometimes instead of Abuelita’s chauffeur, Diego, to bring me home: Flor, in jeans and the light blue Columbia University sweatshirt she liked to wear, maybe carrying some books if she’d been to the IGA library first, waiting out by the front gate, and the older boys going, “Ah, mira esa india rica, vos! Puta! Why doesn’t she come work for us! Listen to this little indio, he says she’s his sister, qué cerote, vos! ...”

  I wanted Flor to take me to the zoo to see that monkey, and when I said so at dinner one night Abuelita was so instantly riled that she stood up from the table with her soft, rouged and powdered jowls trembling and her eyes full of white light and in a tone of triumphant outrage against all the disorder Flor had introduced into her house that summer shouted:

  “Ya hace dos años que el mico ese murió!” It’s been two years since that monkey died!

  And she glared at me. It was more my fright at her anger than what she’d actually said that made me shrink down in my chair, face burning, tears starting. Abuelita sat back down, poutingly composing herself, resuming her meal of dark pigeon meat in raisin sauce and boiled vegetables. Then, looking directly at my still utterly chagrined mother with an entirely new expression of watery-eyed sentimentality, Abuelita smiled and let out a whinnying but dreamy laugh, and in a voice still quavery with turbulent emotion, said, “All of Guatemala was sad the day that monkey died, mija ...”

  It so happened that Flor was in the kitchen at that very moment, eating a solitary meal at the maids’ table before the maids’ turn and listening in on our every word—no one had ruled that Flor couldn’t eat with us, I don’t think, but this was yet another aspect of her stubborn stand in behalf of her own beleaguered dignity that summer. But suddenly there she was in the dining-room entrance, still holding her fork and looking something like a skinnier, darker Elizabeth Taylor in The Taming of the Shrew, wild eyed and taking deep breaths and looking like she might bite. Instead, in a voice I clearly remember as being shrill with adolescent insolence and hurt, she shouted:

  “Of course they were all sad. This is a country of monkeys and that was the most talented monkey in it!”

  That night there was shouting in the house for a long time after I was sent to bed, and phone calls to my father in Namoset. And the very next day Flor told me she was going home, though there were three weeks left in our summer vacation. She flew to Miami and then, to recoup some of her money, cashed in the rest of her ticket and rode a Greyhound bus all the way back to Boston. It was years before my parents stopped arguing sporadically about Flor’s behavior that summer—and it was my father, of course, during one of those frantic phone calls, who had somehow prevented Abuelita from terminating Flor’s life with us.

  Though Flor did send Abuelita an earnest-seeming and oddly self-belittling note of apology, which my mother brought back with her to Namoset years later, after Abuelita’s funeral, when I was in my first year in college and Flor had just graduated Wellesley and moved to New York. It was still in its envelope, postmarked Macon, Georgia, where Flor had mailed it from the bus station. The note was short, so I remember more or less exactly what it said:

  “Dear Doña Emilia, Please forgive my bad behavior. You are right to demand nothing but respect in your house. I know that everything good that has ever happened to me I owe to you. Guatemala is a wonderful country and I will always be proud to be a Guatemalan. And you are a wonderful woman and grandmother and an example to me. I must try harder to understand pride. With all my respect and affection, Flor de Mayo Puac.”

  The only signs of defiance in that note were that Flor wrote it in English—which meant Abuelita probably would have had one of my uncles translate it for her—and enclosed her sixth-grade report card, which she’d brought with her all the way to Guatemala.

  As for Pepe Ganús: I remember that when we were driving out of that very same farm where the campesino boys tossed firecrackers to keep the parakeets off the sorghum—it was the second time I’d been there, a weekend or two after Flor left—Pepe had suddenly stopped his pickup and, without a word to us, had gotten out of it and pulled a pistol from his guayabera-curtained waist and then aimed it with his arm out long and straight. He was aiming at a pig rooting in one of his fields, and he shot it dead. Actually his first shot missed—it was incredibly loud!—dirt flew up, but with the second and third shots the pig skipped a few times and fell over. Then Pepe got back in and we drove on, while he explained that the pig was from the village just beyond his property and that he’d warned the villagers to keep their animals out of his fields. My mother and I were both absolutely silent the rest of the drive home, our silent communication as exact and unequivocal as it might have been between two compatible adults on at least one matter: we both knew we’d seen something despicable. My mother didn’t speak to Pepe again until we’d pulled up in front of Abuelita’s. She stood by the open door of his pickup and said into it, in Spanish:

  “My mother always told me never to trust a man with small hands and feet.”

  That was all she said. Which is why I remember so well that Pepe just pawed the air once with an extended and pointy little hand that resembled a delicate starfish, then reached across to pull the door shut, and drove away.

  I live now in this very same house, where I take my meals alone at the very same long mahogany table above which the crystal chandelier still jingles as if from Abuelita’s outbursts instead of from the shattering blasts of mufflerless buses passing outside or the occasional actual tremor in the earth; my meals cooked and served now by the last maid left, Chayito.

  The other night I took Moya out into the patio and yanked up the tiles beneath which has been preserved, like a patriotic shrine, the blackened earth where Abuelita lit her anti-Communist charcoal.

  This was distinctly meaningful to Moya, who is the sort of person who, say, when confronted with any fat non-Spanish dictionary will automatically begin leafing through it to see how many Guatemalan cities and towns and so on the compilers saw fit to include in the verifiable lexicon of that language; who, picking up a world history will flip to the index to see if Guatemala has its own listing; who passed up the chance of an Ivy League and cosmopolitan career as a professional political exile a
nd expert on the murderous and stultifying little country that chased him out because he preferred to return and resume his oblique but heroic life as a newspaperman for a newspaper that hardly anyone reads (though everyone reads ¿Dónde?). He looked down at Abuelita’s charcoal pit for a long time, pinching his lower lip between thumb and forefinger, musing.

  There was a clear, full-moon sky, the rain clouds having spent themselves that afternoon and been pushed off by a Caribbean wind sweeping over the desert and then the cordillera. Against that glowing sky the immense silhouette of a volcano, absolutely black and conical as a witch’s hat, loomed even more impressively than it does by day.

  “So much that Guatemala is living now,” I said, “entered this country through this hole in my grandmother’s patio.”

  Moya liked that idea. He gave me one of his flatteringly astounded looks and said, “Bonita idea, vos.”

  “It’s like a witch’s caldron,” I said. “Except she couldn’t really know what was in the brew.”

  “Sí, vos,” he said. “So much that Guatemala is living, has lived these past thirty years, comes from this hole in your abuela’s patio.” I suspected then that he might already be developing this idea for a newspaper column. “So much, so many things,” he went on. “Pero tú y yo?—no. Not you and I, Rogerio. Or any other guatemalteco.”

  Not him, not me, not Flor, or any other Guatemalan. I did realize what he meant by this. Hardly anyone entered Guatemala through the hole in Abuelita’s patio. Tools were passed through it, that’s true, such as killing tools for vile apes, all the tools they needed.