The Long Night of White Chickens

by Francisco Goldman

  This was the idea Moya more or less went on to develop in one of his typically oblique newspaper columns, which I am proud to have contributed to in my way: Guatemalans must take responsibility for their own acquiescences and even defeats just as surely as they can take pride in the nation’s victories and in their dreams of democracy, et cetera, et cetera.

  THIRTEEN

  The Park Street-bound Red Line train emerged from the tunnel and began to cross a bridge over the Charles River. Moya (he remembers now) sniffed loudly, drawing mucus back into his burning, stuffed sinuses. The flat gray light outside, the metallic brightness inside the train, hurt his eyes. Feeling sluggishly disinterested, he looked out at the view, the choppy gray river and the complicated mass of the city: the ancient-looking red and brown brick of the buildings, roofs of oxidized copper, domes, skyscrapers, the dead trees and the snow-patched dead grass along the river, bridges, sea gulls, the unbroken flow of traffic. He could not have felt more lonely, more acutely dissatisfied with or conscious of himself.

  He wore a navy blue arctic parka with a hood fringed with neon orange fake fur, olive corduroys, and a long, red scarf wrapped three times around his neck, and socks that were too thin for the weather and made his ankles feel as dully distracting as a minor migraine, and the same black loafers that in Guatemala, where he could afford it, he used to have shined at least once a day by the shoe-shine men in the Central Plaza in front of the National Palace (the shoe shiners always knew the latest rumors about goings-on in the palace). The soles of his feet felt as chilly and wet as his T-shirt did under his armpits; his sweater itched. His hands, in shapeless leather gloves, were moist. He felt he had not chosen his winter wardrobe carefully enough. With his stipend money, he had rushed to the Harvard Coop, and feeling by turns impatient, intimidated, and wantonly enthused, had made all his purchases in one afternoon.

  When, in his entire life, had he ever even worn bright red, never mind neon orange?—but the parka had looked warm, vos. He felt, now, like a bundle of dirty laundry.

  Before coming to Cambridge, to Harvard, Moya had never in his life met a foreign woman, that is a European, North American, or Asian, who was not at least a little bit obsessed with what quite understandably obsessed Moya: Guatemala. Some of these very same women, of course, were indeed to be found in Cambridge, including the professor, Dr. Sylvia McCourt, who had arranged to have him come to Harvard in the first place, but in Cambridge there were so many more, millions it seemed, women who were not even a little bit that way. Here, in Cambridge, were millions of women who, if reading the news, were quite likely to skip over the occasional mention of the always revolting developments in Guatemala without feeling the slightest pang of interest or remorse. Yet these same millions, from what Moya could tell by eavesdropping on them in cafés, stammeringly conversing with them at the occasional gathering to which he was invited, sitting by them in classrooms and lecture halls, on the whole seemed—How did they seem? Alive, beautiful, healthy, opaquely serious. Fortune’s favorite daughters. Totally mysterious. In Cambridge, Moya, at first, felt overwhelmed by a variety beyond his comprehension, and stupefied that he could have lived so long in ignorance of it.

  Look at those two chinitas—but probably they were Japanese—sitting opposite him on the train, layered in contrasting black winter fabrics. They leaned into each other, chatting and smiling as if satiating themselves on the too rich scandal of someone else’s love life. One wore a sickly blue shade of lipstick, the other brightest red. One had hair sculpted into an intricate mass of long, black barbs; she resembled an electrocuted bird with the radiant face of an obscene Oriental angel. Her face was painted like a Guatemala City whore’s, and she wore the rugged black leather jacket of a corrupt Guatemala City motorcycle policeman. Yet look at the appealing propriety of her lap: her neatly ironed, pleated black skirt and the university textbooks piled there—Advanced Immunology—and her dainty hands primly folded on top in skintight, shiny leather gloves.

  He looked over all the women on the train, students mainly, many of them standing. A girl yawning, her glassy blue eyes looking right at him yet not registering. Her quiet, composed, intelligent, somewhat tired expression looking right through him suddenly exhilarated him, as if he’d just understood that in Cambridge he would be allowed to remain invisible for as long as he wanted.

  There was only one black on the train—the race problem, Moya had effortlessly deduced, was Boston’s, and the United States’, most pressing sociopolitical problem. But this negrito was with a white woman whose face was as composed and somewhat tired as the face of that woman sitting opposite. Not only were they sitting close together, holding hands, but they were both wearing headsets plugged into the same Walkman. Confirming an earlier insight: this other type of gringo, of which there were millions in Boston alone, often preferred any distraction to serious political discussion. Moya felt himself suddenly impassioned by a heated need to articulate, to expose; the subway train pulled into Park Street Station, and Moya, pretending to himself that he felt exactly like himself again but secretly despising or at least exhausted by himself, jumped up. In his heavy arctic parka, he walked like a penguin. The car emptied, and, accompanied by a hundred or so university students, only one of them black, he walked up the steps to the second level, where he spotted a Green Line train pulling in, which instantly made him feel the need to repress a soft inward sob. Why? Because the Green Line train was the one Flor used to take into Boston.

  Why, everywhere he went in Boston, did he feel as if his shadow was snagging on Flor’s, pulling him up short? Why Flor’s shadow whispering indecipherably into Moya’s?

  “You will make a wonderful saint,” he had teased her, much later on during the Long Night of White Chickens, after she had been somewhat drunkenly and certainly somewhat archly reciting the qualities, textures, and odors of impoverished and malnourished infants’ caca and the endemic illnesses these revealed: “. . . yellow and stinky, that’s giardiasis. Common diarrhea is runny, of course, and accompanied by much gas. Amoebas, bloody. Oh Moya, I see a lot of caca.” But even these words had seemed beautiful to him, because by then everything Flor said seemed part of the long, slow Rapunzellike descent of her hair towards the bowl of sweet and sour sauce, which he had so raptly and suspensefully been following, watching the slightly curled ends of her hair descend ever closer to the sticky liquid as she leaned ever closer towards him. But then, with his teasing remark, Flor had immediately sat back in her chair, hoisting her hair far above and away from the bowl as she laughingly said, “Oh sure, Our Lady of Caca. Anyway, for his Holiness to accept me for canonization, wouldn’t I need three miracles, or something like that? Well, so far, believe me, I haven’t performed even one.”

  Here Moya’s wit had failed him, as if it had fled into the new, daunting distance between hair and bowl. He had wanted to ascribe to her the miracle of having, in just a few hours, caused a springtime in his heart, but had immediately foreseen that there was no graceful and light way of disguising the rather complex emotion and condition such a remark implied. And while his mind stammered, the opportunity for a bright and affectionate rejoinder that her words had provided passed. Flor leaned forward on her elbows then, into the suddenly awkward silence, as if truly disappointed that she hadn’t, in fact, ever performed a miracle. But her hair, the ends of her black, lyrically descending hair, now fell into the sweet and sour sauce. A small handful of Flor’s hair now lay curled and partly submerged in the glowing, sticky liquid, and she did not notice.

  Love, which was already happening inside him and he hoped inside of her too, is in this way furiously fast and decisive, aligned with both the miraculous and the rational: just when Moya’s own confused ardor, shyness, and ominous lapse of wit had caused the wrong silence to settle between them, a silence awkwardly and gloomily after-scented with the problem of unhealthy infants’ caca and Flor’s failure to perform miracles, love had propelled her hair into the sweet and sour sauce, and Moya was free
:

  “Flor, mi amor, look, you have dropped your hair directly into the agridulce sauce,” he said gaily.

  And Flor, truly astonished, said, “Oh!” sitting up straight again with a light clap of her hands. Her hair followed her up, its sweet and sour sauce–coated tips sticking to her white blouse, just inside her breast. She said “mierda” and laughed, and reached for her napkin. But Moya gently took it from her. “Let me,” he said, his face very close to hers now, his face glowing as warmly as one of the paper lanterns overhead as he felt her moist smile and breath so close. He brought her hair in his hand to his lips, and kissed it. She said, “Moyyya,” and laughed. He said, “Qué rico,” how tasty, and she laughed more softly and said, “You are really too much.” And he said, “I wonder if the rest of you goes so well with sweet and sour sauce,” and though she held herself perfectly still he could feel, even in the air between them, that her whole body shook with repressed giggles. “Hah,” she squeaked, barely able to get even that little sound out. “I don’t require seasoning,” she murmured, “I am sure.” And he said, “Ah, no?” And then he said, “But I must clean this,” and began to move the napkin towards the small stain in her blouse just inside her breast though she softly intercepted his hand. She held his hand briefly in hers, smiling at him, perhaps coyly, perhaps warningly, her eyes blazing. Then she took the napkin from him, dipped it into the ice bucket, and cleaned the spot herself.

  “I feel it is a miracle,” he said then, calmly. “I have not felt so happy in a long time.”

  The brief, barely lingering look they exchanged then was the bridge leading to everything that was to happen between them from that moment on.

  “But my gosh,” she said. “I’ve been doing all the talking!”

  “... So this was my first truly independent adventure, all the way from Miami to Boston by bus. Oh Moya, you should have seen it, I didn’t have to pay for a single donut or soda all the way, and, by the time I got home, I had the addresses of seventeen soldiers to write to. Many of them going to Vietnam too. They were all so handsome and nice to me I couldn’t believe my luck!”

  “Seventeen soldiers! Did you write to them?”

  “Ay noooo. Can you imagine what Mirabel would have said if suddenly I had letters from seventeen soldiers coming to the house?”

  “Seventeen soldiers in Vietnam,” said Moya and, being who he couldn’t help but be, he shook his head portentously. “How many people know that twenty-eight Green Berets died in Guatemala in 1968. Plus the two thousand peasants killed in that obsessed campaign to destroy two hundred guerrillas.”

  “Really? Is that true? Twenty-eight? I’ve heard they were here but I’ve never heard that,” said Flor. “Oh well, that figures.” And after a short, distressed sigh, she added, “Qué país, no?” What a country, no?—Which one? Moya was about to ask—but Flor was already saying, “You know what I remember? We’d stopped for a break in the bus station at Macon, Georgia. And this gross, sweaty man came up to me and, well I cannot quite do a southern accent, but he said, ‘Girrrrl, I been watching youuu and I can’t figure it out. Are you Filipeeno or what?’ ...”

  “How did you answer this racist man?” asked Moya.

  “I said I was Guatemalan, pues, but soon to be American. He laughed like I had just proved his big ugly point somehow. But my soldier friends, some of them black by the way, chased him away. You know, in my Massachusetts family, we were always a bit judgmental against southerners; Ira had a tough experience down there in the army. But that horrible man in the bus station is the only adult who ever spoke to me that way in all my years in America.”

  “The only adult? You mean children—?”

  “In Namoset! The teenagers there? Are you kidding! Spik this, spik that, spik spik spik, well, they thought they were being funny, you know, but they could not free this buzzing fly from their minds. The most provincial of the provincial. And such thugs! Ay, even poor little Roger tried to be like a thug, though he was never a convincing scary person—well, you knew Roger. Adolescence is a form of torture, in the United States anyway. Or so it seemed to me—”

  FOURTEEN

  “Before I met your father,” my mother said suddenly, when we were sitting at the kitchen table over a bottle of sherry on the night of our return from Guatemala, after my father had already gone to bed, “I was in love with a man, a devout Catholic, a man who went to mass every day. And he turned out to be a very bad man, a liar, a drunkard, a womanizer. All my life I had been raised to believe that Catholicism made people good, Roger. But after that, I said, Catholicism does not make people good. And when I met your father I said, Look, here is a good man, and Catholicism had nothing to do with it. And that is why I married him.”

  This was the first time my mother had ever even alluded, in front of me, to her great girlhood love with the Italian who eventually married the coffee plantation owner’s daughter, or spoken so directly about why she had married my father. I sat there pondering her reasoning for a while.

  “Well, Dad is good,” I said.

  “He most certainly is.”

  “You think Catholicism makes people bad?” I asked.

  “Of course not,” she said. “But Flor was raised by nuns. Did this make her good?”

  “Mom. Please.”

  “Look at the boyfriends she had. And did I think she was a good influence on you? I have held my tongue on this for twenty years. I was not as blind as I was innocent! And as far as you and your father were concerned, she could do no wrong. What about the time your father was in the hospital in New York and we sent you two back by train and she took you to that Cuban’s apartment?”

  “I wonder where he is now?”

  “Ach! Probably in jail.”

  “Mom, Flor was upset, she thought Dad was going to die or something. And Tony was her boyfriend.”

  “And that African!”

  “He was Nigerian. A Wellesley professor, a literature scholar. That’s a pretty extraordinary person, don’t you think?” Dr. Ben, from Nigeria, Oxford educated, a specialist in Melville and New England Transcendental-ists—who knows where he is now. That was when Flor was twenty, twenty-one, in high school, and Dr. Ben boarded with Miss Cavanaugh in her house in Wellesley. She was an elderly Boston Brahmin feminist who, in the thirties, just out of Wellesley College herself, had undertaken a motorcycle journey with another young woman all the way to Chile. Miss Cavanaugh, who passed away a few years ago, founded the Latin American Society of Boston; she sat on the board of directors at the private school where my mother teaches and on the board at Wellesley College too.

  “Miss Cavanaugh was aghast, my dear. That African lived in her house! She did not speak with me for a year. For a year I felt ashamed to show my face at Latin American Society meetings ...”

  “She was just jealous.”

  “Cómo que jealous? An opinion that perverted could only have come from Flor. Is that what she told you?”

  “Miss Cavanaugh loved Flor! Hanging around her house, that practically saved Flor’s sanity in high school. She helped her get that scholarship to Wellesley.”

  “She stole and sold my jewelry.”

  “That was Tony and you know it. After he found out about Dr. Ben.”

  “Oh sure, don’t remind me—”

  “And she never saw him again after that.”

  “Oh sure—”

  “She never did, Mom. The guy was having problems.”

  “How do you know he didn’t send those roses that came today?”

  “Because they came with a poem attached, didn’t they. She hasn’t seen him for years.”

  “She never saw him again because he ran off to Miami with another woman.”

  “OK. Good. He went to Miami. Mom. Please. This isn’t fair.”

  My mother’s lips had closed into a little girl’s pout.

  “Mom. You loved her . . .”

  “The saddest thing in the world is to die young, I would not wish that on anyone. She . . . m
esmerized you for twenty years like a witch.”

  “She did not.”

  “My own mother saw this. She told me. Mirabel, she has your son under a spell like a witch. You loved her, and I thought that was good. Because you didn’t get to see enough love in this house between your father and I. I don’t know why I thought that was a good replacement ... I was innocent but I was not blind.”

  “Mom, I had plenty of love ...”

  A one-day closed casket wake in McGee’s funeral home; and then Flor’s casket at the top of the aisle between the pews, in front of the altar, at St. Joe’s, while a young priest who had never known her reached his hands into the enclosure Flor used to tell me was the actual Heart of the Holy Spirit and brought out the chalice and offered communion, which no one took, and then spoke a eulogy that was a brief outline of her accomplishments, lamented her terrible end without evoking the circumstances, all who knew her will so miss her. My mother wept as hard as my father and I. At the cemetery, in the snow, with the casket suspended over the hard rectangular cavity in the otherwise empty Graetz family plot, the priest dashed holy water like salt, wished her peace in the benevolence and forgiveness of God, and we, the few who had gathered, fled back to our cars. A few of her Wellesley friends were there, including that strange, malevolent girl with pink hair who, seven months later, would turn up all coked up or something when I was tending bar one night. Zoila, Ingrid, even Tony, lost to time, I wonder if even Flor had had any idea where they were now. Thirty-six roses and a poem at the house. Telegrams and cards. No past or even secret lovers in person among the mourners.

  Delmi Ramírez arrived the day after the burial, on a Saturday, with her three young sons from Oklahoma, where she lives now. I hadn’t seen her in about fifteen years. She looked older, much older than Flor. Her hair was dyed blond. She’d become a stern mother, of hawkish expression. She paraded her three Okie boys, bronze skinned and fair haired, stiff in their cheap new suits and bow ties, in front of my discomforted mother and father as if it were a visit to royalty, and boasted about how much money her mechanic husband was making in Tulsa—quite a lot actually—and said she owed all her happiness to Flor.