The Long Night of White Chickens

by Francisco Goldman

  I said that I didn’t get it and Moya insisted that he felt he was being lucid. I asked who paid the faferos and he said it wasn’t necessarily what we really wanted to know, because faferos don’t have to be paid by anyone in particular to say anything in particular. “We are talking about un cierto tipo who can survive as a journalist in Guatemala, vos; some draw a regular salary from the army and, for others, you can say even their regular salary is their fafa. Fear, ignorance, and fafa are my shepherds, I shall not question or want, ves?”

  —But didn’t I see how glad the police would be to rid themselves of this embarrassing problem caused by a bobo policeman who found this house he should have left alone?

  Likelier though, he said, is that the whole mess evolved something like this:

  The inevitable rumors were beginning, and so López Nub’s sister and sister-in-law were becoming embarrassed. Because colonels can traffic in whatever they want, contraband, drugs, weapons, passports and immigration papers for Hong Kong Chinamen, you name it though no one publicly dares to; and all those government ministries, utilities, foreign-financed projects and nonlethal economic aid and newly accessible lands to plunder and grab, virgin ranches, oil and lumber concessions, their own fiefdoms; countless rackets more profitable, more macho, less arduous and less ignominious than the selling of Indian war orphans to clandestine fattening houses and abroad, a wimpy Corrupt Stork’s racket for money-grubbing caraculo lawyers and witches . . .

  But a colonel’s women?—they go to tea parties and baby showers.

  “. . . So maybe other women are snickering at them, vos. Soon their children will be hearing comments in school, vos. López Nub’s sister contacts her brother and says, Brother? Did you hear that the directora of Los Quetzalitos was found murdered yesterday? Can’t you have the police say it was her house? And have them make a really big fanfare, vos. This woman was a stuck-up gnnga-chapina . . .”

  So here was a chance to put an end to embarrassing rumors about the sister and sister-in-law of López Nub and focus all hatred of baby sellers on Flor as well. Which excited the faferos, because here was their chance to make great patriotic rhetoric against baby sellers and make it sound like they were blaming the hypocritical gringo slanderers of Guatemala all in one murder, simply by accepting everything that the police said as true. In the end they would even feel justified and quite clever, because who would even be interested in the true rumors if not for the sensationalizing lies which they did not then realize were lies—“Ja!”—in the news! And it was all so easy, because everyone said Flor was doing that anyway, profiting illegally off her adoptions.

  “So what you’re trying to tell me is that everyone in the Guatemalan press is a fafero.”

  “Mostly everyone still alive, yes. Outside the morgue that day, puta! Our fafero Olympic team.”

  “You?”

  “Rogerio.”

  “Well, why are you different?”

  “. . .”

  “You were there that day with the rest of them!”

  “To see you, Rogerio.”

  Pssst! Oye! The fattening house they were saying belonged to that gringa chapina . . . ? The archbishop’s chambermaid is pregnant. The army ambushed a guerrilla column last night, wiped the shit out of them, and you know what? there wasn’t a chapín among them, they were all Palestinians and Libyans, vos! Who listens to every curlicue turn in the baroqueness of rumors that winds through Guatemala? Who believes them? Shopgirls, when privileged to hear them. If Uncle Jorge had heard, he would have thought, just a shopgirl’s chisme, shopgirl talk. He likes the rumors about the Palestinians and Libyans. Choose your rumor.

  “People were amused, Rogerio, this is all. Not amused about Flor, of course not. But one more murder in Guatemala vos? How many were going to say, ‘This one murder! This is the most outrageous murder!’ No, vos. Instead they said, Look how easily López Nub’s sister and cuñada get away with owning a fattening house! What has Coronel López Nub been doing, flying them weekly loads of bebitos ishtos from the Quiche? Ja. Like this was funny. Do you see?”

  “No.”

  “Then this rumor, Rogerio. López Nub’s sister did the murder, with her own hands. Because Flor was working with her but really she betrayed her. Because really Flor was with La CIA. She was pretending to arrange adoptions of stolen babies to nice gringo families but was actually bringing these children back to CIA hospitals so that their organs could be used for transplants to save the lives of rich gringos et cetera. Increíble, no?”

  “. . . His sister murdered—?”

  “Rogerio! The sister of López Nub probably started this rumor herself. Because now that everyone knows she is a baby seller, she at least wants them to think of her as a baby seller patriótica and well-intentioned! I am not joking, vos. We are talking about some real ignorantes. This is a gross, stupid woman, Flor would never have let her into her room!”

  “But what if they were partners, Moya?”

  “Rogerio, no, vos. Impossible. Because in Guatemala there is this saying: Firemen should not step on each other’s hoses. But sometimes I think this rule only rules chafas. If Flor was partner with a colonel’s sister, then this other colonel, Malespín, could never have dared to threaten her, do you see? But all these rumors, Rogerio, what do they matter? The official police line is still that no one knows who did this murder, and for once maybe the official line is right.”

  “So who was the niñera at the house, then? The one who—”

  “Puta! Saber. I don’t know. A niñera fafera. I had no luck in finding her.”

  “You looked for her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh. You mean you started investigating all this.”

  “Yes . . . Rogerio—”

  “So you suspected from the start that something was . . . not right.”

  “Not right, claro.”

  “So who did it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’ve told me everything you know.”

  “About that house, yes. It was not her house.”

  “So you don’t think she was trading babies or whatever.”

  “. . . I feel terrible, vos. I thought you at least knew about the faferos. Someone did kill her, Rogerio. Why?”

  “So what do I do now?”

  “. . .”

  “I mean what the fuck am I going to do about this?”

  “I don’t know, Rogerio, but I— But what I must first tell you is that Flor and I—fuimos amantes . . . Yes, lovers, a little bit, pues. For some months—”

  “So what! So fucking what!” And an old Jewish woman surrounded by her coterie at the next table in the museum café rasped, “Keep yuh voice down, young man! Where do yuh think yuh are!”

  * * *

  So this, I felt sure, was the main reason Moya had come to Brooklyn to see me: to talk about Flor, about him and Flor, to get it all off his chest, thinking that perhaps enough time had passed and that for some reason I ought to know if I didn’t, because it had bothered him not knowing whether I knew or not, and he’d thought that I knew the rest of it anyway. I never really let him get going on it. For some period of time—he said for a few months—they were lovers. Like what kind of lovers? A casual affair? Lover lovers? I couldn’t bring myself to ask him this, let him tell it as it should be told when it is time for him to. Until a month before her death! Claro, given what I hadn’t in fact known, he rapidly acknowledged, he could see why I didn’t think it was so important that they had been lovers, sí pues. But, in Cambridge . . .

  Eventually we got around to all of it, what I’ve already told. Her shadow in Cambridge. The girl from her orphanage in the yard. As for what the Swedish volunteer had told us about Colonel Malespín, it probably had been just another corrupt chafa’s extortion scheme. Going into hiding like that really might have been good judgment on Flor’s part, the only prudent thing for her to do, vos. Of course even when Moya knew her it would have been easy for him to miss some very hidden, even de
viant side to her, he wasn’t poking into everything she was doing, well, of course he wasn’t—But in retrospect it’s always easy to suspect that you might have missed something obvious. It was hard for me to listen, I was reeling under the overload of all he’d told me. It was really all too much to take in. It made sense that we collaborate, he said. If I wanted to. He went on about it. I guess I just sat there nodding—until the African immigrants who make up the staff of the museum café suddenly erupted at us in scolding tones from behind their push brooms and bus trays, telling us that the café was closing.

  Outside, we went for a walk along Eastern Parkway. Of course we ran into the Guatemalan knish vendor’s truck. It was parked in front of the little park next to the massive school for the deaf that I’ve never seen a single person go into or come out of, though there are always things like snow-flakes scissored from paper taped to the insides of the upper windows. A strong, rain-portending wind was gusting around with more force up high than near the ground, ripping yellow-green leaves from the tops of trees, filling the sky with them. From a short distance the leaves, tumbling and twirling down, seemed to surround the truck like a tumult of parakeets.

  “Knishes,” I said. “It’s a Jewish food”—after Moya had gasped in surprise at the sight of the thing, KNISHES CHAPÍN, quetzal birds, pyramid, and volcano painted on the panel. I’m sure it must have struck Moya as some kind of omen, though I suppose he would say he doesn’t believe in omens, not Moya the Lucid. I told him, “It’s always there.”

  We crossed the parkway so that Moya could get a closer look. A kid of about twelve, the vendor’s son, was there too, standing on the sidewalk next to the truck with the visor of his leather cap pulled low over his eyes and a wooden handcart holding colored syrup—filled bottles to pour over shaved-ice cones, just like in Guatemala.

  Moya mumbled, “Pero increíble.”

  I’d never stood so close to that truck before. It had first appeared in the neighborhood some months after Flor’s death, and I’d just wanted to stay clear of it. I waited dumbly by Moya’s side as he and the vendor began a short, cryptic conversation. The vendor said he was from Huehuetenango. Moya repeated Huehuetenango, and the man repeated it too, and then Moya, in Spanish, said, Yes, it’s been hard up there, hasn’t it been? And the vendor seemed suddenly nervous, brusque, his black eyes shrank. Sí, duro, hard, he said, and he turned sideways and slid some gyros onto the hot middle of his grill, though we hadn’t ordered any. The meat sizzled softly. At the top of his wide, brown neck, along the underside of his wide chin, there was a long, crude scar. A scar near where Flor had hers, though longer and sealed with ugly, ruined skin—a machete scar, I thought. I saw that Moya, of course, had noticed it too. You’ve been to Huehue? the kid suddenly asked Moya, lifting his head to peer at him from under the visor. Moya said, Claro. And the kid turned to look at me, his tilted-up nostrils flared like an otter’s, his Indian eyes a shinier, even blacker version of his father’s. And you? he asked me. You’ve been to Huehue? I said not recently. Ah, he said, and looked back at Moya. And how is it? Tranquilo? the kid asked him. His father singsonged from inside the truck, Si’, sí, tranquilo. Huehue ‘sta tranquilo, verdad? And the kid nodded, repeating, Tranquilo, pues. Sí pues. Moya shrugged and softly echoed, Tranquilo.

  We bought a tamarind-flavored ice cone and a can of Coke. And after shaking hands and exchanging the usual Guatemalan courtesies—A pleasure to have met you . . . A pleasure to have met you . . . Gracias . . . No, jovenes, muchísimas gracias! At your service! . . . Gracias . . . It looks like rain. Doesn’t it look like rain? . . . Yes, it does. Well, gracias. Qué te vaya bien . . . Good luck with your knishes, vos! . . . Ay gracias!—Moya and I walked on, both of us strangely shaken, I think, or mystified and briefly silent. I was licking the ice cone. The faint and artificial tamarind flavor, the grainy ice, the very idea of eating it there on Eastern Parkway was like a continuation of the melancholy and visceral (it had sent a shiver through me) ludicrousness of the conversation we’d just had at the truck.

  “You want some of this?” I asked Moya, holding the cone out to him.

  “Gracias, ‘mano. No,” he said.

  “Guatemala no existe,” I said.

  Moya raised one eyebrow. “Verdad que no?” he said. “No existe.”

  He smiled sadly, and we walked on. Twelve years ago he and I had walked like this, to the bus stop after school every evening. Back then, on any one of those evenings, I might even have been carrying a syrup-flavored ice cone. I suddenly felt close to Moya then, on the parkway. What I mean is that for a moment this closeness really felt like a natural response to a mutual past, and not just a temporary illusion caused by a nostalgic ice cone and this sudden visit from a stranger, essentially a stranger—full of secrets, the secret origins of his prematurely whitening hair—but one full of perplexing news and connections to the present too, a brand-new present.

  I really didn’t know what else to say to him except “My father should hear what you’ve told me,” and in response to his look I said, “About faferos and the fattening house.”

  He said, “I am going back to Cambridge tonight. We can go together, if you want.”

  Then that spell of closeness was broken as I kept running over in my thoughts all that Moya had told me. I felt my resolve growing, my heart turning to stone with hate. Total resolve, total and suffocating confusion and hate.

  I just lost it, right there, with that stupid snow cone in my hand, for the first time in many months, I started to cry (for the first time in seven months, since that night when the girl who’d had pink hair at Flor’s funeral had come in while I was tending bar to reminisce). And Moya—though I was as confused about him, because who the hell was this Moya and why should I tell him anything?—stood watching me for a moment, and then suddenly and stiffly threw his arms around me.

  “You don’t know what it’s been like,” I said. And he didn’t, he didn’t know the half of it. “Oh shit, you can’t imagine . . . I’m sorry . . . I’ll be all right . . .”

  “It has been a nightmare, Rogerio, I am sure.”

  “And it hasn’t ended. It’s just going in a new direction, right?”

  “Sí, vos. That’s the way it is. But now you have a compañero in this.”

  “—You were almost my brother-in-law?” I think I meant this as a joke to dismiss my crying, or as a signal of gratitude for the way he was being, though I think the remark confused him more than anything else.

  “Ah pues, not quite,” he said after a moment, very solemnly, blinking.

  “I’m sorry. When I’m ready, I just can’t listen to it, you and her, right now. I’ve spent over a year being mad at her, and being—”

  “It’s not so important. I understand. You need to make friends with her in private again.”

  “That’s it exactly,” I said. “Except what you’ve told me about López Nub and everything, what does it change? She still might have gotten herself killed for trading babies. Isn’t that what you’re saying? It’s like we’re right back at square one.”

  “But don’t you feel calmer now?” he said.

  “Yeah, but why? Why should I feel calmer about it?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Because somehow, in this grotesque, banal, and obscene comedy which I have today described for you—”

  “—Thinking I already knew it!”

  “Pues sí. In this labyrinth of obscenities, it is possible to believe in her innocence again, though perhaps this is just a fragile intuition to follow. Maybe we would not feel this if we did not love her.”

  “—So what if we find out we’re wrong?”

  “This is a risk, no? With the other hand I would say that, no matter what, we must never lose this again.”

  He walked with his arm around my back now, the way Latin American students who are good friends do.

  I felt convinced then that he was some kind of genius and, though it embarrasses me to say it now, a savior. I felt fine being
in the weaker position compared with where I’d been before, and ready to trust him with all my resolve and confusion. Like an earnest student, I said, “It being Guatemala, after all.”

  “Pues sí,” he said, lightly . . . which somehow means the opposite of “sí pues” though both mean “well yes” and both can mean “Yes, well . . .” But sí pues is more affirmative, that’s right! of course! or it’s fatalistic, as in no kidding or you said it, and with a question mark it’s Am I right or what? But “Pues sí” is softer and has a short up-down melody, it’s an open-ended and ambiguous punctuation: Well yes, and that’s the least of it but just the beginning too, it being Guatemala after all, which, after all, doesn’t even exist. (—and with a question mark it’s a flirtatious little chirp, “Pues sí? mi amor? . . .”)

  Personal involvement aside, how could he not have felt challenged. He, a Guatemalan journalist in exile enrolled in a course on nonfiction narrative—“A peripheral crime,” he called it, on the Amtrak Minuteman train to Boston that very night. “But one that allows the weaving together of many threads, Rogerio. Because look at all the elements, vos, just the journalistic elements.” And he listed them: the baby trade, war orphans, the war, the military and the counterinsurgency campaigns; the corruption, apathy, and ineptitude of the legal system, the police, and the press; a Guatemalan-born U.S. citizen with every opportunity to make a good life in the United States who mysteriously and dramatically returns.