Once, long before Moya knew her, Flor was staying in a chalet just outside Santiago Atitlán, on the lake.
“Who did this chalet belong to?”
“Just a friend,” she said.
“Was he there too?” asked Moya.
“Just a friend. And no. And how do you know it was a he?”
Anyway, this was a really nice chalet. Most of the chalets on that side of the lake were no longer visited by their owners because of the proximity of guerrillas on the nearby volcano and mountains. Foreigners often rented these chalets from their owners now, and quite cheaply.
Here’s a story Roger didn’t know, though Moya did not reveal it to him. It was the kind of story that, outside the immediate Guatemalan context, might cause extreme worry to loved ones far away. So of course she would have kept it from her Massachusetts family (as she often referred to the Graetzes—but then, who was her Guatemalan family?). It was a story that Flor only told Moya during an unprecedented moment of dense intimacy, confidence, and trust.
Every day while Flor was at the chalet, she jogged. So that day she went for her jog, through misty forests and milpas, on a dirt road here and there traversed by Indian farmers and sons carrying crude hoes over their shoulders or bent under impossible loads of firewood harnessed by straps to their foreheads and backs. At the sight of Flor in her maroon jogging outfit, the fear caused by unseen footsteps left their eyes; they even smiled as she went by. “Buenas tardes.” “Buenas . . .” But at a remote bend Flor ran into three judiciales, civilian agents of the military. They were standing beside a black-windowed Jeep parked beneath the constant swooping and swirling of swallows from nests in the dirt cliff above. Well, these guys were always lurking around, armed of course, but it was most unusual that they would intrude themselves upon a foreigner or any resident of a lakeside vacation chalet. The three judiciales led Flor back into the forest and there ordered her to strip. She complied. She knew she was going to be raped and then almost certainly killed and anonymously buried there. None of the poor farmers she had run past would dare risk admitting to having seen her. Stupid of her to have gone jogging, to have forgotten she didn’t really look foreign. It so happened she was menstruating. She pulled the tampon out by its string and tossed it on the ground between herself and the judiciales. “Eso qué? What’s that?” They had never seen such a thing. Disgusted and frightened, they ordered her to put her jogging sweats back on. She was not to breathe a word of the incident to anyone or they would kill her. Now go, whore!
Indian and rural mestizo men alike apparently shared this fear and revulsion towards menstrual blood. Peasant women stuffed themselves with rags; some kept their periods secret. Flor had even heard it said that there were men who didn’t even know women menstruated. It was considered a curse should a menstruating woman step over a hoe, or come in contact with any of a man’s working implements.
When she told Moya, the incident was already nearly two years past. They were in bed, and had been talking for hours. It was only the second time that Moya had actually passed an entire night in Flor’s bed in Los Quetzalitos. A brief silence held between them.
“You were very lucky, mi amor,” said Moya.
“Wasn’t I?” she said. “And stupid to go jogging. Thank God for luck!”
It was to affirm the existence of luck, not to dramatically or warningly exploit a brush with the deadly monster, that such stories were usually told among intimates. “Thank God for luck!” You could never stop saying it in silence, but the company of a trusted intimate sometimes afforded the release of being able to say it out loud. Trusted, de confianza, that was key. Moya knew not to resume with questions such as “So what were you really doing all by yourself, if you were by yourself, at that chalet?” In the face of certain punishments and their manner of being applied, everyone is as innocent as a little white spider.
Moya will never forget the day he discovered that his own intelligence set him apart. This happened when he was ten, in Zunil, a village outside Quezaltenango, where his mother took him to pay homage to Maximón. Tricky doer of good and evil, sacred subverter and balancer, backwards and upside-down spirit, sexual degenerate, unsanctimonious and lax father confessor who just listens, Judas—all kinds of crazy stuff is the Indian Maximón, with carved wooden face and cigar in mouth, straw fedora and rainbow raiments, the most sacred relics of the ancestors and cofradia, or religious confraternity, bundled inside. But Moya’s mamita took him to see a ladino- bastardized Maximón. In too tight necktie and itchy woolen suit, he rode with her on the bus through mountains and hills full of sheep grazing and apple orchards to Xelajó, where they spent the night, catching another bus to Zunil in the morning. Maximón was housed in the large, dirt-floored front room of a crumbling mud-brick house in a mostly Indian town. Inside, pilgrims sat on benches along the walls, waiting their turn to prostrate themselves before the idol. Some had come all the way from Mexico. They all wore their best clothes and jewelry. Not an Indian among them. The ladino Maximón was a store mannequin with a painted mustache seated upon a throne. He wore mirror sunglasses, a bowler hat; in his mouth was a white, brass-tipped cigarette holder with burning cigarette. He wore a light blue suit, a yellow tie, saddle shoes. Around the throne candles and incense burned, and heaped flower petals festered among the offerings. Unlike the Indian Maximón, this idol did not receive drinks and splashes of aguardiente. From where he was seated, Moya could very well hear that every single pilgrim had the same request, for money. Make us rich, Maximón. They kissed the mannequin’s hands, shoes, they took turns lighting its cigarette. They stuffed small bills into its clothes. Moya’s mother, like all the rest, whispered and pleaded with desperate devotion. Make us rich, why not? She pinched Moya hard when he refused to kneel, refused to light the mannequin’s cigarette, refused to utter a single request. Seated against the wall were three Mexican prostitutes in satiny red, yellow, green dresses, their rank perfume mingling with that of the candles and incense. They looked at him fearfully, at the blasphemer. He had a sudden desire to urinate on Maximón’s saddle shoes. But he didn’t. Reflected in Maximón’s sunglasses he saw himself, his dark little face, radiating intelligence, and for a moment was stunned and silent, absorbed in the reflection. Moya loved his mamita, his doting and generous inferior. So he mastered himself. He took the idol’s hand. Like an eloquent altar boy he spoke. He said, “Maximón, cabrón. Thank you for recognizing me.” He picked up one of the tapered candles, held it to the cigarette. Then he took out his little wallet, removed the only quetzal in it, and placed the bill in the mannequin’s bill-festooned suspenders. He winked at the three prostitutes, three winks, one for each. His mamita cuffed the back of his head and laughed. Everybody laughed. Moya turned and walked out of the idolatrous den, removing his necktie. Outside, he asked his mamita for an ice cream.
Moya’s father was, of course, a sailor, but the last time either Moya or his mother heard a word from him, Moya was in his next to final year at the Colegio Anne Hunt; all of which is insignificant, because when his father left for the last time it was with an earful of Moya’s gentle mother’s shrill and fed-up wishes never again to have to hear another word from him. Fathers, especially among the poor, are not made to last in the tropics anyway, vos. This father could barely read, was a drunk, whimpered in his sleep like a depraved eunuch, was the sort of man capable of engrossing himself in an all-day bicycle race narrated over the radio, was full of caca, and when drunk only wanted to boast about the night he and his crew mates threw a sailor overboard in the middle of an equatorial Atlantic crossing because he was a bothersome, sneaky, hypnotizing queer, full of maricón black magic, so they threw him to the sharks, remorseless, with cackling pride—who needs a father with a mind and spirit inseparable from the worst filth all around?
On the El Minuto-man train, staring out the window at the ocean’s vast, slow darkening, Moya thought of his father, of sailors in general, and recalled, with the same brief and clairvoyant sense of lonel
iness he’d first felt upon reading about him as he lay on his bed on a snowy afternoon in Cambridge, the Central American sailor who had burst in on the Nicaraguan consul in Paris one day almost a century before: “I’m not here to ask for anything or to borrow money! I only wanted to salute you, sir, because you are my country’s consul! I am a sailor, here in France off a boat from China, and next I go to India!” The sailor said good-bye and left, having no idea that he had just saluted the immortal poet Rubén Darío, who years later recorded the episode in a slim memoir. A turn-of-the-century Central American sailor, wandering from China to France to Bombay, dropping in to salute his country’s consul wherever one could be found. That’s what Moya was thinking of when Rogerio interrupted his meditation on the train, asking about Sylvia McCourt. He was thinking that he would have to do something with that jaunty and uncorrupted little sailor in his annual Ode to Darío editorial, assuming he got his old job back at El Minuto.
Strangely, that haunted moment has lived on. Often, now, in his own voice and heart, Moya hears the lonesome ebullience of that world-wandering little sailor, late at night especially.
SEVENTEEN
Sylvia McCourt, only a year or two older than Flor, was already a tenured professor of political science at Harvard when she met Moya in Guatemala. She was prominent outside academic circles too: a frequent contributor of editorials and articles to influential newspapers and journals, invited to appear on televised panel discussions, a member of prestigious foreign policy councils and so on; Central America was her recent area of specialization.
“Curious choice for such a serious scholar, don’t you think?” dead-panned Moya, when he first told me about her on the train to Boston. “She must not like to read very much, vos.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “I’m always surprised by how much there 15 to read, actually.” But he was only joking, I think.
Moya and Sylvia were introduced at a happy hour gathering of Guatemalan journalists and political personalities held in Sylvia’s honor by Teresa Truczinski, the U.S. embassy’s press attaché, at her penthouse apartment in a Zona 10 condominium high rise.
There, a magnificently self-assured, aerobically fit, golden-haired, and tender-eyed Sylvia McCourt and Moya and several of the heartily cordial guests were all out on the press attache’s balcony enjoying the fresh evening air and the powdery-pastel vista of a typical, smog-abetted Guatemala City sunset. The horizon was a long, jagged line of dimming mountains, and, looming above, dominating the orange-pink sky with their irksome perfection and remoteness, were two immense volcanoes.
Before being invited to Teresa Truczinski’s penthouse for the first time, Moya had never seen his city from the air. His flight to Boston was his first in a plane, his return home his second—but all that was still in his future. Standing on the balcony, Moya gazed down, absorbed in studying the Zona 10 blocks below, an unlidded maze of high walls boxed around big houses and eerily unpopulated yards holding swimming pools, artificial waterfalls, blossom-splattered gardens, private aviaries; a maid took down laundry next to a giant satellite dish on a rooftop patio; in another yard a gardener stood over a small, whitely smoking pile of burning brush; a watchdog galloped along its side of the wall. Moya had once had a girlfriend who lived down there, in what seemed not just a long time ago but a whole other life.
Among the guests pressing themselves around Sylvia McCourt on the balcony were Coronel Lenz Méndez, the head of Army Public Relations, portly Pepe Arnulfo, director of the nation’s largest newspaper, and Paco Palma Passafarri, owner of the second largest paper and founder of his own political party. Also in attendance, most still lingering in the living room, were several of the country’s more prominent faferos—and faferas—and Celso Batres, the suave and handsome and politically ambitious third-generation owner and director of the newspaper Moya worked for, El Minuto (¿Dónde? too, and much more profitably, though that was treated by everyone as a secret). One day not even two years before, Celso had come to the public university—“La U”—to guest-lecture at the law faculty and had ended up plucking Moya from an unknown fate, offering him a weekly column called “The University Student’s Point of View” and full-time employment at El Minuto, mainly because of the sardonic, if respectfully delivered, insight Moya had offered during the question-and-answer session: “It’s true, what you say, Licenciado Batres, that here in Guatemala there is a fundamental respect for freedom of expression. Here, anyone is free to say whatever he wants. And if someone doesn’t like it, then he’s free to kill you.” Nervous giggles, beginning softly, swept the lecture hall, crescendo-ing into generalized laughter. Finally even Celso Batres, standing stiffly with his hand in the side pocket of his Italian jacket, had to let a boyish grin of mischievous acknowledgment undo his close-lipped, urban-hidalgo expression.
So now here was Moya, by far the youngest person on the U.S. embassy press attache’s balcony, younger even than the two Indian waiters in white shirts and black neckties, balancing trays of cocktails wrapped in paper napkins in one hand while pulling out lighters to light the chainsmoking guests’ cigarettes with the other.
Teresa Truczinski always invited Moya to her gatherings when there was a visiting influential intellectual from the States in town. For one thing, she realized that Moya was one of the few working Guatemalan journalists who could hold his own in conversation with a visiting intellectual. Teresa Truczinski, pretty if bug-eyed, appeared to actually like Moya, but sometimes this seemed to conflict with feelings of annoyance that his presence aroused in her as well, a purely professional press attache’s annoyance perhaps, as when she seemed to wonder if maybe she’d erred in giving Moya and his opinions too easy access to some obviously impressionable yet not inconsequential visitor: Once, when Moya was leaving one of her gatherings in the company of a successful Hollywood screenwriter who was researching a movie—she’d been hired by an extremely famous Hollywood actress who wanted to play a young gringa widow who takes over her late Guatemalan husband’s coffee plantation in a conflictive zone of the highlands—Teresa, smiling giddily and as if under the sway of emotions she couldn’t quite master, intercepted them as they waited for the elevator that stopped right inside her penthouse living room; there she pinched Moya’s cheek and held on to it as she said, “If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then isn’t it a duck?”
Moya had never heard this expression. In the elevator the screenwriter asked, “What was that all about?”
And Moya said, “Teresa thinks I am a Marxist. Or a Communist. A subversive, a guerrilla, a revolutionary, something like that. She was warning you, I think.”
“I thought that was what she was driving at,” said the screenwriter. “But I didn’t want to say so myself. Are you?”
“No,” said Moya. “Teresa is afraid that by the time we finish dining tonight, I will have your gringa providing sanctuary for guerrillas on her farm, and giving all her land away to her Indian workers.”
“Sounds good to me,” said the screenwriter. “Maybe you’re in the wrong line of work. Where does it go from there?”
Why did Teresa Truczinski think Moya was a Marxist or a whatever? Mainly because of his reputation as the country’s one surviving newspaper columnist with some sting, however subtle, in what he wrote. She might not have had anything else to go on but that. Maybe she even thought his bright charm was sneaky and loaded, and that this was typical of young intellectual Marxists. But Teresa Truczinski also knew that whether Moya was actually a Marxist or whatever or not, visiting intellectuals from the States would often think he was too.
Which was usually fine with Teresa. She was glad to have Moya at her gatherings to give visiting intellectuals the idea that it just wasn’t true that in Guatemala all such people were dead or in hiding or absolutely unwilling to show their faces at a U.S. embassy event. And she usually wasn’t too afraid of whatever Moya might actually say to a visiting Sylvia McCourt, knowing that intellectuals tend to have a mo
re inquiring and sophisticated take on the country than, say, visiting congressmen, and so are going to run across Moyalike opinions anyway, with or without a Moya. (She never invited Moya when U.S. congressmen were being hosted, there was absolutely no professional reason to.)
Teresa Truczinski realized, of course, that it is always a Sylvia McCourt, with all her prominent credibility, who is going to have much more influence than a Moya ever could on how some undecided congressman might vote on such issues as military assistance to Guatemala anyway. But, incredibly, a Moya might have some little bit of influence on a Sylvia. And there just wasn’t much Teresa Truczinski could do about that. It was just one of the occupational hazards of a press attaché. It was often a thankless job, Teresa’s.
Of course Moya had his own reasons for putting up with all this. One was his desire, even his duty, to meet and try to influence the thinking of all the Sylvias who came through Guatemala on what they usually and somewhat militaristically referred to as “fact-finding tours.” Another reason was that Moya, for some time before his exile, had begun to suspect and hope that the army had finally begun to regard him as a relative untouchable because of his having been seen at so many events befriending the likes of Sylvia—that is, the army might have come to regard him as someone better left alone or even chased into exile than as someone to snatch, torture, rip open for his secrets, and then kill, realizing that to do the latter could very well boomerang, raising a hysterical outcry in the editorial and opinion pages of American and European newspapers all out of proportion to the damage he could do with his mariconcito propaganda dinners and screws with Sweet Sisters of Solidarity and the occasional Sylvia McCourt, a much tougher cookie than any knee-jerk solidarity or human rights type anyway.
The danger would resurface, Moya had always realized, if the press attaché ever decided that it would be frankly impolitic and insulting to the other prominent Guatemalan journalists and governmental representatives who attended her gatherings to keep inviting Moya because he had finally become too “controversial.” But by having chosen to go temporarily into an “exile” sponsored and even modestly publicized by an international human rights organization; by having fled a country whose military regime and civilian loyalists regularly denounce such organizations as fronts for the Communist conspiracy to conquer the world; by having allowed that same organization to arrange a few Guatemala-tattling speaking engagements for him before solidarity and church groups in the Boston area (to which the Guatemalan embassy in Washington dispatched its own agents, and none too discreetly, vos; they certainly stood out with their Mayan noses and bureaucrats’ polyester suits, with their soberly attentive and then, as Moya’s tattles mounted, turbulently rigid patriotic expressions)—by having done all that it is possible that Moya has finally crossed over into what Teresa Truczinski and now her successor, Elsa Nardone, would have to regard as the frankly impolitic, if not as an outright admission of subversive association. Since his return to Guatemala, the new press attaché hasn’t invited Moya to anything, despite his new Harvard connections and polish.
The Long Night of White Chickens Page 32