Later, when Moya was already working at the newspaper, some little patojo bobo tossed into the pool a rubber ball, which the bull hippo swallowed; the ball got stuck in its esophagus. Despite the emergency operation performed by a team of veterinarians right there on the concrete sunning platform that arched the pool after zoo workers had dragged the choking hippo up onto it with ropes and pulleys, the hippo died. Its carcass was delivered to the immense garbage dump in Zona 13, and the very next day headlines appeared in the city’s two main dailies announcing that the poor people who lived in the garbage dump were feasting on hippopotamus meat.
Naturally newspapers reach the garbage dump even on the same day they are published, and at least a few of its resident scavengers were able to read. Two days after the sensationalistic headlines, which El Minuto had nothing to do with, Moya was sitting at his Royal typewriter in the small second-story newsroom when a noticeably acrid and filthy stench came up the stairs, though nothing, not even the blank page of paper in his typewriter, moved. Then, from the reception desk downstairs, he heard a commotion of angered, affronted women’s voices shouting hipopótamo this and hipopótamo that. He went down. Marta Andrade, the very pregnant secretary, and Natividad Molina, the less noticeably pregnant secretary, were standing rigidly a few feet back from the reception counter. And there, on the other side, reeking of nothing other than the garbage dump, that is, of an entire city’s rotting vegetables and carrion and sewage and the toxic fumes of anything that can be thrown away and burned, all of it combining into a single stench that really did seem to have the solid abrasiveness of a hot blizzard of filth on a dry windy day at the dump, were about a dozen of the women who lived there. But for the wrapped, twined plastic leggings some of them perpetually wore for wading through garbage, they did not look that much different from the rest of the city’s poorest people, in torn and stained dresses or shredded, smoke-smudged traje, boxy bellies protruding from so many years of parasite-infested diets and so many pregnancies, hair stringy and sticky because of the impossibly high price of even soap, brown faces too weighed down with premature wrinkles and toughened skin to be anything but impassive, open mouths displaying sporadic teeth that looked like wooden pegs hammered in at odd angles. But their eyes, despite whites reddened and yellowed from constant exposure to smoke and conjunctivitis infections, were livid black beams, irradiating all the fury and affront of what they seemed to agree was the greatest indignity yet inflicted on the poor who lived in the garbage dump—many of whom actually raised their children there, all of whom spent their days fighting with vultures and pariah dogs over the fresh leavings delivered by the donkey-drawn yellow trash carts and the big trucks of industry and private trash-collecting services, who fought over scraps to eat, junk to sell, and even boiled the carcasses of dead cats and dogs right there in iron drums to sell to the glue factories; and who lived in loose shacks made ofjunk erected on a terrain of compacted, sun-baked trash, which could spontaneously ignite into multicolored chemical flames at any moment during the dry season or melt into quicksand pools of putrid mush during the rains.
So it had been insult enough all the times television crews had arrived, hoping to film the eternal pariah dog said to be loping around the dump with a severed human hand in its jaws, or to record the discovery of yet another trash-swaddled abandoned infant (on its way to a private orphanage perhaps, destined to be raised by doting, wealthy, and cultured parents in Paris!), anything to sensationalize the domesticated hell the scavengers had to live in, to ridicule them as the lowest of the low, poverty’s phantom clowns, circus performers already on the other side of life. But this was the worst yet.
“What do you think we are? Savages? Animals? That we would eat hipopótamo!”
“That ugly beast that we didn’t even know was called a hipopótamo?” insisted the militant delegation of women from the thousands said to be living in and around the garbage dump. The beast had lain there untouched even by dogs and vultures for all of that first day, and it wasn’t until the third day that the sun had softened its hide and swelled its innards enough that it broke open on its own like a giant overripe melon, and then, yes, the dogs and vultures did feast on it, “Sí, señores, but not us!”
“Honestidad!” shouted one of the women.
“Honestidad!” shouted the others after her.
“Dignidad señores, por favor!”
They wanted Moya’s newspaper to stand up for the essential and now ridiculed dignity of the garbage dump’s residents, who hadn’t swallowed a bite of hippo, though some had eventually boiled down its hacked remains to sell to the glue factories, y porqué no? They wanted El Minuto to denounce the other newspapers who had printed those slanders, and wanted those other papers to print retractions and apologies—they were on their way there next.
“Then, señoras, this is just the man you want to see,” said Marta Andrade, still frozen in place behind her huge belly, her eyes running. She lifted one hand away from her nose to gesture at Moya, then turned and fled into the back patio, followed by Natividad Molina holding a handkerchief over her face.
Moya, eyes running too, listened, questioned, nodded in sympathy. It was rare in Guatemala City to find poor people standing up for themselves like this, even if their insurrectional anger seemed a little misplaced. He felt moved, convinced. He even felt a surge of relief, because the Essential Dignity of the Garbage Dump Women and the Slanderous Incident of the Dead Hippo was going to make a fine newspaper column, and he’d been really stuck, staring at a blank page all day. It was just right, just what he wanted to say and could get away with saying within the parameters of what was safely allowed in “The University Student’s Point of View.” (Moya still registered for, though never attended, one class a semester to keep this credential intact.)
Back upstairs, Moya set to work. During the next few hours, several of his colleagues arrived, all of them cursing and muttering over the lingering smell that resisted even the bus fumes pouring in through the flung-open windows. He began his column by describing the hippo couple nestled in their stagnant, florid pool at the zoo, which he hadn’t been back to in years; Cupid and Venus he named them, which he knew weren’t their real names, but El Minuto didn’t check such facts; he evoked their celebrated power to draw snuggling lovers from far and wide to the edge of their concrete pool, though he and Patti, specifically Patti, were the only lovers he knew of who had been affected by the hippos in that way. Of course he ended up thinking about Patti. Wherever she was and whatever she was doing on the other side of the city, she must have heard the news of the dead hippo by now, she must have remembered Moya.
He thought about Patti so much that afternoon that finally he had to make an arduous effort to summon all his concentration and rhetorical talents to finish his column. When it was done, Celso Batres liked it so much he said he wished he’d written it himself. But this was one column Moya was determined to see published under his own byline, on the chance that Patti would see it. Moya stood his ground. A staff photographer was dispatched to catch a bus over to the zoo to snap a picture of lonely and submerged Venus’s solitary hump. Both the column and the photograph ran at the bottom of the front page of the next afternoon’s edition. A week went by. No word from Patti. Well, of course not. Such is life in the tropics, vos.
“El Vergudo,” Big Dick, was the name Patti had given to one of her stuffed hippo dolls and “Chichas de Melones,” Melon Tits, was another. “Cara de Puta,” “Pija de Mapache,” “Woody Allen,” and one, purple with yellow spots, was called “Anne Hunt.” Patti’s mother always brought her a hippo doll or figurine when she returned from her travels. On the Amtrak Minuteman train, Moya recited the names of Patti’s hippos. He was getting pretty emotional, looking back on his life, drawing lessons from it. Only days before, he’d made up his mind once and for all to return to his country.
Funny, he said then, how easily Patti Mundinger had slipped from his life, and how unexamined he’d let their parting be then
. It had just seemed a law of existence, that he had to let her go without a fight. But couldn’t it have been different? No? Maybe? Rich people have married poor ones for love in Guatemala before, vos, when that rich person was at least a little bit of a rebel, and as stubborn as his or her mate. But, like magicians, her parents had made Patti vanish, sending her away to Ohio until she came to her senses. And he, with all the complacency of a magician’s audience, had been accepting of the fact that what magicians can put on stage they can make vanish—kind of impressive to watch, but completely expected.
Out on Teresa Truczinski’s balcony, at her gathering of Guatemalan media and political elite and the distinguished visitor Sylvia McCourt, Moya felt stirred by his proximity to the mystery of power and his own insights into it. Which is what he always experienced at these events. Not that the guests included absolutely the most powerful people in Guatemala, but certainly Colonel Lenz Méndez, because of his high rank in the institution he served, and Paco Palma Passafarri, owner of his own newspaper and political party, and even Celso Batres were well on their way to becoming so. Most of the rest were ambitious faferos and comparatively potent enough—for all their diverse humanity, they were still very much like the actual voices through which the most powerful spoke to make it seem irrefutable that Guatemala was made up of many more assenting voices than just their own.
Power had always been a mystery, so ridiculously simple and brutally unanswerable that it seemed remote from ordinary human behavior. But what always really got to Moya at Teresa Truczinski’s gatherings was his recurring revelation that even he, a sailor and seamstress’s son, could probably end up just as powerful as anybody there (with the plausible exception of the monstrously handsome and up and coming Colonel Lenz). Moya felt confident that he could actually rise that high, even in Guatemala. If he wanted to, vos. On Teresa Truczinski’s balcony it was all right there, just waiting to happen.
On her balcony, as at any gathering of wealthy Guatemalans, anyone would consider it extremely impolite to be offered a cold drink that wasn’t well wrapped in at least a paper napkin. The middle classes, on special occasions such as quinceañeras (sweet fifteen celebrations), served drinks in paper napkins too, but only after the women had spent hours in the kitchen scissoring napkins in half to save money. Nearly everyone else in the country rarely even had the opportunity to endure cold fingers. Poor people’s food stalls usually didn’t have refrigerators; in their cantinas, men on binges passed out over warm bottles of aguardiente and beer. A significant portion of the population drank corn mush or coffee brewed from corn kernels or rainwater from hollowed gourds. This hierarchy of separate worlds seemed impregnable.
Unless one came upon a secret thread linking them, as Moya had—that thread in this case being Moya himself, his talents in combination with his fortuitous circumstances. It was all one world, that was his insight. Already, just being on the press attache’s balcony, he had a higher social position than he had ever aspired to or thought possible; from there, he could climb even higher. For example, he could move to one of the big newspapers (Paco Palma’s or Pepe Arnulfo’s), shut up and accept fafas, and with his rhetorical talent go on to become the country’s foremost Greatest Living political columnist, elected and reelected head of the press association, a position he could then parlay into one of leadership in a political party, and then make his pact with the army and whichever necessary oligarchs, and then, it really wasn’t at all unimaginable, even become a presidential candidate one day under a democratic system in which the army allowed civilian presidents to sit in the National Palace, which was the promised future both Paco Palma and Celso Batres were angling towards. Along the way he would feel obligated to partake of all kinds of illicit opportunities to enrich himself so as not to alienate others with a sanctimonious superiority. As president he would passively preside over so many lucrative rackets, so as not to alienate his democratic allies in the army high command, that for generations Moya children would be attending private schools in Switzerland and meeting their Moya parents for Christmas vacations in Gstaad.
That the corrupt and cynical route to power was much more decipherable and likely, and survivable, than an honest one was no surprise. Surely Celso Batres could never behave so scandalously. What was astonishing to Moya was that this future seemed at his fingertips, like a baited wallet protruding from Colonel Lenz’s trouser pocket. Moya and the colonel and Paco Palma Passafarri and Celso Batres and everyone else were all part of just one world, one extending well beyond the borders of Guatemala. Already Moya was capable of infiltrating his voice onto the editorial pages of leading U.S. newspapers—in fact, Sylvia McCourt would even quote him by name.
But on Teresa Truczinski’s balcony, Moya understood that it was his particular fate, his obligation, his only viable choice, to have just the degree of access to the mystery of power that his being there guaranteed, and to manage it as well and as opportunistically as he could, and hope not to get crushed. He took one last, thoughtful look out at the city and the horizon. Out there, in the mountains, a scorched-earth counterinsurgency campaign; in the city, secret prisons, secret torture cells, secret courts, secret cemeteries, state of siege. Otherwise, everywhere in the country, as on earth, life went on as normal. The breeze fanned Moya’s reddening face. The wild chatter of grackles seared the night air. It might have looked as if he was idly fingering the petal of one of Teresa Truczinski’s potted geraniums, but really he was pinching it hard. He looked blankly at his scarlet-smeared fingers, put his hand in his pocket. Now it was time to fix a smile on his face and go into action, and that would be somewhat amusing, alternately elating and degrading, and later on, when he looked back on it, would produce surging feelings of melancholy that would last for days.
Colonel Lenz Méndez, in dress uniform, epaulets on his broad shoulders and candy trains of colored ribbons crossing his vast chest, had Sylvia McCourt’s attention now. She must have found him kind of unbelievable to look at, though her expression didn’t show it—her eyes were fixed on the colonel with a glistening, deep brown stare that seemed as frank and nonjudgmental as a healthy and beautiful dog’s. Guatemalans were rarely as tall as the colonel, on the balcony only skinny Moya was taller, just barely. But the colonel was a massive stack of oblong muscularity, a military Michelin Tire Man, and literally monstrously handsome: with blazing blue eyes and close-cut, chafed blond hair and a pale Tecún Umán nose, he looked like a Paul Newman pumped up with helium. The colonel, like Patti Mundinger, came from German stock, though illegitimately, his mother rumored to have been an Indian servant on a plantation. If not for the name Lenz, Moya might even have suspected Patti’s father of being the progenitor.
Sylvia was standing straight as a soldier herself, her napkin-swaddled drink held in two delicate-looking hands at her hip. Curly, golden brown hair was pulled back from her wide, angular face and tied into a fluffily cascading ponytail that stopped midway down her back. Moya could tell she’d spent the day in the sun—at the ambassador’s swimming pool?—because the cut of her blouse bared her wonderfully rounded shoulders, and the warm reddish gleam of ripening mangoes suffused the firm, freckled skin there, and crowned her cheeks and nose. Then the cozy, perpetual creases of a slight and skeptical smile around her lips deepened, spreading new creases, not from anything the colonel had said but in generous anticipation.
And what did Colonel Lenz say?—this irrefutably capable man, nearly fluent in English, who had been chosen to head Army Public Relations during this difficult time when Guatemala was being treated as a pariah state on much of the world stage. The colonel said, “Do you know what I think, Sylvia?” and then he paused, looking down at her over his drawn-up chest, striking the pose of a confident and winning Military Animal refining a thought. “I can well imagine that you could have been a Miss America. You look like a Miss America!”
Puta, qué bárbaro, thought Moya, inwardly rejoicing over what a fool the murderous colonel had just made of himself.
/> But on that balcony, only Celso Batres and perhaps Moya, by now, at last, had the sophistication and self-control to know never to use a line like that on a Harvard professor. If the colonel had been speaking to the sort of “gringa” he was most used to meeting—wives, girlfriends, secretaries, and aides of all those right-thinking pilgrims to the little land of Right makes Might: starry-eyed businessmen and congressmen, arms dealers, Texas billionaires, fantasy mercenaries on Soldier of Fortune paramilitary junkets—such a line might have come off charmingly and innocently enough. It was something almost any Guatemalan might have said. In fact several of the men on the balcony, including Pepe Arnulfo and even Paco Palma Pass-afarri, chuckled or nodded appreciatively.
Sylvia McCourt almost immediately blushed, her surprised, flustered, oddly delighted expression summed by an ever-widening grin that made it look as if she might ask, What? Did you really say what I think you said? But she didn’t know what to say. It was the colonel who really looked flattered.
Moya guessed that Sylvia was thinking something like My God, there it is again, that hilarious, incredibly ingenuous and naive Central American masculine charm, even a combat-hardened colonel has it, you have to adjust your reactions, you need completely different standards when judging these people, but just wait until I get back to Harvard and tell my colleagues that a colonel said I looked like a Miss America!
Moya felt bitterly swept by pathos, and all tangled up in his divided self. Because he knew that in other circumstances he could sound just as naive as any of his countrymen, and that he could also be every bit as elitist and patronizing as the professor.
The Long Night of White Chickens Page 34