He’d become a snob. Was that what it was? He didn’t think any Guatemalan woman was good enough for him unless she also led that sort of existence? And he couldn’t go near that kind of woman without risking both their lives because he was always being watched. And that kind of woman would probably mistrust him anyway. She would see through him, she wouldn’t think he had it so tough, and of course he didn’t. She would think he was merely some kind of fanfarrón (one who makes a great fanfare). She would even misunderstand him. And imagine the compañera who would also let him spend all his time running around with foreign women? (But, my love, it is all for the struggle to save the nation! Síííí pues.)
But it was part of the transaction, his modus operandi, for Moya to lure foreign women into telling all about themselves. All he had to do was listen and they were left feeling that a bond had been formed. To them it was all vitally important, of course: all the steps that had led to the decisive moment when they realized they cared so much about a far-off, suffering little country that they had to go there themselves, as something other than just a tourist. They never expected him to care. But he did, it fascinated him, he was detective, anthropologist, father confessor, and seducer all at once, listening to them outline their journeys in such a way as to make them seem somehow inevitable. Around them he was like a boy crazy for fairy tales: the little girls who wore wooden shoes and stuck their fingers in the dike, the sleeping beauties who woke up, the girls with peas under their piled mattresses, the princesses in their towers who let down their hair.
And with them, Moya had from time to time spent happy days and nights filled with scentless kisses and shockingly straightforward lovemaking. Then they went home. They always went home, and hardly ever came back; they busied themselves according to their needs and dispositions, and cultivated their nostalgia.
But Moya kept in touch. Almost as if using his hands to project ominous puppet shadows against a wall, he sent himself looming into the fond and concerned memories of others through the international phone lines. Usually, this was just to send greetings. The more familiar (to them) Moya saved his sentiments and ideas for the letters he posted in anonymously initialed Hotel Biltmore Maya envelopes. But a woman’s readiness to accept a collect call in the middle of the night counted, vos. It was just such a series of calls, in an unprecedentedly urgent tone, one to his friend Laura Moore in Washington, another to Sylvia McCourt in Cambridge, that had so swiftly landed Moya at Harvard with stipend. (Where he, six months later, did the unexpected thing and went home himself.)
Even singular and exceptional Laura Moore (raised in Pocatello, Idaho, where her father was wealthy but an abusive alcoholic, and where she was a high school champion skier), the Queen human rights leaf-cutting ant, that intrepid two-legged bonfire of inexhaustible focus and feeling and will, went home sometimes. She went home with her suitcases packed with the cassette recordings and typed testimonies of victims who—and this was what truly amazed Moya—no matter how much their tragic tales resembled the hundreds of others Laura had already discreetly listened to and transcribed, always made actual warm tears slide from her reddened blue eyes, soaking her cheeks, the golden, angular face that others, mainly out of jealousy, regarded as being one of haughty and competitive scorn, but that Moya knew to be one of the most redeeming faces he had ever seen. Laura always came back. She was Moya’s closest friend among the foreign women who came to Guatemala, but she had never been able to love him. They had not offered each other the slightest possibility of peace.
But none of his foreign women, his friends, offered that peace. They were too eager to submit. They only saw Moya in his role, and would consider it a betrayal to separate him from it. Eventually, a bitterness crept into Moya’s relationships with the foreign women. Instead of arranging to meet them in restaurants with clean and credible food, he lured them to the poor people’s food stalls in the market behind the cathedral. Even Moya, on just his El Minuto salary, could afford to eat somewhat better than that. He led them in by the butchers’ stalls, the floors sticky and rank with old blood and flies, past the dried-fish sellers with their fly-coated offerings. At the food stalls he ordered chicken soup ladled from big pots into plastic bowls, a still feathery rooster’s head submerged in the broth, or a whole claw. Or plates of beans with chunks of pig gristle. Warm sodas served with plastic cups washed and rewashed in tubs of cold, greasy water. Even Moya ended up with diarrhea.
“So what is it you look for in a man if you are to love him in a serious way?” Moya asked Flor de Mayo—this was still fairly early on in the Long Night of White Chickens, just after she’d told him that in fact she had not had many “boyfriends,” adding a beat later, “Well, not serious ones.” He hadn’t even yet admitted to himself that he wanted to be that man, it was just one of his standard story-initiating questions.
And Flor didn’t even pause to think. “Self-knowledge,” she said brightly, as if she’d worked it all out long ago, and then she looked at him with her eyebrows raised.
Moya was astonished, because that was exactly what Sylvia McCourt had said just the previous year, when he’d held her in his arms all night, both of them fully clothed, in the Hotel Biltmore Maya. And self-knowledge, as Moya conceived of it, was perhaps his weakest, his least developed area—inevitably so, after years spent telling himself that even his own shadow wasn’t in on what he was really thinking, vos.
It struck Moya, that night, as an extraordinarily superior thing to say, a standard that he had never before truly considered; now that he had heard it twice, the idea took on new authority, and for some time filled his inner life with self-doubt. Was it just a coincidence that two of the three most formidable women he knew had answered that way? The third formidable woman was Laura Moore, but she had answered the question with a caustic laugh and said, “I’ll know him when I meet him. Haven’t yet.” And then he’d felt her watching him from behind a mask of wry amusement.
Of course Moya didn’t yet know Flor’s habit of saying provocative and even somewhat pretentious things, often recalled at random from half-remembered philosophy and literature courses at Wellesley College, but spoken with spontaneous and unshakable conviction nonetheless. Having said one thing or another, she could often then defend it with rapid-fire chatty passion, spraying a mercurial logic all over the place. This habit eventually became very dear to Moya, simply because he learned to recognize it, and because he so liked her.
“Sí pues, self-knowledge, ajá,” said Moya. “. . . But how do you mean this?”
“Gravity,” said Flor immediately, as if she were being quizzed and had this answer ready too. “A stillness. That you feel not just comfortable with, but yourself stilled by. Stilled by? I mean, what do I mean? You don’t just look for one thing of course, OK? I think love is two people separately looking in the same direction together. It’s two people entrusted with each other’s vulnerabilities. It’s two people who are going to end up knowing everything about each other, as much as two people can know. So, self-knowledge. Gosh, who needs a guy who doesn’t know himself?”
Sylvia McCourt had also answered this in a similar way, though more concisely. Solidity. Feet on the ground. A man who wasn’t going to disappoint her by making ridiculous mistakes and decisions.
Moya asked Flor, “And so you have this, this self-knowledge?”
“Hah!” Flor had bleated after a moment. “I should hope that by now I’ve learned something.” But then she leaned forward and whispered con-spiratorially, “I’m somebody you phoned, remember? Supposedly for an interview about orphans. I came along because you’re a friend of Roger’s. Except now we’re having this conversation.” For a moment she held his gaze. “Except it’s more like an interrogation.”
“Pero, Flor! How can you say this? No one is insisting that you tell the truth, so it is the absolute opposite of an interrogation. I asked what it was like to go live in Boston, and you told me about policemen and snowstorms. Luzbel depiedralumbre, pues. Go right ahea
d! It is fun for me to figure out what you are really saying.”
“But I didn’t make that up, ask Roger, he knows that story—Cheers.” Flor smiled, took a deep drink of her rum. “I’m not trying to really say anything.”
“Bueno, chula.”
“You’re pretty overbearing, you know that?”
“Yes, I know, you have already told me this. Would you like me to tell you about the Colegio Anne Hunt instead?”
“Hah! Absolutely not. Why would I want to hear about that?”
“I agree. But you were in school with little children when you were much older. And now here you are in Guatemala again, taking care of little children. Who would not wonder about this?”
“. . . Excuse me? Wonder what?”
“Why do you not want to be with people your own age?”
“. . . The two have nothing to do with each other, Moya. Back then I went to school because it was my best option. It was ridiculously boring, my very own excruciating road to somewhere, but I had to do it. Here I took the job because it was offered to me and it seemed an OK . . . Oh! Do you really think I had some mad, unconscious reason for taking the job at the orphanage? Why do people like me take jobs like that, I mean, isn’t it always basically the same reasons?”
“I don’t know, pues . . .”
“And listen, I didn’t speak English at all when I arrived in Namoset, I didn’t even read Spanish that well, so sitting in elementary school reading circles every day was necessary, and totally beneficial, however occasionally humiliating. Even the penmanship classes were helpful, believe it or not. But my life hasn’t been this joke, Moya, and I’m no genius. I did the first three grades in one year, the next two in another. And by fifth grade the books were wonderful anyway, Jules Verne, Tom Sawyer . . . Oh yes, I also learned that time can move very slowly indeed. And it was a very illuminating experience, being this freak, who wasn’t always sure if she was ten or fifteen, no? I realized my crush on a teacher was very different from a ten-year-old’s; I think I went around spewing this chaos that everyone, myself included, was too puritanical to address, it being Namoset, Massachusetts, and not, say, Chiquimula. And math, vos, forget it, I was barely ahead of even the second-graders! You have to remember where I came from, Moya. The monjas’ teaching methods were not quite Jesuitical, you know what I mean? We had separate classes for sewing, cooking, sure. But religion spelling and math we received all in one class! ‘Why does February have twenty-eight days?’—this is what our lessons were like—’Because this is the number of blisters Job had on his body! Spell febrero!’ and we’d all have to recite F-E-B . . . ‘Spell Job!’ J-O-B . . . ‘Count to twenty-eight!’ Uno, dos, tres . . . ‘Why does febrero have twenty-eight days?’ Because Job . . . Ecclesiastical ‘Sesame Street,’ you know?”
The reason Moya had phoned Flor de Mayo for an interview on the “orphan situation” in the first place was that, though he had no clandestine ties of his own, he sometimes wrote for the exile news service in Mexico (which was practically the same thing). What would be suppressed in Guatemala could be published there. Usually he didn’t try to hide it; he used the telex machine in the El Minuto office to file if the story didn’t seem especially controversial, or the telex in the Hotel Ritz if it did, and he never appended his name. Usually his dispatches were on his own initiative. Without their having to ask, he simply made a habit of sending the exile news service whatever couldn’t be printed in El Minuto.
But the exile news service had only two regular ways of contacting Moya with their occasional requests. Highly trusted Sweet Sisters of Solidarity brought sealed envelopes from Mexico. And sometimes one of these envelopes suddenly appeared on Moya’s desk, without his knowing exactly who had left it there.
Laura Moore had heard a rumor from a trusted source that someone who worked at El Minuto was an urban subcomandante for the “Egyptians,” which was “Aunt Irene”—style code for the Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres, the Guerrilla Army of the Poor. Though Laura Moore was extremely discreet and had an uncanny propensity for finding surprising sources, Moya was deeply disconcerted that someone had passed such a rumor on to her. But Moya knew that urban comandantes rarely fit the stereotype, that they had to be masters of circumspection and even disguise to survive in the city. For all anyone could really know, it might very well be Natividad Molina, the blithely unreliable receptionist downstairs, who was actually a deeply clandestine guerrilla comandante, and occasionally left envelopes on his desk. Laura Moore liked to indulge the fantasy—perhaps in the way of dreaming up her perfect man, the one she’d recognize as soon as she saw him—that it was Celso Batres, the very handsome and dashing and really quite intelligent and liberal-spirited owner of the little-read El Minuto and the ubiquitous ¿Dónde?. That was certainly an amusing idea: Celso, Moya’s boss and benefactor, leaving unmarked envelopes on his desk, directing him what to write for the exile news service. You never know, vos. But Moya told Laura it was even likelier to be Natividad Molina. He also told Laura he was furious with her for having told him about it in the first place, it was just about the last thing he wanted to know! (Secrecy being a church, forced confession et cetera, no one wanted a shadow that could be hauled out of himself like a bloody fishing net full of wriggling identities and names . . .)
One day, inside the unmarked and sealed envelope that had mysteriously appeared on his desk, Moya found a request for an article related to the illegal trade in orphans. Enclosed was a photocopy of a G-2 memo, on official Ministry of Defense stationery. The memo, beneath various bureaucratic subheadings, nonjudgmentally stated that there was at least one hospital in the United States, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, that was purchasing Guatemalan orphans in order to use their organs for transplants to save the lives of rich gringos. Having served that purpose, said the memo, the orphans were then incinerated. At least one foreign-owned or -directed orphanage or clandestine baby-selling ring must be knowingly collaborating (said the memo).
In retrospect, this should give some idea of the credulous ignoramuses slaving away in the carrion-stuffed catacombs of the G-2 bureaucratic empire. But this should come as no surprise: Moya believed the memo too.
Eventually, when he went to Cambridge, he would realize that the United States was unlikely to allow such flagrant excesses to take place in a vigilantly regulated hospital within its own borders (though perhaps not as unlikely if a live orphan was worth much less in the marketplace than the sum of his or her parts). But back then it had seemed absolutely logical, in keeping with everything he had witnessed and been taught to believe and wanted to believe. Moya certainly understood why the exile news service would want a story on this scandal that seemed to him only marginally more lurid than so many others. But these sorts of stories were hard even for gringo reporters to substantiate. Not that the G-2 memo wasn’t by itself substantiation enough for the news service. Beyond his willingness to contribute and apparent trustworthiness, it was Moya’s lapidary rhetorical gift that the news service valued.
Inside the envelope, along with the memo, was a note written in an anonymous hand. It listed every U.S. citizen who owned or directed a private orphanage in the country. On this list, of course, was Flor de Mayo Puac.
From time to time Moya had heard Flor spoken of, and had always remembered her relation to his old school friend, Rogerio Graetz, who had betrayed him by staying atop a fence while Moya jumped down alone to face a vicious dog. Their friendship had, of course, ended over that incident; but Roger had never known how much Moya had looked forward to making up the next summer. He’d even evolved a plan, a little ceremony, whereby they, together, would toss poisoned meat to the dog from atop that fence, and thus renew the friendship. Moya hadn’t known that Roger would not be returning for his annual two-month immersion in the Colegio Anne Hunt; often, when he felt lonely and sad, his mamita would even say, “But your friend the gringito will be here soon!” But it was not until 1979 that Moya saw his old friend again, and quite by chance, in Pas
telería Hemmings—by then the dog must have been long dead, and was nearly forgotten. Roger was in Guatemala visiting Flor de Mayo, who for some reason had returned.
Since then, Moya had occasionally spotted Flor, had actually noticed her without having the slightest idea who she was. The very first time he saw her was one afternoon during the refacción, or snack, hour in the Hotel Pan American in Zona 1. A marimba band was playing, and she was sitting alone at the table closest to the Spanish-tile fountain and its continuous watery dribbling, reading a gringo paperback with a metallic blue-and-silver cover. She didn’t touch her coffee, her pecan pie was half eaten. There was a pause in the music. Behind the long wooden keyboard of the marimba, the six musicians, in synthetic maroon suits, stood poised over their mallets like solemn waiters displaying six bottles of finest wine and then, all of them in unison taking a quick little bow, they launched into a sprightly rendition of the Wedding March, though no one in the room seemed to be getting married. Various customers and foreign hotel guests traded knowing smiles, rolled their eyes, or gaped at the sublimely straight-faced musicians bent over their expertly flourished mallets. But the attractive, dark, obviously Guatemalan woman curled up in her chair by the fountain went on reading, her expression not registering the slightest interest in the marimba band’s perhaps unfathomable, though not atypical, decision to perform the Wedding March during the midweek afternoon snack hour. Nor did she glance up when the waiter, dressed in Quiche Maya ceremonial traje, with turbanlike cloth headdress, britches baring his muscular peasant thighs, stopped at her table to refill her coffee. Moya’s eyes were drawn to her sturdy if gracefully tapered brown ankle, the smooth arch of her heel and cheerfully naked foot: she had one leg crossed over her knee, and dangling from the very end of that raised foot was a black cloth loafer, lightly and continuously bounced away from her bare sole and then back, that light bouncing caused by a similarly repeated up-and-down exertion of her black-masked toes, both motions seemingly possessed by a rhythm that was not that of the Wedding March. She wore navy blue slacks, a loose-fitting and very clean white blouse, no jewelry that he could see, a subdued but arresting shade of red lipstick on her slightly pursed, musing lips. Her nose protruded with gypsy haughtiness against a backdrop of softly tumbling black hair. Lowered lids and the angle from which he watched partially obscured her eyes, which seemed fixed darkly and raptly on the shiny paperback perched on her thigh.
The Long Night of White Chickens Page 38