The Long Night of White Chickens

by Francisco Goldman

  It didn’t occur to Moya that he had seen her somewhere before, his memory didn’t serve up the faded visage of a sweetly smiling adolescent in tight jeans and light blue sweatshirt with hair falling over her face as she bent to receive a kiss from little Rogerio racing towards her through the Colegio Anne Hunt’s front gates, while the older boys clucked and hissed, “Mira esa india rica, vos . . .” But her hair was not straight and servants didn’t go around dressed that way. Even back then she would have looked taller than she actually was, with longish legs, long, thin arms, a long if femininely rounded posture. But she was very brown, which was why the boys had called her india. Moya too was much mocked, back then, at Anne Hunt, for his own poor person’s complexion, even by those boys who were not much lighter. But even such slight variations in hue allowed them to feel vindicated when taunting Moya. “El moro,” the Moor, “Mulato,” “Cara de mico,” Monkey Face, they called him. At home he would weepingly plead before his mamita, “Why did God make me so ugly?” Sí pues, that was when he was little.

  The Wedding March came to an end, followed by a pretty and sentimental melody that Moya, never very musical, didn’t recognize. One of her hands now hovered over the tabletop, groping in the air, while her eyes remained fixed on the book held against her thigh. Suddenly her hand dropped onto the half slice of pecan pie and picked it up, carrying it towards her lips. Moya watched as she obliviously worked the entire half slice of pie into her mouth, all the time still reading. She chewed; soon her long fingers were softly soothing her lips, apparently nudging sticky crumbs into the path of her flickering tongue. But then—perhaps it was a stifled laugh over what she’d been reading, or a bit of pie caught in her throat—crumbs flew from her mouth as she quickly hunched forward, hand scooped over mouth. Now he saw her eyes, large, nearly black, worried-looking disks darting around the room. The hand came away from her mouth, she sat back and resumed her reading. Could she be a prostitute? From one of the most upscale burdeles, perhaps taking a break before or after a visit to one of the generals in the nearby palace? But reading a book in English? No, it couldn’t be. Should Moya rise and intrude himself upon her? No, she would rebuff him, she was certain to be muy burgesa, narrow-minded and petulant. Or maybe she was one of those former barra show girls, or the most beautiful flower plucked from some jungle backwater, who had married a colonel, accompanying him to some European capital while he served as military attaché in an embassy. There she had acquired her incongruous tastes for understatedly elegant clothing and vulgar novels, without ever shedding her bad table manners. What a funny world, all one . . . Moya went back to his newspaper, El País from Spain, borrowed from Celso Batres, who was as generous as he was handsome and liberal spirited and who always saved his El País for Moya; who would actually say to those who asked him for it first, “Ah, I’m sorry, I’ve already promised it to Luis Moya.” So in that day’s El País Moya read a Spanish reporter’s account of languishing in a hotel in Ecuador with a raging fever from a bad bout of malaria when a local paper was pushed under his door, its headline proclaiming that Jesus Christ had reappeared in Guayaquil, the feverish reporter thinking, Hostia! I’d better file . . .

  An absurdly high-pitched voice, in English, its chapina accent barely noticeable, full of bright and artificial formality and cheer, was saying, “Hi, Mr. and Mrs. Ferguson! My, you gave me a start. Are you enjoying your stay in Guatemala?”

  The woman, all in one motion, had stood up and dropped her book on the floor, and was fumbling with delicate headphones and wire as if disentangling seaweed from her hair.

  “Excuse me! I was just—It’s not very patriotic of me, I know, but I just can’t stand marimba.” And then a squeaky, wheezing laugh. She stooped swiftly to retrieve the book, put it on the table, and shook hands firmly with the Fergusons, two middle-aged gringos who dwarfed her, accompanied by an officious little chapín wearing suit and steel-rimmed glasses. Flor, nearly two years later, when she was actually able to recall that afternoon, told Moya that the Guatemalan he’d observed was an adoption lawyer who had approached her on behalf of the Fergusons. She had decided then and there that even if a child were available—she couldn’t remember if, at the time, one had been—they could not have that child. They’d seemed perfectly nice, said Flor, but not right, not what she looked for. Not that they wouldn’t be loving parents, they had pleasantly homey if excessively narrow temperaments, her impression anyway. But she hadn’t at all liked their description of their “All American” little town in South Carolina. Probably, just probably not the greatest place on earth to one day find yourself wondering why you’re the only brown-faced-shiny-black-haired little kid in town. Another problem was that parents always want their children to think at least somewhat the way they do, verdad? Well, the Fergusons were Republicans, and proud enough of it to want it known. To each his own of course and far be it from me but in the South . . . Look, hadn’t the South gone mad for Republicans and warring foreign policies? Weren’t they all over Central America backslapping the killers now, donating helicopters and mercenaries and fundamentalist religions and army-plundered charity shipments to internal refugees to win “hearts and minds”? She assumed all that must be expressive of at least some degree of widely held community belief, however well meaning. No, she was sending no orphans there, impossible, c’mon, no fucking way—so many of them massacre survivors after all! The only gringo southerner she’d ever granted children to was Ozzie Peterkins, the black football player who built the jungle gym in her orphanage yard, a true sweetheart and something of a cosmic thinker, believe it or not, Moya. Also she didn’t like it when people mentioned right away that they wanted a child under four years of age, in good health, as light skinned as possible, with full mental capacities, one that could be proven never to have suffered the potentially brain-damaging effects of severe malnourishment. They had every right, of course, every right, but she wasn’t that kind of matchmaker. When she came down to it, she liked who she liked, pues, that was her right too. She tried to find parents she herself would have liked being raised by. She didn’t do that many adoptions, and since there was no science to it, she simply interacted a bit, browsed through her own impressions and intuitions, until she decided. There was a mística to it. These were whole and often very complicatedly begun little lives she was signing over. It was important to have a sense of how the future would guide the past, you know what I mean? The power she had was incredibly intimidating; she said she needed nerves of steel sometimes, when faced with such a decision. It was just that she trusted herself to get it right more than whoever else might try to. It exhausted her. No one knew, she told Moya once, during the five brief and turbulent weeks that they were actually lovers, how often she had silently called herself a monster, how bitterly she’d derided her own conceits and prejudices—

  “No . . . !” Moya had protested, and she, that night, had finally, for once, accepted his efforts to soothe her conscience, full of these strange dilemmas, rarely confessed, that he had never encountered before. She was telling herself, then, that she wanted to leave, and by then he wanted to go with her, only with her.

  So apparently that was what Flor was telling the Fergusons and the tense and seething little lawyer, as politely as possible, that there was no child available, there in the Hotel Pan American, when Moya still had no idea who she was, when he had simply watched, dumbfounded by the squeaky gringo-intonations of her nearly ludicrous voice. He had been unable to comprehend another word of their conversation, trying to eavesdrop from several tables away through the strident buoyancy of marimba and dribbling fountain, other voices and silverware. It was over quickly. She stood and retrieved the crunched black cashmere cardigan that had apparently slid off the back of her chair onto the seat. Smiling, her gaze fixed with solicitous attention on the moribund Fergusons, she unfurled the sweater, put it on. She shook hands, even with the bowing little lawyer, and then walked rapidly out of the hotel, holding her paperback high in one hand against he
r chest and the Walkman by her hip in the other. It always made Moya feel sad to watch a vivid woman, one who obviously had pride and an earnestly lived inner life, walk with such self-possessed and somewhat self-conscious rapidity out of a public place. They seemed always to trail behind them so much undeserved rancor and suspicion. No one can watch a woman like that leave a room in that way without feeling dully left behind. He looked over at the table, and saw Mrs. Ferguson’s livid blue eyes, her lips rapidly moving, Mr. Ferguson tiredly nodding along. The lawyer, meticulously working both knife and fork, delved into his chocolate éclair, his tiny feet in shiny black shoes poised on tiptoes on the floor beneath his seat.

  The next time Moya saw her was at the front of the line at one of the other ticket windows at Cines Capitol, on Sexta Avenida. This night she was dressed in jeans and a short leather jacket. Moya and Rolando Mezquita were standing in line for El Hombre Elefante. Flor bought a handful of tickets for the Cantinflas movie, and went to where a dozen or so children waited in an orderly line with another woman, this one very blond, plain and plump, in her twenties. The children, boys and girls, were dressed variously, in untucked shirts, knee-patched pants, ill-fitting dresses, many of them with cowlicks, many of them Indian featured, many of them with runny noses. As soon as she reached them with the tickets, the little line dissolved, the children went sprinting towards the escalators laughing, screeching happily and frantically for popcorn, candy, aguas. The two women serenely followed.

  A schoolteacher? wondered Moya, fascinated once again, not just by her beauty but by that beguiling air of distracted, pleasant, haughty something.

  He pointed her out to Rolando, Paco Palma Passafarri’s gossip columnist. Rolando said, Sí pues, La Flor. Esa gringa-chapina, muy rara, very strange. Rolando unleashed a torrent of bilious invective, his eyes popping with steamy venom. A whore, a snob, bastante creída. Raised in gringolandia, with rich Jews, she went to be a servant but they gave her a fancy education because she used to screw that old Jew and look at her now, running an orphanage, a baby seller, sells her older girls to brothels too, she probably screws colonels to get away with it all, splits the profits with them, you know how they all are. Crazy woman, don’t get any ideas, a nice-looking brownie but totally fucked up, she’ll go with anybody for just one night, I think even Paco Palma has had her and probably his wife has too. They’d reached the front of the movie line, and Rolando said, “Why are we going to see this shitty Tarzan movie anyway, let’s wait for the midnight show, it’s from Sweden, I hear it’s chévere . . .” Moya was accustomed to Rolando’s hysteria, his hyperventilating purgings and regurgitations of all the futile gossip that ran like a virus through his overheated blood. It was as if the whole city spoke through him, but only in its most infecting, malicious, frivolous, resentful, dishonest, drunk with hatred and whatever else spirit. He vomited what he heard through razor-sharp, clenched teeth, got it out of himself, and then could be quite humorous and even gentle natured. He wrote poems, little poems, in sylvan dariano style, a Darío at his parodied worst, full of ornamental lacy weeping and laconic sighing over love’s evaporating morning dew, and published them in the El Minuto weekly literary supplement under his late aunt’s name. So Moya más o menos disregarded what Rolando had said about this Flor. What was her name again? Flor de Mayo Pulque, Pulpo, Puta, Puas, something like that, said Rolando. Picaflor. Flor Alambre de Puas, Flor Barbed Wire, that’s what it is, jajaja . . . Could she be that Flor? wondered Moya, astonished. Maybe, yes, why not? Rogerio’s “like a sister.” So she had stayed in Guatemala! And ran an orphanage now? It must be her. Qué raro. Verdaderamente.

  Now and then Moya saw her again, twice more taking her orphans to the movies. Each time he was left feeling more curious, even bewitched. He asked around about her. Some people actually said that she was muy simpática, very nice though very private, muy fina, with an absurd voice, poor thing. Others said she was a baby seller, but always in the tone of the usual rumor mongering. Moya even asked Celso Batres, who didn’t even mention the editorial that Flor would later, on the Long Night of White Chickens, tell Moya that she had submitted to Celso. Though that wasn’t surprising, since it would have led to a conversation, however brief, about why Celso had not published it. Celso said, “Oh yes. La directora de Los Quetzalitos. I’ve met her at their annual charity ball and here and there sometimes. A nice person, muy simpática. Well educated too. Taking care of orphans, pues, who could fault that? Can you fault that, Moya? No, I wouldn’t believe the other things people sometimes say, which is why I assume you are asking me about her, verdad, Moya?” Despite the casual tone in which his boss had spoken, he was visibly angered, and glared at bewildered Moya with nearly violent contempt. Celso was, above all, a decent man, aloof from the pettiness and spite of bored reporters’ babosadas, their doggerel, and it hurt Moya that Celso didn’t understand that he held himself above that too. It especially stung Moya when, before walking away, Celso, all his suave self-control dissipated in an instant of schoolboyish blasphemy, snapped, “If my reporters had been there they would have been the first to speculate about how much God paid the Virgin herself for the Conception, no, Moya?” Celso apologized for that remark, albeit briskly, the next day.

  When Moya received the photocopied G-2 memo and the impossible assignment of writing a piece on the cannibalization of exported orphans for the exile news service, he didn’t for a moment suspect Flor of involvement in such a racket. As for the more general charge of profiting illegally from adoptions, well, he understood the ambiguities of such a charge, the lack of legal guidelines and the general lawlessness that might make the simple will to get things done at least look improprietous. It was that way with everything, vos. He really wanted to meet this Flor de Mayo Puac, and his chest pounded, his eardrums throbbed, at the thought of phoning her out of the blue, arranging an interview on the orphan situation as a ruse for infiltrating himself into her life. It was crazy, it would never work, she might be gringa but she was chapina too, she would think of him as just another poorly paid little reporter, a forty-quetzal-a-week periodista with little more status than one of the sidewalk typists in front of the Palace of Justice, filling in official documents and titles for illiterates. But surely she would know who Moya really was, wouldn’t she? And it would matter to her, wouldn’t it? Finally he found the courage to phone her. Within the first few seconds of their conversation he realized that he already adored her highly individual voice. But she hesitated. He mentioned Rogerio, whom she called Roger; she agreed to meet.

  And within fifteen minutes of knowing Flor de Mayo, there in the Fo Lu Shu II, Moya had dismissed all the rumors he had heard. Her eyes were too shiny, her smile too genuine, her manner too spontaneous, her initial skepticism of him too charmingly and frankly explained, for it to be true. She was good, he sensed this. She loved to talk, and nothing excited Moya more than a woman who did. He made her talk. He listened, doted, prodded, jousted, he led her into a verbal peregrination through her whole curious life. Yes, that night Flor told Moya quite a bit about herself (though almost nothing about that Cuban, or any other of her boyfriends), in that practiced yet previously highly reliable way in which she was accustomed to telling about herself. Moya was left charmed, transported, beguiled; full of dare, he finally kissed her hair and love exploded inside him. But she ended up in tears. That was just before two pickup trucks loaded with white chickens pulled up in front of the restaurant’s gates.

  Flor, from the very beginning, certainly saw right through Moya that night (remember that business about San Carlos girls, his ironic, winking machismo?). The extraordinary thing was that in doing so she bore him no particular ill will. Maybe that was because she felt she had been as buffeted by fate as he, only she admitted it to herself. In truth, they were both pretty spent, near the end of their ropes, the night they met, though he had hardly allowed himself to acknowledge that yet. But from the very first, in her frequently playful exposures of Moya, Flor really did introduce him to
the game of recognizing himself a bit—or maybe it was more like bumping into himself, there on a train platform crowded with all his delusions and conceits—without letting it become tedious or traumatic.

  And he wasn’t too bad at seeing through Flor de Mayo, was he? Later he would tell himself that they had recognized each other very quickly that night, like two aliens from an unforgettable, infernally imbrued little planet. A planet that resembles this planet in almost exact detail and, in fact, overlaps it, so that aliens have to inhabit both at once. Which is why aliens often sounded a little nutty.

  Everyone in Guatemala, she had declared, who could afford to should adopt an Indian war orphan. As if that were it, the ultimate moral and political solution that everyone had been waiting for. But yes, she knew, they would rather take in a curlew first! So Jesus should come down to earth and make everybody act better. Moya was appalled at her simplistic naïveté, until it dawned on him that what he was actually hearing was the exhausted yet lucid reasoning of a fellow alien. Moya realized he knew all he needed to know about how Flor had passed the last few years in her soul, for her to have reduced it all to this complex joke told with the straightest face and even the most serious intentions possible.