“What a pretty thought, Florcita,” he said.
“On and on . . . ,” she murmured.
Downstairs, as always, on and on, there was an orphanage. It didn’t matter.
He stroked her nalgas. What pretty nalgas, what a pretty and perfect word, nalgas. One nalga, and the other nalga. Left and right nalga, one with a beauty mark right in the middle. Two nalgas, a milkier shade of brown. Very round and smooth and ample, decorated by one winking freckle right in the middle of a nalga, inviting so many kisses and soon delirious nuzzles. Didn’t these wonderful nalgas express the radiant and robust side of Flor’s nature, for she really was both of those things and these nalgas were too, warm and hearty like domed, clay bread ovens, like smooth hilltops with the sun just coming up behind, Moya, ay no. Her belly was charming, and her thighs smooth, strong, and long, and the triangular little puffs of flesh between her breasts and armpits always made him want to kiss them over and over before plunging his nose into the warm cow pasture clover of those armpits. As anyone can see, Moya was unspeakably happy that morning, stroking Flor’s nalgas, prolonging her fable without words.
And then she made him wait nearly two months to do it again.
PART THREE
EL OMNI
The only ones daring enough to play are dead.
POPOL VUH
TWENTY
I’ll be back in two days, I told Chayito before I left, and if I’m not, then don’t worry, I’ll definitely be back in five. It really was a small triumph of nerve and resolve that I was even able to formulate an illusory plan, I think, and one so specific at that—if not two days, five. That was three mornings ago. But I must have heard something less decided inside me, time rushing out like a tide and the possibility of going with it, because I packed extra clothing, four paperback novels (one for Zamara) and brought more than enough money.
I only said five days on the off chance that in El Progreso things would work out with Zamara in a way that we’d want to go someplace else to celebrate, maybe even here to the Hotel del Norte like we did the last time, or across the bay to Livingston. Except I felt so sure it was only going to be two days, I didn’t even let Uncle Jorge know, figuring I’d be back before he even missed me, or that he’d phone and Chayito could tell him.
So I didn’t dismantle and put away my homemade alarm and escape system either. It seemed especially unlikely that Uncle Jorge would drop by over the next few days and then ask Chayito for the key to the upstairs addition over the rear of the house, where of course I’ve been living all this time. But if by some chance he does, then he’ll see it: empty soda and Gallo beer bottles stacked at the edges of chairs under the windows in the otherwise empty spare rooms facing the central patio; and in my bedroom, a coiled length of rope on the floor, one end tied to a side frame in the multipaned wall of glass, the windows on either side of it always left at least partly cranked open, the smaller square window that opens horizontally, and the long rectangular one that opens vertically—my escape window.
The steel door at the top of the stairs leading from the patio to the addition is secure enough, always left locked and latched when I’m inside. But someone could conceivably get up onto the roof, then ease themselves down the side like Dracula and work their way in through a window—but then they’d definitely knock over some bottles. (They wouldn’t try it through my bedroom window because what if I saw them first and had a gun?) So I’ve always slept, lightly, with all the inside doors open to be able to hear anything in the other rooms. Even the crash of one of those bottles against the floor would have woken me, I hope, in a flash and had me moving with something like instinct: out of bed and dropping the rope into the narrow rear patio and letting myself down on it, scaling my neighbors’ wall and then their neighbors’ wall and so on, disappearing into the neighborhood like Spiderman.
I practiced it one Saturday evening when Chayito was at evening mass and my neighbors had all left early to assist in the preparations for a wedding party at their “Tío Humberto’s” (nearly everything that gets said above a whisper in that house seems to carry into the narrow echo chamber between our windows—a hardworking middle-class family lives there), even their one maid, Juana, had gone with them, though strictly as a maid, of course. The first thing I did in preparation for my trial run was lower the blinds, as this would be a likely impediment in the case of a real emergency: I usually remember to lower them at night so that in the morning Juana, hanging laundry on their second-story rear patio, won’t see me sprawled naked in bed in my glass exhibit case with a morning hard-on like she did the last time, peering at me from around the edge of a just hung towel, a clothespin in her mouth; I sat up, covering my lap with the sheets, and she ducked behind the towel and stood frozen there, hiding her face like a moose, until finally she just turned and scampered in her skidding flat shoes straight back across the small patio to the door.
On nights when I’ve felt especially paranoid, hardly ever for any concrete reason, I’ve at least remembered to keep boxer shorts on. But now I lay back on the bed fully clothed and listened for the imagined surprise of a bottle crashing and then I tried to move fast, up and out, slipping behind the blinds and flinging the rope out almost in one motion, stepping shoulder first through the window, and pulling the rope taut with my fists as I leaned out into the air, but then I hung there suspended for a moment, wondering which was best, to just boundingly sort of rappel down or to lower myself by the arms and shimmy down, which would probably be quieter, but slower—I ended up doing something in between, my knees and elbows banging off the metal window frame and the smooth concrete while I tried to stifle my ouch, the rope searing through my grasp before I caught it firmly; I was in better control when I reached the rough-surfaced stucco of the lower part of the house, walking myself down past the barred, curtained window of Abuelita’s old bedroom. Then I ran to the wall and caught the top on my second leap and pulled myself up and rested there on my forearms, briefly studying my route: if I were to vault the wall at this spot, I’d land just behind their carport and have to run through their short, unkempt yard to the next wall. I let myself back down and stood there flapping my burning palms, bashed elbows throbbing. I knew I’d have to move faster if it ever counted. The small patio on our side used to be a garden with a flagstone path but now it’s root-knobby dirt, a few drooping banana trees surviving down at one end, and some of Abuelita’s finch cages, rusted now, stacked like empty lobster traps by the door in the corner. Using one of the rough-edged flagstones, I smashed a little foothold in the wall, widening an earthquake crack.
I felt it would give me half a chance anyway, though of course any number of things could and probably would go wrong. They might be able to chase me, but I’d be over the first wall before they got to my bedroom if I moved quickly enough, and then maybe someone along my route would offer to hide me, though I doubt it. The killers aren’t always such nimble types anyway: I know because the four who were in the death squad that briefly displayed itself to Moya and me back in November were pretty beefy. Street kids, on the other hand, can probably flicker up and down the sides of walls like lizards. But I set up my bottles long before the first of those notes was slipped under the front door, when los niños de la calle were just about the last thing I was worried about.
Have I ever just come right out and said that this is an unbelievably sick and evil place? But that so much of it seems to happen with a certain genius, leaving behind almost nothing but invisibility and silence? All this with my rope and bottles was first provoked months ago, in January, by an incident that had absolutely nothing to do with me, when they broke in through the electronically wired windows of a relatively low-level, young Scandinavian diplomat’s house without setting off the alarms, then raped her and used knives to so methodically mutilate her that she was left permanently disfigured in all her private places and will never be able to have children, though they didn’t touch her face at all. Supposedly they did it because she’d become i
nvolved with one of the guerrilla organizations, she was passing information and embassy insiders’ gossip to them or something. That’s surely one of the reasons she and her embassy kept it quiet, as there was no way of raising the obvious charges without publicly admitting the indefensible diplomatic “misdemeanor,” and no way of not sounding as if they were doing anything but voicing the most astoundingly paranoid and grotesquely undiplomatic insults ever voiced even if they did. Any way you looked at it, there wasn’t much they could do or even say, and there was no way of proving anything. There wasn’t even the galvanizing newspaper sensation of a Scandinavian woman in the morgue, and not even ¿Dónde? has figured out how to translate silence. Of course she may have had the profoundest personal reasons for wanting to maintain her anonymity (they’d probably counted on that as well). She spent a week or so in the hospital and then was quietly flown home, causing far fewer ripples on the surface of things than even a declaration of persona non grata and a diplomatic expulsion would have.
Soon after the international aid organizations discreetly ordered all their foreign staff (presumably whether they’d ever cultivated guerrilla contacts or not) who still lived in individual houses to move to securer places, the Zona 10 twin condo towers over Lord Byron’s, for example.
Which is how I first learned about it, from a Japanese girl working for UNICEF, Yuka, who’d just moved in over Lord Byron’s and came down to have a drink a few times before the place grossed her out for good. She was really sorry to have given up her modern, glassy house in Zona 14 with the rear patio and hammock overlooking the primordial vista of untended tropical garden running lavishly into the maw of an immense and often fog-lidded barranca—with the volcano on the horizon behind it, oh, just so beautiful. Yuka said they’d all been cautioned that it was safest not to talk in public about what had happened to the diplomat but I seemed like such a nice harmless guy and why shouldn’t I know? Then I suddenly understood why one of the new Scandinavian volunteers at Los Quetzalitos had suddenly flown home too, and felt pissed that not even Edvarga had told me about it. She’s one of the other two new girls who didn’t leave, and later, when I asked her about it, Edvarga said she’d been warned it was best not to talk about it too, both by Rosana Letones (your successor, Flor) and by the diplomats from her own country, who’d summoned their nationals for a secret meeting in the wake of the incident. Foreigners, after they’ve been here long enough, perversely love to be let in on this kind of secret anyway, I think. (My secret, of course, has been with me from the start.) It’s as if they eventually learn or at least sense that the country can only be truly experienced through this particular kind of weighted silence; talking too freely about it, they might dispel both their own precautionary dread and sense of control, which could leave them feeling weightless again, outside reality, an utter foreigner again, not even nearly as well rooted as those Lord Byron’s expats who blusteringly ignore and deny everything—another way of going native. Anyway, Rosana had assured them that she and the other girl had nothing to fear because—nervously tooted little Scandinavian laugh—there could not possibly be any government informers or active guerrillas among the orphans. Couldn’t possibly be, I repeated, my face reddening because of other echoes the conversation had suddenly brought close (you). But Edvarga wasn’t thinking of you at all, she smiled and blushed back at me as if responding to a flirtatious innuendo. I was trying to have a crush on Edvarga back then, so as to have one more excuse for dropping by the orphanage. But nothing ever happened, partly because the only love I was really interested in, even when I didn’t want to be, was Zamara’s.
That was when I put together my own alarm system, as Abuelita’s house, unlike every other sensibly run household in the city with the means to afford it, has never been wired for security, not even downstairs, where only Chayito lives. If Uncle Jorge goes into my quarters he’ll see it, bottles and rope, and worry. Or else maybe he’ll draw panicked conclusions about what I’ve been up to here all this time (just one month shy of a year now), which he has certainly wondered about, I’m sure. Who knows what Uncle Jorge knows or suspects about my true life here? There’s the little Chayito could tell, which she probably has, though I doubt Uncle Jorge would care that much about my having brought Zamara home a few times, though it certainly made Chayito treat me more stonily than ever. If Uncle Jorge were to ask her, Eso qué? Chayito’s most characteristic response would be, Those are bottles on chairs under the windows. El joven puts them there.
Of course there’s always been the excuse of the house—willed solely to my mother—and my supposed familial duty to sell it, but it’s been sold for more than two weeks now, with little help from me, to an Evangelical Protestant ministry from Louisiana who agreed to pay in dollars rather than in ever-devaluing quetzales, so my mother is feeling very pleased and relieved about that, and both my parents are expecting me home soon because of it. The evangelicals won’t be moving in until the first of July, seven weeks from now—Chayito, unless she stays on to work as a maid for the proselytizing heathens, will be living out her days in one of the boarding-houses my family owns near the Avenida Bolívar—by which time I’ll probably be in Mexico or else back in New York. It was my plan to stop off and see Moya there even before the house was sold. But this new mystery and urgency of the notes, I don’t know yet exactly what it means, or changes, or what to do about it. And I’m wondering if Chayito went ahead and told Uncle Jorge about that too, though I begged her not to.
The note Zamara slipped under the door before she went home to El Progreso came in a sealed envelope, my name crudely printed on the front, so Chayito couldn’t have read that one. I mean the other two, from “the lost boy” (Lucas Caycam Quix is, or maybe was, his name). They didn’t come in envelopes, but I’m almost positive I got to the first one before Chayito did; I came in and there it was inside the door, and I could hear a Catholic religious show droning on the radio from the kitchen. But Chayito definitely read the second one, a cryptic but more ominous follow-up that came four mornings ago.
She brought it to me in my room, wearing her pink-plastic-frame reading glasses and holding the note out between pinched fingers in one limp and twiny-looking old woman’s hand. Like the first one, it was a full sheet of medium-sized lined paper that had been folded once, ragged along the edge where it had been torn from one of those staple-bound school copybooks.
I wasn’t really surprised that another note had come, which isn’t to say I hadn’t been in a worried muddle about the whole situation, and I was dismayed that she’d found it first.
“Mejor te vas de una vez mañana,” she declared. Best to leave tomorrow. Home to the United States, I realized she meant as soon as I’d taken the note from her hand and looked at it and then up at Chayito again. It was kind of an extraordinary moment. I’d never seen her look so . . . lucid. Her expression was more cross than worried, behind the glasses her enlarged eyes were fierce orbs of implacable clairvoyance: it was the look of an abuela who has always known it but finally found proof that her grandson has turned out to be just as much of a reckless and gullible fool as his grandfather once was.
That’s the conclusion Chayito’s long life had suddenly brought her to—the burden of having outlasted everyone else in the only house she’d known since her remote Indian childhood in the mountains; the unsortable chaos of so many years and the populated fog inside her, which her ordinarily gruff demeanor barely masked—all of that had somehow been dispelled by this crisis of an anonymous threat against a family member slipped under the door, allowing Chayito to find the firm conviction that she was and maybe had always been Abuelita. That was what was behind her brusque command.
The note, scrawled in blunt soft pencil, merely said: “Te vi. Venga el jueves o vengo por tí.” I saw you. Come Thursday or I’ll come for you. It was signed with a crude symbol, an upside-down tilted cross, I thought at first. Or maybe, no probably, some kind of dagger. This was totally idiotic and ignorant! Why would I ever agree to a
nother meeting after a threat like that? Unless he, or they, really believed I was that desperate to meet face to face with Lucas Caycam Quix—your murderer, Flor? and now threatening to become mine? Come on!—and that I would deduce, since I’d been promised protection and trust in return for a cash payment, that the safest course for me to take would be to go along with the plan as prearranged. Did they think I was that stupid?
“Isaw you”—that was Friday, when they would have seen me waiting on the Incienso Bridge before I changed my mind and retreated. Now it was Monday. Why Thursday? Why not tomorrow? Was it a ploy, phony precision meant to convince me of his, or their, seriousness? Buying time? For what? I could just walk away. They had nothing to gain in coming after me, it would just blow it for them. I folded the paper up and put it in my pocket, anger overcoming the fear trembling my legs. Because, in truth, I’d been expecting something like this note, though not that it would be so starkly menacing. Part of the anger I felt was at myself, for having become involved in this at all.
“Don’t worry” is what I told Chayito after I’d put away the note. “I know who it’s from. It’s nothing, just más porquería. I was leaving tomorrow anyway . . .”
“Good. As long as it’s tomorrow,” she said, with a relieved, even forgiving finality.
“No, just to El Progreso, for two days . . . or five.”
Then I went into an act, to reassure her, just as I imagined my extremely high-strung grandfather used to when he was in the kind of trouble I was going to pretend this was, which Abuelito often and scandalously was; at least until Abuelita forced him to give her sole dominion over their joint wealth and properties, to prevent him from giving it all away bit by bit to secret mistresses and even the fortunate whores he found during his sporadic but profligate bouts of madness. It seems I have a number of illegitimate half-aunts and half-uncles scattered about the city, some who became prosperous enough on their own (one owns a taxi company), others still living off modest Arrau-money retainers. A few of them were even invited to Catty and Mercedes’s quinceañeras. (Uncle Jorge and my cousins, thinking it no big deal now and even a little quaint, have told me all about it; my mother, of course, never had.)
The Long Night of White Chickens Page 41