The Long Night of White Chickens

by Francisco Goldman

  That day I spent with her in Nebaj, Sor Clarita collected from every one of her new refugees the same appalling story that, in the remote region they’d been marched down from, the routed guerrillas were so disoriented they were running around trying to sell salt to refugees for sixty centavos an ounce. But in the market, at the stall where Sor Clarita stopped to buy plastic bowls and plates for her new refugees, she asked the vendor to give her bowls and plates in every assorted color but green. “No green?” I repeated as I waited by her side, and then I knew why before she even answered, remembering the old no-war-toy policy you had revoked for G.I. Joes at Macy’s that day. “Es el color del ejército, pues,” Sor Clarita whispered as we walked away from the stall, the color of the army, pues . . .

  So what went wrong, Flor? I think I know why you stayed, and when I left Nebaj I thought I knew it better than ever. You could even have counted yourself as lucky, you didn’t have to feel helpless, you were offered the directorship of an orphanage and malnutrition clinic. It was too late to go home because you’d already come and seen; you knew and had forgotten that “Guatemala no existe” and then lost “all perspective,” living with a small country like it was a sick but curable person. So this felt right: an orphanage and malnutrition clinic was something you could put your heart and soul into, it was you all over. And though it wasn’t righteous destruction and it wasn’t social change, it was preservation—of little victimized lives. But preserving them for what? An inhuman question, only a demagogue would ask it, but there are plenty of those, and, anyway, a lot of these kids carried very important memories, memories that if well sheltered might even grow strong and hot enough to melt the fake movie snow of politicians, might even grow strong and audacious enough to lead a highly spiritual and vanquishing army down from the volcanoes. It was something to do, it could even be made to fit the big picture: the nuns turned endangered children over to you, you traveled right into the heart of the war zones to receive them sometimes, you involved foreign embassies in your health care abroad program and thus involved entire nations in the plight of little survivors. You did some adoptions but were fastidious about it, looking for the most healing and fertile soil for haunted and potentially very powerful memories—all that’s fine, it’s wonderful, even if a bit nutty, because, after all, later, not one of your orphans had any memory at all of Lucas Caycam Quix.

  What I don’t know is what went wrong or why, though I suspect now it wasn’t so different from what Moya so feared in himself: the simple despair, hopelessness, and tedium, the germy dog bite of defeat. Which can always be overcome, because the strong persevere and heal, but there will always be that dangerous time when for a while it seems to blacken and undo everything.

  TWENTY-THREE

  “Cómo?” exclaimed Moya, in the Omni. “Vos, cómo? . . . You mean calling her back to Guatemala, vos?”

  “No, not that exactly. I’m talking about who she was. At her most real, she felt artificial too, or something like that.”

  “Superficial?”

  “No—”

  “I heard her say this once. All on the surface.”

  “Sometimes I think we sound like Rocky and Bullwinkle together.”

  “. . . Quiénes?”

  “Hey, Bullwinkle, you’re right! Flor was never just a Namoset kid! She was two people!”

  “. . . Una esquizofrénica, vos.”

  “No, because the other one was silent, invisible. Like when a guy gets his arm amputated but can still feel that it’s there, still attached to him? He looks, and it’s not there? It’s as if he’s two people, the other one still walking around with two arms, doing entirely different things, but where? He can’t know. He just senses that he’s happier or at least more complete somewhere else.”

  “Ah, bueno. So, today, the death squad did kill us. We are dead, vos. I can feel that this is so. Here we sit, in a hotel for putas, talking babosadas. But, gracias a Dios, we are happier than the dead Moya and Rogerio, who cannot see us.”

  “Yeah, something like that. But see?—not because Flor came from here and so could never really find a true Flor up there, and so had to come back here. That’s not it. But because of what we were like, who we were . . . I don’t know. I don’t know what I mean.”

  * * *

  Because of the way it happened. Because of the way we became almost a happy family. During that very first year, my unhappy mother poured her heart out to the silent, terrified, barely adolescent girl, though she would hate to admit that now. It was futile, what could that little girl say?—her disquieted eyes already imposing a silence on my mother, because what else did that girl know how to say and how else did she know how to say it but in the brightly atonal, hopeful, false but not false voice that said, “Ay Doña Mirabel. You will be happy soon, I am sure. Don Ira is so nice. Roger should have happy parents.”

  Before Flor knew it she’d become something like our idiot savant matriarch, our young foundling mother, daughter too. It’s true, my parents, all of us, eventually found ourselves outwardly behaving as if living up to Flor’s expectations of what we should be. Her personality was somehow stronger, soft-handedly molding us, showing us the way with none of Abuelita’s stridence or mania for order. If Flor had never come to live with us, if my father hadn’t put her in school and then everything else, would there ever even have been a normal conversation at our dinner table? What on earth would we have talked about?

  Instead, we had Flor telling us about her trips into Boston, about what was on sale in Filene’s Basement last week, about school, about the last book she’d read, about why she preferred the Princeton campus to the one at Cornell, about boys, about Tony when he was still considered “OK.” And because Flor did all the housework and looked after me, this freed my mother to spend the time she needed on her college degree in Boston, and then on her job as Spanish teacher and Foreign Students Club and Romance Language Club director at Shreve Hall, the girls’ private boarding school in Dover. Miss Cavanaugh was on the board of directors there (she was on the board at Wellesley College too), and that connection led to the Latin American Society of Boston, which Miss Cavanaugh was the founder of, and to other social invitations where my mother never had to try to act American. That is, at Shreve Hall, she could be in her Empire of Nostalgia and the Kingdom of her Pride and earn a salary at the same time, and at the Latin American Society, be in it and socialize. Outside the house, my mother recovered her still youthful ebullience and developed her own will; it was as if her true life was out there, and then she could wear this new life home, where Flor helped her to sustain it by being just enough her Guatemalan maid.

  Despite their rivalry, which became more pronounced over the years, Flor and my mother often seemed like old best friends together:

  “Never, Flor, trust a man with small hands and feet.”

  “Pero, Mirabel. I have not met any. Tony’s hands and feet are very big!”

  Once Flor bought a Ouija board, the kind that came packaged like any other board game for children. That was soon after she’d turned nineteen, in the spring before that autumn of my father’s gallbladder attack. In the basement Flor asked it, “Who am I going to marry?” She concentrated very hard, with trembling fingers on the plastic Ouija disk. Slowly the Ouija roamed, spelling out “A-N-T-O-N-I . . .”

  “You’re making it spell that,” I shouted. Flor made a frightened face. “But I’m not!” And she flipped the board over angrily, then sat there with her hands in her lap, biting her lower lip. Moments later she set the board up again.

  “Ask it again, it’ll say someone else, you’ll see.”

  But instead she asked it, “Who will Antonio marry?” This time it was me who flipped the board over, but then we both, to my relief, started giggling. But at dinner that night I said, “Flor’s Ouija board said she’s going to marry Antonio.”

  And my mother, in an instant, turned into a somewhat less convincing Abuelita. She put on her severest expression, looked at Flor, and sai
d, “Those are sacrilegious because only God can tell the future.”

  “Mom,” I said, “that’s silly.”

  “No,” said Flor. “Mirabel has a reason. I was stupid to buy this. Only God knows the future. It could be the Devil, trying to make me do the wrong thing.”

  “Has Antonio asked you to marry him?” asked my mother.

  “No,” said Flor meekly.

  Now my father looked up from his food, but he didn’t say anything. Flor said, “It was just a game.”

  “It was,” I said. “And when it started to spell his name, she flipped it over.”

  Both of my parents were looking straight at Flor.

  “I would never marry Tony,” she said, as if reciting a memorized oath of office, and then she stared down at her plate as if she’d never before noticed the dismal surprise of her own cooking.

  “Ay no,” said my mother. “I knew he would. What else does he know how to do? It would ruin your life, Flor de Mayo. Is that what you want, my dear, to ruin your life after you have put so much into improving it?”

  “Aw, Mirabel, of course she doesn’t,” said my father.

  “Yes, I know. My life,” said Flor. “I know. My life. My life. If you want I will leave the table and throw that preposterous game which started all this away right now!”

  “Flor, sweetheart, don’t get upset,” said my father. “We are just concerned for you. It’s like Mirabel said, it would be perfectly normal for Tony to want to get married—”

  “What else does he know how to do?” interrupted my mother. “Make babies so that you and the babies can starve together while he runs after women? He is a Cuban, no?”

  “Oh!” exclaimed Flor, in that nervy state between laughter and tears. “Y chapines, qué?”

  “My dear,” said my mother (who had somehow picked up Miss Cavanaugh’s way of saying “my dear” whenever she felt like getting up on Abuelita’s high horse), “Guatemalans can chase after women all they want, but in this country they are not going to get anywhere, and do you know why? Because they are too short and not good looking. Unless they are from good families, in which case they are probably not in Boston but in Guatemala looking after their farms. Too many poor Cubans look the same as the rich ones, no? This has been the cause of Cuba’s disaster, and if I were an intellectual I could prove it. But I do know this, you will not be the first young woman ruined by Cuban vanity and arrogance, punto y cabal!”

  “Mirabel,” said my father.

  Flor just sat in stunned silence for a moment, with her hands in her lap, and then she lowered her head, and soon her shoulders were shaking with repressed laughter. “Ayyyy Mirabel, pero qué horrible . . .” But soon Flor started to cry. It was the first time she’d ever cried at the dinner table in front of all of us like this, with high-pitched braying sobs and squeals of bewildered misery. Her lips were twisted to the side, and, though her hair falling forward partly curtained her face, I could see fat, lusterless tears sliding down her face with astonishing rapidity, clinging briefly to her cheeks and chin and then jumping to her lap, and then she was gasping for air, hiccuping, whimpering, “Tonyyy, mi pobrecito, ay noooo, nooo.”

  We all sat paralyzed for a moment. I had sort of caused this, of course, mentioning the Ouija, but I had the feeling that I shouldn’t be at all sorry I had.

  My mother sighed, but then said Flor’s name in a sympathetic way. And my father got up from his chair and stood in an ungainly posture beside Flor until she finally propelled herself up and laid her head into his shoulder, and then my father cradled her head with his hand. Flor gaspingly asked that I be sent away, and I was, and then they talked for a long time.

  “So this one gusanito, este niño bonito, this is who received all her love,” interrupted Moya.

  “But she had other boyfriends later,” I said. “Dr. Ben, who boarded with Miss Cavanaugh in Wellesley, came next. And of course in college and when she was living in New York she saw people. I remember her mentioning a Brazilian who worked at the U.N., like she did for a while. She could have been a U.N. bureaucrat, you know, if she’d wanted to.”

  “Flor liked black guys, vos. I say this simply, well, because it just seems that she did.”

  “. . . Well, Dr. Ben, a Nigerian professor, Ozzie Peterkins, a football player, there’s not necessarily a pattern there, Moya. I didn’t know the Brazilian. But, true, there weren’t many white guys, I mean, you know, gringo white guys, that I can recall. On the other hand, you can say there were nearly as many white guys as any other kind.”

  “But in proportion to the general population? Far fewer, vos.”

  “There was this one guy she was seeing in college for a while who used to call her his brown angel because before he met her it had never occurred to him that an angel could be brown. Some epiphany, huh?”

  “I don’t care what some fucking guy like that says,” said Moya.

  “Anyway, this kind of conversation, so what? It’s just cultural. White guys usually don’t grow up hearing mi precioso, chulito, niño divino, and everything in their ears all day long, that’s all. Which probably makes it easier to be that way later, and Flor liked that stuff, right?”

  “Sí. . .”

  “Of course all that helps to make great romantic liars too, machista smoothies, so who says it’s better? Anyway, what does this have to do with anything, maybe we should get some sleep.”

  But we just sat there, looking at opposite red-and-purple velvet walls, on the round red satin bed, under the fake-gold-marbled mirror on the ceiling, amidst the ineradicable scent of cheap perfumes, toilet waters, and colognes, the olfactory legacy from the female side of the room’s history: adulteries, love for money, amores secretos. To protect customers’ identities from employees and vice versa, there was a buzzer to press for room service or to pay the bill, and a revolving hatch, dumbwaiterlike, in the wall. And outside every room’s door, a garage, that’s why it’s called an autohotel, just drive right into any open garage and the door comes down by remote control and not even a chambermaid ever sees you. Though Moya and I had come by taxi—as had Zamara and I about a month before, the first time I’d ever been in an autohotel, maybe in this very room, on this very same bed. On that first of our two nights in the Omni, six months ago, and following that brief silence after I’d suggested that we try to sleep, my thoughts really did turn to Zamarita, and the memory of our past lovemaking there. But I also wondered what she would have thought if she’d known that earlier that same day Moya and I had come out of my house and found a death squad, a black-windowed Cherokee with four murderers inside of it, four Freedom Fighting matones waiting for us, though in the very next instant we’d escaped them, because oí me, my “heroic” reactions, putting, I even joked later, a certain long-past incident and its persistent insinuations to rest once and for all, because this was a death squad, make no mistake about it, not just some pig-shit-worm-infested dog. And of course I was dying to tell Zamara all about it.

  Sitting there on the red round bed, I even imagined myself doing that, saying, Zamara, you know what it’s like when you swim in the ocean and suddenly you imagine a shark circling? And I imagined her widening her eyes at me like she always does and saying, Sí, mi amor? And I touched her naked arm, affectionately smoothed damp hair out of her eyes, and said (imagined), And you half-expect to turn around and see the fin sticking out of the water, circling you? But of course it’s never there, and you think, God, imagine if it had been there, what could be scarier than a shark’s fin circling? Well, that’s what it was like when Moya and I came out of my house this evening, Zamarita, though at first it seemed like just any other evening. Some of the buses going by already had their colored lights on inside. There were a few schoolgirls on the sidewalk, I even noticed the way the powdery evening light made their white blouses and even their white teeth glow kind of phosphorescently. Moya and I were going to the tienda on the corner to have a beer there, but then I looked over and saw this black Cherokee following us.
Driving along slowly on the opposite side, then slowly veering into the middle of the street. I touched Moya and we looked at it and froze, but the Jeep came to a stop too, and we thought, No, it can’t be, and started walking again, but then it rolled along with us again . . . it was just like always having imagined what it would be like to see a shark circling and then there it was, circling. Instead of running, we stopped again. Now all four doors opened. They came out, three of them carrying Uzis, machine guns. You know, Zamara, the guys who are always described in the newspapers as “four heavily armed unknown men”? So you never read the newspapers, OK. Heavy mestizo faces, hard black-beetle eyes—I can remember it so clearly. Only one wore sunglasses. Two in black leather jackets, one wearing denim, the other in jacket and tie. Big guys with big faces. All of this happened in an instant, right in front of that small private hospital just down the block. Where were the schoolgirls now, or anyone else? Why didn’t anyone scream? Four murderers staring, just beginning to lift their guns like mariachi musicians lifting their instruments—I took Moya’s arm and pulled him down behind one of the two parked ambulances there. That was my first split-second reaction, Zamara! And at that very instant the bus that had just turned the corner came chugging down the street, gears grinding as it fought for a higher gear, it passed right between the ambulances and the death-squad guys, and I jerked Moya up by the arm and we ran along with the bus like a shield between us and jumped onto it while it was still accelerating down the street! So that was my second split-second reaction, Zamarita! I saved us! Me, it was my reactions! Some of the passengers had seen los hombres desconocidos and now they looked at us, amazed, not saying a word, wondering if we’d been the intended target, hard to believe, wondering how it could be that we were there. The four matones got back into their Cherokee and then they sped away down the avenue, Zamara, past the bus and all the way down the long straight avenue and through all the red lights like a rocket soaring away sideways. Moya and I were still standing there by the driver, who had his own worries, what with his recalcitrant gearbox and shift. Over his windshield, taped sideways, was a girlie magazine foldout with the tits blackened out. Now we remembered to fumble in our pockets for change, since we still had to pay for this opportunity of having saved our own lives by jumping on a bus. And then we went and sat down in one of the empty hard seats. And Moya said, La gran puta, vos, and then he said, Verdaderamente increíble, and then he fell silent and monkey faced. That’s when the adrenaline started coursing through us, when my knees and hands began to shake and I almost began to weep. We rode the bus all the way out to Zona 10, ourselves shaking and the bus, as always, shaking, its black fumes rising through the rust-tattered floor, until we got off near the Hotel Biltmore Maya (where, from the lobby, we’d immediately phoned Consul Simms, and he told us to stay someplace safe that night, and for me to come see him the next day, but to take a taxi and not walk anywhere).