The Long Night of White Chickens

by Francisco Goldman

  So what do you think of your Roger-oger now, huh, Zamarita? Yes, she’d been listening (I was still imagining, there in the Omni), she’d taken this all in, her glossy pony eyes looked frightened now. She said nothing for a moment, just stared at me. Then she gave her head a cocky, affronted little shake like she always does. Maybe she grabbed for one of my cigarettes, like she usually does. She shook her head and looked at me almost poutingly and raised her chin and widened her eyes and said, Bueno, te habés ganado mi respeto por lo heroico que sos, and laughed. I laughed too and said, No, en serio, Zamarita. Now she bit back her own smile and acted huffy. Acaso me crees bruta? Mentiroso! No Zamarita, it’s no lie, it really happened! We escaped and here I am in the Omni with Moya, maybe even on the same bed where you and I—Here I am dreaming of you, Zamarita.

  Wondering what Zamara would have thought about it even filled me with the temporary certainty that she really did love me. Because I suddenly felt convinced that if something had happened to me it would have been a terrible loss for her, but one that she, like so many thousands of others, would have had to bear, silently and invisibly. Perhaps I had a pathetic right, on that one night only, in the Omni, to indulge myself in such ruminations.

  But on the afternoon following our first night in the Omni, Consul Simms at the embassy would relieve me of my worst fears while at the same time dispelling that briefly glorious myth of our heroic escape by telling me that the death squad “could have splattered you two all over the sidewalk like tomato sauce if they’d wanted to. Those guys do not screw up. No, Roger, it was what we call a ‘heavy-handed tail,’ meant to send a message.”

  A message to Moya, of course, not me, and Moya certainly took it and was preparing himself, once more, to flee the country, so that even our holing up in the Omni, if they did know about it, was like a message back to them: Moya is leaving, see? See how Roger also went to the Canadian embassy in the morning, trying to arrange the terms of Moya’s political asylum and refugee status? So hold your fire, señores . . . Because they would never come after just me, I could take the risk, had to, of coming and going from the Omni.

  In fact Zamara didn’t love me, not like that, not yet, and would not even have grieved for me that much if the death squad had succeeded in et cetera, if only because she already knew—I’ve tried to assure myself many times since—that she had nothing to gain from spending her emotions on me since I had already told her, with laudable honesty, that I wasn’t likely to marry her or to bring her and her little son back with me to the States to live. Well, I wasn’t. I said I didn’t make enough money to support her and a kid in the States. I told her I was probably going back to school. I actually said law school. I told her I wished I could be two people, one who would be happy to spend the rest of his (lobotomized) life in a hammock with her and this other one who was so honest and who would be happy to go on spending time with her like a boyfriend until he had to go home (or until his obsession was sated).

  I really don’t think Zamara’s life story would have turned out anything like Flor’s even if the people she’d worked for as a maid had put her in a Los Angeles elementary school. And I don’t think Flor’s might have turned out like Zamara’s had she gone to work for any family but mine, though of course there’s no way of proving any of this. Zamara has had even less formal education than Flor received from Las Hermanas del Espíritu Santo, who nevertheless prepared Flor only to be a servant, albeit for the household of a Spanish ambassador. But it’s hard to imagine Flor ever falling for some chiczno-grencho surfer boy who would impregnate and then just blithely dump her, isn’t it?

  I picture her at least marrying Tony. But even Tony, with that Cuban vanidad and his jeweler’s apprenticeship, might not have let himself fall for just a common house servant. One of the very first things that captivated him about his niña de Guatemala was the serious nonsense of that Flor-in-the-fourth-grade stuff. He couldn’t possibly have foreseen, that first night in our basement when he teased Flor about being the luckiest girl in kindergarten, that he would lose her once and for all to a Wellesley College visiting professor, a Nigerian Melville scholar no less, when she was in her last year of high school and soon to be accepted on full scholarship to that same college.

  A distinguished young man, degrees up the wazoo, Dr. Ben. But all that was necessarily hush-hush too, of course, they even tried to hide it from Miss Cavanaugh. I never doubted that it was a good relationship for Flor, it was about time she had a boyfriend she could admire and look up to, though it would have been even better if she’d had one she didn’t have to keep secret. Miss Cavanaugh was wild about Flor and was always filling her head with notions of Third World pride and accomplishment, and here he was, a living embodiment of the excellence she preached. She even used to say things like “Flor, if it is your dream to be president of Guatemala one day or even your adopted country’s United Nations ambassador, then don’t let anybody call you a Don Quixote because El Quixote was a man and never had the opportunity to attend Wellesley College!” Miss Cavanaugh was a feminist too, and in her youth had been an Amelia Earhart-like adventurer. On her famous motorcycle journey to Chile following her own graduation from Wellesley she’d had a love affair (she once confided to Flor) with a South American benevolent dictator and while it lasted apparently fell victim to the fantasy that she was actually going to marry and then reform him, democratize him and free the serfs, like a Boston Brahmin Evita Perón. Except this was during the thirties and the dictator had an ineradicable pen pal’s enthusiasm for General Franco and Hitler. He used to summon a secretary from the German Mission to transcribe his letters to the latter, which is how Miss Cavanaugh learned about it, walking in on one of their sessions during siesta one afternoon. The very next day she got back on her motorcycle, rejoined her traveling companion, and off they went into the rest of the century. Miss Cavanaugh never revealed the identity of that dictator to Flor, who was too polite to insist on knowing. But Flor was once allowed a look at Miss Cavanaugh’s constantly revised handwritten account of her journey, at the chapter including her traversal of Guatemala. I don’t know why Miss Cavanaugh was never able to get it published, but I would guess its most obvious failing was a saturating gentility that erased all trace of her robust spirit: too many idealized descriptions of landscapes and picturesque customs and democratic prescriptions, no mention of her deluded tumbles in the hay. When Miss Cavanaugh finally did get a book published, it was an illustrated one on Christmas traditions in Latin America. Our inscribed copy was always kept on display on a coffee table in the living room with a bookmark at the page where both Mirabel Arrau de Graetz and Flor de Mayo Puac, in that order, thank God, received grateful mentions for their contributions to the Guatemala chapter.

  Evidently Miss Cavanaugh was as convinced of the importance of holidays as she was about education and female independence, and looked like a physical manifestation of all her enthusiasms: titanic and pink, with enormous pillowy breasts and a handsome ship’s-prow head slackened and spotted from age; her pale blue eyes almost always looked squeezed into a friendly John Wayne squint, and her hair, which she still wore long and tied back, was the same faded yellow and texture of an angel’s on a Christmas tree ornament. Even her refined voice and laughter had a jolly, ringing timbre. Once a year she held an Easter egg hunt in her yard near the Wellesley College campus for the children of her many Latin friends.

  I’d considered myself too old for years and had no interest in tagging along on the afternoon when Flor, soon to turn twenty-one and in her next to last year of high school, bicycled over to help Miss Cavanaugh color eggs and hide them around the yard. She loved going over to Miss Cavanaugh’s in the afternoons whenever she had some free time, but she’d never before met her new boarder, who had just moved out of his apartment in Cambridge so that he could be nearer the Wellesley College campus, where he would be teaching Melville along with a course in modern African literature the following year. That afternoon Miss Cavanaugh coaxed Dr. Ben d
own from his attic room to help hide eggs in the yard and to meet the guatemalteca she was going to talk into choosing Wellesley over Radcliffe no matter what. Then it was a matter of minutes, not days or hours, before Dr. Ben began to win Flor’s extremely flustered heart. Under a tree in Miss Cavanaugh’s yard, while Flor was looking around for a place to hide the first egg, he sang her that song from West Side Story, “María, María, I just met a girl named María . . .” He knew all the words and sang it all the way through in a rich, deep, sensitive voice that he’d mastered in a boyhood spent in an Anglican Church school and its choir. First encounters like that one under the tree seem to have meant a lot to Flor. But Dr. Ben went off to Oxford and France for the summer, and it wasn’t until he came back to Miss Cavanaugh’s in the fall that things really got going between them.

  Two months into that fall of Flor’s final year in high school, my mother noticed that some of her jewelry was missing, including an heirloom from her father that she was saving for me, a gold, pearl-studded tiepin. A brooch was missing too, but this didn’t matter nearly as much as the tiepin. Why would a burglar take the tiepin and leave the matching cuff links behind along with her few truly valuable pieces of jewelry? It was only because the robbery seemed to have been conceived for no other purpose than to hurt and madden my mother that her suspicions fell almost instinctively on Flor—though unspokenly, because there was absolutely no other evidence. I suspected one of my friends had done it and was miserable over the lack of respect this showed and terrified of the consequences. For a year, ever since the explosion over the guidance counselor, Flor and my mother’s relationship had been at an all-time low, though each of them, knowing that by next fall Flor would be off to college, had been doing her best to keep from provoking the other. But that week following my mother’s discovery of the missing tiepin was like a form of silent madness for all of us.

  None of us knew a thing about Flor and Dr. Ben yet, and even I believed that everything had finally come to an end with Tony. Now there only seemed to be time for studying and visiting Miss Cavanaugh in her house near the providential campus, with its promise of a future that had finally begun to seem actual and attainable. But every morning Flor still had to wake up and confront the life that had been the same for too long, another day of high school, except the classes were actually hard for her now. It really was grueling, and I believe it did take a ton of inner fortitude to pull it off, Flor’s last, long kick towards the finish line my father had stretched across her life nearly a decade before.

  Which, of course, is one of the reasons her high school guidance counselor said he could easily imagine Flor inspiring a television movie one day. But he’d also seemed to have the idea that if that movie was ever made, my family would be portrayed as one more obstacle. He was under the impression that we treated Flor like a maid, that we “exploited” her, as he actually put it. That had happened in the fall of Flor’s second year of high school, after she’d received the first C of her student career, in trigonometry, along with two rare Bs in chemistry and English. A huge deal had been made of this despoiling of Flor’s invincibility; she’d gone around in a daze of angry disillusionment for weeks. What if she went on getting grades like that for the rest of high school? She was terrified it would mean kissing her full scholarship good-bye, despite her minority status and interesting individuality. Flor wasn’t enduring this only to end up at Boston State or U Mass with half her high school classmates! That she could have done even if she’d moved out, married Tony, and gone to night school.

  In her panic over that report card, Flor must have said something at school about not having enough time to study, what with her household duties and her evening job to save money for college (though as far as I could see, most of this was spent bargain hunting for French clothing in Boston) and in doing so must have set certain alarms off in the guidance counselor, who phoned my mother at Shreve Hall and asked that she come in to discuss certain private matters regarding Flor de Mayo Puac.

  My mother came home from work earlier than usual that evening and went straight into the kitchen—where dinner, perhaps one of Flor’s pot roasts, was simmering on the stove—and to the basement door where she called down to Flor in such a way that I instantly knew something was up. Then she stepped back and waited, demurely holding the collar of her raincoat closed under her chin with both hands as if against a chill. But her hands were trembling, and her fixed stare never wavered as we listened to Flor’s footsteps scampering up the stairs. Flor came into the kitchen smiling a warm welcome, but a split second later her face fell.

  “I spoke to your guidance counselor this afternoon, Flor,” said my mother in an odd singsong. “He said that we treat you like a maid, and that this is affecting your ability to do well in school. He thinks it might be better if you went and lived with another family until you’ve graduated. What do you think, Flor? Would you like that?”

  “Ay no, Mirabel,” whispered Flor, biting her lower lip.

  “‘Mrs. Graetz, I am sorry to be so blunt, but this is not Guatemala.’ This is what that heepie, that jerk said to me! Imagínate? I had no idea. Do you feel like you are still in Guatemala, Flor?”

  “. . . Mirabel, I do need more time to study—”

  “Unconshunabal—Sin consciencia!” shouted my mother, who proceeded then to orate her version of the guidance counselor’s entire tirade, which included his opinion that it was unconscionable for my family to be taking advantage of the naïveté, generosity, and goodwill of such a wonderful girl, one whose life story he wouldn’t be at all surprised to see made into a television movie. Mrs. Graetz, this is not Guatemala. Which he’d made a point of reading up on, he even delivered a brief recitation: exploitation of Indians on the plantations, the use of fatally poisonous pesticides banned in the USA but exported to Guatemala, the hemisphere’s most inequitable distribution of land and wealth, and so on. In short, not just the land that bananas come from, but an altogether indefensible little place. The guidance counselor offered my mother profuse admissions of guilt over U.S. culpability. But he personally was not going to just stand by and watch such injustices perpetrated upon one student he was in a position to protect. If the situation could not be swiftly corrected, then he proposed that Flor live with another Namoset family, and suggested that the school board had the authority to enforce such a decision.

  “—Increíble!” exclaimed Moya, almost gleefully. “So you do live with a small country like it is a person, no? It chases you like an angry little dog even up there. Puta. Here was this man, a guerrilla guidance counselor.”