The Long Night of White Chickens

by Francisco Goldman

  “Moya, the guy was basically ridiculous.”

  “But Flor was a political schoolgirl?”

  “I don’t think she had any idea the guidance counselor was going to go that far. She looked flabbergasted! And when my mother was finished doing her imitation of the guy, she said, ‘Well, maybe it is a good idea, Flor. You would have more time to study, to visit Miss Cavanaugh, to sneak around with your boyfriends—’ And then she exploded. She screamed, ‘This is the gratitude of dogs! Y yo que he aguantado todos los insultos de esta vidajodida sin siquiera levantar la mano!’ (And I who have put up with all the insults of this screwed-up life without even raising my hand!) Then she lifted her hand all right; she slapped Flor right across the face. Whack! That did it, that slap, she had a red mark for days. Flor screamed, ‘Fuck your gratitude, fuck it!’ She ran downstairs hysterical and my mother was screaming, ‘Go ahead, say your dirty words, say fock! say sheet!. . .’ Oh boy, Moya, it was quite a scene.”

  “But Flor didn’t leave your house?”

  “Are you kidding? It all got pretty much worked out. With me and my father as referees, of course. From then on it was my job to vacuum the rugs and clean the bathroom once a week. It was already my job to shovel up Klink’s shit from the yard every night and put it in the incinerator. No one was about to suggest I take over laundry and cooking too. She cut her Brigham’s job to two nights a week. The way my mother finally put it to her was that she could go ahead and regard herself however she wanted, as an exploited maid if she wanted, or as a family member who had chores to do because the family wasn’t rich enough to hire a full-time maid. My mother worked every day and nights too, Moya. She stayed at school late into the afternoons to run the Foreign Students and Romance Languages clubs and taught adult Spanish two nights a week at the Latin American Society because we really did need the extra money. My father, you know, never earned very much.”

  “But Flor was a maid, or felt like one, and resented it.”

  “Well, that’s what my mother must have wished like hell she could have told that guidance counselor. Of course she’s a maid! And an extraordinarily lucky one at that! That’s what she would have liked to have said. I mean, after all, Abuelita was still sending up a salary of a hundred bucks a month, which isn’t a lot but it’s still four times as much as anyone pays servants down here. Which my father supplemented with rewards for good grades and everything, he called her salary an allowance. My mother didn’t care what it was called as long as the housework got done. But sure, Flor started to resent it, or rather to resent my mother.”

  “Y viceversa, vos.”

  “Because of course everyone else on earth treated Flor like she wasn’t a maid.”

  “Like an aristocrat.”

  “I don’t know if I’d go that far. As someone very special. Except, Flor thought, for my mother. Though, you know, my mother didn’t actually treat Flor like a maid anyway. It was just this underlying thing.”

  “Guatemala, vos. This runs under everything.”

  “You don’t think that was humiliating for my mother, sitting in that guidance counselor’s office listening to that? Look, though she’d never said it to Flor’s face, not ever, the fact was and always had been that at any moment, even after Flor had her U.S. citizenship, my mother could have given this ultimatum: Ira, enough of this charade, I didn’t ask for a daughter, I need a maid. Do what you want with her but she’s fired. I’ll have my mother send up a good-natured muchacha who will be absolutely delighted to do her housework and go into Boston on her days off! In other words, Ira, she goes or I go! So why do you think it never came to that?”

  “. . . Because your father would have chosen Flor, vos?”

  “No. He just would have refused to send her packing. And then what would my mother have done? It would have been her move, right? So OK, Mom was probably terrified of that and that was one of the things that restrained her, and I don’t blame her. But she loved Flor too, and Flor loved my mother. But things just eventually got to a point, somehow, where neither one of them could admit that without undoing everything they felt they stood for. They were always challenging each other, like two gladiators. Their own myths clashed. The Empire of Nostalgia versus the, you know, the Wellesley-Bound—”

  “Aristocrat.”

  “Again with the aristocrat?”

  “I have experience of Harvard, vos. Cómo no? She, Mirabel Arrau’s maid, Flor de Mayo Puac, was going to be like an aristócrata and have everything in Los Estados Unidos that Mirabel Arrau could not. In a few years more, if Flor had stayed, your mother might even have been teaching Flor’s daughter at that school for rich girls, verdad?”

  “That’s part of it. Jealousy. Jealousy even of Flor’s relationship with Miss Cavanaugh, the true Boston blue blood, OK. And also, like I said, what they knew or sensed about each other as women. Flor got to see Dr. Ben much more regularly than she’d ever seen Tony, who was basically like her childhood love. So her relationship with Dr. Ben was more mature, you know. Well, she was twenty-one, for Chrissakes. Miss Cavanaugh wasn’t in her house all day every day, she was a busy woman, but it didn’t take her long to figure out what was going on up in her boarder’s attic. Who knows what Miss Cavanaugh really thought about it, maybe she was jealous. But no matter what she did with that dictator when she was young, she was, after all, a Boston Brahmin, nutty for Easter egg hunts. But by the time she got around to saying something to my mother about it—well, my mother and Flor were already at their wits’ ends with each other. Flor, cool it with the African professor, Miss Cavanaugh can’t take it, it’s been centuries since she’s had a lover—that’s basically all my mother said. Later Flor said it was the first talk as true equals they ever had.”

  “And the tiepin, vos?”

  “Oh. Well, after about a week, Flor just announced at dinner one night that it had just occurred to her what might have happened. Weeks before, she said, Tony had come to the house, uninvited of course, out of the blue, to try to win her back. In the afternoon when no one else was home. They argued in the basement, but she stood her ground and said no. Though she couldn’t come out and say so, Tony had never really been out of her life, but Flor had finally told him about Dr. Ben and that’s why he’d come to the house. So at the table Flor said that at one point Tony went upstairs to piss and that that might be when he’d stolen the jewelry. This time it was my father who got angry, but all he said was, ‘Don’t use words like that at the table, Flor.’ Words like piss, he meant. And Flor actually went, ‘Oh Ira, come off it.’ She was exhausted, fed up, like I said, and she was miserable because she knew my mother was going to make her get the tiepin back. Which was just what Tony wanted, of course, I mean that must’ve been the point. So Flor went into Boston to see him one more time, and found him shacked up with some sleazy woman, and he denied taking the jewelry. Maybe he’d already sold it, or he just wanted to keep it because it really wasn’t worth that much, beyond the emotional value of the tiepin to my mother, I mean, and maybe now in some twisted way to Tony too. In the end, my mother, every bit as sick of it all as Flor, just said, ‘Well, now we know why Tony never succeeded as a jeweler’ . . . But Flor came home from that final confrontation just totally devastated, over Tony, over the final waste of all those years of loving him, I guess. She felt so bad about it that things were never really the same between her and Dr. Ben again, though she really did like him a lot and respected him much more than she ever had Tony. Anyway, Dr. Ben was engaged to a Nigerian woman who was studying to be a doctor in France.”

  “. . . And Flor did not know?”

  “No, he told her.”

  “Ajá!”

  And the next year you went to Wellesley and delighted and scandalized your dormmates with your enfants terribles fairy tale about us. Simply because it was that kind of fairy tale, and everyone who heard it wished it were true. Forget it.

  Because there’s another reason I’ve been telling all this. Moments later Moya, adopting his most
formal tone, as if somehow it only concerned him in the most objective possible light, said:

  “On that last night we talked, Flor de Mayo said, ‘Vos, I would never want to be Guatemala’s first lady anyway. My gosh, what a fuckeen nightmare this would be.’ But I only mention this now, Rogerio, because of what you said about this Señorita Cavanaugh telling Flor that she could be president of Guatemala. And Señorita Cavanaugh herself, she thinking that she might be an Evita Perón primera dama. I wonder if this too might be a pattern.”

  “Moya, you’re not about to suggest that Flor came back here because she wanted to be president or first lady someday, are you?”

  But Moya persisted in pursuing his own echoes, and I believe now that they led him as close to the revelation of Celso Batres as he could get without knowing it for sure and speaking his name out loud; that is, if he didn’t already know. Of course, back then I had absolutely no reason for suspecting any of this.

  But on that last night that you and Moya spoke, which was also your last night alive, when Moya offered to go with you to France or anywhere, he said you answered that you’d never really wanted to be first lady anyway, which at first startled and thrilled him because it sounded as if you were on the verge of saying yes. He even thought your remark specifically referred to an old serious joke of his: that even he, Moya, could actually rise that high, could actually be El Señor Presidente one day, even in Guatemala, if he wanted to. It was only after you were already dead and he no longer needed his own optimism that he let his guard down and confronted what he’d felt pretty sure of all along but hadn’t allowed himself to admit: his near certainty that he’d never confided any presidential aspirations to you, even jokingly. Apparently that was the first tangible hint Moya had ever had of another “secret lover,” of someone else in your life of whom it could be said, at least jokingly, that he might one day, by marrying you, eventually make you Guatemala’s primera dama.

  “—So if not me, who, vos?” said Moya. “I mean, puta, Paco Palma Passafarri?”

  So why did it occur instantly to me?

  “Well, you always say Celso Batres might be president someday—You’ve never thought of that before?”

  “But Celso is married, vos. And he is very religious. And his family is very powerful on all sides; if he divorced his wife, his father might even disown him, and his father-in-law, worse. And he would not ever get to be president, vos.”

  “So? She said he wouldn’t leave his wife for her.”

  Moya gaped incredulously.

  “Well, you brought it up, Moya. I know he’s handsome and everything, but, I mean, if Celso and Flor—wouldn’t you have known about it?”

  “Claro,” he said, but he still looked worried.

  “But he didn’t know about you and Flor, right?”

  “Yes, he did, I am afraid,” said Moya. “Celso is the only person I ever told, until you, Rogerio.”

  “So then it couldn’t have been him. I mean, if he was with her, and you told him you were—”

  “It was a boast, more than actually a confiding. Really, in a way, a terrible thing, a true moment of betrayal. Like some stupid macho, I made a boast. It was the only time I broke my promise to Flor to keep our love secret.”

  “You boasted about Flor to Celso?” I cringed inwardly, not having to hear the words to know what they were like, since aren’t such boasts always essentially the same?

  “Sí pues. I was angry and feeling bad, vos. This was soon after we . . . after she had stopped seeing me. Which does not excuse it, claro, but . . .”

  “OK, so you boasted about Flor to Celso. Then what? What’d he say?”

  “Nada. He didn’t say anything.”

  “So you see? Relax, it wasn’t him, Moya. It couldn’t have been. He would’ve punched you or something.”

  Seeing how chagrined Moya seemed over the revived memory of his indiscretion, I suddenly felt unbelievably touched, that’s all. I understood that almost anyone might have done the same in the wake of an amorous rejection. What I thought was, What an inherently decent and even kind of innocent guy my friend Moya really is, to still be feeling so bad about a stupid boast. And also that he’d really loved you, and that you’d hurt him.

  I said, “Look, you’re reading way too much into this, Moya. One silly remark, come on. Of course it would be a nightmare to be first lady. And probably Flor did mean you. Anyway, you don’t really believe that she ever actually worried about that, about having to become first lady, do you? Now I really think we should get some sleep because we’re getting delirious here.”

  Later, after I found out about you and Celso Batres from Rosana Letones, Moya’s boast, its possible and imaginable repercussions, became one more phantom key to your fate, which I pursued in much the same way I found myself simultaneously pursuing Lucas Caycam Quix, down an invisible trail made of my own speculations and “divinations,” certain that in both cases I would never really know. So it seemed appallingly unfair to put any blame on Moya, despite everything else. I couldn’t even bring myself to tell him what I’d found out since—never mind about the terrible but phantom scenarios I’ve been able to draw from it all—until the other day, when finally I put it into a letter.

  That night in the Omni, Celso Batres invisibly and discreetly departed the room, like a ghost who has come much too early for a haunting. We thought we’d escaped certain death, and it had filled our blood and our heads with fireworks. We didn’t even know yet that it had only been “a heavy-handed tail, meant to send a message,” that they’d only wanted to scare us. I lit another Payaso cigarette; in my hand I held the square, poinsettia-red little pack, its portrait of an idiotically grinning white-faced clown. Then I put it down, exhaled, lay back, and looked up into the mirror where only three weeks before I had watched myself lying next to Zamarita, but now in that mirror I saw the grinning payasito on the red satin bed and Moya’s hand reaching for it, heard him saying, “What the hell, I will smoke one.” Though recently estranged, Moya and I were good friends again. I was sure I’d even saved his life.

  “Una cosa más,” said Moya suddenly, when he had finished his cigarette and finally seemed ready for sleep. “If your family was so poor—”

  “I wouldn’t call us poor, exactly.”

  “How was it you could afford all these travels with the Harvard football team, vos?”

  “By betting,” I said. “My father bet on every Ivy League football game, and that’s all his winnings went to, our trips. He was really good at it.”

  And by the time I was done describing all the ins and outs of that, Moya had drifted off to sleep on the far curve of our round bed, and I switched off the light and lay back again, staring up at the blackened mirror. I thought about Zamara. I wanted to think about Zamara. Think about Zamara, I said to myself, getting ready to feel almost happy, remembering Zamara as I’d seen her below and above me, on the bed and in the ceiling mirror, on that one night that she’d said was her first night in an autohotel too, though that doesn’t mean much. But she hadn’t been working as an artista for long, and they don’t have to leave with the customers and most of the customers can’t afford the hundred quetzales at least anyway (one night I saw Zamara write her price on a napkin for this American business type, she wrote “500,” which is a price no one would ever pay and he laughed like it was a joke and she scolded, En serio, and he said, Forget it!). Thus the mythological or at least relative purity of artistas de barra, which perhaps only I, and certainly on that first night, wholly believed in—that first night that so resembled love that ever since I’d hardly been able to even go near her without feeling panicky symptoms, heart pounding, tongue tied—ridiculous, I know. And the only place I’d gone near her since was the place where she worked and where I’d first seen her, one of three fancy barra shows situated on the same block around the corner from the Conquistador-Sheraton in Zona 4: nearly pale, now multicolored Zamara (as I first saw her), eyes brimming with trepidation under the red, orange,
and blue lights of the round, elevated stage, the yellow sequins of her tasseled costume’s top and bottom flaring, her hips and thighs moving to the music and her elbows and hands lifted as if in a doll’s embrace, her smooth shoulders and the tops of her skinny arms so slightly moving too, as if tingling from invisible kisses instead of nightclub drafts or something else spreading a chill over her skin, Zamara reflected endlessly in the light-spangled mirrors along the club’s facing walls, her eventually bared, almost womanly, and impossibly pert everything moving but ever so delicately and modestly for a stripper.

  Though I should make it clear that raunchily immodest dancing or patron behavior is not often seen at a reputable barra show. It’s almost as if artistas de barra perform for genteelly degenerate princes instead of for the usual bunch of high school kids and young guys with jobs and off-duty junior military officers, and quietly high-strung cadets with their short Mohawk haircuts. Of course there are always older men too, variously respectable sorts with their paunches and mustaches. Only once in a while does a group of rowdy young Americans turn up—Peace Corps guys still new to the country, say—who forget or just don’t know about the decorum of barra shows versus strip clubs in the States. So they yell and applaud too loudly when an artista removes her top and then her bottom, they gesticulate too wildly for her to toss her sequined garments into their outstretched hands from the stage. They don’t know that an artista only tosses her things to a patron—though he will never wave his hands—when he has earned this by patiently buying her six quetzal fruit juices and watery whiskeys, for which she receives redeemable chips, and danced with her over and over on the club’s small and always crowded dance floor. Only then might an artista toss her garments with a desultory flip of her hand to a patron and only then can he, for the amusement of his drinking buddies, hold her sequined and cheaply perfumed top or bottom to his nose and sniff it like a flower or wear it over his head, this being the only overt raunchiness permitted at a barra show, where the waiters will even glide over to the dance floor to deliver a chastening look to any artista dancing in the arms of a patron with too much pelvis grinding going on. Only later, and only if he has been buying her drinks and making her laugh with his jokes and danced with her and held hands with her and waited for her at his table when she has gone off to change because soon it will be her turn onstage again and then told her when she’s returned how beautiful she looked up on the stage and how sabrosona she looks now, only then can a patron say, Let’s go somewhere and canchis canchis or Let’s go somewhere and fuck mamita rrrrica and then negotiate a price for an artista to accompany him to an autohotel or even for a whole weekend in a beach chalet or private finca—if he’s wealthy, a junior military officer even, one who happens also to be the son of a general.