And because this is Guatemala and many of the polite young men, some of them junior military officers or ranchers or cocaine smugglers or even all three at the same time, carry pistols and are staring now at the backs of the wildly waving and uninhibitedly whooping gringo boys, the waiters, some of them pretty tough sorts themselves, with scars on their faces that can act like a warning third eye, come over to the gringos and tap one of them lightly on the shoulder and frown. And that’s enough, and if it’s not they gesture with their lips, in that precise way they have of slightly twisting their lips to one side or the other instead of pointing with a finger or even visibly nodding, they point with their lips at the table of hard-staring men with 9-mm pistols protruding from their belts or bulging in shoulder holsters under their jackets. And then the gringo boys settle down; even off-duty U.S. Marine embassy guards, who are of course prohibited from running around at night bearing arms, most of them really nice guys anyway who just want to party and don’t want to be shot at any more than any of us do, learn pretty quickly not to mess with that.
So that’s where Zamara was working when I met her, earning about a fifth as much as the girls in a fancy burdel like Marujas or the Valhalla but five times as much as she could doing anything else outside the ambiente, working in a shoe factory or as a shopgirl. She’s one of the lucky ones in that respect, lucky to be pretty, that’s all, and no father or brothers or even a boyfriend around to stop her. Most artistas even earn enough to hire Indian maids to look after their children, even though usually they’ll all be living crammed into one room in a rooming house, the Indian maid unrolling her straw petate to sleep on the floor. But Zamara was lucky to have a mother who could look after little Rex. Almost every Sunday she took the bus to El Progreso to see her son and give her mother money, and then was back in time for work on Monday.
Zamara never tossed her things to anybody, ever. And that look she got in her eyes when her three-song set was finished and she’d been completely naked for about five seconds already but now had to walk that short, humiliating gauntlet past a few tables of staring men to reach the curtained entrance to the changing rooms in back, possessively clutching her sequined garments in one fisted hand down by her side, that thoughtfully riled and deeply perturbed what-are-yow-looking-at look with which Zamara strafed the room; or that other look when she was still up there on the stage, when she was still in the second song of her three-song set and hadn’t had to take anything off yet but was just moving her hips and nalgas and swiveling her high heels, watching herself watch herself ad infinitum in one of those facing wall-length mirrors, getting lost in an infinity of Zamaras watching Zamaras, every Zamara framed in diminishing arcs of colored lights—those looks are what told me Zamara has a lot going on inside. In my own boredom and drifting desire, I’d lose myself in that abstract Times Square of spangled lights and repeated dancing girl too, staring into that peaceful nighttime endlessness that seemed to have no surface. And on the very first night I ever saw Zamara I caught her eye right there in the mirror while she was onstage dancing and we smiled at each other like goofy adolescents—which of course is what she still is. A little later she snuck up behind me while I sat with Larry at our table and tweaked my nose! When I turned my head she was already dashing off with that country girl swagger of hers to sit with some of the other girls in a corner, dressed more plainly than the others that night, in just jeans and a plaid shirt, my lovely pueblerina. After she’d tweaked my nose and dashed off, Larry, with that Kentucky twang of his, with his bartender-barber’s conviviality, said, “She’s a frisky pony, that one.” Usually he says things like “Tits you can bounce a quarter off” or “She’s a racehorse, that one,” though neither of those would apply to Zamara, who looks as if a quarter bounced off any part of her would leave an ugly bruise.
The song that always announced Zamara’s appearance at the top of the lighted stairs leading down to the elevated stage was “I Wish They All Could Be California Girls.” She’d come down the stairs to the Beach Boys, with careful steps and her hands on both rails, beneath colored lights and hanging ferns and against a backdrop of ultraviolet-lit fake boulders, and then she’d step onto the stage with that warning look already welling in her eyes and she’d lift her elbows and her hips would start moving almost as if against her will, as if they’d simply been trained to move like that to certain music. The second song was always “El Mangu,” her gaze floating away, mesmerized by all her gazes in the mirror, and the third Juan Gabriel’s melting torch song . . . miraaaa mi soledad, miraaaa mi soledad, que no me sienta nada bien . . ., her tasseled and sequined top coming off, then at the very last second the bottom snapped off, and then the short angry walk off the stage and past a short row of tables, before her startling, perfect, and rebuking white buttocks disappeared through a velvet curtain into the rooms in back.
Then came those first few nights of properly invested attention that I can’t quite bring myself to call courtship, when I already had such a crush on her that all I did in Lord Byron’s was bug Larry to close up early so that we could rush over, those nights of drink buying and dancing and hours of silly conversation and even a few quick kisses when the waiters weren’t looking before I finally said that I would pay just this one time for us to leave the club together. (Larry, the expert, had told me that was the way to do it.) I felt as nervous as a teenager asking her out on a first date, but I made my little speech, I promised that we’d go on regular dates and everything but only this once would I pay for her as if she worked in a burdel and not as an artista de barra. She said yes, but in that way of hers, shaking her head no while saying yes and smiling as if this was very clever. We took a taxi to the Omni.
Less than a week later, not even minutes after Larry and I had arrived from Lord Byron’s and had settled into our table, my eyes still searching the darkness and the double-rowed tables and banquettes and the dance floor, Larry nudged me so I wouldn’t miss it, Larry who thinks nothing could be dumber than getting hung up on one artista de barra; but artistas don’t have to turn tricks and some of them never do and some of them are hardly ever even asked to, but it’s hard to say no to the money: so there went Zamara, wearing the Dodgers’ baseball jacket she’d brought back from L.A. and looking remarkably like Linda Ronstadt in it, accompanying a patron I hardly got a look at towards the front door. He went out first, I just registered a yellow polo shirt and designer jeans, and she exchanged some quick, smiling remark with the doorman and then she was gone. While I sat there looking at the door like it was another kind of mirror, and Larry had a fit of yokel laughter over my crestfallen expression. It’s not hard to steal love for free from this or that artista on a Sunday or even in the afternoons and evenings before they have to be at work, not hard even in a fancy burdel like the Valhalla, if you’re foreign especially, and attentive and nice and funny enough, a friend, then it’s not hard. Larry is practically the maestro at all that. Because of the way his face lights up as soon as he walks into the Valhalla and because of his red hair, the girls there call him Fosforito, little lit match, though before long Sofia, a garifuna black from the Caribbean coast, six inches taller than he, had exclusively claimed him, and the other girls had to keep away. Sofia works as a bank teller by day and in the late afternoons goes to beautician school, and she doesn’t sleep in the Valhalla because she’s already bought her own small house with a walled-in yard where she raises peacocks and ducks and she’s saving her money to open her own Zona 10 hair salon, except there’s the problem of trying to lure fufurufas into a salon owned by a negrona. But Larry is a muy convivial gringo, and he has a haircutting diploma too, so this is what Sofia offered Larry: a home and partnership in a fancy hair salon that she will pay for. All he has to do is marry her.
But I, up to that night in the Omni with Moya, had not been able to get anything for free from Zamara—who, the next time I saw her, disarm-ingly and affectionately smiled and said, “Buy me a stereo.” I said, “I’ll buy you an elote,” a roast
ed ear of corn like they sell on the street, and she laughed and said, “Teniente López me compró un estéreo.” She said it with a certain insouciance that made it seem like a very wittily ironic thing to have said indeed. And I said, “Since when do lieutenants make so much money? I thought they had to at least reach major. Anyway, you told me you didn’t like militares, Zamara.”
Except she’d said Lieutenant López, a common enough name. But she was obviously dying to spill the beans, like she’d been out with a Kennedy or something, so it didn’t take me long to get it out of her that she meant López as in López Nub, yes that López Nub, the general’s, the defense minister’s son, the nephew of the sister and sister-in-law, the women who according to Moya’s scenario had instigated a defamatory newspaper campaign in order to drown out the rumors of their own involvement in a clandestine baby-fattening house. Moya’s reaction to a López Nub relation suddenly turning up in the periphery of my life couldn’t have been more blasé—he was supposed to be surprised that a millionaire general’s son, a lieutenant, would turn up at one of the city’s fanciest barra shows and choose the artista I claimed was prettiest? And what did I think, the lieutenant was going to spill all his family secrets to her and then elaborate? As for my competing with a general’s son for the same girl, if that’s what I was getting up to, well that, said Moya, was pretty much the way a certain Peace Corps guy got a bullet in his head a few years ago. No, you don’t do it, Rogerio, babosito, you cede the territory. I knew he was right, of course, though I was as intrigued as I was, if not outright jealous, exasperated. I’d figured by the time I returned to the city from my trip through the highlands the lieutenant would have dropped her already, but I’d ended up in the Omni before having a chance to find out. It was ridiculous to feel hurt and angry at a puta for behaving like a puta, of course. But Zamara was an artista de barra.
But all that went through my mind as I drifted off to sleep at the end of that first night in the Omni with Moya was a repeat of that night’s recurring thought that right here on this same round bed (it might actually have been the same bed) I’d made love to Zamara, truly, had felt her soft belly and hips so sensually and naturally rolling beneath me, had felt her skinny arms around my neck and had watched in astonished adoration as private pleasure and mute desolation and even something like deepest wishfulness showed in the beautiful, long-lashed young face beneath me, the face turned sideways on the red satin pillow or looking open-eyed at me or past me into the mirror, where I guess the undeluded story was being told, but I couldn’t stop smoothing her damp, soft hair with my fingers, kissing her, I felt overwhelmed with tenderness and even sadness, wishing at the same time for it to be possible for us to share something other than this and knowing it was impossible and not knowing, not comprehending that really it was her stealthy-as-a-panther spirit that was embedding itself in that place where one can love, that it was that and not her vulnerable abjection which moved me. I felt close to the source of something important that night, and I didn’t even see it. Though I did kind of piss her off when I started babbling that I was going to save her, and she very haughtily scolded, “Y vos quién sós, Jesucristo?”
* * *
Vos. Guess what finally came in the mail?
Moya once knew a girl, born of Nicaraguan and Guatemalan parents, who had lived through two devastating earthquakes, the Managua earthquake of’72, and the one in Guatemala just over three years later, both of which occurred at night. Both times the wall behind Moya’s friend’s bed, as well as parts of the roof above, fell down upon her as she slept; both times her father’s strong arms pulled her out through rubble in her bed just as she was waking up to the surprise of not being dead. Both times, exactly the same.
So it was for Moya, two rooms, two earthquakes (no strong arms): the first time in Flor’s old basement bedroom in Namoset, when Roger said, “Moya, Flor had a secret lover,” and the second in Alma Mejia’s apartment in Mexico City, where Moya now lives on a sofa in the small living room, when, sitting on that sofa, he opened Roger’s five-page letter, which had been mailed from Puerto Barrios, Guatemala, postmarked three weeks before, and read:
“Moya, I better just come out with it. Flor’s secret lover was Celso Batres. Rosana Letones told me that they used to meet in a hotel suite that Celso kept in the Cortijo Reforma. That’s the same hotel my father and I stayed in! Even the chambermaids knew! And Rosana knew because her grandmother, the mother of that Guardia Nacional colonel who’s still in jail in Nicaragua, lives in that very hotel. Also Celso used to go with Flor when she had to go out of the country sometimes and probably vice versa, this confirmed by Rosana on her own orphan biz trips to Sweden and other countries, when people sometimes confuse her with Flor and even ask after Celso. Moya, let me get right to it, and, honest to God, I don’t blame you, at least I don’t think I do and pray that there’s no reason to, because you didn’t already know, did you, that night in the Omni when you told me about the time you boasted to Celso about Flor, you didn’t know then, did you?
Don’t even confide in your own shadow, vos. Moya’s country’s folk sayings are nothing if not as apt to reality as folk sayings can be; he used to like to think this one ruled him, that even his own shadow was ignorant of his deepest secrets, thoughts, and anxieties since he never even whispered of these things in its presence. Keep your own shadow in the dark! (But cast a lucid gaze over everything.) Bueno.
Celso Batres, of course, had many qualities that Flor would have found endearing and attractive. Handsome, intelligent, wealthy, uncorrupted, even idealistic, no murderer, certainly an occasional reader of Darío.
She could be a little crazy, you know. It was as if hobgoblins, desert spirits, had stayed on inside her. Once there was a storm and Flor slipped silently from the bed. Moya woke, noticed her missing, and then found her standing naked with her arms out on the small balcony outside the window in a torrential rain that tasted of the Caribbean and wild and chilly mountain winds, lightning flashing in the shaking leaves all around. As Moya crawled through the window, all she said, in English, was “I love it here, Marco. I’ve never been so happy.” “Moya,” said Moya, thinking that perhaps she had said Moya. He stood beside her, naked himself, teeth chattering, amazed by the ecstatic gleam of her eyes. Back in the room, she calmly dried herself off, smiling at him without a word. Then she went out to make the rounds of orphan checking and came back chuckling because she’d found the orphan boy with the thyroid condition in the older girls’ dormitory and had decided to let him stay there because both he and the girl whose bunk he was sharing were sound asleep, oh, so sweet. She immediately fell asleep herself, and in the morning claimed she only remembered certain fragments, she was certain they’d both shared the same dream, though she admitted that in 1979 she’d briefly had a relationship with one Marco Tulio, an architect who had suddenly and without explanation left the country, he’s in Madrid now, well, you know how it was back then, he owned that chalet on the lake where—Did I really say his name? I really said Marco? How funny, I haven’t thought about him in ages! Moya, you can’t be jealous of some guy I went out width four years ago!
Clutching Flor in his arms after a bout of love during his five unforgettable weeks of not quite unrestricted nightly access (surreptitious late-night arrivals, dawn fleeings), Moya often had the remorseless feeling that he was presiding over the dissolution of the old Moya. It felt almost like an urge to die, a gambler’s fearless but submissive faith in what comes after. He fell totalmente in love with her and soon lost all sense of familiarity with himself, a condition that challenged him all the more because she never once unequivocally declared that she was in love with him, though now and then she wavered; even her impassioned confusion seemed glorious cause for hope. Moya couldn’t believe that he wouldn’t eventually master both her indecision and his own unprecedented inner chaos, and emerge better for Flor from the struggle as well. In the meantime he went around in a feverish monk’s rapture. Even by day, during those fi
ve weeks of love, he lived in a nocturnal carnival of watching her, smelling her, tasting, listening to, studying her. After they made love he wouldn’t even wash, escaping with her salty film intact. He sat at his El Minuto desk humming her four-note love cry; the memory of her stilled-black-minnow gaze, her ever-scrutinizing and mysterious eyes maddened his afternoons. Moya had always been a robust lover, stunning his foreign girls with his unfailingly uncomplicated endurance; he had never been inventive, but he’d raised a lot of dust. But floramor was something else, like one of those fairy tales where the suitor has to perform ten perilous tasks first, vos. She said once that that was why she preferred older men, well certain ones, they were cheerfully perverse and had hearty and expert appetites minus the apologies or shyness of youth, they didn’t give sex all those dumb meanings. In response to Moya’s flabbergasted look she giggled. She said she was only jodiendo, that is, she was not being quite sincere, and then she turned her head to the other side of the pillow, laughing so deeply she ended up curled into a little ball. Another time Moya noticed Flor gazing at him with a chillingly premonitory sadness, but even before he could ask why, she said, “Someday, Moya, some other woman is going to get all the benefit of everything I’m teaching you.” “No!” She had always known it was just temporary, and never pretended otherwise. Yet when Moya realized she was serious about leaving Guatemala, he said he would go too, despite the fact that she had already broken off their five-week “affair” and was now characterizing it as a beautiful but probably spent and needless passion. Moya persisted, argued, sought to prove—amazed that he was capable of pouring so many words over her doubts. How he entertained and amused her, even during those final weeks when she wouldn’t see him anymore and might even have been secretly hating him (because of that boast) and almost all their conversations were over the phone. But at the very end, hadn’t he almost convinced her? She said she’d never wanted to be la primera dama anyway.
The Long Night of White Chickens Page 51