If, as Zamara also claimed—though it is very possible my overly eager line of interrogation led her into it and she was just trying to both please and impress me and then later in her stubborn pride refused to retract it—but if it is true that Teniente López took her to his family’s Pacific beach house in Likin one weekend, and that his Aunt Mirza López de Betz and her family unexpectedly turned up there with three of her own servants in tow, and that one of those servants was in fact the same girl who was photographed in the newspapers as the niñera fafera, if that is true—and Zamara said it definitely was, nodding her head and chewing her knuckle as she stared at the folded shred of newspaper in my hand; but maybe only saying it was true because I’d brought her back to the house and in my bedroom had pulled out that old newspaper picture and had asked her, Do you recognize this girl, have you ever seen her anywhere, for example, maybe when you were with the lieutenant on that day his tía turned up at the beach house? So that maybe Zamara, thinking that it was a trick question and that I already knew, said it was true so that I would be sure to believe that she really had been to the beach house? But if that was true, and Zamara really had seen her there, well, what was I supposed to do about it and what did it really change? It only told me what I already knew and a little bit more: that Señora Mirza López de Betz was so secure in her impunity that she had ludicrously dispatched her own servant to perform the role of a captured niñera denouncing you, Flor, as the owner of an accidentally discovered fattening house.
It’s entirely possible that the lieutenant took Zamara to his beach house. I’ve of course seen the undoubtedly contraband portable Sony stereo he gave her in Zamara’s little room, and the Panama T-shirt he brought back for her from one of his “business” trips to Panama, undoubtedly undertaken on behalf of his papi. It’s entirely possible that Zamara really saw the niñera fafera, but it’s not that good a photograph and it is also possible that Zamara was just saying that to please or impress me and then refused to retract it because what did I think she was, a liar?
But if Señora Mirza López de Betz is mad enough to make her own servant play the niñera fafera, might she not have been mad enough to have contrived your murder too, her impunity like a limitless charge account for a free-spending madness, enabling her to take a life just to squelch an embarrassing rumor? Well, enough of these baseless speculations. I don’t do that anymore . . .
Three months of Zamara, that’s all, Flor. Three months of being able to say, Well this, anyway, was all I could do for anyone here, bring some love and happiness into one artista de barra’s life, and receive quite a bit more of it back. Three months of nights with Zamara and no more nights like those during the first three months after Moya left when I was without Zamara, when I used to sit in Cuatro Caminos, the little cantina next to the barra shows where the artistas often gather before and after work, drinking with Larry until the morning light was harsh, and the girls had all gone home, and only the drunken night-crawling scum remained, I sank pretty low, Flor. Three months of afternoons with Zamara, in her rented room in the ramshackle house around a concrete patio, making love in Zamara’s windowless room, pictures from movie star magazines and Vanidades taped to the dirty pink walls, one bare light bulb in the ceiling; nights sitting next to Zamara, watching her yawning up into the smoky darkness behind colored barra show lights, plopping her head down in folded arms on the table and then looking up again, heavily sighing, “Ayyy quiero mormrrir,” from boredom, hate, this life of six nights a week from eight in the evening until five in the morning that if only I would rescue her from . . . but all I was ever ready to do was take her home, her place or even mine, despite Chayito’s enraged stare—“This is my friend Zamara, Chayito,” “Mucho gusto, señora,” and the stare; trips with Zamara, to the coast, where in Puerto Barrios we spent a night right here in the Hotel del Norte and a rainy afternoon in the house over a bar where the featured artistas from the fanciest sailors’ nightclub live, playing gin rummy and smoking pot on her friend Paola’s bed; and then across the bay to Livingston, where we stayed in the fanciest hotel and got to make love under a ceiling fan in our immaculate white room overlooking the bay, where at sunset we could see dolphins playing in the pink waves beneath all the swooping birds. What did we talk about? Hardly anything, though almost always amiably. Well, lots of things. Really, mainly, we fucked, and you know what that’s like, when that’s all you want to do and everything you do is part of that. But I treated Zamara pretty well, didn’t I? I bought her dresses, I went with her to El Progreso to visit her mother and son in their poor persons’ small compound of shacks around a chicken-shit yard and brought presents for them both; I took her to movies, restaurants and watched her eat with her fingers, bought her real cotton underwear so that she could get rid of her poor person’s sackcloth ones, and just lay in bed with her for hours with my nose buried here and there, smelling her hair, her neck, her armpits, faintly rose-and-olive-hued Zamarita. I told her drugs were bad for her and convinced her; I gave her a García Márquez novel, the easiest to read and shortest, the one about the colonel and the rooster, and she loved it, she took it everywhere with her and plowed right through it in about six weeks; I took her to the doctor and to the dentist and to the circus and on yet another of those nights when she’d skipped work because I’d agreed to pay her docked salary and the fine, I introduced her without fanfare or shame to my cousin Freddie when we ran into him and his fufurufa girlfriend in the Jaguar disco at the Hotel Biltmore Maya. I gave her one thousand dollars of my “wedding gift” to put towards her son’s education. I tried to convince her to enroll in beautician school like so many of the other artistas do, but she wouldn’t because it would mean too many afternoons away from me. And I was happy, I think, knowing this was temporary, and because our bodies really did love each other, and because my obsession seemed insatiable, and because she really does say a lot of funny things and has a wonderful stillness inside; because I stopped asking myself who I was or who I was turning into and didn’t search for anything more inside her beyond that which I already knew about and, my God, what could have been more unfair than that? Because I still had five thousand dollars left and then three and then a bit more than one. Because my dancing got better and better and I even stopped reading the newspapers, because I just liked watching her, the way she watered the gardenias planted in Carnation milk cans outside her door in the afternoons before we went inside to make love; liked the way, on our walk to the General Cemetery one afternoon, she impulsively reached out and rang the bell attached to the ice-cream vendor’s cart, waking the elderly ice-cream vendor dozing against a wall; liked the way she dragged me all the way to the General Cemetery just to see the famous spot where two illicit lovers are buried with their proper spouses, their adjacent tombs joined by the thickly gnarled, groping tendrils of a single dense vine. Two days after I told Zamara that I’d soon be going home (though to Mexico first), I received a letter under my door, full of misspellings, in chicken-scrawl print, telling me that I was a coward, a putero, a vicioso, a borrachito, one she loved anyway and had chosen over a lieutenant, one who was afraid to admit to himself that he had fallen in love with just a common artista de barra and because of that was going to turn everything into shit. When I went to the club to find her that night, her friend Lucy told me that Zamara had gone home to El Progreso to make her principled stand, certain that I would admit my error and follow her there. I was going to do that, wasn’t I? Lucy was sure I was going to go, wasn’t I?
Every night in the Medellín, here in Puerto Barrios, Paola asks me the same thing. I don’t have to marry her, she says. Just go see her, anyway. You don’t have to go back to the city. Take her to Mexico, why not? Zamara will land on her feet no matter what, vos. She’s proud! Just go see her, Rohyyer. Te vas, o qué? Are you going or what?
Well, I can at least do that, can’t I? I want you to think well of me, after all. I haven’t spent a year here only to learn heartlessness. By now I should have so
me idea of how to solve my own crime, anyway.
But first I have to tell about Mariel the street girl: her earnest endeavors to find Lucas on my behalf ended up inspiring a criminal mastermind with an idea for a trap that I almost walked right into, whether Mariel actually knows that now or not.
Fourteen years old, torn shoes, cowboy shirt knotted over belly, fake rhinestone-studded denim skirt missing most of its stones, and glitter smeared across her eyelids, the tops of her plump cheeks—at night Mariel sells sex too, in the cantinas off 18 Calle, slipping a cheap but potent mickey into her “suitor’s” drink just before going to whatever sleazy room, and then making off with the usually paltry sum in his wallet. So she claimed, anyway, and showed me the pills, available in any pharmacy.
Mariel came up from behind me one day on Sexta Avenida, grabbed my hand in both of hers, and said she’d found Lucas Caycam Quix. Again. This wasn’t even a month ago, after I’d long stopped believing that he was even alive. But it was a practically once a week occurrence, Mariel snagging me on the streets of Zona 1, telling me she had news, so that then I’d buy her a meal, which I would have done anyway. Mariel had claimed to know of Lucas right from the start, back when Sor Clarita and I were initiating our search, but so did many of the street kids and usually for the same reason as Mariel initially did: not for money once they realized we weren’t offering any, but simply to prolong our interest and attention. For a while I’d even formalized our agreement—Mariel was “my best informant”—taking her to lunch in Pollo Campero every Thursday afternoon, where I’d always let her win one quetzal at a time from me in macho bets over who could eat fried chicken with the most chili sauce heaped all over. Then I’d listen encouragingly while Mariel pretended that she knew about Lucas, but so far had been unable to find him, but was getting closer—I knew this let her feel that the lunches were part of an honest transaction, keeping up the illusion of a significant bond between us. My friendship was a big deal to her, I thought. I was nice to her, listened to her problems, and I wasn’t even a social worker. And it was certainly always interesting to hear her totally appalling stories.
This time, when she pulled me off Sexta Avenida and into the Picadilly and then upstairs into a booth, we ordered pizza and waited for two boys who Mariel said would soon be arriving to explain everything. Then she got busy carving her initials into the tabletop with her fork. The extravagance of the whole ruse really was kind of touching, but I was in a bit of a rush that day too, with plans to meet Zamara for an afternoon movie. Just when I was trying to find the right way to say that it looked like they weren’t coming after all, so that I could get the business of consoling her over the failure of the meeting out of the way—we’d just been served our pizza, and hadn’t even had the first of our hot sauce bets yet—suddenly there they were, standing at the edge of our table with their hands in their pockets: two street boys, teenagers, with rolled-up sleeves exposing crude ink tattoos on their forearms—the skinny one, the boniest, with the harder yet handsomer face of the two, also had a solid black teardrop—the size of a peanut—tattooed just under the duct of his right eye, like it had been squeezed out in some moment of unprecedented pity or self-pity long ago, oily-inky, and then had just dried right there, before it could even roll down his cheek. That teardrop’s effect, of course, was pretty sinister, since it seemed to signify the absolute opposite of a real tear, mocking anyone who might ever have expected or wanted him to shed a real one. But when I asked him about it much later his explanation wasn’t so subtle: he said he’d gotten the tattoo when he was a little boy because someone had told him it would make people feel sorrier for him when he sang for money on buses.
No need to draw this out. They said they were Lucas’s friends; I met with them twice more after that. They belonged to the same mara, street gang, and they knew all the right details: about Lucas’s life, the adoption, his vengeful rage about it. They claimed he was one tough indio. Lucas did not earn his money legally, but at least they were “una mará audaz,” an audacious street gang. What he’d believed back then was that someday he was going to earn enough to have his little sister María de la Luz, his last surviving family member, come and live with him so that they could start an honest life. But then you’d sold María de la Luz for thousands of dollars to France, where her organs were going to be removed and transplanted to rich people so that they could live instead, and that was why, in justifiable revenge, he’d killed you. I listened to this, but I was suspicious: I knew they could have put that whole story together just from what I’d already told Mariel, along with the usual rumors about the baby trade.
Then one of the boys said that Lucas had even kept your fur stole, his petrecho de guerra, his avenger’s trophy, and even described it accurately enough, though he didn’t use the word ermine. I asked for more proof, I wanted to see it. At the second meeting the boy named Gato Cinco—not Teardrop—pulled a delicate tonglike utensil from his pocket and laid it on the table and I thought, What’s that for, boiling eggs one at a time? Then I realized it was an eyelash curler, not even rusted, shiny and silvery as if it had been preserved carefully and just polished; no makeup coated, tiny lashes stuck to it: your eyelash curler.
I told them that I had no desire to try to have Lucas arrested or to harm him, that I just wanted to talk with him. The first note slipped under my door, purporting to be from Lucas, affirmed his understanding of that. This crudely penciled but logical warning read: “If you are not being honest with me, this will come out bad for you.” He would speak to me for five hundred dollars. Now Lucas’s goal in life, according to his friends, was to earn enough money to buy his sister’s freedom from France, rejoin his parents, and find a way for them all to live together someday in the city, or maybe Quezaltenango. I was to show myself on the Incienso Bridge so that he, from somewhere in the slum below, would be able to see that I had come alone. His friends would then come and fetch me on the bridge, and lead me down to him.
Is it so hard to see how I fell for this? But it baffles me now. I hiss: jerk, idiot, payaso! But sometimes things happen in a way that makes it seem that all your courage, resolve, or even intuition have succumbed to a dreamlike momentum outside of you. Then what saves you? Nothing, if you don’t wake up in time. But if you do? An instinct? A warning from inside like one of those soft and silent premonitions that only pass between true lovers?
I didn’t tell anyone about my important mission, not even Zamara, when I left on foot for the Incienso Bridge at the appointed time. So what did I think I was going to get out of “Lucas” for my five hundred dollars? Confirmation that his mad motive of revenge had been justified? Then what was I going to do, shake his hand? Of course I wanted to talk some sense into him about his plans to buy back his sister, and encourage him to rejoin his parents, who would be overjoyed to see him, and would soon have more than enough money to set up a modest home in the city or Quezaltenango, and begin a new and I hoped healing life. I wanted to tell him that we had both been cruelly wronged, and wanted to at least try to make amends with fate. I wanted to hear what he had to say for himself and look into his eyes and decide then what to feel about him once and for all. What if I found that I hated him for his brutal ignorance, despite the justification of his presumed motive and the horrors he’d survived? Maybe as a secret punishment I would later do what Zamara would probably do (and is probably doing to me right now): cut a limón into eight pieces and write Lucas Caycam Quix onto a strip of paper and then fold it back inside the pieces and sew the limón up again with red thread because the thread has to be red, and drop it into a sewer. But he wouldn’t be the only one who deserved that hex.
The Incienso Bridge spans a vast, deep barranco behind Zona 1, a densely packed slum spreading down one steep slope, garbage perpetually smoldering all over the other. Five hundred dollars folded up in an envelope in my pocket, I walked all the way out into the middle like I was supposed to, and waited, standing on the pedestrian walkway inside the rail. The bridge s
eemed to sway underneath me whenever heavy trucks sped across. From where I stood, I could see all the way to the gorge’s far end, where sheer rock cliffs looked as if they’d been split apart by a sharp ax of lightning: a thin, frothy stream ran out of the split and along the very distant, grassy, garbage-strewn bottom. Among palm trees that looked like pressed green daisies from that height and flame-flickering flowering trees were thousands of flat tin roofs, weighed down with tires, boulders, cinder blocks, and rusted pieces of scrap, so that it looked like a factory had blown apart in the sky and landed all over the barrio in bits and pieces. Dirt paths shot down through that tumbling casbah of shacks; the people I could see walking on them were just specks. Perhaps one of these was one of Lucas’s friends, climbing towards me now.
I waited for just a short time, listening to the way the walls of the gorge seemed to channel the barrio’s village sounds upwards along with the smoke from cooking fires and just as lightly: an airy, strangely inanimate repetition of barking dogs, demented roosters, infants crying, children screeching, radios playing, all of it amidst a soft-as-milkweed muttering that sounded like prayerful or vengeful old women whispering to themselves—probably just the wind and air reverberating in the hollowness of the gorge.
The Long Night of White Chickens Page 56