I didn’t feel particularly nervous at first. I guess I was in a suspended state, waiting to see what would happen and knowing that I needed calm much more than fear to get what I wanted from the meeting. I wanted to know, is all, and wasn’t it worth the effort to find out? But you know what I actually felt at that moment, Flor? You know what I was actually thinking? That I missed Zamara. I wasn’t really thinking of Lucas at all, or even about this dangerous bait of five hundred dollars in my pocket. I had left her bed only hours before and still hadn’t quite separated myself from the lingering coziness of her embrace, the bed, the dark little room; I still had the taste of her mouth in mine, and the cool dry air up on the bridge somehow made the damp scent of her in my nostrils even more pronounced. Because I knew that this was the end and that it meant I’d be going home soon, and I just missed her already, that’s all. And then I felt sad, as if instead of merely leaving the country, something much worse was about to happen to me. I probably even smiled to myself, feeling nostalgic already, remembering how in bed that morning I’d told her some more about you, all about that time you were lost in a blizzard. Tiny, sun-shrunken, corrupt little raisins. . . like that the silent words came to me, on the Incienso Bridge. I’ve been trying to re-create exactly what it was I was thinking and feeling on the bridge and how it came to me, but it all happened in a matter of seconds, almost: Tiny, sun-shrunken, just like corrupt little raisins, ay no . . . By then I’d already begun to walk off. Casually, looking down, hands in pockets, as if really I was just going to pace back and forth a bit, impatiently, though what I was thinking now was Who else would have actually kept that eyelash curler around but a poor cop’s wife? Some poor beat cop with control over a teenage mara. Five hundred bucks, a lot to some loser cop who’d probably keep most of it for himself, sharing the rest with his two subservient punks, Gato Cinco and Teardrop. By then I’d already started running into Zona 1, and didn’t stop until I’d reached the Avenida Elena, which marks the beginning of my neighborhood.
* * *
One of the last times I went home to Namoset I spent hours ransacking the house, looking for a certain old crayon drawing of a Christmas tree. I knew that the drawing had been kept around for years, and it seemed outrageous to me that anyone could have thrown it out, though maybe even Flor had done so, during one of her especially driven cleanings, not even pausing to reflect over its more than just sentimental value to me. I’m sort of surprised I haven’t told this story yet.
One dim, wintry, and maybe even snowy day when Flor and I were in the first grade, we were all trooped into a sixth-grade classroom and lined up against a wall, in front of the blackboard, as if to face a firing squad. The girls from the school’s fifth and sixth grades had already been assembled there and were lined up against the opposite wall, staring, scrutinizing us, their eyes excitedly jumping from face to face. What all the fifth and sixth grade boys were off doing that afternoon, I have no idea.
Then, on a teacher’s command, the older girls literally stampeded down the desk aisles towards us, and I was immediately claimed by an excessively delighted sixth grader with curly, bobbed hair who must have really wanted a little brother and for some reason wanted him to look just like me. I will never forget the way she charged down the aisle, in a tartan plaid dress, her mouth open, one hand already reaching for me: I was flooded with pleasure and wonderment—for that moment I was all hers.
But of course no one chose Flor, who was even a little older than the sixth graders. The teachers had ignored this obvious dilemma. They thought, I guess, that Flor was the same, or even less developed, than a first grader, because her English, at that time, was only somewhat more advanced than baby talk. I glanced over and saw Flor still standing against the blackboard with a discomforted squint, a handful of hair pulled into her mouth so that she could chew on it. But the sixth grader was already excitedly pulling me towards her desk. I looked over my shoulder and saw Flor’s eyes, furious, following us.
Flor solved this confusing situation quickly, though. She marched right over and snatched me from my girl and said something like, “I draw Christmas tree! Yes!” and began leading me towards an empty desk, though she stopped and turned to the suddenly bereft sixth grader and gestured for her to follow.
I guess the point of the day’s exercise was that the older girls were supposed to crayon Christmas trees far more elaborate than those we were capable of, so that we could learn this skill and then take the drawings home to our parents as if we’d done them ourselves. I would also guess that the teachers’ thinking included the idea that the older girls would get some practice at being perfect and attentive baby-sitters and little future mothers as well.
So the three of us ended up at the same old wooden desk where Flor, suddenly plunged into deep concentration and with her soft voice that mesmerized even the sixth grader, began crayoning in and explaining in Spanish—which I somewhat translated—the Christmas tree she said they’d had in her Guatemala City convent orphanage: she put white doves in the green boughs and flaming Roman candles and brightly colored mythological animals made of feather and straw that she told about as she went along, and she put a resplendent quetzal bird instead of an angel on top and set a parade of spider monkeys in cone-shaped caps riding unicycles around it on a floor carpeted with pine needles and tropical blossoms. Then came the eerily delicious minutes when there was nothing more to tell because Flor was filling in the picture’s backdrop and occasionally yawning squeakily—the sixth grader and I as if hypnotized watching Flor’s long, already womanly brown fingers curled around a series of crayons swished back and forth according to some dreamy pattern, until the sheet of paper was completely covered with the richly glowing sheen of stained glass. She let the sixth grader take it home with her, and then promised to make me another one later but only if I stopped crying.
That evening, at home, after she’d finished preparing our supper, Flor called down to me in the playroom where I was watching television, and when I came upstairs I found her sitting at the kitchen table, paper and crayons ready.
“Bueno. Now we will draw your tree, like I promised, Rogito,” she said, with a somewhat forced smile. A bit mystified but eager, I sat beside her, and watched her do it all over again: the same animalitos and whispered anecdotes, slowly filling in the backdrop in the same dreamy way . . . Steadfastly, refusing to hurry, relishing and prolonging her perfect scheme, as if everything depended on its being a minutely exact replica of that afternoon’s Christmas tree, Flor finally finished. Then, before I even had a chance to gasp in appreciation, she picked up the glossy sheet of paper in both hands and held it under the table—I heard paper tearing. She watched me with a bemused, expectant expression. My scream brought both my parents hurrying from the living room, where my father had been reading the newspaper in his armchair and my mother had been watching television and sipping domestic-brand sherry.
“You forgot all about me,” Flor was saying, in Spanish. “This afternoon, when you threw yourself so happily on that girl, you left me all alone!” But she had already brought her hands back out from under the table, holding, intact, the spectacularly crayoned sheet. She’d hidden another piece of paper on her lap, that was the one she’d torn.
I stood there silently reeling as my parents came into the kitchen and suddenly, I guess because Flor started to first, we were both giggling, me so uncontrollably I finally had to lay down on the floor. My parents were very impressed by the drawing, and must have assumed that my scream had been one of delight, though my mother couldn’t resist commenting with light disapproval on Flor’s fantastical exaggerations.
So once upon a time, there were two identical drawings of that Christmas tree: mine and that sixth grader’s.
Year after year, Flor brought mine out at Christmas and taped it to the refrigerator. And every time she taunted me with the memory of how I had supposedly rushed into the arms of the sixth-grade girl who had claimed me, and every time I succumbed to the same confused
mix of hilarity and guilt and, of course, love, remembering how upset and then angry Flor had looked, left all alone, standing there against the blackboard with her hair in her mouth.
On the bridge, when I heard Flor’s voice—that wasn’t just memory. Her voice still exists, and that was proof. Memory is like a long conversation during which, at any moment, Flor might tell me something unexpected—as long as I, despite many other preoccupations, go on keeping up my end well enough, and listening.
When I spoke to Uncle Jorge on the phone, he agreed to wire me the rest of my money, which I’d been keeping in his office safe, when I get to Mexico. But it was a strange conversation. Puerto Barrios has sad associations for him, I know. That’s because when my mother and uncles were young and still living at home, Abuelito suffered three mysterious bouts of certifiable madness, each of them three years apart. Suddenly he’d wake up one morning knowing entire Verdi operas by heart, singing at the top of his lungs. And then he would escape on his riotous sprees, buying expensive presents for his mistresses and whores, even signing family properties over to them until Abuelita had everything put in her own name. My uncles, teenagers the first time it happened, would have to track him down, and then they always had to take him, in a straitjacket, here to Puerto Barrios, where they’d book passage on a banana boat for New Orleans; there Abuelito would receive electric shock therapy and then be OK for another three years. Those gulf crossings with Abuelito in a straitjacket are Uncle Jorge’s most painful memories, and here I am now, leaving by launch instead of banana boat in a few days.
When I told him not to worry about the bottles on chairs he’d find in my rooms, he said yes, he’d already seen them, and that it made him feel very sad that my stay in Guatemala had ended this way.
“Tío Jorge, don’t be sad,” I said, kind of lamely. “Everything’s fine, it really is. Though it would have been nice to see it raining there again.” The rainy season had finally come to the city a few days before.
I didn’t hear anything for a moment and wondered if the line had gone dead, but suddenly Catty was on the phone: “Roger, you didn’t go to Puerto Barrios to get married to that girl Freddie saw you with, did you? Because if you did I am going to be very angry.”
“What? No, Cat. Who told you that?”
“No one, it’s just that Papi is very sad, and I thought—Well, he has been worried that you are going to do something crazy like that, Roger.”
“Tell him not to worry about it, Catty. Really. Everything’s great.”
And then we said our good-byes: I wished Catty luck when she starts medical school next term and sent my love to everyone. But suddenly Uncle Jorge got back on the phone again to ask for my help in translating, into English, a strongly worded message he was sending to manufacturers in Taiwan regarding a certain missing shipment of toys that he’d already paid for. His voice was familiar again, booming: “The Taiwanese and I have exchanged twenty-seven telexes already, Roger! And neither of us still has the slightest idea of what the other is talking about!”
When I got off the phone I paid my hotel bill and walked all the way into town in the soggy heat to where the Fuente del Norte buses leave from. Just as I was about to board the bus, I looked up and saw a familiar face in the door, that same merrily bemused smirk, that very same bus driver’s ayudante who’d made fun of me for not knowing where I was going. Grinning, he held his hand out for my ticket and said, “Hombre, all these weeks with the mermaids and still with a sad face? Qué pasó?”
Franciso Goldman’s short fiction and journalism have been published in Harper’s, Esquire, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, The New Yorker, Outside, Playboy, Buzz, and Más. He divides his time between New York and Latin America.
The Long Night of White Chickens Page 57