The Long Night of White Chickens

by Francisco Goldman

  It was into that scandal that my father and I flew together, to bring Flor’s body home for burial.

  It is something of a long story, what happened those two days in Guatemala, and I will come to it. But I will say that nothing happened to convince us that what the papers and authorities were saying about Flor wasn’t true. Nothing. And it is what I’d more or less believed since, for over a year, about Flor, until the day just over a month ago when Luis Moya Martínez looked me up in Brooklyn, New York, where I was living.

  I’d known Moya when I was of elementary school age, from all the summers that my mother and I spent back in Guatemala visiting Abuelita. (Flor stayed home in Namoset all but one of those summers and wanted to, or at least pretended to want to, not that Abuelita would have offered to pay her airfare too. Abuelita had her own maids, no need to bring ours and so on—Except my father had made Flor not just a maid.) Because Guatemalan schoolchildren don’t get their long vacation until October and my mother had her own idea about why attending a Guatemalan private school would be a great thing for me, I was enrolled every summer in the Colegio Anne Hunt, the school that all my cousins have gone to. Moya—and even then everyone but the teachers called him nothing but that—was one of a handful of scholarship students there.

  But since then I’d only seen him twice. The summer after my junior year in college I drove down to Guatemala by myself in a Ford Mustang that belonged to my roommate, who was in Italy, where his girlfriend had gone to study art history. He’d told me I could use his car while he was away, though of course taking it down to Central America wasn’t what he’d meant. But he wasn’t the type ever to even notice the mileage on his odometer, and when I got back in August, just days ahead of him, I took it to the car wash and then in our driveway used a sponge and his portable blow-dryer to steam the Mexican tourist stickers off the windows and he never noticed a thing. I’d taken that car for the crazy adventure of it, because I was infatuated then with what just this degree of recklessness might mean about me (though if it meant anything of value, I can’t say I’ve lived up to it since). But mainly I’d gone down to visit Flor. And on the unforgettably chaotic day that the government reversed the direction of all the major one-way avenues in Guatemala City, I ran into Moya in the cake shop—café called Pastelería Hemmings. He was still a university student himself then, studying to be a lawyer at San Carlos, the public university.

  Then I saw Moya again, even more briefly, outside La Verbena morgue, where my father and I, accompanied by U.S. Consul Joseph Simms, had gone to claim Flor’s body.

  * * *

  But when my mother phoned to say that at a Latin American Society of Boston event she’d met a young Guatemalan man who was studying at Harvard now and who said he’d known me at the Colegio Anne Hunt, it didn’t even cross my mind at first that she could mean Moya. I thought I knew what he was doing now: he’d become not a lawyer but a Guatemala City newspaperman. And though I’d never read anything of his and didn’t even know which paper he was working for, my experience of the newspapers there in general, which have to be read to be believed, made it impossible for it even to occur to me that anyone from that background could get accepted into any kind of program at Harvard. Not that I could imagine anyone from Anne Hunt being at Harvard, certainly not any of the boys. (I might as well admit now that Harvard has always been a somewhat touchy subject with me, given my father’s long obsession with the idea that his son should go there, a cause I did not help along very much by graduating from Namoset High with a 62 average, which placed me near the top of the bottom fifth of my class.) The Colegio Anne Hunt is a rich kids’ school, but not one of the very best ones. It isn’t like the American School or even the Colegio Maya, where they have teachers from the States and you have to take an aptitude test to get in or else have parents with enough cuello or pull, something like a supersignificant last name, to buy you in anyway. And of course I remembered that among the boys at Anne Hunt it had always been such a point of privileged macho pride to do badly that most never even graduated unless they went back during the school break to take the special and expensive course that allowed them to. (And allowed Anne Hunt to design her school’s annual graduation ceremony to be as feminine, delicate, and expressive of the same values as high society coming out balls.) So who, in all that crowd of Anne Hunt cabroncitos was at Harvard now? And why would he remember me and be asking my mother for my telephone number?

  “A very charming young man, muy elegante, muy bien educado” is how my mother described him over the phone, though I guess she’d say the same about Porky Pig if he was a Latin American at Harvard. She is the vice president of the Latin American Society of Boston this year, which has a floor of a brownstone on Newbury Street as its headquarters, and she told me how she’d met this elegant young “stranger” when, during the milling round over coffee and pastries following a Venezuelan diplomat’s lecture on the intellectual history of Latin America, he’d approached her to ask, completely out of the blue, what had ever happened to the antique electric train that for years had decorated a window of Arrau, our family department store in Guatemala City, at Christmastime. My mother’s laugh over the phone must have matched the one she’d given the stranger then, full of pleasure and surprise over having her family’s business prominence so unexpectedly evoked within earshot of so many of the society’s patrons—real Boston blue bloods, she has often reminded me. Which gave her the chance to recite for the stranger the cheerful and nostalgic homage I of course know by heart: . . . Well yes, claro, that wonderful toy train, her father used to say the elves made it to escape Switzerland, where they’d been enslaved for centuries in an underground cuckoo clock factory. Because it was a Swiss toy train, you see, though her father bought it in a Hong Kong market during his buying trip through the Orient in 1932. Back then Arrau’s toy department must have been the equal of any in the world! General Ubico had no children, of course, but he used to walk over from the National Police just to say hello to her mother and look at the toys. Yes, of course, Ubico was a dictator and that is wrong but the times were so different then and he was a friend of her mother. But that train was special, her father wouldn’t sell it, not even to Ubico. Though unfortunately it ceased to exist the day the Arrau store in Quezaltenango caught fire, she’s sure it was an accident because, you know, why would anyone? caught fire during a student riot coincidentally soon after that train had been brought up there for a special window display of antique toys in honor of Children’s Week in Quezaltenango. Ay no, the treasures, the absolute treasures that were lost in that fire ... ! Though of course at Christmas you can still hear the tape recording her father made, the one with bells from Tchaikovsky’s something or other and the Negro opera singer from Belize with a deep, deep voice who her father hired to do the voice of Santa Claus, you can still hear him! The Guatemalan stranger would have nodded with enthusiasm here, would have known of the annual event if not the actual history, would have known that my mother’s brother, Jorge Arrau, still plays that recording over the loudspeakers at Christmas while the little man who plays the part of Santa Claus stands on the store balcony pantomiming along to the Belizean’s operatic and Caribbean ho ho hos and throwing candy to the children below, always so many children that the police have to close Sexta Avenida to traffic.—That recording is nearly forty years old! And do you know that little man who plays Santa is the very same man who has been doing it now for nearly forty years? (the stranger gapes in astonishment, he’d never realized) He must be able to act along to that recording in his sleep! Two hours of ho ho hos and Feliz Navidades and if you watch you’ll see that he never misses a single ho, he opens his mouth for every single ho! Which just proves that any job worth doing is worth doing well, my dear! (Later Moya confessed to me that while his inquiry about the train had been an effective conversation opener, he really had madly desired that train as a boy and had even fantasized about talking me into stealing it for him.)

  “. . . Well, tall, dark, a
bout six feet, I think,” said my mother, trying to describe the elegant young stranger.

  “Oh good, tall, when I haven’t seen this guy in like twelve years probably. Brown eyes too I bet. Speaks good Spanish I bet. This is helpful, Mom.”

  But she couldn’t remember his name because she’d assumed that if he’d gone to the Colegio Anne Hunt then she would at least know his mother, but of course she didn’t because Moya’s mother has never been anything, or rather anybody, more illustrious than Anne Hunt’s seamstress, and back then when we were in school his father was an officers’ mess waiter on a cargo ship owned by the Somoza family of Nicaragua.

  “Well, he said he knew Flor de Mayo too,” said my mother. “Of course I didn’t tell him that you are working in a restaurant, my dear. I told him you are applying to graduate schools. Have you? Are you?”

  “. . .”

  Nervousness can bring out a breezy petulance in my mother’s voice, as well as suddenly make her native accent much stronger, and the more or less native attitudes she reverts to when she is feeling like that can seem malicious, though they really aren’t meant to be, though they can certainly be irritating. I mean, no, I hadn’t applied to anything, and was pretty much paralyzed by the whole idea, and she knew that.

  But just mentioning Flor makes her nervous now, and so she can’t bring herself to very often, and I know that makes her feel as if she is somehow failing me, as if somehow I’ve needed nothing more than to pour my heart out to her about Flor and to hear all that she might have to say. When really she isn’t failing me at all, because I’ve tried not to mention Flor either, very often, not to my mother. (Though maybe Moya is right, and I do need to pour my heart out about Flor, to hear all that I might say.) But she thinks that I am only being vengeful and stubborn in some unnecessarily private way, and that I just won’t understand that Flor, her death and everything, truly shamed her, and stripped her of so many of her most necessary illusions. For she even thinks that Flor has made it impossible for her to go back to Guatemala again, partly because of the way the publicity surrounding the murder must have concentrated the sharpest scrutiny on my mother’s life among her relations and lifelong acquaintances and friends, who, of course, a few initial condolences aside, never mention Flor de Mayo to her in any of their correspondences.

  Mirabel Arrau was sent to America by her mother—I know she imagines them thinking and gossiping all over the place—for reasons well known and embarrassing enough, and look, there she married a much older man, a Jew and not even one with money and after she left him for the first time and then went back to him because her little son contracted tuberculosis, her mother sent her a muchacha, a servant, a maid. And her husband put that maid in school and treated her like a daughter. And her son made her his sister and something more, yes, something more, don’t you think? Because when Mirabel’s son came down here, remember?—that same year that that muchacha came down and took over that orphanage, that son practically ignored his own family and spent all his time with that—they ran around like a pair of-—and were seen several times drunk together, disoriented together—That girl who had been their maid and who was of course corrupt in who knows how many ways and then, por Dios, without honor or shame, her husband and son came down to take her body back and were shown treating our poor little news reporters so crudely, so offensively on television and with no respect for this country at all or for Mirabel’s good family name and then, but no, ay no, would you believe that they took her back and buried her in their own family plot! And now Mirabel has left her husband again! Living on her own, without help, a mature woman, living on her own like some poor little student in Boston! But I will say this we will all say this Gracias a Dios que bendiga that neither Mirabel’s father, Don Rogerio, nor her mother, la santísima Doña Emilia, lived to witness any of this because ay no . . .

  Guatemala, in so many ways the Kingdom of my mother’s Pride when I was growing up, her Empire of Beautiful Nostalgia, has become, she thinks, because of Flor and only because of Flor, a place where her name only provokes gossip and condemnation or searing pity and silence. She really believes that. And I have wanted to tell her that this can’t possibly be true, that she must be exaggerating, that her old-fashioned Guatemala, Abuelita’s socially rigid Guatemala, probably doesn’t even exist anymore, that even Uncle Jorge’s family has suffered their own little scandals and, look, aren’t they doing more or less fine? But I can’t. How am I supposed to bring it up if she admits nothing? says nothing? True, there were a few remarks to her from Uncle Jorge and Aunt Lisel complaining about my behavior and casual dress that one summer, and they at least pretended to be a bit offended that I had chosen to sleep on a couch in Flor’s apartment rather than in the guest room at their house (they should have known my mother would blow their comments all out of proportion, Aunt Lisel probably did know). But I’ve lived long enough now with my mother’s Pride and Nostalgia that it doesn’t take any special insight or powers of divination to know the rest.

  Instead she has taken as her rhetorical escape the very sense of responsibility I have to admit I’d long urged on her. Because in Boston she often acts as if she has turned on Guatemala now because of the other things happening there, which I’d been telling her about for years, though I absolutely stopped mentioning it after Flor died. She is hardly a political person but I guess you don’t need to be, she can read the Boston Globe, has heard my father angrily recite what he has read there in recent years, both of us reciting what we’ve read there or elsewhere with, at times, the most unjust belligerence, as if partly blaming her. For so many years my mother considered it one of the great offenses of life in the United States that even the plumber might assume she was Puerto Rican or, even more grating to my mother, Cuban, and so think that he could treat her as a social equal or even inferior. But now she often acts as if she prefers even that to being identified as a Guatemalan by even the most perfunctory of newspaper readers, who usually associate her country’s name now only with such things as death squads, torture, disappearances, the most horrific and widespread massacres. And on days during the past year when the news from Guatemala has been especially shocking (the bayoneting of Indian babies and pregnant mothers by government soldiers) I’ve even heard her speak of renouncing her Guatemalan citizenship, which she has held on to all these years. My mother is not insincere, but I know that Flor came first, that the hurt Flor caused us has opened her mind, her emotions, to what has seemed like a fuller acknowledgment of these crimes.

  So I didn’t doubt that she’d resolved not to mention Flor at all on the phone that day, but then had finally felt obligated to. I do think I understand her. And I also felt a need to protect myself from Flor. I let a silence run between us before I finally said:

  “He said he knew Flor? From when she was at Wellesley or what?”

  “I, I really don’t know, he didn’t say, he just said he’d known her and that, you know, of course . . .” She sighed, flustered. “He offered his condolences is all. Are you taking good care of yourself at least, Sweet Pea?”

  “Uh-huh,” I said.

  “I had dinner with your father a few days ago, by the way. He’s reading Don Quixote, and now is full of the idea that he should visit Spain this summer. Don Quixote, can you imagine? He never showed an interest in things like that all the years we were married, he never even learned Spanish ...”

  But then I was barely listening. She went on about things related to their separation, and then about how much harder it was to get to work on time now that she had to drive all the way from Boston to Shreve Hall, the girls’ boarding school in Dover where she teaches Spanish, she’d already been late for her first morning class three times after fifteen years of only having been late once . . . While I thought, Well, any one of them might have known Flor, even through the orphanage but more likely through the night life in La Zona Viva. I ran through that gargoyle gallery of all my old schoolmates again, and even considered Moya. He’d grown tall. He
was dark. But Flor had never mentioned him to me, and I didn’t link him to any boyhood obsession with that train.

  “But you know,” said my mother, when I’d pressed her again for a more distinguishing description, “his hair is starting to turn white. It looks fine on him but he is young for that, poor fellow.”

  His hair was turning white. I dismissed the possibility of Moya. I didn’t know that, in fact, his hair was turning white. That day, over a year ago, outside La Verbena morgue, when Moya suddenly appeared, I hadn’t been interested in any detail so fine as the premature silvering of his hair, certainly under way by then. I did notice the size of his hands, one of his hands, the way his long, livid fingers lightly cradled a small reporter’s notebook and a tape recorder held together with tape; he’d walked towards me holding these objects a few inches in front of a bleached white shirt pocket loaded with pens. And then I’d noticed his expression, tremulously wide-eyed and miserable with what I took to be shame and a sensible fear of me. I’d thought, How dare he be here? and had only wanted to hate him . . .