The Long Night of White Chickens

by Francisco Goldman

  One thing I know about Guatemala now is that little of this sort happens here, no matter how shocking or outrageous, without a reason, without actual people sitting down somewhere and deciding that it should happen. Though sometimes their reasoning can seem just as outrageous or bewildering as the thing done. The new traffic ordinance was meant to improve the traffic flow, and in that way was even linked to a promised improvement in the economy. Because the perpetually jammed up traffic at certain transit points in the city’s layout was responsible for making people late for work, for wasting gasoline and diesel, and that affected, among other things, the profitability of buses, as did the slow traffic, which also hindered truckers passing through downtown on their way to the highways leading to the coastal ports, and time is money. It was especially supposed to improve the traffic flow through the crucial maze of rotaries, underpasses, and switchbacks down at one end of Zona 1, suturing together downtown’s old, dense grid of straight, narrow streets and the wide boulevards and expressways of the newer residential and industrial zones beyond. This area, during the rush hours, was usually impassable. My other uncle, Dr. Nelson Arrau, warned ahead of time that the whole thing might be a scam anyway, a contract awarded by government or city officials to some self-made urban planner in return for a payoff, resulting in an essentially berserk and thoughtless recommendation. And though the government had announced the new ordinance days ahead, Uncle Jorge predicted the disaster, and he’s an ultra patriot. It’s not like everybody reads the papers, he said. And of course they don’t, not in a country of rampant illiteracy where much of the Indian population, at least half the national population, doesn’t even speak Spanish. And it’s not like everybody listens to the radio, paying special attention to every government public service announcement or motivational message, of which there are many. And of course people are going to get confused, or just forget. It wouldn’t even take that many to screw it all up.

  In the end traffic flow was actually improved a little (though now, five years later, it’s as bad as it ever was). By that night the number of fatalities reached thirteen. It’s the kind of thing that could happen in any small, poor country, you were supposed to say.

  Or else, “Guatemala no existe... ” et cetera—So claimed Moya that afternoon in Pastelería Hemmings, reciting the speech that was in fact the opening paragraph of a French thriller he’d read in translation—something about a philosophical Gallic trucker and his hair-raising drive across Guatemala transporting a dangerous cargo, various native and foreign malevolents in pursuit—which ended with the fine “Guatemala doesn’t exist, and I know, because I have been there.”

  Moya loved that; still does, still trots it out now and then and always as if for the first time. And I carried it around with me all these years, always hearing it in his dramatic and particularly Moya voice: almost too mannishly resonant to be believed, his vibrating r’s rolled off his tongue in such a way that he did seem suited to play the part of Count Dracula, which is what he was actually doing then, in a homespun version of Dracula that his little theater group was putting on—the very production that must have caused him a batch, maybe even his very first batch, of barely discernible white hairs. Because in Brooklyn I mentioned it and he recalled that the play had had a short-lived success, well attended by university students and other sophisticates who found in it the illicit thrills of an obliquely rendered political satire, until the first wave of death threats shut it down. A few anonymous notes delivered backstage promising God’s vengeance against the enemies and defamers of Guatemala were all it took. Then, to be extra prudent, his theater group promptly took out an ad in a newspaper pleading that their production had been meant as nothing more than a faithful retelling of the famous Transylvanian tale, and that they’d only dressed the count’s peasant victims in the native traje of the Indians because it had seemed most convenient, if, of course, they now realized, insensitive to the point of unintended blasphemy to do so.

  What happened that day in Pastelería Hemmings—while outside the demolition derby of the damned went on, a whole city of poor people’s vehicles lurching around to the deliberate rhythm of car horns bleating near and far through the demonic whine of sirens—is that Moya left his table and came up behind me and spoke my name, and I whirled around and saw this tall, very black-haired (then) and frightened-looking (I thought) person standing there, and I saw his friends watching from their table. Their expressions were solemn, suspenseful. They looked like serious university types. Even the girl, her gaze aimed too directly at me from between sharp brows and a small, shinily upturned nose, seemed devoid of youthful frivolity: dressed in plain gray blouse and jeans, wearing no makeup, no feminine embellishment other than a thin, limp ribbon of Indian-woven threads dangling in her hair like a colorful shred of traje torn on a thorny bush. Which is to say they looked political as hell. That they knew my name utterly panicked me, blinded me from any possibility of recognition. It’s supernatural, almost, the way Guatemala infests you. I don’t think I’d ever given it deep thought, exactly, but now I suddenly knew that the worse nightmares the country has to offer could begin just like this, with a seemingly chance encounter, a name spoken inquiringly, and all the years you were going to have left to live vanishing right in front of you, draining from the room like a sudden hush in the idle chatter of a cake shop’s crowded mezzanine—four sets of eyes absorbing you, the last eyes you’ll ever see . . .

  “Rogerio Graetz? Verdad?” this person had said to me, though not even my mother called me Rogerio anymore, and I’d completely forgotten that at Anne Hunt I’d sometimes been called that. (I’m Roger, a name Guatemalans tend to smudge into Rohyyer.) He struck me as frightened looking because, of course, I knew nothing yet of the expressive if limited plasticity of the adult Moya’s face, which even in repose is like one you might see jumping out at you amidst the medieval gloom of a Spanish Inquisition painting: the somberly composed face of an intrepid young Moor, long and full lipped, but his eyes staring out as if to pass, in the split second between blinks, a frightful message to a secret coconspirator. But then, suddenly, Moya’s big, lustrous eyes go even wider and his mouth hangs open goofily, exposing blunt white teeth (the teeth of a cartoon horse, almost), and his long ascetic’s frame seems to just breathlessly dangle there. Though all this usually looks something like total alarm, I’ve since learned that it can mean just about anything: astonishment, ardor, anger, elation coming on, yet another of his seizures of insight or truth.

  In that electrified posture Moya stood over me, having spoken my name. Now I was trying to get a grip, to reason through my panic. Enough seconds, only seconds, had passed for me to realize that if anyone was in immediate danger it was probably these people, not me. Then I thought: Jesus, what’s Flor gotten mixed up in now? They could only know of me through her, I thought, though she’d said nothing of connections to student revolutionaries. They’re in trouble, I thought, and they’re going to ask me to get a message to her, and then she’s going to be in trouble . . .

  “Luis Moya Martínez,” he said, extending his hand.

  “Cómo no,” I said, still gaping, recognizing but not quite grasping, and then it hit me. “Holy shit, I don’t believe.”

  “I know your face,” he said, grinning his big-toothed, cheek-crunching grin. “You look like your cousin but different. Yes, I knew it was you”—at Anne Hunt half the classes were conducted in English, and Moya, always a good student, if secretly so, was nearly fluent even then, long before his six-month sojourn to Harvard, though his own accent is so strict he sounds as if it must ache his jaw to speak it—“It is he, my old friend Rogerio,” he announced, turning towards his friends. “Verdad que les dije?” (Didn’t I tell you?)

  And now the girl smiled at me, and they all chimed in with the usual holas and mucho gustos, bobbing their heads. Moya said they’d all just come from their theater group rehearsal. The girl was transformed now, her dimpled face brightening as she pertly lowered her lips to t
he pink straw standing in the fluted glass filled with her pastel licuado, and soon her eyes were flicking happily back and forth between the guys sitting on either side of her, who seemed to be competing to make her laugh and having no trouble getting her to . . .

  “I’m amazed you recognized me,” I said, when Moya had sat down.

  “But you look like your cousin Freddie.”

  “Sort of.”

  “But yes! The eyes,” and he slashed in brows, Arrau brows, over his own with his finger. “And the nose, still the same.”

  “Oh well,” I said, feeling a little taken aback over how excited and happy he seemed to be at having found me. “Anne Hunt.”

  His laugh was a deep, uproarious giggle. “Yes, Anne Hunt. She is still living.”

  Then for a moment neither of us seemed to know what to say. Moya’s eyebrows jumped gleefully. I was having trouble connecting the intense little poor boy who had been Moya at Anne Hunt with the hyper, friendly university student who faced me now. And while I had memories of Moya as a schoolboy, none of these seemed like particularly winning reunion anecdotes. We’d actually had a friendship at Anne Hunt, but the truth is it had ended badly, ended in fact the very day we had tried to seal it.

  At the colegio we’d both been outsiders, Moya simply because he was poor, secretly studious, too inwardly intense for a little boy, a strange bird; his mother, a seamstress, made all his clothes but always made them the same, as if she just didn’t quite get that the Colegio Anne Hunt didn’t require uniforms because all the other students had the means to dress differently each day. By the time I arrived every June, well into their school year, Moya’s annual pair of gray woolen pants and white shirts had always been so overwashed, scrubbed week after week with gritty soap against the sides of his mother’s stone sink and hung out to dry, that they’d turned almost the same color and texture, the soft, smolderingly opaque, sunwhitened gray of an overcast high noon in the tropics. Wrapped in this garb, Moya, skinny like a palm sapling trunk, eyes burning, looked like some impoverished Arab holy man’s son.

  The Guatemalan rich have a style of their own: most Anne Hunt boys were really just tiny versions of the men they would grow into, fanatically fastidious in appearance, shoes always blazingly shined, shirt cuffs rolled crisply back to expose expensive, gold-banded scuba diver’s and astronaut’s wristwatches, boys pampered into an effeminateness contradicted by their obstinately extroverted, boisterous, violent-gestured personalities. Nothing could harm them outside the magic ring of their tight-knit family clans, nothing else really existed. Most, if their families owned plantations and established businesses, would never feel a pressure to become particularly good at anything. So that, in this world, even liking sports was looked down on. (I mean the usual team sports, because waterskiing, then hang gliding and motor-cross rallies, polo, anything smacking of a playboy’s uncontroversial adventures, were somewhat popular and still are.) But it was seen as somewhat of “Indian” ambition just to want to kick a fútbol around ... I remember my father complaining to his brother, my uncle Herbert, who played football at Harvard, about why he did not especially care for the kinds of people he was introduced to the two times he’d accompanied my mother to Guatemala: “To me, Ted Williams is a hero. Here’s a man who could do things no other man on earth could do, a man who thrilled millions with his wonderful, wonderful skills. To him, hitting a baseball was a science. But to these Guatemalans he’s just a bum! Talk about Ted Williams to them, and they get embarrassed, actually embarrassed for you, Herbert, and they wonder how the hell Mirabel could have married some guy who goes on about this bum.”

  So there I was at Anne Hunt, a middle-class American kid, Little League and Squirt League hockey despite my beginnings as a tubercular child invalid who’d emerged from a year’s quarantine clinging desperately to Flor’s spiritedly sallying-forth legs. It was Flor who had finally spent hours in the backyard teaching me to catch a baseball after my father had given up in exasperation over my fear of the ball and meek determination. I knew how to act, eventually, as if I wasn’t afraid of a fight; became a Red Sox, Bruins, Harvard football fanatic and thought all of this meant a lot. And I believed glory and a true measure of oncoming maturity lay in the ability to endure all manner of anguish while you patiently tended and molded both sides of your crush on some oblivious girl until finally you got your chance to lure her into the woods or onto a couch at a party in a basement with the lights turned down—not that I’d yet succeeded at any of that—while quite a few of these Colegio Anne Hunt boys, by the time they were thirteen or so, had already visited a bordello or matter-of-factly molested and even impregnated a family maid or said they had.

  I was American, wanted to be regarded as nothing other than Gringo American those summers at Anne Hunt. I wanted them to know it was just this weird accident of family fate that caused me to be among them at all. Wanted them to get the idea that, in the tough playgrounds and swamps and factory dumps of Namoset, none of them could have survived two seconds.

  Which meant that I was flabbergasted and enraged by all these imperturbable Guatemalan kids who thought themselves frankly superior to me, even racially superior! They were richer, most were even whiter. In my face the lightly mestizo features of the Arraus, some of whom are actually green-eyed and blondish chelitos, have been made even more pronounced, somehow, by the side of me that is Jewish. This hooking triangle of a Maya nose—my mother’s is a much daintier version—that, seen from the front, looks almost flat and bull-nostriled, these slashing brows and eyes that, caught in a camera’s flash gleam like black diamonds or like the eyes of a demonic dog’s, are regular Arrau features. But my father is actually much darker than my chestnut-haired mother, and from him I inherited this complexion and a slightly wavy mop of thin black hair.

  So for a time, at Anne Hunt, I was called “Indio.”

  And: “My grandfather is British,” said Vinicio Lange to me at school one day. “That makes me more gringo than you.”

  Comments like that, endlessly—they knew how to torment me. They knew about Flor too; many of them had gotten a glimpse of her that one summer that she did accompany my mother and me down from Namoset, when she would pick me up from school. “Hey Indio, you fuck that puta muchacha of yours yet?” some of the older boys would say, though I was still too young that summer to know very much about it. “C’mon, Indio, so what if she’s like your sister, since when do indios not fuck their sisters? We told you how to do it, just knock on her door some night after she’s gone to bed, sniffle and tell her your tummy aches, and once you’re in that bed, cabrón, don’t hesitate, spring your little pigeon right on her!”

  Another thing about Guatemalan rich kids—it’s considered fair to kick during a fight, kick you in the face, in the balls, with those sharp-toed, hard-heeled Continental loafers and ankle-high zip-up boots they all liked to wear, and any number against one, that’s fair too. And when you come up battered and shoe shredded, you want to run to the bathroom, to wash away not just the blood but the sickening scent of their hair creams and colognes.

  In the Colegio Anne Hunt library there was a section of paperback novels from the United States and England, and on the other side of the room, two short, segregated shelves designated “Jewish” and “Negro,” where you’d find Bellow and Singer, Wright and Baldwin. Maybe, as my mother said when I went home and told her about it, this was all just plain naïveté and Irish ignorance on Anne Hunt’s part. After all, there weren’t any “Negroes” at the school to insult—Moya was probably the darkest kid there, but they had that and a world of things to insult him about. Still, you didn’t expect such meanness in a library. I was no precocious reader—fantasized about reading much more than I actually did so—but I liked libraries: Namoset’s red-brick colonial-style one, with its fireplace-furnished reading room and framed N. C. Wyeth paintings and prints on the walls or preserved under the glass tops of the long reading tables, his original illustrations for Treasure Island, Robinson Crus
oe, Sinbad the Sailor, his World War I recruiting posters and misty, gray etchings of colonials trapping muskrats from canoes in the Concord swamps. And the library of our elementary school, which was brand new the year that fifteen-year-old Flor and I were transferred into it, when I was in the second grade and she’d already been jumped ahead to start the year in the third grade, though within a few months she’d be in the fifth: every student was given a blank ceramic tile to fill in with paint and gluable colored sand, and then two walls of the library were tiled over with these, so that to this day you can go in and see Flor’s rendition of a wickedly wrenched cactus in the Chiquimula-Zacapa desert, a blue volcano on the flaming horizon and a cowboy-hatted man, drawn all in black and from behind, gazing out at it, a red machete in his hand.

  Anne Hunt’s maiden name was Dwyer, she came from Philadelphia, and with her dowdy corona of tightly coiled, rust-colored hair, chill blue eyes, pallid, perfectly round face, rouge clouding across her puffy cheeks like artificial food coloring dropped in milky water, she did resemble my father’s version of the Wicked Witch of the East, Congresswoman Louise Day Hicks, the genteel-prole hatemonger and segregationist who ran for mayor of Boston and almost won. Her husband, Scobie, was from Philadelphia too—he owned shares in some of the country’s major hotels, in the city and out at the tourist sights, and I don’t know what else, but in Guatemala he’d become a multimillionaire, a friend of presidents and generals. (Well, all the presidents were generals.) Their radiantly pretty daughter Jessica was a classmate of my cousin Catty, and here’s a clue to the nature of her upbringing in the home of that expatriate Minerva, who owned our school and taught American history in it too: In ‘79 I sometimes went to watch the Saturday broadcasts of major league baseball games from the States in Uncle Jorge’s study, and the afternoon that Jessica was there visiting Catty she dropped in to take a diffident look at what I was getting so worked up over in there, shouting away at the Guatemalan announcer who howled, “Ave María Purrrísima” through an echo chamber after even insignificant plays, and who switched on the very same disco song after every out or base-on-balls, as if the few static seconds it took for a man to trot down to first or back to the dugout were just unbearable without a chorus of women vampily blasting, “You set me on fire fire ooo ooo ooo ...” Well, I discoursed with heartfelt bitterness against this moron for several minutes, and it did not seem to offend Jessica’s nationalism, if she had any then, since she probably considered herself more Philly than Guat anyway—in fact she laughed delightedly, while I melted under her sparkling, near-violet gaze. Then she asked me which team I was for. It was somebody against the Pirates, the “We Are Family” team led by Willie Stargell that went on to take the series. I said the Pirates. And she widened her eyes at the screen like an astonished southern belle and said blithely, in her lightly accented English, “How can you be for that team? They’re all neegers!”