The Long Night of White Chickens

by Francisco Goldman

  Then he stood up quickly and as erectly as a proud soldier and glared at me, his chest rising and falling.

  “Go get my shoe,” he said.

  The dog was still barking, attacking the fence and branches as if mad with grief over its missed opportunity for slaughter.

  “Forget it,” I said, my voice breaking childishly.

  And he bent to pick up his notebook with shaking hands, and then, with his foot that still had a shoe, he gave my notebook a vicious kick, sending it fluttering out into the street.

  “Gringo de mierda,” he said. Gringo made of shit.

  He limped away down the dark, walled street, maintaining his erect and rigid dignity despite his one-shoed gait. I waited until he was a faraway figure in glowingly pale clothes fading into the exhaust-clouded light of the avenue where the buses ran, several long blocks away. Then I picked up my notebook and started home again, the dog’s ceaseless barking scalding me.

  Gringo de mierda—those were the very last words he spoke to me until some eight years later in Pastelería Hemmings, when he came up from behind and said my name. So sure, that incident shamed me, became one of those that, recalled spontaneously and unwillingly over the years, evinces a face-burning shudder of self-recrimination and doubt. I remember when I came home to Namoset that fall and told Flor about it, her face turned nearly as red as mine, she shuddered and squealed in embarrassment for me. But she got a kick out of gringo de mierda, and for a couple of weeks went around calling everybody in Namoset that, even the cops, who didn’t know what she was saying and thought she was just being flirty and nice.

  But that happened in the permissive remoteness of childhood, when our characters are still hopefully somewhat fluid, changeable, or at least improvable. And Moya certainly didn’t seem to be holding it against me then and there, that afternoon in Pastelería Hemmings. Was he even remembering it?

  I broke what had been a brief, shy silence: “I’m in Guatemala for a month.”

  “Ah bueno ...”

  “Almost over now.”

  “Are you taking a vacation?” he asked.

  “Yeah, guess so. I’m visiting Flor, she’s here now. I have to be back in time for college, you know . . . It’s been some day, huh?”

  “Some day?”

  “The traffic.”

  “Puta, vos, yes. Some day!” he said, reacting as if I’d just made the most stunning observation. “Well, that’s one way to solve the problem of traffic jams, yes? Eliminate the drivers, eliminate the pedestrians,” he deadpanned grandly, again.

  When I laughed, his smile broadened, and then he gave me one of his significantly shocked, wide-eyed looks and said, “Ay no, Rogerio, pero qué pats, no? What a country. Guatemala, puta, vos, mira, vos—” And that was when he launched into his recitation about Guatemala not existing, him knowing because he’s been there.

  And when it was over I laughed again, quietly and a bit uneasily, and said, “That’s pretty good.”

  “Yes,” he said with a nod. “Pretty good!”

  Then we talked about Dracula, and how he was studying to be a lawyer, and a little bit about Flor, and a little bit about the situation in Guatemala—which made him suddenly reticent—before I finally said, “Remember that with the dog?”

  He slouched in his chair, looked at me meaningfully. “You were not a good friend that day, Rogerio.”

  For which I apologized, feeling foolish.

  “Gringo de mierda, sí pues, I remember,” he said musingly.

  “I felt guilty about it for years,” I said, exaggerating somewhat, of course. “I never did anything like that again.”

  “Still, I would not want you on my side in a combat,” he said, jokingly enough.

  “Yeah, yeah,” I said, forcing a laugh.

  “Should we go and try again?”

  “You’d trust me?”

  “Would you trust me!”

  “Hah! We’d both stay on top. Well, that’s smarter anyway. So let’s not waste our time.”

  “It is a deal,” he said.

  And we laughed and talked a bit more and that was that—

  I didn’t see Moya again until that day, some four years later, outside La Verbena morgue, when he was there as a newspaper reporter.

  I saw him for maybe less than a minute that time, because my father and I and U.S. Consul Joseph Simms were leaving, heading for the embassy car, the consul holding up his hands and saying, “No interviews, no interviews please,” to all the Guatemalan press gathered there, and the next day they said in the papers that we had violated the human rights of all Guatemalans by refusing to comment publicly on the case—meaning that we’d violated their freedom of press and information. They really did that, hyped it up like it was another big hypocritical yanqui fuck you to Guatemala. (“Dos yanquis más contra Guatemala” read one newspaper subheading—“Two more . . . against . . .”) But it didn’t even occur to me to wonder then about why they were actually doing it, going so overboard, trying to whip up this endless indignation over Flor, the Moral Monster of the Western World.

  Moya emerged from the ugly swarm of Guatemalan television, radio, and newspaper reporters outside the morgue, calling my name, gingerly cradling his tape recorder and notebook in one long-fingered hand—I was stunned that he’d dare approach me.

  We’d just visited Flor’s body, laid out on a concrete slab amidst some other bodies in there. I wasn’t crying now. My eyes, like my mouth and throat, felt dry as sand. But my father, who can seem to tower over me though he is only one inch taller, and whose shoulders can seem twice as wide as my own though mine are not especially narrow—rage can make him seem gigantic, and his face, big, old, rough, heavy featured, looks angry even when he is serene—my father was still crying, his face was drenched, but he was looking around glaring and daring. “Look at this goddamned slime,” he went. “What about the other people in there, don’t give a fuck about them, do you!” He meant—I was shocked not only to hear him cursing at the Guatemalan press but also that he’d noticed, I mean registered and drawn that conclusion so quickly, about the other two dead young men and the Guatemalan press’s disinterest in them. (His old policeman’s eye, I think, because in the army he’d served in the military police, so that later when that one American wire service reporter came to interview us in our hotel room he was able to concisely state what he’d seen and asked her why nobody cared about those men, just about Flor—and she, just a little older than I, with a gentle gravity and trying to show she was uncontaminated by the same indifference and yet no longer shockable at least outwardly, and there to talk about Flor not torture victims anyway, she said, Well yes, you know it’s like that in there almost every day and the press here, you know, they’re not exactly antiestablishment and even if they are, there’s all that fear . . . And I said, My old friend Moya was one of them, and she said, Luis Moya, you know him then? and I said, Yeah, he was there, sort of too angrily and defiantly and she started to say something but just nodded, you could see her thoughts working, a kind of tiredness with the failure of her enterprise—particular or general, I don’t know—but she was realizing we had nothing newsworthy to tell her about Flor and she was tired of bothering us, tired of our innocence too perhaps . . .) Stretched out on slabs, skinny but pigeon chested, their open eyes, like Flor’s, full of the empty, astounded, fed-up stare of the dead or maybe that stare only belongs to the just murdered dead. Both of them had horribly battered faces but one hadn’t been washed off yet, his face was a mask of not yet completely congealed blood, he was still bleeding a little, I think—and his lower lip looked just torn off. And the other had a cleaned-out gunshot wound in his temple and a clean-looking slice where his penis had been. Both of them were speckled with what I now realize must have been cigarette burns. I’d barely glanced, but even in my dizziness, spaciness, the nausea of the heaviest rage ... I took it in. That carnage a contrast to the clean, nearly pristine, unbearable visage of Flor’s nakedness, the slash in her throat cle
aned and neatly stitched—so cleanly, precisely, delicately stitched that it smacked of her own fastidiousness, as if she’d sewn up her own mortal wound in defiance of the many forced indecencies of death (I mean, here we were, looking at her). The floor was tiled in pale colors, wet, blood sheened, here and there petaled with blood, and there was a drain in the middle and a hose coiled in the corner. I remember that, looking at it and thinking, A hose for hosing blood. And a blandly delicate Arabic-looking man in a lab coat was there, speaking quietly with Consul Simms. All three of them, Flor and the other two that were dead, had their mouths open a little, and flies flew in and out of them from one mouth to the other, not preferring any mouth to the others, lightly touching down and riding up. (The soul leaves through the mouth? ... it takes a long time to leave and flies impartially love it, they play in that slow exhalation like dolphins in waves.) Unbearable, I mean everything there, it was Flor except she wasn’t there. I looked and looked and looked (just as I look now, with a certain tremulous modesty and willed detachment, refusing that most blatant and final look—and recalling now as I recalled then, like a cold drop of anguished premonition recalled, that famous nineteenth-century explorer’s description of a young and beautiful Indian girl’s funeral—she’d died of heartbreak and he wrote that in death she had a sweetness of expression, as if forgiving the callous boy who had abandoned her, and you could tell the explorer was falling in love with her face, either as he watched the funeral or as he wrote about it later, and he described the dirt slowly covering up her face as the Indians buried her . . .). The wide arching brows, the wide Asiatic cheeks, the haughty Maya Princess nose, the feral brown skin with its tropical rainwater sheen, plush lips no lipstick long lashes traces of eye makeup wide-open eyes and no sign of life in death just as there had never been any sign of death in life in that face so far as I knew . . . She had a sweetness of expression, but such were her features, there was no new proof of innocence in it, she almost always had a sweetness of expression. She told me once about some old boyfriend of hers (which one?), about him laughing because he’d never realized, never thought that an angel could be brown, My brown angel, qué pasó?

  —and her fingers, so tapered and womanly and brown and somehow always so much more long-lived looking than the rest of her, with a darker hued brown, like melted chocolate, in all the creases—They’re like monkey fingers, she used to say, the fingers of a hairless monkey! but I didn’t think so; and her nails, perfect in death, painted a soft pink; and her tawny palms, which always astonished palm readers, professionals as well as amateurs, because one palm was nearly smooth and the other so filled with crisscrossed wrinkles as to be indecipherable, as if clutching there as loosely as a handful of fine sand the layered, lacy palimpsests of all her lived lives: one palm told no story at all and the other held the record of three lives for every century going back to the beginning of time and who could find the future in that muddle?

  What can I tell you? That I held Flor’s smooth hand while my father held the other, and that we wept and brushed flies away. And that we were in there with her for about half an hour, while the consul and little coroner politely waited outside. And that the worst feeling ever was the decision to leave.

  Outside, Consul Simms, a man of light and athletic movement, Ivy League—seeming though a graduate of the University of Utah, heard my father’s outburst and took his arm and said, “Mr. Graetz, the car is this way.” Consul Simms seemed really to care for my father, and several times, during the time we all spent together, I had the impression that they would have enjoyed talking to each other under different circumstances.

  But my father and I, we’d both stopped moving.

  My father has always had mixed feelings about Guatemalans anyway—except for those few he absolutely adored, including Flor of course, and of course there were many sorts of Guatemalans he’d never met. Now his face was wet and furious, his lips sullenly pinched like he wanted to spit. He faced down that stunted, polyester mob—stunted, ignorant, venal-looking men, so many of them in the Guatemalan press (or was it just the hate?), and their equally sullen, jagged faces glared back, while their mouths emitted hysteria-strained voices, their eyes growing wild in their own agitation and rancor over my father’s blatant and visceral contempt. Jew and mestizos hating each other—the chemistry, at that moment, felt horribly unique; it changed the air, made it unfit to breathe. My father had already made up his mind not to believe a word of what they wrote or said, no matter what Consul Simms and others, later, usually with so much appropriate though unappeasing delicacy, implied about Flor.

  But there was Moya.

  “Not now, Luis,” said the consul.

  And Moya, of course, looked scared.

  “Rogerio,” he said, stepping right up to me, in a single motion patting my shoulder and dropping his hand down to take mine. “I am so sorry.”

  Now I was trying to counterbalance my father’s rage with as dazed a poise as I could bring off. I was conscious of the image we made.

  “You’re a reporter?” It was all I could manage.

  “Yes, but . . .”

  “Qué quieres.” What do you want.

  “Nothing, Rogerio,” he said. “I—”

  “She didn’t do it,” I blurted, because I could still make myself believe that, we hadn’t even gotten Consul Simms’s lowdown yet. I was looking away, at the dirty, bile yellow wall outside the morgue.

  “This is very ugly here,” I heard him say. “But that is the way they are here.”

  “You’re here, aren’t you?” I shot back, glaring at him now, while other Guatemalan reporters elbowed each other, crowding in, trying to hear what we were saying. One of them was pulling on my sleeve with rapid little tugs and repeating in an absurd dwarf’s voice the “information” that the “deceased” had grown up in my house—I jerked my arm away.

  Moya didn’t say anything. He was looking around at his colleagues as if truly astonished to see them there.

  I said, “Sí pues.” Sure.

  And I hurried away, falling in step behind Consul Simms and my father, who walked, I remember, with the lopsided, heavy-footed gait of an utterly exhausted and defeated athlete leaving the playing field, his hands loosely fisted at his sides.

  “Rogerio,” I heard Moya call after me. “I have no part in this.”

  TWO

  The first time I ever saw You: My father must have left early from work for the airport, and it wasn’t until much later, on an afternoon the dimming color of gray slush and a new snow falling through it like millions of fuzzy little light bulbs, that he came home with you, Flor. This was in 1963, during the year of my quarantine, I was five. My quarantine room was the living room and I was supposed to stay there, on the sofa mainly, avoiding excitement and drafts.

  But I was in the kitchen, waiting. So where was Mrs. Olafson, the elderly Swedish lady who came in the days to baby-sit? Drably unaffectionate Mrs. Olafson. She wasn’t a cleaning lady. She only cooked lunch, watched television for hours, looked after me. I remember her gray Swedish meatballs much more distinctly than I do her face. In fact I don’t place her in this memory at all, though she must have been there because my parents wouldn’t have left me home alone. My mother was at college in Boston.

  My lungs were still healing, but I was past the danger point in my illness—it had been months since Mrs. Olafson had had to wear a surgical mask—so maybe I’d begun to wander the house a little. And Mrs. Olafson, knowing she wasn’t going to be working for us anymore, probably wasn’t even trying to keep me quiet and confined—better to let me wait in the kitchen, daring the coming breezeway draft.

  You were coming to be our maid! We were going to have a muchacha!

  And I’d been indoors, stuck in a living room, for the better part of a year already—nearly a quarter of my life so far! So I very well might have been beside myself waiting there, thrilled and anxious and praying that you would be young and pretty, not old and mean.

  And m
y memories of the muchachas—which just means girls and is what maids are called—who lived in my grandparents’ house in Guatemala City must have been bewilderingly and vividly present: bewildering because how could I, at that age, have understood how and why two places could be as different as my grandparents’, where nothing was drab, and this little house on Codrioli Road, where I spent much of my time alone, or practically alone, staring out the picture window at a plain little house that mirrored our own, or amusing myself with toys on a sofa? That sofa’s coarse evergreen-and-blue weave still colors my consciousness of those days the way the ocean must a sailor’s after he’s been on it at least a hundred days.

  Indian girls, those muchachas who worked for my grandparents, with long black hair, gleaming eyes, and quick, fleshy smiles. They plucked chickens in the courtyard; helped me lure my fat pet palomino rabbit out from under the oversized sepulchral furniture; propped me in the seat of a big, grilled window to watch the street for the passing of the urban goatherds and the donkey-drawn yellow cart of the trashman; rubbed a juicy lime on my ankle after an insect bite while I sat against a tree, sobs subsiding, on the rich, machete-mowed lawn of our lakefront cottage. I craved, demanded their attentions endlessly. They wore the native skirts and huipil blouses of the Indians, thick cloth so colorfully and intricately woven and embroidered, patterned with birds, flowers, animalitos . . . corn smelling, smoky, rain-and-mud smelling. They’d stand at the outdoor sinks in the mornings washing their hair with black soap, wringing out the long wet coils with both hands, then brushing luxurious straight black hair with long downward strokes, talking and laughing together in the clucking singsong of an Indian dialect. Even Chayito, old even then, the one maid who was old, had that hair, though gray streaked—when she let it hang loose she looked like a witch-hag in a fairy tale. Her eyes were bothered black slits in a wrinkled leather mask. She had the lumpy bare feet of a troll. Abuelita was almost submissive only to her, and it was only Abuelita whom Chayito treated with the doting, stern attentiveness that was her brand of affection. She did my grandmother’s hair every morning and evening and was literate in Spanish and would put on her pink-plastic-frame eyeglasses and read out loud to Abuelita, whose eyesight was already failing, from translated Zane Grey cowboy novels before they went to bed at night. But once, when I must have been bugging her, she threatened to scorch me with her iron, hatefully jabbering at me in an incomprehensible tongue.