The Long Night of White Chickens

by Francisco Goldman

  “I don’t know, I just didn’t picture you being ... so cheerful and funny.”

  “Oh!” said Flor. “Not always.”

  “I guess it’s just that everybody has to find the thing that fulfills them,” said Cathy, and, though I sympathized with her, I was really beginning to wish she’d stop. “For me, it’s acting. Acting lessons, dance classes, singing lessons, it just fills my days. It’s so hard and competitive. There’s so much to learn. I guess it’s selfish, but I know I’m doing exactly what I want to do.”

  “I don’t think that’s selfish,” said Flor. “I think that’s great.”

  “Thanks,” said Cathy, with a smile of relief. “And I think what you do is great. Takes all kinds, right?”

  “Takes all kinds,” said Flor. “And there sure as hell are all kinds.”

  The last words Flor ever said to me in person were “No, Roger, it’s OK, you sleep.”

  And she bent over to give me a warm, familiar kiss on the lips, her hair falling over my face.

  And then, “Bye-bye, see you soon. I love you, patojo.”

  The door was open, the only light in the room coming from the hall, where a bellboy was lifting the last of her three heavy suitcases onto his cart.

  But our last true conversation had taken place about two hours before, when I woke suddenly and euphorically and found her awake beside me, smiling at me in the dark and in a continuation of my dream. Except we were both fully clothed. I’d dozed off on one of her hotel room beds, but I still don’t know (and of course never will) if she’d been lying there with me or if she’d just come over from the other bed.

  “You were talking in Spanish,” she said, as if surprised I hadn’t forgotten how to. “And making such a commotion.”

  “I dreamed we were making love,” I said, just like that, but then I yelped as if I couldn’t believe it and buried my face in the pillow. But it had felt like wild, dangerous joy, and as innocent as if we’d just met and just had to do it—my heart was actually pounding.

  She laughed is all. And rubbed her hand through my hair—when I was a child I’d make her do that for hours sometimes, and then she’d say, “OK, my turn.”

  “I really did,” I said. “Crazy.” But now I wasn’t even sure that I actually had. Maybe it had been someone else I was making love with and then while I was still waking up she turned into Flor because I was trying to talk to her, in Spanish.

  But then she put her arm around me and hugged me, and lay her head on my shoulder, and I felt her warmth seeping through me, and wondered if she could feel the state I was in, and felt sure that any second she was going to say something like Well, in dreams nothing is forbidden and that’s why I say dreams are just a bunch of caca. Because I’d heard her say that before.

  Instead she said, “Well at least you have those dreams about people you know, Roger.”

  “What?”

  “It’s better than having them about people you don’t know at all, don’t you think?”

  “Isn’t that supposed to be, I don’t know, romantic—like maybe you’ll recognize them somewhere later?”

  “Maybe. But it’s less mature.”

  Mature? “What do you mean, mature?”

  “You know what?” she said. “I don’t know what I mean. Sometimes I think dreams are really just a bunch of caca. In my opinion, anyway.”

  I suppose there were a million things I was dying to say, a million things I felt, or maybe just one or two of each, but all I could sort out to say for myself was something I instantly regretted for its daytime banality, returning me firmly to myself: “Did you like Cathy?”

  “Cathy seems very nice, and I think she likes you a lot.”

  “She is nice.”

  “Well, you’re still so basically unsure of yourself, Roger,” she said. “It must be hard for you to feel confident about what you have to give.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  She laughed quietly again, her head on my shoulder.

  “Well what about you?” I asked.

  “Me?”

  “Who do you dream about, since your dreams are so mature?”

  “... Hah! I am in a big slump. Nowadays I have little orphan girls in my bed. They hold their own lotería to see whose turn it will be, and what can I say? If I say no now, I think I will incite a rebellion. So there I am, like a mother wolf with all her puppies. And some of them have very bad dreams, and I wake up in the morning in sheets wet with their peesh.”

  “Oh God, do you really?”

  “Sometimes. All my pajamas have that faint ammonia smell now. It just won’t wash out.”

  “Gross,” I said.

  We were quiet for a while, in the complete dark.

  “Haven’t you ever been really in love yet?”

  “Really really?” She paused. “Of course. Once at least.”

  “Who?”

  “You know who.”

  “Tony.”

  “Twice I guess.”

  “Tony and who else. Not Dr. Ben.”

  “Well Tony of course. But that was a long time ago.”

  “So who else?”

  “You don’t know him.”

  “You never told me?”

  “Never told anyone, hardly.”

  “In Guatemala?”

  “Uh-huh. I never told anyone because he is married and doesn’t want to leave his wife. I really thought I wanted him to, but you know what? Maybe I’m relieved that he won’t.”

  “What a jerk. You always fall for jerks, if you want my opinion.” Not that it’s really my absolute opinion.

  “Well, maybe it’s my opinion too.”

  The room was beginning to feel saturated with sleep again, with the dark and the retained warmth of Flor flowing through me too cozily for it to feel adamantly anything. Her alarm clock was set for a quarter to five. In another hour and forty-five minutes I’d be accompanying her to the airport. (Except she left me sleeping and went alone.)

  “Well when I really fall in love it’ll be with someone like you,” I said. “Even if I have to go to Chiquimula and find an orphan and start over.” It wasn’t the first time I’d ever told her that.

  “Hah,” she said, her voice sweetly evaporating until she found it again somewhere damp between her chest and throat. “And when I next fall in love, I hope it’s with someone who thinks as highly of me as you seem to, and can convince me that they’re not just insane or something.”

  FIVE

  My father and I didn’t find any of our letters to Flor, or any letters at all, among what remained of her belongings in her second-story bedroom in the main house of Los Quetzalitos. I don’t want to make too big a deal out of what isn’t at all surprising: all her papers had been confiscated by the police for their investigation, even what private photographs she had. Any photographed face might lead to a suspect, a player in the baby trade. We understood that the police couldn’t be expected to immediately distinguish the innocence of my or my father’s face from that of a bearded, sad-eyed stranger with his arm around Flor’s waist as they posed for an itinerant photographer in front of a painted backdrop of winged cupids at an Indian fiesta in Solóla—if there was, in fact, any such photograph as the one I’ve just reasonably imagined; I mean, if that’s anything like what her “secret lover” looked like.

  But the man who wouldn’t leave his wife for her wasn’t Flor’s only lover during her four years in Guatemala. She’d had boyfriends, of course. Moya, I might as well tell now, was one of them, for a little while anyway (and he’s never worn a beard).

  “Did you ever give Flor a picture of yourself? Did she have any pictures of the two of you together?” I asked him on the Amtrak Minute-man train from New York to Boston, that six-hour journey—there was an hour’s delay in New Haven—of bar car tale spinning, revelation, evasion, and resolve building, the end result being that here I am where I’d sworn I’d never set foot again, back in Guatemala.

  Moya shook his head unsurely and seemed a
bout to elaborate, but I cut him off.

  “I’m only asking,” I said, “because we didn’t find any photographs at all in her room.”

  “Ah,” he said, “Pues. She did own a camera. Though she never used it.”

  “I know,” I said. “A Nikon, right? That was missing too.”

  Well, what can you expect from police who don’t even earn a hundred bucks a month? Even most of Flor’s wardrobe was missing. I hadn’t visited Flor during the years she was running Los Quetzalitos, but I know she used to have a jean jacket, a Boston Celtics jacket, a short leather jacket, the full-length leather coat she’d wear up on winter visits, and the striped ermine stole she bought during her overtly boom years of employment in New York. Even her perfumes and facial crèmes and makeup, even that plierlike gizmo for curling eyelashes she was so funnily self-conscious about using that, when she did, she’d jump away from her mirror and pop out of the bathroom for just a show-time moment, grinning, holding the gizmo to her lashes and squeezing, just so you wouldn’t think she was trying to fool anyone, you know. Well, she liked eyelash gizmos or whatever they’re called and makeup and perfume and knew how to use them, of course she did! She’d grown up in a nuns’ orphanage dusting her face with powder from the inside of the empty rice sacks in the kitchen, rice powder being a much more discreet cosmetic than, say, flour. The kitchen cooks would save her and the other girls the sacks. The nuns may have frowned on such vanities, but they didn’t forbid them. Excessive strictness, they knew, was a good way to provoke teenage orphans into fleeing their provenance for the hard, corrupt, but freer life of the streets, a lesson Flor used to say she never forgot and applied even when baby-sitting me and, of course, later at Los Quetzalitos. Discipline and training, the monjas insisted on that, but they weren’t inquisitorial. Flor had fun there, was the impression I always had. She even played catcher on a girls’ softball team that reached the Guatemala City schoolgirl semifinals.

  So where were her cosmetics, her clothes? Imported cosmetics are expensive in Guatemala. Were they being sold in the smugglers’ and thieves’ black market in the Trébol? Or was there a policeman’s wife sweating in an ermine stole and using the gizmo to curl her lashes in a hut made of sheet metal and cardboard in some poor slum barrio?

  I had a terrible vision the other day of one of those donkey-drawn yellow trash carts bearing Flor’s mattress like a giant blood-sated empress mosquito through the city streets to the vast garbage dump in Zona 13—But then I remembered that the orphanage, which of course has much daily refuse, would have contracted a private trash-collecting company. They use trucks.

  The mattress had been taken away by the time my father and I found ourselves in that sunny, incriminatingly austere bedroom. Outside her window, a single star-shaped frond at the end of a willowy branch danced in a light breeze. The children were being kept out of sight, away from the room; we heard only the faintest infant cries and twitterings. One policeman, tiny and sun shrunken like a raisin in his dandruff-flecked blue uniform, sat on Flor’s desk chair, on round-the-clock watch. “Buenaaas,” he singsonged when my father and I, let in by a politely disappearing nun, came into the room, and that was all. He just sat in that chair, daydreaming I guess, not even watching us.

  Her closets were almost empty. The blond hardwood floor, freshly and rigorously mopped, gleamed. Her glossy rosewood desk looked derisively ready for its next occupant, all its scrap-littered drawers open. The walls had already been newly whitewashed in seemingly random places so that now only white streaks marked Flor’s final grabbings and gropings. Absent from the adjacent bathroom, with its jade-colored octagonal sunken tub banked with a small forest of densely growing ferns, was Flor’s usual bathroom clutter. Even most of her likely underthings. The bookcase was full, and some of her music cassettes had been left behind, the ones that she’d taped herself or that others had taped for her, those with distinct handwritings inside the cases: Merengues para Flor. And sure, they’d left behind old shirts and pants, sneakers, a pair of mud-caked Palladium desert boots. On the walls, a few Guatemalan primitive paintings, a Caravaggio poster reproduction from the Met, and an autographed publicity still of Ozzie Peterkins, the All Pro NFL nose guard who adopted two little kids from Flor and who, while waiting for the legal paperwork to go through, built the elaborate hardwood jungle gym in the Los Quetzalitos yard. He ordered and paid for the wood and bought the necessary tools and everything and then built it all by himself. It was an incredibly nice gesture. And Flor had been thrilled to be able to tell my father all about it, of course. She’d phoned him right away and even put Ozzie Peterkins on, and Ozzie had promised my father that the next time his team came north to play the Patriots he’d leave free tickets at the gate and get him a locker-room pass and everything, except his team hadn’t come to play in Massachusetts since.

  “It seemed to me that a lot of her clothes, and of course her jewelry, were missing,” I told Moya, on the train, though as far as I could recall what expensive jewelry she had could fit in one small, always very special, box.

  “Claro,“ he concurred, restrainedly enough, I mean, I appreciated his not attempting a verbal cataloging.

  “And her safe. Apparently she had a small safe and the police took it. That, anyway, was on the list of confiscated things they gave us.”

  “Of course,” said Moya. “Did they say what was in it?”

  “Papers.”

  “My son,” said my father—at National Police headquarters on Sexta Avenida, which looks like the Wicked Witch of the East’s castle painted Miami Beach pink, with a monument and bust honoring now retired Colonel Chupina out front in a little palm grove—to young, gaunt, partially toothless Sargento Sandoval of the DIT (the police detective squad), a donkey-bristle crew cut atop his high, square forehead; Sergeant Sandoval was clearly perplexed by the situation his superiors, who must have decided it would be too impolitic to speak with us themselves, had placed him in. Flor, I was sure he believed, had been a base criminal, but our grief and concern had to be respected, after all we were Americans and all over the newspapers, and you could tell he wanted us to come away with a good impression of him at least—“is sure that Flor owned a stereo. But it was not in her room.”

  And I translated this, as I translated everything that was said during that seemingly pointless interview.

  But what did this have to do with Sargento Sandoval, a desk officer? Couldn’t we see that he was sitting behind his metal desk, a portable typewriter on top of it, in his own bare little office? Sergeant Sandoval can read and write, he stayed in school until he was fourteen, he is a desk officer, prestigiously detached from the more lucrative rackets of the streets. He simulated courteous professional thoughtfulness for a while. But his dark, yellowed eyes almost pleadingly beseeched us, Do you know what a cop earns in this country? What do you expect? Don’t even think about it, señores, you’re wasting your thoughts!

  And then he folded his hands on his desk and smiled tightly, as if truly and bashfully chagrined over the disillusioning insight he felt professionally obligated to offer us: “Ayyy, sí pues,” he drawled. “No sé, puede ser, it could be. Many people have been going in and out of there since the event, no? Las suecas? Se fueron, no?”

  The Swedes? They’ve left, no? Flor’s Scandinavian volunteers. Young women from Sweden and Denmark—true, one had almost immediately flown home, shocked, terrified for her own safety, and the other girl had apparently taken refuge in the house of her boyfriend, a Brazilian working with an international aid organization. And the nurses, the niñeras, the kitchen cooks, and teachers had all been given at least a week off by the Los Quetzalitos Board of Directors, because the Sisters of the Holy Spirit had volunteered to move in en masse to tend to, quiet, and counsel the orphans, and would stay there full-time until the ordinarily aloof board of directors had appointed a new head of the orphanage and, assuming they were all cleared by the ongoing police investigation and were wanted back, regrouped the staff. For the board
of directors, made up primarily of ladies from some of Guatemala’s most distinguished families, some of whom had actually grown up with my mother, were not meddlesome: they sponsored a yearly charity ball and otherwise had given Flor wide sway, having left even the vital matter of overseas fund-raising in her hands.

  So maybe it was the Scandinavian volunteers, or the nuns and niñeras and cooks, who had made off with all Flor’s stuff. Uh-huh. Who were we to deny that human behavior can be disillusioning?

  “Debe ser muy grave, muy grave para los niños, pobrecitos,” said Sergeant Sandoval, several times, with heartfelt plaintiveness, whenever he found himself confronted with another of our appalled silences.

  Which I cynically translated, even the second and third times, word for word and with blatant mimicry of his sentimental intonations. He says it must be grave, very grave for the children . . . And Sergeant Sandoval would nod along as if in solemn gratitude for my fidelity.

  Two ladies from the Los Quetzalitos Board of Directors were kind enough to meet with my father and me in the coffee shop of our hotel, their commentary running along the lines of Such a shock. They’d never suspected. Originally, when they’d voted on Flor de Mayo’s appointment, she’d seemed such an eager, well-educated young woman, clean, always smiling, one of those devoted to the welfare of the unfortunate among us but not at all resentful. They’d had no way of seeing through to her shortcomings if in fact she’d had any though of course they weren’t saying that she had nor could they because that’s why there are police, verdad? Though her past was most unusual, a girl from the servant class, wasn’t that what she originally was? Increíble, no? But her credentials had seemed as good as those of her predecessor, a young Canadian woman who’d gone home to marry, and that had been good enough for the board. But then they’d begun to hear but of course had never believed. Pues, you know, just the sorts of terrible things idle people are always saying, that’s what they’d thought at first anyway. “But in these terrible times, ay no, Señor Graetz, with so much subversion, which causes us all so much suffering. The Devil himself must have a perverted fascination with this country, I think sometimes that he can corrupt anybody. Not even a fine education guarantees protection because look at all the subversion we have here at our own university, Señor Graetz . . . ,” said Señora Zambrano de Suero. The other woman, Señora Torra-Halbe de Ugarte, was wearing a shimmering, wide-shouldered dress of woven metallic blues and greens; fortyish, her round, silk-smooth, golden face framed by a luxurious mane of Irish setter red hair tied over one shoulder in a thick black velvet bow; her delicate wrists as embellished with bracelets as a harem dancer’s and moving like that too, her fingers fluttering, invoking mysteries that had nothing to do with what we’d gathered to discuss; she had large hazel eyes and bright arched lips from which her sugary contralto and superficial inanities warbled like a blithe and senselessly charming seduction. Eventually it affected me that way, I have to admit—as if the exhaustion of so much bewilderment and grief inside me had suddenly left me vulnerable on the outside to the caresses of a gilded beauty and a well-meaning insincerity that seemed incapable of any feeling for death. I couldn’t take my eyes off her face, her lips, her hands. Whenever she directly met my gaze, I looked away and my face reddened. Sensual delirium flowed through me, I spooned another dollop of papaya and lime sherbet into my mouth, begging inwardly for the meeting to be over so that my confusion could end. “You’re Mirabel Arrau’s son, aren’t you?” she said to me, moistly smiling. “I am not sure that she will remember, but I met your mother at my older sister’s wedding, oh, so long ago. Aida and your mama, they went to school together. That was in, well, I was still a girl, but I thought she was just so linda, so dulce. Toda una dama. Your father married one of the loveliest young women in all Guatemala.” My father had a pretty confused-looking blushing reaction himself.