The Long Night of White Chickens

by Francisco Goldman

  “Did she tell you about the time she was lost in that snowstorm?” he asked me, in Brooklyn.

  “Of course.”

  “You know that story well, vos?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And the one . . . the one about your abuela and the monkey?”

  “Moya, I know this stuff inside out, and tons more. Why?”—and so on. He hadn’t thought of bringing me into it until he ran into my mother at that Latin American Society of Boston event.

  It wasn’t until we were in Namoset, after we’d taken the train from New York, that I told him about the secret lover. We’d gone downstairs into her bedroom in the basement and had both been sitting without speaking on her old bed for a while, but Moya’s eyes had filled with quiet tears and suddenly I just blurted it out: There was a married man who wouldn’t leave his wife for her but she did say that in the end she felt relieved that he wouldn’t. By the way Moya gaped at me, and then briefly covered his face with his hands, and then quickly bolted to his feet and asked me to repeat what I’d just said—I absolutely knew then that it was the first he’d heard of it.

  But I feel there’s no need for me to hear any irrelevant details about whatever went on between Flor and Moya. If he had anything essential to tell me, I’m sure he would have by now. It goes without saying, of course, that I don’t suspect him of being mixed up in whatever happened, and anyway, if he had been, it’s logical to assume that my father and I would have heard about it because the police, or rather military intelligence (G-2), who basically run the police detective corps, probably knew all about their romance—much more than I know about it—for, whether or not they were spying on Flor during that time, they almost certainly were on Moya. And they hardly would have wanted to protect him. After all, it wasn’t all that long after that Moya had to flee with his ever-whitening hair into exile, albeit into temporary and well-stipended Ivy League exile, though it was a brave enough choice he made, to come back. He could have stayed in Cambridge.

  Moya says that when he returned to Guatemala a few weeks ahead of me he actually wore his Harvard necktie through customs—a none too discreet reminder to any and all interested onlookers of what G-2’s infamous computers could reveal with just the following finger taps on a keyboard: Luis Moya Martínez. “Six months at Harvard, culerotes!” On a special Save the Young Newspaperman Fellowship. He has many more influential and powerful connections now. Profs who can phone profs who can phone distinguished alumni senators and ambassadors who can phone generalísimos and say: Let that boy go! We know you’ve snatched him and do not harm another hair on his head or you can kiss even your nonlethal military aid good-bye! “VE-RI-TAS, vos!” Some general is going to call a bluff over just an honorable newspaperman like Moya? In the Art of War, not a good move. But you never know. He says they’re still opening his mail, vos. Of course you can’t go using up your U.S. Senate connections over a trifle like that.

  SIX

  Payaso cigarettes, Gallo beer, windows open and my sound box turned down low, Wilfredo Vargas lewdly, robustly growling, “Miiii medicina eres túúúúú ...”

  This is the bedroom I chose for myself, in the addition Abuelita had built over the rear part of the house, completed only a few years before the night she sat down in an armchair downstairs, let her head droop to the side, and went to sleep forever. “She passed away just like that, without any warning, just like a little bird,” that’s how my mother tells it. I’m sitting at the unevenly carpentered, untreated pine desk I bought the other day from an Indian vendor who was carrying it down the street on his back with four crude chairs stacked and roped between the upturned legs. “Just the desk,” I said. Moya, when he saw it, said it reminded him of what the dictator Estrada Cabrera said long ago when after more than two decades in power he was deposed and imprisoned: “I have been like the Indian carpenters of Totonicapán, up at dawn and working hard every day of my life, forever making bad furniture.”

  Maybe it’s just the absence of motor fumes and traffic uproar that makes breathing actually pleasant at night, that lets the mountains flow invisibly into the quiet of the city at night, into all its earthquake cracks. You imagine you can smell the infiltrated histories of soaked forests where the sun never penetrates, where a dead tree can remain standing perfectly mummified in the wet dark air for centuries, until someone comes along and just pushes on it with their hand or kicks or leans against it and poof!.: it collapses into a pile of fine peat powder and drunken ants at their feet (“Sixty million years of constant photosynthesis!” I read that in a magazine article on the Guatemalan cloud forests). Every night smells quite a bit like leaf-burning season in New England, as if the damp smoke of faraway slash-and-burn farming fires mixes with the smoke from a million charcoal cooking and garbage fires lingering over the city’s peripheral slum-ravines.

  Usually, at night, at this time of year, it rains for at least a little while. You don’t actually find Caribbean crabs scampering around the patio in the morning, but from the rain’s clatter—heavy drops gradually quickening and suddenly subsiding, unlike the afternoon downpours, which come all at once—you almost expect to. What I do find in the central patio sometimes is the small antique fountain filled to the brim and moths or butterflies floating, their wings washed absolutely translucent, antennae twitching like tiny oars. And once, sunk to the bottom and looking like a tiny medieval samurai buried in a limpid green tomb, a drowned hummingbird.

  It’s three in the morning and I’m nearly exhausted enough for sleep, though there’s something about my nights here, this constant and more or less unfocused impatience and agitation I’ve been feeling, that keeps an echoing din going inside me, one that seems to grow louder the quieter it gets outside. Though this neighborhood, in Zona 1, with streets dark and deserted at night like a labyrinth of canals, is never completely quiet. Sounds wake you in and out of sleep. The sudden squeal of faraway tires, backfires that sound like gunshots; the police who walk their beats in pairs, communicating with each other across the empty blocks in the warbled code of a Maya whistling language, sounding like commando owls on secret missions into the night air behind enemy lines. This is the precise hour when the invisible city, as wide as the actual one, of crowing roosters starts coming to life, inciting the invisible city of howling, barking, yapping dogs. And when the light is deepest phosphorescent blue, that’s when the soldiers of the Presidential Guard—the National Palace is only blocks away—come out for their predawn jog through the glowing mists, hundreds of rhythmically stomping boots against wet pavement and the occasional warrior druids’ cry of some militant slogan being sounded off (Moya says his grandfather could remember when all military parades or processions were silent: “Because back then soldiers went barefoot, vos!”;). Every 6:00 A.M. but Sunday I’m jolted back awake by the screeching transmission and thunderous idling of my neighbor’s messed-up car in the echo box of his tiny garage, just over the wall on the other side of the narrow courtyard beneath my window. And one dozing spell later, from nearby or from farther away but always because it’s always somebody’s birthday, dawn’s staccato explosions, strings of birthday firecrackers being set off, often accompanied by the fainter celebrations of mariachi bands singing “Mañanitas” . . . Then the uproar of the morning’s first mufferless buses, and ambulant street vendors crying out like professional mourners: “Avocaaaaa-dos”—as if every avocado in Guatemala died yesterday. Ever hear a man pour all his plaint and grief into the word for eggplant? “Berenjeeeeenas.” They pass in the street, stop by barred, shuttered windows or kitchen service doors to ring and ring, bleating out a name for whatever they’re selling: “Zapaaaatos”—the ambulant cobbler. It’s such an Indian sound: deep, resonant, ancient, the sound, somehow, that an immense, gnarled, and knotty old hardwood oak, ripped open by lightning, might make. But Indians have worked as street vendors in cities since Spanish colonial times, haven’t they?—pitching their products as if embodiments of the Indian soul to people living behind high
walls and barred windows ever since? The Spaniards could have forbidden it if they didn’t like it, decreed a thousand lashes for the smuggling of excessive complaint or pagan anguish into the word for eggplant. Instead they must have encouraged this bathetic bleating as the key to good salesmanship! But why? (must ask Moya) . . . And then the Bandas de Guerra, the War Bands, public school kids practicing year-round for the Independence Day parade, marching through the streets in school uniforms, boys and girls playing rudimentary martial music on snare and bass drum, a few xylophones, a few trumpets. Also the daily Pan Am flight to Miami, taking off and shattering the morning in its thundering, straining, protracted reach over the mountains and volcanoes, rattling windows and walls. Time to get up.

  I’d stayed out late (Lord Byron’s) and was in the kitchen with a slight hangover, downing glass after glass of purified drinking water from the five-gallon jug mounted in a swiveling brace, while I waited for Chayito to finish preparing my morning orange juice. She insists on doing it herself, though it always takes her a long time, slicing green oranges in half with a knife that looks like Genghis Khan’s sword at the end of her tiny arm, then pressing with both hands on the handle of the juice press as if drawing water from a rusty well pump. She always ruins it by putting in too much sugar, but I don’t complain anymore because she’s always made it that way and doesn’t seem to hear anything I say anyway. Chayito was one of Abuelita’s maids even during my childhood; I’m pretty sure she’s the one who used to threaten to scorch me with her iron. She was living alone in the house, a pensioner maid tending ghosts, sleeping in the same old maids’ quarters though all the other bedrooms were empty, when I arrived last month.

  Suddenly the front doorbell, not the service door’s, rang, so I knew it couldn’t be for Chayito. Moya’s the only person who has ever come here looking for me without any advance notice before, and never in the morning. So I was a little alarmed. But when I opened the front door there was just an old peasant-looking man out there, holding a dirty straw cowboy hat over his breast, and wearing an old buzzardlike black jacket with a frayed yellow shirt and thickly knotted tie. He was an Indian, or else heavily mestizo, and had the expression of a rain-drenched sparrow.

  He asked to speak with my grandfather, but his presentation was much more floridly decorous than that: With your pardon, joven, could you be so kind as to inform mi patrón Don Rogerio Arrau that Chepito Choc Something of San Antonio Suchitepéquez is asking for just a little minute of his time and humbly awaits him here . . .

  “But Don Rogerio has been dead for nearly twenty years,” I blurted.

  And he stared at me with birdlike, frightened eyes.

  “But Doña Emilia, she finds herself in good health?” he asked.

  “No, she has passed away too,” I said, totally baffled of course. “Can I help you with anything?”

  “And you, joven?” he asked. “You are of la familia Arrau?”

  “They were my grandparents,” I said.

  “Sí pues,” he said. “Yes, I see. Then you are their grandson, Joven, permíteme ...” And as he went on with his speech a terrible pleading whine surged through what had so far been his demeanor of quietly desperate, befuddled dignity. His wife had died just the day before in San Antonio Suchitepéquez and he’d ridden the bus all the way to the capital to ask his old patrón for the money to pay for a coffin and a burial, just a decent pine coffin for his wife . . .

  By the time he was finished telling me about it he was almost inaudible with grief and the plain fear, I saw, that he wasn’t going to be able to bury his wife as he wished. But I told him to wait and closed the door, left him prayerfully blessing me there while I went up to my bedroom to get a twenty-quetzal note from my wallet, that amount being almost equal to the same in dollars. I felt moved, stunned really, by this encounter with an old man’s pure grief and devotion and my inherited place in it. To have ridden the bus all the way from some faraway pueblo, arriving in the capital almost as if in another century, only to encounter his old patron’s gaping gringo grandson . . . Walking back to the door with the money in my hand I suddenly felt gratified, even excited over the whole incident, as if this old man was giving me a piece of information, an insight, worth far more to me than just the money I was giving him.

  Then he said it wasn’t enough. I saw all the hope go out of his pleading eyes in an instant; he even seemed a little angry. And I nearly became indignant. How often do you give a stranger twenty dollars and get told it isn’t enough?

  But his despair nearly drove him to a frenzy, roused him for one last desperate try. A decent coffin. A church burial. His withered cheeks were tear soaked. Fifty quetzales was what it would cost. He’d had no one else to ask but his old patrón. Bless you, oh bless you, joven, ayudame . . .

  I was about to suggest that he go to my uncle at the store to see if he could get the rest there, when Chayito arrived at the door behind me.

  “Chepito,” she said, unsurprised sounding, a completely uncharacteristic note of sympathy instantly intact.

  “Cesaria,” he sobbed—the name he’d known her by in some remote past, I guess—and then he went through his story again. Chayito stood in the doorway consoling him while I rushed back inside for the rest of the money. Far away in San Antonio Suchitepéquez there was going to be a little funeral procession, a pine coffin, borne on the shoulders of villagers through muddy streets to a burial ground, that I had paid for.

  Then Chayito and I watched him shuffle away down the long block, his hat back on and his head down, his shoes dragging like horseshoe crabs.

  The family that lives in the small pink house next to the junkyard across the street run a dry-cleaning store out of their converted little garage, always with one of two almost fantastically pretty, always overdressed and bored young sisters, never the mother, working the counter—now I suddenly became aware of one of those sisters watching me and felt swept by the disquieting depth of tedium in her expression, in her strikingly Persian eyes. She looked back at whatever it was she was holding in her long-nailed hands, dry-cleaning receipts or something, and shuffled through them. Her purple dress had starched-looking, billowy sleeves; I could see her brassy jewelry glinting. I walk past that dry-cleaning counter, close enough to reach out and touch it, at least twice a day, always aware of either sister’s furtive glance flashing-vanishing like a dark fish darting through coral. Sometimes I say hello but we never speak further. It would take a learned charm completely different from my own, such as it is, to know how to get past the iron formality, timidity, and stifled rage of those two bored, beautiful sisters.

  Inside, in the parlor, I asked Chayito, “How did Chepito know my grandparents?”

  She emitted a dry sigh. “A saber.” Who knows.

  “But didn’t he work for my abuelo?”

  “Claro,” she said.

  “Well, as what?” I asked.

  “A saber,” she said, and shuffled back towards the kitchen . . .

  I’d completely forgotten about Chayito’s pink-plastic-frame reading glasses, forgotten that she even used glasses, until I came home late the other night and found her sitting in an armchair in the parlor in front of the glass-encased Virgin and the always flickering novena candles in the corner, reading out loud to herself in an old lady’s monotone from one of Abuelita’s old cowboy paperbacks. Just the sight of her made me cry out, and then I stood there, goose bumps rippling over my skin, patting my chest, grinning at her, and saying, “Huy! Qué susto!” What a fright!

  What my Arrau relatives believe is that the main reason I’m here is to sell this very house—that, and to take some time off to reacquaint myself with la madre’s patria and, who knows, maybe even fall in love with and marry a chapina of good family (that’s what they, albeit fondly, think) and then invest my fairly modest inheritance from Abuelita here (twenty thousand quetzales, not to be signed over to me until my wedding day, though if an irresistible investment opportunity were to suddenly arise, I’m sure I could
talk Uncle Jorge into letting me have it)—this house which my mother solely inherited and tried, briefly, to turn into a hotel. But it received only a B rating from the tourist ministry, which meant she had to charge twenty quetzales a night, too cheap to draw a high-class clientele and too expensive for world-wandering hippies. Maybe, in three years, about fifty people, Central American traveling salesmen mostly, stayed here. So she quit the hotel idea.

  That I should sell the house—though I’m certainly allowed to take my time—was about the third thought that came to my mother’s mind when I told her of my plan to return to Guatemala with Moya. The first was “Oh Sweet Pea, oh no. But why? Those are ignorant and violent people down there now, and you’re not a reporter. Your friend is, let him do it. Roger . . .” And I said, “Mom, don’t you think the truth should be told?” and she said, “Of course I do. But not by my son!” Her second thought, once she’d accepted the inevitability and cautious thoroughness of our plan, was that I should be sure to bring nice clothes and not wear sneakers.