The Long Night of White Chickens

by Francisco Goldman

  Moya and I meet in Pastelería Hemmings every morning, just after ten, for breakfast and to discuss our still evolving strategies, though often we end up just talking about Flor.

  “You know what occurred to me the other day,” I said to Moya there. “Why didn’t Flor hate kids? You’d think she really would have hated them. I remember when she was in the fifth grade, and she was, well, at least sixteen by then. So her body confused the little boys in her class. They’d do stuff like chase her around the playground trying to grab her breasts and mooing—”

  “—moong?” interrupted Moya.

  “The sound a cow makes, you know? Until she had to start socking them in the face. And they were always trying to look up her skirt and everything. There wasn’t much I could do about it. She’d already been jumped ahead a couple of grades” (though I used to do that kind of thing too, I’m sorry to say, though only at home, and only up to a certain age).

  “Of course,” said Moya, “running an orphanage, this is a great way to have revenge on children, no?”

  “Yeah right. Moya ...”

  “But she was always so reluctant to explain it, no? She said she was just asked to run Los Quetzalitos, and so she falls into it, just like that?”

  “Well, I’ve heard you say you just fell into newspaper work, just like that,” I said. “I mean, what were you doing in ‘79? Studying law. So look at you now?”

  As for the street vendors, what Moya said is that back in the earliest days of the Spanish Conquest, when the Dominican friar Bartolomé de Las Casas was experimenting with peaceful conquest and evangelization and utopian community as an exemplary rebuke to the massacres being perpetrated by the conquistadors in the name of same God, king, and cause in this same “reino de Guatimala,” Las Casas summoned several of the Indian vendors who used to wander from village to village selling and convinced them to wander announcing the glory and redemptive martyrdom of Christ instead.

  So maybe, reasoned Moya, ambulant Indian vendors have always pitched their wares with a certain fervor that would have struck the heroic friar, just as it had somewhat similarly struck me, as being appropriate for communicating the gospel to the Indians, who were pagan and idolatrous of course but considered the earth itself holy and everything that grew from it holy too?

  “Interesting,” I said, “I’ve read one book by Las Casas, but he didn’t mention wandering vendors—”

  “Or maybe this apocalyptic melancholy did infiltrate into the vendors’ voices after the Conquest,” said Moya, much more taken with all of this than I’d expected him to be. “Saber. Who knows. Strange that it is only los ambulantes, though. There must be no markets on earth quieter than the Indian markets, Rogerio. The women sit softly talking to each other in their languages, and, though also selling, they hardly call out a thing, no?”

  “We may be in separate labyrinths, Rogerio,” said Moya, another time. “But we are hunting the same minotaur, vos.”

  That was the day we rather ceremoniously and symbolically inaugurated our investigation. All I did was go and look at Los Quetzalitos, nothing more than that, while Moya waited for me in the Café Fiori on the Avenida La Reforma. That was about two weeks after my return to Guatemala. (Given my emotional state when I’d been there with my father, I hadn’t noticed very much, of course.) What could have been easier, more natural, than for me to have gone and looked at the orphanage on my own when the right mood took me? Something made me wait until Moya was ready, until even this could be made to feel like part of a coherent strategy.

  Nobody in Los Quetzalitos, as far as Moya and I know anyway, has any idea that I’ve come back here to find out what truly happened to Flor. My father and I had those few days of media exposure here, but now, almost a year and a half later, no one has pointed at me in the street, shouting, There he is! Flor’s “case” seems to have been forgotten, buried under so many other fleetingly sensationalized and inconclusive scandals. Even in those Zona Viva watering holes, I’ve recognized no one from that whirlwind summer when I did visit Flor five years ago. Some of them must be the same people, but I don’t specifically recall any of them, nor they me. Even in Lord Byron’s, Crystal Francis’s eyes registered only the slightest glimmer of recognition from those few minutes last year when she’d served me a beer. Nevertheless, sooner or later people, even in Los Quetzalitos, may somehow get wind of my being here. Will that matter?

  Couldn’t I simply have gone to Los Quetzalitos, introduced myself, and asked to spend several days doing what the police never did, quietly and gently interrogating the orphans who were there that night, trying to draw out of them whatever they might remember?

  Unlikely, said Moya, in the Café Fiori that very morning when we inaugurated our investigation. The new director, he said, is doubtless protective of the children and wouldn’t want them reliving that already long ago—long ago to children, he meant—trauma. And we have to be prudent. It’s not completely impossible that one or more of the orphanage employees really might turn out to be implicated in either plausible crime: the murder, the baby trade.

  The new director’s name is Rosana Letones. She’s from Nicaragua, fortyish or maybe a little younger, supposedly the daughter of a Nicaraguan National Guard officer, one supposedly imprisoned now by the Sandinistas. But she went to college in the States—somewhere in California, thinks Moya—and has not lived in Nicaragua since. She’s supposed to be una tipa good humored and fairly good looking, dark haired and featured (like Flor), but Moya’s never seen her. He’s just asked around.

  “This is going to be next to impossible,” I said that morning, feeling suddenly pessimistic. “We’re not detectives, or child psychologists or seers.”

  That was when Moya said that about separate labyrinths, each of us pursuing the same minotaur. I have to admit I fall for this stuff, the heroic sentiment, even when it’s that metaphoric. But I tried silently to explain it to myself, failed, asked Moya what he meant, and got a brief review of the mythology, which of course I’d forgotten, if I ever knew it. Theseus was after the minotaur in the labyrinth to free the city above it.

  I laughed. “We’re going to free the city, are we?”

  “Claro,” said Moya, grinning.

  By separate labyrinths I bet he meant that mine is personal, his political, national, or at any rate more than just personal, something like that. So OK, Free the city. Like Flor used to say, in dreams nothing is forbidden, and often enough during the last month or so this really has all felt like some kind of dream to me, though not necessarily a providential one. (One of the ways Guatemala City can seem the same as a dream: the only thing forbidden is waking up.)

  Moya might be recognized by anyone in Los Quetzalitos, particularly the children, he said, so it wouldn’t do for us to be spotted together outside, looking at it. There was much less of a chance that I would be, if only because the regular staff had been temporarily suspended in the immediate aftermath of the murder, when my father and I had gone there.

  So I left Moya sitting in the Café Fiori with my New York Times and walked the several blocks to the orphanage, down the long, silent, wall-lined streets of Zona 10. Here, immense flowering trees rise from behind every wall, and the top floors of the more modern homes look like the superstructures of ocean liners in dry dock, satellite dishes like conning towers on every roof. Servants clustered, chatting, by service entrances as I passed. Gardeners on the aprons outside were busy pruning smaller trees and shrubs into neatly geometric or anthropomorphic shapes: quetzals, monkeys. Wild scoops of bougainvillea and orange trumpet flowers topped the walls, nesting in barbed wire and cascading down, hiding minibarricades of broken glass. I turned left, then right on 11 Calle. The large metal doors of a driveway swung open, pushed by two Indian maids in bright pink uniforms, and two black-windowed vehicles, a BMW and a customized Cherokee with gun portals in its sides, drove out and turned down the street—before the doors swung shut again I caught a glimpse of a yard lush with undomesticated jungle foliag
e, two turkeys strutting past the base of a fountain topped by a plaster reproduction of that famous European statue of a naked little boy peeing.

  I turned one last corner and walked down the block towards an immense volcano looming on the horizon as if from just beyond where the walled, tree-bowered, narrowing street seemed to drop off into the sky. The volcano was a hazier, more subdued shade of blue than the sun-flooded sky around it. A single brilliantly white cloud was snagged over the crater.

  LOS QUETZALITOS—the wooden plaque set into the whitewashed wall by the front gates still bore the hand-painted logo Flor herself had designed: a peaked roof with six happy quetzal chicks perched along it, rising sunbeams radiating from behind.

  I stood for a while on the opposite side of the street, looking at the upper stories of the main house, where Flor’s bedroom was. That part of the house is narrower than the rest, and the one side directly facing the street forms a white, windowless rectangle that, with its peaked, red-tiled roof, resembles a church bell tower. The black barbed wire running in four taut and parallel strands from black iron rods set into the tops of the very high walls surrounding the property is new; later Moya said it wasn’t there in Flor’s time.

  That was all I could see: walls, the tower, the massive pines inside the yard, a barren but stately avocado tree, and one eucalyptus tree. I couldn’t even see the roofs of the other buildings in the compound, or the top rungs of the jungle gym built by Ozzie Peterkins. Wind in the trees. Birds. All else was sunny translucence and silence broken only by the hollow clang of what sounded like a cooking pot dropped on concrete. Then I heard the far-off-sounding insect drone of a crying infant. It went on for a long time, then stopped.

  The sheet-metal front gates have a small, sliding shutter for peeking through that can be latched shut from the inside, as it was now. But the gates are framed in the wall by two high stucco pillars, and in one of these pillars there is a mail slot, a slanted slice through stucco, mortar, and brick, with a dropoff chiseled into it from the inside to make a place for pushed-through mail to land.

  So I crossed the street, thinking that I would run the risk of peering through the mail slot, and when I reached it I didn’t hesitate, I just bent and did it: a walleyed view of grass and the gravel drive, concrete steps and a mop in its pail, tree trunks, and over there, straining my vision as far to the left as it would go, in front of the one-story structure that must be the classrooms, blurred by shadows and the shifting patterns of sun through the trees, a geometric edge of Ozzie Peterkins’s jungle gym.

  Then I heard voices to the right and looking over that way saw four girls coming into view, and a little boy crawling spastically after them with some kind of big white box strapped to his back. Another extremely thin boy was walking behind, with an expression too sunken and haggard for a little boy. The girls were about ten years old, two in pants, two in dresses. I could see now that it was a white wicker laundry hamper that was strapped to the back of the crawling boy—I saw its hinged door flapping open. The others glanced at him now and then, and glanced away. This wasn’t play, exactly, no one was laughing very much. They were simply crossing the yard as if on parade, one boy crawling along with a laundry hamper strapped to his back. The procession crunched across the gravel drive and proceeded towards the jungle gym, the strange, thin boy lagging. One of the girls declaimed something, and I’d already stood away from the mail slot when it made sense to me.

  “Tortuga,” she’d shouted. Turtle. The boy with the laundry hamper on his back was pretending to be a turtle.

  Through the barred gate of the service entrance across the street, an Indian man, holding a rake, watched me. I nodded towards him as I headed back down the street, on my way to the Café Fiori. “Buenaaas,“ he softly intoned.

  Is there, could there possibly be, any significance in the fact that it was quite possibly Flor’s laundry hamper? I vaguely remember it as one of the few things the police had left behind in Flor’s ransacked quarters. Moya thinks he remembers it too.

  “So Rosana Letones wanted her own hamper. Es lógico,” said Moya, in the Café Fiori after I’d rejoined him there. “And for the children there, anything can be a toy. Imagino pues.”

  He said, after I’d described him, that he remembered the thin, haggard-looking boy too. Apparently he’s much older than he looks, and has a thyroid condition that has stunted his growth. Flor was always saying that she was looking for medical treatment for him in Sweden or elsewhere, said Moya, though she never managed to procure it because there were always cases that were more urgent or that had a better chance of being cured.

  Here’s an interesting story that Moya heard from another El Minuto reporter, who heard it from a doctor at Roosevelt Hospital just the other day:

  In an unpopulated dirt field next to one of the new squatters’ barrios that have sprung up on the city’s outskirts in recent years, a woman and a little girl were violently struggling: the woman was slapping the girl around, apparently trying to drag her off, and the girl was resisting, shrieking for help, frantically trying to wrench free. The people from the barrio who witnessed this, mainly women too, were sure that the unknown aggressor was a witch who’d come to steal one of their children, and they rushed into the field to attack her with sticks, stones, and fists and would have beaten her to death if she and the child hadn’t been able to make it understood that they were mother and daughter, and had merely been walking through that field on a routine errand when the girl stopped to urinate in some weeds, except she’d crouched right over an anthill and fire ants had swarmed up her legs, bottom, and into her dress, fiercely biting—thus the commotion of a mother trying to slap ants from the squirming body of a terrified child and to free her from her dress. The little girl must still have been being bitten as all this was being resolved, but it was her badly beaten mother who had to be taken to the hospital. She came that close to being killed, one more innocent victim of the hysteria and rumors spawned by the ongoing illegal baby trade.

  Why did this strike me as an actual piece of evidence when I heard it, however indirectly it could be related to Flor? Because we have so little to go on and this simply felt like evidence, like the first in a long series of new clues that might ultimately exonerate Flor or even condemn her? A clue to the hysteria that had unquestioningly assumed her guilt, however rooted in the actual crimes of baby stealers and sellers; or a clue to the hysteria, provoked by an actual crime, that might have motivated whoever killed her.

  Every day I remember this and remember it again now: Flor de Mayo, most recently a resident of New York City, sitting cross-legged on her sofa in the furnished Zona 10 apartment she’d rented after she’d moved out of the Pensión Aigle in Zona 1 (her job as director of the orphanage still in the future), recounting her first months in Guatemala City with the overexcited air of a small-town girl plunged into a true urban immensity for the very first time, telling me how really weird—actually she said weer, she always dropped that d, really weer, Roger—it was that Guatemala City seemed even bigger to her than New York, harder to know, somehow, but how could that be? Was it just terror and guerrilla and counterwar that made it seem bigger, made it throb invisibly out there, drawing all your sensations out into it? But not just that, she answered herself.

  Not a city of East Sides and West Sides and deftly demarcated and marginalized neighborhoods but a city of straight wall—ruled and earthquake-cracked streets leading nowhere (down any one of which her killer might always be walking or driving, a secret lover passing on the opposite side . . .) and peripheral barrios springing up overnight so unknowable in their anonymous misery and secrecy that they’re indistinguishable from the barrios that have existed for years; a city of weer and mysterious dwarfs and horse-faced women with fire eyes who only appear at night ... and a census of rumors livelier and more visible than the names they’re attached to (“The archbishop’s chambermaid is pregnant!”). “... A city with at least one of everything, you know?” said Flor.

>   And I think I do know just what she meant now. Because a city with at least one of everything feels bigger than it really is—because if you can find anything you want, there must be many more things you don’t even know about yet; and if there’s one of something, why shouldn’t there be another just around the block or in another zona? One Lord Byron’s . . . But that summer of ‘79 we found one reggae bar too, one bar with a punk band, one where the bar band plays only “Songs from the ‘Sixties,” one Al Astra, a rich kids’ discotheque in a credible planetarium, night galaxies above and moonscape sculptures rising from the dance floor, one Pandora’s Box, the egalitarian gay discotheque (the only place in Guatemala, Flor said, where rich and poor socialize on a more or less equal footing), and one after-hours club she’d recently heard about in a private mansion in Zona 10, restricted to off-duty death squads and close allies in that netherworld only—drinks and gambling after work, machine guns leaned against chairs, and every single waitress in the place an adolescent girl and completely, but completely naked, not allowed even to wear shoes or jewelry (not that surprising in a city where as many girls must work as strippers as they do as maids, but they wear G-strings and stiletto heels at least); one public university run like a hive of deadly secret societies; one exclusive rich kids’ private university run like a temple to the worship of Milton Friedman (or is it someone Asian now?) economics; one imitation Eiffel Tower; one Street of Solitude, one Street of Forgetting, one Street of Miracles, and one Street of the Rabbit; one Thai restaurant, one Malaysian, one Japanese; one old hag street vendor called La Millonaria, who held the last remaining Socialist politician’s head in her lap as he quietly bled to death in the parking lot he’d just been assassinated in; one Hindu family, the women in saris, playing badminton in Parque Morazán on a Sunday afternoon, just a few blocks from where I’m living now; one dark and musty textile store that has, says Moya, the connoisseur of the city’s singularities, an ancient Chinaman at the counter who is fluent in Yiddish after so many years of working for the even more ancient and reclusive Polish Jewish immigrant couple who own the place but never deal with the customers, preferring to sit in a back room behind a green curtain sipping hot tea from clear glasses, doing the accounts or reading and playing Big Band jazz records on an old-fashioned phonograph; one La Merced Cathedral, with its cracked bells tolling for half an hour before every evening mass, the oddly unresonant clatter carrying through Zona 1’s dense, smoky air like the clumsily flapping wings of some hollow, tinny, mechanical bird; one most charitable Television Store Owner who tunes all the TVs in his display window to “The Three Stooges” every evening so that street kids can gather in the polished plaza of the store’s entrance to watch but not hear, Indian street kids with lice in their hair and glue-sniffer eyes, dressed in castaways’ rags, sitting there cross-legged, raptly watching and shrieking with laughter, punching and poking each other in imitation of the silent antics of Larry, Curly and Moe—this on Sexta Avenida, where the Arrau store runs the length of a block, the one avenue that at that hour and every night looks like a tunnel of perpetual flame with drifting motor fumes and smoke pouring from take-out caves and sidewalk braziers, everything illuminated by the Hong Kong—style canopy of protruding, bristling, blazing neon signs all along the avenue. Guatemala City seemed to Flor, back then anyway, and seemed to me and seems even more so now the biggest and most unknowable city on earth, one as particular in its inscrutable ways and strong flavors as any other—though I realize that this is probably one more illusion caused by the intensity and single-minded focus with which I now have to watch it.