The Long Night of White Chickens

by Francisco Goldman

  “Well, I’m not, to tell you the truth,” said Flor. “I guess I wouldn’t mind a glass of rum.”

  “Of course we could never print something like that.”

  “So then what is there for us to talk about?”

  “I would like to take a more indirect approach. Why did you come back to Guatemala?”

  “Why?”

  “In the United States you could be making much money, no?” he said. “You could have a great profession, a wealthy and intelligent husband, and not be bothered by the extreme and macabre situation we are living in in this insignificant little country. Instead, here you are making yourself crazy over the moral failings of guatemaltecos who will never adopt their own country’s orphans. But if not for these failings in the first place, there could not be so many orphans. You are in a street with no exit.”

  But Flor seemed suddenly taken with the song coming from the radio inside, a woman with a throaty, feisty voice singing about a man called Estúpido. She smiled briefly to herself, then looked back at him. “What did you say?”

  “No,” said Moya. “Every time I look at Time magazine or the New York Times I find myself skipping over the articles on, for example, Ethiopia. Out of guilt I make myself go back and read them, imagining how uninteresting the same kinds of articles on Guatemala must seem to the average citizen of the world.”

  “I’m from here too, you know.”

  “Yes, but what drew you back, and then made you stay?”

  She shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know. A longing to see it again, I guess.”

  “Was your life in the United States so unsatisfying?”

  “Not really. I mean, it was my life, pues, which admittedly has been pretty strange. So what made me stay . . . Well, what do you think? Why do you think I stayed?” She stared at him furiously for a moment, and then, suddenly, her mood seemed to shift again, and she grinned. “The way they make wonton dorado in Guatemala?”

  Moya called the waiter. He ordered an entire bottle of rum with a bucket of ice and limes, and the wontons with sweet and sour sauce.

  —Luzbel. Lumbre de alumbre . . . This came later. Somehow that particularly well-aimed and already affectionate joke of quoting Asturias helped to turn the tide, by making her want to protect and stand up for and insist on what was hers alone, her story. This was when he had begun to seduce her by listening.

  Moya also has something to add regarding the tall, thin boy with the thyroid condition whom Roger spied trailing after that other boy who was pretending to be a turtle with Flor’s laundry hamper strapped to his back.

  The thyroid boy looked ten at most, but was something like nineteen. Quite intelligent, vos, though, because of his condition, often extremely lethargic. That unfortunate boy was too easily tired to ever be able to pursue a productive life, but he was not too easily tired to be continually sneaking into the girls’ quarters to fondle and be fondled—a totally shameless desgraciado. Flor told Moya about that boy on the very Long Night of White Chickens, told him that she’d always suspected but had never been able to prove that he was the father of an infant girl born to a thirteen-year-old orphan just seven months after Flor had assumed the directorship of the orphanage. In the face of much evidence to the contrary, the girl went on insisting on the immaculate conception. Because the adoption laws forbade the separation of children from the same nuclear family—a law originally formulated to protect the integrity of the sibling relationship, of course, not that of mother and child—that girl and her infant daughter could only be legally adopted as a pair.

  “So here was a chance,” said Flor, in the Fo Lu Shu II, “for some couple to turn themselves into parents and grandparents at a single stroke!”

  “How unusual!” exclaimed Moya, watching the ends of Flor’s hair dangle over the bowl of sweet and sour sauce near her elbow on the table. If she leaned forward a bit more, he suddenly and capriciously reasoned, her hair was going to go right into the sauce.

  “Needless to say, that couple never turned up. Not that I actually tried to find them.”

  By the time that girl was just fifteen, said Flor, she was working full-time in the orphanage kitchen and living on her own, at her insistence, in a rooming house near the bus terminal market, so that she could have the freedom she needed to find herself a husband, a father for the baby girl, who continued to live at Los Quetzalitos. But it wasn’t long before she stopped coming to the orphanage altogether, either to work or to visit. A few months later Flor received a postcard: the girl had made her way to Houston, Texas, and had a job breading shrimp in a frozen food factory and would soon be sending for her daughter. She left no return address and Flor never heard from her again. And the thin, oversexed, essentially invalid boy with the thyroid condition never displayed the slightest acknowledgment or even awareness that the little girl—three years old by the time Moya came on the scene—was probably his daughter.

  “Just another machito,” sighed Flor. “We don’t operate in a cultural vacuum there, though I certainly wish we could sometimes.”

  Later, when Moya began to spend time with Flor at Los Quetzalitos, it became obvious to him that she had never stopped feeling at least vaguely vexed by that boy—what was his name? He used to initiate and lead the boys in his quarters in masturbation sessions too. Flor was constantly threatening to expel him from the orphanage if he didn’t stop, but she was never serious about these threats. What could she do? Was it so abnormal, she rhetorically asked Moya once, that the orphans, so hungry for love, would discover and invent on their own love’s most obvious and greedy expressions?

  “Bunch of horny buggers,” said Flor. “Well, not buggerers, gosh, hope not anyway. Who knows what goes on down there when no one else is watching?”

  “Let’s face it,” she said another time. “It could be a lot worse. In the state orphanages, Christ, it’s the grown-ups who work there who molest those kids. That’s one reason they’re always running away, figure they might as well sell it on the streets instead of give it away for free, you know what I mean?”

  Moya soon began to conceive of the orphanage as a subterranean hothouse generating aphrodisiacal fumes that floated like pollen through the windows, radiated through the walls and floors. And putavos, that, it seemed to him then, fundamentally explained a lot. Love explained even more, perhaps, and love has never been the same since. Though some of it, it seems to Moya even now, recalling his unforgettable five-week frenzy of floramor, must have been and must remain simply inexplicable.

  Now Moya turns his attention to his photocopy of a certain notebook originally consisting of 160 bound and numbered pages, two-thirds filled with writing in Flor’s own hand. One day well into his and Roger’s investigation, Luis Moya had for seven hours buried himself in the basement archives of National Police Headquarters in Guatemala City; there, with the stealthy permission and advice of a friendly, stalwart, very bribed (with Roger’s money) and only somewhat raisinlike police sergeant in charge of the archives, he’d searched for Flor’s confiscated papers and records, held there among countless others in a moist, messy labyrinth of twined paper bundles and boxes. The case was not officially closed, and Flor’s papers could not be returned until it was. That hardcover notebook was by far the most interesting item he found in that already rotting cardboard box of ransacked papers and unenlightening documents. In it Flor had jotted rudimentary records of adoptions, orphans, adopting families—omitting any mention of financial transactions, however—along with other memoranda regarding the daily operations of the orphanage and clinic.

  Now Moya searches the notebook’s numbered pages for the not uncharacteristic entry on Ozzie Peterkins, the gringo football player—that was humorous too, Flor explaining to Moya what is a guard of the nose—who built a jungle gym while waiting for an adoption to be finalized by the courts. Finally he finds it, on page 37, dated June 1981:

  “Carlos and Moisés Fiallos just might be the luckiest little boys in the world! It really is incredible, th
ey’re going to grow up locker-room brats, sons of a Man Mountain earning a third of a million dollars a year, and one who saves his money and invests it wisely to boot. Strange to think he’s only a few years older than Roger. He showed me pictures of his house in Texas, just incredible, he built a lot of it himself, well, just look at what he’s doing out in the yard right now. Where does he get that energy! He’s so healthy and positive! He said, ‘Flor, hon, what you need is a good ole jungle gym.’ Before I knew it, he’d hooked on to that lumber exporter guy who claims to be a nephew of Lord Carrington, and now I have a truckload of top-of-the-line tropical hardwoods in my yard. It’s like some ancient myth I don’t quite get the meaning of is being played out here: For five days now he’s been out there in his little yellow shorts and sneakers, wearing nothing else, showing off his truly stupefying muscles, hammering and sawing and sweating away, building the most elaborate jungle gym I have ever seen. I run back and forth to the family court showing off his financial statements, with my So what if he’s a single parent, so what if he’s African-American, Look, here are Polaroids of the jungle gym he’s building for all the orphans! If this doesn’t go through, I can just see Ozzie stomping down to the court building and kicking it over by himself—would serve the weasels inside right, believe me. At night he takes me out for dinner and he’s so sweet, telling me all his dreams for Carlos and Moisés, we joke and say they’re going to be a pair of Mayan-Warrior-Deity Outside Linebackers! Also he plays the guitar. All the children, who at first were terrified of him, now think Ozzie is a magical, friendly, gargantuan, talking and singing bear who “belongs” to us. But oh, are they going to be sad and jealous when he leaves with Carlos and Moisés quite literally under his arms, I’ll have a lot of cheering up to do then. I phoned Ira, who of course loves this, he said Ozzie is a real crunching tackier. Also, I’m so glad he is not changing the boys’ names. When I asked him why he’s never married, he joked, ‘I think there’s enough of me here to be Mama and Papa both, don’t you?’ Said he’d marry me though. He’s just kidding, I’m sure. But Ozzie seems in many respects a very mysterious man. So who knows! Oh no, Flor, not that. I told him I’m way too egotistical to ever be second banana to a famous football star.”

  NINE

  Flor’s thirteen letters and postcards offer no real clues. Weekend trips, brief excursions away from Guatemala, these often prompted her to write. Two of her letters were from Yucatán beach resorts, and another was written on a rainy evening at the counter of a Sanborn’s in Mexico City while she was waiting to go to a Bellas Artes opera; one she wrote late at night, though the sky was still light, in a hotel room in Stockholm, when she’d gone on business related to the free health care abroad program. Sometimes she’d reminisce in a pretty obvious way about this or that: “... It’s autumn up there. All our Autumns of the Patriarch! I keep feeling like it’s time to get in a car and follow the changing foliage and the Harvard football team up to Dartmouth!” Or she’d try to analyze or exhort me in some more or less sisterly way: “Roger, what is it with you? . . .” Yeah, yeah, Flor.

  Only two of her letters were really substantial, which isn’t to say they were confessional or the sort of letter she might have written to a best lifelong female friend if she’d actually had one, to Delmi Ramirez, say, if Delmi had lived a life more in step with Flor’s. But the two letters were important to her. Both were handwritten on unlined paper despite their length, and you could tell she’d held the pages over something straight to guide her lines across them, and her penmanship was even more fastidious and perfect than usual.

  One was written in September ‘79, well into her very first year in Guatemala, when Flor finally found the courage or whatever it was she’d needed to take a bus out to Chiquimula to try to find out how or even if her father had actually died:

  “Well, I went to Chiquimula. I almost said home to Chiquimula, but that would be a sentimental exaggeration, wouldn’t it be? One morning I woke up and just knew I had to do it. I walked to where the buses are, thinking, Well, if there is any bus going to the oriente, if there’s any bus leaving when I get there, if there isn’t a bus, is, isn’t, is, et cetera. Fuente del Norte, Fountain of the North, was the name of the bus I got on for this most formaljourney. My attentiveness to the landscape was nil. Only once before in my life had I traveled this route, in the opposite direction, of course, an opposite clock: then it was evening when we went through the mountains, not sunny. I closed my eyes and tried to sleep so that the trip would go faster. I spent the night in a motel at the El Rancho junction and the next morning went on to the Chinaman’s general store and from there retraced my childhood steps all the way out to the arid lands and through that chiaroscuro of candelabra cactus and agave. Not at all what you would expect, Roger. That walk, last executed by me when I was six, seemed even longer now and the land seemed even vaster and emptier than I remembered it from then, when it used to seem I knew the place of every cactus and invisible path. The horizon is still mountains. In stranded little settlements I asked everyone I encountered if they had any memory of’El Negro’ Puac, but nobody did. Several times I was sure I was lost, that I’d come in the wrong direction completely.

  “Then a Toyota pickup pulled up in a cloud of dirt and dust, driven by the civilian comisionado militar, kind of like the local sheriff. Recently, I was to learn a bit later, he had actually shot himself by accident with his brand-new pistol in the foot, this was why he limped about. Well, he had no recollection of El Negro Puac either, but he said he knew an old woman who of course remembers everything that has ever happened around there, and he drove me to see her.

  “But things have changed out there, Roger. People mainly grow tobacco for the foreign companies now, who teach them how and have brought in irrigation of a sort from the Rio Motagua, which often doesn’t have much water anyway. You see these little sprinkler systems, dancing weeds of water in the dust. So a lot has stayed the same too. The people out there must be even poorer than the Indians in the highlands because the land is so dry, but of course they would never admit it because they’re so proud and practically consider themselves Spaniards. Maybe that’s why they stay. Much more fertile valleys and plains are so close by, but the dry lands look something like the parts of Spain where only scraggly olive trees grow.

  “So the Military C. drove me in his pickup. He was repeating, ‘El Negro Puac, El Negro Puac,’ as if something might occur to him, though I gardnered that he was just wondering about that Indian name and about me who could not have matched his typical notions of an Indian’s daughter, I’m sure. I’ve learned that in the Izabal region there has always been quite a bit of intermarriage between Kekchis and the Caribs and mulattoes who’ve migrated in from the coast a bit, and I think that perhaps my father’s origins were like that and that was why in Chiquimula he was called El Negro. Though for all I know he came from Honduras or anywhere and Puac was just a name he’d assumed since the Old Woman said that all he told about himself upon arriving in Chiquimula was that he’d worked in the town of Bananera loading banana trains and that his name was Puac. Which the old woman decided must be phony because why would the only tidbits of information El Negro ever gave out about himself be true? She just assumed he must be huyendo, on the run from who knows what. No one comes to live in the desert just like that, she said, not a big handsome mango like El Negro! She said this with such sudden old lady’s gusto I almost blushed with pride. I’ll never know, though, who my mother was, or where she came from or who nurtured me in infancy.

  “Well, this vieja, my ancient oracle, was just there, in an agua stand she owns beneath a grove of dusty trees by a whitewashed little bridge over an almost totally dry riverbed. Yes, she certainly did remember El Negro and even his little girl, who’d sold eggs from a basket nearly as big as herself, and then she matter of factly accepted that it really was me (in jumpsuit and shades and baseball cap, picture it) and that, here’s the stunner—she’d always believed it possible that it wasn’t true
that I had died along with my Papito!

  “‘I died too?’ I gasped, from surprise. (Idea for a short story: the possibility that all my life I have been a ghost.) I couldn’t help it, I started giggling like a maniac and, oh boy, that sent the MC into hysterics. He was bouncing around on his one good foot chortling, ‘You died too! Ja ja ja!’ and the old woman looking at me like perhaps I should have. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Disculpe, señora. It’s just that I’m so surprised to hear that!’

  “So this was all very weird. She really did seem to have an oracle’s memory and omniscience. Which made it extra surprising, and spooky, and rather impressive that she had no recollection nor had she ever even heard of my father’s lover, La Gatita. Which proves that he was muy tight-lipped and she was muy muy buena at sneaking around. Do you recall the man holding a machete on the tile on the wall in our old school library? Well, Roger, wait’ll you hear this! It seems I may have some visionary capacities myself, though it is probably more logical to say that machete fights are about the commonest thing going out there and that as a little girl I knew it and it left an impression.

  “I know I’ve told you many times what I remember of that fateful night and the day that followed, and that this all had something to do with Mirabel forbidding me to tell you any more scary or ‘immoral’ stories. How all I remember was Gatita coming back through the desert in the morning and my father gone, and how she just put me in her car without explaining, drove me all the way to the capital, told me my father was dead but not why or how, and turned me over to the monjas. The very first thing those nuns did was take away my sad, torn, red-dotted yellow dress that I loved like my own skin and had worn day after day for who knows how long. Later I saw one of the nuns using it to dust the pedestals of the saints in the chapel. Folded up, it fit into her hand like a sponge, the last visible evidence of my old life I ever saw until just a few days ago, when I finally ventured my return. Perhaps I should say next to last. The hard, callused soles of my peasant girl’s feet dissolved too (in this, my first incarnation, my first layer of skin, I was a peasant girl! How easily one ceases to be one!), and I grew the soft feet of a convent girl, but this mysterious process I don’t remember so well.