“Anyway”—
I should explain more fully here just what it was that Flor had told me so many times about what she remembered of that fateful night and following day.
By the time I was in the second grade and Flor was in the third, our conversational compatibility had greatly improved, unimpeded even by the school administrators, who had called my parents in for a special meeting to tell them that if Flor and I were to progress, then only English should be spoken at home, especially between the two of us. Several times a week we’d each be released from our respective classrooms for separate private sessions with a special education specialist who was determined to correct our accents:
“Say mother.”
“mudhair”—because of my much younger age I eventually progressed much more rapidly at this than did Flor and by the end of elementary school would be speaking with a prolish Boston accent almost as strong and some would say as ugly as my father’s.
Back then we spent most of our time together in the basement after school, Flor doing laundry and ironing or studying vocabulary flash cards and listening to the radio, me always hovering close by. Who else did she have to talk to, to practice her English with every afternoon? Maybe I’d also just reached an age, as well as a natural level of intimacy with Flor, where I could be a responsive and comprehending enough listener. We often broke the school’s rule anyway, though Flor tried not to.
So this was when she first began to tell me about her father and La Gatita. The old woman in the letter remembered El Negro as a handsome man, and so always had Flor, though she hadn’t seen him since she was six. “He was a very, very handsome man,” she liked to say, in English.
But eventually Flor found a more exact way of describing him. Because on occasional weekend afternoons my mother would take us into Boston to see Mexican movies in mysterious places that weren’t really movie theaters where we sat in folding chairs, and from where, the show over, we’d always tromp outside into a wintry dusk and the oblivious Boston streets feeling lonely and strangely, joylessly united in a way that we never did when we’d only gone shopping.
Flor decided that her father had looked just like a Mexican revolutionary in a movie, with skin the color of roasted coffee and blue-black hair and always needing a shave. A hard-muscled, hard-featured, and seemingly hard-hearted man, with eyes doing a constant slow burn, and who treated her with a terse, distant affection that of course filled her with love—
“—that of course filled me utterly, utterly with love,” that’s how Flor told it to Moya that long-ago night in the Fo Lu Shu II, her nearly whispering, all-pervading voice extinguishing the restaurant chatter and usurping the radio music. Moya was astonished by her carefully elaborating and unsentimental gravity, the sudden surge of near elation in her “utterly, utterly” and the way it had seemed to suddenly cast a spell, making the rum bottle and filled glasses and even the ice glow with colors that seemed to come from the timbre of her voice alone instead of the pastel paper lanterns and the butane torches in the scarlet-and-gold dragon-guarded patio. Moya asked, “Did he at all resemble you? Puac, this is an Indian name, was he Indian?” Flor mused over this for a moment, then repeated the information found in her letter to Roger about the interracial nature of the coastal departments; Moya, by the way, with a seagoing father and his father’s seagoing father born in Puerto Barrios to mothers who themselves were the ambiguous offspring of mothers who for generations had intermingled with banana-boat loaders, sailors from everywhere, and North American fruit company clerks, shares that heritage. It is likely that Moya and Flor each have, had, an unquantifiable share of both Indian and even African blood along with Spanish-Moorish and who knows what else, vos?
Flor took a sip of her rum, smiled, and said, “I guess I’ve never thought of him as Indian because he seemed so big. But I was so little!”
Flor’s father was peasant poor despite his mythic good looks, but La Gatita, his lover, must have had some money. Flor remembered her only as that, Gatita, little cat, but said she was thin, not little, in fact she was a few inches taller than El Negro. She used to drive over in the middle of the night in a dirty white convertible with a red top. And she had, said Flor, the whitest skin possible and straight black hair like an Indian and ash yellow eyes, big gata eyes, of course. Was she beautiful? She was strange, languid, very quiet, rarely smiling or speaking, but her nails and lipstick were always bright red. Flor thought she smelled like slightly soured milk. “Micita de trapos,” La Gatita used to call her, Little Rag Monkey. She even bought Flor a new dress that she refused to wear because it felt hot as an iron under the sun—not that Flor had ever yet seen an iron—and made of cardboard compared with the ripped, nearly worn to gauze, red-dotted and yellow dress that she’d worn day after day for almost as long as she could remember. We used to wonder if La Gatita could have been her mother but always decided that we didn’t think so.
“—How can you be sure?” asked Moya.
“Intuitively,” said Flor, “and rationally too, especially now. That old woman told me my father and I hadn’t always lived in the desert, right? So was I conceived, born, in Bananera? Is my name really Puac? I don’t know! Bet not, though. There’s no record of a Flor de Mayo being born to a Puac in Bananera. You don’t think I’ve checked? So maybe I was registered under my mother’s name, who the hell knows, who says she and Papito were ever married? Gatita, I’m pretty sure, was married. Anyway, I don’t smell like sour milk.”
Flor’s father would stay outside with Gatita in the hammock that was tied to one beam of a small wire chicken coop and to their one skinny cashew tree, and they’d leave the car radio on—that was probably the part my mother considered immoral—while Flor slept inside on the pile of cornhusk-stuffed grain sacks on a dirt floor that was their only bed. Then she’d wake with the last roosters and her father snoring beside her and smelling of slightly soured milk and of his own strong sweat, which in the sunrise heat always made the traces of lipstick still on his face dissolve into rosy little puddles.
But one dawn her father wasn’t there beside her. When Flor looked outside, the car was, its radio still on, but the hammock was empty and they were both gone. Just that was an unpredictable enough event. She waited for what probably only seemed like hours. Suddenly Gatita came back alone through the desert looking like she’d spent a week wandering in it, and the very next thing Flor knew she was in Gatita’s car, speeding through dirt clouds and then along the coastal highway. That was when she told Flor that her father was dead. Two or three times Gatita told her. What Flor always remembered was staring sullenly at the red dashboard, her hands folded in her lap, telling herself that she must be lying—Flor was only six!—or that a duende had possessed Gatita for the chance of stealing a little girl away. But Gatita was sporadically sobbing, looking sometimes as if she was about to take a frenzied, gagging bite out of the steering wheel . . .
Flor had never been out of Chiquimula that she could remember, but now they were on such a long and terrifying ride, climbing higher into the cold air of the mountains, fire-breathing trucks hurtling right at them down both of the cratered highway’s lanes—she’d squeeze her eyes shut and, opening them again, discover that she was still alive, the trucks miraculously behind. Flor felt comatose with weightlessness and shock by the time they reached the flat, sprawling capital, and she’d already caught a cold from her too sudden ascension into the new and germy climate. Lost in the noisy delirium and smog, Gatita had to drive in circles for hours, it seemed, before she finally found the convent orphanage on the Avenida Simeón Cañas. There, in the parked car, Gatita, without a word, pulled a wedding ring from her purse and slipped it on. Which forever puzzled us, because it seemed that the opposite gesture might have been more appropriate, that is, for Gatita to have taken her ring off if she’d been wearing it before delivering a new orphan to a nuns’ orphanage.
But what difference did it make either way?
“All it proves,” Flor used t
o say, “is that Papito used to make her take off her ring when she came to see him.”
Then La Gatita held Flor’s hand and walked her in through the grated black iron gates and through the jacaranda-shaded small outer yard that was decorated with plaster statuettes of painted toadstools and grotesque laughing gnomes with long beards and pointy red Alpine caps, this being the nuns’ idea of a toddlers’ playground. There Flor stayed seven years, until Abuelita came and picked her to be our maid in Namoset.
“So this is what happened on the fateful night,” wrote Flor in her letter, “according to the benign old oracle of the soda stand. Ours was a worthless piece of land, a piecrust made of baked dirt and so far from the river that to get water for us and our chickens my father at night would carry a pail across the desert to the nearest little finca, which belonged to a man named Soto who had only a small half-starved herd of cattle but a well, and from this well my father would pilfer water. This Soto had apparently been not much bothered by that, but he died and his son, who’d been working as a cowboy on Coronel Arana’s huge ranch in Izabal, came and took it over. The old woman said that this hijo de Soto warned my father away from his well, though there’s no verifying that now. But he caught my father taking water from it that night while Gatita waited in the hammock and with a machete decapitated him. Which, according to the seemingly lawless but actually quite strict and macho code of the desert, was a legitimate defense of property. Even if he had not warned my father, which I cannot believe he did, since it does seem my father was taken by complete surprise.
“When the old woman told me this, the mystery of my father’s existence and death partially solved after so many years of, well of not exactly brooding on it but one does want to know these things, I almost had another fit of the giggles. I had to bite the inside of my cheek and think of something I’m accustomed to thinking of as sad (La Pobre Petrona, who always makes me sad). Remember how furious you used to get with me at serious movies, Roger, when your hero would get shot or something and I would have a laughing fit? That was during our first years together, and you thought I was so ignorant at times. What an uproar you caused when Ira and Mirabel took us to the drive-in to see Von Ryan’s Express and at the end, when Frank Sinatra was shot in the back chasing his train and fell facedown on the tracks, I could not stop giggling.
“Of course my poor decapitated father was what Gatita had not wanted me to see or even know of. What an extraordinary and fast decision that woman made! Though it seems that perhaps in some deep down inner eye I somehow knew it anyway. It’s not hard to gardner why Gatita, whoever she actually was, could not have taken me to live with her. By whisking me off to the nuns, she saved me from a truly awful fate, I am sure. As well as to your abuelita, I owe her everything! Who was she? Where could La Gatita possibly be now? I’m sure I would recognize her.
“So there were certain ironic complexities behind the blank-faced, I imagine, cheek-biting silence with which I returned the oracle’s cataracted gaze. And she went on. When everyone saw that I had vanished, she said, they suspected that Señor Soto Hijo had hacked me to bits and buried me in far apart places, because people began to say they could hear me crying at night from several places in the desert all at once. But the old woman said she’d never heard it and so didn’t completely believe it, and that those other people were probably just hearing baby hyenas and fantasizing.
“Of course, hacking up a little girl and strewing her about was considered repugnant behavior even in Chiquimula, and people spoke of avenging me and even ostracized poor Señor Soto Junior, who was, after all, innocent of any ‘crime.’ But the old woman certainly believes in my father’s ghost. She says people have seen him in the blue light before dawn, you know, walking across the desert all the way to the river with a pail in his hand, trying to undo his fatal mistake. Pues, poor Papito, no?
“She said people call him El Sed now, the Thirst, and that they even leave tortillas and cups of coffee for him at night along his route and find them taken in the morning. Do you believe this? And the comisionado suddenly exclaimed, ‘Oh him! El Sed. Claro! So that’s El Negro Puac!’ though later he said, ‘Esas viejas with their ghosts, they live in their mothers’ centuries still. I don’t believe any of it. Do you? Yo no! Though my mother ...” blah blah blah
“Señor Soto the Younger, you shall be happy to hear, was long ago riding in the back of a pickup full of drunken MLN party militants on their way back from one of their fascist rallies in Esquipulas and it flipped over. Earth receive an honored guest, Señor Soto Hijo laid to rest. His farm was taken over by a tobacco company, and the family who live where we used to now work in the fields there and live in a hut made of coarse boards standing up in the dirt, much like ours, though theirs is uglier, perhaps because my father saw to it that ours was neatly palm thatched and their roof is just more boards. The MC, rather a nice man actually, drove me there, returning to his chant of ‘El Negro, El Negro,’ and shaking his head profoundly. ‘That’s the way it happens,’ he said. ‘That’s why they call it Guatemala’s Wild West out here.’ You know, even though it’s in the East. I looked out at my old ‘yard’ from the pickup, didn’t even get out. No more chicken coop, not even a trace of it, even the cashew tree is gone. Saw a couple of little kids standing around with just T-shirts pulled tight over their malnourished potbellies. Sometimes I used to go around with not even that much on, I’m afraid (we had no Evangelical Fundamentalists in the neighborhood then), the desert air my robe, the entire desert my diaper, until I was old enough to get what must have been my first dress, which was followed by the dress I mentioned earlier. And we always had enough to eat. I made our tortillas, and often there was something more. Gatita probably gave Papito money. Later the MC tried to put a move on me, but I threatened to stomp on his wounded foot if he didn’t drive me directly to the bus and he laughed like a big macho house on fire and called me pícara and said that we ‘pueblerinas’ from the desert never lose our scorpion sting o algo así. He waited with me for the bus, and when it came it was time for a Hollywood movie—ending witticism, something on the order of your adorable, when you were so nice to see me off at the airport before I came down here, ‘Delta’s ready when you are, Flor.’ (No one ever gets why I thought that was so funny, I must have giggled in the air all the way here.)
“So I said, what else, ‘Viva El Sed,’ and he laughed and said, ‘Viva El Negro. I am your friend forever.’ Awww.
“It’s getting chilly. I’ve been sitting on the patio of the Café Fiori, the place with the great cappuccinos and where all the private school boys and girls come after school? They’ve gone home for dinner now. Guess I’ll walk home, sit out on my balcón tonight, and listen for far-off gunshots and squealing death-squad tires. Lovely. And yet, life is not really like that, is it? Not sure how long I’ll be staying, it’s conceivable I’m nuts enough to linger on quite awhile longer. So, are you really liking living in Nueva Jork? It will be fun, the two of us hanging out in the same city again when I get back. So glad you’re finally turning into an adult, ‘sort of.’ I must say I miss you at the Tropical Room; you’re the empty space at the end of every conga line.
“Adiós, y con tanto Amor,
PUEBLERINA”
When I showed that letter to Moya in Pasterlería Hemmings, he read it through without a word, then ran his fingers over the top page as if trying to smooth its neat creases and glanced at his fingertips as if checking to see if any of the ink had come off. He looked at me and said,
“She seems more sad about her dress than about her father.”
“Well, it was such a long time ago,” I said. “Like she says, another incarnation. My father was more like her real father.”
“Chickens also truly touched something deep inside her, from back in that time, vos.”
I watched him keep a long, straight face—Guatemalans! This Guat irony on top of irony, whole indecipherable jungles of it hiding their raw, disturbed hearts.
He scanned
the letter again.
“I like this,” he said, “where she says that chopping up a little girl is repugnant behavior even in Guatemala.”
“Even in Chiquimula, you mean.”
“That’s where you can see that Flor had an education,” he said. “It was a fraudulent election even for Guatemala. Basest corruption, even for Guatemala. A repugnant murder, even for Guatemala. Just this one little word, vos, and we are weighed exactly.”
In our basement in Namoset, in the unremodeled part where the utility sink and my father’s workbench were and where in winter the heat from the furnace was just enough to keep icicles from forming along the poured concrete walls and naked insulation-stuffed ceiling rafters, Flor usually had laundry to do after school. Back then we didn’t have a washing machine or dryer. Clothes were hung to dry by the furnace or were carried out through the bulkhead into the backyard when the weather was warm. Ironing she did in her bedroom, which faced the playroom across a divide that was no less real for being invisible.
Flor’s room became almost like a stage set, I watched her in it for so long, though of course so much that I didn’t see happened there too; but it’s almost as if I ought to be able to evoke her life in that room as if it was all one play: “. . . In the second act a German shepherd named Klink suddenly appeared, sitting on Flor’s bed with sphinx paws and steeple ears. When, towards the end of that act, Flor made love to Tony for the first or second time, Klink was the only witness, and kept her secret until the end.”
Most of the furniture had previously belonged to my already grown Graetz cousins and was there waiting for Flor the night of her first terrified descent into the basement: a bed with a white-enameled headboard decorated with pink roses and a matching dresser—in later years Flor would spray-paint both a glittery color called amber sunrise—a green pear—colored bedspread, a standing brass lamp with a warm orange shade, a glossy red desk. Maids’ rooms don’t often come equipped with desks, but my father must have thought no one could do without one.
The Long Night of White Chickens Page 21
