Finally Anne Hunt, fat ass quivering like flan in her jeans, led his mother upstairs to her dressing room, and did not reappear. Moya waited. After a while he got up from the maids’ table, and, so as not to interrupt the one on duty maid who was sitting in a chair with her eyes riveted to the small black-and-white portable television where a Venezuelan soap opera was showing, he went into the adjacent room he and his mother had entered through. He wanted a soda, and there he had seen crates of empty sodas next to a storage refrigerator. In that room were washing machines and dryers, an ironing board, several five-gallon jugs of purified drinking water, bicycles, golf clubs. He opened the refrigerator, reached for a Coca-Cola, and then, in the cold light thrown by its open door, saw a large cardboard box full of envelopes on the bottom rack. Hotel Biltmore Maya envelopes. Well, these could certainly prove handy. Moya claims he’d never before stolen anything in his life, but now he did so guiltlessly and coolly. He stuffed fat handfuls of envelopes inside his belt all the way around his waist and pulled his sweater down over it and in that chilled paper tutu went back into the kitchen, sat, sipped his soda without risking the commotion of asking for a glass, and waited.
“—I have a present for you,” said Moya, during those first few weeks after the Long Night of White Chickens when he was actively courting Flor.
“Envelopes, how sweet!” she exclaimed, puzzled at first.
Well, it was not as if he had so many other presents he could give. But he had this wealth of envelopes. And she had complained of some of her regular correspondence apparently never reaching intended foreign destinations.
But it was almost two months later that Flor, sitting cross-legged on her bed in Los Quetzalitos, had read him a version of that letter out loud from the spiral notebook in which she had composed it.
“But is this against me?” Moya bluntly asked when she had finished. Was Moya the lover whom Flor had compared to a suffocating, cloying, and polluting small country?
“Moya, I wrote this months ago, when I first started thinking of leaving, I hardly knew you yet. It’s not about you or anybody, it’s about Guatemala and the United States . . . You mean you weren’t startled by my brilliant insights?”
“Sí, sí, mi amor ...”
“You weren’t, were you? You didn’t get it, oh gosh, maybe I should do it over again—” and with that she had torn the pages from the notebook, crumpled them between both hands—
“Florcita! Don’t throw it away!”
“Oh, don’t worry. I have like ten drafts of this thing in here,” she said, and sighed.
ELEVEN
That letter, of course, had come ruefully and bitterly to mind several times during the ordeal of my and my father’s two days in Guatemala. “Bottomless grief in a demitasse”—hadn’t she written that that was really all she was trying to say? I hadn’t been at all surprised when in the end she’d seemed to have decided to stay on and had never considered it my role to try to dissuade her.
Now we were flying home to Boston and Namoset with Flor in her casket in the morning. In our room in the Hotel Cortijo Reforma, my father was failing at trying to get an international phone line, his silent, agonized pacing punctuated by cajoling calls to the switchboard operator downstairs—he was in that concrete state of existence that Flor simply used to call “Guatemala Phone Hell.”
In the hotel room, a soft breeze blowing in through the open sliding doors, I couldn’t help but recall the evocation of the night air at the end of the second of Flor’s significant two letters: I was thinking that this was the last night I’d ever breathe it, that I’d never come back here again, that this haunted night air belonged solely and forever to all of the ordinary and ordinarily malignant and spectacularly malignant inhabitants of this city that now seemed so vast, secretive, and unknowable, so apart from me. Yet it was also the air that belonged to as precise and totally unriddable a space as the coziest childhood memories: a space no larger than the central patio of Abuelita’s house and the bedrooms off the covered passageway running around it, doors and shutters open, pastel walls like candied fruit in the warm yellow light, Flor on her bed that one summer she did come down with my mother and me, reading out loud to me from the book in her lap—Breakfast at Tiffany’s, then an Agatha Christie—while I lay beside her watching moths and long-legged mosquitoes hover beneath the mildew-splotched ceiling. That was before Abuelita kicked her out, made Flor go home to Namoset with three weeks still left in our summer. Yes, Moya, the last straw was an “agrument” they had over a certain very talented spider monkey.
But even during happy times, never mind the cataclysmic, origins such as mine—Catholic, Jewish, Guatemala, USA—can’t always exist comfortably inside just one person. This isn’t necessarily the biggest problem ever faced, far from it of course; it can even be pretty convenient when you’re just looking for something to blame your own general confusion on; the easiest thing is to just ignore it, to not dwell on it at all. But what if you’re not the ignoring type? Then you’ve been born into a kind of labyrinth, you have to pick and choose your way through it and there’s no getting back to the beginning because there isn’t any one true point of origin. Flor used to tell me to think of it as a great opportunity. Not exactly the Helen Keller story either, but lots of mixing and matching in the dark and dwelling on inner composition, the sketch under the painting. So that’s one reason that during the years Flor was running her orphanage I read or purchased just about everything on Guatemala that I could lay my hands on. But I also told myself that by doing that I’d at least be living along an outer surface of her inner world there, and that I’d be able to better imagine her there, and so have more to say whenever I saw her. Even if Flor spoke little about it when we did get together—and often she seemed not in the mood to talk about Guatemala at all—I felt that I at least shared some of her new gravity, and that we spoke as two people well accustomed to it, keeping the conversation light. But this gravity, which I’d mainly acquired through reading—I hadn’t been back to Guatemala since that summer when I’d visited her, though I was always making plans to go—had an allure all its own. I liked the esoteric solidity of a row of Guatemala books across my shelves. Political analysis, history, anthropology, human rights reports and solidarity publications, the travel writings of early explorers and missionaries; the Popol Vuh and The Annals of the Cakchiquels; the novels of Asturias, Cardoza y Aragón’s Guatemala: The Lines in Her Palm ... It was surprising, really, that there was so much to read about the little country that Flor, on crayoned schoolgirl maps, used to render as a flat-headed little duck looking back at its own tail feathers. I even owned a slim volume called The Guatemalan Positivists, about the influential circle of native scholars who, in the last century, proposed as a cure for the country’s total backwardness a systematic belief in the progress of man through his own efforts and the study of logical philosophy. I’m not saying I read that book cover to cover, but just flipping through it you got the idea. The Positivists paved the way for the Liberal Reforms of the Great Reformer, General Justo Rufino Barrios, who discerned the export potential of coffee and took the logical next steps of terminating traditional Indian land rights and inviting ambitious German pioneers from across the ocean to come and own and operate the new, giant coffee plantations. Decades later another positivist dictator built imitation Parthenonlike temples to the Goddess of Wisdom, Minerva, all across the countryside. Guatemala has the highest illiteracy rate in Central America but also the oldest university, San Carlos, Moya’s alma mater. And in the Strand bookstore I actually found a copy of a book written decades ago by a Cornell professor about nothing other than the history of that very university—which I’ve never actually gotten around to reading either, though I liked having it on my shelves among all those other brightly colored paperbacks with dramatic titles on the contemporary situation, its sober blue hardcover spine implying a deeper and more ironic take on Guatemalan history than I actually possessed and one that a working understand
ing of the contemporary situation probably doesn’t even warrant. (In Brooklyn, Moya, stooping down to scan my bottom shelves before he’d even taken off his coat with what seemed a privately bemused eye, said that Dracula was the best book on Guatemala ever written.) Needless to say, much of what I did actually read was written from a leftist point of view or could easily be made to fit with one, but Guatemala has not tended to attract intellectual defenders of the right. Four hundred years of repressing the Indian majority, dictatorship after dictatorship, one decade of democracy ended by a U.S.-sponsored coup that issued in the current thirty years of military rule—understandably, the Rightist Latinist is likely to find more that interests him in, say, Cuba. I was definitely an impressionable enough reader, but it wasn’t a political education I was looking for, nor was I necessarily trying to expand my worldview, which of course just reading about Guatemala isn’t going to do for you. What it all added up to was nothing more than a new way through my personal labyrinth, or a new kind of gravity, one that went through me like a secret dye, deepening the hues of my already in place heritage. To keep it there, to keep it from fading, all I really had to do was carry a book like Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas’s In Defense of the Indians around with me for weeks on end, opening it at random on subway rides into Manhattan and tuning back in to Las Casas’s 500-page monologue and formal argument, originally delivered four centuries ago before the Spanish Court’s Council of the Indies’ out loud and in Latin, against the Holy Roman Church’s and Bishop Sepúlveda’s position that the Indians of Mexico and Central America were no better than beasts. Las Casas named the Guatemalan province where he lived and worked for a while Vera Paz, True Peace, and of course since he left it that remote and mountainous area has known little of that—
Meanwhile I went on living in New York, tending bar, neither happy nor unhappy with this way of life, good enough at it and sure that one day I’d get around to changing it all. While a separate part of me went on living in Guatemala with Flor and the ghosts of centuries.
After Flor died I of course stopped all that. All those Guatemala books turned instantly to hateful junk, slumped together now on the shelves’ bottom tiers where Moya had immediately noticed them anyway, covered with the dirt blown over them by weekly, careless floor sweepings. I wouldn’t even look at the Times anymore, buying only the tabloids. (Though now and then, as often as once every few months, I’d catch the grisly word on page 1 of the Times at a newsstand or someone would mention having read something or seen it on the news. There’d been another coup, I knew that. General Ríos Montt, who’d replaced Lucas Garcia in a coup, was overthrown less than six months after Flor’s death by General Oscar Mejía Víctores, the portly brigadier, our current Jefe de Estado.) And I took down all those Guatemala artifacts—I’d been surrounded by this típico stuff since childhood, and had only put it all up and out in the first place because I didn’t know what else to decorate my apartment with: the carved Ancient Mayan Warrior lampstands that, removed from my mother’s decorative Copacabana context, had suddenly seemed pretty cool; the long-taken-for-granted colors of Indian weavings on my walls that really had, with time, and reading, and dwelling so much on Flor and her heroic work with war orphans in Guatemala, begun at last to take on some of the mysterious life of the (I’d thought I really knew now) oppressed and devout Indian women who’d woven them; the wooden ritual dance masks of Spanish conquistador and Moor, jaguar, monkey, and deer the life of the Indian men who’d carved and painted them just as their ancestors had been doing for centuries.
My ancestors too! Because one of my great-grandfathers was a fat and illiterate middle-aged Spaniard the day he arrived in Guatemala City with no prospects at all, only to squander a number of years hanging around in the capital, where he made friends with many powerful and positivistic people but stayed broke, until he drifted out to the Pacific lowlands, where a mute card reader signaled him his fortune by holding two fingers like horns up to her head. Whereupon he guessed, “The Devil?” and she slyly signaled yes and no, guess again, and he said, “Cattle?” Which is how he became a cattle rustler, riding all the way into El Salvador and even Honduras with his band of lowland thugs and stealing entire herds, only a portion of which made it back alive to the lowlands village he’d turned into his own ranch, where the survivors and offspring of his stolen herds proliferated on the lush, steaming plains. He became so wealthy that his friends in the capital named him mayor. Peasants had to remove their hats when passing his veranda. And he provided slaughtered and roasted ox and band music and fireworks every Sunday in the village plaza. He built shrines to the Virgin of Lourdes throughout the province. And he felt so obligated to spread his pure Spanish seed that Uncle Jorge says that to this day everyone in that area is our cousin, an anecdote my mother never includes in her phantasmic inventory of Pride and Nostalgia. He married the prettiest Indian girl he could find. His name was Francisco Medrano, and the pretty Pocomil Indian was Josefa Coc, and he found her one day when, out riding along the foothills just beyond the lowlands, he led his horse down for a drink to the rushing stream hidden by jungle at the bottom of a shallow barranca, and there, in a natural green pool along the opposite bank, bathing naked, was the young brown beauty with whom he began my ancestral line.
She was fifteen when she bore him his first child, and she died six years later while delivering his sixth child, but first daughter: Abuelita. That small and dainty-faced Indian girl who didn’t even speak Spanish, born a decade before the turn of the century and preserved in no one’s active memory but in one single hand-me-down photograph in my mother’s album, dressed in a black Mary Poppins suit with choker, her ebony hair up in dowager’s coils, was my great-grandmother? So that if she’d lived into old age I might well have visited her out at the ancestral hacienda and found her reverted to Indian ways, kneeling in the shade of a ceiba and weaving her own funeral huipil?
When Francisco Medrano died a decade after, it was of cancer of the tongue from so many years of licking his thumb to count out his money—telling that, you have to mime it like my mother does, thumb moving quickly back and forth between tongue and the invisible clump of bills in the hand.
The five sons inherited all the ranchlands and spawned five separate Medrano generational lines that apparently now have little to do with one another and almost nothing to do with we Arraus, city merchants, landlords, doctors, would-be venture capitalists. Abuelita, a ten-year-old girl, was dispatched with her ample dowry trunk to a boarding-finishing home owned by a Parisian widow in the capital.
My mother’s father, the illegitimate son of one Colonel Rogerio Arrau and his nearrest, dearrest, lifelong mistress, had mestizo bloodlines going back to the Conquest.
Does any of this mean anything? I was trying hard to believe that it did. I had a URNG guerrilla poster that I’d picked up at a solidarity fair on my wall too, smiling young Indian compañeros standing on the crumbling, growth-tufted steps of a partially excavated Maya pyramid in a jungle clearing, their FALs and AKs exultantly hoisted over their heads. Looking at it, I’d sometimes attempt the feasible act of feeling moved by the notion that that was ancestral ground too and that ancient relations of mine really had lived among such pyramids as royalty, priests, warriors, slaves—their hearts ripped out by jade blades on the sacrifice stone, tripping their brains out from hallucinogenic water hyacinth enemas. I have a minority share in that raza. Well, you might as well have told me I had ancestors on Mars. Taking that poster down and rolling it up, throwing it into my closet with the rest of Guatemala, I petulantly thought that that “liberated” pyramid wasn’t in Guatemala at all, but over the border in the safety of Mexico. That was when I was back in my apartment in Brooklyn, right after the funeral in Namoset. But it was already starting—Guatemala no existe—that night in our hotel room, when I felt so many of my embarrassing certainties, obsessions, gravity, and even love already seeping away, out through the sliding doors opened onto the balcony.
My father had fi
nally gotten an international phone line and was saying, “Well of course we’re bringing her home with us,” his exhausted voice rising. I looked over at him from my idle slump on the couch. He was slightly bent forward, the receiver held to his ear, the fingers of his other hand over his wallet in his back pocket as if protecting it from pickpockets.
“Mirabel,” he said after a while. “Aw Mirabel, be reasonable. Don’t make it tougher than it has to be.
“I have money set aside, I can—Mirabel . . . Don’t say that, she’s family . . . Well, she was to me. And she certainly was to your son. He has been a great help, a great help, he’s a brave kid, I am very proud of the way he’s been here . . .
“Yes, Nelson’s wife did phone and Jorge and Lisel have been very understanding . . . Mirabel, they haven’t said anything about it . . .”
After my father hung up the phone, he stood over it for a moment staring down, his hand still in his back pocket.
“Dad?” I said. “What’d Mom say?”
“What?” he said, looking at me.
“How’s Mom doing?”
“Imagine that,” he said, after a long moment, in a tone of voice that made it seem he was beginning a new conversation entirely. “Your mother thinks we should have buried Flor here.”
I found my mother’s suggestion so shocking that my first reaction was to feel stunned by the logic of it, as if it really was the obvious thing to do and incredible that we had overlooked it.
The Long Night of White Chickens Page 24
