The Long Night of White Chickens

by Francisco Goldman

  They were staying in the motel on the cliff overlooking Route 128, on the outskirts of Namoset, by the Industrial Zone. I went the next morning to have breakfast with Delmi in the House of Pancakes, and while we were sitting there, I guess it’s pertinent to add, since it happened, Danny Ainge, the Boston Celtics guard, the Mormon from Brigham Young, drove up in a big car, a Cadillac probably, and came in for breakfast too, looking much taller than he does on TV among the real giants.

  Delmi was full of nostalgia, and much more relaxed than she’d been in front of my parents. She went on and on about the convent orphanage days as if they’d been the happiest times anyone could imagine.

  “Boys used to fly kites with messages for us over the walls. Sometimes they didn’t even know our names. They’d write, For the patoja with curly hair. Or, For the one who looks like a beautiful rabbit. We’d argue over who they were for, and try to lift each other up over the wall to peek at them . . .”

  But I kept thinking of the story Flor had told me four years before, in the one reggae bar in Guatemala City, a story that seemed so incredible and ridiculous that I’d thought she was just pulling my leg, dramatizing for the hell of it—I almost would have refused to believe any of it if Flor hadn’t put so much effort into telling it.

  “I know it’s really weer sounding,” Flor had said, “but I’m telling you, cross my heart. . .” Delmi, after a few years, had left her job with the family in Chestnut Hill, moved into an apartment of her own, and started working in the Combat Zone as a stripper. Then she became addicted to drugs.

  “What drugs?”

  “I don’t know. Every drug.” Flor never knew much about drugs.

  And then Delmi had ended up in a lesbian bordello somewhere in Mattapan.

  “A lesbian bordello? There’s no such thing.”

  “No such thing! I was there! I went to rescue her! That lady had a whole house, and it was a lesbian bordello! Rogerio, you don’t know the things that can happen to a Guatemalan girl living on her own in the city. She didn’t have someone like Ira to protect her. It really was like the Devil got into her. I know, but that was what it was like.”

  Flor said the madam there kept Delmi stuporous and chained by her drug habit, completely out of it. Flor went in and slapped Delmi hard in the face several times and made a big commotion and dragged her outside and into the car where Tony was waiting. And then Tony kept her locked up in his apartment for three months, until her addiction was broken. This, if it was to be believed, had happened when Flor was in the ninth grade, and no one in my family had known a thing about it. That was back when my father’s biggest worry was that Flor was going to blow everything by getting married to Tony.

  Flor usually had a lot of tact, at least where I was concerned. Almost by natural disposition, she was incredibly protective of me. It wasn’t until the last years that she started telling me things I’d never known or even suspected.

  On one of her last trips to New York she told me that during her first year with us she’d thought often of leaving us because our house was so unhappy. Maybe the benumbed, comfortable giddiness of a day in the sun was responsible for this: we’d taken the train to Jones Beach together, and now we were having iced margaritas in the air-conditioned, pastel melon ambience of a Tex-Mex restaurant downtown. I’d said something about a college friend I’d gone to visit in Houston. And Flor brushed hair flayed by ocean winds out of her half–closed eyes, her pupils had a skittish black gleam, as if being buffeted by the uncontrollable thoughts slipping from a sun and margarita–sated mind, and she said, “Oh yeah, Houston—You know, I almost had a job there once. In Dallas. As a mayyyyd. Fíjese. This was during my first year with you ...”

  And it just came out. She’d even written to the Espíritu Santo nuns asking them to find her another job and they eventually wrote back to tell her of one in Dallas and she almost took it. Because it used to break her heart the way my mother would stay in bed on Sunday mornings, sobbing. I had never heard of this. Flor said she used to keep me downstairs, so I wouldn’t hear it, my mother in the bedroom sobbing. It made Flor feel so helpless and lonely. But what would my father do? After a while he gave up. He’d go outside and do yard work, or he’d sit in his chair reading the Sunday papers, or he’d go into Boston to play cards. “And then the things Mirabel would tell me later, she had no one else to talk to, and I, who was I? What did I know?” There was so much sadness in the house, but that’s why she’d stayed, because of me, to protect me from it and to love me.

  Where do the what ifs stop and does a logic other than chance take over? (What if Señor Soto Hijo hadn’t decapitated Flor’s father? if La Gatita hadn’t driven her to the Las Hermanas del Espíritu Santo? if I hadn’t contracted TB? if my mother hadn’t agreed to try to reconcile with my father? if Abuelita hadn’t chosen Flor but another girl, even Delmi Ramírez, instead?) With that, Flor’s decision to stay with us in Namoset instead of going to Dallas (because of me), doesn’t it stop being chance and become something else? It becomes Flor de Mayo, leading to everything else.

  FIFTEEN

  My mother had worried that I would not get to see enough love between her and my father, so she had thought Flor could provide a replacement, then Flor had mesmerized me like a witch. And as if that were all there ever was to it, with Flor’s death the black (or white) magic spell that had held my family together dissolved. My mother, determined to start over, moved into an apartment in Boston, near the Quincy Market waterfront. And my father was left alone in the small house on Codrioli Road that Namoset teenagers had liked to call the Copacabana as if in celebration of all the happy illusions inside. Well, the house, now that all but one of those illusions were gone, couldn’t just get up and rumba away, could it (leaving behind the gaping pit of the basement foundation where the beautiful demon from Chiquimula had conceived and raised herself)?

  Like a true hero, in the face of all pessimism, my father was determined to hold on to the last illusion: he wanted to clear Flor’s name, as if only by his doing that could some of life’s old sparkle return. He wrote regularly to congressmen, who ignored him, and every other week phoned Consul Simms in Guatemala, who didn’t, though the news was always the same, no news; no more was known with any certainty than had ever been known. We spoke frequently, of course, and sometimes I took the train up to Boston to see my parents separately on my days off. But I refused even to reminisce, to talk much about Flor. Guilt was my mask: like it was my fault, me who had originally convinced my father, arguing so passionately in defense of Flor’s being in Guatemala at all. Of course back then my compelling arguments had little pleased my mother, because she’d always thought my so-called paralysis was a result of my feeling so thoroughly outdone by Flor that all I wanted to do was bask in the glow of our long association and that this was just the latest manifestation. Definitely an exaggeration, I used to insist.

  It was my mother, who, in the months after Flor’s death, displayed the most striking gift for survival and happiness. She just swept the past out of her way. She, who, after all, should have known her own country best, found a way to blame it for almost everything. Because of Flor, she felt she could no longer comfortably go back there, and said she didn’t want to anyway. It was because of her own “guatemalidad” that she had remained innocent for so long after she was no longer blind, accepting what she shouldn’t have out of life because she hadn’t been able to get out from under Abuelita’s mandates. Now she was occasionally heard to say that she was so ashamed of her native country’s notoriety she was even thinking of renouncing her citizenship. As vice president of the Latin American Society of Boston, it was my mother who moved to cancel the annual Guatemala party in protest of the human rights violations there, though it is also true that the society had already canceled that party two years in a row for the same reason. But she still went on Channel 63 at Christmas as she does every year with some of her prep school Spanish class girls dressed in Indian traje to tell about Christmas in Guat
emala, to sing a posada song accompanied by my mother knocking out the tica-toca-tic rhythm with a stick on a large turtle shell cradled under her arm. Certainly a sweet and harmless enough thing to want to do, I’ve always thought.

  Before long my mother was seeing an Argentine heart specialist, several years younger than herself, who practices at Mass General—that is, they were romantically involved. But I’d first heard mention of him a few years before, as the so distinguished-looking clarinetist (who was also a surgeon) in the amateur Dixieland jazz band that every Tuesday night for years has been playing in a certain Mexican restaurant that my mother and her colleagues have long liked to frequent for margaritas and such following Tuesday night organizational meetings of the Latin American Society of Boston. My mother certainly deserves this kind of happiness; she said she’d only started seeing him recently, I didn’t press the point.

  She must have been thinking, though she never would have put it so blatantly, Well, now you are left with your own life, Roger. Get on with it. I knew that was true enough, and tried to behave, outwardly at least, as if composing myself to “get on with it” was just what I was doing. Of course no one could have expected that I wouldn’t grieve deeply. I needed time to heal. But what exactly was there to get on with? To try to clean Guatemala out of my life had seemed a sane, if only symbolic, first step—Soon I felt I didn’t even have a history. I didn’t know what I was trying to heal. Had I lost a relative, a sister as it were? A best friend? A myth? A metaphysical lover? A lie? My own history?

  There were too many questions. I couldn’t handle it. I let my thoughts, my sadness and anger take a relentless course inside of me. If this was about the end of illusions, then I wanted to get on with that, smash them all up, be truthful and even brutal about it. Maybe that was how to heal. I told myself stories and learned that I could be made of the ones I chose to tell, not simply the ones that life had laid haphazardly around me. But now I chose to tell them silently, and only to myself. I wanted to purge myself of all the old stories, or at least learn to look at them in a new, mean way. Remember the night my father had his two in the morning gallbladder attack in the Howard Johnson’s Motel on Eighth Avenue in New York City?—tending bar, where I was working six nights a week and taking as many double shifts as I could get, I told this and other stories to myself, corrupting every detail, nourishing myself on them like a ravenous ghost while as if in some separate dimension I went on amiably pouring drinks, bantering with customers; and even kept up my cheerfully tepid affair with Cathy Miller, who understood that my cold good cheer was a form of macho self-repression and denial, and that it was not the right time to press me for a commitment. But I wasn’t repressing or denying anything, I thought I was doing the opposite, but silently, in that way of talking to yourself that isn’t even quite inner monologue because you’re hardly conscious of using words though of course you are. That morning we saw Harvard lose to Columbia and their great quarterback Marty Domres at Baker Field and in the evening we dined at some fancy restaurant with an old boyhood friend of my father’s named the Camel and his wife. Flor was nineteen and in the ninth grade. She was in her sophisticated stage and always asked the waiters for steak tartare even if it wasn’t printed on the menu but they had it for once and I had the duck à I ‘orange because it was what I always ordered after Harvard games when we were on the road because though I really liked duck à l’orange I knew I would let my father down if I ordered anything else, had known it ever since that evening years before at an alumni-crowded restaurant after the game Princeton won because they had the great fullback named Cosmo with a long Polish last name beginning with K when a tall red-faced Texan who was actually wearing a cowboy hat and boots with his suit and Tiger tie stopped at our table on his way out to say that he’d been watching me relishing and devouring that ole duck à l’orange and that he envied my father for having a little boy with such a good hearty appetite, because his own son, who was evidently my age—and who stood behind his father limply glowering at me and who did, in fact, look kind of sallow and ill nourished—never ordered anything but hamburger and mainly, dang it, because he liked the french fries and licking catsup off the bun. This garrulous Texan had obviously had a few drinks, but still, his words had a great effect, everyone on earth soon heard of them. From then on I was little Roger who, after his Harvard game, just has to have his duck à l’orange, he picks the bones clean. The sulking sons of Texas millionaires ordered hamburgers, licked catsup off the buns, they made their fathers less proud. I would let mine down if I ordered anything else, not because of the dish itself or even what it symbolized though partly that but because it had become part of the ritual and this, Flor and I both tacitly understood, was what mattered most, my father’s enjoyment of the ritual—tending bar, bantering away and telling myself all this, my cruel stories, and trying to make them even meaner—Steak tartare, oh yeah? Duck à l’orange! Oh sure. We’ve sure as hell lived up to all the shiny, lying promise of that fucking duck—

  Fifteen months after the funeral and one month after he had run into my mother at that Latin American Society of Boston event, Moya, then at Harvard on the special scholarship that saved him from death threats in Guatemala, came to Brooklyn.

  “. . .”

  “You mean you didn’t know?”

  “What do you mean I didn’t know?”

  “Oh Rogerio!”

  “What? What didn’t I know?”

  “This was all a fafero job. Everybody knew that, within days, vos!”

  “What? What the fuck’s a fafero?”

  “What’s a fafero!”

  “What’s a fafero! C’mon Moya, don’t dick me around!”

  “Ay no. It’s a reporter who takes fafas, vos—bribes.”

  “. . . You mean Consul Simms knew this?”

  “He must have known eventually. Within days, vos.”

  “. . .”

  “Or maybe not, vos. You know how it is, they don’t leave the embassy so much. Some things they are the last to know.”

  “. . .”

  “It isn’t a consul’s work to go around shouting fafa at Guatemala. Rogerio, do you know how unextraordinary this whole story was? Within weeks everybody forgot about it, forgot about Flor de Mayo . . .”

  “. . .”

  “Not forgot her, but, you know. I did not forget! But something like this is always happening. And who is going to make the big deal if it is common knowledge?”

  “—-Jesus. My relatives knew?”

  “Pues, not that everybody.”

  “I don’t—”

  It was in the Brooklyn Museum café, just about the only place to get a cup of coffee in my neighborhood, that Moya and I had this conversation. And it wasn’t even what he’d come to Brooklyn to tell me. Mainly he’d come to tell me about his love affair with Flor. He’d thought I already knew about the rest: about the faferos, and then the clandestine fattening house’s true owners. This sounds like bombshell information, I know, but I’ve already warned that it isn’t really. Of course I didn’t really understand that back then, in Brooklyn, I mean at first, though Moya tried hard to make it clear enough.

  So this was it, Moya’s info: The police discovered, by accident, perhaps, a casa de engordes, a fattening house, a house for hiding children. So maybe, said Moya, some honest or corrupt but certainly bobo policeman found the house and thought he was going to “make a big bribe and then discovered that he was really made of shit . . .”

  Because the house belonged to the sister and sister-in-law of López Nub. General López Nub who is now defense minister but at the time of Flor’s death was Coronel López Nub in charge of a garrison in the highland department of Quiche, and then later one of the conspirators and beneficiaries of the coup against Ríos Montt—“Un coronel muy poderoso,” said Moya. “Anyone announces that, vos, prints that, about this house, and they are dead tomorrow. So the police are sitting on this like an egg they are too frightened to hatch. For how long? Weeks, days, so
mething like that . . .” But the rumors were coming out, because even sun shrunken and tiny like a raisin bobo ambulatory police will talk, that a fattening house belonging to someone más o menos importante had been found—

  “. . . Then, suddenly, puta, a few days or even weeks after, Flor de Mayo is killed. And the police come out and say, See, we found this house yesterday, and now this woman is dead. It was her house. We captured this niñera. And the faferos begin to earn their money.”

  So there was Moya, in his navy blue arctic parka with its neon orange fake fur—trimmed hood, his pallor after a winter in Cambridge almost as yellowy and sickly as that of the Warhol print of Someone or Other on the museum café wall, telling me all this, which he’d thought I already knew and which, I’d see, didn’t matter anyway because— I lit another cigarette and he said, “I haven’t seen anyone do this for a long time. Smoke one cigarette right after another.” I glared at him, frantic, and said, “Well what the fuck? The general, the army killed Flor?”

  And he said, “No, hombre, I don’t think so— But you will see—Cálmate, vos . . . You will see, it does not change things so much, Rogerio. Because— pues, why?”

  The house belonged to López Nub’s sister and cuñada (sister-in-law), a fact, if it is a fact, that Moya regarded as not even coincidental but as part of a ceaseless pattern, an ever-present camouflage that anyone else could have hidden behind (murderous chafas, colonels, and generals, reflecting the illusion of evermore as if in facing mirrors . . .)

  “So who would dare to have put pressure on then Coronel López Nub to extort or embarrass him? Who else could have ordered police to that house, could organize such a plot to extort or embarrass except other even more powerful military men? But how many of these powerful chafas do not have relatives involved in criminal activities, vos? As long as it is just rumors and not an official accusation from a military tribunal, so what? So who is going to do this to a coronel, vos? Not even General Ríos Montt, unless a coup against himself is all he is wishing for. And Coronel López Nub, he is up in the Quiche waging contra-insurgencia, fighting guerrillas, burning villages—it is going to occur to this exceptionally busy man to get rid of this threat to his sister and cuñada and to his own family name in a country where no one expects a coronel to have a clean family name, by murdering this woman he has probably never even thought of so that she can be blamed? And to have her killed with a knife, a wound that with a little luck she survives?”