The Long Night of White Chickens

by Francisco Goldman

  He pronounces “Nonfiction Narrative” like any self-important, jargon-struck grad student, his whole nature seems to change, Moya’s teeth turn to scissors for the few seconds it takes him to speak those words.

  On the train, in the bar car, when I was feeling hyper and fervent and more resolved than ever, ready to drink and talk a streak and on the verge of committing myself to go in on all this with him, I’d almost said, So go ahead, tell me about you and Flor, I’m going to hear it anyway, it’s probably even essential to our investigation that I do.

  Because we’d been talking around and around it, dwelling on all the outrageous particularities of the crime and on Flor herself and me and Flor, but not on Flor and Moya. What our talk had so far most revealed about Moya, I’d thought, was an extraordinary generosity. He’d put his own immediate needs and obsessions aside, devoting himself wholeheartedly to helping me decide what I should do.

  But now Moya was gazing with utterly lapsed expression out the window at the Connecticut seascape and had hardly touched his beer. The light from outside made him look even paler, dried out—losing his color from having no one to tell his love story to. It was my fault. It was, after all, what he’d come to Brooklyn to talk to me about. So I really was about to say, Go ahead, tell me, but the phrases that took shape in my thoughts dissipated on my lips. Instead it came out as “So who is this Sylvia McCourt? Just how did she get you into Harvard?”—because he’d already told me how, six months before, when it had become necessary for him to leave Guatemala for a while, a certain human rights organization had paid for his ticket out, and a professor named Sylvia McCourt had gotten him into Harvard.

  Moya came to in an instant. Just the mention of the Harvard professor made him lift his hands to the tabletop and look at me with a wry expression. He sat up straight, took a fast drink of his beer, grinned, and said, “Esa picara, vos. Cómo me jodio.” About Sylvia. That picara, meaning something like “that rascal,” friendlier than “bitch,” even admiring; jodio, “how she screwed, toyed, fucked with me.” “How?” I asked, and ended up getting an episodic narration of the young adult Moya’s political and amorous life, minus Flor—

  SIXTEEN

  Luis Moya Martínez does remember very well that long-ago train ride from New York to Boston. In Brooklyn and then on the train, Roger had given the impression that he did want to hear the details, any details, of what had transpired between his old friend, Luis Moya, and Flor de Mayo Puac. Pues, it almost seemed as if Roger didn’t believe it, and so would not dignify this unbelievably tasteless joke or fantasy or lie by ever mentioning it again. But of course he believed it, or else why was he there, on the El Minuto–man train to Boston with Moya, headed to tell his parents of his decision to return to Guatemala?

  But Moya did not actually need or desire a confessor, and the offering of such confessions and confidences is not exactly in his nature. (Secrecy is a church, vos.) He wanted something else from Roger, what only Roger was in a position to remember and tell; though Moya doesn’t think it immodest to add that he also then believed he was offering his old friend a great or at least interesting opportunity. In truth, Roger’s life in New York did not seem so stimulating, he seemed to have become something of a deadbeat there.

  Flor had had sisterly concern about this, sometimes even saying, “Maybe Roger should come down here for a while. It might be just what he needs.” Even at a time when she was often rhetorically asking herself, in Moya’s presence, why she had ever come at all or stayed so long who needs this fucking heartbreaking hellhole I want to go someplace unpolluted is there any place like that Moya? Oh gosh, how would you know? . . . (How would Moya know.)

  The true mystery of the life and death of Flor de Mayo Puac—Why she came? Why she stayed? As for Los Quetzalitos, she always claimed to have just fallen into it, just as, it is true, Moya could claim to have just fallen into newspaper work and thus all that came after.

  Flor said, “Maybe you could help Roger get started in journalism.”

  Moya said, “Rogerio is going to come and work at El Minuto for forty quetzales a week? I don’t see it, my love.”

  And Flor laughed, “Ay Moya, por favor, no seas tan imbécil! Maybe he could pick up a string or something. He probably thinks it’s really hard to become a correspondent. I mean, hah. At least he speaks Spanish. And, after all, he is half Guatemalan.”

  “Whatever that means,” remarked Moya.

  “It can mean nothing or it can mean whatever he decides to make of it, this is the nature of the bicultural opportunity, you know what I mean?”

  “Opportunity?” asked Moya.

  “You know that famous definition of surrealism, don’t you? The chance meeting of an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissecting table?”

  “Ahá, sí pues.”

  “Well what about a gringo Russian Jew and a Guatemalan fufurufa Catholic on a dissecting table . . . ?”

  After a moment, Moya said, “In a way this would be true of you too, verdad? Puta, quadcultural, in the sense that all chapines are at least tricultural, or at least, as you put it, there is this opportunity. Spanish, Indian, the synthesis.”

  “In a way, uh-huh. Culturally, I guess,” she said. “Though for me, and I bet for you too, Moya, the synthesis, such as it is, is really all there is, and I wonder to what degree it actually is a synthesis, and not something else. How Indian do you actually feel, ever? Spiritually, that is. I’m not talking about toothaches, or the political ache. But even the average tourist probably sees as much of the highlands as you have in your whole life, am I right? So OK, Guatemala, in what we like to think of as its deepest self, is Mayan. We, who aren’t actually Indian, what is it we absorb? Not that supposed Indian lack of egocentrism, that community and cosmos first stuff, that’s for sure. Oh yes, we can and should learn from it, but I don’t think we do, much.”

  “A heavy spirit. A weightiness that feels Indian.”

  “Oh come on, you don’t have a heavy spirit.”

  “But I do! This buoyancy surrounds it like a rag bundle that I am smart to never look inside of.”

  “Uh-huh. And the ancient wisdom is in there too, I suppose.”

  “No. What wisdom I have has been gained in this life, I am sure.”

  “At the Colegio Anne Hunt.” She laughed. “As usual when we get on this subject, we soon begin to disguise our confusion and even guilt with the usual pretentious clichés.”

  “Verdad?”

  Moya—who did detect in his boyhood friend a yearning for something beyond his bartender’s life—offered Roger the chance to be a protagonist in a true-life adventure, one fired by indignation, repudiation, the desire for just vengeance or simply desire, and not without peril. Youth doesn’t last forever, vos.

  Truthfully, Moya thought his old friend “Rogerio” seemed like a really nice guy. And bartending had at least taught him the art of likability, which was not a bad thing to possess, it could open doors, even in Guatemala where—How should Moya put it? At Harvard one day, browsing in a bookstore in that paradise of bookstores, Moya happened to flip open an apparently much esteemed gringo novel, wherein his eyes instantly fastened on the sentence: “He had that Latin American likability.”—Puta! Was that really a known generalization anywhere on earth, that Latinos, as opposed, say, to Germans, are likable? Likable to whom, vos? But Moya read it, in this book, which he then stood swaying and mumbling over like those Orthodox Jews with their Bibles he was to see later on a subway platform in New York. Because who especially likes Argentines? Or Peruvians, for that matter, those preening blond hidalguitos from the gilded seaside barrios of Lima (there was one in his seminar on the Romantics at Harvard and this pubic-hair-yanked-from-Lima thought he was Shelley, vos, for his oral presentation he actually pretended to be Shelley, and when he was finished the impressed prof actually said, Gracias, Don Shelley, and soon a certain exquisitely beautiful classmate named Ariadne was loving Shelley rather than Moya). Costa Ricans are the Argentines of Centra
l America and Hondurans are too stupid to be hated by anyone except Salvadorans so Guatemalans hate Mexicans when they are taking a break from hating themselves and each other, but, hombre! of this Moya is sure, guatemaltecos are not especially likable—vos, the land of mala sangre? bad blood? a nation not born of the first Malinche Azteca but a nation unborn from a whole brood of humiliated and violated malinches maya impregnated by that genocidal lunatic, cheater at dice, and instigator of La Noche Triste, Cortéz’s banished lieutenant, Don Pedro de Alvarado; to the north, a mestizo nation born of the love between a Malinche and a Cortéz, but down here a stillborn morass, not even a nation, vos, ladino-mestizo cities, Indian mountains, and not exactly a fraternal relationship between them. Sure, some are excellent, but the man who wrote of Latin American likability could not have met many chapines, vos.

  But Rogerio, he was pretty likable, though yanqui as apple pie (an apple pie with a Maya nose). What pierced Moya about that likability was that it invoked Flor, made her seem close by. Roger and Flor were very different, but some things Moya had thought only Flor did, he soon realized that Roger did too. In Namoset, in the kitchen, Moya watched Roger peel a tangerine while they continued conversing. From inside the peel he stripped the white navel and stringy white membrane, pinching it with his fingers until he’d fashioned a small eight-legged white spider, which he set down without comment on the table. Moya had seen Flor do that, on the beach at Puerto San José, though she had marched hers from Moya’s chin all the way down his bare belly and past his navel—Moya had quipped, “Innocent little spider.” Then “innocent as a spider” had entered both their vocabularies, and has lived on in Moya’s. “El Gordo was innocent as a spider, but they took him—”

  On the El Minuto-man train, Moya prodded Roger. (“What was it like, Rogerio, that one summer that Flor did come to Guatemala with you?”) He knew Roger was still in something of a state of shock; an immense new hole had just been opened up in Roger’s life, and in the bar car he seemed to be trying to fill it, draining beer after beer. It was near sundown when the train rolled past a long repertoire of waters: marshes, suddenly a beach in a cove (adults strolling on that beach actually stopped and waved vigorously at the train, just as happy peasants in their maize fields like to wave at anything that goes by), the horizonless vista of a bay. This was when the conductor, an elderly Irishman with an alcoholic’s raw nose, came down the aisle speaking quietly though rhapsodically and as if only to himself about the bay at sunset, which he said he had the opportunity to see almost daily and found more beautiful each time and that it was enough to make anyone believe in God. The bar car’s passengers all heard him and the effect was unanimous: everyone looked out the window, falling reverentially silent. Moya looked out at the soft yet brilliant blues, the dissolving pinks, the jubilant greens of sea grasses and trees along the curving shore. After a while he reflected that with the exception of there being not even one volcano on the horizon, this vast waterscape could be Lago Atitlán at a similar hour. Except that lake inevitably conjured thoughts of evil spirits and demons, of dervish winds springing from the middle of the lake to pull Indian fishermen under, an unfriendly and forbidding lake that tourists often regard in an opposite way, comparing it favorably with those of Switzerland and Como, Italy. They say, that is the Indians supposedly say, that the wind that blows across that lake from north to south does so only when someone has drowned, because La Dueña, the Goddess of the Lake, doesn’t want Indian corpses putrefying and befouling her crystalline depths, she just wants their spirits, so she makes that wind blow until those drowned Indian fishermen bob up amidst the reeds and floating pumice stones along the shore. What does Moya make of such myths? (apart from the recurring rejoinder: Typical of a goddess!) Water is water vos, gringos, por ejemplo, have sturdier boats, they don’t toss their fishing nets in and fall in with them, they wear life preservers, and, most important, they all learn to swim. Here Moya feels totally ill at ease . . .

  Moya does like to imagine a Guatemala so evolved from its present darkness that one day a future president, a cultured and worldly man, addressing the United Nations, might choose to do so in Tzutuhil Maya, his first, his native village tongue. And if Moya himself should ever gain such ultimate power, claro, what a sweeping land reform he would enact, returning, ipso facto, much ancestral land. Perhaps the most just Guatemala, or at least one expressive of the interests of the majority, would be one that Moya, no lover of farm life or of any form of ethnic nationalism, would feel compelled to flee, if only out of boredom—to Paris, with a clean conscience at last, vos!

  Flor had been right: the average tourist saw as much of the Indian altiplano, the highlands, as Moya had; the same could be said for most Guatemala City ladinos, who rarely ventured beyond the tourist towns as well. But for Moya, trapped but always busy in his crowded urban grid, even travel to the tourist towns was risky, and to venture beyond them, completely proscribed. The highways through the milpas (maize fields) and mountains were deserted. Military roadblocks were common. Sometimes men wearing black hoods with holes cut over the eyes were accompanied by soldiers onto the buses, and then people, peasants mostly, innocent as spiders, were pointed out by the black-hooded men, taken off, never seen again; the practical effectiveness of terror owes much to such theatrics. Out there Moya could easily be snatched, and by the time a foreign human rights organization heard about it. . . oh, too late; and no “witnesses,” none that would talk.

  Los Quetzalitos was home to many Indian orphans. In the yard, little girls played at being their past selves, kneeling in a circle, patting out tortillas from mud. The orphanage, of course, was conducted in Spanish, it had to be, and the children soon adapted. But with sudden bursts of Indian dialect and snatches of song, orphans often took Flor and even themselves by surprise. Roger had spied on a boy with a laundry hamper strapped to his back, pretending to be a turtle, but was that in any way suggestive of an indigenous atavism? Some private remnant of son and dance? A celebration of a nahual, a child’s animal double and protective spirit? Saber. Who knows. Flor, who did know a bit about all this, once told Moya of an Indian belief that children separated from their villages had been separated from their souls. If they died, and were buried far from their villages, then their souls would forever wander, in exile from the world of the ancestors.

  “Strange to think,” she whispered, solemnly, “that under this very roof, then, are scores of little children who have been separated from their souls.”

  “So you are saying,” said Moya, “that adult souls are portable, but children’s are not.”

  “Apparently,” she said. “And, believe me, nothing in the clinical orphanage literature tells you how to deal with that.”

  “And when they go to Sweden or Paris to become Swedes and Frenchmen, do they remain separated from ancestral souls?” asked Moya. “Or do they then receive Swedish or French ones? Like that Indian boy you sent over to receive a Swedish kidney.”

  “Something like that probably takes place, yeah.”

  Flor could get quite carried away with these things, almost like a child trying to frighten herself. But of coursé, growing up in the desert, she’d been exposed to many superstitions, though she was ambivalent towards this aspect of herself. Once, during a trying conversation in her room, Moya said, “You have to trust me. I know you don’t believe it, but we could have a great life together. My faith will carry both of us,” and for emphasis he rapped his knuckles on the edge of her rosewood desk and she exclaimed, “Oh no! Don’t tell me you’re getting superstitious! That would be too much! I need you not to be!” Another time, in a more rational mood, she explained the tiny old man-monsters with beards called los wins whom some of the orphans apparently feared. “Well, think about it,” said Flor. “They had corn milpas outside their huts. Ears of corn have beards. Looking into a milpa at night, they could imagine it was the wins out there, tiny wicked faces with beards, making the corn move and laugh. So you see where some of this comes from. Th
eir mothers used to tell them about the wins to keep them from straying off from their huts at night.” But once, standing in line outside a movie theater, Flor had met an Indian shaman, a brujo. He was well dressed though, fairly young, wearing a Swatch watch; he had once been a seminarian and then rediscovered la vía autóctona, the sacred Maya way. He worked part-time as a computer programmer. He claimed to have great powers. They went out for drinks. A few nights later he came and visited her at Los Quetzalitos. Outside, in the yard, sitting on rungs of Ozzie Peterkins’s jungle gym, under the trees in the yard, he became very intense. He said, “You must trust me. If you don’t trust me, it won’t work. You must clear your mind of all suspicion you might have of me.” He held both her hands.

  “So you trusted him,” said Moya, but Flor ignored the innuendo in his voice. Suddenly, she said, all the leaves on all the trees and bushes in the yard, eucalyptus and avocado up high, hibiscus and bougainvillea below, took on a buttery glow and began to rattle and shake in unison, not even as if from a strong wind, because there was no wind, but as if the night air had sprouted a tiny hand for every leaf high and low, which in unison were shaking them all up and down. Then it stopped. The brujo said, “You have stopped trusting me.”

  Flor laughed, “True, I had. He had one hand halfway up my arm under my sleeve, and another right inside my thigh. Chapines, even brujos, never just want to talk, do they? He said that if I went to bed with him then he would know I’d freed myself from all suspicion or doubt, and that then he would teach me everything. I said, Can’t we just be friends? Oh well, he didn’t want that. But he really did that with the leaves. Maybe I was hypnotized, Moya, but I saw it. Do you really think he could have taught me how to do that?”