The Long Night of White Chickens

by Francisco Goldman

  So there—then—was Moya, out on the balcón, inwardly arranging himself for the tricky combat of the next hour or two: be noticed in just the right way, capture this Sylvia McCourt’s attention in just the right way. He always employed the same method: to be very cautious and subtle in what he actually said, while hinting in various quietly vigorous ways that he would be able to say a lot more in different, less guarded circumstances if he wanted to (until Sylvia just had to get him alone).

  Early on it was still time to hang back and let the others fray Sylvia’s attention a bit. Moya leaned against the smooth concrete rail, neither drinking nor smoking, barely listening in, biding his time, peering down over Teresa’s potted geraniums and letting his thoughts drift off with the view below, which was filling him with a familiar, if always initially estranging, nostalgia for his Colegio Anne Hunt days, and for Anne Hunt girls, quite a few of whom lived, or used to live because every single one of them was married now, in the very houses he was now hovering over as if in a helicopter. Hombre, he’d come a long way in the six years since he’d graduated from that school, such abrupt changes in his life: La U, with all its hard-core political ferment, intrigues, and mortal danger, then the newspaper, his rapid and precarious rise to relative prominence there.

  Back then, when he was a teenage scholarship student at Anne Hunt, instead of satellite dishes tuned in to every television channel in the sky, those houses had Betamaxes inside, and Moya found himself recalling the almost unbearable sweetness of the long-ago afternoon when he’d made out with Patti Mundinger in her den for the first time while a rented movie played: The Hindenburg, a burning Nazi blimp and Germans in flames screaming and leaping from it while his tongue played with Patti’s in a rich delirium made up of her constantly replenished lipstick, her baby-clean breath, her perfume and the English garden fragrance of her freshly shampooed hair, her flickering gray eyes fixed on his with a startled, radiant studiousness that startled him right back. He held her delicate torso against him on the leather sofa, one hand playing with her buoyant little breasts through the fine fabric of her blouse and tenacious little bra for hours. Suddenly Patti’s elderly urban-finquero father came into the room unannounced to say hello, receive a kiss on his cheek from his only daughter, and politely shake his visitor’s hand. Moya stood and coped, wondering if the old caballero was noticing what felt like a stain on his pale woolen pants and the erection swelling beneath it, not to mention the lipstick smeared on his face, wondering how the old man couldn’t, and realizing in the next instant that this was the kind of old man who made it a point of honor not to notice much at all.

  “Mucho gusto,” said Patti’s papa, after he’d shaken Moya’s hand. “Your father is Enrique Moya, the son of Violeta Rademan de Moya, no?”

  “No,” said Moya, smiling, showing all his teeth.

  “Ah bueno, let us stay out of that labyrinth then,” said the old man, who with another handshake left the room.

  Later, breaking the lovers apart again, a bashfully smiling maid with a frozen shrug came in carrying a large silver platter holding chocolate cake and fresh-ground export-quality coffee poured from an antique silver urn into delicate china cups rimmed with actual gold and decorated with painted birds of paradise.

  “Do you like coffee, Moya?” Patti spoke in a voice so sweetened by the excitement of love that it sounded to Moya as if she were asking if he felt the same about her.

  “Of course!”

  “Well, we own five plantations.”

  “Ajá.”

  She giggled delightfully. “I mean this is our coffee, from our fincas, that’s all. We’ve got tons of this caca.”

  “. . . It’s delicious, vos!” It was the best coffee Moya had ever tasted.

  Patti Mundinger! I couldn’t believe it! “Almost pretty,” insisted Moya on the train, suddenly seized by her again, all these years later. “Anyway, a certain something. And a little bit of a rebel, vos, truly.” Aflaquita, skinny, with ivory, gold-flecked skin and straight, reddish hair all the way down to her tiny waist and big gray eyes and kind of a rabbity nose and mouth, and that cheerful, fluttery nervousness, like inside she was full of butterflies. The summer that I was fourteen was my last at the Colegio Anne Hunt, so I hadn’t set eyes on little Patti Mundinger in twelve years, but I instantly recalled that pretty and lightly borne nerviness, and the way she’d seem to set her attention down on any arbitrary thing and then get woken up from it in a startled panic. This, I’d thought then, was a true sign of unconquerable dumbness. We were eleven the summer that I watched from two desks away while Patti spent the whole morning in a trance, pressing and twirling and twirling a sharpened pencil against a fingernail on the hand she held flat against her desk . . . until finally she jumped up in stunned horror over the lead-smeared hole she’d drilled right through the center of her nail and the blood beading from it. With swooning steps Patti made her way up the aisle, not saying anything, on the verge of fainting, holding her hand up so the teacher could see. She was rushed to a hospital. And then Anne Hunt herself stormed the classroom, accusing all of us of having seen what Patti had been doing and doing nothing to stop it. Which was true enough. Though we all, Moya included, insisted in unison that we’d been paying too much attention to the blackboard to notice. Anne Hunt exploded, uncharacteristically blurting that it was because of children like us that Guatemala would always be a primitive country, completely uncivilized, because none of us cared, and if Patti died of lead poisoning it was our fault. It hadn’t occurred to any of us that what we’d witnessed was a suicide attempt. I remember leaving school that day under a dark cloud, all of us feeling that we ought to rush off to church and pray for Patti. Even the most boisterous and sadistic of the cabroncitos were solemn. It all gave power and mystery to poor Patti’s inscrutable little rite of self-immolation, so that we had to wonder what was really going on inside that cheerfully distracted, high-strung, and suddenly unnerving girl, and feel scared for her. Though I have to say I never saw her do anything that fascinating again.

  But see, things did get to Patti, said Moya. The violence really started to get to her. That was during Moya’s final year at Anne Hunt, the year of the devastating earthquake of February ‘76 and the crackdown against the church reconstruction organizations and their volunteers, for the army and the Right knew that well-meaning city youth were easily led astray when they went up to the mountains or into the slums to help poor people; before long the guerrillas were strong again.

  Patti was seventeen and falling in love with Moya, but soon the violence was all she wanted to talk about with him.

  “Moya, last night I heard shots, and you know what kind of shots? Two. Just little seconds apart. Pap then pap. And then silence, do you know what I’m saying?” Patti’s small voice would break. “Moya, yesterday morning our neighbor went out for his jog, and he ran by three bodies.” She saw no humor in it. “Moya, you know what I thought during the earthquake, when we were afraid of the aftershocks and had to sleep outside? I thought, Look at us, the rich, shut out of instead of into our homes by fear for a change! Turning things inside out like that, I saw what we are made of. Fear! Is that crazy?”

  She said she was afraid of dying. No, worse, she was afraid of getting used to it. So many people were dying and the worst thing that could happen to you, she speculated with touching uncertainty, would be to get used to it, close your eyes to it, because that would be a death in life, right, Moya?

  Moya agreed. But he wasn’t absolutely sure. Maybe there were worse things that could happen to you. Vos, this remains one of the big questions raised by life in Guatemala!

  But none of the other girls at Anne Hunt ever talked that way. Maybe they were not as sensitive. They were not supposed to be, they weren’t supposed to notice, they were raised to keep their eyes cheerfully closed to all of it. Meaning to impress, but slyly, they might say, “We should all do something to help the poor starving Indians,” but then they’d let you know they meant the in Indi
a Indians, and then they’d giggle, so cute, so deliciously sly. But look what happened to the Miss Guatemala who was disappeared! She’d had ties to the guerrillas, it was her lover who dragged her into it. You see what can happen even to a Miss Guatemala?

  Patti wasn’t like the others, even if she did have that inbred gift of playing the seductively chirpy and slyly clever loquita (little nutty one), the tried and true way for a girl like her to get what she wanted. But what did Patti want? For life to answer the questions she asked it, for it to turn itself inside out and show her. She’d made Moya her confidant. He was an outsider at the Colegio Anne Hunt no matter how many years he’d been there, so Patti thought she could tell him anything, thought she could safely open up and explore a whole forbidden inner life as long as he was there to listen. Except there was a peculiar sameness to what Patti kept finding; or maybe she just felt incapable of discovering anything else until she’d solved the basic riddle posed by what she kept finding, and so she just kept blasting away at that black-and-white, obsidian-and-diamond-hard riddle of social injustice, of just a handful of rich and everyone else poor, thus so much and so many kinds of murder.

  Moya drank in all her words without regard for the bitter aftertaste of circular obsession because he was going in circles too: brooding over Patti’s fruitlessly debated and resolutely maintained virginity while they made out for hours by the hippo pool in the zoo or progressed to various stages of undress in the Betamax den but with the door locked—her globe-trotting young mother off in Vienna or Martinique and wherever else it was she went with her art gallery—owning best friend or with her other friends, the cliquish members of the No Tememos Tiburones Club de Buceo (We Don’t Fear Sharks Scuba Diving Club), of which the only member who actually ever dived was the owner of the two-hundred-foot yacht in which the members of the little club were transported about the Caribbean; her elderly father at home, though not in any active way. The old man could usually be found in his study, ineffectually double- and triple-checking his five farm administrators’ accounts and sitting in a shaft of turquoise light from the pyramidal skylight overhead, which his wife had installed to prevent melancholy and as an inducer of pristine meditations.

  “Moya, why everyone poor and we so rich?” “Patti, why don’t you let me tuck my pigeon in? Why don’t we raise a little dust?”—Patti growing increasingly fraught and almost anorexic, Moya gloomier and hornier, until finally, in the den, Moya did slip his pigeon in and carajo! that cheered them up for a while. Then Moya slipped his pigeon in over and over for months, they raised a lot of dust, vos. This was the first time in his life that Moya had been so in love. He worried that Patti might one day immolate herself into becoming a nun. He dreamt of the serene, strong, and happy woman that Patti, with his love and patient help, might someday become instead.

  “Poor Patti”—that’s what Anne Hunt used to say, in front of their American history class, whenever Patti, lost in a daydream about raising dust with Moya or just trying to catch a little nap after one of her sleepless, especially morbid nights, was unable to answer a question. “She doesn’t get enough attention at home because her mother married a man much too old for her and so she has to go running around the world looking for excitement. Poor Patti has no one to talk to, no one to set an example for her. Do you see, girls, what happens when you marry a man too old for you?”

  Why is it some people, no matter how they behave, quietly or extrovertedly, come wrapped in a poignant aura of loneliness and neglect and thus seem filled with the drifting black butterflies of delusion too, which even someone as ordinarily insensitive as Anne Hunt couldn’t miss? But everyone knew that Patti’s mother, who came from a good Guatemalan-Scotch-German family that had lost everything during World War II and never regained it, had married old Don Ernesto Mundinger for money. There were rumors that before the wedding, when Don Ernesto had by choice lived on one of his fincas in Alta Verapaz, he’d gone around wearing traje and had fathered children with Kekchi Indian women, that he’d been friendly with shamans and become fluent in Kekchi, that that was how he’d whiled away his life. Patti’s mother had quickly put an end to that, moving him to the city. For the sake of appearances, of course.

  Suddenly it even seemed conceivable that Moya, just turned eighteen, might one day marry the only daughter of a multimillionaire from a fine old family, descendants of illustrious German pioneer coffee planters. But then Patti’s parents suddenly woke up, because Anne Hunt, not so insensitive after all, realized that if she didn’t wake them up no one else was going to. Anne Hunt found a college in rural Ohio that would accept Patti immediately—after all, she had just graduated with passing grades—and off she went, without even a good-bye party.

  For a while Patti wrote to Moya—describing field hockey injuries and ice-skating lessons, and the night she had to wait up until dawn in a freezing barn full of steaming cow shit just to take a stupid picture of a veterinarian delivering a newborn calf because it was her photography class assignment to do so, qué putas, Moya!; and the party she went to where she innocently consumed two hashish-laced brownies and ended up throwing up all over her dress after she’d devoured six bags of potato chips and pretzels all by herself; at college parties no one danced but just got drunk and drugged and stood around instead, everyone hated her Camilo Sesto records, she sure missed Moya and Guatemala.

  It took about six months for Moya and Patti to lose interest in each other. Moya was becoming completely immersed in university life, truly wanting to purge himself of any association with the Colegio Anne Hunt, trying to act as if he’d actually spent his childhood at the Liceo Javier being taught by bearded Jesuit priests who’d had to flee into exile one after the other, or even at the Escuela Normal with the poorer boys and girls who were already in clandestine cells and spray-painting wall graffiti before they were out of puberty, or so Moya imagined. In political development, clarity, discipline, and even in his fundamental understanding of such pervasive euphemisms, he was still way behind the patojos who had actually gone to such schools, and didn’t even understand the lesson yet of living as if not even your own shadow is in on what you are really thinking, vos. It took years to get that one down, to learn that a pose of complete apathy and silence could look stealthy and even more incriminating than outright subversive extroversion, the latter being the commonest tactic of second-rate infiltrators and spies. Playing Dracula had seemed to strike the right balance, but even that had gotten him into some trouble, but then he understood that some trouble could be the best defense against the ultimate trouble and was even preferable to no trouble at all when you knew that logically it should be there, which gave way to the common superstition that some trouble over and over again could inoculate against the ultimate. By the end of 1980 La U was a shell of its former self anyway, so many student leaders dead or in hiding or up in the mountains and much of the faculty dead or in exile; even protest marches through the capital had come to seem like mass acts of suicide, and so had ceased. Was it merely Celso Batres’s lightning stroke that had saved Moya from his place in the deadly lottery, transferring him from one G-2 file marked “students” to the back of another marked “periodistas”? There was no way to know. Even the most innocent young spiders at the public university lived in constant danger.

  It was early in his fourth year at La U—the very year that Celso changed his life—that Moya glanced at a newspaper society page and there, in the usual spread of tuxedoed and gowned fufurufas at a wedding celebration, recognized classmates from his past life at the Colegio Anne Hunt, and Anne Hunt herself and Patti’s parents and, of course, mamita mío, Patti herself. Evidently she was back from Ohio for good and had just married Moncho Vasconcelos Grau, who the paper said had attended the American School, the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, and was now one of Guatemala’s outstanding young Windsurfers. They were taking their honeymoon in Baja California. Patti looked skinny and like a spooked rabbit in her wedding gown—struck dumb, it seemed, by the photograp
her’s flash. Moya felt—how should he put it?—bad. Something swept through him, an acidic and hollowing gust of something he’d never experienced before. It left a bitter aftertaste on his tongue, the old dried-flower taste of her voice. For a week or so after it continued to attack him at unexpected moments during the day, and woke him with clockwork regularity at a quarter to five, keeping him awake until dawn.

  She really had been a little bit of a rebel, vos. Well, just her going with Moya proved it. And she used to love to go to the zoo, to see the hippopotamus couple there, though usually all they could see were two slimy humps protruding from the rank chartreuse water that was confettied with petals from the flower beds on the elevated banks inside the concrete wall ringing the pool. Once there was an Indian man there, just down from the highlands probably, looking at the paired humps. He lifted his amazed, delighted gaze to Patti and Moya and announced that those were the biggest snakes he’d ever seen.