The Long Night of White Chickens

by Francisco Goldman

  “Much more beautiful than Miss Jeane Kirkpatrick,” said portly Pepe Arnulfo, the fafa king, jumping in with a deep, gravelly conquistador’s laugh. He was the clever one, he knew exactly who it was Sylvia really wanted to be.

  She gave in to it then, her laugh genuine and relaxed. “Oh well, that’s the first time anyone’s told me that. So thank you.” She laughed again and said, “Though, you know, Jeane Kirkpatrick isn’t a Miss.” She beamed, enjoying herself now, at the colonel. “I was runner-up for high school homecoming queen once, though you don’t want to know when.”

  Colonel Lenz Méndez’s muscular cheeks colored. It had been getting around lately that the colonel was a particularly aggressive womanizer, which anyone might have guessed. But at a recent European embassy dinner he’d kept his hand on the knee of that embassy’s chief political officer’s gorgeous Laplandic wife throughout the meal, though she hadn’t dared to mention it to anybody until later, when she told Celso Batres in circumstances Moya still wasn’t very clear about, who told Moya, who told Rolando Mezquita, who was Paco Palma Passafarri’s gossip columnist, who of course couldn’t publish it but liked the story anyway. It was good to feed things like that to Rolando, because sometimes he’d repay you with something really interesting.

  Colonel Lenz Méndez said that if Sylvia, unlike Jeane Kirkpatrick, was indeed a Miss, then she should spend some more time in Guatemala, she would find herself happily cured of that condition, he was sure.

  And before she could figure out what to say to that, Paco Palma Passafarri, who wore an expression that seemed to be perpetually gloating over its own profound gloominess, said, “Oh no, Sylvia is married to her career, am I right? In Guatemala, you know, it is still very hard for a married woman to be married to her career too. Here it is like—”

  “Hah! Bigamy,” said Sylvia, finishing his sentence, her eyes flashing with keen interest at Paco Palma, because she knew he was an important man.

  “Worse! Adultery,” said Paco Palma. “And here a man will go out and hunt down his wife’s lover if he has to, but how do you shoot a career! Instead the man gets very frustrated, and that is dangerous for everybody.” And his face shifted into a thoughtful frown made up of many weighty and gloomy lateral folds while he nodded his head, which was his way of laughing at his own jokes.

  The colonel, roused by rivalry now, said, “Guatemalan women don’t have careers? When was the last time you set foot in the countryside, Paco? Washing clothes, grinding the corn, making tortillas, working in the fields, watching the children, weaving and sewing, feeding the chickens and pigs, going to market, I call that a career. A campesina’s work never stops!”

  “And that has turned out dangerous for everybody,” said Moya, from the periphery, and for the first time Sylvia’s keen but tender eyes glanced his way, and their eyes briefly locked.

  That night Moya and Sylvia went out for dinner and talked for hours, Moya so movingly that he actually brought tears to the politically influential professor’s eyes. She was leaving for Nicaragua, the next stop on her “fact-finding tour,” in the morning; and back in Cambridge she would quote Moya by name in her editorial, referring to him for all the world to see as “Guatemala’s best young political analyst.” At dinner in Guatemala City she had asked Moya for his definition of democracy. He had simply said that democracy is not a gift handed down from above but everyone’s responsibility. In the context of the conversation they had been having, these words, so simple, idealistic, and hopeful sounding after such a pessimistic and apparently persuasive analysis, had brought tears to Sylvia’s eyes.

  “So why is she a pícara?” Roger quite reasonably asked, when Moya told him of it on the train from New York to Boston.

  “Because she used these words to argue for military aid to the contras in Nicaragua. Putavos! That wasn’t what I’d meant! So it wasn’t so great for me.” (Though that wasn’t the only reason she was a picara.)

  “. . . You mean it made trouble for you in Guatemala?”

  “It could have. But, no . . . it didn’t.” (He let it be known, in certain circles, that he had been quoted “out of context” while, for his own protection, he pretended in other circles that he hadn’t been.)

  “Did you . . . Was she your lover too?”

  “Un poquito.”

  “What do you mean, a little bit?”

  “Just that one night. We didn’t make love, vos. She wanted me only to hold her all night long. Our talk, it had upset her somehow. But after, we stayed friends.”

  “So are you a guerrilla?” Roger suddenly blurted. “Look, I know, not a gun-toting one, obviously, but organized, you know, in propaganda or whatever?”

  Moya peered at him for a moment over the can of Budweiser suspended in front of his lips.

  “I just thought I’d ask. It doesn’t make any difference to me, believe me. I just think I should know.”

  “Bueno. No, Rogerio. I am not.”

  Roger’s face suddenly reddened.

  “Rogerio,” said Moya. “One thing you must be very clear about. When you are in Guatemala, you can never, ever ask anybody questions like that. No one would ever tell you anyway. And you can only get yourself in trouble by asking.”

  “Oh sure, I know that,” said Roger. “But we’re not in Guatemala now, are we?”

  Sylvia McCourt had ended up feeling so upset—when that conversation in the restaurant had led to its continuation in her room in the Hotel Biltmore Maya (partially owned by Anne Hunt)—that she had needed Moya to hold her. The source of her anxiety might seem improbable, but Moya had been able to respect it. Sylvia really was a woman “married to her career,” and at that moment her career revolved around searching for the most apt response to her own government’s obsessed and often belligerent harangues on Central America, something that, without sounding at all extremist, would create a stir on editorial pages and in high-level foreign policy circles. She had wanted to propose an adjustment that in that highly calibrated and tense world would rivet attention to her, just as the seemingly minor but unprecedented nudging of a pawn can explode like a bomb in a game of chess between grand masters.

  In general Moya believed that all political conversations, however passionate, were like games of chess between mediocre or even very good players—nothing worth recording, nothing new ever said. But Sylvia’s great aspiration was to one day have intimate access to the yielding ear of a future, probably Democratic, U.S. president, and there was no reason to think that she might not attain it, if Professor Jeane Kirkpatrick, so many decades Sylvia’s senior and no more precocious, had. So Sylvia really was like a plausible Delphic Oracle, a potential unleasher of war, plague, and famine; imagining what it would be like to make love to Sylvia, Moya had pictured their synchronized orgasms combusting into a mutual vision of the isthmus in flames in 1999. Moya had never found himself playing his own game at such a high level, and he had wanted to plant a bomb too.

  “If you want us to accept what you call democracy,” Moya had said, “which I admit would be an improvement, then you cannot ask us to accept for ourselves what you never would for yourselves.”

  Because if democracy was everyone’s responsibility, then nobody could be immune from its most fundamental precepts. So how can you suggest, Sylvia, that a small country such as Guatemala can have participatory democracy while forgoing, for example, the cleansing and inaugural rite of justice? Without it, democracy would be degraded before it had even begun.

  Sylvia McCourt admitted it was unlikely that the army would allow elected civilians even to raise the possibility of trying them for extrajudicial murder, or for any other crimes. She even agreed that the absence of such trials would be one of the various and similar preconditions that the army would demand in exchange for that promise to allow elections. After a long silence, Sylvia firmly suggested that one day the army might learn to stop torturing and killing civilians, that patience and pragmatism all around were what was needed.

  Moya said, “Sy
lvia, you know in your heart that that isn’t good enough. Anyway, they won’t stop as long as there are civilians who are unhappy to live in a society that only an army can enforce. And how patient are we supposed to be? Oh Sylvia, if only countries like mine were given the chance to humiliate our own criminals. Maybe we would find the courage and coherence to do so, perhaps not. But, puta, as it stands now, even excellent friends such as you, Sylvia, essentially propose that we endure every human indignity because of the Soviet Union. Why don’t you take your worries about Central America directly to the Soviet Union then, I’m sure you can work something out, and leave us alone!”

  “Because that’s not how it works, and those concerns are not frivolous. What’s more, I do reject any notion of moral equivalency. Saving you from Communism is not an inhumane policy,” she said, somewhat peevishly and defensively. The chessboard she had to play on was one of nightmarishly limited possibilities. He had wanted her to admit this, and she basically had.

  “. . . So what you’re saying,” she said then, in a softer tone, “is that because I think trading a higher level of aid for a promise of elections isn’t such a bad deal, I’m some kind of apologist for murderers.”

  “No, Sylvia, you couldn’t mean that!”

  “What would you have me say then?”

  “Absolutely no aid without trials. Trials are much more than a symbol. They are our only hope for becoming civilizied. The army’s power to terrorize must be ended.”

  “Hah! Not even Carter went that far. They’d think I’d gone completely off the map!”

  Moya let himself smile warmly. “If my side doesn’t win this one, Sylvia, we may never have the chance to win anything else, with or without elections. To me this is the only so-called ideological battle that matters.”

  Sylvia had a bit of a crisis after that. She was full of frustration, because she could not think of a convincing alternative to what Moya had suggested. Finally she said, “If only everyone down here were more like you, Moya. Idealistic, sure, but reasonable too; I’d even say wise. But it’s not like that, is it, and you know that better than I do.”

  “Perhaps my reasonableness is my weakness,” he said. “So let me say it. I would not be sorry to see the blood of chafas running in the streets, yet I can do nothing to cause this. Some would say that even having this wish makes me as bad as they are. I hope that isn’t true, since perhaps it is only a wish. Do you know that this hotel room is probably bugged?”

  “Bugged, do you really think so?” she stammered. “Oh I don’t care, I feel so . . .” Sitting on the bed, she held out her hands, inviting Moya to stop his antic pacing. “Let me hold you,” she said, grasping his hands. “Hold me . . .

  “I have to say,” she said, when they had been sitting with their arms around each other for a while, “our ambassador is not a credit to my country.”

  “Sí pues. He has extremely small feet, did you notice? And his wife mocks him in public . . . I feel so . . . too.”

  “. . . I don’t know what to think. Believe it, that’s troubling for me. You’ve made me feel so artificial, somehow. And that’s because, well, we’re on your home court here, aren’t we?” (Here, Sylvia had to stop and explain “home court.”) “If we were all exposed to the minute particulars all the time, we’d be incapable of deciding anything. And I’m supposed to resist that; I’ve been trained to think of what we do as close to a science, a human one, and yet the human element can come along and subvert everything sometimes, it’s pathetic. But I know that when I’m back on my home court, so to speak, it won’t seem like that anymore. And, Moya, that’s when I’ll remind myself that the world isn’t made of angels, and that political science most certainly is not the study of angels. And an angel is what I think you clearly are.”

  “Oh no, Sylvia, not me. Unless I am an avenging angel without wings, marooned on a soggy cloud. Anyway, angels are already—gone; they no longer live in the earthly dimension.”

  Pues, they kissed. There, on the wide bed in a probably bugged hotel room partially owned by Anne Hunt, Moya and the beautiful young Harvard professor kissed deeply, heaving against each other, both of them seeking a moment’s transcendence in each other’s roiling lips and tongues and warm breath, in the illusory promise of their bodies pressed together. For weeks after he felt drunk on the toasted almond smell of her skin, the intoxicatingly soft static of her crisp golden brown hair against his cheek, the lamplit mirage of her warm, arched neck. But truly, Sylvia was upset, and didn’t want him to remove her blouse, she wanted only to be held. Sporadically kissing but always less passionately than the first time, they talked until dawn, about everything, including what Sylvia looked for in a man she might love. Self-knowledge was first on her list, a quality she clearly thought Moya possessed, though he felt he didn’t, not in the least, mainly because his life, like almost all his countrymen’s, had been constricted by such a lack of choices. He’d explored so few possibilities.

  In Cambridge, back on her home court, Sylvia, a lioness again there, full of new arguments, formidably yet friendlily stuck it to Moya, which is the other reason he called her a pícara. It hadn’t been fair, he’d felt ambushed, in no mood to defend himself, and anyway, he absolutely still stands by what he said the first time around. They never kissed again, nor, in Cambridge, was their having done so one night ever alluded to. And yet it was Sylvia who invited him to Harvard, and there remained his loyal and generous if occasionally antagonistic friend.

  EIGHTEEN

  And of course I believed him, and maybe I still do. What Moya truly is, I decided after just a few weeks here, is a first-rate Guatemalan newspaperman and columnist, practically one of a kind. Except his newspaper isn’t just the one, or the two, that Celso Batres owns: Sylvia McCourt and almost everyone else he comes across, myself included, we’re all supposed to be his “newspaper” too. He works on us, uses us. So Moya’s a bit like Dracula after all.

  It hit me this morning, just like that: Our investigation isn’t meant to go anywhere. Like this is Moya’s design, his original intent. Come and investigate a murder in Guatemala. It won’t go anywhere! See? See what it’s like here, America?

  Could Moya really use Flor like that? What about Flor? Or am I the one who’s just losing it now?

  But listen to what he said earlier this morning—glancing around with his habitual and instructive caution at the powdery old women having coffee with four teaspoons of sugar apiece and angel cake here in Pastelería Hemmings—in response to my only halfhearted suggestion that we go public with at least the obvious allegations about the clandestine fattening house being owned by López Nub’s sisters:

  “Ah sí, vos, buena idea! Bueno está que nos atropellen, que nos ametrallen, que nos rompan la cara, que nos echen unos cien mil toneladas de mierrrda. Que nos culeen, vos, y no sé qué más, vos!”

  What he was more or less saying was Oh yeah, great idea, man! Just great that they stomp on us, machine-gun us, break our faces, dump a thousand tons of shit on us, fuck us up the ass, vos, and I don’t know what else, vos!

  Moya obviously enjoyed this recitation, the violent salsa of it. He was beaming, the ruddiness flushing his face, making him look like he’d just come in from a healthy jog and almost boyish too, despite his salt-and-pepper hair, which can make him look a seriously lived decade older than his twenty-six years. He’s back on his turf now. He can be downright raucous about terror.

  This is the guy who, still frazzled by his several months of feeling lost in Cambridge, by his own querulous dismay over what he maintained was his sparse or by now just plain thwarted talent for self-expression in the face of what he called the bottomless North American “I,” had said that being at Harvard had made him feel that “Spanish is a first-draft language or else the Guatemalans who speak it are a first-draft people.” Of course he was dramatizing as well as ludicrously generalizing, and not being fair to himself, at least. But now his Cambridge internment is over. Guatemala can seem to provide all the self
Moya needs, and, in his mastery of its relative handful of brutal nuances and complexities, he can dazzle, can seem as quick and intricate as a computer. Now I’m the one feeling totally out of it, as simple and tightly wound as rope.

  I’ve been here nearly five months now, and so far we haven’t uncovered a single concrete fact; we’re not one bit further along than we were that day on Eastern Parkway, when Moya elaborated all that about las hermanas López Nub and the niñera fajera. I’ve felt ready for months to take some kind of stand—some kind of not too suicidal stand—but against whom? And how? Voice our dissatisfactions with the Guatemalan legal and media establishments in the free fafero press? Go to the Security Forces? (Moya insists that any such phrase as rule of law is just not in play here and debate over whether or not that is “really as true as it seems” is off the table. “Such is life in the tropics,” he likes to say, as if winsomely, in English, and that’s that.)

  I was feeling humiliated, clownish, at a loss, utterly softened, sitting here this morning, watching Moya revel in our powerlessness with what struck me as such cynical glee; I have to distance myself a lot to get the idea that this behavior of his might be purely acclimative, that this is his way of kicking down the door and walking out something like a free man, because dwelling on it, seriously dwelling on it all the time would accomplish nothing but to make him feel so morose and so defeated that it would rob him of himself. He lives here, he’s the one who had to flee into temporary exile and then came back, chose to. He’s the one who actually gets death threats, I mean, in the past has actually gotten them. What bigger joke on life is there, I’ve heard him say, than feeling fated to disappear, thinking that first thing in the morning and then having to get on with your life, having to make this huge effort to fight off rational fear as just some narcissistic or even hypochondriacal (despite whitening hair, churning stomach, a sometimes tic under his right eye) indulgence. He needs to feel brave, so he needs to feel cheerful.