In fairness to Moya, it can’t be said that he has ever actually practiced “investigative journalism”—but who in Guatemala actually does? Maybe he thinks we’ve tried everything possible and secretly is as frustrated as I am over how quickly we’ve run out of options. His idea of searching the lower-class burdeles was typical, because it made perfect and enticing sense on the surface and didn’t reveal itself as ludicrous until I put it into practice. Off and on for weeks I haunted the poor people’s brothels, carrying a photograph of Flor (not the too precious one of her at the zoo with her orphans) and another torn from an old newspaper of the niñera fafera, the alleged nursemaid who denounced Flor and then vanished.
Moya’s thinking, then, was this: if Flor really had ever been involved in the illegal baby trade—and of course we were determined to prove that she hadn’t been—then somewhere in Guatemala, most likely here in the city, there had to be a woman or girl, at least one, who would have worked for Flor, whose job it would have been, say, to take some illegally or ambiguously acquired baby into a municipal office and register it as her own, so that later she could turn up in family court with both baby and birth certificate and, still posing as the mother, give the baby up for adoption, that being the modus operandi of so many immaculate conceptions and profitable deliverances. Similarly, the sister and sister-in-law of López Nub would have had to find a fake niñera if there wasn’t a real one. Where better, vos, to look for women and girls who will rent their identities and faces than among the poorest who rent their bodies?
It’s common knowledge, said Moya, that the low-class burdeles constitute the human pool that the foot soldiers of the baby trade are recruited from. And it has to be poor whores because no baby trader is going to hire one from an upscale burdel or a fancy barra show, because what if the family court judge already knows her personally or at least recognizes her? Anyway, no matter how appropriately distraught she behaves in court, she just won’t look believable, won’t look as if it is completely beyond her capabilities to find a husband or otherwise keep her child alive, and even the corrupt judges are sensitive to appearances. All of which made complete sense, because the girls I’ve seen from the upscale burdeles certainly look well fed and as if they go to dentists and hair salons too, and I happen to know that their employers even enroll them in aerobics classes at the same gymnasiums the fufurufas go to. Strolling around La Zona Viva in the afternoons, the upscale bordello girls, even in the way they dress and carry themselves, seem indistinguishable from the rich girls in every way—until they talk, anyway.
So I started at the level of the places that advertise themselves as “sauna-spas” in the newspaper classified pages and moved steadily downwards, all the way down to the appalling one-room shacks of the poorest people’s burdeles along the railroad tracks at the edge of Zona 1, and hit many sorts of places in between. I always went alone, since Moya was always busy and has such a complete aversion to such places that he would have been useless. And usually I went late in the afternoon, just after siesta, because it was safest then, the lingering men less likely to be drunk yet or in predatory groups, though I still had to be careful, and knew to retreat quickly at the first signs of bleary-eyed macho hostility. I’d order a beer, try to strike up a conversation, all the time keeping my eye out for the niñera fafera and always almost finding her among so many scrawny, flat-chested girls with pocked complexions, orphan’s haircuts, and stunned expressions over having found themselves stranded so soon in life among so many toothless, plump-shouldered, bawdy crones in bright-colored sliplike dresses. Eventually I’d bring out my photographs. “Have you ever seen either of these señoritas . . . ?” Then the silly comments would begin, the spurious claims, the women crowding around. I’d fold the photos away in my wallet, finish my beer with burning ears, and leave, ribald comments and mocking innuendos peppering me from behind as I made my way to the door.
Ridiculous, I know. Of course, one of the ruling suppositions of my mission was that I was never going to find a woman or girl who’d worked for Flor because there wasn’t one—but that to be able to draw such a conclusion with any authority, the search had to be as meticulous and thorough as possible. What I really hoped was to find the niñera fafera. It was like a schizophrenic gambler’s addiction, this desperate hope of not finding and finding at the same time. I was never going to be able to get to every burdel. Which is why what I was doing began to seem so stupid but also why it was so hard to stop. All I needed was one stroke of luck. What if I’d found someone who’d worked for Flor? Well then, that would have been the end, I would have packed up and gone home, there might even have been a secret sense of relief. But what if I found the niñera fafera?
It dawned on me, long before I gave it up, that it’s so much easier to prove guilt than innocence. Innocence doesn’t leave a trail. Not finding a girl meant almost nothing. (Guate no existe.) Yet what strange things I saw along the way: the run-down houses hiding “saunas,” where old, bent Indian women wandered the dark corridors like medieval witches, carrying swinging censers heaped with the twisted stems of thickly smoking burning herbs even into occupied rooms to fumigate against lice and crabs and to numb the many hungers and terrors of stunned, scrawny girls; and the raucous place near the General Cemetery, where all the women were fat and wore bikinis, and all the men wore cowboy hats and western shirts, and the rooms had only curtains for doors and were all off the central bar area, and the men were all given sparklers so that after they’d accomplished their feats of love they could light them and hold them out through the curtains to whistles, stamping feet, and applause.
At times I feel completely puzzled as to why I’ve stayed on here in Guatemala. But this morning in the Hemmings I was feeling too sad, too soft, to feel any real anger towards Moya. He’d changed the subject anyway. Last night he was out with a young woman from Iceland, a radio reporter for Icelandic National Radio.
“Fíjese,” said Moya . . . But how to exactly translate fíjese?—a word so commonly used here and one so suggestive of a particular Guatemalan something or other as perceived by the Zona 10 gringos that some entrepreneur among them has even in the last year printed up bumper stickers that read ¡FÍJESE! which are for sale now in gringo-owned and -frequented restaurants and bars all over Zona 10, Lord Byron’s, of course, included. “Just imagine!” is the translation my Spanish-English dictionary gives, though you can say that just as well in literal Spanish. “Fix on this” is the way I clearly recall Hemingway translating it in one of his stories, which is right too, more right than “just imagine” as growled by a hard-ass macho but all wrong for fíjese as chirped by some chapina secretary or maid. So why, here, wherever there are gringo-driven cars and Jeeps are there bumper stickers shouting, “JUST IMAGINE!” or “FIX ON THIS!” at the general populace? In Lord Byron’s, among all the Reagan, U.S. Marine Corps, Chicago Cubs, et cetera bumper stickers stuck to the refrigerator there is now one reading ¡FÍJESE! and a stack of more for sale behind the bar—“What is it with all the fíjeses?” I asked the new bartender Crystal Francis has hired to work there now, a skinny, red-haired, leprechaunlike, smalltown Kentucky, come to the Big Third World City kind of guy named Larry. He rolled his eyes and hooted, “Haven’t been in Guatemala long, have you, buddy?” And a middle-aged man sitting next to me at the bar, who I later learned is the top executive here for an American food company, said, “I’ll tell you what. Whenever I hear a secretary or muchacha say fíjese, I know the news is going to be bad and hard to believe. You know, like, Fíjese, I would have dried the laundry if you’d asked me to, Don Pete, but you only asked me to wash it? So there’s my laundry, neatly folded and sopping wet, heavy as a brick, just in time for my business trip to Costa Rica.” And Larry guffawed. “That’s it! That’s fíjese!” And he puckered his lips and batted his eyes like Betty Boop and went “Fíjese! Ooooo!”
(And the day that Consul Simms brought little Belinda Towne by the hand to Flor’s orphanage, the abandoned little Texan was w
earing a filthy yellow T-shirt with big red letters across the front screaming “¡FíJESE!”—“Fíjese! You’re telling me!” wrote Flor in her letter. “Her hippie parents just dumped her in Panajachel!”)
So Moya said, “Fíjese,” and then, “There really is such a place as Iceland.”
Worldwide interest in his poor, screwed-up little country turns up such wonderful surprises for him—so regularly that I guess it isn’t so surprising anymore. Guatemala’s the center of the world, no one can get enough of it, even Iceland is clamoring, dispatching her most affably articulate and insightful and of course politically progressive and let’s not forget attractive media starlet, for smart Icelandic radio bosses somehow know that even the most cultishly secretive and murderous generalísimo can get diarrhea of the mouth when confronted with a pale European beauty proffering her little microphone like a peanut to Dumbo. Led by his dumb dick, this Sexy Chafa’s seduction attempt came out (as described secondhand by a gleefully whispering Moya in the Hemmings) as a boastful if somewhat sanitized avowal of the hard line, because, what the hell, it was only Señorita Green Party from Iceland, it’s not like he’d say it on CBS: “Yes, we hit that town hard, but that’s counterinsurgency, chula. Are not a few hundred dead Indians worth it if it means saving the country from Communism?”—in an editing room in Iceland, they will certainly cut that jaunty term of endearment, chula. What a great quote. But where can Moya use it? Not in El Minuto, or even in ¿Dónde?. But he will copy her tape of it and play it for every foreign reporter or dignitary and human rights investigator who visits him. He’ll infiltrate it out to the exile news organization in Mexico. His “newspaper” extends everywhere.
“We went,” said Moya, “to the Cine Lux, for that new Star Trek movie. Putavos! It was excellent!” And then to a little Zona 1 café to drink muddy espressos and analyze the movie like a pair of seriously whacked out Parisian semioticians (Flor wasn’t Moya’s only involvement, he hasn’t tried to hide that; he’s been out with a lot of these European Green Party types and their norteamericana counterparts).
“You never go out with Guatemalan women anymore, do you?” I observed.
Moya, with his look of blown-away self-revelation, said, “This is true, vos. I am a bad son of the patria. I do not consume what the country produces!”
Now I look out the window from my perch here on the mezzanine and realize that it must be twenty past eleven, because Uncle Jorge and cousins Freddie, Mercedes, and Catalina have just emerged from the Hemmings, and are proceeding up the sidewalk. They’d been sitting downstairs for the last twenty minutes, and I hadn’t even noticed.
Six days a week and seven during the Christmas season, for decades now, since the days when my grandparents ran Arrau all by themselves, when Arrau was just a ladies’ hat store on the corner, since the days when Abuelito in dark woolen suit, fedora, immense waxed mustache, and carrying an umbrella first startled the downtown Zona 1 populace with his ability to walk with amazing rapidity over rain-flooded sidewalks on the very back edge of his heels with toes high in the air so as not to soak his shoes—Arraus have left the store every morning at exactly five to eleven and marched down 11 Calle to Pastelería Hemmings for their morning coffee break, a ritual repeated again every afternoon, though not as punctually, some time between five-thirty and seven, depending on the rain. Frequently Uncle Jorge takes his afternoon break alone now, since Aunt Lisel rarely comes to the Zona 1 store anymore, and Mercedes will be off taking classes in management and business at the Jesuit university, Catty home with her twins, Freddie off making his rounds of the smaller Arrau branches and boutiques in outlying zones and malls, or going to that fancy gym in Zona 10 that I go to also sometimes.
I watched them walk up the sidewalk, out of sight: Uncle Jorge in his gray Hong Kong suit, looking like a pharaoh with his balding coppery head and hawk’s nose and flashing Arrau eyes, accompanied by his burly, curly-haired son and his two prettily contrasting daughters: brisk and hearty Mercedes in her box-kite two-piece suit and pumps, and sweet Catty, luminous green eyes and tea-colored skin though not the best complexion (Freddie teasingly and exaggeratedly likes to call her “La Amenaza Pinta,” The Spotted Menace), straight hair hanging loosely around her shoulders, in green blouse and faded jeans, pink sneakers. Even during the worst of the urban violence in ‘79–’80, Arraus daily dared the crowded downtown streets for the block-long march to the Hemmings for the morning coffee break, though they went accompanied then by a store security guard and Chus, the family houseboy and jack-of-all-trades, both of them armed with Uzis. It was Uncle Jorge’s way of standing up for normalcy, I think, and even for the principles of democracy, the obligation of the hardworking if privileged Don Jorge Arrau to share the same sidewalks as his employees and mainly middle-class customers, just as his own parents always had, and to not even shelter his well-brought-up and close-knit family from them. Because even when I was at the Colegio Anne Hunt there were teenage girls who thought of Zona 1 as some faraway, disease-ridden, and murderous country, who were forbidden by their parents to go there and thought of their rare incursions as daredevil escapades.
Catty has told me that when she was in Montreal, going to college and falling turbulently in love with and becoming impregnated with twins by and finally marrying Ronnie the Skycap, every morning at five to eleven, no matter where she was or what she was doing, her thoughts would always travel back to that daily public procession of Arraus to the Hemmings for the morning coffee break. So that, even in Montreal, five to eleven was a break for her too, the beginning of twenty-five minutes of secret tranquillity, a break from all the mixed-up fevers of love and homesickness and her constant fear of the guerrillas kidnapping her father; a break from reading things in the newspapers like “uprisings threaten to cover the isthmus in blood” and not even being able to say “Guatemala” out loud anymore without someone, even Ronnie sometimes, answering “death squads,” “massacres,” “But Catty, the guerrillas are going to win!”; when all her fears and confusions were combining to keep her temperature at a constant 99.4 that never varied by even a decimal for all the time she was in Montreal and put dark, melancholic circles under her eyes and complicated her troublesome complexion and burned her ample adolescent figure down to the almost boyish slenderness that has been hers ever since, except during those culminating months of pregnancy. Five to eleven meant security, because no one was going to stop her father from enjoying his tea and oatmeal cookies ever, not when Catty could so clearly see him in her mind’s eye that she felt like she was right there in person, crowded into a booth with her siblings and Papito just as they always had during the Christmas season when they all worked together, even when she was a little girl, when it first became her job to say, “Let me fix your tea, Papito.” Which is still her job, because whenever I see them coming in from the mezzanine window and go downstairs to join them, there’s Catty fixing her father’s tea:
“Gracias, princesa,” Uncle Jorge always says, and she, “One or two teaspoons of sugar, Papito?” even though she knows that of course he’ll say, “Two, mi amor,” and then, “Let me taste it for you—it’s still too hot, Papito,” and she’ll blow across it softly and taste it again and then, “Now it’s ready, Papito,” and he’ll sip it and say, “Exquisito, mi amor. Gracias, muchísimas gracias,” and then dip the first of his two daily morning oatmeal cookies into it. Catty in Canada could see it all so clearly that it didn’t even hurt to acknowledge her own absence, because over the phone her father had told her how that very first Saturday morning without her they had all gone to Pastelería Hemmings and Mercedes had felt too shy to assume her big sister’s role so that Freddie had been the one to go, “Let me fix your tea, Papito,” imitating Catty’s voice and everything so that father and son had ended up laughing with so much hilarity and love that the laugh traveled all the way up to Canada and snugly buried itself in Catty’s heart and sprang lovingly to life again every time she confronted the fact of her own absence from the morning
coffee break. She’d just laugh right out loud, and Ronnie, if he was there, even Ronnie would smile and say, “It must be five to eleven.”
* * *
Moya, walking down Sexta Avenida on his way home from the newspaper office, had paused on the sidewalk in front of the Picadilly’s wide entrance and spotted Roger sitting alone at the bar in an aural halo of blaring electronic pop music, female voices chorusing, “deenko dee deenko dee, deenko dee deenko DAH . . .” Moya knew that his friend often did this in his loneliness and boredom now, drank in the Picadilly or elsewhere, and then went to where the only accessible women were (the well-fed-looking ones, eh?), often with his new friend from the gringo bar, that Larry.
But as soon as Moya reached the bar, before he even had a chance to sit down, Roger looked right at him and said, quietly and drunkenly:
“I get it, Moya. You really are in guerrilla propaganda or something and what this has all been about is trying to hide that it was the guerrillas who killed Flor.”
Moya was so stunned he could only react, at first, with impersonal logic. “But no one has ever accused the guerrillas of that, so why would it even occur to them to try to hide it?” Then, still standing, hands in pockets, Moya felt a surge of anger. “Rogerio, puta, this is ridiculous and, to me, offensive.”
“Or you killed her,” said Roger, sounding more dispirited than actually accusing. “And you talked me into coming here and doing all this to cover yourself.”
“If that were true, I would be both extremely clever but also insane to have dreamed up such a scheme. You are suffering,” said Moya. “I know. And you have been drinking too much.” And spending too much time in “upscale” burdeles and fancy barra shows, strip clubs, too, he thought to himself.
“Then what is this? What is this, Moya? You’ve been fucking with me in some way I don’t get.”
The Long Night of White Chickens Page 36
