The Long Night of White Chickens

by Francisco Goldman

  Oh Moya, you didn’t even suspect, you didn’t think your old friend capable of actively holding such outrageous notions! Moya saw that his friend was distraught, and didn’t really blame him. But surely he’d never intended to plunge Roger into such wounded and wounding confusion?

  A sudden tear in Moya’s eye was his only answer to his distraught friend. Did Roger, drunk as he was, notice that tear before Moya lightly wiped it away with his sleeve? Did he believe it? With something like martial rectitude, Moya straightened at the bar, with husky voice announced his departure, with comradely but stoic affection briefly laid his hand on Roger’s shoulder, and said, “Go home, pues, Rogerio. You’re tired.”

  “I don’t want to go home. I can’t sleep anyway.”

  You are becoming an addict to inexpensive sex and love that isn’t love, Moya wanted to say, but stopped himself.

  Instead he said, “Bueno.” He did not further refer to Roger’s pained but outrageous allegations, he simply went home, to his little room in the Pensión Bremen, only a few blocks away, where he sat up for hours matching his wit against the small computerized chess set he’d bought with the last of his stipend money in Cambridge.

  But what a notion. That Moya would want to invent an entire chronicle of the life and death of Flor de Mayo Puac and the ensuing investigation merely to cover his own, or the guerrillas’, tracks! Or that Moya would want to chronicle an entire life and investigation only to show that it wouldn’t go anywhere! True, he had always known that it might not go anywhere, and that this alone would not mean it was not worth chronicling.

  That was in October. Roger lost faith and even seemed on the verge of formally renouncing all participation in the investigation and going home. Then things started to happen.

  It turned out that Larry, bartender-putero, had earned a haircutter’s license in his native Kentucky before coming to Guatemala. By way of explaining the pungent anti-lice shampoos and soaps he’d doused himself with before coming to work at Lord Byron’s one evening, he revealed to Roger that once a month, for free, he cut orphans’ hair in Los Quetzalitos, and had done so for the first time that very afternoon. A charitable gesture, no doubt, but even Larry admitted that the presence of the Scandinavian volunteers was an inducement, a certain Norwegian in particular. Roger saw his opening, and pretended an extreme interest in Scandinavian girls too. Larry invited him along next time.

  At last, an unobtrusive entrance to the orphanage! It was by far Roger’s best piece of espionage work yet, vos. When they met for the first time in over a week in Pastelería Hemmings, the two friends reaffirmed their commitment to the project, yet Moya was left with the feeling that Roger had still not overcome all his suspicions.

  One new problem was that Roger now faced a monthlong wait for Larry’s next orphan haircutting day and another was that they really didn’t know what his plan should be, once he got inside.

  “Try to make friends with Rosana Letones, without letting her know who you are, of course,” suggested Moya, referring to the orphanage’s new director. “Rogerio, who knows where it will lead? Maybe she will let you take some of the children on an outing to the zoo or to the movies.”

  “A month!” exclaimed Roger. “I can’t wait a month!”

  Well, soon his three-month visa to stay in Guatemala would expire again (actually, through a remote family connection in migración, he’d twice received thirty-day extensions, but now Roger had been told he could not have another unless he paid a certain large sum to a certain recently promoted official whom the remote family connection now worked under; an indignant Roger had refused to pay it). He would have to cross into Mexico at Tecún Umán, then cross back for a new visa. He decided to take a little bus trip through the highlands and the tourist towns along the way, mainly to help pass the time until the next orphan haircutting day. Before leaving Roger gave Moya the money he would need to bribe Flor’s old notebook out of the police archives, in the basement of National Police headquarters.

  Roger, at the time, could easily afford it. The quetzal, for so long on par with the dollar and in recent years nearly so, had suddenly plummeted to more than two to one and had gone on plummeting. Unfortunately Roger’s inheritance from his abuela of twenty thousand quetzales, which was to be turned over to him on his wedding day, had never been transferred to an Arrau account in Miami, and Miami wanted no part of quetzales now. So tío Jorge Arrau decided to sign the inheritance over to Roger while it was still worth something, vos. They went to the bank together to withdraw a check for twenty thousand quetzales, worth nearly the same in dollars only weeks before, and then took it to one of the heavily guarded, black-market money-changing offices that had recently sprung up in the blocks around the post office, and sold it for eight thousand dollars in cash.

  Mysteriously, the whole black-market trade in dollars seemed to have something to do with the central post office, and it was the post office that eventually played a main role in Moya’s getting chased out again:

  Soon after the quetzal’s slide began, everyone, Roger included, stopped receiving mail from the USA. But it wasn’t until two armored mail trucks leaving the airport were hijacked within days of each other that rumors began to coalesce around the common suspicion that someone was stealing the mail. And there was only one logical reason for anyone to be doing that, vos: to get at the bank checks sent by immigrants in the USA to their loved ones and dependents at home, loved ones more desperately dependent than ever now that even half a dozen eggs could cost half a day’s wage, though it was hard to see why even the price of eggs should be pegged to the dollar.

  So Moya and an El Minuto photographer snuck into the post office mail-sorting room one afternoon during the siesta hours, pushed some of the heavy wooden counters aside, and photographed what they found: piles of envelopes sent from the USA, torn open and discarded. Celso Batres went ahead and published the picture on the front page of the next day’s El Minuto. It was that rarest thing, an El Minuto scoop, one the boss thought they could get away with because on the surface it didn’t seem to implicate anybody but the mail sorters. Except the mail sorters were taking their stolen booty directly to those money-changing offices near the post office. Some of these had originally been founded by ordinary merchants quick to capitalize on the new instability, which had turned dollars into the most hoarded and one of the most profitably speculated commodities in the country. But after a few Mafia-style rubouts, it had become clear to everybody that certain elements within the army were now in control of the black-market trade for dollars.

  Which was why Moya, in his hastily composed column accompanying the picture of the envelope massacre, invented a decisive love letter, one that would have repaired the love between a Juan Chapín working as a pharmacist’s assistant in Los Angeles, California, and the girl from Barrio La Limonada who had resigned herself to never seeing or hearing from him again. Fearing eternal spinsterhood, she finally relented and married the army sergeant whose boorish threats “in defense of her honor” had chased all her suitors away, including the handsome young pharmacist who’d written to invite her to join him in California. She was never happy again. Moya signed off with this sentence: “The sergeant had an ally, El Anticúpido, who flies around with an Uzi instead of a bow and arrow, destroying love letters and even hijacking mail trucks to get at them.”

  Of course Celso Batres would never have consciously exposed Moya to mortal danger by publishing a column guaranteed to arouse the sharks’ feeding frenzy, no matter how much glory it would bring the paper. That post office foray was a late-breaking story and Celso still had his own lead editorial to write and not much time to worry over Moya or even to notice the uncharacteristic lack of subtlety in Moya’s closing line (though where did Moya explicitly say El Anticúpido was a military man anyway, vos?). The editorial, titled Sin Razón, No Reason, one of Celso’s more frequently employed titles, was on the need to legalize the dollar black market so that it could operate in the open like the competing
change bureaus familiar to all travelers in European capitals and even Mexico; which might not save the quetzal but would at least eliminate the degrading spectacle of so many hawkers in the streets around the post office, all those women in rags breast-feeding their babies while hissing “dollars dollars” at passersby, frightening tourists, leading them to illicit-seeming little back rooms; there was no reason that the act of changing money at the going rate should feel like a drug deal, was there?

  So Moya’s column appeared as written and on that first crucial day, in accordance with El Minuto’s small circulation, caused a small stir. But even the prominent dailies weren’t afraid to follow El Minuto’s lead in waging a sensationalistic campaign against civilian post office employees and their gold rush fever, in fact Anticúpidos became the slogan of the entire campaign. Within days even the Miami-Cuban ambassador was forced to speak up, defending the inviolability of U.S.-stamped mail (if not the love between illegally immigrated pharmacists and their novias at home). And that was when the army must have realized that Moya had finally succeeded in actually hampering them a bit.

  All of this happened while Roger was away on his short journey. While in Quezaltenango, on his way to the border, he happened to glance at the new issue of ¿Dónde? and, flipping through it, found “The Prophecies of the Prophetic Rats of Barrio Prado Vélez,” a regular ¿Dónde? feature. This one was about a Quiche Maya Indian girl who had the ability to project her own world of experience far into the future, though she was in Hungary in the seventeenth century, a prisoner of the Bloody Countess of Transylvania, who all by herself tortured and murdered some six hundred clandestinely imprisoned young maidens and bathed in their blood, and, though the column was unsigned, he immediately recognized there the hand of his recently somewhat estranged friend Moya. (“The Bloody Countess is evil, but I am not,” Moya had the girl say through the mouth of the prophetic rat. “We are almost opposites, though my temperament is not extreme. But her witch has warned that the blood of a brown-skinned virgin cannot restore her youth. I am the countess’s unwilling servant and witness. . .”) Roger correctly deduced that Moya must be in some trouble and phoned him at El Minuto. Of course they employed very guarded language over the telephone: “Sí pues,” said Moya. “I’m thinking I might have to visit Aunt Irene soon, if I can find the time. If you see some nice handicraft, would you buy it, something warm, a poncho perhaps, she likes that kind of thing and it’s cold in Canada.”

  “Huh?” said Roger. “. . . Oh! Oh, that Aunt Irene! Moya, it’s that serious?” Aunt Irene, of course, was a code name for a certain human rights organization sharing those initials. In an excessively panicked tone, Roger stutteringly said he was going to hurry his trip to Momostenango to buy a poncho but only if he could pay with his Visa card. “You know, my visa card?” he repeated. “See you soon then,” said Moya, quickly hanging up.

  Having craftily thrown the authorities off his border-crossing path (as if it was he who was in trouble), Roger soon returned to the capital with his new visa. There the situation quickly accelerated into one of ultimate danger: a death squad, waiting for Moya, as he and Roger were walking to a corner tienda for an evening beer.

  But Moya doesn’t want to talk about that, or about them. Why should he? He is alive, isn’t he? Why give them free advertising? We know who they are, what they do and why they do it, don’t we? Moya refuses to chronicle that encounter with a death squad.

  NINETEEN

  From approximately six in the evening until half an hour past midnight, Moya and Flor sat under the eucalyptus trees and the paper lanterns in the dining patio of the Fu Lu Shu II in Zona 9, in the glow of butane torches. She sat facing the arched entrance into the main dining room of the restaurant, a semicircle of wood carved and painted into a scarlet, gold-scaled dragon. Moya faced the vine-covered wall which during the course of that night had already undergone so many transformations: into the convent wall of the orphanage where she was raised; a Boston blizzard; a stuffy elementary school classroom where an adolescent girl sat squirming in her seat surrounded by children almost ten years younger; a Greyhound bus full of seventeen soldiers and an adolescent gringa-chapina rolling through the norteamericano Deep South . . . When Flor’s hair finally descended into the sweet and sour sauce, love was already happening inside of him, perhaps for the first time since Patti Mundinger. But what made this night so different, that it led him back to love?

  Because Moya had often done this, coerced foreign women (and Flor’s citizenship, at least, was foreign now) into telling all about themselves. For him it was a form of travel, and something more. For them, it was often such a tender surprise that someone such as he should care. But who, in his position, wouldn’t have? This goes to the heart of Moya, the curious role he played back then. They were inseparable, his heart and his role, like a heart-shaped cookie stuck to an overbaked cookie sheet.

  His role was to tell his foreign visitors what they had come to hear, and sometimes even more; to enlarge his country, make it seem bigger, make it emanate, that was always his aim. Often all he had to do was recite his country’s folk sayings—some of them of his own invention—with a certain dark élan: “In Guatemala, vos, you can’t even confide in your own shadow.” “To be a Guatemalan of conscience is to live like a hunted animal.” “In Guatemala, even the drunks watch their words, which doesn’t mean they don’t make a lot of noise, vos.” “Oh well, chula, the dead to their hole, the living to their bollo. What other choice is there?” (bollo, a kind of sweetcake, rhyming with the word for hole, hoyo). They got the idea. Moya had often pictured his women friends back in the cities they came from, addressing rapt audiences in church basements and university lecture halls or speaking over the radio with voices full of dramatic emphasis, “. . . From so many death threats, his hair is turning white! As he said on the night we met in the capital, To be a Guatemalan of conscience,” et cetera.

  With touching humility (not Sylvia McCourt, who had little, but the others, the Sweet Sisters, the Angels) his visitors always went out of their way to assure him of the seriousness and purity of their intentions. As dryly and succinctly as possible, so that he couldn’t for a moment have cause to think they were in any way seeking glory or reward for themselves from the suffering of others, they outlined their various projects and missions. What they learned from him and others, they would take home and employ in the fight against the deceptions of standard political discourse and the mass media’s parroting, against misinformation and indifference.

  That was how they all saw it, vos. Even Moya had come to see it somewhat that way, knowing that he could be a most effective “guerrilla” simply by allowing foreigners to secretively indulge the fantasy that he was one, though of course this could never be acknowledged between them, not even in the most seemingly intimate conversation (secrecy being a church, forced confession its penultimate sacrament). He was always under surveillance, so his first line of defense was to behave at all times as if he had no compromising secrets, as if he couldn’t possibly be leading a clandestine existence as well. The moment it could be proven that he did, not even his reputation as the country’s last truly independent print journalist (still residing in Guatemala, that is), with a network of media-sophisticated girlfriends all over the world, would be able to save him. Of course, Moya had always overestimated the effectiveness of what his friends accomplished when they went home. But so did the chafas.

  Few people in Guatemala read what Moya wrote in El Minuto anyway. In a strange way, he wrote for foreigners. It certainly legitimized him for them. Then he, by paying attention to his visitors, by playing his role, legitimized them.

  So just as Moya appeared to eschew clandestine ties, he had no Guatemalan lovers either. He knew that he might endanger any chapina who became involved with him. This sounds overly romantic, affected. So, put another way, it was certainly something he had to consider. The last one had been Alma Mejia, the girl in his theater group whom Roger had briefly met in Pastel
ería Hemmings in ‘79. She had fled to Mexico later that same year. There she’d involved herself in exile work, a coordinator for the exile theater groups that performed for solidarity audiences around the world. She lived with a compañero without marrying him, they gave their children names out of the Popol Vuh. Alma lived in the organized ladino exiles’ world of melancholy, heroic delusion: she still believed in victory, in the transcendent logic of history, in the inevitability of justice, in the poetic myth of one nation, on and on.

  But Moya could no longer imagine himself falling in love with a chapina who hadn’t faced and made at least similar choices. Wouldn’t he want his woman to have a conscience, to be lively in her heart, full of feeling and sweetness, to be at least a little bit intelligent and capable? Pues, what would that bring her to? She would have to lead some form of clandestine existence, if only in her heart.

  Because by the time Moya met Flor, aboveground opposition hardly existed anymore. Where clandestine organizations survived in the city, it was as separate sections of a snake hacked up into many pieces, buried far apart and deep under the earth. It was hard to imagine a country more justifiably saturated with paranoia. The last thirty years of violent repression—not to mention the centuries before—had perhaps bred a new kind of human being, as if in a poisoned petri dish. Resolutely silent, suspicious, dishonest, full of denial, quick to believe the worst of anyone, guilty when guiltless, guiltless when guilty. Noisy in the cantinas, but, even then, the desperate noise of the stifled. And such capacity for delusion. Even the religious landscape had for many become one of confusion and delirium, because how to speak to the soul without addressing the terror so many felt there, and how to name the devil without increasing the terror? (But the Evangelical Protestants told the people that they were the devil, repent and be safe. So the army thought they had found a new ally in the shepherding of souls to replace the old one and said, Let there be more, and, from the gringo Bible Belt and California, the divine screamers poured down, warrior monks of the Conquest’s unfinished business.)