The Long Night of White Chickens

by Francisco Goldman

  This note is from a crazy girl, I declaimed to Chayito. Obviously not a girl from, well, the type of background I understood that she and all my family would expect me to know, but we all make mistakes, Chayito, especially when we’ve been drinking and have too much money in our pockets! You know how I am, Chayito! Oh Chayito! What kind of girl would send such a vulgar note! What does she expect to get out of me that way!

  Under my rant I was thinking: They wouldn’t dare try and get into this house. And I’d been wanting to go see Zamara anyway.

  Chayito seemed unpersuaded. Probably she didn’t think it looked like a note even a desperate girl would write. But the lunacy of my onslaught had returned her to the fundamental fact that she couldn’t really be Abuelita, because she didn’t dare box my ears, or phone a travel agency to book my flight immediately and then place me under house arrest. That fierce light of grandmotherly omniscience had faded from her eyes.

  “Please don’t tell my uncle,” I said. “He’ll worry for no reason. And I am going home soon, I really am.” She turned and shuffled out of the bedroom, and, addressing her tiny bent back and the long, withered braid hanging down it, I said, “Thank you for caring though, Chayito.”

  I left the next morning, carrying a nylon duffel fully packed with even more than I needed for five days. But I honestly don’t recall even considering the possibility that I might not be back, or else why didn’t I bring all my money? Before stepping out, I stood in the doorway for a moment, looking up and down the avenue. A small herd of unattended goats was leashed by a single tether to the chain-link fence of the junkyard opposite, and our elderly mailman, hump shouldered from so many years of hauling around a fat leather bag almost bigger than himself, was mopping his brow with a handkerchief while he urinated into the weeds by the crumbling salmon-colored corner of the little house next to the junkyard. Who was I looking for? A street kid, any street kid? One was passing by on the other side, but he was just a very small barefoot boy, in ragged black pants like a circus clown’s and an even more torn white T-shirt, and he looked totally absorbed in the pale green slices of unripened mango he was devouring from the small plastic bag in his hand.

  I hardly ever get mail anyway, I started walking even before the mailman was done peeing. I passed the dry-cleaning shop, its counter just a few feet in from the sidewalk, smiled and said hola to one of the beautiful bored sisters on duty there, and she smiled and said hola and then immediately went back to looking angrily stunned by life, trapped inside her strangely unapproachable beauty and the even stranger impression of an evaporating spirit which seems to surround her like an imploding halo.

  At the corner I stopped and took another look around, and felt sure that I wasn’t being followed. The Fuente del Norte bus line terminal was still thirteen blocks away, on 18 Calle, but I decided to walk, though there was no reason to. It didn’t even occur to me that this might be the last time I’d ever walk this way, through this city that has become so familiar that right now I can shut my eyes and wander through its near replica inside me, hearing its mix of cacophonies and silences, smelling its smells, indulging myself in this weird beauty of an ugly city where you get to feel like an invisible angel just by roaming around in it not doing any harm to anybody.

  So I didn’t pause to notice specific landmarks and say good-bye to them; I didn’t think, There’s the little tienda where you decided to become a U.S. citizen because Abuelita’s maids wouldn’t let you in from the rain, Flor. Though only two blocks from the house, in front of the small private hospital with its two ancient ambulances parked out front, I couldn’t help but remember, as I always do, that this was where a death squad intruded itself on Moya and me one especially pretty evening when the sunset was making everything around us glow with old-fashioned cigar box colors—we “escaped” it, of course, our reactions couldn’t have been quicker. Though it was meant for Moya, not me. Which is why only he had to leave. (I’m invisible, or at least I thought I was.) That’s another story, and seems almost another lifetime ago now. I have a lot to tell now, Flor. A lot to try and put in order. Six months since Moya left, and I feel like it’s been practically a whole short, separate lifetime.

  The dry season has gone on baking the city, and most of the countryside, almost a month longer than it’s supposed to: the upper slopes of the volcanoes on the city horizon look almost faded to haze and the mountains are brown, streaked by dark green pine ridges and golden dirt roads. Downtown the traffic kicks up gusts of unwashed grit and litter, and puffs of undiluted black exhaust waft around weightlessly, hanging in the air like the ghosts of unsolved murders, breaking over pedestrians hurrying through them, eyes squeezed shut, hands cupped over mouths and noses. I stopped at American Doughnuts for coffee and a coconut donut, and while I sat at the counter looking out at a shiny customized van with gun portals in its sides stopped in traffic at a red light, I suddenly fantasized that inaugural rainy-season downpour finally falling, turning even that van’s black bullet-proofed windows translucent.

  I’ve definitely developed a traffic phobia here (which might seem surprising since I never had one even in New York). Whenever I reach some downtown destination on foot, I feel limp with relieved tension and even a little proud and lucky to have gotten through it again. It’s the way drivers speed around tight blind corners even on the most crowded streets; and the way some people seem to so exaggerate their pride in owning a vehicle and the elevated sense of hierarchy it brings them, that they think they own the space in front of the fender too and consider any pedestrian’s intrusion into it a violation of private property and a slight against manliness. Even if you’re just a few feet from the curb when the light changes, some of them come right at you, tires squealing as yet another mufferless Toyota pickup explodes forward, and when you’ve scampered out of the way and whirled around what you usually see is one of those mustached mestizo faces staring hard from the driver’s window, just daring or challenging you to do a thing about it. Even Uncle Jorge, with atypical scorn, has acknowledged, “You’re right, Roger, the idea of pedestrian right-of-way was never exported to Guatemala!” Years ago Abuelito was knocked back onto a curb by a wildly careening bus (in fairness to the bus, Abuelito, even on foot, could be as heedlessly hurried as any Guatemala City driver) and treated for broken ribs by an old family doctor who dismissed the importance of the bump on the back of his head, which, had it been drained on time, wouldn’t have hemorrhaged massively and killed him. That happened while my other uncle, Dr. Nelson Arrau, long before his nearly paralyzing stroke, was in temporary exile in England because of his persistent efforts to start a barefoot doctor program in the countryside; the then regime considered the idea of training students to be the rural Johnny Appleseeds of dysentery pills completely Communistic. My mother has always felt that, if Dr. Neli had been here, he would have diagnosed the bump, and Abuelito might still be alive today; he was six years younger than Abuelita. Subconsciously at least, I’ve probably been predisposed to a horror of the traffic here ever since.

  But I’m not at all alone in this: Mariel, for example. She’s a thirteen-year-old street girl, my best “contact” among los niños de la calle. She was telling me all about her terrifying life one day—razor fights with other girls over boys or the contested ownership of a pair of shoes; sadistic child molesters and their slickly baited ploys; police who round up vagabond girls just to sexually abuse them—but when I asked what scared her most, she didn’t even have to think: “The traffic,” she said, widening her glitter-painted eyes. “So many people get run over!”

  And 18 Calle is where, I remember both Flor and my mother telling me, there used to be a famous amate tree—it isn’t there anymore—that the Devil lived in, a tree with blossoms that supposedly only the blind could see. It’s also the street where, in the afternoons and evenings, I could usually find Mariel. Or rather, all I’d have to do was walk up and down through the narrow space in the sidewalk left between all the contraband-vendors’ tables and clot
hing racks until she spotted me from wherever she was lurking. It being morning when I passed through on my way to the buses, I knew she must still be asleep after one of her late thieving nights, crammed into a windowless room in some foul-reeking rooming house with six or so other kids to be safe from the police, sleeping with her shoes on to make it harder for any of the others to swipe them. I kept an eye out for her anyway, but it was more in that yearning way of revisiting the mixed emotions of the past, that futile attempt at telepathy (what’s she thinking now)—as if it were years instead of months ago, when I was still playing detective, that we’d met here so that I could take her to lunch at Pollo Campero. I felt sure that if she saw me now, she’d hide. Whether from shame or fear or both, I didn’t know, and probably never will.

  The Fuente del Norte buses (the same line that transported you on your return trip to Chiquimula five years ago) leave from a lot crowded with the buses of other lines, an uproar of swirled dirt, engine racket, and the bayed chants of the ayudantes, the bus drivers’ assistants: they call out the names of cities and towns for illiterates who can’t read the signs over the windshields and then have to keep it up for the duration of the trip, hanging out the bus door baying, “Puerto Barrios Puerto Barrios” or whatever at every stop or every time the bus slows for people standing along the highway, most of whom probably aren’t waiting for anything but are just standing there, which is why even express buses seem to take forever.

  I bought a ticket for El Progreso in the tiny Fuente del Norte office, and though my “express” wouldn’t be leaving for another forty-five minutes at least, I went back outside with my duffel and bought two cans of pear juice from the little girl who ran up to sell them, and a halved and peeled orange dipped in wheat germ and a touch of chili powder in a plastic bag from another, and the morning papers from the men selling those. I found my bus and got on, though it was still completely empty. It was one of those long-distance coaches with comfortable leather seats, though torn and patched, worn through to the straw in places; most of the reclining mechanisms didn’t work either. This was total luxury compared with the knee-crunching peasants’ buses I’d taken all through the highlands: squarish little boxes originally built in the faraway land where even children’s school buses become obsolete and end up down here, refitted with chubby mountain-and mud-climbing tires and painted like colorful birds, kept running forever by ingenious mechanics who can conjure any spare part from any scrap pile; carrying whole bundled-up markets on their roofs and Indian peasants sitting four to a seat inside, children and even live poultry on their laps, the overfill squatting and stooping with stolid patience the length of the lurching aisle, the closed air thick with unsurprisingly unpleasant odors, not their fault, parasite-infested stomachs and intestines do that, turn people into nonstop farters and belchers.

  I found a seat that was perfect, neither the window next to it nor the one up ahead was jammed. People here generally don’t like to travel with the windows down—except when they’re drunk and worried about vomiting—partly it’s all these notions about chilly air giving you a cold in one way and hot air doing it in another; I have gotten colds traveling from infernal lowlands to cool higher elevations and vice versa, but as far as I’m concerned the stronger the breeze the better. Usually I have to fight these trip-long skirmishes, people seated behind me reaching over to close my window, me opening it again awhile later; it’s the window ahead that’s most important. But I felt pretty confident that by the time the bus reached the desert, people would want at least some air coming in—I left both windows partly open and sat down to wait. A certain coven of street kids, terminal glue sniffers all, like to gather at the far end of that lot, by the dilapidated row of food stalls and lime-trunked trees, but these weren’t the kids I was supposed to be afraid of now. I could see two of them from the bus, slumped shoulder to shoulder on an abandoned tire in the shade, looking like gaunt, ancient opium addicts peacefully dwindling away. Now and then one or the other lifted a twiggy arm and brought the glue-soaked rag in his fist to his nose and held it there for a moment.

  I ate both halves of my orange and saved the pear juices for the thirst of the trip. I couldn’t bring myself to read the newspapers and just sat there staring out the window at the glue sniffers. It was then that it first occurred to me that I really should have put away my alarm system, like I always had whenever Uncle Jorge brought prospective buyers to look over the house. Eventually, slowly, the bus began to fill. The driver and his ayudante were in their separate front seats under the tinsel-wreathed portrait of St. Christopher, the engine was idling loudly. The ayudante, a middle-aged man, not a boy, kept having to get up and shout “Puerto Barrios” out the door, and now and then he clambered down to help someone with luggage. I’d left my duffel on the seat to discourage anyone from sitting there, but now I felt guilty and moved my bag up onto the rack. A few minutes later an extremely pretty girl got on, tall and slender like a young model, her fine-featured face full of that easy radiance that makes you think of healthy outdoor living, a loving family. She stood at the top of the aisle, holding her small suitcase in both hands and a folded umbrella tucked under her arm, her slowly blinking eyes scanning the rows of seats as if with innocently prim discernment before settling on the empty space beside me without meeting my eyes. She was one of those girls who fill you with a sense of wonder over what can happen even in deadbeat desert or banana plantation towns or a decaying and vice-ridden port (pretty much all this bus was going to pass through), places where so many of the men still live by such primitive codes that all their stories seem to end in violence, ruinous and drunken humiliation, or quietest oblivion when they’re lucky; but sometimes they manage to provide the seed for a girl like this too, and probably nothing else. Her blue-green-striped dress looked brand new, as did the yellow plastic belt around her waist. Maybe she’d come to visit relatives in the city and they’d bought her the dress; maybe tomorrow she’d be back in a faded old hot-weather smock, washing laundry at an outdoor public sink or even in a river. Maybe on her visit to the city she’d learned how pretty she is, and now she was going to take this surprising knowledge home and wait to see what it meant. I didn’t want to frighten her off so I pretended to busy myself in one of my newspapers, staring into it without reading, hoping she’d take the seat. From time to time I’ve lost my heart on the spot to girls like her and then have usually found them to be as ardently innocent as they seem on first impression, and so locked into their limited circumstances as to be almost incapable of construing anything else. Only outright abandonment or starkest desperation, both common enough, seems able to force an impulse towards freedom into their lives, and then only after they’ve already encountered the first bitter tastes of life on the move. I’m thinking now of Zamara, but of you too, of what might have been your fate if Señor Soto Hijo hadn’t cut off your father’s head in the desert.

  When I glanced up again I saw both the bus driver and the ayudante remonstratively urging her to sit down between them on the shotgun seat. The ayudante was cleaning their belongings—-jackets, blankets, the new issue of ¿Dónde?—off the aisle side of the seat and pushing it under the dashboard while the driver, beaming and flirting from behind his wheel, took the small suitcase from her hands and then held it out to the ayudante. She was laughing, enjoying the attention, the special invitation to ride up front and watch the road unfold like a movie. She sat down and vanished from my craning sight.

  It was near noon when we reached El Progreso, at the beginning of the arid lands. The town is just another of those heat-flattened desert towns that don’t seem to serve a fundamental purpose anymore, though three or so centuries ago, long before it got the positivist-era name it never flourished under, it might have been a thriving mule caravan stop on the royal trade route to Panama, where the Spanish flotillas anchored. The bus, enough of its windows finally open now, hurtled down through parched, amber cactus hills and turned into an oven as soon as it pulled over to let passeng
ers off. But the quivering heat outside and the dusty walk into town suddenly loomed ahead like a proof that I hadn’t thought this through well enough and didn’t know what I wanted to say to her after all. I sat back in my seat and tried not to have another thought about it until the hot wind was coming through the windows again. That was when I said my first good-bye, to Zamara, my lovely, pale, faintly olive-and-rose-hued Zamarita; feeling miserable because I knew Moya’s prophecy on that last night we talked had probably come true (“. . . her heart can break like any other, vos”). Except I’m so indecisive that now I’m not even sure it was good-bye. She was and must be still waiting for me, sitting patiently on that little stool in the shade of that one dusty mango tree, waiting for the willed surprise of my unresonant knock against the corrugated-metal door hung loosely on wire hinges to the stick fence enclosing the baked-dirt yard of her mother’s house. But I hadn’t told her I was coming, and had sent no message.

  As soon as I decided not to get off at El Progreso, I thought I might go to Chiquimula instead, as if retracing your own previous journey had suddenly been revealed as my hidden intention. So often I’ve found myself doing that or imagining that I was: walking where you did, Flor, trying to see what you saw and know what you knew, even listening for your own inner voice in my thoughts and the silence all around . . .