The Long Night of White Chickens

by Francisco Goldman

  When the ayudante came down the aisle collecting fares from new passengers after we left El Progreso, I paid again to go as far as Chiquimula, which made the ayudante and even some of the other passengers regard me suspiciously, as if there must be something wrong with me for not knowing where I was going. I spent the next hour or so watching the desertscape and the high, completely eroded peaks farther back, wondering if anyone ever went up there, even on horseback or mule, and for what reason. Somewhere in the desert, I’d heard, there is a prosperous and hermetic village where all the women and girls are blond and green eyed and spend their lives making the finest lace in all the Americas, just as their ancestors have been doing for centuries.

  Then I didn’t get off at the Chiquimula-Zacapa crossroad either, though the pretty girl, amidst much fanfare from the driver and ayudante, did. Opening her umbrella against the sun, she walked off into the Zacapa side of the desert all by herself, carrying her little suitcase. This time I voluntarily went up to the front to present myself to the ayudante and endure the embarrassment of changing my ticket again. He was still leaning sideways in his seat, trying to catch a final glimpse of the girl in the desert as the bus pulled out, his face and skimpy mustache drenched.

  “I’m not getting off here,” I said, holding the sweat-softened paper ticket out to him and reaching for my wallet.

  “Este anda más perdido que el Judío Errante”—This one’s more lost than the Wandering Jew—he said, grinning at the driver, who turned away from his driving to gape at me. All the other passengers were smiling as if it were all just too incredible. “This is the third time he’s changed his ticket!” the ayudante boomed; and then a woman said, “Ay pobrecito. Can’t you see that he’s a tourist and doesn’t know what to see?” And another said, “There’s a dinosaur museum back there near Zacapa. Why don’t you go see the dinosaur bones?” And I said, “No, I’m just going to Puerto Barrios.” And then the ayudante grinned leeringly and said, “Para las sirenas!” for the mermaids, and the driver happily growled, “Claro, there’s not one other reason to go to Barrios,” which made some of the other women passengers look at me disapprovingly as I made my way back down the aisle.

  Soon the desert was behind us, the landscape gradually turning a softly browned green: the vast cattle-feeding plains and stately trees of Izabal, and the ruined palm plantation with the oil-rich palms imported from Africa that refused to adapt to their new soil, row upon row of spearlike trunks and fronds withered into floppy black mops that look like tribal Africa sorcerers’ masks. And then, almost suddenly, the highway became a tunnel through banana plantation lowlands, the dense vegetation luminously green even in the shade, pushing the huts and small houses of occasional little settlements so close to the highway that the people who seemed to be perpetually sitting outside often had to pull their legs in to let the bus roar past. You could tell that life was different here because the air was so changed, not just hot but solid as it washed in through the windows, full of ineffable scents and a ripened viscosity that words and even innermost thoughts seemed to stick to: from outside the bus a young girl’s voice haughtily piped, “La cabronada es que . . .” but the rest of her speech was carried off by the tearing of air as a speeding semi truck passed us going the other way; and then seconds later a young, shirtless man walking down the highway with his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the pavement mumbled, as if right in my ear, “Huele ella así, pues, porque fuma como un turco . . .” She smells like that because she smokes like a Turk. Only it was the woman sitting in front of me who burst out in laughter, screechingly repeating como un turco while the man beside her cheerfully snorted, Así. . . An evangelical radio preacher’s voice boomed from the thick and seemingly unpopulated jungle outside, “I Went under the Mountain and There I Saw the Big Dead and the Little Dead,” and that’s the last thing I remember hearing before drowsiness turned to sleep.

  I woke up on the road into Puerto Barrios, where the air was no cooler or lighter but less haunted, stirred up by the hubbub of the perpetual parade of pedestrians and bicycle riders and the loud percolations of so many low-horsepower motorbikes bouncing along, driven by wiry brown and black boys, some with girls in colorful dresses and high heels riding sidesaddle on back, legs crossed at the ankles, toes primly pointed up.

  And as soon as I stepped down from the bus a sun-bronzed blond girl on a scarlet stingray bicycle waved at me as she pedaled by, and then turned to smile brazenly over her shoulder. She was no more than thirteen, and looked as if she came from the secret village of the lace makers.

  I hired a taxi to take me through town, down the long paved avenue to the oceanfront and the Hotel del Norte. And when I checked in I said I’d be staying for a week or two, maybe even three, and put most of my money away in their safety deposit box because the rooms there don’t have locks. My life had changed again, but this was the moment when I first began to notice, because it was the first time I allowed myself to admit that maybe I wouldn’t be going back to the city at all.

  The last time I was here was with Zamara, in the middle of that spell-like stretch of months after Moya left when all I ever wanted to do and almost all I could think about was fucking Zamara. Same bus, same taxi ride. I should mention how simply and nicely dressed she was because of what happened at the check-in desk.

  She was wearing one of those unadorned T-shirt-material dresses, purple, with a low back, and high-heeled gold-lamé shoes, the delicate kind, all straps, baring her painted toenails. I’d bought the dress. The cotton clung to her from the humidity and the long hours of sitting on the bus, but she looked remarkably fresh and neat, and the only makeup she had on was lipstick. Zamara has a wonderful stillness inside of her. Partly it’s the way she likes to stop and stare at things—store windows, landscapes, people in the street; that stillness in her stare seems to beckon the world closer, as if quietly luring some timid creature. And after she’s taken it all in and is almost ready to move on, she often doesn’t say anything, communicating her reaction or appraisal with a quiet expression, as if words might frighten the subject of her interest off, even a store window full of delicately shimmering shoes. A suddenly bold, almost indignant widening of her dark, glistening eyes might mean, How ugly! But that expression of having just tasted something good, almost ruing a pleasure so ephemeral that there might not even be another spoonful for her: this can mean she wants something in the store window but doesn’t want to come right out and ask. And a way of sighing, holding her breath and then letting it out softly and almost luxuriantly through her nostrils, the corners of her lips squeezed into a dimpled smile, her eyebrows slightly arched: this means, How lovely!

  When we got out of the taxi she stared for a long time at the white balustraded seawall, the ornate stone benches, the green gazebo with its single bulb glowing like a pearl in the greenish evening air, the palms and seabirds, the clouds massed like faraway pink and yellow pyramids in the darkening sky, a majestic freighter as strung with lights as a used-car lot sailing diagonally out into the ocean, away from the new modern port nearby on the bay that has made Puerto Barrios practically obsolete as an actual port, though not as a center of seamen’s nightlife.

  “There go the patria’s bananas,” I said, though of course I didn’t know what the ship was really carrying.

  “A dónde?” she asked.

  “A los japoneses.”

  A moment later she asked, “How do they keep them from rotting? You can’t put bananas in ice.”

  “They’re very green now, but I guess they’ll be ripe when they get there. They have to time it just right.”

  I remember the way the breeze, drying her dampness just enough, lifted soft strands of dark hair off her partly bared shoulders, and that the soft, smooth-sheened skin was slightly blotched from the all-day heat, and tangy tasting when I kissed her there through the feathery drift of hair, one hand pressed lightly to the bared part of her back, feeling the almost humming warmth. Then she turned her head just en
ough to watch me from the corner of one gleaming eye, and when she’d sighed her happiness through her nose, she said, “They’ll be yellow, like them,” and giggled. I guess my look was blank. She widened her eyes and said, “Los bananos . . . !”

  We walked up the waterlogged steps and into the hotel through the wide screened porch and into the office across the corridor from the bar—I was dying for a drink. A dapper man in a white guayabera who looked as if his ancestral roots might be in India stood behind the counter; at the desk a handsome, curly-haired woman sat behind a portable typewriter. They both looked for too long a moment at Zamara, then quickly at each other, and then the man asked me to step into the corridor, where he politely but firmly said that this is a reputable hotel and that guests aren’t allowed to bring women from the town back to their rooms and that I’d find notices posted in every room saying the same.

  I was amazed and felt awful for Zamara. Did it show like a mark on her face that only I couldn’t see or what?

  I knew I had to be careful, that if I challenged his sense of authority no reasoning or even a bribe would sway him. In these situations, it’s always best to pretend not to speak much Spanish, just enough to earnestly argue in a single direction until hopefully the opponent gets bored.

  “We’ve just come from the capital,” I said, trying to look wounded and confused, as if I had no idea why women from the town weren’t wanted there or why he’d mistaken Zamara for one of them. “We’ve never been here before.”

  “She is one of those from the Medellín,” he said flatly, as if he’d had these arguments too often and wanted to get right to the point. The Medellín is the famous bawdy sailors’ nightclub just down the road, and I knew for a fact that Zamara had never worked there or anywhere in Puerto Barrios, though her friend Paola does.

  “The where? Discuple, but I don’t know what you’re talking about. She’s my fiancée, we’ve just come from the city and I know this is a respectable hotel, anyone can see that. We’re taking the ferry over to Livingston tomorrow.”

  “Señor,” he said peremptorily, running one hand through his ointment-inked hair. “Anyone can see that you have only one piece of luggage.”

  I asked him, please, to wait there just one moment, I didn’t want to embarrass my fiancee, and I walked back into the office with a breezy smile for Zamara, who was leaning against the wall glowering, and picked up my duffel—the clerk was already following me in through the door but I swept past him back into the corridor, and then I put the bag down at his feet and unzipped it. Zamara’s things had all been packed on top.

  “Ve?” I said. “Those are not mine.” For emphasis I plowed my hand through her underthings, all of them new, and plucked out the top of the bathing suit I’d bought her just the day before. “Do you think this is mine?” I even pulled out her scrunched copy of Vanidades magazine, dog-eared from the trip. “Do you think I read this?”

  * * *

  The rooms in the Hotel del Norte only cost about six dollars a night and are almost as spare as changing stalls in an old-fashioned bathhouse and smell the same, with thick, glossy coats of paint to protect against salt corrosion and rot. I’ve heard the hotel was originally constructed as a United Fruit administrative building during the heyday of the U.S. fruit companies, though someone else said it used to be their malaria hospital. No one who works there now seems to know which, as if the salt air eats up memory when it hasn’t been painted like everything else. But it makes a beautiful hotel, sitting like a giant, four-story Caribbean palace on the Bahía de Amatique, all wood, screened windows, and wind. The rooms don’t even have fans, but don’t really need them because at night, with or without rain, there always seems to be a breeze coming off the bay and in through the louvered, gauzily curtained double doors. All night long you can hear wind in the long, verandalike corridors, evenly strained through the long screens, gathering whispered force in the maze of staircases climbing up through the middle of the hotel; then, as soon as the sun comes up, there’s no breeze at all, and almost no air. Downstairs there’s a large nautical bar and an even bigger dining room, screened in on three sides and surrounded by water, with white tablecloths, and black waiters in white waistcoats who stride with silent steps across the spongy floorboards carrying serving trays with all the dishes covered by silver lids (this is where I’m sitting now, at one of only two occupied tables, the gray, tepid water slurping at the pilings just outside).

  In the open yard behind the kitchen there is a spider monkey, and a tree with a tire hung from a rope for it to play on. That evening, after we’d finally checked in, as Zamara and I climbed up the stairs on our way to our room on the top floor, Zamara paused on the first landing to stare at the monkey. It was pacing back and forth at the end of its long leash in that way spider monkeys do, looking like a long-limbed hillbilly with his thumbs stuck high into his suspenders. Then it climbed up into the tree and hung upside down, looking in our general direction and chattering. “Ay, pobrecito el mico.” Zamara claimed the monkey was looking right at her and waved, though I doubt it could have actually made her out against the twilight and shadows.

  “Zamara?” I asked her then. “Did Teniente López ever bring you to Puerto Barrios?” Until recently, the lieutenant had been her boyfriend, or at least she’d claimed he was. She nodded her head just once, and I asked, “Where did you stay?”

  “At the naval base,” she said, and I knew it must be true. Of course they would have gone to the Medellin and sat at a table with the base commander and his officers.

  That night we went to the Medellin ourselves and sat at a table with Paola and the black Panamanian fire-eater who is the star act there. Then, long after we’d come back and fallen asleep, I woke alone in the single bed we’d been sharing though there was another one in the room, and saw Zamara standing in the light of the door she’d just pushed open. It was the beautiful, softly glowing blue light of a tropical predawn over the ocean, but I thought she probably shouldn’t walk all the way to the bathroom stark naked like that.

  “Amorcita, put something on,” I said.

  But she didn’t even glance back before she stepped out. I got up and went after her with a towel, and found her just outside the door looking confused, blinking out at the immense bluish neon cloud that both the ocean and sky looked fused into.

  “Quiero ver al mico,” she said. She wanted to see the monkey. “He was right here!”

  “Zamara.” I laughed softly. “Estás somnambulando, vos.”

  I hugged her to me and walked her gently back to bed, and, when we woke again a few hours later, she didn’t remember any of it.

  I’ve been here three days. I really should phone Uncle Jorge, or at least send a telegram. People quite understandably worry and even panic here when they expect to know where someone is but suddenly don’t and haven’t heard anything: so many silences that last an eternity begin in just that way.

  The newspapers say it still hasn’t rained inland, but it does on the coast; the clouds pile up in great multitiered pillars, some of the rain sweeping in, a lot of it letting go out there, faraway wind-slanted or funnel-shaped commotions low over the horizon, probably capsizing fishing boats and shrimpers. I have an image in my head now of the last six months since Moya left having lifted off of me all in one piece, sort of borne up by the force of my meditations, hanging there like one of those heavy-bellied clouds. I can sit back, study that cloud, and begin to make decisions. Do I tell it in order? (my trip through the highlands and return to the city: Moya with the notebook, the death squad, then hiding out with Moya until he could flee the country; a week later I infiltrate the orphanage; two months later a nun whom I’d met on that trip through the highlands comes to the city with news of a lost boy . . .)

  Or do I try to tell it according to some other logic? Because told in order, it wouldn’t make sense: I didn’t understand things in the order they happened, I didn’t foresee what they would mean later; and I’m not supposed to be telling what
happened to me, but about Flor.

  I can’t just let it out all at once either, but inside that fuming cloud that’s the way it seems to be happening, all these charged particles slamming around: Lucas Caycam Quix. Sister Clarita. María de la Luz de Prey. Mariel, the street girl. Señora Mirza López de Betz; her nephew, the lieutenant; even the niñera fafera. Rosana Letones. Celso Batres. This isn’t supposed to be about me or even about Zamara, though she too plays a small role in what I have to tell now, the unfolding of your plausible fates. Moya, of course, was always supposed to be the chronicler of our investigation, but when he departed this land of wonders six months ago he was almost as innocent of all this—almost, I think, and still must be—as I was then.

  Maybe I should start with the notebook and, if not with that, then the nun, Sor Clarita from Nebaj, who of course knew you. The first real lead came from her, and the notebook merely clarified it—confirmed by omission the ambiguous existence of a lost boy, Lucas Caycam Quix. Except I’m not sure that I can even tell the difference between what has actually happened and what didn’t anymore, though the answers I’m seeking depend on my being able to: I don’t even know if Lucas Caycam Quix is real.

  If only there was a way to tell it all through your eyes, Flor. Then I could just be the passenger, bracing myself for the cruel impact I’d already know waited at the end of the ride (foretold but never foreseen right there in the palm of your hand, the indecipherably crisscrossed and layered one): Was your murderer, Flor, a vicious street boy who believes you “sold” his sister into French “slavery”? Or was it the general’s sister after all? Or someone else entirely? And whoever it was, did you ever have a chance to understand or were you too distracted or muddled or defeated by something else?