The Long Night of White Chickens

by Francisco Goldman

  Basta, mijito! Let the secrets rest, I can almost hear you pleading. Even exposing your murderer wouldn’t get me to the bottom of anything but that, would it, and how can I expect to accomplish that in Puerto Barrios anyway? Why don’t you just shake me awake as if from a dream and tell me to forget it? So here’s one answer: I cannot because so far I have been unable to extricate myself from you, and I am tired, exhausted, of feeling haunted.

  Wouldn’t you rather hear all about Zamara, Flor? That happened, for sure. Or even about Moya and our “heroic” escape from a death squad? Oh Flor, she’s so beautiful—though perhaps you wouldn’t think so, you wouldn’t think Zamara is that beautiful. With her soft pale cheeks and dark easily riled eyes and adorably expressive mouth, she really looks like she has a lot going on inside. She definitely has charisma, though she is often very quiet. She has black shoulder-length hair, cut in a wide, fringy bang over those eyes. Her voice is somewhat chesty and bleating, though in a much lower, that is far more normal, register than the voice I am obviously invoking. She’s nineteen or else is lying about her age and is younger. She has a little son from when she was in the States three years ago, when she went to Los Angeles and found work as a maid for a family who didn’t enroll her in elementary school and there fell in love with a half-Chicano, haif-grencho (Zamara slang for gringo) surfer boy named Rex, who impregnated and then dumped her. But she managed to keep her maid’s job until her pregnancy became impossible to hide, and when she was fired she managed to hang on in L.A., illegal and with little money, brave Zamarita, until her baby was born so that he could be a U.S. citizen even if his mother couldn’t. She named him Rex too, spent the rest of her money on the airfare back to Guatemala, and then moved in with her own long-single mother in El Progreso, also called Guastatoya now that everyone has tired of the stale mockery of the former. She languished there for about a year and then left her son behind with her mother and came to the city to work in the ambiente, though not in a burdel but as a barra show girl, as “una artista de barra.” I met her soon after, in October, just weeks before I left on that nearly two-week trip through the highlands, the ostensible purpose of which was to cross the border into Mexico at some point along the way so that I could come back in with a new visa. Moya was already in trouble then, over his column about the post office and the black-market dollar trade, published while I was away. But he’d also managed to bribe your old notebook out of the police archives with the money I’d given him for that purpose—the notebook in which you’d preserved rudimentary details and sometimes startling anecdotes regarding the adoptions you arranged and the adopters (including Ozzie Peterkins, who’d wanted to marry you?); that very night of my return to the capital, November 4, after Moya and I had spent the afternoon poring over the notebook, the shit hit the fan, and we ended up hiding out in an autohotel called El Omni. Two days later I accompanied Moya to the airport for his second flight out of the country in a year, though this exile is probably going to last a very long time, if not forever.

  I wrote to Moya yesterday and posted it from the hotel. I told him everything. I won’t be surprised if it takes weeks to reach him, but I think it would be best if it got there just ahead of me:

  TWENTY-ONE

  I know; I’ll start with your voice, recovered from this disorder of echoes inside me:

  “All I want for Christmas is for Ira to get better”—do you remember that, Flor? In front of the F. A. O. Schwarz toy store on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan?—that’s what you said again, so many years later, in Chichicastenango, during my trip through the highlands, when you spoke to me as if in a ghost story.

  In Chichicastenango I picked up your trail again after having lost it completely during my search of the lower-class brothels of Guatemala City, in the frustration of looking for you everywhere where you couldn’t possibly be and the despair that came after, when I came so close to abandoning our project for good. In the nighttime silence of a market plaza in Chichi, I heard your true secret voice. There, in that mountain market town or in the swooping patterns of bats in the chilly night air or simply in front of my stare, the secret logic of your life—our lives, because we remain linked in this no matter what—briefly spelled itself in the silence, almost as if in the suddenly decipherable lines in an impossibly crisscrossed palm.

  When I got back to the city and found myself quickly holed up like an outlaw with Moya in the Omni, I even tried to explain it to him, though I’m not sure I really understood what I meant anymore, not in the same brief way I had in Chichi—it seemed an awful lot to hang on one seemingly innocent sentence spoken in front of a toy store window nearly a decade and a half before.

  It happened in New York City, on a Sunday morning, seven or eight hours after we’d been woken in our hotel by the groans of my father’s 2:00 A.M. gallbladder attack. We’d come to New York, of course, for the Harvard—Columbia football game and were staying, like we always did, in the Howard Johnson’s Motor Lodge on Eighth Avenue. But the hospital my father was in was on the Upper East Side and that’s where we were walking from, all the way back to our hotel, when we stopped in front of F. A. O. Schwarz to look at the windows. My mother had caught a dawn flight and was in the hospital with my father now, and we’d been sent back to the hotel to pack our things for the train home to Boston.

  In front of the F. A. O. Schwarz window you asked me what I wanted for Christmas. I wanted Bauer hockey skates and gloves, and said so. I bet there was even a small note of indignation in my voice over your even having had to ask.

  So see how much I’d changed by then? (Though of course so had you, nineteen and in your first year of high school, going around dressed like a French librarian, and me in the sixth grade.) Because for years, of course, all those prior years to the fifth grade, I mean, I’d been happier to spend my afternoons in the basement with you and as far as anyone could tell had been happily oblivious of any other possibility, though this seemed to have retarded me in some pretty obvious ways . . .

  But it wasn’t that hard to become a “Namoset kid” after all. I’d started tagging along and then just kept going, over and over, out to the frozen swamps, oblivious, or seemingly oblivious, as always, to whatever resistance I at first encountered. So I’d been accepted by the other boys at school almost as soon as I’d tried to be and not because they had finally become used to having me around, or because they no longer minded all the other ways in which I was different, or had decided to tolerate those differences. I really had become just like them, in every way that seemed to matter, I mean. And the ways in which I remained different seemed no more important than the ways in which anyone’s personal history or idiosyncrasies might make him so, might expose him to continuous punishing ridicule, if he didn’t know how, or lacked the essential enthusiasm and energy, to conform. So what if my house was called the Copacabana because of the funny accents they heard there, the funny decor they saw, the funny affectation of Spanish wrought-iron grill under the windows of our one-story ranch house? In Namoset there was always a lot of rough talk about ethnic and religious origins anyway, and, while there were plenty of fully Jewish kids around, there was only one Copacabana. I thought it didn’t matter when I was called spik since anyone could see that I wasn’t really a spik, I only sort of looked like one. Or I’d get stuck with temporary nicknames like Juan Valdéz.

  Eccentricities, of course, attract a lot of attention in small towns, and Flor, especially by the time she was in high school, going around dressed like some uptight perfumed French librarian at the height of the hippie era and working in the Brigham’s ice-cream parlor in the evenings, certainly attracted attention. By then she was starting to hate Namoset at least as much as my mother always had, but it was almost as if she expressed that by making the town love its own stereotyped if benevolent legend of her strangeness—because Namoset was never Flor’s prison so much as it was the circus of her dexterity that had finally become the frumpiest little one-ring show, into which she still had to step dai
ly for the performances of her interminable adolescence. Flor’s story was so widely known and obvious seeming that people practically disassociated my family from it, as if she was a nearly permanent fixture of the town who bore the same relation to everybody. She was the pretty foreign girl who had started out as a nearly illiterate fourteen-year-old in the first grade and look at her now, nineteen, starting high school, straight A’s, on her way to college!

  Flor provoked a kind of baffled awe rather than maliciousness, because even though she was both cheerful and haughty, and seemed possessed by some unswayable and private sense of mission that couldn’t have been only about wanting to go to college, she was always so dauntingly literal. All she wanted was to go to college, that’s what she’d say over and over. In a town where, frankly, many people didn’t think going to college was the be all and end all. It was as if behind this monomania, there was a secret that couldn’t be communicated, perhaps having something to do with where she came from. As if she might be jailed in her native country if she didn’t get to college. It was as if no one had ever encountered anyone so cheerfully single-minded and remote, which made her seem much more mysterious than she actually was. No one really knew a thing about her private life, about Tony. Every year she could count on the most self-regarding teenager in the senior class to contrive some spectacular play for her attentions, and at the climactic moment she might merely widen her eyes at most and say to him, Are you on drugs or do you think this is one of those movies? You’re just a boy! Only I could have told them that this prudish and superior grandstanding was in one sense absolutely literal, but in the other simply a ploy. The myth of her own superiority and sovereign independence was her only defense against her own uncertainties, and her best weapon against Tony, whom she was as in love with as ever. And she was no prude with Tony.

  With everyone else—outside of our family, of course—she was so literal it must have seemed she was the one on drugs. She wanted to go to college, that’s all. Everything she did, every night she served ice creams, every book they saw her reading while she waited at the bus stop, was in the advancement of this cause. They all must have imagined that she went into Boston on weekends for the libraries, or for the art museum, or to case out the dorms at Radchliffe. She could have stood out on the corner with a sign saying, I NEED MONEY FOR COLLEGE, and I swear not a soul walking by wouldn’t have dipped into their pockets. And if anyone asked her just what it was she intended to do with a college degree she was likely to answer with that same stupefying literalness and a smile that seemed to suggest an incomprehensible irony, Oh well, we’ll see, maybe I’ll get married, the important thing is to get to college. That was her late-Namoset persona, anyway. She wouldn’t let anyone see her impatience and boredom, her deeper confusions. And on the sidewalks in Namoset Square, she was always so nice and friendly to the police.

  I wanted new hockey skates and gloves, nothing else, and when in front of the F. A. O. Schwarz window I said so, you said, “Oh gosh, Roger, next thing you know, you’ll be into cars.” Like being into hockey was the same as being a greaser, when in fact, in Namoset anyway, the opposite was true. “You will be one of those little hoodlums who spend all their time trying to be scary, and then suddenly they have nowhere to go but the army or a gas station.” The extraordinary thing was that your voice was suddenly quavery and high, like you were about to cry. “Roger, that would break my heart, do you hear me? I would feel like every minute I’ve spent with you has been a complete waste of time. Roger, you have to stop trying to be like everyone else. Don’t you see where that will lead you? At dinner last night, in front of Ira’s friends, when they asked you how you were doing in school, you went on and on about hockey. It isn’t even winter yet! I could have died of embarrassment. We could all tell you were just making it up too—”

  “I was not.”

  “Roger, you are not the star of your team. This is not even really a team, right? Teams of tough little boys from Boston do not travel all the way to the swamps in Namoset to play hockey against you and your friends.”

  I was silent for a moment, and then I giggled, and then, in response to your disappointed look, fell silent again.

  “. . . Well, what do you want for Christmas?”

  You actually thought about it for a moment, but then you said, “All I want for Christmas is for Ira to get better,” and there was a little catch in your throat, a tiny sob, and you exhaled a fluttery sigh . . .

  That, and then the little catch in your throat, the exhaled tiny sob. It went ping, something in your voice, a note I can’t exactly call false, because it wasn’t quite that, but I’ve never forgotten it, and have never, until perhaps recently, fathomed its meaning to me.

  There, in front of F. A. O. Schwarz, what I first felt was shame, because I hadn’t said what you had, selfishly requesting hockey skates and gloves instead (no wonder you often seemed his favorite, you always knew just what to say), and then I felt a flash of confused anger, as if you’d tricked me. Well, we were tired, and of course you were concerned and still a little shaken, so was I. It had been a long stretch of nearly sleepless and frightened hours, set off by what still has to count as one of the principal shocks of my life: my father’s bellowing moans suddenly waking us at two in the morning in our darkened room in the Howard Johnson’s. You were in the other bed, across from my father’s vacated one, and I was in a cot near the wall, and my father was in the bathroom with the door closed, moaning like some terrified, mortally wounded bear curled up in a cave. I’d never heard a sound like that, it froze me as soon as it woke me, that awful, surrendering sound of pure agony, but it stopped as soon as you ran to the door in your pajamas and shrieked, “Ira . . . ?” Then my father came out in his bathrobe with his hands over his groin and went silently to the closet and put his overcoat on and it wasn’t until he sat down on his bed and reached for his shoes that the groans tore through him again. In a matter of seconds, it seemed, you’d helped him to get his shoes on and had rushed into the bathroom clutching your clothes to your chest and bounced back out dressed like a French librarian, with even the velvet ribbony bow tie neatly in place under the starched white collar of your blouse, tugging at the hips of your knee-length black skirt, slipping feet into black pumps and grabbing your houndstooth blazer and tossing your makeup into the pockets all in one motion while we were already following my father’s moans and methodical steps out the door . . . Somehow he was able to tell the taxi driver the name of the hospital he wanted to go to. And there we’d waited, on an orange couch in a fluorescent-bright waiting room, terrified and feeling like orphans, disbelieving of the nurses and doctors who occasionally stopped by to assure us that everything was going to be all right, until my mother arrived from her dawn flight from Boston only five hours later, and was soon after let in to see my father.

  When she came back out she said that my father didn’t want us getting too worked up over what the doctors said was just going to be a routine operation, life should go on as normal, we had to be in school the next day. They couldn’t have afforded the extravagance of keeping us in a hotel for a week anyway. Until my father was ready to come home, my mother would stay with an old friend from the Latin American Society of Boston, a Chilean woman married to an American business executive, Mr. Mac-Kenzie, who worked in New York now. They lived in an apartment on the Upper East Side, only blocks away from the hospital.

  And then my mother had given us money for the train to Massachusetts, and for the taxi from the Route 128 station to Namoset, as well as for a taxi from the hospital to the Howard Johnson’s. But we’d decided to walk instead, so that we’d have more money to spend at the snack bar on the train.

  It wasn’t until we’d turned away from the F. A. O. Schwarz window and were walking down Fifth Avenue again, your words still echoing inside me, that I was able to briefly detach those words from the drama of the situation. That was when something went ping, a short and jarring little something, like an insight forming but th
en dissipating before it could be expressed. From then on whenever I remembered you saying that what you wanted for Christmas was for my father to get better, or whenever I found its echo in other things you said or even did, I’d relive that jarring little sensation of having felt on the verge of knowing something and then having lost it.

  We caught the noon train from Penn Station, but, instead of getting off at Route 128 like we were supposed to, we went all the way to Back Bay Station in Boston. And then you took me to Tony’s apartment, where we stayed until the morning. This was a completely obsessed and reckless thing for you to have tried to pull off, of course, and a big mistake in more ways than one, for it ended up wrecking your relationship with my mother, which had always been pretty tenuous, in a new and irreparable way. No matter what else, my mother had always felt that she could at least trust you to act responsibly in regard to me. But there was something else that the incident flushed out of hiding between the two of you, a rancor that was never overtly addressed and couldn’t have been, having much to do with what you both felt about each other as women, I think, what each of you explicitly or intuitively knew about the other.

  So you couldn’t really have been all that surprised when, in the heat of the first face-to-face castigations following my parents’ return from New York, my mother accused you of “acting like an ordinary whore in front of my son.” But you gasped anyway, like it was one of the most unexpected hurts of your life, and whispered, “Ordinaria? . . . Yo? . . . Like a . . . in front of. . .” And gasped again and said, “Ay no, Mirabel.” Then, silently, you stiffened and fixed my mother with a teary, accusatory stare of your own.

  My mother may have, perhaps must have, found in that stare an allusion to her own love affair of two summers back with Pepe Ganús the hog assassin, which had also, arguably, taken place right in front of “her son” (though it is also true that they had been as discreet about it as possible, and the son, back then, had been quite uncomprehending). And perhaps in that stare my mother read another kind of sexual defiance, even more hurtful, that went deeper, and further back. You probably didn’t think my mother had ever been a very good wife to my father. Out of blind loyalty or even out of an old Chiquimula predisposition, you tended to unthinkingly absolve my father of any blame in that, Flor. So I think it was at least partly because of my mother’s trepidation and even panic over the silent messages in that stare that you escaped any punishment over the incident. (In fact my mother would actually seem even angrier over something that would happen the next year, when a Namoset High guidance counselor would summon her to a private conference and there accuse her and our family of treating you “like a maid.”) In the end my mother—and my father too, for different, easier reasons—probably felt relieved to just accept the explanation, or alibi, that you tearfully kept insisting on: that your unprecedented lapse of judgment had been caused by your fear that my father might die.