The Long Night of White Chickens

by Francisco Goldman

  Even if my life during those first seven months after Flor’s death was gloomy and privately estranged anyway, that was to be expected, it was what life was now. Then that girl, I don’t even know her name, came into the bar while I was working one night; came in out of the blue, not pink haired anymore but artificially auburned and black tipped, on one of those hot early September nights, wearing a low-cut black minidress that set off her strikingly porcelain white skin, bared shoulders small cleavage and small yellowish eyes in such a way that she seemed to glow from within with refrigerated light. In her late twenties now, at least. She was by herself, and jittery seeming. Maybe she was on cocaine, and was on her way to something late-night and had stopped in for a drink to settle her nerves, or to meet someone, or just to pass the time. She had the brightly opaque gaze of some tiny animal creeping up to the edge of a clearing. We recognized each other right away.

  “I know who you are. You’re—”

  “Roger,” I said. “You were at Flor’s—”

  “—funeral, uh-huh,” she said softly, her eyes fixed too brazenly on mine. “We were friends at Wellesley.” A moment later she giggled as if at a hidden meaning in our short exchange that had passed me by.

  And I thought, Oh boy, what a wacko, that’s all—though instantly and even bemusedly recalling an editorial that had run in a Guatemalan newspaper during the two days my father and I were here, which I remember almost word for word even now:

  . . . Wellesley College, world famous as a definer and inculcator of the most refined feminine values, the very same institution that prizes among its many distinguished alumnae Madame Chiang Kai-shek of China, the star of the beloved movie Love Story, several Miss Universes, and Señora Fernanda Vieyra de Paredes, that siempre bella exponente of Guatemalan womanhood. To these very outstanding damas of Wellesley College in particular one sympathizing editorialist wishes to convey the assurance that one falling star does not dim the brilliance of the constellation . . .

  You see what happens to Wellesley girls? I practically sneered to myself, though not out loud.

  “Well, what can I get you?” That’s all I said, coolly and politely enough; she asked for a Stoli on the rocks. I got the drink for her, didn’t even charge her, and went on working. And because I was aware of her unsettling eyes following me the whole time, I made myself even more exaggeratedly extroverted a bartender than usual, which was perhaps the wrong strategy, for I can see now how that, along with the free drink, must have invited the transgression.

  She sat there sipping her vodka, watching me, smiling and smirking away to herself as if over some bit of excited, sneaky cleverness. She was a little deranged or mad, and cocaine, if that’s what it was, wasn’t helping her, that’s what I thought. Then I glanced at her and asked, a little exasperatedly, “What’s so funny?”

  But she just smirked and kept looking at me. I went back to working my way up and down the bar. Finally I just stopped in front of her and almost shouted, “What?”

  And she laughed again, and softly said, “Oh, I was just remembering.” Then I knew that she was about to say something about you and felt dismally trapped since, after all, I had just demanded that she tell it.

  “She used to talk about you a lot,” she said, and it made her feel so gleeful to say this that her bare shoulders wriggled.

  “Uh-huh,” I said.

  “You were like my hero, one of my heroes for a while. I can’t believe it. Funny, isn’t it?”

  “I was your hero?”

  “Well, you know how girls get in college, dorm talk, all night long, the big confessions,” she said, leaning as close as she could to me across the bar, practically hoisting herself up on it, her slightly nasal, confusingly earnest yet ironical voice lowered to a near whisper now, her eyes fixed not on me but on something off to the side. “It was beautiful. And what a drama! All those years and your parents never suspected? So strange and secret, lovely and hidden, pure and very naughty at the same time. Was it like between mother and son, or servant and little master? Or like incest, but it wasn’t really, because you weren’t siblings and incest really is kind of fucked up and creepy anyway, and the way Flor told it was so beautiful. I was sad it was over, except on our floor it wasn’t over, it was soap opera número uno—”

  It wasn’t true, and I said so. What else could I say? Well, imagine how I felt then, how this just impacted on everything, instantly. Stunned isn’t enough. Poisoned! And for her to be so fliply sentimental, casual!

  “It’s not true,” I said. It wasn’t. I gave my head a little shuddering shake, as if to make her feel that she was just some kind of trivially bad dream. I didn’t know what else to say. Nothing remotely like this had ever happened to me before (well, not since my Colegio Anne Hunt days, but that was just kids’ stuff!). She’s sick, just walk away, I told myself. But she, who was a most eloquent smirker anyway, who had as many smirks in her repertoire as Eskimos have words for snow, smirked as if she wasn’t surprised that I was denying it.

  “Flor always said you’d been sworn to secrecy or something,” she said. “Oh, you poor guy! But, come on, we all thought it was pretty cool, pretty beautiful. We were scandalized too, you know, but trying so hard to show we weren’t.”

  “Well, that was the point,” I said, managing, really, to stay surprisingly calm. “To scandalize you girls. Impress you. Can’t you see that? She’d waited forever to get to college, and I guess she figured out pretty fast what would make her the center of attention. That’s all.”

  “But really, what was there to be scandalized about?” she asked, as if she thought we were actually going to have a conversation about it. “You weren’t related, she wasn’t adopted. She was just older—”

  And then, just like that, I lost my temper, my voice became heated. “Look, what is this? Don’t you think this is kind of disrespectful? Is this why you came to the funeral? You and Flor hadn’t stayed friends. Because I know where you’re coming from, Flor-corrupting whatever—” And she was blinking now as if my every sputtering syllable was a slap in her face. “You like evil. Like it’s the very coolest thing, right? Look, I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

  “Evil? I didn’t say there was anything evil about it. God. Hardly. The opposite’s more like it. Well, like I told you. Oh c’mon!” She seemed truly taken aback, this foolish girl. “We were friends in college, that’s why I came to the funeral. I was . . .” She looked like she was about to cry.

  But I went on. “Evil has caused a lot of hurt in my and my family’s lives, I mean true evil, a murder, for example, not the kind you people find so hip and aesthetic. That’s why you were at the funeral.” I felt convinced, at that very moment, that she was very evil, and that she had come to the funeral to revel in it in some voyeuristic way, because she thought you had turned out to be evil too.

  “We people? What—Oh please, man, take it easy. I just thought, you know, what are you so ashamed of?”

  “I’m not ashamed of anything,” I said. “I think you should leave. You are cut off.”

  “Look, I’m sorry. I can see—I’m totally indiscreet sometimes, OK? I didn’t mean to—I thought. Oh—”

  It surprised me that she was so upset, but it only angered me more, I’d really lost it by then. “Go complain to the manager if you want, but I want you out of here!”

  “Jesus, I apologize, OK? Good-bye. Listen to me! Flor was great, we all loved her so much. This is so fucked up, I didn’t mean anything by it. I didn’t! OK?”

  “What’ll it be?” I said to another customer, who’d probably overheard the entire conversation, and then she left, she just turned and walked rapidly out of the bar, and left me there, kind of a different person now, again (kind of a different bartender too, in another fifteen minutes or so the manager would quietly relieve me of my duties for the night), flooded with a resurrected confusion, the long-buried, nearly buried, memory of one day during the first summer you were home from college, me fifteen, I’d just fini
shed mowing the lawn, and then come in through the basement and through your door. You with a white towel around your torso, sitting in front of your desk blow-drying your hair. Oh well, you know, just the way our eyes met. Something solemn or dangerous beyond words. I said, “Oops! Should’ve knocked,” and you smiled and in that voice, soft and atonal and somehow so like the voice in which a few years before you’d said that what you wanted for Christmas was for my father to get better, false but not false—you said, “Oh, you don’t have to knock when you come into my room, Roger.” And that look. “OK,” I said, my face burning. And then I flew up the stairs. And it was never mentioned again. I thought it was all in my imagination, we always looked at each other with a certain affection, so what was new now? Nothing? You’re turning into a handsome man, Roger. Well, so what? Even my mother said that sometimes. And you, with a college girl fantasy in your head, that’s all—a game, a dare, a probing will to make a delicious fairy tale that had worked so well on your circle of admirers at college come true? What a splendid way to wrap up the actual story of your life with us! Or did you decide quickly that there was no need to, that telling it was good enough? Moya’s right, who cares? Who would ever have cared if that girl hadn’t come into my bar? Why would I ever have given it much more thought? Why should one striking though highly ambiguous declaration—which after all might simply have been meant in an innocently rhetorical way, as in, Oh, you don’t have to knock! We’re like family!—have come to so haunt me? Have come to fill me with the sensation of living in a secret and impermissible ghost story? Have come to give the what never happened a life of its own alongside what did? Why else, if not for the perhaps innocent or guileless—if also slyly malicious—indiscretion of one depraved and ditzy or just utterly voyeuristic once-pink-haired girl, would I ever have found myself wanting to make such a confession to Moya? And then it turned out not to mean that much, not to be the burdening truth I had thought it was at all! A missed opportunity, that’s all . . . ? But not quite, because of how it lived on inside of me—

  Well, I’d just come back from the highlands, and there is something about Indian towns that provokes a mood of thinking that the truth lies somewhere outside what you actually see and hear anyway, though what you see and hear is certainly there. Partly it’s the pagan-mystical atmosphere of their religious practices, an impression enforced by the famous Indian reticence regarding that and almost everything else. And there’s that widely repeated, and so often misproven, allegedly traditional Indian belief that “white” people aren’t actually there, that we are part of the illusory world. And the silence of the mist-mountains, the silent solitude of Indian towns, at night especially.

  I’d been traveling through the highlands for about a week already, full of silence myself, rarely exchanging more than a few words with anyone, when I stopped in Chichicastenango for the big Thursday market. It was there that a new kind of silence overwhelmed me.

  The market, which used to be popular with tourists back when there were a lot of tourists, was closing down in the plaza. I was watching from church steps, surrounded by softly cajoling Indian incantations: the day’s last worshipers swinging smoking copal-incense censers, splashing aguardiente over the small fires they built on the steps, talking in that very personal way to gods, ancestors, spirits. But what was most striking was the disconcerting quietness of the scene in front of me.

  Indians from all over El Quiché were busy packing up their market in the dirt plaza at the end of just another unfruitful market day, that’s all. They were dismantling their stalls, putting their unsold produce into baskets and sacks, wrapping big loads with tarp and rope. They were packing everything up and carrying it all off piece by heavy piece on their backs, unimaginable loads packed onto their stooped backs and held by straps around foreheads and other loads balanced on heads. Everybody seemed to be moving in slow motion. From the elevation of those steps, I watched moving patterns: the warm colors of trajes, black-haired heads, the whites of eyes strained upwards as if reaching to touch the protruding edges of the loads on their backs, and small clouds of kicked-up dirt under their feet. It was a melancholy scene, and very quiet. The creaking noises floating through the air sounded like they came from the strained rigging of a big three-masted ship in a strong wind, but this was only the creaking of so many loads and bundles strapped to the backs and heads of people carrying away their market.

  But really it was the light that looked laid over them, over the plaza, that seemed like the actual place that this silence reverberated from, instead of from the people underneath it. An indescribable late-afternoon light was pouring through the white clouds, gauzy but evenly spread across the still-brilliant sky, and an orange sun was falling behind the mountains. The light was a most unusual, almost pumpkin-colored gold, but only just over the market, where it seemed to thicken semitranslucently, as if from the raised dust and drifting incense and even the shadows of the two bleached white churches on the plaza and the darkening mountains all around. It lay over the market, so still and golden, infusing every face and wretched posture.

  I know what a religious painter would have made of it—the light of God accompanying the poor. It made their “suffering” stand out as if in a frieze, in a way that went beyond dignifying it. I could see how some people might think they were having a revelation at a moment like this. But wasn’t it meaningless, just a natural accident, the light, I mean, not the people? Just a trick of shadow and dust and sinking highland sun. And not the suffering, of which there was evidence everywhere: the acrid rotting stench, the sweaty, shitty stink of poverty, the vista of so many bent, shuffling people consumed by the same staggering task, carrying their market on their backs to where buses waited on side streets, others facing long hikes home to mountain villages and aldeas miles away; stunted bodies of a race inverted and mocked by the healthier, brawnier, even chubbier physiques of the conscripted young Indian soldiers, who were well fed, barracks toughened and demented—I haven’t mentioned that there were soldiers around the plaza, with their automatic weapons, strolling about in that aimlessly menacing way of soldiers in a garrison town. Well, there are always soldiers, everywhere. But it was only in the last year that the army had started letting nuns and priests back into El Quiche: right there in Chichi, a Peace Corps girl had told me at lunch that very day, they’d recently given back the Spanish priests’ rectory on the outskirts of town that they’d requisitioned at the height of the war, except the Indians refused to go inside it anymore, not even to visit the newly returned Spanish priests, because of all the people they knew who had been tortured to death in the rectory when it had belonged to the army, so they were just leaving lighted candles for the souls of the dead outside the front door. (The Peace Corps girl, Cindy, from Wisconsin, had come into my nearly empty hotel for lunch and recognized me from her occasional weekends in the city, from the “gringo bar,” Lord Byron’s, and, though all that about the priests and nuns is the sort of thing no one would ever dare talk about in Lord Byron’s, I’d managed, over the course of lunch, to convince her that “I’m not really like that,” so she’d let herself talk—)

  But if it hadn’t been for that light and the way it had seemed to lay a separate dimension over the scene of the market closing up, a separate something that seemed to blend suffering, silence, faith—that light that looked like their companion—I know I wouldn’t have felt so shaken, or maybe moved is the word, by what I’d seen, I might not even have noticed the silence. Maybe I would have thought, Poverty, soldiers, nuns and priests, torture, what else is new? Because if my months in Guatemala hadn’t accustomed me to being at least aware of that, hadn’t bred that silence inside of me . . . (Because who would want to listen to me go on about it down here? I used to talk about it much more when I was still up there. So that down here, when I find myself silently talking about it, I’m usually imagining someone listening up there!)

  Then the light went away, and soon there was just the nearly empty market, with cor
rugated metal and plastic sheeting—roofed permanent stalls left standing, and steel gates rolled down over the fronts of the permanent shops along the plaza, and soldiers and the faint rotting smells mixed with lingering incense, and the silence that I couldn’t let go of.

  When I went back to those church steps after dinner and reencountered that empty silence—only it was even emptier now because almost everyone was gone and it was dark, bats twirling through that dark like fiendishly dancing roof tiles—after I’d been sitting there awhile, why did I think of my family and Flor?

  Well, of course Flor was very much on my mind. Because of what Cindy had told me, I was trying to decide whether or not to take the long bus ride up to Nebaj, to see if I might find the nuns Flor had referred to during one of her earlier visits to New York. But there was something else that Cindy had told me. She said that whenever she tried to ride her bicycle out to the more remote aldeas in her jurisdiction and was approaching the entrance to one of those hamlets, Indians often ambushed her from the cornfields along the roads, throwing rocks and dirt clumps until she turned back. She’d been confused about why until a nun—“Believe me, only the nuns ever know what’s really going down out here,” Cindy said, exactly as you might have, Flor—told her it was because they’d all heard the stories about gringas coming to Indian villages to steal children. This anecdote had nothing to do with you, of course. You didn’t do that. But it reddened my face anyway, as if it was an actual piece of damning evidence.

  Sitting on those steps in the chilled night air, facing the plaza, I suddenly found myself trying to imagine what my family would have been like if you had never come to live with us. But I couldn’t really imagine it. The frustration I felt was that same childish one of lying on my back in the yard trying to imagine the end of the stars. I had the thought that my family should never have happened at all, and then, as if in a silent panic, dismissed this nihilistic notion. But I could only imagine a silence, and then all of us as a product of that silence, our lives willfully built up and maintained around it, by you, Flor—somehow maintained by you. So that you could one day go to college.