The Long Night of White Chickens

by Francisco Goldman

  That’s when I suddenly remembered my father’s gallbladder attack and your standing in front of F. A. O. Schwarz saying, “I just want Ira to get better.”

  That jarring little note was caused not by the artificiality of the sentiment, but by the unconscious truth that artificiality was essential to what we had, and lay like silence near the heart of everything, and made everything seem possible—made even lies seem not very different from nonlies. What I mean is, I realized you couldn’t help it. That was your innocence. The love was real. But maybe you had no other way of expressing the life that had been given to you, or of really knowing it, except by pushing on the boundaries of that artificiality, trying to find where it began and where it ended.

  But it was as if there was another life too, the one that would have happened if you’d never come to live with us. I had the sense of a true history developing, our true and invisible fate, always happening, unseen, alongside this other one, our silent companion, like the light I had seen over the market. And I wondered if maybe you had always or finally heard it calling you back.

  TWENTY-TWO

  “The de Preys are extremely wealthy . . . ,” you wrote in the notebook that Moya bribed from the National Police archives while I was away on that same trip through the highlands; the de Preys being the French couple who’d come to Guatemala to adopt three-year-old María de la Luz Caycam Quix, originally from a small cantón in the municipality of Nebaj in the Ixil Triangle region of El Quiché, which I did in fact get up to, by bus from Chichi. “. . . Marcel, 35, is a businessman, and Nancy, 27, is a student and future full-time mother. Very loving, I believe, and so sophisticated, of course, and quite very beautiful. They are not overboard Catholics, but they intend a private Catholic education, as these are the best girls’ schools in Paris. Nancy de Prey believes little children should begin learning Latin and to play piano even before starting school. This sounds farfetched, one of those things a well-meaning young mother will never get around to. I’d worry about them being overexacting, but come on, they’re French, they want to be taken very seriously, but they are quick to laugh and are pleasantly surprised by the French restaurants here, thus capable of optimists’ delusions despite themselves. They go quietly goo-goo whenever they see María de la Luz. They will be patient and loving with her no matter what, I know. They even intend to keep her name María de la Luz, or Marie de la Luz anyway.”

  And that was all, a typical notebook entry, in your own poised though somewhat bulbous print. It gave no other information except the date, February 3, 1983, which made it the last adoption you finalized. I realize now that means it happened sometime around the end of your affair with Moya, though he said he couldn’t recall it or any other adoption, specifically. We’d only lingered over that entry, without even the slightest premonition of what it would come to mean later, because it was the last one, and because Nancy de Prey had given her occupation as student and is French. Moya thought that the de Preys might be the parents of the little girl he thinks he recognized playing in a snowy yard in Cambridge, because when the black-bearded man who was apparently the girl’s father came out of that home’s front door and picked her up in his arms, Moya heard him call her “Poupon.” But the notebook named thirteen parents of both sexes who listed their occupation as student, three of them French, any one of whom might have ended up at Harvard and picked up that catchy French term of endearment, Poupon, Little Doll. Moya might just have thought that he recognized that girl and that she recognized him back, but any Guatemalan or Central American adopted orphan playing in a snowy yard in Cambridge might have provoked that hallucination.

  But Flor, what a mess would have greeted you at Los Quetzalitos one afternoon (if you’d lived and stayed on . . .) when, just over four months ago now, in January, Sor Clarita came to the door with a Polaroid snapshot of an adult Ixil Indian couple in rags: Señor Caycam and Señora Quix de Caycam.

  I realize, as did Sor Clarita of course, that you’d had no way of knowing that María de la Luz’s and Lucas’s parents were still alive, since Sor Clarita, when she’d turned the children over to you, had told you the parents were dead, believing it to be so herself, having even procured death certificates from the municipal authorities in Nebaj and encouraged you to find the children a loving home abroad if you could, since what future did they have here?

  More than three years later the Caycams turned up alive—brought down by the army from the Cuchumatanes Mountains and interned along with the rest of their captured band of nomadic internal refugees in A’tzum-bal, Camp “New Life” in Ixil, just outside Nebaj. Sor Clarita had found them there on one of her routine missions of charity and unofficial census taking through the model villages and military holding centers for refugees, which was why she was carrying the Polaroid, though the last thing she’d expected to photograph was a miracle. At first their surnames, Caycam and Quix, prompted no recognition; but by the time they’d finished telling how two of their four children had perished in an ambush during their flight into the mountains three years before, and that they’d never been able to establish the fate of the other two but that another internal refugee, formerly of their same cantón, claimed to have heard from someone else that the two children had been captured alive in the mountains and brought down to Nebaj and turned over to the nuns shortly before the expulsion of all Catholic priests and nuns from El Quiche, Sor Clarita knew exactly who the Caycams were. Tearfully, she confessed her own role in the transferring of María de la Luz and Lucas to a Guatemala City orphanage. The Caycams, of course, were overjoyed.

  The next day Sor Clarita rode the bus all the way to the capital, a twelve-hour journey, and went directly to Los Quetzalitos to confirm her own worst fears: that she had found the parents of two children who you, through no fault of your own, had apparently allowed to be adopted abroad. Rosana Letones has no records of the adoptions you arranged and so couldn’t tell Sor Clarita who in the world had adopted little María de la Luz and her older brother Lucas. But the Caycams, miserable as their circumstances now were, naturally wanted their children back. And what God makes, no one has a right to sever. Which was why cheerful and brave Sor Clarita was now kind of in hot water with her order over the screwup. She had no other recourse but to head off to the family court when it opened the next morning, hoping against hope to find a record of the adoptions in whatever bureaucratic mess awaited her there. But, as I’d already met Sor Clarita in Nebaj, and she alone knew of my connection to you, she phoned to tell me of the calamity. I told her to meet me right away in Pastelería Hemmings so that I could show her the illicitly acquired notebook, which so far had served no investigative purpose, and of course there it was: María de la Luz Caycam Quix, then three years old, adopted by the de Preys of Paris after having spent almost two full years in Los Quetzalitos. But no mention of her brother Lucas.

  So where was Lucas, Flor? Why wasn’t Lucas mentioned in your notebook?

  “Ah pues. There must be some mistake” is what Sor Clarita said, of course. We were at one of the mezzanine tables in Pastelería Hemmings, having coffee and oatmeal cookies. Sor Clarita wears a grayish blue habit, cut like a nurses’ uniform with the hem below the knees, and one of those modern headcloths with little more drapery than a French Foreign Legionnaire’s cap. Pulling her hair back behind its tight band, the headcloth frames her round Indian face in a way that helps to lend her features a frank expressiveness. When Sor Clarita and I had talked about you in Nebaj, I’d only seen stubborn loyalty, even love, and a kind of friendly humor in those eyes, as if whenever she thought of you she remembered some risqué joke you’d once shared; I saw sadness in them too, of course. But a tragic and unjust fate, which she surely thought yours was, was nothing new to Sor Clarita. She preferred to save her laments for the scarcity of medicines and even corn among the little the military was allowing the nuns to distribute to the refugees. And because of her affectionate opinion of you, Flor, I’d left Nebaj feeling almost as secure about your true ac
tivities in Guatemala as I had when you were alive.

  But now, over the notebook in Pastelería Hemmings, Sor Clarita’s eyes looked suddenly clouded with perplexity and an even deeper disorientation. And my face reddened as it always does whenever, beneath the surface of whatever is happening or being said, your death suddenly reasserts itself like a haunting presence: a demon-you who won’t go away, always still out there, forever reenacting the crimes that were attributed to you and taunting me with their obscure logic—because why no Lucas?

  It’s against the law, of course, Florcita, niña perdida, even in Guat, to separate siblings by adoption—prohibited in accordance not just with common morality but as a precaution against the mortal sin of accidental incest too. Did you tell the de Preys about Lucas? Had you ever spoken to Lucas Caycam Quix to ask for his permission to send his little sister to Paris or to tell him that he could go too? Where was Lucas, Flor?

  “I’m sure that when I go to the French embassy, they will tell me that Lucas went with his sister to France,” said Sor Clarita, collecting herself, a strained brightness in her voice. “La Flor forgot to write it down. She was like that, no? Once when I was visiting, fíjese, she forgot where she parked her van. Uff, we had to walk up and down streets—”

  “Lucas is definitely not with the de Preys in Paris, Sor Clarita,” I interrupted, quietly. “That she would have written down.”

  I thought then, We’ll never find him. I knew it already. But there was never going to be a way to just dismiss the riddle of Lucas, because he had definitely been taken to Los Quetzalitos, and his sister was definitely adopted by the de Preys, and his parents were definitely alive and wanted both their children back, and Sor Clarita definitely found herself in a mess that would embroil her for months.

  “Maybe he ran away,” I said to Sor Clarita in Pastelería Hemmings. “Flor had some runaways, I remember her saying so. Maybe he didn’t like being in an orphanage, or didn’t want to go to Paris. And Flor went ahead and let María de la Luz be adopted because she thought it was best for her. Or best in some other way.”

  Sor Clarita put her hand over her mouth, as if to stop me from saying the unspeakable—that the other way might have been that the de Preys simply offered a lot of money. Of course it’s always much more difficult to find adopting parents for a three-year-old Indian girl when she comes with a thirteen-year-old brother attached. But that still didn’t explain what you’d done with Lucas. (I reject, out of hand, and did so from the start, any possibility that you could have “eliminated” Lucas to make his sister more adoptable.) Or maybe Sor Clarita covered her mouth because she’d suddenly foreseen what an exhausting and unrewarding quest she herself was now embarking on. It would have been almost impossible for her to say so out loud, I think, but didn’t she have more important matters to deal with, so many people up there in the Ixil who needed her more urgently? But Sor Clarita had no choice now but to take responsibility for what she had innocently set in motion nearly four years before. Her mother superior had apparently seen to that, and with reason, because the reputation and even the security of the order’s mission in Guatemala could be at stake. It would be a disaster if the avowed enemies of the Church, of nuns in the highlands in particular, were ever able to provide the press with a sensationalistic excuse to denounce Las Hermanas de San Vicente Paul as accomplices in the violation of adoption laws and even in the baby trade. It wouldn’t even be beyond them to fly the Caycams, should they grow disgruntled enough, by helicopter to the capital for a press conference before the Constituent Assembly.

  “Or maybe something happened to him,” I said. “Maybe he died, Sor Clarita, and so it was perfectly legal for her to let María de la Luz be adopted. When you get in touch with the de Preys, they’ll know all about it.”

  “Wouldn’t she have written that in her notebook too?” Sor Clarita asked, her voice nuanced with hope. Her hand, perhaps instinctively, came up to grasp the plain wooden crucifix on her chest.

  “Maybe not. It wasn’t an official record or anything, she kept it just for herself, I guess.” I slid the notebook towards her again, and her worried eyes followed as if it might suddenly jump up and bite. “But look at this, where Flor wrote, No matter what. . . Maybe that means something? Maybe Lucas is the what?”

  And we both leaned close over the notebook, to look again at where you had written: “They will be patient and loving with her no matter what, I know.” Here your enthusiasm had probably just bubbled over into an obvious banality, I thought. But I ran my finger back and forth under the small printed words as if trying to tease another meaning out of them.

  Then Sor Clarita leaned back with a flummoxed sigh and stared gloomily at her oatmeal cookie as she dunked it rapidly in and out of now tepid coffee; fresh oatmeal cookies would be a rare treat in Nebaj, and she’d eaten her first one enthusiastically and without dunking it, smiling shyly as she chewed despite the business at hand.

  I felt my eyes sting and searched frantically for something appropriate to say. This was real, not one of Moya’s hypothetical scenarios, not another fabulation of silence, love, and shadows. A missing boy, and no one to implicate but you.

  “We’ll find him,” I said, though I felt sure we wouldn’t. “I’ll help you any way I can, Sor Clarita.”

  “When I first saw that patojo carrying his baby sister in his arms, do you know what I thought?” Sor Clarita suddenly blurted. “That the soldiers must have captured them from wolves.”

  And then she told me the terrible story of what had happened to Lucas and María de la Luz in the Cuchumatanes Mountains, and I listened unaware that I was following the first footprints in a long trail that wouldn’t reach an end until I stood on the Incienso Bridge nearly a week ago, waiting for a flesh-and-blood phantom to show himself at last. Up to that moment almost everything I’d been able to learn or deduce about your fate I’d found in what had come to seem the only worthwhile place to search: the ever-spreading silence and invisibility underneath everything here. Maybe that’s another reason I left the bridge that day—not just premonitory fear: I didn’t need a new explanation because I thought I already understood.

  Moya, in his bitterest moods, used to say that one thing that went wrong with you was that you came back here, period. He thought that at Harvard he’d seen firsthand the life you gave up. Why fly away from the “American Dream” opportunities handed to you to go flitting around the dark side? What sense was there in that? But I’d always known why you did; I think now it was as simple as I’d always claimed. I knew why again as soon as I walked into Los Quetzalitos for the first time and encountered your clamoring horde of peepee-reeking orphans and I knew it even before that when I went to Nebaj from Chichicastenango, which was when I’d first met Sor Clarita, talking to her in the penetrating shadow of a military garrison surrounding the convent house that the order had only been allowed to reoccupy in the last year, recalling Sor Clarita from Bolivia. The garrison literally surrounded it, so that villagers had to pass two military checkpoints just to reach the convent door; inside the nuns could sometimes hear the screams of prisoners being tortured to death on the other side of the dining-room wall, they’d even made a tape recording of it to play for their bishop if he ever came to visit, not that there was a thing even he could have done about it. They’d held a little tape recorder like a stethoscope right up to that wall for that pain- and terror-maddened man screaming as if stranded all by himself at the bottom of a deep well, an unreachable well dug into the moon. Sor Clarita played it for me that night, a voice faintly screaming and howling between long gaps of silence from a small tape recorder atop a pine table in an austere nuns’ dining room, not because she thought there was anything I could do about it, Flor, but because she had loved and trusted you and so just wanted me to know in the same way she would have wanted you to know, that’s all. Four nuns were living there, in the little convent house called Medalla Milagrosa (Miraculous Medal) behind the church without a priest and an army garrison sp
read all around, but only one who had known you. And they only felt safe enough to talk when they were alone in the dining room upstairs, because who knew who might be an informer among the Indian girls in their beautiful red cortes who came to sew charity clothing in the dirt patio or the Indian men who came to chop firewood and the others who came for domestic advice or to ask for medicine or to confess or just to talk, or even among the catechists? So foreign visitors with prying questions were not their favorite kind of visitor, but luckily it was Sor Clarita who answered the door when I knocked at it, when I said, for the first time since I’ve been here, “My name is Roger Graetz, Flor de Mayo Puac grew up in my house in the United States.” And Sor Clarita’s bushy eyebrows went up in startled consternation. “Flor de Mayo, la pobre,” she said softly, and then put her finger over her coarsened lips. “Pase,” she said, and I came in, and spent the rest of the day with her, helping in her ceaseless chores, though all she really had to tell me then was that yes, she had handed over children to you before; she didn’t really elaborate and there was no reason for her to then, because the Caycams hadn’t turned up alive yet.

  The mountains all around, with black pine—forested slopes darkened by the fog and mists spread over them like the tattered wings of predatory silver birds, concealed refugees who had fled into them to escape counterin-surgency, the notorious massacres, crop burnings, mass rapes, and pillagings that had already resulted in the complete unpeopling and abandoning of four hundred plus highland villages in five years. Tens of thousands of people had been living in and wandering the remotest valleys of the Cu-chumatanes and the jungles of the Ixcan for years now, moving by night, sleeping in caves or in deep forest by day, living on roots, leaves, tiny forest creatures when they could catch them (which is how Lucas and his baby sister had survived too), sometimes stopping to plant some corn in the hope that the army wouldn’t come before it could be harvested and burn it to prevent the guerrillas from eating; trying to evade army bombardments, for often the army did not distinguish between fleeing columns of guerrillas and those of refugees, believing them to be one and the same, especially since it was originally the guerrillas who had promised the refugees protection, declaring it a “liberated zone” like the so far unconquerable ones in the even smaller, neighboring country to the south. This one was conquerable, and the refugees were often abandoned by their protectors and sentries, even as they slept and an army incursion approached. They were bringing refugees into Nebaj by the truckload the two days I was there, jamming them into model villages for “reeducation,” teaching them that they had actually fled into the mountains to escape the guerrillas and that they were forgiven now for the illogical error of fleeing guerrillas by going to hide where the guerrillas were, because they were just dumb gullible indios anyway but now they had a chance for a New Life! But the army was still turning the sickest children over to the nuns first because the nuns insisted. I saw a group of twelve when I helped Sor Clarita carry sacks of food and plastic plates from the market to the holding shed where the army had confined them, some still accompanied by their parents, their clothing in shreds and their hair falling out from malnourishment, their eyes liquid with infections, faces and limbs covered with sores and mountain leprosy; that’s how Lucas and his baby sister had been brought down three years before, when they had been captured among the wandering remnants of a fleeing village that had been scattered by simultaneous bombardment and ambush on their way to Mexico. Lucas’s parents (Sor Clarita had believed) and two siblings had been killed there, but in the chaos he’d managed to lift his infant sister, María de la Luz, from the cloth in which his dying sister had been carrying her on her back; later Son Clarita would insist that Lucas had been sure his parents had died too and the others with him had confirmed it, because so few had escaped that massacre, just as so few escaped so many massacres. Over time, Sor Clarita would realize that Lucas’s story wasn’t unique at all.