The Long Night of White Chickens

by Francisco Goldman

  One afternoon at El Minuto, only a week after Flor had broken off her affair with Moya, Celso Batres came out of his office to give Moya his daily copy of El País from Spain and found him sitting at his desk in a dark stupor. “Moya, why so triste?” asked Celso, cheerfully, the benevolent boss and benefactor, grandson of Don Celso Batres el primero and son of the visionary Don Rubén, in his shiny Bally loafers and Yves Saint Laurent blazer and slacks and monogrammed “it’s from Jermyn Street, Moya, even better than your mother makes” shirt, and always just slightly mussed English schoolboy hair, and taller even than Moya, lean and broad shouldered and fit from going three evenings a week to tae kwon do classes with his two fair-haired little sons who always wore their white karate robes and yellow belts to the newspaper office where they ran around jamming the drinking fountains with bubble gum so that later the water sprayed out over Moya’s mamita- stitched pants, vos, and sticking bubble gum mustaches on the black marble bust of Celso’s illustrious late grandfather: Don Celso Batres el primero, once-upon-a-time Rubén Darío’s worshipful young drinking partner and the founder of El Minuto, the most illustrious positivist paper of its day, though it hasn’t increased a percentage point in circulation since. Though back then the patriarchal Don Celso certainly had not needed the money, vos, converting his indigo plantations to coffee, sheep farms to cattle ranches, Indian shepherds to cowboys. All that was eventually divided between four sons: two of those aging sons still living in Miami now while helping to fund their favorite extreme-rightist political party at home, vos, and another son living in Los Angeles, where he is a renowned interior decorator, and the oldest, the iconoclastic and visionary widower Don Rubén Darío Batres, living now behind high walls in Zona 15 on the El Salvador highway, in a secluded mansion compound said to be situated a full mile inside that pine-forested property, Don Rubén who inherited El Minuto as well and was its director until passing the reins to his only son, Celso (whom Flor had apparently—); a visionary and implacable and deeply religious old Don Rubén, always welcome at every papal nuncio’s and archbishop’s dining table, rumored to have been plotting his son’s rise to political power since the day that son was born and named Celso, grooming him to be the aristocratic positivist savior and reviver of the reformist and nationalist cause of the ‘44 Democratic revolution once the power of those low-class military apes the gringos put in can at last be broken; a visionary Don Rubén who sent his son to the Colegio Austríaco and then to Ample-forth in England and to the Sorbonne for three years before returning him to the Universidad de San Carlos for one year to complete a law degree and begin learning his future as a man of the people; a Don Rubén who taught his son how to write courageously moderate editorials with smoke and mirrors so that a closer look would reveal they said almost nothing while creating a forceful and dignified impression and that the secret to maintaining a comparatively unfettered newspaper in Guatemala, one whose reputation for incorruptible independence would accrue to its owner and director, was to keep its circulation so tiny it could run without any advertising at all; a visionary and conspiratorial, if somewhat deluded, Don Rubén who for decades now has been cultivating junior military officers in secret, giving them seditious books to read and sending them to his brothers in Miami for advice with their investments, except none of those officers ever seemed to turn into anything but millionaire senior officers; an implacable Don Rubén with an unharmable son because family comes before politics and the old man with just a phone call to Miami would be able to summon a certain extreme-rightist party’s private death squads like chariots from heaven should the apes or anyone ever harm his son; an astute old man who abetted his son’s safety and even his social standing by marrying that son off to the daughter of his old school chum and founder of that same rightist party when that daughter was still in adolescence though Celso, enduring his sole year at the USAC, felt certain that he loved her anyway because he’d been told it was his wondrous fate to do so almost all his life and without a doubt she was charming and pretty, vos, that woman to whom Celso has been married fifteen years now but whom Moya has never seen anywhere but in the other newspapers’ society pages, fitting her genteel gowns like packed-in cottage cheese but with a remarkable facial resemblance to her father, the same apple-cheeked face and the most beautifully cowlike eyes ever seen on a face that didn’t belong to a cow, this being the wife of the same Celso Batres whom Flor had apparently loved, the same Celso who apparently had actually considered and maybe had even been on the verge of leaving his wife for Flor and who perhaps didn’t really want to be president after all, who perhaps had been on the verge of committing either the most foolish or the most redemptive act of his life by running away from his preordained fate to love Flor forever?

  Because why else had Flor suddenly dismissed Moya from her life, if not over this so-called Secret Lover whom Roger in his letter was now identifying as Celso Batres and whom of course, if it was true, Flor would not have been able to bring herself to tell Moya about, if only to spare him the humiliation, vos. Because what if Celso, after a separation of three or more months, during which Flor had briefly taken Moya as a lover despite herself, had actually and finally come back into her life, saying something like I can’t live without you, you’ve won, if you don’t want to be first mistress someday then I will abdicate like that English king? Because if Celso had actually divorced his wife to marry Flor he almost certainly would have been parted from his presidential future as well, because it is still a Catholic country, vos . . . And poor Don Rubén’s only solace would have been that Celso, by inventing ¿Dónde?, had at least fortified the family fortune and improved the national literacy rate just a little bit.

  Cut the bullshit, Moya, did you know? That day, vos, in the El Minuto office, or even nearly two years later in the Omni when you confessed the boast to Roger, did you know?

  This is what Moya forced himself to draw from the allusions scattered through Roger’s letter: that Flor had taken Moya as her lover after at least two months of enduring her loss of Celso, which she had believed to be final, and after two simultaneous months of enduring Moya’s blind and frantic persistence as well. Five weeks later, when Flor ended her amor secreto with Moya, perhaps she did so because Celso had unexpectedly come back. A week later Moya made his boast. Three weeks later Flor de Mayo . . . pues.

  Rogerio, was it Moya’s fault? Was it a pendejo’s jealousy and spiteful rage that made Moya say what he said? But how could it have been, if he didn’t know? But duringjust that moment, when he betrayed Flor with his idiotic boast, did he somehow know it? He wouldn’t even let his own shadow in on it but did his own shadow cast it up onto his lips anyway when Celso came out of the office carrying El País that day and said, “Why so triste, Moya? Aren’t any of your German girls in town this week?” Then Celso put the copy of El Pats down on his desk and smiled at his tormented employee.

  Moya stared blindly at the newspaper on his desk, felt his face growing hot, and before he knew it he was answering with false, swaggering cheer:

  “Ayyy, no sé, fíjese, la hembra esa, la Flor, the one who takes care of orphans? Me tiene bien enculado, vos! Pero es una mujer incansable! She’s inexhaustible! I just had an article on the orphan situation in mind when it started but, puta, I haven’t had a full night’s sleep since!”

  For a moment Celso was silent, but he looked as if his eardrums hurt and as if this delicate yet anguishing pain was growing worse by the second: face slowly darkening, lips shrinking, eyes straining, fogging. After all, Celso had no way of positively knowing how Flor spent all her nights, so perhaps at that moment his mind was busily confirming fabricated past suspicions and jealousies of his own. His hand rigidly poised atop the copy of El País on Moya’s desk, he rapped it with all his stiffened fingers and then lifted his hand into his blazer pocket and stammered, “No me digas? You don’t say? Pues. Aha . . . There’s a strange story in there today, a priest in Spain pulled out a pistol in the middle of mass and shot one of h
is own parishioners, qué raro, eh?” and he turned and headed back towards his own office while Moya hurriedly and plaintively said, “I love her, that’s why I can’t sleep, she loves someone else, I think, that’s why she won’t see me anymore,” thinking that Celso wasn’t even listening but he was because without even turning around he said, “No te preocupes, Moya, just play hard to get, I’m sure she’ll come back. Women like that are all the same.”

  And then Celso went into his office and an hour later came out looking quite composed, saying good-bye to everybody without meeting their eyes, and he was back at work the next morning and then the next, everything normal, leaving at two in the afternoon and not coming back until six as usual, but for two days Flor wouldn’t answer her own phone (now did Moya know it?) and when Moya phoned the orphanage office the Swedish girl who answered said she was in a meeting and on the third day Flor sounded very tired but not surprised to hear from him, Qué tal, Moya, but no, she still didn’t want to see him, please listen, it can’t be like that between us anymore, we’ll be friends I’m sure, but please wait a bit Moya; though Moya went on persisting. Flor was too kind to blame him or perhaps still too stunned. Of course she didn’t mention what had happened. Perhaps she was still hoping it wasn’t final, and was probably hating herself, stupid Flor, getting mixed up with one of Celso’s employees, one of his little periodistas! Maybe she’d always been terrified that Moya might say something to Celso or maybe believing it was finished between her and Celso had even secretly wanted Moya to say something even though theirs had been un amor secreto too and Moya wasn’t supposed to tell anyone, but then when Celso came back it was too late and all she’d been able to do was pray silently that Moya would have the dignity to keep his promise?

  So Moya caused it, he ruined their chance to be together, is that it? Flor was just with Moya to pass the time, or because she needed someone then, and then Celso came back. Celso had loved a “Wellesley College girl,” one who, by loving Moya, from what undoubtedly would have been Celso’s point of view, had returned herself to the desert.

  Was it only the final illogic of despair and defeat that let Flor waver over Moya again at the very end? Or even indignation over Celso’s snobby callousness, which had revealed to her the relative nobility of Moya, despite his crass boast? Sure. But she had liked Moya a bit, perhaps a lot, hadn’t she? But it was the end. She was murdered, denounced everywhere but in El Minuto and ¿Dónde? as a baby seller. Celso Batres hid his own grief, shock, anger, and humiliation behind his suave pride. He approached catatonic, bewildered, and devastated Moya in the office and said he was sorry, a tragedy, take a week off, two weeks, he apologized for being so unsympathetic that day, she was a fine woman he was sure, he used to see her at the charity ball; that sensationalist outcry in the papers, it probably wasn’t like that, was it? You were investigating all that with orphans, Moya, weren’t you? We’ll see when the dust settles, pues, time always tells . . . Celso was most convincing that day, vos. And then Celso himself went away for a week, to the United States, to participate in a two-day forum on the nation’s future at Georgetown University, for Celso’s reputation as a moderate reformist democratic hope had spread among followers of Central American politics even without Don Ruben’s manipulation, and at Georgetown he again met Dr. Sylvia McCourt, who later, at Harvard, told Moya that Celso’s contribution had been most lackluster.

  But when Moya returned to Guatemala more than a year after Flor’s death, Celso most generously and decently rehired him, despite what Celso knew, despite how he felt, and it is not hard to imagine how he still felt, vos, over Moya having deceived his boss and benefactor, sharing his “mistress” behind his back, for he must even have suspected that Moya had known about him and Flor all along! Though Moya had not!

  But hiring Moya back was no mere act of generosity. Undoubtedly, Moya’s boast had given Celso the excuse he must have secretly yearned for in at least one-half of a divided heart, the excuse not to have to defy his own illustrious destiny and ravage his family for the pleasure of an outlaw love. Celso had hired Moya back because caballeros have no memories when it is the decent or prudent thing not to have them; had hired him back as his end of an unspoken gentlemen’s pact to bury a dishonorable past by forcing a secret complicity upon a rival—one who hadn’t even realized he’d been a rival—and who had no other source of employment or meaningful existence. Because it would never do for it to get out that Celso Batres had been the lover of the infamous gringa-chapina baby seller and that he had even been on the verge of abandoning his own wife for her, vos. Celso had the connections even to deal with the G-2 if it came to that, but Moya posed a different challenge. Better to treat Moya as a protégé, one who might share, in accordance with his position, in Celso’s well-known destiny. Celso liked and respected Moya, Celso knew Moya had possibilities. Presidential secretary one day, Moya? Who knows, maybe even Ambassador Moya? Or Assistant Foreign Minister Moya? Such were the dreams of loyal faferos.

  Moya never knew? Not even that night in the Omni, when he and Roger actually discussed the possibility that Celso might be the “Secret Lover,” when Moya had been unable to disguise how perturbed he was by the possibility and seemed never to have even considered it before, though finally the two friends had dismissed it as too unlikely?

  Honestly, sitting alone in the Omni throughout the day following that first night, in a red-walled whore room, on his way into exile again, this time probably permanently, because of one fucking column about the post office, that conversation with Roger about Celso barely crossed Moya’s mind. He had other worries, vos! His fate was in Roger’s hands; Roger, who at that very moment was running around Guatemala City having appointments and hopefully not sneaking off to see that putita of his: he was at the U.S. embassy learning from Consul Simms the seriousness of Moya’s enemy’s intentions, and he was at the Canadian embassy, trying to convince them that Moya deserved urgent action on his request for political refugee status ahead of so many others from throughout Central America who made their way daily to that same beleaguered if fairly hospitable embassy seeking the same.

  Picture Moya then, one peaceful spider waiting for so many new surprises, sitting on a round red satin bed, with nothing to do but read and reread the newspapers Roger had left for him that morning. Well, it was his profession, it was what had brought him to that room, after all. He read an editorial beginning “When Guatemala City was a little cup made of silver, brimming with peace, and the bands in the Hotel Palacio played Glenn Miller, so that we called it the Choo Choo Hilton, after the Chattanooga Choo Choo . . .” and turning the page, found a military spokesman saying, “These so-called disappeared, who are they? They are people with no sense of responsibility who run off to Miami to seek their fortunes without informing their families, abandoning wives and children . . .” Deeper in the paper, he found the mundane news that three separate bodies had been found by roadsides in three separate departments, all showing signs of torture and missing their heads. Moya knew that if he’d left Roger’s house alone the previous evening he might by now be missing his own highly identifiable head. He put the newspaper down. Now, in the Omni, Moya wept. Quietly, vos. Since his return from Harvard he had tried to be very careful in what he wrote, but that fucking post office! He didn’t want to go and live in Canada or anyplace else.

  When Moya had collected himself, he recalled a prescient conversation he’d had with his difficult friend Sylvia McCourt in her office at Harvard only six or so months before. Sitting at her desk lunching on yogurt and a can of tomato juice, Sylvia, by way of trying to dissuade him from the imprudent martyr’s folly of returning to Guatemala too soon, had said:

  “Moya, if I’m standing on a beach with a can of tomato juice and I throw it into the ocean, do I then get an ocean mixed with tomato juice? Or have I just lost my can of tomato juice?”

  After a moment of reflection, Moya boomed, “Clever Sylvia! But this is the dilemma exactly! Well, which?”

  “A
ctually,” said Sylvia, blushing, “that’s rather well known, I first heard it from a philosophy professor I had—”

  “But ideas don’t belong exclusively to anybody when people are discussing,” interrupted Moya. “You said this yourself the last time we talked.”

  And she had, when Sylvia, exasperated by Moya’s reticence during a long conversation that she had initiated—seemingly to prove how ferocious she could be now that she was defending her ideas on her own “home court” rather than in the Hotel Biltmore Maya—had said:

  “Ideas aren’t exclusively personal or incriminating, not in a discussion between professionals and friends, Moya. You don’t have to hide. This isn’t Cuba. Or Nicaragua, for that matter.”

  Which sounded like an insult to Moya, one that he could take personally or in behalf of all his countrymen. Sylvia had gone on pressing her attack.