Those were the first moments of the six-month stretch since Moya left, that whole separate short lifetime, which will definitely be coming to an end in another day or two, when I will take a launch to Punta Gorda, Belize, and from there make my way by bus through the Yucatán to Mexico City.
TWENTY-FOUR
Sor Clarita was given dispensation by her order to spend as much time in the capital as necessary to resolve the fiasco of María de la Luz having been adopted by the de Preys of Paris minus her brother Lucas, two years before los padres Caycam turned up alive in the Ixil. With the help of the French embassy, she was able to track down the de Preys and write to them; two weeks later she received a typed and notarized reply in perfect Spanish. In that letter the de Preys maintained that you had merely informed them that María de la Luz was the only survivor of a family that had included three older siblings; you had not mentioned a specific Lucas. María de la Luz, only one year old when she was brought down from the mountains with her brother and three when she was adopted, has never, wrote the de Preys, shown any signs of remembering any member of her natural family. Surely, if she had a living brother, she would have at least spoken his name? The de Preys, however, were not going to damage “Lucecita’s” fragile sense of security by dwelling on the subject of a missing brother with her, just as they had decided not to tell her what had happened to you. She was still far too young to be able to absorb such news or to comprehend its meaning, especially now that her past seemed safely buried beneath a five-year-old’s absorption in and healthy adaption to her new life: the life, wrote the de Preys, that would be hers for the rest of her days and would never be replaced by any other, the true life now of María de la Luz de Prey. As for María de la Luz’s natural parents supposedly having turned up alive all these years later, missing all their children, the de Preys were skeptical. They questioned if the Caycams are who they claim to be, and wondered if they had invented the story as a means of seeking financial gain. Though, of course, added the de Preys, if by some miracle a brother named Lucas is alive and found, and it can be proven that he is indeed María de la Luz’s brother, they will do their duty and adopt him too.
“It’s obvious that these are good people, to reply so scrupulously to just an ordinary nun with no legal power to do anything,” said Sor Clarita, feeling confused by the news that the de Preys would adopt Lucas if we found him, since this was not likely to please the Caycams. “Because honestly, if there was a way to have left them out of this completely without doing an injustice to the Caycams . . . But instead, here is a faraway nun they wish they had never heard of, filling their home, a very good home I am sure, with so much undeserved doubt and turmoil. Have you ever heard of anything like this before, a nun whose work it is to spread unhappiness?”
More letters were exchanged, Sor Clarita reiterated that she had seen Lucas alive with her own eyes and in writing to them had merely intended to inquire if they knew of anything that might illuminate the mystery of his fate. As for the Caycams, she was fully convinced that they were indeed María de la Luz’s natural parents. The French embassy raised the obvious point that the Guatemalan family court was unlikely to rescind the adoption on behalf of a poor Indian internal refugee family anyway, and that, even if they did, the French courts would undoubtedly refuse to extradite the child. Against her own better judgment and even wishes, Sor Clarita had to reply that God’s law is higher. It was unthinkable that María de la Luz, now nearly five and French-speaking, should be taken from her wealthy and loving parents in France and returned to her natural parents to live in a zinc-roofed shed in a model village, though nevertheless the Caycams continued to insist that they wanted their one definitely surviving child back.
But when I last spoke to Sor Clarita, about a month ago now in Guatemala City, she had finally arranged a solution. Photographs of María de la Luz de Prey depicting all aspects of her extraordinary new life now decorated the rough plank walls of the resigned Caycams’ shed in A’tzum-bal. Soon, a substantial cash payment from the de Preys would arrive, which, along with the intervention of the French embassy, would liberate the Caycams from that model village and allow them to resume some vestige of their former life. They’d be much better off materially than before, though of course much poorer in family and community, since neither really existed for them anymore. They had also been promised a trip to Paris to visit their daughter; the de Preys were terrified that the authorities might confiscate María de la Luz if they were to bring her for a visit here. They were inviting Sor Clarita to come to Paris too, to act as translator and to provide spiritual comfort and even sanity on what promised to be a taxing journey for the Caycams.
“They are wonderful people, this family de Prey,” said Sor Clarita, full of amazed emotion in the Hemmings. “At any step along the way, they could have refused to discuss it further and left it to the courts, and that would have been the end of it. Sometimes I even wished they would, I was prepared to accept all responsibility. But for it to end like this? Es una maravilla. Fíjese, these de Preys really do care about the poor Caycams.”
“Well, Flor did choose them to be the parents,” I said.
“Claro,” said Sor Clarita softly. “No matter what else, she did that . . . Ay no, pobre la Flor, because truly, she was a love. I was always saying, Flor, why aren’t you married yet? When is the wedding, pues? I was teasing, but perhaps if she had found someone good for her . . .”
“Yes, I know,” I said, as we both fell into another of those silences that will forever, in my memory, seem inseparable from the Pastelería Hemmings mezzanine and the melancholy view outside.
“That little girl is already learning to play the piano,” Sor Clarita finally said. “Imagine what it will be like for the Caycams to see that!”
By then Sor Clarita had long ago given up her search for Lucas—which I’d sporadically helped her in—among the street children of Guatemala City, so many of whom had instantly claimed to be Lucas as soon as they’d sensed they might have something to gain. Eventually she’d come to believe that the likeliest scenario was that Lucas must have run away from Los Quetzalitos within days of having arrived, because that would explain why no one remembered him there. And that then, poor patojito of blackest horrors and misfortune, Lucas might have lost his life in any number of ways amidst the perils of the city streets, or even in trying to make his way back to the Ixil, driven by some suicidal mission of retribution. Though for all we could ever know, Lucas had walked all the way to the United States to find a better life, never intending to come back at all or even to send for his baby sister—which in the courts would probably have constituted abandonment of family. In that case, you would have been well within the law, “such as it is,” arranging for the de Preys to adopt María de la Luz, since you had no way of knowing that the Caycams were alive. Though that still didn’t explain why you’d neglected to tell anyone about Lucas.
Sor Clarita ventured the possibility, perhaps even the certainty, that because you’d decided that it was best for María de la Luz to become a de Prey, and because you had little or no more knowledge of Lucas’s whereabouts or fate than we, you decided not to mention him, making his oblivion complete, so as not to risk any impediment towards swiftly legalizing the adoption; or to provide anyone, perhaps your most hostile nemesis, Colonel Malespín, the head of migración, with an excuse for seeking a large bribe.
But I thought, though I kept these ruminations to myself, that it was just as possible that you, quite simply, had forgotten all about Lucas, or that you were feeling too distracted to pay attention to the usual protocols and details just then, or that maybe in your rancor at life you’d even decided to defy them. Because if the adoption was finalized on February 3, 1983, that was right around the time of your breakup with Moya, and also right around the time that Rosana Letones’s grandmother, Doña Hercilia Letones, noted, as did all the other gossips in the Hotel Cortijo Reforma, including the chambermaids, that you had briefly resumed your afte
rnoon rendezvous with Celso Batres in a suite he kept for that purpose in that same hotel; which was also around the time that Moya made his indiscreet boast, which I’d bet anything is why for the last two weeks of your life you were no longer seen arriving on foot just before or after Celso at the Hotel Cortijo Reforma in the afternoons, nor was Celso. (And in Mexico I’ll find out whether or not my friend Moya could possibly have intended that as the inevitable consequence of his boast. . . simply because I need to know, for myself now, and that’s all.)
Of course none of this means that you were a criminal, Flor. Just because you at times liked to live a double or even a triple life; or because you could tell a monumental lie; or because you felt taunted by the secret unreality of your life; or because the defeat that was your own heartbreak compounded the encircling darkness of something or everything else—none of that means you were a criminal, or that you somehow saw or sensed the end coming and then for some reason decided to justify it in advance or to tempt it.
These were my obsessions. And it was I who became obsessed, though for just a while, with the absurd notion that Lucas Caycam Quix might have been your murderer, though this was based on nothing, on evidences as insubstantial as phantoms. I never forgot that I was developing my Lucas scenario almost in a last desperate attempt to make sense of the world for myself, trying to understand what it was in you, what might have been happening in you at that time that could have led him—or anyone—into your bedroom, carrying a sharp knife, on the fatal night. Not needing him to be real and not even wanting him to be real, believing he had nothing to do with you beyond an accidental involvement in an indecipherable but inevitable fate, I led Lucas Caycam Quix to you, Flor. He was the missing piece that allowed me to assemble an illusion out of phantom evidences, that’s all. Because Lucas was small and light-footed enough to be the intruder who woke none of the sleeping orphans in his coming or going that night, but who left the one wide-awake orphan with the haunting memory of an easily dismissed noise amidst the silence. And Lucas had a motive, one implausible enough for an implausible murder. Most of all, I eventually understood, he was a murderer I could almost forgive, so that I could go on hating what had spawned him even more. But I should make absolutely clear that all of this, everything I was able to learn, find out, divine, about Lucas Caycam Quix, and even Celso Batres and the niñera fafera, happened during the first three months after Moya left. And then I gave up, because it was all contradictory, mixed up, inconclusive, but I felt I understood it well enough now according to my own needs and design. What came next was three months, basically, of Zamara, three months of something like live and let live, and Zamarita. Until, just a few weeks ago now, when Mariel the street girl claimed to have found Lucas and said that she could prove it.
When Sor Clarita first introduced me to the mystery of Lucas Caycam Quix that January morning in Pastelería Hemmings, I’d already talked to the one orphan who was awake that night, and it was soon after that Rosana Letones let Edvarga and me in on what she knew about you and Celso.
Because I’d already accompanied Larry to Los Quetzalitos on his haircutting day by then: stepping through those rust-speckled sheet-metal gates for the second time in my life and for the first time since I’d done so with my father, my heart hanging from a thread of apprehension and secret thrill as we made our way up the walk, Larry carrying his barbering tools in a brown paper bag, past Ozzie Peterkins’s jungle gym and into the main house, where I immediately found myself swarmed by a clamoring horde of love-starved orphans in that first-floor playroom full of broken toys (where later I even found the same indestructible rubber spider you handed me on our last shopping trip to Macy’s). I picked a tiny Indian girl named Francisca up in my arms because I had to pick somebody, so many were shouting and jumping up and down with their tiny hands in the air. She looked just like a baby brown Zamarita with the long bangs Larry had given her a month before; Francisca wrapped her arms tightly around my neck and then wouldn’t let go, she kept kissing my cheeks and singing out happy little shrieks, and whenever I tried to put her down she just held on tighter, looking at me with the panic of a little girl being waded through deep water. Larry set up his temporary barbershop in the one-story schoolhouse outside the main house so as to escape the stampede, and I had no choice but to carry Francisca over there with me, and must have been holding her for nearly an hour already when I felt her warm pee dribbling over my arms. Larry cut thirty-nine heads of orphans’ hair that day, which ended with both of us showering with antilice shampoo in the Scandinavians’ bathroom (not your old bathroom, thankfully). True to his nature, he gave the boys military haircuts unless they knew exactly what they wanted instead, and indulged all the girls, employing every flourish learned in his Kentucky haircutting school and improvising others. Niñeras brought the younger children over from the house in groups of five—one of them picked up bawling Francisca and carried her away while I was still at the sink trying to wash the front of my shirt; when I put it back on, I left it unbuttoned. Only the older children were having classes that day, though these did not seem to be conducted with any firmness of purpose. Of the six windowed classrooms off the central area where Larry was cutting hair, two were in use: in one a middle-aged woman was writing the names of world capitals with chalk on a blackboard, and, in the other, one of the Scandinavian volunteers was sitting at her desk immersed in a magazine, some of the children bent over workbooks and others ambling in and out of the classroom to watch Larry. I soon found myself sitting on the floor with three of the older girls playing jacks and was positive I recognized at least one of them from the photograph of you outside the zoo, not so much by her features as by her laugh: the way, turning her head away to laugh, she held her knuckles to her lower lip; the Lift of her eyebrow; light softly shining off the top of her high cheek. No one seemed puzzled over my presence there that day, certainly no one recognized me, and no one mentioned you at all. It was agonizing not to be able to ask them any of countless questions, to accept that all I could do was watch and listen, but this was weirdly enthralling too, to be a spy among children. The girls I was playing jacks with were too shy to converse with me, though they were quietly glancing at each other, shaking with giggles throughout. They were fourteen years old at most but already wore cheap lipstick, painted their nails, and were extraordinarily expert players, bouncing the ball and scooping up jacks with effortless sweeps of their hands. When it was my turn, they all ended up covering their faces with their hands.
Larry said, “Hey, Ed, where’s Rosey?” Hand clamped around the back of a little boy’s head, Larry was mowing away another Indian cowlick and exaggeratedly smiling and rolling his eyes at someone behind me; I looked over my shoulder and saw that one of the teachers, slim, blond, nearly diminutive Edvarga, had come out of her classroom. She said, “If it’s Tuesday afternoon, she has gone to play cards with her grandmother and her friends. Her grandmother lives in the Hotel Cortijo Reforma,” and she sniffily and confidingly added, “Rosana’s father was one of Somoza’s generals, they have much money,” and then she smiled warmly at me. “So is this why you have come here today, to practice jacks? You are not a hairstylist too?” Then Edvarga, who hates being called Ed, abandoned her classroom to join in for several rounds of jacks. Apparently the schooling in Los Quetzalitos has always been fairly lax, from even before your time, Flor. I’m sure you did your best to improve it, but you couldn’t do everything yourself.
One of the older boys who had his hair cut that day, exasperating Larry by insisting on a Michael Jackson cut, was Patricio, the eighteen-year-old whose incurable thyroid condition makes him look like an unnaturally elongated and emaciated ten-year-old with a wise old man’s world-weary eyes. That long-ago day when I went to spy through the orphanage mail slot, he was the one I saw lagging behind that strange procession with the little boy who had your old laundry hamper strapped to his back. Patricio, according to Rosana, isn’t expected to live for many more years, but he shouldn’t have t
he sexual energy he apparently has either, though Rosana says he’s much more of a tireless fondler, embracer, and smoocher than he is a tireless fornicator. But there’s no stopping him, so as a precaution she gives him rubbers and he claims to use them, he’s always asking for more, though Rosana suspects this is just an image-conscious ploy. I mention this mainly because it explains what Patricio was doing in the older girls’ dormitory the night you died, when he was the one wide-awake orphan.
But I didn’t meet Rosana Letones until the next time I went there, on my own, ostensibly to visit Edvarga. She really is quite a card, Rosana, fortyish, with a plain, friendly, brown face, a winning look of almost adolescent merriment in her eyes, and a lavish figure that, snugly packed as it always is into tight blouses, tighter jeans and hoisted up on high heels, seems always to be saying a gracefully timed if slightly lascivious good-bye to that manner of dressing.
One day during the Christmas season, Rosana let me take a group of six boys, including Patricio, on an outing for the first time. She trusted me well enough by then, without having any idea of our connection, Flor. But the orphanage is in this way like a lending library. Rosana never lets me take the girls, because everyone always wants to take the girls and the boys are always being left behind; the girls are cuter and better behaved, and the boys need big-brotherly role models. I took them downtown to Zona 1, to see the famous Arrau store Santa Claus, not having seen him myself in over twenty years. I’d warned my relatives in advance that I’d be doing that, ascribing it to a sentimental motive that probably didn’t fool my worried Uncle Jorge. But there he was, standing on our blue-and-white tiled second-story balcony over Sexta Avenida, dressed as Santa, megaphone speakers mounted in the window behind him: the same small man who has been pantomiming along to my abuelo’s old tape recording for four decades now, never neglecting to open his mouth for a single one of the Belizean opera singer’s booming ho ho hos. The block was closed off with barricades and police for the performance as always, packed with children and parents, and when Santa started raining candy and small plastic trinkets down, there was a mad, shrieking and roiling scramble. But Patricio clung to me, his cool sweaty palms grasping my arm and his head rested against my ribs. He is easily exhausted, very frail, he certainly didn’t have the energy to join the mad scramble for candy.
The Long Night of White Chickens Page 54
