“I’ve seen this before,” he said dismissively. “La Flor brought us once.”
That was the very first time I’d ever heard your name on one of your orphan’s lips, Flor.
“Who?” I asked.
“Flor de Mayo,” he said. “She died.”
“How?” I asked.
“Murdered, pues.” He clucked his tongue impatiently. “You didn’t know that?”
“I’ve heard something about it,” I said. “How did it happen?”
“Nobody knows,” he singsonged, rolling his head against my side. I had to quickly return my girl cousins’ waves now; they’d spotted me in the crowd from inside one of the mannequin-filled display windows.
“Did you like her, Patricio?”
“Ah sí, claro, fue muy buena onda!” he said, and then he giggled happily. “Vos, she liked making love.” Then he imitated a woman’s love cries, tremulously, not obscenely but mischievously, I understood that, but still.
“That’s not very respectful, Patricio,” I said, forcing myself to smile. “Eres muy pillo.” You’re really an imp.
He giggled again. “The whole world likes to make love, she was no different, and she was lonely a lot. But when she wasn’t, ooooo! Much noisier than Rosana.” Some of the other little boys had come back, holding fistfuls of candy, pockets bulging with candy; one of them had a slightly bloodied lip.
“So you always know what’s going on, huh, Patricio?”
He raised his small, wan face to gaze up at me. “Claro. But I wish I’d seen el asesino. I almost did, vos. Only I, because the rest were all asleep . . .”
On the night you died, Patricio, as he often does, had snuck into the older girls’ dormitory, in a separate little bungalow next to the classrooms. He was lying awake in the arms of a soundly sleeping fourteen-year-old named Sarita in the top bunk closest to the window offering an unobstructed view of the front gates and the path to the main house. But the quiet rasp of the gate being unlatched and opened in one motion was the first sound he heard, and when he looked over the gate was already being quietly closed from the other side, he only heard its soft metal thump.
“Fue todo,” that was all, said Patricio, there in the crowd in front of the Arrau store, while Tchaikovsky’s bells boomed again from Abuelito’s old recording.
That night Patricio had drifted off to sleep without giving it another thought, assuming it just must have been one of the full-time niñeras sneaking out.
So you didn’t even scream—because you never had a chance to understand or because you understood too well? Your murderer severed your windpipe with a highly sharpened and medium-sized blade, maybe even a good kitchen knife, and then fled the room and down the stairs, silently, still carrying the never-to-be-recovered weapon, past mute dormitones of sleeping orphans and malnourished infants in incubators, and at least one wide-awake orphan, Patricio, who would have heard you had you screamed. Though on second (or millionth) thought, Why, if you understood too well, would you have kept quiet anyway? Pliant collaboration with your murderer, this hardly seems feasible, Flor, no matter what your despair or disgrace. Did he catch you by surprise, alone in your room? Were you alone because you wanted to be, and had shooed the usual brood of little girls away? Or were you waiting for somebody, or even for a late-night phone call you didn’t want anyone to overhear? Or did you just need to be alone? Did he slash your throat and then suffocate you with a pillow so you couldn’t scream? And then, your murderer gone, did you get up from your bed at least one more time, smearing bloody handprints on the walls as if groping all over for a light switch in a too dark and unfamiliar room, exactly as you might have groped on your very first night in our basement before making your way up the stairs to snack on a stick of butter? And then you went back to bed and died once and for all? This is too terrible! I’m the wrong person to describe this, I can’t fake a coroner’s detachment. But this is as close to a final report as we are ever going to get, Moya having departed long before he could get around to “chronicling” our investigation, as there was nothing for him to chronicle yet except maybe the secretive depths or shallows of his own perhaps misplaced guilt.
I had to stay away, of course, when, in January, only days after our first meeting in Pastelería Hemmings, Sor Clarita went with a French embassy official to interview all the orphans who might have been old enough to remember Lucas Caycam Quix during the short time he might have spent in the orphanage before running away, if that is in fact what happened. Talk to Patricio, I advised her. If anyone remembers, it will be Patricio. Only eleven orphans were qualified. Because privacy is hard to come by in an orphanage, the interviews were conducted in the room you set up as a piñata workshop, apparently so that some of the orphans could learn that useful craft; no one ever goes into that room anymore, though it remains cluttered with the wire skeletons of never completed piñata animalitos, cartons of crepe and tissue paper.
Patricio had only the shadowiest memory of it: he kind of remembered that there was an older Indian kid who promptly ran away, but kids were always coming and going, from the malnutrition clinic especially. But he also told Sor Clarita that there was another street kid named Lagarto who used to sneak into the orphanage to sleep with another of the older girls sometimes, very late at night, after you were asleep, until one of the girls complained and you threw him out and then Lagarto stood in the street outside screaming and throwing rocks at the gates and you went out in your bathrobe and shouted that if he ever came back again you would have him arrested. You’ll never get near one of my girls again if you don’t lift your life up so you can come and visit in the day like a respectable boy! Patricio claimed you actually shouted, which is possible, since your voice certainly carried, and it seems that everyone who ever knew her turns into Abuelita eventually. But street kids sneaking into the orphanage to make love to the girls? No wonder you always had a lice problem there. Except now with the new barbed wire atop the high wall outside, Patricio, as he puts it, has “the henhouse” to himself and no longer has to contend with outside rivals, but there’s still a problem with lice. Rosana put that barbed wire up as soon as she was hired to replace you.
When I “just happened” to drop over to visit Edvarga later the same day of Sor Clarita’s visit, Rosana said, “I think that poor woman was innocent because if she hadn’t been, wouldn’t she have thought of putting barbed wire up to protect herself? She might be alive today if she had, verdad? Or maybe she had men coming over the wall to see her too; nothing would surprise me anymore! But she was in love, you know. Oh yes, my abuela used to see Flor coming into the hotel where she lives. Everyone there knew about my poor predecessor and that newspaper owner, from that famous family, los Batres, no?”
Just like that, I found out, Flor. Rosana went on and on—rapt Edvarga providing the occasional little gasps and simple prompting questions that kept her going, so that I didn’t have to say a thing—telling us that for a while her abuela, who after all didn’t have much else to do with her bitter life as a hotel-dwelling exile but gossip with the chambermaids, had even become convinced that Celso Batres must be the murderer; until the chambermaids convinced her that it couldn’t be, because he was such a gentleman, from such a fine family, there was nothing sinister in his having had a seemingly inextinguishable passion for his formidable mistress—seemingly because hadn’t it been going on for more than two years without showing any signs of letting up? But when neither of you was seen coming into the hotel for months, everybody had been certain that the affair had finally ended, although Celso continued to pay rent on the suite. So no one had been surprised either when, about a month before you died, you and Celso started meeting there just as regularly as before. But one afternoon soon after, you and Celso had a fight: a chambermaid even heard his angry shouting, but it was over quickly because suddenly the door slammed open and Celso fell silent as soon as he saw the chambermaid standing in the hall. You walked out and past her, swiftly to the elevator without saying a w
ord, your head down and hair over your face as if to hide tears. You were never seen there again.
“—Practically the whole world knew about Flor and that Celso Batres,” said Rosana, telling how even on her visits to Sweden and elsewhere on orphan-related business, people sometimes asked after Celso, and more than once had even mistaken her for you. “Honestly, that always gives me goose bumps, because: huy no! But that poor woman! I can’t think badly of her no matter what. Of course it’s all in the past now, two years ago already, isn’t it best forgotten? But yes, Flor used to walk over to that hotel from here, in the afternoons. On foot, fíjese? She was in love, es obvio. Without a doubt, he’s handsome. Intelligent, prominent, a newspaper owner, there are those who say he might even be president someday, I’m sure it’s possible . . .”
We’d been sitting in Rosana Letones’s new, air-conditioned, first-floor office, having coffee, all three of us smoking; but I was just staring down into my cup of coffee now, face throbbing. Edvarga set her cup down and picked up a clipboard and started riffling through its pages with what seemed feigned attention. “Dios mío,” Rosana said softly. “But it must be bad luck to talk this way.” (Though she could hardly be superstitious, she even kept your old bedroom, simply because it is the best bedroom.) “Eddie,” Rosana suddenly said, in English, “can you open the window please. Must let this smoke out!” Suddenly I blurted, “I’m supposed to be playing tennis with my cousin!”—and I got up, opened the door, and went out almost in one spastic motion, Edvarga exclaiming behind me, “You play tennis?” I walked all the way home, from Zona 10 to Zona 1, listening to you tell me how what couldn’t plausibly have happened, very plausibly might have; and how none of it would have happened if not for Moya’s . . .
It didn’t take Sor Clarita and me long to find Lagarto through the help of the foreign social workers who work with street kids, one of whom, an Italian, does in fact remember you coming to them two or three times to report runaways, though of course you never insisted that the children be forced to come back and asked only for the chance to talk to them if indeed they were found. Lagarto didn’t lift his life up at all, he’s a complete glue addict now; the police caught him stealing automobile batteries one night so they’d poured glue all over his head, which was why he was going around with a shaved head, begging his few daily centavos by singing “Cielito Lindo” off-key on city buses. He’s one of the glue sniffers who hang out in that lot where I caught the bus that brought me here to Puerto Barrios. But he’d never heard of a Lucas Caycam who’d run away from Los Quetzalitos either, but his mind was so glue fogged he didn’t even remember you. None of the social workers has heard of any boy who ran away from an orphanage and then somehow learned that his sister had been “sold,” though even if they had, they probably wouldn’t tell me, as most tend to be somewhat romantic about los niños de la calle and very protective of them, with good reason, I’m sure, as the vast majority are harmless—and there are thousands upon thousands now, many of whom lost their parents in exactly the same way that Lucas believed he’d lost his. The police often kill street kids anyway. Maybe Lucas got involved in one of the maras, the criminal street gangs, many of these actually run by the police, and died that way (if he did die), at the hands of a rival gang. Maybe he was in a mara car-stealing ring or even, irony of ironies, the baby trade, snatching infants from their mothers’ arms on the streets, and was killed for screwing up a job, or for some kind of double cross. Mariel the street girl knew a lot about all the different ways street kids can be preyed on or manipulated into being pawns in the lowest echelons of the rackets. I met Mariel during my search for Lucas, before I accepted that he must be dead or had walked to the States, and then gave up, even stopping my occasional visits to Los Quetzalitos. By then I felt so convinced of how you might have let yourself draw Lucas to your room that night, I didn’t need it to be true.
Celso Batres, by the way, is the most self-disciplined liar ever or else has the coldest heart ever. I don’t want to hurt you, Flor, but he denied any involvement with you when I went to see him at El Minuto. I didn’t even phone for an appointment, I just turned up and asked to speak with him at the downstairs reception desk, where I gave my name, which he must have recognized; so it must have given him time to compose himself too, so perhaps it was a mistake to have given my name. (And what had you told him about us, Flor?) When I was let into his office he was sitting at his desk, family portraits and photographs of himself shaking hands with Latin American politicians and celebrities on all the polished mahogany walls. He asked what he could do for me, that’s all, and when I told him who I was and that you had been like my sister and so on, he just tilted his head with perfect curiosity, like he was really puzzled about why any of this should matter to him, but was too nice a guy to ask out loud. And he really does seem like a nice guy, Flor, he even has some of Tony’s elegantly good-natured airs, it isn’t hard to guess that in other circumstances he’d be very charming and affectionate, I can even sense what you two had in common. But I also remembered you saying once that it is just one of life’s injustices that the person who most deserves one’s love is not necessarily the one who gets it (I even think it was before you met Moya that you said that, wasn’t it?). So I finally said, You loved her, Celso, you sent that poem, you used to meet her in the Cortijo Reforma and so on and wondered to myself what crime I was actually accusing him of anyway. Still, he just sat there for such a long moment, looking so befuddled that I suddenly wondered if maybe Rosana Letones’s grandmother had been utterly mistaken. But then Celso surprised me, pounding his desk once with an open hand and whispering seemingly that he’d had it with this zombie country where rumors are the walking dead, Moya’s a Communist and is trying to poison his life, and he sat back, took out a navy blue handkerchief, and wiped his eyes, then looked at me with a steady gaze and said:
“I’m sorry about what happened to your sister, but I barely knew her. Believe me if you want to, or don’t. The problem with this country is that everybody does everything in secret and, in the end, we all pay. I mean to say we all pay because everybody believes everything.”
“You loved her though, I know you did,” I repeated, staring at him. And the troubled look in his eyes as he stared back told me that it was true, and that he knew he was letting me see that. Or did I just imagine that too?
“I’ll excuse your impertinence, but just this once, Señor Graetz,” he said then. “Yes, your sister was a wonderful woman, I know. And terribly unjust things were said about her. But my advice to you is to find something better to do with your life than what you’ve obviously been doing. Find another way to honor your sister, if you loved her so much, instead of spreading rumors and indulging in this perversity. I have a family to protect. I don’t have to tell you that in this country, when people spend their time plotting ways to harm people, they often end up getting hurt themselves. I should think that Luis Moya would have taught you that. I have nothing more to say.”
Well, I really didn’t persist in my “perversity,” Flor. I gave up soon after and found another one, because it was around that time that Zamara finally became my lover “once and for all,” her thing with Lieutenant López finally behind her if it had always been as before her as she’d claimed—though without a doubt it took the teniente much longer to tire of Zamara than anyone had predicted. Zamara liked to insist that it was I who’d won her away from him, which I had a hard time believing, though I appreciated the attempted flattery. But I hadn’t received a single threat of any kind, and I was never that invisible. For protection, I had nothing more than my bottle alarm system. I’d behaved as prudently as possible, during the months when I was “ceding the territory” to the lieutenant. But there had been many nights when I’d gone to the nightclub where Zamara works anyway and she’d always been glad to see me, had danced with me, had even returned my furtive kisses and nuzzles. Letting ourselves get carried away on those occasions, we’d even made promises to each other, though that I w
ould marry her and bring her and her son to the States was never one of them. Zamara didn’t turn tricks at the club anymore, not even for me on my boldest and most passionately persistent nights, but she was never there on weekends anymore, and all the other girls would say then that she was off with her lieutenant. Was she as frightened of him as I was? Was she just waiting for him to lose interest in her so that she could be with me? I can be a very romantic and self-deluding person. Because it definitely felt romantic—though admittedly sick to take any satisfaction from it—to go on wanting her while knowing that I could not have her because of her liaison with a most plausibly murderous and unprosecutable lieutenant.
One night I came into the club and as soon as Zamara saw me, before I even had a chance to buy her a fruit juice and thus establish my ritual right to at least sit beside her all night, Zamara rose from the corner table where she was sitting with the other girls and came towards me with a big smile. “Hola, amorcito.” Without another word she led me by the hand to the dance floor, put her soft arms around my neck, her hips against my hips, and we both enjoyed my much improved dancing for a while—no longer did the other girls point at me and call out “mucha ropa,” too many clothes, during merengues and cumbias, so there’s one accomplishment—and then she put her lips against my ear and said that it was over with the lieutenant, that I’d won her, she was all mine, and that we could meet tomorrow in the afternoon but only if I took her to that fancy new seafood restaurant in Zona 9 that looks just like a pirate ship; me murmuring in her ear, Claro, claro, cómo no, mi amor, claro . . .
The Long Night of White Chickens Page 55
