The Long Night of White Chickens Read online

  Critical Acclaim for The Long Night of White Chickens

  “Francisco Goldman has produced a remarkable first novel ... a beautifully balanced mix of intensity and grace, intelligence and imagination. I admired all kinds of things about his book, not least of which was that it told a terrific story, never didactic, always rich in incident and human drama. The Long Night of White Chickens deserves a wide readership, lots of prizes.”

  —Tim O’Brien

  “A TALE THAT SENSITIVELY DEPICTS THE VERY BEST OF HUMAN DIGNITY AND LOVE. . . . Brilliantly crafted . . . with great skill and poetic beauty. . . . [Chickens] has the ability to captivate the reader with its powerful descriptive voice.”

  —Marjorie Agosín, The Christian Science Monitor

  “THIS BOOK IS A JEWEL. ... It is an insistent story, filled with characters who keep whispering to us long after we’ve put the book down. ... A book about the many faces of truth, full of love and humor. . . . Playing with time and reality and the idea that beauty and evil are inextricably linked could be dangerous for a first novelist, but Goldman pulls it off.”

  —Suzanna Andrews, The New York Observer

  “FRANCISCO GOLDMAN IS AN IMMENSELY TALENTED WRITER and possesses sure literary instincts.”

  —Alvaro Mutis, author of The Adventures of Maqroll

  “WHAT FRANCISCO GOLDMAN HAS CREATED IS A MASTERPIECE. . . . Combining American optimism, Latin illusion and Russian angst, his remarkable first novel magically explores life, love, death, politics, intrigue and obsession in a bicultural plot twisting from here to Guatemala. . . . Infinitely satisfying.”

  —Maralyn Lois Polak, The Philadelphia Inquirer

  “FRANCISCO GOLDMAN, IN THIS FINE FIRST NOVEL, DELIVERS A COMPLETE WORLD, SENSUAL, TENDER AND PAINFUL IN ITS FRIENDSHIPS, AND EXPANSIVE IN ITS MEMORY... WITH A WEALTH OF STARTLING DETAIL, HE GIVES US A WORLD THAT FEELS AS IF IT COULD ALMOST BE TOUCHED.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “IT TAKES ONE’S BREATH AWAY.... Goldman pulls together the threads of the story brilliantly, moving back and forth in time like a nimble Mayan weaver creating an elaborate huipil.”

  —Los Angeles Times Book Review

  “HERE IS A FIRST NOVEL DISPLAYING A ROBUST BRILLIANCE WE ARE NOT LIKELY TO SEE AGAIN WITHIN THE YEAR. ... A SPLENDID AND RIVETING BOOK . . . HUMOROUS, ANECDOTAL, PERCEPTIVE, BEAUTIFULLY WRITTEN, AND INFECTED WITH AN INTENSE SENSE OF JOIE DE VIVRE. . . . [Goldman] approaches Central America . . . as a knowledgeable insider in both societies. He is very Yankee, very Guatemalan: the history of intervention and the story of personal identity are inextricably entwined.”

  —Richard Gott, The Guardian (London)

  “The Long Night of White Chickens is a wonderful book of leaps: leaps through cultures, with a thousand humorous or profound insights about ‘Gringos and Latins’; . . . leaps between horror and beauty; and leaps between observation and imagination. An enormous and pleasurable surprise!”

  —Elena Castedo

  “TELLING THE PUNCHLINE FIRST TAKES GUTS AND STYLE—both of which Francisco Goldman has aplenty. Flor, a woman who is dead when the novel opens, comes brilliantly alive as Roger chases her life through Boston snowstorms, cheap whorehouses on the outskirts of Guatemala City and highland villages of the repressed Maya.”

  —The Boston Phoenix

  “ELOQUENT AND POWERFUL ... A COMPELLING LOVE STORY AND AN INTRIGUING MYSTERY ... A MASTERFULLY CONCEIVED WORK OF ART. . . . Lyrical, at times comic, a prose that faithfully captures the speech patterns of Central America. . . . Dramatic tension melds with rich descriptions of Guatemala City life: A wealthy Parisian family that five years after adopting an Indian orphan are told her parents have reappeared. A Colombian couple whose sexual excitement on their wedding night ends in an absurdly comic death. . . . And the Fo Lu Shu, where Flor and Luis Moya fall in love during a long tropical night.”

  —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  “SEAMLESSLY MELDS PRIVATE AND PUBLIC, INTROSPECTION AND ACTION. ... A COMPLEX, RIVETING NOVEL.. . . The narratives of Roger and Moya—the former related in first person and the latter in third—expand the reader’s knowledge through an enriching counterpoint.”

  —Anne Whitehouse, The Miami Herald

  “A BEAUTIFUL STORY OF NATIONAL IDENTITY AND LOVE. . . . ROGER MIGHT BE EITHER THE NATIVE SON IN SEARCH OF HIS ROOTS, OR HOLDEN CAULFIELD ON A BRIEF TRIP TO HELL. ... With García Márquez, Goldman shares a love of narrative abundance, a profusion of character and detail that accrues to a rich whole. . . . Illuminated by innumerable small moments of humor, beauty and power.”

  —The Bookpress

  “A SPLENDID FIRST NOVEL . . . Fashions a surfeit of intelligent detail about its protagonist’s two countries into a fascinating study of cultural contrasts.”

  —USA Today

  “Francisco Goldman has synthesized the literary traditions of two continents in one of the most ambitious literary debuts in years. Funny and sad, wise and wide-eyed, Chickens is a richly layered, genre-busting novel that shuttles between suburban Boston and Guatemala City and devours everything in its path.”

  —Jay Mclnerney

  “The novel, like Roger himself, stands between two worlds—in part a personal story of love and coming of age, it is also a grand historical assault in the tradition of Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene.”

  —Vanity Fair

  “AN ENTHRALLING FIRST NOVEL. . . . PASSIONATE, ROMANTIC AND GRIMLY WITTY . . . SUBTLE AND TENDER.”

  —The Evening Standard (London)

  “DAZZLING. . . . Blending Yankee can-do intellectualism with Latin myth-making.”

  —The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)

  “This striking debut novel begins as a coming-of-age story and ends as much more. Part nontraditional love story, part mystery, this book is also an examination of politics—social, sexual and emotional . . . acidly observant . . . Roger’s emotional journey is a long one—Chickens is clearly rich enough to be savored for a similarly long time.”

  —People

  “FIERCELY REALIZED. . . . THIS LARGE, BURSTING BOOK, WITH ITS ELASTIC BRILLIANCE AND GEOGRAPHICAL ROAMING, IS A GENEROUS RIPOSTE TO SEGREGATIONIST ‘MEANNESS.’ ... A good part of the novel deals with the exhilarating strangeness of growing up in the U.S. with a Jewish father and a Guatemalan mother. . . . When Goldman writes directly of Guatemala ... the prose rushes along with the pleasure of discovery, and dense description is used for its primary work: enchantment.”

  —James Wood, Vogue (Britain)

  “LEAVES THE READER PONDERING THE COMPLICATIONS OF VULNERABLE HEARTS AND RAVENOUS DESIRES.”

  —Minneapolis Post-Bulletin

  “The Long Night of White Chickens is an exceptional novel which gently forces us to acknowledge and truly listen to voices from beyond our borders which have been hidden for too long.”

  —Ariel Dorfman

  “EXTRAORDINARY. ... A CONSUMMATE STORY TELLER . . . The novel’s triumph is Flor, a heroine as complex and fragile as the society she inhabits.”

  —The Boston Review

  “A REMARKABLE NOVEL. . . . Accruing vivid new details at every turn, Roger’s account gives the reader the most immediate possible sense of a country and its people, the comic and appealing as well as the horrific.”

  —The Times Literary Supplement

  “GOLDMAN’S COMPLEX AND MASTERFUL TALE LOOPS AND TURNS AND DOUBLES BACK ON ITSELF, REVEALING THE TRANSMUTABILITY OF TRUTH, THE NARCOSIS OF OBSESSION, THE ENIGMAS OF CULTURE, AND THE IRRESPRESSIBLE DRIVE TO SURVIVE.”

  —Booklist

  “A novel that is about love and self-discovery, obsession and the persistence of memory. . . . Goldman is so skillful that he is able to digres
s for many pages and not lose either the reader or the novel’s direction. . . . Flor [is] a charmingly eccentric character who leaps at us from the pages.”

  —New York Newsday

  “HARDLY A STANDARD FICTIONAL DEBUT . . . Goldman has written a murder mystery that is also a psychological puzzle, political thriller, boy’s own adventure, family drama and muticult comedy. It’s a love story—several love stories, actually—and off-kilter history of Central America in the ‘80s, a story of obsession and repression. . . . The plot flashes back, forward, sideways: Frank Goldman sneaks up on you, obliquely, the way childhood memories sometimes do.”

  —The Village Voice

  “A TRIUMPH OF TALE-SPINNING.”

  —Atlanta Constitution

  “A TOUR DE FORCE... A WONDERFUL NOVELIST.”

  —The Wichita Eagle

  “IMPRESSIVE. . . . Goldman has a particular gift for catching the truth of some emotionally taut moment and twisting it into an unexpected image. . . . Sexual politics are very much the strong suit of this politically charged novel. ... A remarkable debut altogether.”

  —The London Review of Books

  “To be in love with a book is to exhibit all the classic symptoms of romantic obsession. Once you’ve begun, you can’t stop. You want to read it all the time, be with it, of it, in it.... All of which is to say, I LOVE YOU, THE LONG NIGHT OF WHITE CHICKENS. ... A story of unfulfilled and obsessive love, though it is as much a political novel and an exploration of the way we create our personal histories as a love story.”

  —Marion Winik, The Austin Chronicle

  ’The Long Night of White Chickens is ONE OF THE MOST EXTRAORDINARY FIRST WORKS TO BE PUBLISHED IN DECADES. Not since Nabokov’s infamous Lolita or Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon has an author displayed such mastery of contemporary literary method.”

  —The San Francisco Review of Books

  “Myth intermingles with reality as Goldman guides us through his haunting first novel, a family love story. ... A tapestry of understanding.”

  —The Seattle Times

  THE LONG NIGHT OF WHITE CHICKENS

  THE LONG NIGHT OF WHITE CHICKENS

  FRANCISCO GOLDMAN

  Copyright © 1992 by Francisco Goldman

  The Guatemala that forms the backdrop of a portion of this novel is a fictionalized country—nonexistent—despite occasional references to actual events, institutions, and prominent personages. Its greatest unreality may lie in its omissions: impossible, through a mere story like this one, to fully convey—or to exaggerate—the actual country’s unrelenting nightmare.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Goldman, Francisco.

  The long night of white chickens / Francisco Goldman.

  I. Title.

  PS3557.0368L66 1992 813’.54—dc20 91-44318

  ISBN 0-8021-3547-1 (pbk.)

  DESIGN BY LAURA HAMMOND HOUGH

  Grove Press

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  02 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12

  For Bert and Yoli, my parents,

  and Barbara, my sister

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This would have been a different book if not for the friendship, and the guidance, of certain people, whom the author wishes to thank, while absolving them of all blame: Morgan, whose support from the very beginning, and patience, were integral; also Binky; Bex; Jean-Marie; Bob and Karen; Annie; los Andersons de La Mara Internacional, Ken and Jon Lee; Chuck; the Tintoris; my editors at Harper’s; Anton; Webs; Aldo; my family in Guatemala, past and present; Tina, my best friend, The Not-So-Secret Sharer; and Julio, who cast a lot of light in a small country—that country is darker now, for me anyway, since he was forced to leave it.

  PART ONE

  GUATE

  NO EXISTE

  y bajo la ventana de mi Bella-Durmiente,

  el sollozo continuo del chorro de la fuente

  y el cuello del gran cisne blanco que me interroga.

  and beneath the window of my Sleeping Beauty,

  the continuous sobbing of the running fountain,

  and the neck of the great white swan that questions me.

  Yo persigo una forma . . .

  RUBÉN DARÍO

  ONE

  When I was five years old, and still in quarantine for the case of tuberculosis I’d picked up in Guatemala the year before, Abuelita, that is my mother’s mother, sent us an orphan girl to be our maid, and this was Flor de Mayo Puac. Her passport and working papers said she was sixteen, but she was pretty positive she was thirteen. In the Guatemala City convent orphanage where Flor had lived since she was six (pretty positive of being six), the nuns had let her celebrate her birthday every May 10, the anniversary of her baptism there, which might actually have been her second baptism, though her father, when he was alive, had never once taken her into a church that she could remember. But the date seemed accurate enough, and not only because of the evidence provided by her name. She’d lived with her father in the department of Chiquimula, on the desert side of the mountains there where the first of the year’s two or three heavy rains usually fell in April or May, inciting the locusts’ racket, and it was always around that time that her father would suddenly change her age, saying, “Now you are five, mijita,” and then, “Now you are six.” Flor lived in the convent orphanage for seven years, and then one day my grandmother came and picked her.

  What had happened was that my mother had left my father when I was one and had taken me back to Guatemala, where I was going to grow up as a rich person, as she had, which is, of course, just one way of putting it. But then I caught TB from one of our maids and we went back to Massachusetts for the better hospitals in Boston, and also because Abuelita had my mother convinced that my illness was punishment from God for having abandoned my father up there, for three years, in the little suburban ranch house on Codrioli Road in Namoset that my mother had never really liked. My father was still living there, alone, when we came home. Me, tubercular, browned by three years of tropical sun and then yellowed by illness, speaking no English, but still—his son. Abuelita, being a devout and ebulliently authoritarian Catholic, was against divorce, but she’d been just as against the marriage. My father is Jewish, and seventeen years older than my mother. He was raised in the poorest Jewish immigrant neighborhoods of Boston.

  And because he was never comfortable with the idea of having a maid in the first place, and did not think a thirteen-year-old girl should spend all day housecleaning in a house where there wasn’t all that much to clean, my father decided that Flor should go to school. We were enrolled in the first grade together at the beginning of the next school year, and Flor eventually graduated from Namoset High four years ahead of me, in 1972. After that she won a full scholarship to Wellesley College, which is in the town of the same name, right next to Namoset.

  But in 1979 Flor ended up back in Guatemala City, where she was eventually hired to be director of a private orphanage and malnutrition clinic called Los Quetzalitos. On the seventeenth of February, 1983, towards the end of General Ríos Montt’s highly successful counterinsurgency campaign, which according to what I’ve read in the papers and elsewhere added tens of thousands of new orphans to Guatemala’s already huge orphan population, Flor was found murdered. She was discovered by some of her orphans lying on her bed in her room at the or
phanage just before six in the morning, wearing pajamas, and dead from a single deep knife gash in her throat.

  And the very next day the two major Guatemala City dailies came out saying that just two days previous the National Police had uncovered a clandestine safe house for hiding babies—also called a casa de engordes, or fattening house—many of them not even orphans but illegally purchased and even stolen babies, and that they were being kept there until their illegal adoptions could be arranged. That is, until they could be sold to childless couples in Europe and the United States, this apparently being a highly profitable and widespread business in Guatemala and elsewhere in Central America—“a business angle to civil war and violent repression,” as one human rights publication I read phrased it. The newspapers ran photographs of a house full of crowded cribs. And close-up shots of the frightened face of a captured niñera, or nursemaid, who was quoted as saying that her employer, or rather one of her employers but the only one who ever came to the safe house in person, was Flor de Mayo. And the newspapers and police theorized that behind this lay the probable motive for the murder, since Flor couldn’t have run that kind of business all alone: so that it must have been her partners, tipped off somehow about what the niñera had said, who had silenced Flor forever, before the police had been able to procure the order for her arrest. The police said they were searching for these anonymous partners and that justice would be done, not just for the crime of an internecine murder but for the defamation and disgrace that all such baby-selling rings brought upon the patria.

  They said that Flor’s job as director of a legal orphanage had merely served her as a front, and as her introduction into the whole business of adoptions. And, as one newspaper put it, it was people like Flor, “a woman of pocos escrúpulos,” few scruples, who were “desprestigiando,” de-prestiging, the entirely honorable and necessary occupation of taking care of orphans and legally finding them loving homes abroad. The newspapers highlighted Flor’s beauty, though not to any specific purpose. And they made very much of the fact that, although she was Guatemalan born, this alone could not account for her corruption as she was a United States citizen who had spent more than half her life in her adopted country and had graduated from one of its most elite colleges for women. Direct U.S. military aid to the Guatemalan military government had been cut off by Congress since 1978 because of the human rights violations, considered the most excessive in the hemisphere, and no one since in Washington who had tried had succeeded in coming up with the right words to persuade Congress to fully turn it back on. But the military, and many in the Guatemalan press, and many Guatemalans who considered themselves patriots, such as my relatives, liked to think of that cutoff as a kind of blanket violation of all Guatemalans’ human rights and as a new and hypocritical form of imperialism, and now the newspapers posed Flor’s case as another form of hypocrisy and imperialism: a highly educated U.S. citizen selling, for personal profit, the surviving victims of the alleged human rights atrocities that North Americans professed to be so concerned about.