by David Unger
In these smaller towns and villages of Provence, he has stopped seeking out brothels, because he doesn’t want to contract another case of crabs, or something much worse. He is happy masturbating in his bed, with toilet paper at his side, imagining pulling down Perla’s panties and letting her receive the deposit of his sperm—which traditionally fell on the movie house floor—inside her body.
* * *
In April, as summer warmth spreads into the streets of Paris, Guillermo returns to the home he has known since he was a child. After telling his parents all about his many adventures—but leaving out the sexual ones—he once more becomes a slug in their house, occupying the studio apartment built for him when he was in junior high. It is his castle, his aviary, his lair, where he can listen to Nat King Cole and Andy Williams cassettes, leaf through photography books, sneak up Playboys he bought in an El Portal newsstand, and fondle himself in peace. And this he does with more fury than pleasure.
Finally, after weeks of his son’s slothing, Günter once more climbs the stairs to his room. The man has aged rapidly, making Guillermo wonder if he is sick. He asks the question he is so fond of asking: “What are you going to do with your life, Guillermo?”
“I don’t know, Dad,” the boy replies without any hesitation.
His father glances around at the rumpled clothes in the corners of the room, the stacks of magazines. It takes a big effort, but he says in a high-pitched voice: “I want you to take over La Candelaria. I want to retire.”
Guillermo’s heart sinks. He recognizes that as much as he does not understand what motivates his father, his father does not understand him in the least.
“I want to do something on my own, Dad. Make my own mark. Maybe take up farming.”
This is a new one for Günter. He is almost speechless. “Farming? And do what? Grow cabbage?”
“I was thinking of artichokes,” Guillermo says, remembering how delicious they had tasted in France, the meaty leaves dipped in a warm sauce of butter, basil, and garlic. He has never even seen an artichoke in Guatemala, but he is certain they can grow here. Maybe not in abundance, and certainly never to find a way to his father’s table, but the soil and the climate would be appropriate for developing a large harvest.
“Is this what you got out of three months in Europe?” His father is frowning. The reddish hair on his head is turning gray. “That you want to grow artichokes?”
“I was away for four months.”
His father glares at him, exhausted. “Okay, four. What difference does it make? You go to Paris, London, and Amsterdam and a light goes off in your head that you want to be a farmer and soil your hands?”
“I don’t want to be stuck in an office,” Guillermo says, recalling Carlos and resisting the instinct to joke about a light going off in the head of the son of a lamp store owner. “And I’m not good at selling.”
“What about studying something of value? Instead of you planting artichokes, what about the business of farming? Let somebody else do the heavy work.” He remembers his son’s cockeyed dream to work in an archeological site in the middle of the Guatemalan jungle.
“Agronomy?”
“I don’t know what it’s called, but it puts food on the table: farming, distribution, sales. Anything to avoid seeing you on your hands and knees in the dirt.”
Once in a while the old man has a good idea, Guillermo has to admit. “I wouldn’t mind becoming a rich farmer, Father.”
“This is what you have learned in Europe?” Günter goads. “That you abhor working for a living? You would prefer being a gentleman farmer to taking over a proper business that has been developed by your father?”
Guillermo doesn’t want to argue. “I don’t abhor poverty, I just don’t want to live in poverty. Poor people sicken me.”
“So now I understand why we have Indians and guerrillas fighting together in the mountains of Guatemala—because they have chosen to be poor? And you feel that Europe is a tired continent with lots of museums. Is that what you think?”
“Europe is worse than Guatemala,” he tells his dad. “At least here there is hope of change. There are only fossils over there.”
Günter Rosensweig is exasperated. He turns on his heels and starts walking out stoop-shouldered. Guillermo recognizes this posture as the same his father uses on customers, which he believes will result in sales. But this time there is no sale in sight. The customer will never call him back.
“I don’t want to wear an apron every day,” says Guillermo, his voice cracking.
Günter turns around. Guillermo is holding his breath. Again he has tears in his eyes. The father understands how his son sees him. In an apron. Like a maid.
“Come here, son.”
Guillermo runs into Günter’s open arms. For months he has been holding in his frustration, his sense of utter failure. He hates his emotions and promises himself that he will never be so weak as to lean on anyone again. He doesn’t want to wound his father—he isn’t sadistic—but he doesn’t want to be trapped in a life he finds repellent.
Günter strokes his son’s head as his own tears come flowing out. Yet they are crying for different reasons. Guillermo wishes he could stop, but he can’t. Maybe this is what happens when you tell your father that the work he does is demeaning, or maybe it’s because it has been months since another human being has touched him with something resembling love.
* * *
It is 1980 and a very dangerous time in Guatemala. Most of Guillermo’s high school friends decide to stay abroad, taking courses, working, or traveling over the summer. They are advised not to come home. Their parents must tend to their stores and offices, risking being kidnapped, but why should their children put themselves in danger? The mother of a Colegio Americano friend is kidnapped, and when the family fails to pay the million-dollar ransom quickly enough, she is shot five times and left on the side of the road by Chimaltenango, with her jewelry still on her.
The message is quite clear: Pay up, and pay up well, or die.
Guillermo is nineteen and President Lucas García claims the country has never been safer. This is the real stupidity, to speak of order and the rule of law as if history has ever been civilized. Guillermo remembers that the Mayan golden age offered the seventh century a vicious hierarchy, superstition, and the yanking out of still-beating hearts, not to mention slavery and constant warfare. And the Romans and the Gauls let thousands of their soldiers die in futile combat.
It was a butcher shop then, and so it is now. In Guatemala City, businessmen are hiring twenty-year-olds with automatic rifles, buzz cuts, and bench-pressed muscles to determine who lives and who dies with the flick of a wrist.
His father sells lamps. In high school Guillermo was just another boy who dreamed of kissing the girl who barely knew he existed, but smiled through him just the same. The girl knew that his father sold lamps, while her own father owned factories, had three white convertible Impalas in the garage, membership at the Mayan Golf Club in Amatitlán, and a house in Likín with a motorboat and skis. Without saying a word to their daughters, they knew they would never date anyone with a background like his.
* * *
So Guillermo finally tells his father he wants to be rich, filthy rich, so he won’t ever have to hesitate at a restaurant before ordering steak or lobster. And he will never touch a lamp again, unless it is to turn the switch.
Since he only spent two thousand of the four thousand quetzales that his father had given him for his trip, he has enough money to pay for a semester’s worth of courses at Universidad Marroquín, where Juancho is now studying. His friend insists that he start taking summer courses immediately, not to wait for the fall term.
The Chicago school of economics is the rage at Marroquín. Everyone prays to the god of capitalism and that god is named Milton Friedman. The theory is simple—reduce or eliminate taxes and let money do what it has always done: create more money. Somewhere down the line the quetzales will trickle down to the boot
black or the street sweeper.
There’s no place for guilt about inequities or the gap between the rich and the poor, because economic policy rewards those who take initiative. Allow the merchant class to make money freely and they will use their profits to further fertilize the fields of bounty. The Promised Land will have glass buildings, streets paved with gold, papaya and avocado trees growing in the backyard of every house. It will be paradise on earth.
Guillermo has no trouble with this philosophy. In fact, he embraces it. Soon enough he is reciting Friedman quotes—sculpted into the wooden signs at the entrance to the library and the other buildings on campus—by heart. A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both. But his favorite quote is, He moves fastest who moves alone.
“John Maynard Keynes” and “federal government” are bad words. The university is filled with serious young men planning to be millionaires by the time they turn thirty. Guillermo has become one of them—but since he is a loner, he does not join any clubs.
He believes that free enterprise is king.
He plunges into his studies. He hates his literature and philosophy courses, where the idea of economic success is, if not belittled, then considered an obstacle to social equity. The novels he is forced to read and the philosophy he is obliged to study all stress the negative, but Guillermo is now interested in emulating systems that allow unfettered wealth and happiness.
In high school, everyone read existentialist literature voraciously. His classmates thought that Camus’s The Stranger was the greatest novel ever written: a man who feels nothing when his mother dies, who kills another person for no apparent reason, who refuses to repent for his sins, who not only doesn’t believe in God but spits in His face, and who happily awaits his execution hoping that a big noisy crowd will be there to see him hanged. They loved the novel because it had nothing to do with their actual lives.
His courses in macro- and microeconomics, organizational management, propensity theory, business economics, and motivational factors in economic growth, however, are too theoretical and dry. He realizes that what he likes most now is not studying and memorizing economic concepts but arguing with his fellow students. He has become an acolyte to capitalism, his new religion, but even more so, he’s become a skilled debater. He is convinced that he can actually win a debate defending the position of either Marx or Engels.
Marroquín counts among its students the sons of the wealthy: the Paizes, the Sotos, the Halfons, the Habers. No matter what political or economic positions his fellow students stake out, Guillermo always goes one step further to the right. While his classmates fear a Communist takeover, many of them consider Ríos Montt’s military coup against Romeo Lucas García regrettable because it involves a distortion of the rule of law. Guillermo, however, alone among his classmates, happily applauds it.
“Are you going to sit on your hands while the guerrillas take over your father’s factories, kidnap your family, and ransom them for millions of dollars? When will it stop? When your parents are impoverished and your sisters sold into prostitution?”
He argues not only because he has mastered the facts, but because he has worked hard to develop the skill to distort them. He is gifted in foreseeing his fellow students’ counterarguments, like a champion chess player. He can see two steps ahead of them and he revels in the anticipation of his successes, even before achieving them.
By the second year, Guillermo abandons his business studies to pursue law, an occupation better suited to his developing skills as a manipulator. He takes courses in commerce and procedural law at Marroquín, but also graduate seminars in constitutional and tax law at the Landívar. The more knowledge he acquires, the more power and money he is sure to have.
For the first time in his life, Guillermo knows what he wants to do.
* * *
When he was in Paris, Guillermo heard a French diplomat say about his own country, C’est un pays de merde. If France is a shitty country, Guillermo wonders, what would this same man think of Guatemala? At best, C’est un pays trop bizarre.
chapter three
feeding elephants
One Sunday in May, Guillermo and Juancho decide to go to the Aurora Zoo, the scene of so many happy childhood outings. There’s a palpable tension between the boys, as if something remarkable has happened to change their relationship. In reality, nothing has, but Juancho feels scared of his friend now that Guillermo has become so combustible. He doesn’t want to end up feuding. Juancho is pleased to be driving, so that he need not look his friend directly in the eye.
They park close to the zoo’s entrance. The walkway is sprinkled with visitors—grandparents, parents, and children on bicycles or scooters, Indian families, worker families, all kinds of families, except those of the very rich. The jacarandas are in bloom, with their inverted cones of scarlet flowers, and the shrubs are pockmarked with white and red berries. The clouds in the sky are thick and tuberlike: it might rain later that afternoon, but now the sun is shining, not too harshly.
The aroma of cotton candy, sugared nuts, tamales, and mixtas—hot dogs with avocado wrapped in warm tortillas—hangs listlessly in the air.
“I’m hungry,” Guillermo says suddenly, putting out a cigarette. He picked up smoking in Europe as a way to calm his nerves and to feel more self-assured, but never smokes in front of his parents. He doesn’t want them to remind him of how he complained about Carlos’s smoking.
“I could eat something,” Juancho replies hesitantly. He’s thin as bamboo.
They go over to a food cart and wait their turn in line. Guillermo shakes his head when he sees the menu on the side of the cart saying that the mixtas cost thirty-five cents each, and a small Coke twenty. This is all chump change, yet he feels obliged to complain. “We used to pay a nickel for them at Frankfurts near the Cine Capitol. Do you remember?”
Juancho nods. “And the Cokes used to cost six cents.”
“Life—and inflation—in the damn tropics,” Guillermo says.
He orders two mixtas for himself, one for Juancho. He would prefer to drink an atol de elote, but he knows he’d have to leave the zoo. The cart man prepares the mixtas deftly, as if he were a machine, putting the hot dog on a griddle-warmed tortilla and then slathering it with guacamol. He pulls two cans of Coke from his Styrofoam ice chest behind the cart.
Guillermo gives the man two quetzales, and refuses the change.“Keep it—you should invest in a new cart.”
The man nods and is already taking a new order. He has a look on his face as if to say the world is filled with sergeants and few soldiers.
“What do you think?” Guillermo asks his friend. They are sitting on wobbly stools on an elevated table piled high with napkins and soiled wax paper.
“They taste the same to me.”
Guillermo shakes his head, watching half of his second hot dog fall to the sidewalk as the tortilla breaks in half. “The ones at Frankfurts were grilled, not boiled, and the avocado was dolloped on a thick corn tortilla from a big plastic container that sat cold in the icebox. These tortillas are made of wheat flour.”
“Nothing’s what it was,” says Juancho resignedly.
“You are so right,” agrees Guillermo, with more than a hint of disgust in his tone. “Let’s pay a visit to our old friend La Mocosita.”
The elephants are around the corner from the mixta cart. La Mocosita, the erstwhile baby now fully grown, seems unusually agitated. She keeps walking back and forth in her pen, dousing her back with water and trumpeting. Guillermo looks at her and swears there are tears in her eyes. When the two friends try to feed her bananas, she turns her back on them. That’s when they see the broken arrow sticking out of her haunches. Someone has shot her, and a thread of blood issues from a small hole near her tail, trickling down her left leg.
Thousands of gnats can kill an elephant, Günter Rosensweig used to say, so his son would understand that the
smallest creatures can accomplish a lot if they decide to work together.
“Can you believe this?” says Juancho, horrified.
“My stupid father . . .” Guillermo whispers. He pulls a Pall Mall from his shirt pocket and lights up.
“I don’t understand what your father has to do with anything. We need to find a zookeeper.”
“. . . always talking about the importance of people working together when he should have been telling me it only takes one asshole to wreck a beautiful thing. What kind of person would shoot an arrow into an elephant’s backside, in a zoo no less?”
They look frantically for a guard around the neighboring lion and tiger cages. They go to the exhibit where three Galapagos turtles sleep like prehistoric rocks on a grassless stretch near a standing pond with storks and ibises. They finally find a zookeeper sitting on a bench with the Prensa Libre covering his face. He is snoring loudly.
Guillermo pulls the paper off his face.
“What’s going on?” says the keeper, shielding his eyes from the sun, his legs kicking in the air.
“Someone shot an arrow into La Mocosita.”
“Huh.” The zookeeper raises his shoulders. “I’m in charge of the reptiles. You need to find Armando, the keeper of the large mammals.”
He makes no effort to get up. They see why: there’s an empty pint of rum next to him. Furthermore, he packs more pounds than a grown sea cow. He would fall on his face if he tried to stand.
“You drunken piece of shit.”
The keeper flays both his arms in the air as if trying to punch them, but he can’t get himself up. He looks like a fat cartoon character with elephantiasis.
Guillermo and Juancho run over to the monkey house. A zookeeper, wearing green rubber pants and boots, is hosing down the cement floor of the cage while some gibbons hang from rings and growl from above. They tell him what they’ve witnessed.
