by David Unger
After Michelle returns to San Francisco, Guillermo is able to sell his parents’ house in Vista Hermosa and set up their mom in one of the high-rises off Avenida Las Americas in Zone 14, close to the Gran Centro Los Próceres. He feels that she will be safer and better taken care of there. With the money his father has saved over the years, he hires her a chauffeur and a live-in maid. She will be well provided for, because Guillermo finally understands that there is a payoff to all his father’s money-pinching. He has left his wife with oodles of cash.
But three weeks later, on January 6, the day of the Epiphany, the maid discovers that Lillian has simply died in her sleep. She is sixty-eight years old. An autopsy is required by law, and indicates there has been no foul play in her death. No trace of drugs, no unusual illness. With nothing left to live for, she has simply up and died. Guillermo pleads with his sister not to come back. What for? For a second burial? He ends up burying her in Verbena Cemetery; thirty of her friends, most of whom Guillermo never knew, attend the funeral.
So within three weeks he has lost both his parents. He is more stunned than grieved. Rosa Esther doesn’t know what to say or do to quell Guillermo’s loss. She has lived her whole life without the support of parents; she does not understand why Guillermo suddenly starts crying at odd moments. She seems angry at his tears, walking away rather than embracing him. Guillermo begins to feel a greater distance from her. Maybe he doesn’t really need anything from her. Not anymore.
Certainly not their usual sex habits.
Only Guillermo can understand Lillian’s death. The night before she died he had a dream that the Angel of Death flew over his bed and sprinkled droplets of poison on his face. He survived by keeping his mouth shut. The dream is a premonition that he will be constantly stalked by death. He is not frightened. Forewarned, he will live his life vigilantly, but will have a long life.
* * *
Guillermo and Rosa Esther return to New York for the final semester at Columbia. These have been happy years for them, he with his studies and freedom, and she with the variety in her life. The subway costs thirty-five cents—there is music, art, theater, and literature everywhere in this city, and despite occasional muggings they are living in peace. When they get together with their friends, the others complain more vociferously of the violence in Argentina, Chile, Peru, and Uruguay. They express fear for the safety of their relatives, but also for themselves. They have been vocal in criticizing their homegrown dictatorships from abroad and are fearful of spies.
In truth, they live with the tense knowledge that their student visas are about to expire. By July 1 all of them must return to their homelands. None of them are ready—they’ve grown comfortable with the peace the United States offers them.
To stay beyond the two years of his academic visa, Guillermo applies for a postgraduate fellowship at New York University’s business school. He wants to study banking and finance but is rejected. And with the death of his parents, Rosa Esther is more intent on returning to Guatemala to spend time with her own familiy. She wants to be around should her grandmother become sick.
“This is our reality,” Rosa Esther says to him. “The fun’s over.”
“I don’t want to go back.”
“Well, I do. And if I return, you do too.”
He glares at her, realizing that the love and respect he had for her has turned to something else. He recalls what he said to Juancho when the latter challenged his marriage.
It’s not yet time for a divorce, but he’s ready to push the envelope.
* * *
As if to deny the future and upset his wife, Guillermo buys himself a fifteen-gear Peugeot and Rosa Esther a three-gear Raleigh. If they are going to leave New York, they might as well spend their last months exploring the city.
“This is the most foolish thing you have ever done. I will never ride that bike,” she tells him, more angry with his lack of consultation than the waste of money. She knows that his parents’ deaths have left them without money worries for years.
He simply shrugs. Every weekend or holiday at daybreak he takes his bicycle down the elevator and rides through Riverside Park or Central Park. He makes a habit of biking over the Brooklyn Bridge to Fulton’s Landing, where he eats ice cream and stares at the monumental beauty of the Twin Towers in the distance. He discovers Sahadi’s on Atlantic Avenue and buys dates from Morocco and ma’amoul from Yemen for Chichi, Mercedes, Deseo Vino, and even his wife. On several occasions he rides to the Bronx Zoo, where for the first time he sees a red panda, and thinks back to his many visits to the Aurora Zoo with Juancho.
One day, he bicycles all the way to Brighton Beach, where he eats potato and mushroom knishes and watches the many Russian immigrants sunning themselves on the boardwalk. He does not want to leave New York, though he knows their visas are about to expire. And anyway, Rosa Esther would make good on her threat to leave him.
At least he will return armed with a master’s degree in commercial and international law from Columbia University. And the years in New York have allowed him and Rosa Esther to establish independence from their families, or this is what they tell their New York Latin American friends. But there is no need to justify their actions. Everyone but Ignacio and Deseo Vino has decided to return to their birth countries to reintegrate. As foreign citizens without working papers or green cards, they have no choice but to leave since no one wants to stay illegally.
There are parties every Friday and Saturday night in May and June. Marcelo starts his drinking early and by nine o’clock is snoring in his chair. He’s always the first to pass out, leaving Chichi tantalizingly alone. Rosa Esther finds this spectacle of drunkenness distasteful and she returns alone to their apartment as soon as dinner is over. She nods her head in disbelief when her husband says he will be home by midnight. She acts as if she doesn’t know it, but she is convinced that Guillermo has been making love to Chichi since April.
But she is wrong—it began two months earlier . . .
At the beginning of February, Chichi and Marcelo had decided to host a Valentine’s Day party in their ground-floor apartment. All the friends were there, drinking heavily and smoking grass, dancing with their partners. At one point Guillermo went to the bathroom to pee. He didn’t see Chichi sitting on the toilet seat. Closing the door, he finally noticed her and glanced down at her crotch, her thick black bush, and then their eyes locked. Chichi immediately stood up and approached Guillermo, turning the bolt behind him. Her eyes were on fire; she had waited a long time for something like this. And so had he.
He could taste her cigarette breath as she kissed him and put her hands on his jeans. Then she knelt down on the bathroom rug, pulled down his zipper, and put his penis in her mouth. She rubbed his testicles while she consumed him.
Guillermo could hear Jim Morrison singing over and over again: “When the music’s over, turn out the lights . . .” The bathroom door was vibrating. He pulled out of Chichi’s mouth and lifted her up. He thrust himself inside of her and they started making love standing up, tightly clenched. He was trying to hold back his orgasm, but he couldn’t. He was too excited to be inside a woman who truly wanted him. He came as he heard her begin to sing in her poor English: “Before I sink into the big sleep I want to hear, I want to hear the scream of the butterfly . . .”
She clung hard to him. He felt her nails digging into his back through his shirt. He had come, but remained hard, and she used his hardness for her own pleasure. In another couple of minutes she let out a series of soft cries that he tried to cover up with both his hands.
* * *
This was the first of many trysts. In fact, Guillermo visits Chichi every Tuesday and Thursday morning when Marcelo’s Shelley and Wordsworth course meets. After class, Marcelo always goes straight to Butler Library to study. They make love without protection and by May she is pregnant. Chichi doesn’t care who the father is—what she wants most from life right now is a child. And Marcelo, ignorant of everything, is pleased t
o have an heir.
What neither Chichi nor Rosa Esther realize is that Guillermo and Mercedes are also having a romance. Mario, the sympathetic bachelor, has given each a spare set of keys to his apartment so they can get together every Friday morning.
If making love to Chichi is animalistic, lovemaking with Mercedes is slow and romantic, an instrumental duet, though she insists he use a condom. Mercedes feels she could fall in love with Guillermo and his dark features, and this makes their liaison every bit more dangerous. She tells him not to worry, but he does. They could fall in love and wreck two marriages.
Each week Guillermo’s balancing act becomes more complicated. He is certain that one of his three women will discover the truth. Still, he is cautious in his planning and movements and, surprisingly, feels no guilt pleasuring three women; well, two. He has discovered the true power of sex, and wants to explore it even more.
But the dalliances soon come to an end. The military is overthrown in Argentina after the Falkland Islands debacle and Mercedes and Carlitos are invited to return to Buenos Aires immediately and form part of the new Alfonsín government. Marcelo and Chichi are returning to Chile because Marcelo has been offered a professorship in English literature at Valparaíso University, a position he can’t decline. Neither Mercedes nor Chichi speak with Guillermo about leaving Rosa Esther.
Rosa Esther announces proudly to her husband and to the group of friends in June that she will be giving birth in late November. She has known since March. Guillermo is taken aback by this public announcement, and he wonders if she held back telling him because she was suspicious about his affairs. He doesn’t question her in private, but he is inwardly pleased to know that his wife will have something to distract her from his affairs when they return to Guatemala. This is all having a child means to him right now.
* * *
It looks as if the group will part as friends—until the moment the shit hits the fan. Chichi and Marcelo have passed herpes back and forth for years, and during a flare-up, she passes it on to Guillermo, who passes it on to both Mercedes and Rosa Esther. He has no option but to confess his infidelities.
All three couples are prescribed antiviral medication that will curb the symptoms, though it will never eradicate the disease. Chichi and Marcelo don’t really care; Carlitos doesn’t want to hear the details, but is willing to forgive his wife if she declares (which she does) that she will stay faithful to him from now on. Guillermo tries to fabricate excuses for his behavior: how the death of his parents unhinged him; how the women seduced him; how it all happened because no one wants to go home. But Rosa Esther fumes. She is unwilling to forgive Guillermo for putting their baby in jeopardy. She feels more betrayed than heartbroken, and will punish him for this sin of biblical proportions. She also fears the medication will damage their baby.
Guillermo admires himself for confessing to being the culprit, and actually convinces himself that he is a victim of circumstances, and of seduction by their female friends.
The last party toward the end of June is unusually quiet and tense. It is filled with maudlin speeches, pointed accusations, and empty promises to keep in touch. There’s a sense that an era has ended.
The timing of their departures could not be more perfect.
chapter six
all unhappy families are unhappy each in their own way
Back in Guatemala following graduation and his parents’ deaths, Guillermo uses his inheritance to buy a house with a spacious backyard in Vista Hermosa not far from the campus of the Universidad del Valle. Their house is at the top of a hill, on a corner, and it has views of the lights of Guatemala City off in the distance. It is palatial.
Without discussing it, Guillermo and Rosa Esther settle into the typical married life of well-to-do Guatemalans: they buy matching Oldsmobiles, begin amassing objects to fill their home and their lives. While there is pleasure in populating one’s house with furniture, sophisticated electronic systems, landscape paintings, and Mayan artifacts, this is accompanied by the increasing emptiness in lives obsessed with accoutrements.
Soon they will be going on weekend trips to Antigua and Panajachel and of course doting on their child when it arrives. He will take up golf or tennis like the majority of the men of his generation. She could begin studying French now that she has mastered English, or go to exercise classes, but instead abandons her shift to Catholicism and becomes more deeply involved in the Union Church.
Rosa Esther bonds with the religiously conservative but socially liberal parishioners. They believe that their maids and groundskeepers should be treated with utmost enlightenment, having them work no more than fifty hours per week and providing them housing in which only two people occupy a room. The hired help is almost like family, and the parishioners often organize fundraising events to secure money for special operations to repair cleft palates and other deformities in their workers’ families.
They are preparing to be saved on Judgment Day.
* * *
Following the rush to marry and recalling the wonderful and inspiring chaos that was New York, it becomes clear to Guillermo that he and Rosa Esther have little in common. They are unsuited in temperament and philosophy. He wants to socialize with work associates and she prefers to spend time only with her sister and grandmother, and eventually with her newborn child. He loves to eat fresh papaya with fried eggs for breakfast, and she prefers yogurt and granola. They cannot even agree on the kind of coffee to have in the morning.
Guillermo was raised by a Catholic mother and a half-Jewish father, and though he had an extremely strong moral base as a child, he has no real interest in religion. Rosa Esther, on the other hand, thrives on the activities of the Union Church and insists that they build a truly Christian home. Their sexual drives were dissimilar from the start, but after his various infidelities, there is a more apparent religious undercurrent to hers. She now thinks of sex solely as a means for procreation and is dismissive of it as a release of tension or for recreation. At best it becomes a biweekly, sometimes monthly indulgence, performed more out of obligation than passion.
Guillermo becomes sentimental when he recalls his graduate studies in the States, what he refers to as “the period of intimacy, of shared experiences.” He often wonders if they had been alone, without friends and without the distraction of a magical New York City that glittered in their hearts and in their imaginations, if their relationship would have begun to unwind earlier. He knows that his heart or at least his penis is bursting with passion, and he finds it difficult to discount his trysts with Chichi and Mercedes as isolated events.
No, they were clearly more than that, and formed the foundation of his new morality—something he cannot discuss with his wife. As he goes about building his reputation as a financial lawyer with some success—first working for the Banco de Guatemala and then for Credit Suisse—he discovers that he can atone for his betrayals by pledging allegiance to the God of Onanism: masturbation, in lieu of sex, brings him pleasure.
After Rosa Esther gives birth to their first child, Ilán, and two years later to their daughter Andrea, she withdraws from the physical realm, and he can see the window of their life as a unit closing down. He fondly remembers cavorting with Chichi on Tuesdays and Thursday mornings, and his Friday soirees with Mercedes. He sees these moments as the highlights of his married life. Spilling his seed two or three times a day on a toilet seat is hardly a sin.
But giving his wife herpes certainly was.
Rosa Esther falls deeper and deeper into family and church. It is clear to both Guillermo and Rosa Esther that they have lost the thread from her heart to his, and vice versa. Since he feels wounded by and sometimes furious at her judgment, he never wants to bring the subject up. And for her own reasons, neither does she.
* * *
One night they are lying in bed reading. Guillermo is unable to concentrate. The buzzing of his lamp and the occasional drip of water from the bathroom faucet is distracting him.
&nb
sp; “Something has come between us,” he says, putting down the newspaper.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Guillermo.” Rosa Esther is wearing glasses and reading a book in English about Pilates.
“We used to want to make love,” he says, surprised at his directness. He is aware of his erection.
“Never,” she answers icily, not taking the eyes off the page. “Well, maybe before you started seducing your best friends’ wives.”
He rolls over to her side of the bed, pulls off her glasses, and attempts to straddle her.
“What are you doing?” she gasps, trying to push him off. “Have you gone mad?”
“Look at me!”
She does. Her eyes bulge, adding color to her creamy white face. He is much stronger, so she stops resisting him.
He relaxes his grip and in that moment she hits him hard on the forehead with the edge of her book. It is a sharp momentary pain and he is more hurt by the fact that she has struck him than by the bruise. While he is holding his head, she bounces him off her and stands up.
“If you ever touch me like that again, without my permission, I will leave you and take both of the children. Do you understand?”
He doesn’t know what he has done wrong and is too frustrated to respond. He is starting to hate Rosa Esther and because he sees the children as extensions of her, he is beginning to resent them as well.
