by David Unger
* * *
While Guillermo and Rosa Esther were living in New York, Juancho was getting his BS in international banking from Universidad Marroquín. Afterward he landed a job as a financial advisor for the Taiwan Cooperative Bank, which was looking to develop financial opportunities in Guatemala, one of the few countries in the world with which Taiwan had diplomatic ties. In short order he married Frida, a pharmacist with a thriving practice near the Campo de Marte. They bought a house in Vista Hermosa, not far from where his parents lived. He soon found his banking work boring and his employers inscrutable, so he decided to become a loan officer for the Banurbano of Guatemala—in this way, he could help small local businesses grow. But this job as well was not to his liking. His superiors forced him to deny loans to young entrepreneurs that he would have preferred to approve. He was also told to funnel tens of thousands of quetzales to businesses he suspected were shell companies, certainly not in need of capital. He had no one to complain to, and he felt that basic decisions were being made for him. He was simply being asked to execute them.
But Juancho is no liberal hero. He does not believe in social welfare, or that the government should be doing anything to correct the injustices in society. In this, his thoughts mirror Guillermo’s, but his ideas are expressed with much less hostility. At best, government should be a referee to make sure the capitalist system functions properly, and that no single corporation can establish a monopoly. Taxes should be kept at a minimum, just high enough to fund the necessary departments of government: the military, the police, fire, sanitation, airport management, earthquake relief. The private sector should be in charge of everything else, even schools and parks. He will never vote for anyone who is overly progressive, criticizes the military, or attacks right-wing governments. Like most Guatemalans, he does not want to dirty his hands to ensure the enforcement of his ideas. He believes that honesty and transparency in government are important. No one should be asked to do things that are counter to the principals of God and country, and certainly not under-the-table work. He is a decent Guatemalan who believes that corruption is a worm that can pervade all walks of life and needs to be extracted. But he is not a fighter or whistle-blower.
So just as Guillermo and Rosa Esther are returning from New York, Juancho decides on a change of life. He purchases a hectare of land on a sloping plateau in San Lucas Sacatepéquez, about twenty-five kilometers from Guatemala City. Unlike Guillermo, he does not want to become a gentleman or corporate farmer. He wants nothing to do with corruption and illegal activities. He wants to work the earth with his own hands and have it produce bounty.
Juancho buys two hundred three-year-old avocado saplings and hires Marco Zamudio, an agronomist and botanist, to help him start an avocado farm. The soil in San Lucas is rich, the weather temperate. He and Marco embark on an ambitious grafting program, which allows them to reduce the period of juvenile growth and to spur the development of the fruit in half the normal time. So within two years, the saplings will begin to bear fruit. By the fifth year, if all goes as planned, the land will be producing ten tons of avocados—sweet and fresh and untainted—which Juancho hopes to sell to supermarkets and high-end restaurants in Guatemala City and Antigua, and possibly even export to the United States.
But one Wednesday Juancho is driving his truck from his house to the farm in San Lucas. Suddenly he loses control of the pickup, goes off the road, bounces over a gutter that is more like a trench, and slams right into a sprawling rubber tree on the side of the road. His head collides with the steering wheel. Juancho has apparently suffered a heart attack, and is dead on impact. The heart attack must have been strong, sudden, and severe. He is only twenty-six years old.
Guillermo is among the first to get a call from Frida. He is in anguish over his friend’s death. It’s not only the loss of friendship, which has been sidelined, but the awareness of how quickly things can change. Life is ephemeral, like cigarette ash or pollen carried off by a gust of wind, leaving nothing behind. He is troubled by the suddenness of Juancho’s death. He doesn’t want to appear paranoid, but he does wonder if his friend really had a heart attack or if he was killed as punishment for being unwilling to do something illegal at his job at the Banurbano.
A wake is held in the Funerales Reforma a few blocks north of Calle Montufar in Zone 9 on the following Saturday. The casket is left open for viewing, but something has gone wrong with the embalmment of the body. Noses start twitching and hands cover faces. An odd odor floats in the room, like a cloud. People cough and put handkerchiefs to their mouths. The stench is awful.
Since everyone is too polite to say anything, it is a ghastly wake. And while Juancho’s two-year-old son is running around, as if his father’s casket were a big wooden mansion atop a table, Frida is beside herself in grief. She knows something has gone wrong with the embalming but she is unwilling to address the problem, for fear of creating a disturbance. She is more concerned with when the priest will arrive to direct the services, since he is an old family friend traveling all the way from San Salvador. It is a long trip that can become longer with mountain mud slides.
Rosa Esther accompanies Guillermo to the wake, but she provides him little solace. She finds the viewing macabre, especially with the peculiar mixture of decomposing flesh and formaldehyde in the air. She is grateful that she never took the steps to convert to Catholicism. She is suddenly repelled by the pomp, by the eerie rituals, and yearns for the simplicity of the Union Church. At one point, her hand grazes Guillermo’s shoulders. It is a tender touch. For an instant they look at one another the way they did when they first met. He reaches out to grab her hand, but she merely nods and walks back to her seat.
When the priest finally arrives a half hour later, there’s a collective sigh of relief. Instead of wearing a full-length black cassock, he is dressed in dark pants and a black shirt with a white collar. A simple red cross dangles from his neck. He is young, even handsome, and looks something like a beatnik. He touches his nose nervously and confers with the director of the funeral home. The mourners observe how he keeps nodding his head.
He immediately approaches the coffin and closes it, draping the top with a small sacramental cloth he has brought with him, which depicts an embroidered, mostly naked red-and-blue Christ lying on a yellow mattress. He whispers a few prayers under his breath, then asks the attendees if anyone would like to say something.
It is midafternoon, and everyone is tired, hungry, and impatient after the long wait. A few family members say kind, innocuous words amid tears, but there is a sense of futility and hollowness in the air. Words cannot undo the deed. Juancho’s death seems so unnecessary, so premature, so incongruent; no kidnapping, no mugging, no nothing to awaken political speculation or thoughts of bribery. A death without the violence that now characterizes daily life in Guatemala seems too simple to get worked up about.
When the speeches end Juancho’s mother asks the priest if he can deliver her son his last rites.The priest grabs her hand and says that extreme unction is only for the gravely ill or the very recently departed, before the soul goes to heaven. He assumes that Juancho was a good Catholic and there is no need to question whether he was penitent for his sins or not. He is already in a state of grace.
Juancho’s mother is distraught and a bit confused by the priest’s trenchant comments. She leans more heavily on her daughter-in-law’s shoulder, using it mostly as a crutch.
The priest finally realizes he must say something meaningful and kind to comfort the attendees. He calls the mourners around the coffin and initiates the Prayer for the Dead.
The weeping of the crowd is widespread and audible.
* * *
By the time the mourners head for the Cementerio General for the burial it is nearly three o’clock. The clouds are low, almost touching the tops of the trees. It is cold and raining.
If the mood was undeniably dreary at the Funerales Reforma, it is downright grim at the cemetery. Fully three-quarters of the mo
urners have decided to opt for lunch and skip the burial, and there are barely a dozen people, all under umbrellas, to witness Juancho’s descent into the ground.
On the drive home Guillermo is utterly depressed. His parents are gone, he feels lost without his wife’s love and companionship, and now his best friend, who countered his increasingly strong diatribes against the liberal government, is dead.
He finds it increasingly difficult to believe that Juancho had a heart attack while driving. Something or someone else must have been behind his death.
* * *
After nearly five years of living in Vista Hermosa, Guillermo and Rosa Esther decide to give up their house and move to a four-bedroom apartment in the Colonia España, in Zone 14. Crime continues to rise and be more targeted, and he does not want his wife or children to stare down the barrel of a gun held by someone who simply had to scale a brick wall. Their new neighborhood is tranquil—more bubble-like than an Israeli settlement on Jerusalem’s West Bank—and has armed guards at the entrance.
Rosa Esther finally accepts Guillermo’s repeated suggestion to celebrate their eight-year anniversary with a long weekend alone in Panajachel, leaving the children with her sister and ailing grandmother. They stay in a corner suite at the Hotel del Lago with a gorgeous view of Lake Atitlán, and a handful of dormant volcanoes visible from their fifth-floor balcony.
On Saturday morning they walk through the gardens to the hotel’s private beach. The sky is cobalt blue, and there are half a dozen turkey vultures floating high in the sky. The lake water is too cold and murky for Rosa Esther, so she watches from a chaise longue as Guillermo skims the surface of the water, flexing his well-toned arms as he swims in broad strokes.
When he comes out, Rosa Esther stands up and gives him a towel. “I had forgotten that you could swim so well.”
Guillermo smiles, thinking that his wife remembers little about what he’s told her. The swimming has been exhilarating, but he is exhausted, and he is very much aware of how out of shape he is. “When I was in high school, I took swimming classes at the Pomona. Do you remember where that is?” he asks nostalgically.
“Of course. It’s on the same block as Union Church.”
“You might have seen me swimming on days you went to church,” Guillermo says, wrapping the towel around himself and lying down on his chaise longue next to her.
“I don’t think I would have noticed,” she says.
It is a funny comment, and Guillermo has to check his laughter. He wants to tell her that when he met her she was much more open to things than she is now. Open to him. But he already feels that too much water has gone under that bridge. Had she ever been in love with his virility, or was he simply a quick ticket out of becoming her grandmother’s lifelong companion?
Still, he is willing to try to recover what they had in the weeks after they met at Pecos Bill, if only to feel less lonely and to foster a sentimental connection in her.
Later, in the afternoon, he asks Rosa Esther where she would like to dine. She tells him that she’s tired and would prefer to eat at a table overlooking the lake in the hotel dining room. He says that it would probably be too cold and he meekly suggests they order dinner to their suite and have a table set at the edge of the balcony. They can have the fireplace lit. The swimming, the fresh air, has invigorated Guillermo. He wants to see if there’s anything he might do to recapture the passion they once felt for one another.
Surprisingly, she says yes.
He calls the front desk and asks for someone to bring up some wood, light the fireplace in their room, and set up a small table for dinner. He orders a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape, which will cost him more than eight hundred quetzales—a small price to pay to rekindle romance. Guillermo thinks that though he isn’t as captivated by Rosa Esther as he once was, perhaps a couple glasses of wine will animate him to plunge back into her, just as he dove into the cold Lake Atitlán waters.
A hotel porter brings a little round table for them and sets it up near the chimney with a white tablecloth and pewter candlesticks. He even brings a slender vase, with a long-stemmed yellow rose.
At six p.m. a waiter comes up to set the table and open the wine, which they drink while eating crackers and imported Gruyère and chorizo. Guillermo keeps sniffing the wine, which is both bold and full, and he feels a bit drunk after two glasses. Rosa Esther is also drinking, but warily.
They have a lovely dinner, talking mostly about the children. Guillermo mentions the possibility of visiting New York as a family next year for Christmas, and watching the ball drop in Times Square. Rosa Esther says maybe, which is better than no.
When Guillermo has drunk most of the bottle, he calls downstairs for two Hennessys even though his wife says she has had more than enough to drink. He closes the balcony door and tipsily puts more kindling in the fire.
The waiter brings up the cognacs in snifters and removes the dirty dishes. Guillermo gulps his down as if it were water, and feels the heat of the alcohol warming his ears. Then he grabs the other snifter, takes Rosa Esther by the hand, and lifts her from her seat. When he tries to bring her down onto the brown shag rug, she initially shakes her head softly but finally acquiesces.
For several minutes they sit silently, holding their arms around their own legs, watching the flames ignite the new wood in the fireplace. The flames shoot up toward the flue; small branches crackle and spark. Guillermo feels his heart filling with something like love as he begins to sip Rosa Esther’s cognac. She has moved a bit away from him and still has her arms wrapped around her legs, but now her eyes are closed. He leans into her gently and tries placing his lips on her mouth, but he loses his balance and his kiss lands sloppily on her chin.
Startled, she opens her eyes and pushes him away. “What are you doing, Guillermo!” she says rather harshly.
“I’m sorry. You looked so beautiful. I thought you were remembering us—”
“You’re always thinking about yourself. You have no idea what I was thinking about.”
“Why don’t you tell me, then,” he says softly, trying to reach out to his wife. His head is spinning.
“I don’t think you would understand.” She pushes herself up and moves toward the bathroom. “You know that you ruined it in New York with that Chilean whore. Ilán could have been born with herpes.”
He looks down at the rug and says, “Rosa Esther, they were all our friends. We were younger. I was careless.”
“Why?” she asks. “Because you didn’t use a condom with Chichi?”
“I’ve apologized for that.” He gets up to go after her, unsure of what he wants to do, but he upends the glass of cognac at the edge of the rug. He stops to watch the golden liquid dribble across the parquet floor.
“Yes, you did. And then there was Mercedes,” she says, entering the bathroom and slamming the door behind her.
He collapses on the rug, defeated. It seems her religion won’t allow forgiveness.
* * *
When the nightlight is turned off on her side of the bed, Guillermo is surprised to feel Rosa Esther snuggling into him and actually touching his briefs. He is taken aback. They haven’t made love in nearly six months.
He is aware that he is drunk, but he’s cautious because of their previous conversation about Chichi, Mercedes, and herpes. What does she want from me? he asks himself, waiting for her next move.
She touches his briefs again, as if lightly knocking on a door, and lays on the mattress.
His penis hardens in its web of cotton. He lifts her nightgown and moves down the bed. He wants to drink from her. As he puts his mouth on her stomach, she closes her legs and tries to pull him up. He clamps her hand down on her legs as she squirms to get free, but he will not let go of her. He puts his forefinger in his mouth and then pushes it tenderly inside of her. She buckles her legs, throttling them to the side as if he were trying to brand her with a pike, and then suddenly relaxes her body. As he keeps wedging his finger in and around her vulva
he can hear her licking her lips, swallowing, and gasping a word that sounds like his name.
She grinds against his finger, helping him find a more pleasurable spot deep inside of her. When he feels her lips on the side of his face, he lifts his forearm to free her.
Her legs are open wide now, willing him to enter. She pulls down his underwear harshly, bruising his testicles, and with both hands pulls out his finger. He crushes his penis inside her and she arches back. She pulls his buttocks in steady strokes, leaving his hands free to caress her breasts. He pinches her nipples, hard.
Without warning, she lets out a long scream and gulps for air. She has not waited for him. He keeps pressing into her, and she digs her nails into his back as if insisting that he not stop.
When he is about to come, she wriggles an arm under him, grabs his penis, and jerks it out. His semen falls onto the sheets. He’s still feeling it bubbling out of him when she turns over and clutches the pillow on the far side of the bed. Her body is shaking with the aftershocks of her orgasm. She might be crying.
“Rosa Esther, are you okay?”
“Don’t even talk to me,” she answers bitterly, evidently angry at having given in to her pleasure.
* * *
Guillermo is the first to wake up the next morning. He sees Rosa Esther sleeping peacefully with her head on the pillow, her hair spread out behind her.
Guillermo feels sick, like the character from Nausea who one day looks at a tree and only wants to vomit. Instead of feeling pleasure or satisfaction when he awakes, he feels abundant terror. He imagines he will live like this forever, having occasional, meaningless sex with her and finding pleasure with other women. There is a point of accommodation in marriage that is satisfying, almost expected; there is comfort in repetition: the Sunday excursion to a social club and the two o’clock meal; the shrimp cocktails, the baked potatoes, the guacamol, and the cuts of puyaso; the drive home to their bunker-like apartment after playing tennis or softball with the children, who are aligned with her.
