David Unger - The Mastermind

In the morning there’s no blood on the sheets. He is certain Rosa Esther is a virgin, and the lack of blood surprises him, but not enough to question her. He has heard of situations in which riding a horse or using a dildo breaks the hymen, so he feels no need to embarrass her or make an issue of it.

He has a strange dream around daybreak on the first night of their honeymoon at Casa Santo Domingo in Antigua. He sees himself lying in an enormous nuptial bed with Rosa Esther. The mattress and box spring are on the street in front of the Plazuela España, and cars are whizzing by. He assumes they are about to make love but he isn’t able to get an erection — he feels no sexual desire. He knows she is naked under the sheets; he can see her legs spread apart. People are streaming by. He asks her to help him bring the mattress and box spring upstairs where they can have some privacy. She shakes her head and gets up, telling him that this is his duty, not hers. He is a bit taken aback, but decides to comply, and carries the bed alone upstairs.

After dinner on the second night of their honeymoon, Guillermo is overcome with such desire for her that as soon as they return to their room, he rips off her clothes. He is so hungry for her. He throws her down on the queen-size mattress under the large cross overlooking the bed, and tries to go down on her, to taste her sweetness. But as soon as his mouth touches her, she pushes his head away like a joy stick and brings his mouth up against the crook of her neck.

Guillermo relents. He has slept with mostly loose women whom he never had the desire to go down on, where hundreds of men had released their sperm. With Rosa Esther it is different, and he knows in time he will be back there and she will permit him to taste her.

To an outsider, sex between them might appear perfunctory. Yet Guillermo is seduced by her desire to always be below him, to allow him to thrust into her — to violate her purity — to push into her as hard as he can. She always lets out quiet yelps or sobs seconds before he ejaculates. It is hard, carnal sex that lasts no more than a few minutes.

Guillermo is sometimes puzzled because he cannot tell if she is achieving an orgasm or simply tightening her vaginal muscles, urging him to finish quickly. The act is done and consecrated. He attributes her lack of adventurousness to her sense of duty, as if it has all gone according to plan, her plan. He doesn’t attempt to improvise, assuming there is nothing she expects from making love but procreation.

And yet he later discovers that she uses a diaphragm. She does not want to get pregnant, not now anyway, or perhaps not until they return from the States. But this causes him to question her actions: is his wife a kind of dominatrix who doesn’t want to cede control to him? To anyone?

It’s hot, humid, and disgusting on the August day they arrive at Kennedy Airport. Guillermo and Rosa Esther are committed to making the two years in New York City happy ones. Through Columbia University’s housing office, they rent a one-bedroom apartment on the sixth floor of 566 West 113th Street, between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue, next door to the Symposium, a little Greek restaurant painted a light lapis lazuli. When there is some kind of special occasion to celebrate, like the completion of an exam or paper, they go downstairs and eat moussaka, okra, taramosalata, lamb flank, and octopus on lacquered wooden tables that seem to have been removed from an old sailing ship. The food is good if unspectacular, and the retsina, though a bit earthy and tasting of fern, becomes their passion.

Their neighbors are mostly graduate students, many of them from Latin America or Asia who, like Guillermo and Rosa Esther, are happy not to be in their homelands. In time they learn that the problems in Guatemala pale against those in Indonesia, Lebanon, Argentina, and Uganda, and that none of their fellow students want to leave New York, no matter how crime- and poverty-infested it is. New York is a very dangerous city, but Columbia manages to make the Morningside Heights neighborhood a kind of oasis of calm. The biggest nuisance is the woman who wears a plastic flower pot on her head and aggressively sings, “ I’m gonna live forever,” from Fame , at passersby on Broadway.

It doesn’t matter that most of the windows of their apartment face walls, and ivies and philodendrons are the only plants that thrive in the dim light. They live with unpainted furniture from the Gothic Store, bookcases that are wobbly hand-me-downs, and a kitchen table with chairs that were probably rescued from a nursing home.

Their closest neighbors are the Wasservogels, an old Jewish couple living in a tiny but immaculate studio adjoining their apartment who invite them for tea and cookies on the day after they arrive. They are childless Holocaust survivors, with numbered tattoos on their forearms, and their apartment smells the way the elderly often smell: a combination of talcum powder and artificial air fresheners. A week after their arrival, Herbert, a former philosophy professor, is hospitalized with a severe stroke. His wife Irma, who resembles an egret with her elongated neck and white skin, dutifully visits him every morning at St. Luke’s Hospital and stays until seven at night, though there is little she can do. The stroke has paralyzed him, and he is fed through a plastic tube. He dies a week later.

Irma is devastated. If she were a pessimist before Herbert’s death, she now epitomizes gloom and doom. His passing is only the latest episode in a life that began happily in Vienna but was almost lost in the Sobibór concentration camp, where she and Herbert were among the few survivors, and has ended in a solitary studio prison in New York.

While Guillermo goes through orientation at Columbia, Rosa Esther helps Irma by doing the shopping for her. Irma lasts another month before she dies of grief and is replaced by a fat nurse who works twelve-hour shifts at St. Luke’s, and then sleeps.

The loneliness of some New Yorkers barely registers with Guillermo who has never been happier. He is relieved to be away from his father and his decrepit store, his complaining mother, and the small-mindedness of life in an ugly Central American capital. He feels he can breathe without looking over his shoulders, without guilt, without questioning why he is doing what he is doing. He has escaped the armed conflict and all the competing claims by the government and the resistance.

He takes his classes at Columbia Law School on 118th Street, atop a plaza spanning Amsterdam Avenue and overlooking the main campus to the west and Harlem to the east. He is impressed by the huge bronze Lipschitz sculpture of a Greek hero wrestling Pegasus that lords over the plaza with its flying hooves, flapping wings, and gnashing teeth. It is the fitting symbol for the anarchy that rules the world. Guillermo understands that as a law graduate he will be among the forces of order who will attempt to tame this chaos. He will be ready when the time comes.

Though Rosa Esther doesn’t want to, Guillermo insists she take classes to improve her English at Columbia’s School of General Studies. The courses are expensive, but her grandmother covers the tuition fees with the idea that one day her granddaughter will run the Sunday school at the Union Church. Rosa Esther is hesitant at first, but soon proves astute at and happy with learning an English that has little to do with the Bible and scripture.

Rosa Esther makes friends with the other female students in her class, and soon gossips about them with Guillermo. She learns a few words of Twi, Ga, and Urdu, enough to greet her classmates from Ghana and Pakistan. She is fascinated by the strange habits and customs from other cultures: the prevalence of polygamy, arranged marriages, even clitoral circumcision. After three weeks, she knows more about life in Nigeria, Korea, and Japan than she does about the many Maya groups in Guatemala.