David Unger - The Mastermind

Guillermo and Rosa Esther seem to be a happy couple: he impressed by the beauty of his ice queen and she admiring him for his animalistic looks, if from a distance. They are both proud to be seen with someone so different in appearance, character, and appetite. Is it magic? Perhaps. But they also share a distaste for the ordinary.

Theirs is a love sealed by a contempt for the commonplace.

* * *

There are lots of cheap coffee shops nearby — Tom’s Restaurant, the Mill Luncheonette, and the College Inn — that make cooking almost unnecessary. Guillermo and Rosa Esther eat out almost every night since she — having grown up with maids, cooks, and a very solicitous grandmother in Guatemala City — has never had to learn to cook. For $3.45 they can have a baked chicken dinner, boiled potatoes, and, yes, soggy broccoli, a green salad that edges closer to brown, and colorless pink tomatoes with no taste. Their favorite waitress minds the manor at Tom’s: Betty is severely wrinkled, a taller and more vibrant version of Irma Wasservogel, defying her age with dyed blond hair and tons of rouge and makeup.

“What’ll it be today, baby?” is her mantra as she comes up to their table with a wet cloth in one hand and an order pad in the other. She always passes the cloth over the table, whether it’s clean or dirty, dancing figure eights around the dishes, napkins, and utensils. When you give her the order, she looks at you and smiles, never writing anything down. Her pen never strays from its saddle behind her right ear. She never gets an order wrong and is known to give you an extra chicken leg if she sees you have cleaned your plate. She is greatly admired by all the former students who now live in the neighborhood because it seems that when they protested Columbia’s ownership of Dow Chemical and Halliburton stock back in the sixties, Betty had provided them sanctuary at Tom’s. She also authorized the donation of food to those who had taken over faculty buildings on the Columbia campus. “You’re not going to billy club my babies,” she’d apparently told the riot police, defiantly holding a mop across her body to bar their entrance into the restaurant.

On Thursday nights when Guillermo’s corporate law course ends late, he often goes with his classmates to the Gold Rail near 110th Street, where he orders a well Scotch for $1.25, a beer for seventy-five cents — not Gallo or Cabro, but good enough to do the trick — and the blue-plate special for $3.75. The students debate Reagan’s criticism of big government and his belief that social Darwinism will resolve society’s ills. Reagan is Guillermo’s hero, though in this he is in the minority. He passionately defends Milton Friedman’s theories favoring a free-market economy with minimal government intervention. His classmates argue that government is needed to balance the capitalist urge, but they all agree with Guillermo that the social responsibility of business is to increase profits, and to engage in an open and free competition without deception or fraud. These are the ideas he hopes to bring back to Guatemala.

In the meantime, Old New York still exists. You can get a homemade bagel or a bialy stuffed with white fish for three dollars or a huge corned beef sandwich with a sour kosher pickle for two, and drown it all down with a fifty-cent lime rickey, or an egg cream from the Mill Luncheonette. There are three vegetable stands between 110th and 111th streets where the competition is ferocious. Everyone agrees that the tomatoes are soft and tasteless, the cucumbers pulpy, and the avocadoes usually brown and bruised at all three stands, but at least they are not in cans. The local bodega on 109th Street sells Ducal refried beans from Guatemala, frozen yucca from Costa Rica, and every once in a while huge five-pound bags of papayas from Mexico, for thirty cents a pound.

When Guillermo has some free time, he and Rosa Esther go together to Papyrus and Bookforum, bookstores on Broadway that even have Spanish-language sections. He surveys the law textbooks. She looks for novels written by Latin Americans. Her favorite author is Manuel Puig and she devours his Kiss of the Spider Woman and Betrayed by Rita Hayworth . She has him sign copies of his books when he visits New York and reads from Pubis Angelical at Columbia University’s Miller Theatre. Soon she is reading the latest novels by Cortázar, Vargas Llosa, García Márquez, and even Nelida Piñon, either in Spanish or English. But her favorite novel is Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits , which becomes a best seller in the United States. She identifies strongly with the protagonist Alba, a lonely child who plays make-believe in the basement of her house and is raised by her grandmother. It might as well be her own story.

During their second year in New York, Rosa Esther volunteers as a teacher’s assistant at the Cathedral School of St. John the Divine, even though it is not her church or religion. She likes reading books to the first graders, taking them out to the playground, and looking for the peacocks who strut around the gardens when the weather is nice.

Guillermo and Rosa Esther go see movies on weekends, either at the college student union in Ferris Booth Hall, or at the New Yorker, the Thalia, and the Olympia — dilapidated movie houses on the Upper West Side. They don’t know much about film, and they take this opportunity to see the classic works of De Sica, Rossellini, Godard, Truffaut, Renoir, and Fellini — films that had never been shown in Guatemala. They also enjoy seeing classic American films like Sunset Boulevard, Casablanca , and Citizen Kane , which may have come and gone at the Lux, Fox, and Reforma generations before they were born, but reveal so much about the country in which they now live. Guillermo comes to prefer the new European cinema of Lina Wertmuller, Fassbinder, and Herzog, which he adores for their chaos and wild, irreverent sexuality. Rosa Esther hates them for their lack of moral value. In fact, these European films frighten her, like when Guillermo drinks too much and tries to go down on her, or asks to enter her from behind.

She insists on taking Guillermo to the eleven a.m. Sunday services at the Church of the Ascension on Morningside Drive, because it is small and the Mass more intimate. She begins to wonder if she would be happier becoming a Catholic and joining the Iglesia Yurrita back in Guatemala City because she finds the Union Church service bland and mediocre in comparison. She knows this would not make her grandmother happy. She’ll cross that bridge when she has to, but for now, she consumes the Catholic ritual as if it were forbidden fruit.

Guillermo and Rosa Esther are never bored with one another because there is always something new to do in New York. Besides studying, reading, and teaching, Rosa Esther goes to free concerts at the Manhattan School of Music and the Bloomingdale School of Music. Twice a week she swims laps in the Columbia gym and often attends afternoon lectures at the Union Theological Church. When Guillermo is studying at night, she watches American television— All in the Family, Dallas, The Jeffersons, Diff’rent Strokes, The Cosby Show —to try to understand this strange new country a bit better. Soon she is surprised to admit she knows more about the United States than she does about her own native country.

* * *

Rosa Esther and Guillermo become fast friends with lots of Latin Americans who left their homelands to escape the military juntas establishing dictatorial rule throughout the Americas.

There’s the Chilean poet Marcelo Fontaine (nicknamed El Pucho — the cigarette butt — because his mouth and clothes reek of nicotine and he always has a rash on his face), who is getting his doctorate in comparative literature, and his wife Chichi, who is as intellectual as a washerwoman. They live on the first floor of their building and Marcelo has a side job as a porter, helping the superintendent remove garbage from the elevator well twice a week. They tell heartrending stories about crossing by foot into Bolivia’s desert to escape Pinochet’s secret police, eventually making their way to the United States. Guillermo likes the way Chichi looks at him, with sexy eyes and a pouty mouth that seem to beg him to lend her his penis. He imagines she would know what to do with it.