David Unger - The Mastermind

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.

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.

“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.

* * *

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.