David Unger - The Mastermind

Three of their dates end like this.

But on the occasion that Guillermo’s pants become the target of his sperm, he decides he can’t continue seeing Perla. Their sex feels mechanical, and he has difficulty accepting the fact that she’s the one initiating the foreplay. He thinks the man should be in control.

He arrives at his father’s store late, with his shirttail out.

This is the last time they are together.

* * *

“I want you to start working with me, Guillermito.” Nothing would make Günter Rosensweig happier than to have his son become the financial controller of La Candelaria. His daughter fell in love with a woman and is living in San Francisco. “My only son, working alongside his father.”

“Dad, I don’t want to talk about it now.” They are at home. It is a Sunday, a week after Easter. If a resurrection took place the week before, thousands of years ago, Guillermo is unaware of it. Lunch has just ended. His mother is in the kitchen barking instructions at the new maid. He has to escape upstairs, get away, do anything but discuss his future employment with his father. “I have to study for my finals.”

Günter smiles proudly. He imagines his mathematical son overseeing sales, handling the ledgers, while he continues to attend personally to the customers. “You would be a big help to me. You know I like Carlos, but I don’t want him inheriting my business.”

“Pop!” the boy yells desperately. His father has a round, freckled face. His stringy red hair is combed back. His brow is always knitted and his eyes are constantly looking at the world with genuine expectation: the prospect of being liked, of concluding a sale; wanting the world to conform to his desires. There is expectant hunger in his eyes.

“I won’t live forever.” He had a heart attack two years earlier which almost did him in. Guillermo knows that it would kill his father outright if he had to leave his business to Carlos, his most loyal employee. He knows he is being baited, and usually concedes that he will eventually take over the store. For once, however, Guillermo says nothing.

“You never want to talk about it,” Günter presses.

“Not now,” Guillermo says, standing up. He is grateful that he has inherited his mother’s dark Romanian features. If he looked like his father he would end up playing chess every day with a group of bespectacled friends and eating salty pickles. They have nothing in common.

“You don’t want to talk about it now, so when? Give me a date. What about next week after your classes end—”

“That’s way too soon,” the boy says, not turning around. “We can talk about it in the fall. I’ve already made graduation plans with my friends for the summer.”

“What? You want to go to parties and sleep late?” The father shifts in his chair, stands up. “I want you working with me,” he bellows, rooster-like.

This is his father’s fantasy — to have his son at his side, if only for a few months. It’s a scenario enhanced by Guillermo’s failure to apply to college in the fall. In truth, Günter has no illusions that his son will take over the business permanently. Though he has scrimped and saved for years, Günter knows that when he retires, he will sell the store rather than leave it to Carlos. He realizes that it’s impossible to get his son to do anything other than hang out with his friends.

“Go study,” he says crossly, knowing that he and his wife have made a mistake raising their son as they have, pampering him. But Guillermo is already halfway up the steps to the aerie where he lives, where he eats potato chips and daydreams, away from everyone else, hearing nothing.

* * *

When Guillermo finishes high school, graduating in the middle of his class, his father starts in on him again. He expects all the after-school and weekend activities to come to an end and work in the store to begin.

“Pop! Have you forgotten about my graduation trips?”

“What?”

“The trips, the parties! Next week I’m going waterskiing in Likín. Then Rosario has invited us to a weekend barbecue at her family home in San Lucas. And Guillermo—”

“You’re Guillermo!”

“My friend Guillermo Contreras,” the boy says, exasperated with his father who never hears a word he says and doesn’t know the name of a single friend, “has invited the class to go on his yacht and swim and dive in the Río Dulce. And Mario and Nora have planned a spelunking excursion—”

“Spelunking? Speak Spanish!”

“Cave exploration. The caverns outside of Quetzaltenango.”

Guillermo is convinced that his father knows nothing that doesn’t involve either hanging or repairing a lamp. He has never been to Tikal or Quiriguá. He thinks that Cobán and Copán are the same place. When Guillermo mentions working as a volunteer digger with the University of Pennsylvania in September at one of the Mayan archeological sites near Uaxactun, Tikal, or Piedras Negras, his father draws a blank.

“This is what I want to do. All my friends are going to college in August, and I plan to live in a tent in Petén and work with a team.”

“In the jungle? With a shovel in your hands?”

“Yes, we might discover a new pyramid.”

“And what about La Candelaria?”

“This fall, Pop, this fall.”

His father shakes his head. He knows that as soon as September arrives, his son will come up with another excuse. He can’t understand why Guillermo will do anything to avoid working in his lamp store.

* * *

By mid-August the trips are over and Guillermo’s high school friends are preparing to set off to college. He won’t miss all of them, just his best friend Juancho.

And contrary to Günter’s prediction, Guillermo has finally run out of excuses for not working at La Candelaria. Since he studied accounting and business math in high school, it makes sense for him to work alongside Carlos, the bookkeeper, in the glass-partitioned office perched above the sales floor.

Carlos has big droopy ears, mole-like eyes, and breath soured by too many Chesterfield regulars. To escape the smoke clouds, Guillermo constantly skips down the spiral staircase to have cup after cup of coffee at El Cafetal.

“I am so proud that you are here — with me. I could not expect this of your sister.”

There’s nothing Guillermo likes about his father’s store. It’s a long tunnel with hundreds of lamps, some lit and some not, hanging on hooks from the ceiling rafters. There’s no order to the store, and certainly no style. It’s just a tapestry of hanging lights, with a tiny bamboo forest of pole lamps squeezed together at the back near the bathroom. A counter for storing smaller table lamps runs along one length of the store. Anibal, the security guard, walks around like King Neptune with his trident. Actually, it’s a pole with a hook to bring down whatever lamp the customer might want to see up close.

“Selling lamps is an art,” his father says. “It is an art defined by practicality since a lamp has both an aesthetic and a utilitarian function. You will learn about how the shades determine the amount of light filtering into the room. Clients need to know how the switches work and whether they accept bulbs of varying intensities and colors, or just one type of bulb.”

“I know all this, Pop. You’ve been telling me the same thing since I was five.”

His father ignores him; he needs to continue making his speech. “Do they want cheap rubber or cords wrapped in silk? Lamps dangle, sit flat, snake out of corners, hug walls like sconces or torches. They flood, they focus. They suffuse from the top, the bottom, or the sides.”

Guillermo nods his head, but it only encourages his father.

“The shades can be conical, round like pumpkins, bouncy like lanterns. They can be translucent or almost transparent. The customer has to decide.”