David Unger - The Mastermind

To his father, the purchase of a chandelier for a living room or a lamp for a bedroom, a dining room, or a den is a major decision, like the buying of a sofa, end tables, a desk, a refrigerator, or even a car. Customer need has to be met so there will never be a question of returning the lamp within seven days for a full refund , which of course spells disaster, since the lamp cannot be sold as new.

His father refuses to initiate a no-return policy. He is the epitome of the ethical small businessman and he works for the purpose of servicing his customers honestly and efficiently and making them feel satisfied.

Though this is an admirable quality, Guillermo doesn’t want to spend his own life as a lamp salesman. It is too demeaning.

* * *

Günter Rosensweig arrived in Guatemala penniless in the early fifties from Germany. He had a drop or two of Jewish blood — not much — though its lack of traceability despite his last name had allowed his own father to maintain a bookkeeping business in Frankfurt during the war, while many of his Jewish associates were hauled off to concentration camps. It helped that there was a renowned Count Rosensweig living in a sprawling castle in Ardsberg who famously declared to the press that “the best Jew is the dead Jew.” This Count Rosensweig adage was quoted broadly among other Germans.

It saved his father and mother.

Günter had avoided army service because he was asthmatic and had a heart murmur. The postwar years in Germany were difficult and unruly, and he had no reason to stay and help his countrymen rebuild. His parents were both dead, he had no siblings, and he was driven by the desire to emigrate to a new continent, away from the chaos of Europe.

Pictures reveal that Günter had been taller once, and passably handsome. This is the man Guillermo’s mother Lillian, a dark-haired beauty from Cobán, must have met. Her own Romanian father had been a cardamom grower and her mother a Rabinal Maya. Lillian was a few inches taller than her husband, and had an attractive face with chestnut eyes that, while not clever, were certainly seductive. How they ever got together was always a mystery to Guillermo, who felt that someone had erroneously mixed together pieces of two different puzzles, say a weasel with a jaguarondi. Guillermo resembled his mother. People said that he had been spontaneously generated from Lillian, without any of his father’s genetic traits. His sister Michelle had the round face and stringy reddish hair of their father. She would never be attractive, everyone said so, but with his dark brooding eyes, Guillermo would break hearts.

Günter was twenty-three when he began working in Abraham Sachs’s lamp store on Seventh Avenue and soon became his associate. Two years later, after Günter had married Lillian, Abraham died of a cerebral hemorrhage when a fifty-pound lamp landed on his head. With no heirs, Günter inherited the lamp store. A true godsend.

* * *

But godsends don’t necessarily extend to the second generation. When Guillermo’s application to take part in a dig is rejected, he has no choice but to stay on with his father, even if he considers the lamp store a penitentiary.

As soon as he starts working there, Guillermo begins making up all kinds of excuses not to drive in with his father at eight thirty in the morning. I couldn’t fall asleep last night, my head aches. He takes the bus on his own downtown and arrives around ten, just in time to go out to El Cafetal for coffee and donuts.

Günter does not scold his son. Moreover, he is oblivious to his suffering. After six weeks of working, or rather not working, Guillermo confesses his misery.

“The store is killing me, Pop. Working with Carlos is giving me lung cancer.”

Günter Rosensweig is not completely humorless. “At least you don’t have to buy cigarettes to smoke them.”

“Very funny.”

“What would you like to do instead, son? What about coming downstairs and helping me with sales?”

Guillermo frowns. If working with Carlos is life imprisonment without parole, then working with his father and his overweight, poorly dressed, forty-five-year-old employees in black scuffed shoes is a death sentence. They all wear paisley aprons and rely on Anibal to lower lamps for the customers with his trident from the garish helter-skelter night sky. And he would have to hear his father’s sales pitches, which have always embarrassed him. He would also have to wear a blue apron every day. What if one of his friends’ parents — or worse, one of his former schoolmates — were to see him dressed like this?

La Candelaria is the only lighting store left in downtown Guatemala City. Zone 1 is becoming increasingly dangerous, less trafficked, and more derelict as the months go by. Maybe the 1976 earthquake, when hundreds of the old colonial buildings simply collapsed, had been the first nail in its coffin. By 1979, when Guillermo is eighteen, La Candelaria’s business has already begun to suffer from stores in the malls outside of the city center that not only offer lamps and small electronics, but also feature nearby cafés, restaurants, and boutiques in a more attractive setting with plenty of parking. Guillermo tells his father that he should open another store in Zone 9 or 14, but he swats away the idea: “People will always come downtown to shop.”

The noise, the smoke, the heat, the traffic is increasingly horrific. The once elegant downtown streets have become a dumping ground for dozens of improvised stands that front the shuttered businesses and crowd out pedestrians.

Günter declares: “I think you’ll be happier working downstairs with me.”

Guillermo’s eyes well up with tears. What is he doing in Guatemala? All his friends are gone, and he is given a choice between sucking in stale cigarette smoke upstairs hidden from view, or working the floor in plain sight, where the parent of any of his friends might see him. “I can’t do this. It’ll kill me.”

His father doesn’t know how to react. While he is upset that Guillermo doesn’t want to work alongside him, his son’s misery breaks him. “What about doing deliveries?”

Guillermo wipes a tear away from his eyes, smiles weakly.

So throughout the early fall, Guillermo drives a battered Volkswagen van and delivers lamps and chandeliers to private homes. Sometimes he stops in the Zona Viva to grab a coffee or a Gallo beer at a café. He misses Juancho terribly. Driving around, he at least sees the sunlight and pine trees, people and clouds.

But he also sees how Guatemala City is increasingly populated by poor Indians, clogging the streets and making driving dangerous. He blames the government for not rounding them up and placing them in work camps, and for having allowed the guerrillas to control the highlands in the first place.

He is falling into a selfish depression with no sympathy for anyone but himself. The worst part of driving the van is making deliveries to the homes of friends who are off at college. He prays that he can hand the boxes to a maid or a houseman, but every once in a while he bumps into a parent and has to experience his humiliation completely. .

By December his parents are distraught. Guillermo can’t be a van driver for the rest of his life. Or can he?

They decide to give him a generous gift: enough money to tour the major capitals of Europe for the next four months. It won’t be in style, but he’ll be in a new environment. And he will be on his own.

Guillermo hopes that the experience of walking the broad avenues of Paris and Madrid, visiting the great museums of Rome and London, and standing atop the dikes in Holland will somehow illuminate the course his life should take. He believes that, after seeing Velasquez’s Las Meninas or Michelangelo’s Moses— or even visiting the Heineken brewery in Amsterdam — he will wake up one sunny morning and see his future life flash before him.