David Unger - The Mastermind

But is a good night’s sleep enough reason to try to remake your life with a woman you no longer love? He nixes the idea of calling her and doubles down on another shot of rum.

* * *

Guillermo goes to see his accountant one day to see if he can get a better idea of his net worth, to see if he could possibly sell his law practice.

The accountant is not encouraging: he tells him that his firm is worth next to nothing, especially since it has continued to lose clients. Guillermo is incapable of returning phone calls whenever he finds himself in a fit of panic. He confesses to his accountant that he is sure there are people planning his demise, and perhaps even plotting to kill him. He has drafted a new will, which he asks the accountant and his secretary to witness and notarize. It is a simple will that bequeaths his total estate to his children. He wants to have everything squared away, just in case something happens to him.

Guillermo leaves his accountant feeling there’s nothing that can bring him back from the brink. He has become the mastermind of nothing.

Guillermo learns from Rosa Esther that his children, though happy to be living in Mexico, are having problems. Ilán worries he is not masculine enough and is teased by his classmates for not being aggressive or daring. He might be gay. Once when he was around eight and saw a particular boy’s muscular chest, he told his mother that he felt excited, and that he wanted to caress the hair on the boy’s arms. The feelings have continued with other boys. Andrea is treated like a social outcast; she worries that she has an untreatable case of halitosis and that her underarms reek. She wonders why none of the boys seem to like her. Both are having difficulty fitting in with kids who have known each other since nursery school.

But one thing is certain: they do not want to return to Guatemala City.

Guillermo listens to Rosa Esther’s complaints and blames her for their children’s indifference to him. Why did she have to tell them he had fallen in love with another woman, a married woman, a younger, more beautiful woman? A slut, in her words, who worships a god who encourages men to take on multiple wives. As teenagers, Ilán and Andrea think their mother is the most perfect woman on earth, even if she constantly spars with them over their laziness and slovenly habits. They don’t care that Rosa Esther’s once-thin figure, so gorgeous and svelte at Jones Beach in New York, has sagged, nor that the once-cute freckles on her white face have widened so much that they’ve become splotches.

Guillermo is bottled up in mourning and feels a whistling pain flitting constantly through his porous body. He can’t believe Maryam will never come back to him, that she is gone, killed by a slew of bullets before blowing up with her car. It makes no sense, none of it does. Half the time he is drunk, reeking of booze and slurring words that he often only whispers to himself. His eyes are puffy: they look, but do not focus. They are bottomless murky wells. His tongue is a soap pad in his mouth. He has swollen cheeks and constantly itching ears.

One night he takes a flashlight and his gym bag to the roof of his building, climbing up the circular staircase to the upstairs terrace, where the maids hang laundry on poles between the huge gray containers of bottled gas. Guillermo brings a yellow legal pad, parks himself against one of these containers, and starts going through Ibrahim’s papers. Lines referring to interest-free loans and worthless collateral spring up at him. Advances for projects that will never be built assault him, but he is unable to concentrate. Maybe it is the quivering of the light, the shuffling of the wind, the batting of his eyelashes, but Guillermo is not able to form a single cogent thought. And of course he has forgotten to bring a pen or pencil.

He puts everything down and stares up at the sky. There is a high crescent moon and the lightest smattering of stars. He sees a compact trail of smoke off in the distance and wonders if the Pacaya volcano is active once again. He should read the newspapers and find out what’s going on in the world. He seems to remember something about a build-up of troops in Afghanistan, more chaos in Iraq, Daniel Ortega hunkering closer to Hugo Chavez and talking about building a transoceanic canal through Lake Managua with Chinese funding, Putin flexing his muscles in a challenge to Russia’s oil barons.

Why the fuck should he care?

He is looking at a beautiful night sky which could make him cry, but all he can think about is that he has to find someone to pay for Maryam’s death. Miguel keeps insisting that the government was behind the murders, and it is easy for Guillermo to agree. He hates the skinny president, with his horn-rimmed glasses, his mole-infested skin making his face resemble a large conical chocolate chip cookie. He looks like a ghoulish funeral parlor director with his gray suits and white shirts and blue ties, constantly rubbing his hands to express sympathy even as he convinces relatives of the deceased to purchase more expensive coffins. He is a self-proclaimed patriot who is constantly paying tribute to the Guatemalan flag in public while using it as toilet paper at home. Whenever he is filmed sitting at his desk, stroking his hands, he speaks with so much conviction — despite his speech impediment — that Guillermo thinks he might actually believe what he says. With his thin lips and his high, unmanly voice, he is a dead ringer for a chompipe, a turkey, clucking his way through an argument, a man whose discourses are so absurd that only fools would believe them.

Guillermo cannot accept that Guatemalans elected him their president — a hideous wild turkey killing off his enemies each time he gobbles or bats his flightless wings. Miguel has now completely convinced him that the president killed Ibrahim and Maryam. Guillermo is also sure that the president has signed agreements with the leaders of the main drug cartels not to pursue them, as long as they don’t interfere with his looting of the treasury. He can easily imagine the president and his wife hobnobbing with the leading drug dealers in Guatemala, serving them delicious canapés and French champagne. The president is a talented manipulator who hides his backroom dealings perfectly.

Guillermo hates the First Lady even more. He is certain that she models herself in the tradition of Corazon Aquino and Lady Thatcher, a powerful woman who wants the poor to consider her another Mother Teresa. To him she is just a duplicitous chimpanzee: when she smiles and reveals her crooked teeth there is no way the people can believe what she says. Just because she has a social work degree from the Landívar she professes to know how to solve the ills of the country, and thinks that people more skilled than she should follow her lead. She definitely sees herself as another Cristina Fernández de Kirchner; as soon as her husband’s term is over, Guillermo suspects, she too will announce her candidacy for the presidency of Guatepeor o Guatebalas, even though the constitution does not allow the spouses of sitting presidents to run for office. What will she do to accomplish her goals? Divorce her husband, just so that she can become a candidate all on her own? Is she that cold-blooded?

Guillermo’s hatred of her has nothing to do with her being a woman. He admires Michelle Bachalet and Angela Merkel for reaching the presidency of their respective countries on their own, not using their husbands as stepladders to the podium. It is her hypocrisy that rankles him. Guatemala has become Guatemess.

Guillermo prays every day that no one assassinates the president; if that happened, his wife would make a convincing case for being allowed to finish his term. After all, she is one of his most trusted advisors. If someone tries to kill him, his wife would be sure to escape; she might even be behind it. Somehow she would be sitting two rows in back of him at the National Theater, or, at the moment of the assault, in a bathroom stall, rehearsing her inaugural speech. Under no circumstances would she allow herself to die with him.