David Unger - The Mastermind

But Europe does little for him. He awakens each day in a sour mood, and with an erection he sometimes attends to and other times does not. There are too many other boys lying awake in nearby bunks at the hostels where he is staying. He longs for the aerie in his parents’ home.

He feels terribly forlorn. He sees how the other trekkers manage to hook up for a while and travel together, but for some reason he is unable to become part of a group. He is a lone wolf. He realizes that his body language indicates to others that he is unapproachable and not sociable. He thinks back to his month with Perla Cortés and wishes he could find someone like her here in Europe. Someone to wrap his arms around, even if it means allowing her to dictate the terms of sex.

Whenever he feels the need, which is every three or four days, he visits the red-light district of whatever city he’s in. He enjoys the power of money. Sex is cheap and safe in Europe, though in Barcelona he finds dozens of moving black dots in his underwear and feels a horrifying itch. He imagines that he has contracted syphilis and goes to a clinic in the Barrio Gótico suggested by the youth hostel manager. A nurse examines him with gloves and tells him he has crabs. For six nights in a row he has to sleep with a frothy lotion on his crotch, and must desist from having sex. His style is cramped, but now he is a survivor, a kind of war veteran, having come down with crabs.

He develops a unique strategy for each city he visits. While he takes in all the required tourist attractions, he also seeks out one under-the-radar museum or park in order to feel different and unique. In Rome, it’s the Villa Borghese, with its immense grounds and lovely Canova sculptures. In Paris, it’s the Marmottan, which has the huge water lily paintings Monet completed in Giverny near the end of his life. In Florence, the Brancacci Chapel of the Santa Maria del Carmine Church is his choice. Masaccio’s dazzling Expulsion makes Guillermo feel right at home with its depiction of banishment. In Madrid, it’s Goya’s black drawings in the Prado. He sends postcards to Guatemala that he writes while sitting on park benches in front of these museums, to his parents in Vista Hermosa, to his friend Juancho in Tempe, Arizona, and to his sister Michelle, who has decided to pursue a master’s degree in education at San Francisco State.

Guillermo goes to the American Express office religiously in each new city to receive news from home. He hears from his mother that his parents are toying with the idea of moving from Vista Hermosa into a gated community in Los Próceres because of the increasing violence in the country. His sister nervously confesses that she likes women (duh), and has begun to explore her new identity with her Mexican girlfriend Marcela. From his father he hears that the guerrillas are making inroads among the Maya population in the highlands. His good friend Juancho writes that he is so homesick he’s planning to drop out of Arizona State and return to study business at Universidad Marroquín — a new institution opened by Guatemala’s business elite to counter the increasingly radical San Carlos University.

Guillermo feels that Guatemala is changing without him but continues his aimless journey to new cities and museums. He is lonely, and would like nothing more than to go home, but he feels obliged to complete his four-month sojourn.

To conclude his travels he hitchhikes through Southern France and sleeps in seven-dollar-a-night hotels. He has the money, and prefers to avoid the socially inept stays in youth hostels. He visits Avignon, Arles, Saint-Rémy, Les Baux, and Aix-en-Provence, talking to no one but getting a feel for why the Old World is what it is: old. He is charmed by the Roman ruins, sarcophagi, and aqueducts in the south of France. He doesn’t know exactly why, but maybe it’s because they stand in marked contrast to the beauty of the landscape. It’s an unseasonably warm spring, and his nose becomes attuned to the smell of fresh lavender and thyme pushing up through the earth. He sees trees with tulip flowers growing above the crown of leaves.

In these smaller towns and villages of Provence, he has stopped seeking out brothels, because he doesn’t want to contract another case of crabs, or something much worse. He is happy masturbating in his bed, with toilet paper at his side, imagining pulling down Perla’s panties and letting her receive the deposit of his sperm — which traditionally fell on the movie house floor — inside her body.

* * *

In April, as summer warmth spreads into the streets of Paris, Guillermo returns to the home he has known since he was a child. After telling his parents all about his many adventures — but leaving out the sexual ones — he once more becomes a slug in their house, occupying the studio apartment built for him when he was in junior high. It is his castle, his aviary, his lair, where he can listen to Nat King Cole and Andy Williams cassettes, leaf through photography books, sneak up Playboys he bought in an El Portal newsstand, and fondle himself in peace. And this he does with more fury than pleasure.

Finally, after weeks of his son’s slothing, Günter once more climbs the stairs to his room. The man has aged rapidly, making Guillermo wonder if he is sick. He asks the question he is so fond of asking: “What are you going to do with your life, Guillermo?”

“I don’t know, Dad,” the boy replies without any hesitation.

His father glances around at the rumpled clothes in the corners of the room, the stacks of magazines. It takes a big effort, but he says in a high-pitched voice: “I want you to take over La Candelaria. I want to retire.”

Guillermo’s heart sinks. He recognizes that as much as he does not understand what motivates his father, his father does not understand him in the least.

“I want to do something on my own, Dad. Make my own mark. Maybe take up farming.”

This is a new one for Günter. He is almost speechless. “Farming? And do what? Grow cabbage?”

“I was thinking of artichokes,” Guillermo says, remembering how delicious they had tasted in France, the meaty leaves dipped in a warm sauce of butter, basil, and garlic. He has never even seen an artichoke in Guatemala, but he is certain they can grow here. Maybe not in abundance, and certainly never to find a way to his father’s table, but the soil and the climate would be appropriate for developing a large harvest.

“Is this what you got out of three months in Europe?” His father is frowning. The reddish hair on his head is turning gray. “That you want to grow artichokes?”

“I was away for four months.”

His father glares at him, exhausted. “Okay, four. What difference does it make? You go to Paris, London, and Amsterdam and a light goes off in your head that you want to be a farmer and soil your hands?”

“I don’t want to be stuck in an office,” Guillermo says, recalling Carlos and resisting the instinct to joke about a light going off in the head of the son of a lamp store owner. “And I’m not good at selling.”

“What about studying something of value? Instead of you planting artichokes, what about the business of farming? Let somebody else do the heavy work.” He remembers his son’s cockeyed dream to work in an archeological site in the middle of the Guatemalan jungle.

“Agronomy?”

“I don’t know what it’s called, but it puts food on the table: farming, distribution, sales. Anything to avoid seeing you on your hands and knees in the dirt.”

Once in a while the old man has a good idea, Guillermo has to admit. “I wouldn’t mind becoming a rich farmer, Father.”

“This is what you have learned in Europe?” Günter goads. “That you abhor working for a living? You would prefer being a gentleman farmer to taking over a proper business that has been developed by your father?”