David Unger - The Mastermind

Unlike him, the Indians have relatives to mourn them, to seek their bones or their corpses, a vestige to bury, proof that they had lived.

Reading the Guatemalan papers proves futile, but it does give him the opportunity to follow the political developments in his country. The president and his wife have managed to dodge all the accusations of money laundering by the dozens of Guatemalans who want to force them out. It appears the president will finish his term to keep the US from gaining leverage by manipulating a premature regime change so it can restrict the sale of weapons. In another year there will be new elections, and it looks as if the right wing will win. The president’s wife is going to divorce her husband. She is willing to sacrifice her marriage to run for the presidency.

Oddly, Guillermo feels no animus toward the president and his wife, as if recording the tape and the bizarre events that followed have cured him of his hatred for them. He is rankled when the Catholic Church expresses its willingness to annul their marriage so she can run for the presidency. There is no more cynical act imaginable, to eliminate a sacred covenant for political expediency. (Guillermo still pays lip service to the sanctity of marriage even though he has betrayed the precepts dozens of times.) More than anger, he pities the president, who clearly does not want the divorce but is incapable of curbing his wife’s single-minded quest for power.

On one Sunday, Guillermo smiles and shakes his head when he reads that the president has named his old buddy Miguel Paredes a special advisor on economic affairs. He has also been tapped to replace Ibrahim Khalil as the president’s envoy on the Banurbano board. This turn of events makes Guillermo laugh aloud — what a skillful chameleon Miguel is.

He wonders if he had been Paredes’s pawn all along. Now the facilitator can freely funnel money to pet projects where his participation is hidden by governmental sanction and layers of deceit. Was his intention to force the resignation of the president only a ruse?

Prensa Libre shows Miguel Paredes and the president holding hands in the air like best friends, astronauts launched together into space, survivors of a rocket explosion after having parachuted successfully back to earth. Has Miguel replaced the First Lady as the presidential confidante now that she is divorcing him?

All this teaches Guillermo that he has made many serious mistakes. His love life has been an utter disaster. There were mistakes of judgment he has to own up to: he was dismissive of his father and his father’s hope to have him take over La Candelaria; he was jealous of those classmates who had the means to go to colleges abroad; he was duplicitous with both his wife and his children; he was obsessed with finding a cursed, manipulative hand behind everything he did not fully comprehend. His understanding of evil has been simpleminded, and he has never seen the whole picture of anything, choosing to totter from crisis to crisis or success to success without ever considering his actions, not even his own sexual desires.

Guatemala is a hopeless disaster, a country sinking deeper and deeper into its own lies and denials. The newspapers are reporting it day after day. With thousands of citizens involved in the drug trade, Guatemala has become a bazaar of graft and payoffs, piled as high as a basket of dates. His expressions of outrage and his tendency to mistrust all governmental agencies failed to change anything. He had come to believe that even loyal friends, excepting Ibrahim, were involved in plots to destroy the country he loved.

Now he knows that his own bile, his unwillingness to believe or trust in colleagues, has also contributed to his country’s malaise. Like Candide, Guillermo believes he should “cultivate his own garden” in this life. This would be the best of all possible worlds, since so many powers-that-be work day and night to control how things develop. He is no match for them. No honest people are a match for them.

Living in San Salvador, he is learning that he can simply apply his skills to advise and counsel others without investing his own ego in anything. He can apply his own capabilities and draw pleasure in his own accomplishments, like helping an entrepreneur open a legitimate business. There is no need to act courageously, to see himself as purer than others, to feel outrage when things don’t go his way. He wants to live and to let live instead of trying to create a world in his own image.

And the odd thing is that years earlier the mere thought of being in El Salvador would have made him feel imprisoned, since his freedom of movement would have been restricted. Instead he feels freer in exile than he ever did in his life of relative freedom in Guatemala. This gives Guillermo a kind of peace of mind that he hasn’t experienced since he lived across the street from the Symposium restaurant in New York. He is now controlled by the simple desire to do what he knows he has to do: work, listen, and advise. And endure his present condition with something like gratitude.

The fact that he has given up drinking, except for the occasional Suprema, has helped clear his mind for the first time in twenty years. The clouds have dissipated and he can finally see the occasional ray of sunlight.

And there is something else: he actually likes San Salvador, even more than Guatemala City. It hurts him to say it but it’s true. While Guatemala prides itself on being the beautiful queen of Central America, its smugness is a bit dated, like that of an English dowager. While many Guatemalans will admit that civil society has temporarily gone awry in their homeland, they will also say it’s a gorgeous place and that it’s only a matter of time before their country assumes its rightful place as a Latin American leader.

El Salvador, on the other hand, is a crazy, chaotic country, much too violent and polluted to have any such pretensions. Santana wrote a song called “Blues for Salvador” in 1987. It is a tragic, five-minute electric-guitar riff with absolutely no lyrics. The country lacks Guatemala City’s broad boulevards and faux French look, and its glorious, eternal-spring climate. But its citizens are humble, and real. Everyone is trying to survive the best they can with no airs of entitlement. Salvadorans are open, humorous, self-deprecating. The civil war they have endured has affected them each personally, with bombardments, killings in their own backyards, the horrific raining down of bombs and explosives, the extensive loss of life. No one has survived unscathed.

In Guatemala City, the armed conflict was abstract because it mostly took place in a countryside only the Indians thought to inhabit. Here in San Salvador, the craterous wounds of the conflict are visible and palpable, and this makes the citizens more honest, unwilling to hide behind any sort of delusion or distortion.

And then there is the weather, the torrid heat, which makes everyone respond fairly directly, not like in Guatemala, where reality is hidden under sweaters, jackets, or layers of cloth. The lava-like heat in San Salvador strikes everything: Guillermo swears that the walls sweat as much as the plants.

There is a plain, if brutal honesty in El Salvador which Guillermo never encountered in his homeland.

And so his life is not the life he imagined, but for the first time in a while, he can call this life his own. It is a prescribed picture — office, furnished apartment, mercado, whorehouse, library, greasy comedores, café de olla, and pupusas.

How long it will last is anybody’s guess.

Miguel Paredes had been eating a croissant and sipping a cappuccino at the Café Barista just below his Fontabella shop when he got a call around nine in the morning announcing, “Goal.” It was as simple as that, and it told Miguel that the mission was accomplished and Guillermo was dead. For the moment there was nothing to do but wait and let the wheels of the press do their work. There would be plenty of time to plan his response to the murder and figure out the right moment to release the tape incriminating the president. He could hardly wait to see the owl-faced leader’s reaction.