David Unger - The Mastermind

The factory workers who eat at the restaurant love the new dishes, the way her rice explodes with taste and the lamb patties are infused with the three C’s — cumin, coriander, and cardamom. She even finds sheets of filo and makes her own baklava.

Months go by and she realizes she’s adjusting well to life in this small town. She feels a sense of accomplishment. For the first time in a while she’s responsible for her own well-being — she’s independent, beholden to no one.

One day she sees an old push-pedal Singer for sale. She buys it and starts sewing place mats and napkins to add character to the restaurant. Customers start asking her to make some custom-made mats for their homes, which she sells to earn a few extra lempiras. She becomes friendly with a woman who sells fabric at the market and Maryam learns how to use patterns to make simple dresses, blouses, and slacks. She tries not to think too much of Guillermo when she’s around other people. His absence hits her as a lump in her throat and she knows she needs to keep functioning. She can’t let her guard down and seem too vulnerable.

She learns how to be friendly but reserved. None of the coquettishness she carried as a second skin in Guatemala is visible here. There’s nothing provocative about her manner or dress. She is absolutely clear about what she needs to do to survive — creating any kind of interest in her or her past would not be smart.

She reads voraciously. It is her escape. On rare occasions she allows herself to fantasize about Guillermo, to pretend they might have a life together one day. She keeps imagining the trip to La Libertad, that she will get off the bus and see him. She can’t go too much further than that — it feels like she is tempting fate to even imagine that day. But sometimes she can’t help herself, and she plays out different scenarios in her head, always hoping he will show up.

She is happy to be alone, away from the demands and strictures of her former life. This allows her to do her work without distraction and to mourn the loss of her father and lover.

* * *

On the bus to San Miguel she remembers how many times she imagined this trip. How May 1 seemed so far away.

And she didn’t account for the teacher’s strike and the bad weather.

What will they do if they somehow manage to meet up? She has changed so much in these months and is not the woman he knew, not the woman who waited for his calls. She can’t go back to that. If they do meet, she imagines he will have changed as well. If it had been the reverse, and she had heard news of Guillermo’s death, she’s not sure she could have convinced herself to come to La Libertad.

* * *

Music is playing as Maryam wakes up on the outskirts of San Miguel. She gets off the bus and goes to the ticket booth to inquire about the bus to La Libertad. It is ten a.m. and her bus has arrived a half hour behind schedule. When she asks for the next one to La Libertad, she’s told it’s leaving at ten thirty but will be making a stop in San Salvador.

“What about an express?”

“It left fifteen minutes ago. There’s another one at eleven.”

She’s furious at herself for her poor planning. She won’t get to La Libertad until well after one. Her father used to say that women are like lint brushes, picking up thoughts and ideas as they sweep across the surface of things, never initiating anything on their own, always distracted.

Maryam has never felt like a lint brush until now. She knows her bus will not reach La Libertad on time. She could not have predicted the teachers’ protests, yet she feels she’s at fault for being late.

* * *

Maryam falls asleep again on the eleven o’clock bus and dreams she’s in a hotel with Guillermo. They are lying on the room’s industrial gray carpet after having made love.

“So what are we going to do?” she says.

He replies cautiously: “We can’t go back to Guatemala. Let’s assume that Samir wasn’t behind the murder of your father and Verónica. Wouldn’t the real assassins try and kill you? Wouldn’t they be afraid you could identify them or their car? They wouldn’t be happy to have us appear a year or two after the explosion holding hands.”

“I could cut my hair, hide my face under a keffiyeh,” Maryam says, lying across his body, covering his mouth with her scarf.

“What about your green eyes? Wouldn’t they give you away?”

Maryam grows reflective, then snaps her fingers. “Come back with me to San Lorenzo! I can’t imagine anyone there caring who we are.”

“What would I do there?”

“Maybe you could become a fisherman!”

“Start fishing at my age?”

“Sure,” she says.

“Like Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea ? Going eighty-four days without catching a fish?”

“You could cut lumber in the forests outside San Lorenzo,” she says, poking his sides.

“Uh uh, I’m not Paul Bunyan. No manual labor for me.”

“What about moving to New York City? You always brag about your Columbia University law degree. It should be worth something, don’t you think?”

He has turned his back to her and she realizes he has a tattoo of a horse on his back. She had never noticed that detail about him.

“And I’ll grow out my hair,” she says. “No one will recognize me. I’ll become a famous dress designer, you’ll see.”

* * *

She wakes up when the bus arrives in La Libertad. It is one thirty. She bounds down the steps and is surrounded by a sea of humanity.

Guillermo thinks that a half hour should be long enough to wait. Still, he decides to linger by the church for another half hour: doesn’t love require patience?

At one in the afternoon he realizes he has wasted his time. He considers taking the next bus back to San Salvador to avoid the crowds who will be arriving soon, now that the rain has stopped and a fiery sun is beating down.

Instead, he decides to walk the few blocks to the ocean. The streets are dirty in La Libertad, paved with discarded paper, plastic, and aluminum. It’s a hideous town with its dry mud, uneven streets, and pockmarked walls half-eaten by sea salt and the merciless sun. Swirls of dust prowl around the unpainted buildings, leaving a brown film on everything.

He reaches the shore. From the broken-concrete parking lot he sees a rickety pier on ten-foot wooden pilings: it’s almost collapsed into a sea pounding the shore with a steady, thudding rhythm. The pier has remained standing for years in an act of pure defiance. Six-foot waves roll in and adventurous surfers to the left of a stone jetty lie flat on their surfboards awaiting the right wave to carry them to the black, volcanic shore. The sun is trying to peek out of the gray sky. All Guillermo can think about is the pain in his chest: yes, he will return to La Libertad in a year, and the year after that, but he already knows he will come back with increasingly lowered expectations.

On the way to the point at which the pier drops into the ocean, he passes food shacks with thatched-palm roofs; he glimpses oyster shells on ice, turtle eggs on sea grass, plates of fish and grilled potatoes, but he has no appetite. He senses he could willingly starve himself to death. This would be his penance.

When he reaches the end of the pier, he stares out at the brown water in a kind of hypnotic trance. The waves come ashore in perfect order, their symmetry astounding. There’s a distance of fifteen feet or so between each crest and the waves break in precise curlicues, in perfect formation, like the flight of seagulls in the lowering sky.

He turns around and walks back to the square. His eyes are open but he sees nothing, as if a curtain of gauze were blocking his vision. In the square, in front of the church, he spots plenty more buses and hundreds of scantily dressed Salvadorans carrying their clothes in small suitcases or plastic bags, straw mats and thin towels rolled under their arms. The noise is deafening. He goes up to the front of the church; its metallic doors are now shut. He knocks insistently. He has no expectation that anyone will let him in.