David Unger - The Mastermind

He argues not only because he has mastered the facts, but because he has worked hard to develop the skill to distort them. He is gifted in foreseeing his fellow students’ counterarguments, like a champion chess player. He can see two steps ahead of them and he revels in the anticipation of his successes, even before achieving them.

By the second year, Guillermo abandons his business studies to pursue law, an occupation better suited to his developing skills as a manipulator. He takes courses in commerce and procedural law at Marroquín, but also graduate seminars in constitutional and tax law at the Landívar. The more knowledge he acquires, the more power and money he is sure to have.

For the first time in his life, Guillermo knows what he wants to do.

* * *

When he was in Paris, Guillermo heard a French diplomat say about his own country, C’est un pays de merde . If France is a shitty country, Guillermo wonders, what would this same man think of Guatemala? At best, C’est un pays trop bizarre .

One Sunday in May, Guillermo and Juancho decide to go to the Aurora Zoo, the scene of so many happy childhood outings. There’s a palpable tension between the boys, as if something remarkable has happened to change their relationship. In reality, nothing has, but Juancho feels scared of his friend now that Guillermo has become so combustible. He doesn’t want to end up feuding. Juancho is pleased to be driving, so that he need not look his friend directly in the eye.

They park close to the zoo’s entrance. The walkway is sprinkled with visitors — grandparents, parents, and children on bicycles or scooters, Indian families, worker families, all kinds of families, except those of the very rich. The jacarandas are in bloom, with their inverted cones of scarlet flowers, and the shrubs are pockmarked with white and red berries. The clouds in the sky are thick and tuberlike: it might rain later that afternoon, but now the sun is shining, not too harshly.

The aroma of cotton candy, sugared nuts, tamales, and mixtas — hot dogs with avocado wrapped in warm tortillas — hangs listlessly in the air.

“I’m hungry,” Guillermo says suddenly, putting out a cigarette. He picked up smoking in Europe as a way to calm his nerves and to feel more self-assured, but never smokes in front of his parents. He doesn’t want them to remind him of how he complained about Carlos’s smoking.

“I could eat something,” Juancho replies hesitantly. He’s thin as bamboo.

They go over to a food cart and wait their turn in line. Guillermo shakes his head when he sees the menu on the side of the cart saying that the mixtas cost thirty-five cents each, and a small Coke twenty. This is all chump change, yet he feels obliged to complain. “We used to pay a nickel for them at Frankfurts near the Cine Capitol. Do you remember?”

Juancho nods. “And the Cokes used to cost six cents.”

“Life — and inflation — in the damn tropics,” Guillermo says.

He orders two mixtas for himself, one for Juancho. He would prefer to drink an atol de elote, but he knows he’d have to leave the zoo. The cart man prepares the mixtas deftly, as if he were a machine, putting the hot dog on a griddle-warmed tortilla and then slathering it with guacamol. He pulls two cans of Coke from his Styrofoam ice chest behind the cart.

Guillermo gives the man two quetzales, and refuses the change.“Keep it — you should invest in a new cart.”

The man nods and is already taking a new order. He has a look on his face as if to say the world is filled with sergeants and few soldiers.

“What do you think?” Guillermo asks his friend. They are sitting on wobbly stools on an elevated table piled high with napkins and soiled wax paper.

“They taste the same to me.”

Guillermo shakes his head, watching half of his second hot dog fall to the sidewalk as the tortilla breaks in half. “The ones at Frankfurts were grilled, not boiled, and the avocado was dolloped on a thick corn tortilla from a big plastic container that sat cold in the icebox. These tortillas are made of wheat flour.”

“Nothing’s what it was,” says Juancho resignedly.

“You are so right,” agrees Guillermo, with more than a hint of disgust in his tone. “Let’s pay a visit to our old friend La Mocosita.”

The elephants are around the corner from the mixta cart. La Mocosita, the erstwhile baby now fully grown, seems unusually agitated. She keeps walking back and forth in her pen, dousing her back with water and trumpeting. Guillermo looks at her and swears there are tears in her eyes. When the two friends try to feed her bananas, she turns her back on them. That’s when they see the broken arrow sticking out of her haunches. Someone has shot her, and a thread of blood issues from a small hole near her tail, trickling down her left leg.

Thousands of gnats can kill an elephant, Günter Rosensweig used to say, so his son would understand that the smallest creatures can accomplish a lot if they decide to work together.

“Can you believe this?” says Juancho, horrified.

“My stupid father. .” Guillermo whispers. He pulls a Pall Mall from his shirt pocket and lights up.

“I don’t understand what your father has to do with anything. We need to find a zookeeper.”

“. . always talking about the importance of people working together when he should have been telling me it only takes one asshole to wreck a beautiful thing. What kind of person would shoot an arrow into an elephant’s backside, in a zoo no less?”

They look frantically for a guard around the neighboring lion and tiger cages. They go to the exhibit where three Galapagos turtles sleep like prehistoric rocks on a grassless stretch near a standing pond with storks and ibises. They finally find a zookeeper sitting on a bench with the Prensa Libre covering his face. He is snoring loudly.

Guillermo pulls the paper off his face.

“What’s going on?” says the keeper, shielding his eyes from the sun, his legs kicking in the air.

“Someone shot an arrow into La Mocosita.”

“Huh.” The zookeeper raises his shoulders. “I’m in charge of the reptiles. You need to find Armando, the keeper of the large mammals.”

He makes no effort to get up. They see why: there’s an empty pint of rum next to him. Furthermore, he packs more pounds than a grown sea cow. He would fall on his face if he tried to stand.

“You drunken piece of shit.”

The keeper flays both his arms in the air as if trying to punch them, but he can’t get himself up. He looks like a fat cartoon character with elephantiasis.

Guillermo and Juancho run over to the monkey house. A zookeeper, wearing green rubber pants and boots, is hosing down the cement floor of the cage while some gibbons hang from rings and growl from above. They tell him what they’ve witnessed.

“Hijos d’puta, huevones. Maricones. Sinvergüenzas. Last week someone cut off the ear of the pygmy rhino. A month ago a red panda was stolen. What’s going on in this country? Do the guerrillas think that torturing animals will overthrow the government?”

Juancho laughs nervously. He understands that Guatemala is going down the tubes, but not for these reasons. Armed conflicts don’t necessarily spark mischief.

“What’s so funny?” the zookeeper asks, closing the faucet. “Don’t you believe me, you skinny piece of shit?”

“Everything is the guerrillas’ fault. The postal worker strike, the pollution from the buses, the eruption of the Pacaya volcano,” Juancho says facetiously.

Guillermo has never seen a guerrilla, but he has bought the line that those trying to overthrow the government are Marxists on the Cuban payroll. He has seen college students with beards and mustaches drinking beer and cursing the military government at Gambrino’s Lunch or at Café Europa behind the Lux. They are skinny boys with ink stains on their shirt pockets and black pants with cuffs rising up to the ends of their white tube socks. They wear Che Guevara glasses, with thick tortoiseshell frames, even if they have twenty-twenty vision. Their shoes are black and badly scuffed. They are not exemplary members of the human race, but they certainly don’t arouse fear. Most of the time they occupy tables near the Paraninfo where they sell copies of Alero —a literary magazine — or try to get their fellow students to sign petitions protesting the latest government assault in Quiché. Guillermo knows that they are not wholly innocent but it’s hard to imagine these scholarly types living in the mountains and jungles, surviving on plant roots and handouts from sympathizers, and planning raids against fully armed military garrisons. The radical core do their recruiting away from the public eye.