by David Unger
After dinner on the second night of their honeymoon, Guillermo is overcome with such desire for her that as soon as they return to their room, he rips off her clothes. He is so hungry for her. He throws her down on the queen-size mattress under the large cross overlooking the bed, and tries to go down on her, to taste her sweetness. But as soon as his mouth touches her, she pushes his head away like a joy stick and brings his mouth up against the crook of her neck.
Guillermo relents. He has slept with mostly loose women whom he never had the desire to go down on, where hundreds of men had released their sperm. With Rosa Esther it is different, and he knows in time he will be back there and she will permit him to taste her.
To an outsider, sex between them might appear perfunctory. Yet Guillermo is seduced by her desire to always be below him, to allow him to thrust into her—to violate her purity—to push into her as hard as he can. She always lets out quiet yelps or sobs seconds before he ejaculates. It is hard, carnal sex that lasts no more than a few minutes.
Guillermo is sometimes puzzled because he cannot tell if she is achieving an orgasm or simply tightening her vaginal muscles, urging him to finish quickly. The act is done and consecrated. He attributes her lack of adventurousness to her sense of duty, as if it has all gone according to plan, her plan. He doesn’t attempt to improvise, assuming there is nothing she expects from making love but procreation.
And yet he later discovers that she uses a diaphragm. She does not want to get pregnant, not now anyway, or perhaps not until they return from the States. But this causes him to question her actions: is his wife a kind of dominatrix who doesn’t want to cede control to him? To anyone?
chapter five
seven seasons in new york
It’s hot, humid, and disgusting on the August day they arrive at Kennedy Airport. Guillermo and Rosa Esther are committed to making the two years in New York City happy ones. Through Columbia University’s housing office, they rent a one-bedroom apartment on the sixth floor of 566 West 113th Street, between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue, next door to the Symposium, a little Greek restaurant painted a light lapis lazuli. When there is some kind of special occasion to celebrate, like the completion of an exam or paper, they go downstairs and eat moussaka, okra, taramosalata, lamb flank, and octopus on lacquered wooden tables that seem to have been removed from an old sailing ship. The food is good if unspectacular, and the retsina, though a bit earthy and tasting of fern, becomes their passion.
Their neighbors are mostly graduate students, many of them from Latin America or Asia who, like Guillermo and Rosa Esther, are happy not to be in their homelands. In time they learn that the problems in Guatemala pale against those in Indonesia, Lebanon, Argentina, and Uganda, and that none of their fellow students want to leave New York, no matter how crime- and poverty-infested it is. New York is a very dangerous city, but Columbia manages to make the Morningside Heights neighborhood a kind of oasis of calm. The biggest nuisance is the woman who wears a plastic flower pot on her head and aggressively sings, “I’m gonna live forever,” from Fame, at passersby on Broadway.
It doesn’t matter that most of the windows of their apartment face walls, and ivies and philodendrons are the only plants that thrive in the dim light. They live with unpainted furniture from the Gothic Store, bookcases that are wobbly hand-me-downs, and a kitchen table with chairs that were probably rescued from a nursing home.
Their closest neighbors are the Wasservogels, an old Jewish couple living in a tiny but immaculate studio adjoining their apartment who invite them for tea and cookies on the day after they arrive. They are childless Holocaust survivors, with numbered tattoos on their forearms, and their apartment smells the way the elderly often smell: a combination of talcum powder and artificial air fresheners. A week after their arrival, Herbert, a former philosophy professor, is hospitalized with a severe stroke. His wife Irma, who resembles an egret with her elongated neck and white skin, dutifully visits him every morning at St. Luke’s Hospital and stays until seven at night, though there is little she can do. The stroke has paralyzed him, and he is fed through a plastic tube. He dies a week later.
Irma is devastated. If she were a pessimist before Herbert’s death, she now epitomizes gloom and doom. His passing is only the latest episode in a life that began happily in Vienna but was almost lost in the Sobibór concentration camp, where she and Herbert were among the few survivors, and has ended in a solitary studio prison in New York.
While Guillermo goes through orientation at Columbia, Rosa Esther helps Irma by doing the shopping for her. Irma lasts another month before she dies of grief and is replaced by a fat nurse who works twelve-hour shifts at St. Luke’s, and then sleeps.
The loneliness of some New Yorkers barely registers with Guillermo who has never been happier. He is relieved to be away from his father and his decrepit store, his complaining mother, and the small-mindedness of life in an ugly Central American capital. He feels he can breathe without looking over his shoulders, without guilt, without questioning why he is doing what he is doing. He has escaped the armed conflict and all the competing claims by the government and the resistance.
He takes his classes at Columbia Law School on 118th Street, atop a plaza spanning Amsterdam Avenue and overlooking the main campus to the west and Harlem to the east. He is impressed by the huge bronze Lipschitz sculpture of a Greek hero wrestling Pegasus that lords over the plaza with its flying hooves, flapping wings, and gnashing teeth. It is the fitting symbol for the anarchy that rules the world. Guillermo understands that as a law graduate he will be among the forces of order who will attempt to tame this chaos. He will be ready when the time comes.
Though Rosa Esther doesn’t want to, Guillermo insists she take classes to improve her English at Columbia’s School of General Studies. The courses are expensive, but her grandmother covers the tuition fees with the idea that one day her granddaughter will run the Sunday school at the Union Church. Rosa Esther is hesitant at first, but soon proves astute at and happy with learning an English that has little to do with the Bible and scripture.
Rosa Esther makes friends with the other female students in her class, and soon gossips about them with Guillermo. She learns a few words of Twi, Ga, and Urdu, enough to greet her classmates from Ghana and Pakistan. She is fascinated by the strange habits and customs from other cultures: the prevalence of polygamy, arranged marriages, even clitoral circumcision. After three weeks, she knows more about life in Nigeria, Korea, and Japan than she does about the many Maya groups in Guatemala.
Guillermo and Rosa Esther seem to be a happy couple: he impressed by the beauty of his ice queen and she admiring him for his animalistic looks, if from a distance. They are both proud to be seen with someone so different in appearance, character, and appetite. Is it magic? Perhaps. But they also share a distaste for the ordinary.
Theirs is a love sealed by a contempt for the commonplace.
* * *
There are lots of cheap coffee shops nearby—Tom’s Restaurant, the Mill Luncheonette, and the College Inn—that make cooking almost unnecessary. Guillermo and Rosa Esther eat out almost every night since she—having grown up with maids, cooks, and a very solicitous grandmother in Guatemala City—has never had to learn to cook. For $3.45 they can have a baked chicken dinner, boiled potatoes, and, yes, soggy broccoli, a green salad that edges closer to brown, and colorless pink tomatoes with no taste. Their favorite waitress minds the manor at Tom’s: Betty is severely wrinkled, a taller and more vibrant version of Irma Wasservogel, defying her age with dyed blond hair and tons of rouge and makeup.
“What’ll it be today, baby?” is her mantra as she comes up to their table with a wet cloth in one hand and an order pad in the other. She always passes the cloth over the table, whether it’s clean or dirty, dancing figure eights around the dishes, napkins, and utensils. When you give her the order, she looks at you and smiles, never writing anything down. Her pen never strays from its saddle behind her right ear. She never
gets an order wrong and is known to give you an extra chicken leg if she sees you have cleaned your plate. She is greatly admired by all the former students who now live in the neighborhood because it seems that when they protested Columbia’s ownership of Dow Chemical and Halliburton stock back in the sixties, Betty had provided them sanctuary at Tom’s. She also authorized the donation of food to those who had taken over faculty buildings on the Columbia campus. “You’re not going to billy club my babies,” she’d apparently told the riot police, defiantly holding a mop across her body to bar their entrance into the restaurant.
On Thursday nights when Guillermo’s corporate law course ends late, he often goes with his classmates to the Gold Rail near 110th Street, where he orders a well Scotch for $1.25, a beer for seventy-five cents—not Gallo or Cabro, but good enough to do the trick—and the blue-plate special for $3.75. The students debate Reagan’s criticism of big government and his belief that social Darwinism will resolve society’s ills. Reagan is Guillermo’s hero, though in this he is in the minority. He passionately defends Milton Friedman’s theories favoring a free-market economy with minimal government intervention. His classmates argue that government is needed to balance the capitalist urge, but they all agree with Guillermo that the social responsibility of business is to increase profits, and to engage in an open and free competition without deception or fraud. These are the ideas he hopes to bring back to Guatemala.
In the meantime, Old New York still exists. You can get a homemade bagel or a bialy stuffed with white fish for three dollars or a huge corned beef sandwich with a sour kosher pickle for two, and drown it all down with a fifty-cent lime rickey, or an egg cream from the Mill Luncheonette. There are three vegetable stands between 110th and 111th streets where the competition is ferocious. Everyone agrees that the tomatoes are soft and tasteless, the cucumbers pulpy, and the avocadoes usually brown and bruised at all three stands, but at least they are not in cans. The local bodega on 109th Street sells Ducal refried beans from Guatemala, frozen yucca from Costa Rica, and every once in a while huge five-pound bags of papayas from Mexico, for thirty cents a pound.
When Guillermo has some free time, he and Rosa Esther go together to Papyrus and Bookforum, bookstores on Broadway that even have Spanish-language sections. He surveys the law textbooks. She looks for novels written by Latin Americans. Her favorite author is Manuel Puig and she devours his Kiss of the Spider Woman and Betrayed by Rita Hayworth. She has him sign copies of his books when he visits New York and reads from Pubis Angelical at Columbia University’s Miller Theatre. Soon she is reading the latest novels by Cortázar, Vargas Llosa, García Márquez, and even Nelida Piñon, either in Spanish or English. But her favorite novel is Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits, which becomes a best seller in the United States. She identifies strongly with the protagonist Alba, a lonely child who plays make-believe in the basement of her house and is raised by her grandmother. It might as well be her own story.
During their second year in New York, Rosa Esther volunteers as a teacher’s assistant at the Cathedral School of St. John the Divine, even though it is not her church or religion. She likes reading books to the first graders, taking them out to the playground, and looking for the peacocks who strut around the gardens when the weather is nice.
Guillermo and Rosa Esther go see movies on weekends, either at the college student union in Ferris Booth Hall, or at the New Yorker, the Thalia, and the Olympia—dilapidated movie houses on the Upper West Side. They don’t know much about film, and they take this opportunity to see the classic works of De Sica, Rossellini, Godard, Truffaut, Renoir, and Fellini—films that had never been shown in Guatemala. They also enjoy seeing classic American films like Sunset Boulevard, Casablanca, and Citizen Kane, which may have come and gone at the Lux, Fox, and Reforma generations before they were born, but reveal so much about the country in which they now live. Guillermo comes to prefer the new European cinema of Lina Wertmuller, Fassbinder, and Herzog, which he adores for their chaos and wild, irreverent sexuality. Rosa Esther hates them for their lack of moral value. In fact, these European films frighten her, like when Guillermo drinks too much and tries to go down on her, or asks to enter her from behind.
She insists on taking Guillermo to the eleven a.m. Sunday services at the Church of the Ascension on Morningside Drive, because it is small and the Mass more intimate. She begins to wonder if she would be happier becoming a Catholic and joining the Iglesia Yurrita back in Guatemala City because she finds the Union Church service bland and mediocre in comparison. She knows this would not make her grandmother happy. She’ll cross that bridge when she has to, but for now, she consumes the Catholic ritual as if it were forbidden fruit.
Guillermo and Rosa Esther are never bored with one another because there is always something new to do in New York. Besides studying, reading, and teaching, Rosa Esther goes to free concerts at the Manhattan School of Music and the Bloomingdale School of Music. Twice a week she swims laps in the Columbia gym and often attends afternoon lectures at the Union Theological Church. When Guillermo is studying at night, she watches American television—All in the Family, Dallas, The Jeffersons, Diff’rent Strokes, The Cosby Show—to try to understand this strange new country a bit better. Soon she is surprised to admit she knows more about the United States than she does about her own native country.
* * *
Rosa Esther and Guillermo become fast friends with lots of Latin Americans who left their homelands to escape the military juntas establishing dictatorial rule throughout the Americas.
There’s the Chilean poet Marcelo Fontaine (nicknamed El Pucho—the cigarette butt—because his mouth and clothes reek of nicotine and he always has a rash on his face), who is getting his doctorate in comparative literature, and his wife Chichi, who is as intellectual as a washerwoman. They live on the first floor of their building and Marcelo has a side job as a porter, helping the superintendent remove garbage from the elevator well twice a week. They tell heartrending stories about crossing by foot into Bolivia’s desert to escape Pinochet’s secret police, eventually making their way to the United States. Guillermo likes the way Chichi looks at him, with sexy eyes and a pouty mouth that seem to beg him to lend her his penis. He imagines she would know what to do with it.
Carlitos and Mercedes—a handsome, well-mannered couple—are from Buenos Aires and are rumored to be related to one of the junta chiefs. Carlitos is getting a degree in international relations while Mercedes, a blond, blue-eyed former TV newscaster, is studying sociology. They are interested in how the military manipulates the media at home, and they mourn the arrest of poets and painters for simply being the children of well-known opposition leaders. They have a lovely daughter named Valentina, also with blond hair and blue eyes, and enough money to hire a full-time nanny so they can pursue their studies. They are waiting for civilian rule to be reestablished before returning to Buenos Aires. Guillermo also finds Mercedes—Meme—attractive.
Catalina is the daughter of a famous Chilean poet who wrote a memorable poem about a helicopter that, crashing into the Andes, symbolized the overthrow of President Allende.
Mario is a bad Uruguayan poet whose father died suddenly and whose family fortune was swindled by his caretaker uncle in Montevideo. Mario has sad eyes and digs into his bag of tricks to try and seduce every girl he can.
And then there’s chubby Ignacio, a Peruvian Communist architect who lost a hand designing homemade bombs near El Cuzco, and who fled the military by sailing down the Amazon on a raft. He is helplessly in love with the even chubbier and religiously American socialist Hope Wine (everyone calls her Deseo Vino), who often hosts the most elaborate of dinner parties. Within six weeks of meeting one another, Ignacio and Hope get married, assuring he will never be deported.
From their friends, Guillermo and Rosa Esther learn new names for traditional Guatemalan vegetables—choclo for elote or maize, palta for aguacate—and eat canned erizos (sea urchin) with pisco or aguardiente. There
’s always plenty of cigarettes, lots of dancing, endless political arguments, and harmless kissing across couples, as can happen when people in their midtwenties are ruled by liquor and hormones.
Rosa Esther allies with Mercedes, who also shies away from too much physical intimacy. They are always the first to tell the others to quiet down.
New York becomes an endless fountain of pleasure and culture. Guillermo and Rosa Esther live happily for over a year distracted by both the richness of their studies and their adventures, far away from the pettiness and the boredom of life in Guatemala City.
But Günter suffers a stroke in early December, barely three months into his second year at Columbia. Between attending final classes and finishing semester-long research, Guillermo calls home two or three times a day to get reports from his mother. At first he feels a bit of relief. Despite some mild paralysis, the stroke doesn’t seem serious—mostly a warning that his father must sell La Candelaria and retire. But two weeks later, as Guillermo is finishing his finals and making plans to fly home with Rosa Esther for the Christmas holidays, his father dies suddenly from a second stroke, a blood clot that loosened in the carotid artery and went directly to his brain.
His death is awful, but the timing couldn’t be better. Guillermo’s sister Michelle has already gone back to be with their mother and make the funeral arrangements. Guillermo and Rosa Esther arrive just in time for the wake at the Funeraria Morales in Zone 9 and the simple burial in the Cementerio General.
Guillermo stays in the aerie of his childhood home to help his mother, while Rosa Esther spends time with her grandmother and sister in their house near the Union Church. The prodigal son fulfills his filial duties during the month-long winter break. He must reward Carlos and the few remaining employees for their years of service and close down the store near El Portal. La Candelaria has, at this point, lost nearly all of its business to the fancier, more hip lighting stores in the malls, and the best Guillermo can do is get forty-three thousand quetzales for all the remaining merchandise. The downtown store has always been leased—a miracle, because at this point it would be impossible to sell the building for anything other than a huge loss.