When he drives to his law office or visits Miguel at the Sophos Bookstore or Café Europa, he is sure he is being tailed by Korean cars of varying colors. And he imagines that complete strangers with whom he makes random eye contact are following his every move. He sees suspicious faces popping up everywhere, like bats hovering at the entrance of caves. He imagines eyes scrutinizing him at coffee shops and grocery stores. He is under surveillance even when he picks his nose.
Guillermo changes his cell phone number and for two days he does not receive any mystery calls. But then suddenly the hang-ups return.
He takes an Ambien to sleep every night and thirty milligrams of Cymbalta each morning when he wakes up. Sometimes he takes two of the latter, with a shot of rum, even though it makes him groggy and a bit nauseous in the morning. When the medicine is working he feels invincible: he wants to live and bring the guilty to justice. But it is a momentary high. He is unable to conquer the inertia that keeps him from shaking off Maryam’s death and remaking his life. He is stunned by this, never having depended upon anyone to survive, not even when he was aimlessly walking the streets of Europe. Certainly he never had to rely on tiny colored pills.
And he has lost all sexual desire. He hasn’t had an erection in weeks.
The medicine makes him less anxious, even jacks up his mind so that he sometimes has a clear will to live, but his heart is like a mechanical toy from which all the coils and gears have fallen.
One night he almost calls Rosa Esther to ask her if she will take him back. He is ready to move to Mexico. He is willing to chuck his lucrative law practice, all his clients and connections, to go back to his wife and children and get a decent night’s sleep.
But is a good night’s sleep enough reason to try to remake your life with a woman you no longer love? He nixes the idea of calling her and doubles down on another shot of rum.
* * *
Guillermo goes to see his accountant one day to see if he can get a better idea of his net worth, to see if he could possibly sell his law practice.
The accountant is not encouraging: he tells him that his firm is worth next to nothing, especially since it has continued to lose clients. Guillermo is incapable of returning phone calls whenever he finds himself in a fit of panic. He confesses to his accountant that he is sure there are people planning his demise, and perhaps even plotting to kill him. He has drafted a new will, which he asks the accountant and his secretary to witness and notarize. It is a simple will that bequeaths his total estate to his children. He wants to have everything squared away, just in case something happens to him.
Guillermo leaves his accountant feeling there’s nothing that can bring him back from the brink. He has become the mastermind of nothing.
chapter twenty-three. it’s not over till it’s over, or the fat lady.
Guillermo learns from Rosa Esther that his children, though happy to be living in Mexico, are having problems. Ilán worries he is not masculine enough and is teased by his classmates for not being aggressive or daring. He might be gay. Once when he was around eight and saw a particular boy’s muscular chest, he told his mother that he felt excited, and that he wanted to caress the hair on the boy’s arms. The feelings have continued with other boys. Andrea is treated like a social outcast; she worries that she has an untreatable case of halitosis and that her underarms reek. She wonders why none of the boys seem to like her. Both are having difficulty fitting in with kids who have known each other since nursery school.
But one thing is certain: they do not want to return to Guatemala City.
Guillermo listens to Rosa Esther’s complaints and blames her for their children’s indifference to him. Why did she have to tell them he had fallen in love with another woman, a married woman, a younger, more beautiful woman? A slut, in her words, who worships a god who encourages men to take on multiple wives. As teenagers, Ilán and Andrea think their mother is the most perfect woman on earth, even if she constantly spars with them over their laziness and slovenly habits. They don’t care that Rosa Esther’s once-thin figure, so gorgeous and svelte at Jones Beach in New York, has sagged, nor that the once-cute freckles on her white face have widened so much that they’ve become splotches.
Guillermo is bottled up in mourning and feels a whistling pain flitting constantly through his porous body. He can’t believe Maryam will never come back to him, that she is gone, killed by a slew of bullets before blowing up with her car. It makes no sense, none of it does. Half the time he is drunk, reeking of booze and slurring words that he often only whispers to himself. His eyes are puffy: they look, but do not focus. They are bottomless murky wells. His tongue is a soap pad in his mouth. He has swollen cheeks and constantly itching ears.
One night he takes a flashlight and his gym bag to the roof of his building, climbing up the circular staircase to the upstairs terrace, where the maids hang laundry on poles between the huge gray containers of bottled gas. Guillermo brings a yellow legal pad, parks himself against one of these containers, and starts going through Ibrahim’s papers. Lines referring to interest-free loans and worthless collateral spring up at him. Advances for projects that will never be built assault him, but he is unable to concentrate. Maybe it is the quivering of the light, the shuffling of the wind, the batting of his eyelashes, but Guillermo is not able to form a single cogent thought. And of course he has forgotten to bring a pen or pencil.
He puts everything down and stares up at the sky. There is a high crescent moon and the lightest smattering of stars. He sees a compact trail of smoke off in the distance and wonders if the Pacaya volcano is active once again. He should read the newspapers and find out what’s going on in the world. He seems to remember something about a build-up of troops in Afghanistan, more chaos in Iraq, Daniel Ortega hunkering closer to Hugo Chavez and talking about building a transoceanic canal through Lake Managua with Chinese funding, Putin flexing his muscles in a challenge to Russia’s oil barons.
Why the fuck should he care?
He is looking at a beautiful night sky which could make him cry, but all he can think about is that he has to find someone to pay for Maryam’s death. Miguel keeps insisting that the government was behind the murders, and it is easy for Guillermo to agree. He hates the skinny president, with his horn-rimmed glasses, his mole-infested skin making his face resemble a large conical chocolate chip cookie. He looks like a ghoulish funeral parlor director with his gray suits and white shirts and blue ties, constantly rubbing his hands to express sympathy even as he convinces relatives of the deceased to purchase more expensive coffins. He is a self-proclaimed patriot who is constantly paying tribute to the Guatemalan flag in public while using it as toilet paper at home. Whenever he is filmed sitting at his desk, stroking his hands, he speaks with so much conviction — despite his speech impediment — that Guillermo thinks he might actually believe what he says. With his thin lips and his high, unmanly voice, he is a dead ringer for a chompipe, a turkey, clucking his way through an argument, a man whose discourses are so absurd that only fools would believe them.