He doesn’t need anyone’s permission to go for a bicycle ride on an early Sunday morning. Still, he prefers to be cautious and not to be seen. Or rather he doesn’t want to get into a conversation with a tenant or the guard in the guardhouse. None of the usual banter: It’s a beautiful day, sir. Any news from the family? I have a package for you. All the innocuous blah blah blah.
Guillermo goes out the parking lot door, which for some reason does not shut behind him. Should he go back and close it to protect his few neighbors from any potential burglars? He frankly doesn’t care, since he won’t be coming back. The door can remain ajar.
It is a spectacular morning. The wind blows softly and it’s cooler than it has been in recent days. He walks his bicycle along the alleyway that smells of stale beer and, oddly enough, almonds, though there are no almond trees around. When he reaches the avenue he notices the long shadows from the eucalyptus trees growing on the lawns of the houses across the street from his building. His neck feels a bit sore, but the tightness eases as he stretches, moving his head in gentle circles. He leans the bike against his hip and extends his arms to the side.
Enough stretching: he’s ready to go.
He mounts his bicycle and begins peddling. What a pleasure to ride a machine so carefully designed as to nearly ride itself. The gears shift effortlessly with hardly a trace of sound or friction, only the soft click of the derailleur. His legs are pedaling at a good clip. Maryam loved his lean and powerful legs, like those of a stallion. She liked grabbing his ass in her hands, trying and failing to shake it loose from his trunk.
Guillermo glances around. He has never been as conscious of nature as he is this morning. It’s as if he has awakened to a newly created world, one that dazzles him with its beauty and serenity. He hears birds chirping, yes, birds chirping, and feels the sun warm his face. Where has he been these past weeks? Has he lived with his head deep in the ground? Even when he had gone riding to get into shape and shake off his drunkenness, it was on a mission to expiate pain, fatigue, booze, and frustration, rather than to enjoy the beauty of a sunset ride. Nature had once been important to him.
Maryam’s death crippled him. He lost the desire to engage with anyone. With himself. He knows that he has become a worse father than his own was to him. He demonstrated more sympathy for the elephant La Mocosita than he has for his own flesh and blood.
It isn’t the solitude that destroyed him. What he can’t survive is this taste of ashes, the refuse of something that had at one time nourished him but had now decayed. Music, art, meals, all taste burnt, flaking, putrid.
Rotting, now that’s a better word for what he tastes. Everything has putrefied to the point of rotting. Rot and mold.
Guillermo is crying so hard now that he can barely see the road on which he pedals. He squeezes the brakes with his hands, puts his legs down, and stands still momentarily before wiping away his tears on his sleeves.
He stays there on the side of the road, his thoughts racing. When Maryam told Samir she wanted to leave him, he laughed at her. In fact, he told her he would never accept her wish to dissolve their marriage. The only hope for Guillermo and Maryam would have been for Ibrahim to intervene on their behalf. But given his stern morality, they would have had to emphasize the allegedly platonic nature of their romance, built up over the weeks of dining and conversing together with each other, and with him. They could not have admitted the carnality of their relationship, the unquenchable thirst. In this way Ibrahim might have allowed a relationship to develop between them, for he was dedicated to the happiness of his daughter.
Guillermo wipes his eyes on his shirt again. Why had Maryam been killed? What did she have to do with the filth of this world, the drugs, the corruption, the venality? The thought of her burning up, that sweet aromatic flesh, repels him. She did not deserve to die like that.
Guillermo glances down at his watch. It is after eight and he is still not at the appointed spot. He’s no longer sure he wants to die, but he needs to put an end to his despondency.
He remounts his bike and pedals slowly. It hurts him to consider that no one will mourn his death. There will be something unfortunate about his death, but nothing tragic.
Facing a steep incline, Guillermo forces his legs to churn harder. His muscles, nearly atrophied by so much booze and apathy, strain at the task. His legs begin shaking, threatening to cramp, but he simply puts a steadier foot to the pedal.
The agreed upon spot is one hundred meters away, on a grassy ridge at the edge of a pine forest. Across from it sits one of those oversized houses, wedding cake — shaped, with a V etched just below the intercom. It is a hideous house owned by Boris Santiago, the millionaire narco chief.
Guillermo is supposed to dismount his bike at the crest and wait for the assassin to approach by car. It is to be a simple undertaking — a man rides his bike on a Sunday morning, quite innocently, possibly before going to church services. He gets winded from the climb and dismounts his bike to rest for a minute or two before going on.
Guillermo switches to a higher gear and continues up the hill, wondering what he will do when he sees the car approaching. Maybe he will crap his pants — how indecent a way to leave this world — or try to run away into the woods and get shot in the back.
Or will he simply meet his fate by awaiting the bullet, with his mouth open as if to accept the Host of Hosts? Will one bullet be enough, or will he lay there squirming, with his brain oozing out of his skull like blood sausage from the pork skin, waiting, begging for the second bullet, or the third, the shot that will deliver him from the suffering his life has become?
What if the second shot never comes? What if he is condemned to spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair, dumb and blind, blowing on tubes to make the wheelchair move, attached to a tank of oxygen?
Oh please, Lord, not that!
Halfway up the hill, a jackrabbit appears below the hedges of a house on the right. When it reaches the curb, it pauses ever so briefly, twirls a floppy ear, then bounds across the road as if its legs were on pogo sticks, and disappears into the forest.
Guillermo glances toward the sky — there’s an oddly rectangular, dark cloud resembling a chalk eraser. He wishes it weren’t there. He wants to die under a spotless blue sky, as under a coffin’s dark blue velvet casing. Is that too much to ask for?
His legs feel sore as he nears the top. Boris Santiago’s McMansion now comes into full view, taking up the whole crest of the hill. Looking up, Guillermo sees a glass-encased hexagonal cupola at the top — it must be the playroom for the children, or where the ex-lieutenant and his buddies drink bottles of Zacapa 23 and snort samples of the cocaine they fly from Colombia to the Péten fields to the United States.
Immediately Guillermo realizes his mind is exaggerating things — on several occasions he has seen children staring down from the cupola to the road as he cycled by. It is a four-story house, and he can well imagine that from the third-floor windows someone could see the Izalco volcano in San Salvador miles to the southeast, or Lake Amatitlán a stone’s throw to the south. He expects one can see the volcanoes of Fuego and Pacaya belching their endless plumes of gray-black smoke from any of the windows in the house.
As he reaches the plateau he notices that there is no one in the cupola now; the whole family of the mutilator-turned-cartel-chief must still be sleeping, or vacationing in Disneyland.
Guillermo takes a deep breath, filling his lungs with cold, clean air, and slows. To be alive is glorious, he thinks, with tears welling up in his eyes again. If there were a guard in the guardhouse protecting the McMansion, he might have gone up to him to confess his desire not to die, but strangely no one is there.