Maryam was so beautiful that he could imagine a kidnapper or would-be assassin deciding like Clegg, the protagonist in The Collector, to capture her and keep her enslaved instead of killing her.
In darker moments he imagines the explosion has disfigured her, and she has vanished knowing that Guillermo would be sickened by her appearance. Would he still love her with her face grafted over in layers of pink, curling skin? Does one love the body, the heart, or the soul, or a combination of all three?
Why can’t she actually be alive, running some Middle Eastern restaurant in La Libertad? There wouldn’t have been any way for her to contact him during the weeks after the explosion, just to set his mind at ease. But since he too has vanished, without a trace as it were, there’d be no way for her to reach him now. He has done too good a job of erasing his tracks for her to find him. He has entered the ranks of the disappeared.
* * *
Every weekend he goes to the Biblioteca Nacional across from the Catedral Metropolitana on Plaza Barrios and reads through all of the previous week’s daily Guatemalan newspapers — the Diario de Centro América, Siglo 21, El Períodico, Prensa Libre. He looks for any mention of either of their names. He examines each and every page, scans the ads, gossip columns, and wedding announcements as well — he believes he is now an expert in decoding hidden messages.
Of course he finds nothing. Maryam Khalil and Guillermo Rosensweig have both been relegated to the realm of the forgotten. He never imagined his notoriety could allow him to disappear like this, so quickly, without any serious inquiry, like the thousands of massacred Guatemalan Indians dumped in unmarked graves. It sobers him.
Unlike him, the Indians have relatives to mourn them, to seek their bones or their corpses, a vestige to bury, proof that they had lived.
Reading the Guatemalan papers proves futile, but it does give him the opportunity to follow the political developments in his country. The president and his wife have managed to dodge all the accusations of money laundering by the dozens of Guatemalans who want to force them out. It appears the president will finish his term to keep the US from gaining leverage by manipulating a premature regime change so it can restrict the sale of weapons. In another year there will be new elections, and it looks as if the right wing will win. The president’s wife is going to divorce her husband. She is willing to sacrifice her marriage to run for the presidency.
Oddly, Guillermo feels no animus toward the president and his wife, as if recording the tape and the bizarre events that followed have cured him of his hatred for them. He is rankled when the Catholic Church expresses its willingness to annul their marriage so she can run for the presidency. There is no more cynical act imaginable, to eliminate a sacred covenant for political expediency. (Guillermo still pays lip service to the sanctity of marriage even though he has betrayed the precepts dozens of times.) More than anger, he pities the president, who clearly does not want the divorce but is incapable of curbing his wife’s single-minded quest for power.
On one Sunday, Guillermo smiles and shakes his head when he reads that the president has named his old buddy Miguel Paredes a special advisor on economic affairs. He has also been tapped to replace Ibrahim Khalil as the president’s envoy on the Banurbano board. This turn of events makes Guillermo laugh aloud — what a skillful chameleon Miguel is.
He wonders if he had been Paredes’s pawn all along. Now the facilitator can freely funnel money to pet projects where his participation is hidden by governmental sanction and layers of deceit. Was his intention to force the resignation of the president only a ruse?
Prensa Libre shows Miguel Paredes and the president holding hands in the air like best friends, astronauts launched together into space, survivors of a rocket explosion after having parachuted successfully back to earth. Has Miguel replaced the First Lady as the presidential confidante now that she is divorcing him?
All this teaches Guillermo that he has made many serious mistakes. His love life has been an utter disaster. There were mistakes of judgment he has to own up to: he was dismissive of his father and his father’s hope to have him take over La Candelaria; he was jealous of those classmates who had the means to go to colleges abroad; he was duplicitous with both his wife and his children; he was obsessed with finding a cursed, manipulative hand behind everything he did not fully comprehend. His understanding of evil has been simpleminded, and he has never seen the whole picture of anything, choosing to totter from crisis to crisis or success to success without ever considering his actions, not even his own sexual desires.
Guatemala is a hopeless disaster, a country sinking deeper and deeper into its own lies and denials. The newspapers are reporting it day after day. With thousands of citizens involved in the drug trade, Guatemala has become a bazaar of graft and payoffs, piled as high as a basket of dates. His expressions of outrage and his tendency to mistrust all governmental agencies failed to change anything. He had come to believe that even loyal friends, excepting Ibrahim, were involved in plots to destroy the country he loved.
Now he knows that his own bile, his unwillingness to believe or trust in colleagues, has also contributed to his country’s malaise. Like Candide, Guillermo believes he should “cultivate his own garden” in this life. This would be the best of all possible worlds, since so many powers-that-be work day and night to control how things develop. He is no match for them. No honest people are a match for them.
Living in San Salvador, he is learning that he can simply apply his skills to advise and counsel others without investing his own ego in anything. He can apply his own capabilities and draw pleasure in his own accomplishments, like helping an entrepreneur open a legitimate business. There is no need to act courageously, to see himself as purer than others, to feel outrage when things don’t go his way. He wants to live and to let live instead of trying to create a world in his own image.
And the odd thing is that years earlier the mere thought of being in El Salvador would have made him feel imprisoned, since his freedom of movement would have been restricted. Instead he feels freer in exile than he ever did in his life of relative freedom in Guatemala. This gives Guillermo a kind of peace of mind that he hasn’t experienced since he lived across the street from the Symposium restaurant in New York. He is now controlled by the simple desire to do what he knows he has to do: work, listen, and advise. And endure his present condition with something like gratitude.
The fact that he has given up drinking, except for the occasional Suprema, has helped clear his mind for the first time in twenty years. The clouds have dissipated and he can finally see the occasional ray of sunlight.
And there is something else: he actually likes San Salvador, even more than Guatemala City. It hurts him to say it but it’s true. While Guatemala prides itself on being the beautiful queen of Central America, its smugness is a bit dated, like that of an English dowager. While many Guatemalans will admit that civil society has temporarily gone awry in their homeland, they will also say it’s a gorgeous place and that it’s only a matter of time before their country assumes its rightful place as a Latin American leader.
El Salvador, on the other hand, is a crazy, chaotic country, much too violent and polluted to have any such pretensions. Santana wrote a song called “Blues for Salvador” in 1987. It is a tragic, five-minute electric-guitar riff with absolutely no lyrics. The country lacks Guatemala City’s broad boulevards and faux French look, and its glorious, eternal-spring climate. But its citizens are humble, and real. Everyone is trying to survive the best they can with no airs of entitlement. Salvadorans are open, humorous, self-deprecating. The civil war they have endured has affected them each personally, with bombardments, killings in their own backyards, the horrific raining down of bombs and explosives, the extensive loss of life. No one has survived unscathed.