chapter twenty-eight

pupusas and yucca frita

After two months of staying at the pensión, Guillermo decides it’s time to find his own digs. He rents a small furnished apartment on Calle Rúben Darío across from the Parque Bolívar. The furnishings are not to his liking, but it doesn’t matter. He is far beyond caring whether his mattress is firm or not, if the sofa is covered in soft leather or naugahyde, if he has real art or framed posters on the wall.

Another change: before he sought solace in drink; now he is committed to sobriety. He is down to the occasional beer.

Rather than risk working for someone else, he decides to start a consulting service for individuals or small groups of investors interested in opening firms. His legal background is useful—he’s an expert on business applications, articles of incorporation, legal filings—so it should be a breeze to do lawyerly stuff but charge consultant rates.

He rents a small 200-square-meter, air-conditioned office for three hundred dollars a month in the same building that houses the tailor shop where he had his pants made. He buys secondhand office furniture and an old desktop computer, an ink-jet printer, a scanner, and a small desk copier from the nineties.

At a carpentry shop by the market he has a business sign made: Continental Consulting Services, Rafael Ignacio Gallardo, Proprietor. He also has five hundred business cards printed. And as another act of self-determination, he buys a cell phone under his assumed name.

Guillermo Rosensweig is slowly ceasing to exist.

* * *

There are various decisions Guillermo can help entrepreneurs consider: what kind of business to open given the existing competition; deciding whether to manufacture goods, provide information services, or simply sell retail or wholesale products. Though much of his advice could be considered obvious, potential customers might not know that to establish a business, you should know the profile—age and sex—and the estimated disposable income—individual or corporate—of your potential customers. You also should extrapolate future competitive trends and whether or not you are entering a growing, shrinking, or a mature market. For example, if you are selling smart phones, the market would be growing, but anyone interested in selling sewing machines would be entering a mature market where only product innovation would lead to increased sales, and then only to a few customers.

The financial considerations are huge: Does the entrepreneur have a financial analysis identifying the costs related to starting the business? Additional sources of financing should the new business require it? Personal or family money, bank loans (at what interest rate?), outside investors—and a projection of weekly, monthly, and yearly wages and expenses? A budget spreadsheet with the cost of raw materials, labor, rent, transportation, utilities, administration expenses (payment to the consultant!), cleaning, and unexpected maintenance expenses? Guillermo can help the potential business owner identify the price point for the successful sale of products as well as estimate profits.

The only problematic part of the consulting business is that Guillermo cannot legally execute incorporation in El Salvador, or secure valid licenses, file proper municipal papers, etc. At some point he has to work with a local lawyer to complete the process to avoid awakening any suspicion with his fake passport. Luckily, downtown San Salvador is full of these kinds of lawyers.

Although he is unfamiliar with the laws of El Salvador, he knows from his legal work that documents and licenses are all fairly routine in the Central American Common Market. With a computer and the Internet, he can download any required documents from the government offices.

To publicize his consulting firm, Guillermo prints fifty flyers on colored paper and asks proprietors if he can tape them on the inside of their store windows; he also posts them on bulletin boards along Delgado Street. He drops off flyers with his former landlady and with his tailor as well. He displays them in the restaurants he frequents, on any open wall space.

Soon enough, he begins signing up clients, most of whom decide to pay the hundred-dollar application/consulting fee since they have not done sufficient research to mount a new business on their own. These clients, rather than being resentful or frustrated by Guillermo’s probing questions, are, in fact, grateful to him for his thoroughness and his ability to see the larger picture. In the end he will be saving them hundreds, perhaps thousands of dollars in setting up businesses that otherwise would have been bound to fail.

What Guillermo has to offer is experience and an agile mind.

* * *

He throws himself into his work like never before. It’s as if he has been given a second chance in San Salvador, and like a carpenter working with his hands, he finds his job immensely satisfying. He enjoys problem-solving and motivating his clients by the promise of success. He discovers he has the skill to empower them. And most of all, he is surprised by how little he misses his old life, with the exception of Maryam.

He attempts to make up for his loneliness by going to whorehouses. One in particular, La Providencia, he finds under escort service listings in La Prensa Gráfica. It’s more high-end than those near the marketplace and the cathedral, but in the end he only feels temporarily relieved.

There are days when, while listening to Liszt or Debussy or Delibes on a cheap CD player in his apartment, he feels a lump in his throat. The music saps him at the same time that it humanizes him. He listens to Bill Evans’s “Peace Piece” and Cole Porter’s “So in Love.” He feels that Maryam is with him: I’m yours till I die. He allows himself to imagine that she got away, like him. Maybe she escaped from the carnage realizing that to survive she had to disappear. These thoughts are not the ravings of the Guillermo in Guatemala City. His thinking is clear; this could be possible.

There was no forensic evidence of her death—just a mound of white powder that found its way to an urn in the wall of the church at the Verbena Cemetery. Of course, there was no proof of Ibrahim’s death either, yet he knows that the textile factory owner is dead. It is more of a sixth sense about Maryam—there’s a small chance she is still alive. He remembers the anonymous card he received several months back—could it have been from her?

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.

In Guatemala City, the armed conflict was abstract because it mostly took place in a countryside only the Indians thought to inhabit. Here in San Salvador, the craterous wounds of the conflict are visible and palpable, and this makes the citizens more honest, unwilling to hide behind any sort of delusion or distortion.

And then there is the weather, the torrid heat, which makes everyone respond fairly directly, not like in Guatemala, where reality is hidden under sweaters, jackets, or layers of cloth. The lava-like heat in San Salvador strikes everything: Guillermo swears that the walls sweat as much as the plants.

There is a plain, if brutal honesty in El Salvador which Guillermo never encountered in his homeland.

And so his life is not the life he imagined, but for the first time in a while, he can call this life his own. It is a prescribed picture—office, furnished apartment, mercado, whorehouse, library, greasy comedores, café de olla, and pupusas.

How long it will last is anybody’s guess.