The Spitting Death of the Guatemalan Colonel

The Spitting Death of the Guatemalan Colonel is the Queens mall restaurant killing of Guillermo, a Guatemalan death-squad commander, by the former Times reporter. The event is decisive because the reporter enters intending to confront a figure associated with political murder, yet the killing occurs through a spit rather than the knife he has brought and is confirmed only afterward through a newspaper account. The scene joins personal revenge, institutional violence, physical accident, and delayed knowledge in a single, grotesquely unstable act.

Surveillance and Preparation

The former Times reporter first encounters Guillermo during the lunch hour at a nearly empty restaurant whose sound of falling water suppresses the noises of the outside world. Guillermo is sitting at the bar speaking with the underworked bartender. He is presented as a trimly built man with a deepening hairline, a good tan, and a thick black mustache; the reporter recognizes him as the Guatemalan colonel from the newspaper clips, but Guillermo does not recognize the patron. He leaves the welcoming ritual to a waiter and returns to his cigarette.

The recognition carries a political charge that is larger than the restaurant encounter. In Guillermo's glance, the former Times reporter sees the same ranking arrogance that had treated the destruction of a country's intellectual class as an act undertaken for the country's benefit, while also allowing the murder of entire villages of peasants. The reporter therefore does not attack at once. He frames the first visit as surveillance, returning twice more alone for lunch. Each time, Guillermo remains at the bar, offers no more than an impassive glance, and turns his back on the room. Repetition converts the restaurant from an incidental setting into a place of deliberate reconnaissance.

On the third visit, the reporter is seated at the table that has become his own. In his breast pocket is a ten-inch Carborundum steel carving knife bought at the Hammacher Schlemmer store on Fifty-seventh Street. The weapon makes his intention concrete, but it will not determine the outcome. Two young men in dark suits and rep ties join him. Their short, crop-eared haircuts and accentless speech mark them as controlled agents rather than ordinary diners. They ask whether he is from the area and whether he works or lives there. He refuses their questions and challenges their right to sit with him. When one says that they have credentials from Random House Group, he demands to see them, but the other postpones the demand for proof.

Confrontation in the Restaurant

The restaurant has now been emptied of its ordinary social life. No other diners remain, and the waiters have disappeared. Guillermo crushes his cigarette, rises from the bar, saunters across the room, and sits opposite the reporter. He introduces himself as Guillermo, the host, with a bright, blinding smile made conspicuous by capped teeth. The reporter answers by identifying himself as the avenging angel. The declaration is less a practical plan than a sudden assumption of a role: he is feeling bold and suicidal, and language briefly gives his rage a theatrical form.

The two young government men move without apparent hurry and stand behind the reporter, one at each shoulder. They pin him to his chair, making the knife in his breast pocket inaccessible. Guillermo leans back on the rear legs of his chair and laughs at the reporter's claim. He says that others have made the same claim, but that the reporter is the least prepossessing of them. His amusement grows into genuine laughter, described with almost forensic attention to the pink palate and the fleshy flap of the uvula. The scene's balance is clear: Guillermo possesses institutional confidence, while the reporter has been physically reduced to a trapped body whose intended weapon cannot be reached.

The confrontation nevertheless produces an unforeseen weapon. In a mindless rage, the reporter strains against the men's grip, half rises, lunges, and spits in Guillermo's face. Guillermo instinctively jerks backward. That reflex carries him over the chair, exposing for an instant the new, unscored leather soles of his shoes. Chairs splinter, people shout, and breath is forced from a falling body. The movement is at once deliberate and uncontrolled: the reporter chooses the insult, but not the precise chain of bodily reactions that follows it.

Death and Delayed Recognition

Guillermo's fall ends with his skull striking the mall restaurant's wood-grained plastic floor, which is affixed to a concrete base. The former reporter later distinguishes the sound from that of a skull striking a brick lawn-retaining wall. The comparison recalls the earlier killing in Cincinnati and makes the episode part of a recurring sequence of violence whose physical details remain sharply audible to him. The different pitch may, he reflects, have something to do with the quality of the skull bone. Such reflection gives the death an unsettling material specificity rather than treating it as a cleanly legible act of revenge.

The reporter does not immediately understand that Guillermo has died. He runs through the mall parking lot toward the L.I.E., still unaware that the spit has become fatal. This ignorance is central to the event's structure. He knows that a violent encounter has occurred, but he does not know its consequence; the body, the noise, and the escape do not yet provide him with certainty. The killing is therefore experienced first as an eruption and only later as a fact.

The confirmation arrives the next morning when he reads his Times. The newspaper tells him that he has struck again and reveals that the Guatemalan colonel died. The event thus returns to him through the same medium associated with Guillermo's public record: the press clips that enabled recognition also become the instrument that confirms the reporter's own act. Personal knowledge is displaced by mediated knowledge, and the former reporter learns the result of his violence as a reader.

Meaning of the Killing

The episode reverses the expected relation between weapon and result. The knife is purchased, carried, and rendered useless by the government men's grip; the spit, initially an act of contempt, becomes lethal only because Guillermo's reflexive backward movement turns the insult into a fall. The killing is consequently neither a straightforward execution nor a fully controlled assassination. It is an act of revenge whose outcome depends on bodily accident, institutional pressure, and the victim's own reaction.

The restaurant's theatricality intensifies that reversal. Guillermo calls himself the host, smiles with polished teeth, and treats the reporter's avenging-angel claim as material for a joke. The reporter's reply cannot overpower Guillermo's social or physical position, yet the contemptuous gesture defeats the scene's hierarchy in an abrupt and absurd fashion. Guillermo's authority is not undone by the knife or by an announced sentence; it collapses backward with the chair, amid splintering furniture and shouted confusion.

The killing also binds individual retaliation to the broader history invoked by the reporter's recognition of Guillermo. The colonel is not merely an unpleasant stranger in a restaurant: he is associated with the destruction of intellectuals and the killing of peasants. The reporter's rage is therefore directed at a representative of organized political violence, but the narrative refuses to make the retaliation orderly or morally transparent. It leaves the act suspended between avenging justice and mindless rage, between a planned confrontation and a death the attacker himself does not recognize until the following day.