The Guilty (12 page)

I wouldn't have sunk into such melodrama if I'd been in clear danger. The patrol car smelled good, I was chewing blue raspberry gum, we were driving along calmly, obeying stoplights. But in some basement somewhere, El Tamale had snuffed it.

“So you're a filmmaker, then?” Martín Palencia asked suddenly.

“I write screenplays.”

“Let me ask you this. That Buñuel did every fucking drug, didn't he? I have a ton of movies at home, the
pirated stuff we've confiscated from the Tepito black market. All due respect, but I think Buñuel was balls deep. You can tell he was a total druggie, a total visionary. For me, he's the Boss, the Boss of Bosses, like the
Tigres del Norte
say, the kingpin of cinema, the only one who really and truly had square balls.” Palencia gestured wildly in support of his theory, and his eyes twinkled, as if he had already spent a lot of time trying to explain this. “Let an old man like that do whatever drugs he wants! I always say, Shakespeare was a fag, what the fuck do I care? Those motherfuckers are creating, creating, creating.” He shook his head hard from side to side; the gesture suggested coke or amphetamines. “Do you remember that one that Buñuel did where two chicks are just one chick? They're both hot as hell, but they're different, they don't look a damn thing alike, but an old guy mixes them up, that's how fucked up he is. And neither of them give it up. Those damn girls get hotter and hotter. It's like the old guy was seeing double. It makes you want to be as confused as him. That's surrealism, right? It'd be frickin' cool to live all surrealist!” He paused, and after a deep sigh, asked me, “So what was it, what was Maestro Buñuel into?”

“He liked martinis.”

“I told you, partner!” Palencia clapped Carmona on the back.

6.
The Hamster

After a ride prolonged by a filmic discussion in which Palencia tried to convince Carmona that surrealism was hotter than porn, they left me with an official in the D.A.'s office.

The functionary asked me fifty questions. He asked if I had an alias, and if I had engaged in “sexual commerce” with the kidnapped party.

The tough part of the interrogation wasn't the questions but the way they were repeated, barely modified, to expose any discrepancies. Asked in a different order or in a different tone, the questions suddenly implied something else. They made it seem like I knew about things before they had happened, like I had intuited or even planned them.

I worried about Katzenberg. I had brought him to the Oxxo, so I deserved some of the blame for what had transpired. But something stronger, something distant, dangerous, untraceable, had taken control of him. Would they come after me too? Right now, all I cared about was answering those questions that kept transforming with each repetition. At two in the morning, they let me go.

When I got to my apartment, I collapsed onto the bed, thinking about the cocaine I'd left in the Oxxo. I passed out in my clothes and plunged into a deep sleep, in which I felt the occasional brush of a flipper.

I woke up at eight a.m. and looked out the window at the streets that surround the Parque de la Bola. Then I checked my answering machine. Two messages. Cristi's voice exploded with enthusiasm through the speaker: “The script's a knockout! You're the best. I know compliments are out of style in this post-modern world, don't be offended, but you make me want to be old-fashioned. I'm dying to see you.
Kiss kiss!
Alright, a hundred kisses.” Cristi was exultant. I didn't know that Gonzalo
Erdiozábal had sent her the script, nor did I remember giving him Cristi's fax number. Although, honestly, I didn't remember much of anything. The second message said: “Get over here right now. Tania is screaming bloody murder.” (My ex-wife always talked to me like our daughter was a burning building and I was 911.)

I had a slice of pound cake and a cigarette for breakfast and left for Renata's place. On the ride over, I thought about Cristi. Her enthusiastic voice, her desire to be old-fashioned. An incredible thing in such a disastrous moment. I wondered if she would ever use that magnificent voice to demand that I come pick up our daughter. Gonzalo had always been a great friend. Now I knew he was also a better screenwriter.

Tania seemed pretty calm when I got there. Renata, on the other hand, glared at me as if she was reading the most abominable crimes all over my face. She shook her hands around like she was trying to swat a cloud of fruit flies. Then she explained the problem: Tania's hamster Lobito had gotten lost in the Chevrolet, the run-down piece of crap that's caused us so many problems and is rolling proof that the alimony I send her is bare-bones. She pointed at the car: a chance for me to do my part, problems men should fix.

I searched the car for the hamster, imitating some of the expert moves I'd seen the detectives use. The only thing I found was a tortoiseshell brooch shaped like an infinity symbol. Renata had been wearing it when I met her. It was just as hard for me to believe such thin, translucent material could come from a turtle as it was to believe my fingers had once unpinned it from
her. Now the clasp was stuck—or my fingers had lost the touch.

I decided to bring some specialists in on the search for Lobito. Tania went with me to the Chevrolet dealership. A mechanic in a white lab coat listened blankly to my request, as if customers came by every day with rodents lost in the chassis of their cars.

“Wait in Customer Service.” He pointed to a glass-walled rectangle.

There we went. The nation's waiting rooms have filled up with televisions; we sat and watched a commercial for the government that I found especially repugnant because I was the one who'd written it. For a full minute, it shows an imaginary country where four cinderblock walls count for a classroom and the president smiles, satisfied with his achievements. The message couldn't be any more contradictory: poverty seems to be simultaneously resolved and undefeatable. The shot pulls out to show a barren landscape. It's as if the government were saying, “We've done what little we could.” The last image is a miserable little boy with his mouth open under an eyedropper. Executive authority lets a single, provident drop fall in.

I kept my eyes closed until Tania tugged on my pants.

The man in the white coat had Lobito in his hands:

“We had to take apart the back seat.” He handed Tania her pet. “We found this, too.” He passed me a tennis ball that had lost its bright lime color in the dark recesses of the car.

I took it with trembling hands. Its fuzzy texture triggered unsettling memories: Gonzalo Erdiozábal, unrepentant faker, had betrayed me.

7.
The Blesséd Baby Mechanic

In the Eighties, Renata had wanted to live unhindered, but she also needed a car. Though she hated the idea of a man protecting her, she let her father buy her a Chevrolet. For a few weeks, she felt like a traitor and a dependent. She kept throwing her three little I Ching coins into the air but she couldn't find any metaphors to reassure her.

Always happy to help a friend, and to have an excuse to make his generosity a performance, Gonzalo Erdiozábal convinced her to get the car blessed in a traditional rite: “Daddy's present” could be transformed into a “sacramental ride.”

Gonzalo had such an intense way of being incoherent that we accepted his plan. We would go see a priest known for blessing taxis on the day of St. Christopher, patron saint of travelers. The church was very far away, but it would be worth it to take a little trip, try something different for a change.

Renata never wanted to baptize Tania. But pulling up to the Anthropology Department in a brand new car made her feel guilty; an automotive baptism seemed like her chance to mix a bourgeois gift with a socially commended act.

Gonzalo appointed himself godfather. He showed up at our house with a cooler full of beer and snacks from the Tlalpan market.

We went to the outer limits of the city, and even that far out, amazingly, the city kept going. We got lost more than once along the way. Nobody seemed to have heard of the parish, and we kept getting contradictory
directions until finally we saw a taxi decked out for a party, covered with crepe-paper flowers, and decided to follow it.

When we got there, dozens of taxis were waiting to be baptized. In the back was the chapel with its little marsh-mallow-blue towers, like a kindergarten converted into a church.

“Do you think they'll baptize a car if it's not a taxi?” Renata asked.

“That's the important thing: not being a taxi, and being here,” Gonzalo spoke like a guru of the hybrid world.

He hired a trio of mariachis to play for us while we waited. We sat listening to
boleros,
and after my fourth beer, I started to feel bad for my friend. I've left out a crucial detail: Gonzalo was desperately, shamelessly in love with Renata. His flirting was so obvious that it didn't even bother me. While we listened to a
bolero
proposing a million ways to suffer from love, I thought about the emptiness that defined Gonzalo's life and determined his ever-shifting hobbies, how every year for him was constant forward-motion, constant flight.

There was the occasional woman. None lasted long enough to knit him a vest in psychedelic colors or for him to master a new yoga pose. Renata had been a perpetually-postponed horizon, a way to justify his empty flings.

Waiting in line, I felt intensely sorry for Gonzalo and told him the sorts of things that you say in between romantic songs, until the chords come back in to collect their due.

The trio ran out of songs before we reached the chapel. When we were finally just three taxis away, they told us
that the water had run out, too, not only in the church but in the whole neighborhood.

We looked at the priest's dry holy water sprinkler. The wind sent newspapers and plastic bags into the sky.

Renata resigned herself to the idea of driving a car in limbo and parking in the Anthropology Department without having gone through a vernacular rite.

Gonzalo was drunk by then and entirely committed to being our automotive godfather. He told us to wait for him, and disappeared down a dirt road.

We went into the church. On a side altar, we saw the Blesséd Baby Mechanic. His cross was a lug wrench; he was swaddled in a denim jumpsuit. The little pink face, with its fuchsia cheeks, was sloppily painted.

The altar was surrounded by painted tin votive offerings giving thanks for highway miracles and tiny cars the taxi drivers left as offerings.

We went out into the atrium and stood under the last rays of afternoon sun.

Gonzalo had set off with the look of one possessed. I pitied his solitude, his vicarious passion for Renata, his useless costume changes.

A loud bang and a cloud of dust announced his return. He pulled up, hanging out the cab of an Electropura Purified Water delivery truck. The glass bottles sparkled blue in the setting sun.

Up to that point the image was epic, or at least bizarre. When we got closer, it became criminal: Gonzalo was threatening the driver with the metal pin-punch he used to carve
Peace & Love
signs into balsa wood. When he got out of the truck, his face had the deformed look of the demented.

The priest refused to perform the sacrament with stolen water.

Gonzalo showed him a fistful of bills:

“He refused to sell me a bottle.”

“I'm not authorized to go off my route,” said the truck driver, in a slavish tone closed to all suggestions.

“This water has already been suffused with sin,” declared the priest.

In the dusty air, the bottles shone like treasure.

“Please!” Gonzalo got down on his knees with a grand pathos directed as much at the truck driver as the priest.

Two taxi drivers helped us get him into the car. He didn't speak the whole ride back. Our outlandish Saturday fun had turned into something shameful. More than anything, it was awful to be unable to console our friend. After my most embarrassing coke-fueled episodes, he'd told me, “Don't worry, it happens to everyone.” Effectively, anyone could become a lamentable addict. I couldn't say the same thing to him. His loss of control was unique.

I walked him to the door of his building. He hugged me tightly. I could smell his sour sweat.

“I'm sorry, I'm a terrible friend,” he mumbled.

Obviously, I thought he was referring to our absurd expedition to the St. Christopher church. Years later, the tennis ball found under the back seat would tie things together differently.

8.
The Motto

A few weeks before the failed baptism, we spent a weekend with several other couples at the hacienda of Giménez
Luque, a millionaire friend of ours. Even though our host was the only one who really knew how to swing a racquet, the tennis court drew us in like an attainable oasis. More than a few balls went sailing over the metal grille that enclosed the court. But only one of them matters: the one Renata and Gonzalo went after. They came back more than an hour later, empty-handed. They'd looked everywhere for it, but couldn't figure out where it had gone. Renata was flushed. She chewed obsessively at a hang-nail on her index finger.

Now I knew the truth: they hadn't lost the ball in the field outside the court, they'd lost it in the back seat of the Chevrolet, from where they'd just emerged. The same spot my comb had fallen into when Renata and I had made love in the Leones Desert! Lobito had ended up in the very same place.

Could it be some other ball? Absolutely not. The number of lost tennis balls in the world is impossible to imagine. But the feeling I had when I touched the fuzz of that ball, so recently exposed, was irrefutable.

Plus, there were other clues. My relationship with Renata had begun to cool around the same time. She didn't want to make love to me at the hacienda. Her hands avoided mine.

Renata was never interested in tennis again, after that. It's possible that she was no longer interested in Gonzalo, either. I can't find any later connections between them. In a way, she divorced both of us. She couldn't imagine one friend without the other. Gonzalo was, for her, what he had been so many times for others, and for himself: a fit of passion, essential and brief.