The Guilty (2 page)

Minutes later, Cata showed up to emphasize how great I'd be as a mariachi without prejudices (contradiction in terms: mariachis are a national prejudice). I didn't want to talk about that. I asked her what she'd discussed with Brenda.

“Everything. It's incredible how young she seems for her age. Nobody would ever think she's 43.”

“What does she say about me?”

“I don't think you want to know.”

“I don't care.”

“She's been trying to convince Chus not to hire you. She thinks you're too naïve for a sophisticated role. She says that Chus has a chubby for you and she's been asking him not to think with his dick.”

“That's what she's saying?”

“That's how the Spaniards talk!”

“Brenda is from Guadalajara!”

“She's been in Spain for decades, she defines herself as a fugitive from mariachis. Maybe that's why she doesn't like you.”

I paused, then told her what had happened:

“Brenda called a little while ago. She said she's crazy about me.”

Cata responded like a stony angel:

“I'm telling you she's super professional. She'll do anything for Chus.”

I wanted to fight because I had just masturbated and didn't feel like making love. But I couldn't figure out how to offend her while she was unbuttoning her blouse. When she pulled off my pants, I thought about Schumacher, the master of mileage. That didn't excite
me, I swear on my dead mother, but it filled me with willpower. We banged for three hours, not quite as long as a Formula 1 race. (Thanks to Brenda, I had started using the Spanish: “to bang.”)

I finished off my concert at Bellas Artes with
“Se me olvidó otra vez.”
When I got to the line, “in the same city with the same people,” I saw the journalist who hates me in the front row. Every year on my birthday, he publishes an article “proving” my homosexuality. His main argument is that I've made it to another birthday without getting married. A mariachi should breed like a stud bull. I thought about the biker I was supposed to tongue kiss. I looked at the journalist and felt assured he would be the only one to write that I'm a fag. Everyone else would talk about how virile it is to kiss another man just because the script calls for it.

The shoot was a nightmare. Chus Ferrer told me Fassbinder had made his star actress lick the floor of the set. He wasn't that much of a tyrant: he settled for smearing me with garbage to “muffle my ego.” I had it easier than the lighting crew: he kept screaming “neo-fascist plebs!” at them. Whenever he could, he grabbed my ass.

I had to wait for so long on set that I became a Nintendo prodigy. I was also growing more and more attracted to Brenda. One night we went out to dinner on a terrace. Luckily, Catalina smoked some hash and fell asleep on her plate. Brenda told me she had had a “very tumultuous” life. Now she led a solitary existence; it was necessary to satisfy Chus Ferrer's production whims.

“You're the latest.” She looked me in the eyes: “It took me so much work to convince you!”

“I'm not an actor, Brenda.” I paused. “I don't want to be a mariachi, either,” I added.

“What do you want?”

She smiled in an alluring way. I liked that she hadn't said: “What do you want
to be?”
It seemed to suggest: “What do you want
now?”
Brenda was smoking a small cigar. I looked at her white hair, sighed as only a mariachi who has filled stadiums can sigh, and said nothing.

One afternoon a porn star visited the set. “His penis is insured for a million euros,” Catalina told me. Brenda was standing beside me. She said, “The long shot million,” and explained that this had been the slogan for Mexico's National Lottery in the 70s. “You remember things from such a long time ago,” Cata said. Even though the phrase was offensive, they went off happily to get dinner with the porn star. I stayed behind for the tongue kiss scene.

The actor who was playing the Catalonian biker was shorter than me and they had to put him on a stool. He had taken ginseng pills for the scene. Seeing as I had already conquered my prejudices, I thought it sounded like a faggy thing to do.

I was paid the same amount for four weeks of shooting as I got for one concert in any remote ranch in Mexico.

On the flight back they gave us tomato salad and Cata told me about a trick of the trade she'd heard from the porn star. He ate lots of tomatoes because it improved the taste of his semen. The female porn stars appreciated it. I was intrigued. Did that kind of courtesy really exist in porn? I ate the tomatoes off of my plate and hers, but when we got back to Mexico she said she was dead tired and didn't want to blow me.

The movie was called
Mariachi Baby Blues.
They invited me to the Madrid premier, and as I was walking the red carpet I saw a guy with his hands outstretched like he was measuring a yard. In Mexico that gesture would have been obscene. It was obscene in Spain too, but I only realized that after I saw the movie. There was a scene where the biker came close to touching my penis and a colossal member appeared onscreen, impressively erect. I thought that was why the porn star had visited the set. Brenda schooled me: “It's a prosthetic. Does it bother you that the public thinks it's yours?”

What does someone who has become an overnight genital phenomenon do? At the after-party, the queen of pink journalism gushed, “It's so shamelessly raunchy!” Brenda told me about celebrities who had been surprised on nude beaches and revealed penises like fire hoses. “But those penises are theirs!” I protested. She looked at me as if she was imagining the size of mine and seemed disappointed, but she was terribly nice and said nothing. I wanted to caress her hair, to cry into the crook of her neck. But then Catalina arrived, with glasses of champagne. I left the party early and walked through the streets of Madrid until the sun came up.

The sky had begun to yellow when I passed by the Parque del Retiro. A man was holding five very long leashes attached to five Huskies. He had cuts on his face and he was wearing cheap clothes. I would have given anything to have no obligations except walking rich people's dogs. The Huskies' blue eyes seemed mournful, as if the dogs wished I'd take them away with me and knew I couldn't.

I arrived at the Hotel Palace so tired I was barely surprised that Cata wasn't in the suite.

The next day, all of Madrid was talking about my raunchy shamelessness. I thought about killing myself but it seemed wrong to do it in Spain. I would mount a horse for the first time and blow my brains out in the Mexican countryside.

When I landed in Mexico City with still no word from Catalina, I discovered that the country adored me in a very strange way. Leo handed me a press folder full of praise for my foray into independent film. The words “manliness” and “virility” were repeated as often as “film in its pure state” and “total filmmaking.” My take was that
Mariachi Baby Blues
was about a story inside a story inside a story, where at the end everybody was very content doing what they hadn't wanted to do at the beginning. A great achievement, according to the critics.

My next concert—in the Auditorio Nacional, no less—was tremendous. Everyone in the audience had a penis-shaped balloon. I had become the stallion of the fatherland. They started to call me the Gallito Inglés, the Cocky Little Rooster; one of my fan clubs changed its name to Club de Gallinas, The Hen Club.

Catalina had predicted the movie would make me a cult star. I tried finding her to remind her of that, but she was still in Spain. I got offers from everywhere to show up naked. My agent tripled his salary and invited me to see his new house, a mansion in the Pedregal neighborhood—twice as big as my own. A priest was there. He held a mass to bless the house and Leo thanked God for putting me at his side. Then he asked me to go with him
to the garden. He told me the actress Vanessa Obregón wanted to meet me.

Leo's ambition knows no limits. It was in his own best interest for me to date the bombshell of
banda
music. But I could no longer be with a woman without disappointing her or having to explain the absurd situation the movie had created.

I gave thousands of interviews but no one believed I wasn't proud of my penis. I was declared Sexiest Latino by a magazine in Los Angeles, Sexiest Bisexual by a magazine in Amsterdam, and Most Unexpected Sexpot by a magazine in New York. But I couldn't take my pants off without feeling diminished.

Finally Catalina came back from Spain to humiliate me with her new life: she had become the porn star's girlfriend. She told me this in a restaurant where I demonstrated the poor taste of ordering a tomato salad. I thought about the porn king's diet, but I barely had time to distract myself with that irritation because Cata was asking me for a fortune in palimony. I gave it to her so that she wouldn't talk about my penis.

I went to see Leo at two in the morning. He took me to the room he calls his “study” just because there is an encyclopedia in there. He ran his bare feet back and forth over a puma skin rug while I talked. He was wearing a robe with dragons on it, like an actor playing a lurid spy. I told him about Cata's extortion.

“Think of it as an investment,” he told me.

That calmed me down a little, but I felt drained. When I got home, I couldn't masturbate. A plumber had made
off with my copy of
Lord
magazine and I didn't even miss it.

Leo kept pulling strings. The limo that arrived to take me to the MTV Latino gala had first picked up a spectacular mulatta who was smiling in the back seat. Leo had hired her to accompany me to the ceremony and increase my sexual legend. I liked talking to her—she knew all about the guerrillas in El Salvador—but I didn't try anything because she was looking at me with measuring-tape eyes.

I went back to therapy. I explained that Catalina was happy because of an actual big dick and I was unhappy because of an imaginary one. Could life be that basic? The doctor said this happened to 90 percent of his patients. I quit therapy because I didn't want to be such a cliché.

My fame is too strong a drug. I need what I hate. I toured everywhere, threw sombreros into grandstands, got down on my knees and sang
“El hijo desobediente.”
I recorded an album with a hip-hop group. One afternoon, in the main square of Oaxaca, I sat down on a pigskin chair and listened to marimba music for a long while. I drank two glasses of mezcal, nobody recognized me, and I believed that I was happy. I looked at the blue sky and the white line left by a plane. I thought about Brenda and dialed her on my cell.

“It took you long enough,” was the first thing she said. Why hadn't I looked for her sooner? With her, I didn't have to pretend. I asked her to come see me. “I have a life, Julián,” she said in an exasperated voice. But she pronounced my name like it was a word I had never heard
before. She wasn't going to drop anything for me. I canceled my Bajío tour.

I spent three terrifying days in Barcelona without being able to see her. Brenda was “tied up” in a shoot. We finally saw each other, in a restaurant that seemed to be designed for Japanese denizens of the future.

“You want to know if I know you?” she said, and I thought she was quoting a
ranchera
song. I laughed, just to react, and then she looked me in the eyes. She told me she knew the date of my mother's death, the name of my ex-therapist, my desire to be in orbit. She had admired me since a time she called “immemorial.” It had all started when she saw me sweat on Telemundo. It took her an incredible amount of work to get together with me. She had convinced Chus to hire me, wrote my parts into the screenplay, introduced Cata to the porn star, planned the scene with the artificial penis to shake up my whole life. “I know who you are, and my hair is white,” she smiled. “Maybe you think I'm manipulative. I'm a producer, which is almost the same thing: I produced our meeting.”

I looked her in the eyes, red from sleepless nights on film shoots. I acted like a stupid mariachi and said, “I'm a stupid mariachi.” “I know.” Brenda caressed my hand.

Then she told me why she wanted me. Her story was horrible. She explained why she hated Guadalajara, mariachis, tequila, tradition, custom. I promised not to tell anyone. I can only say that she lived to escape that story, until she understood that escaping it was the only story she had. I was her return ticket.

I thought we would sleep together that night but she still had one more production:

“I don't mean to tell you how to do your job, but you have to clear up the penis thing.”

“The penis thing isn't my job: you all invented it!”

“Exactly, we invented it. A European cinematic trick. I had forgotten what a penis can do in Mexico. I don't want to go out with a man stuck onto a penis.”

“I'm not stuck onto a penis, mine's sort of little,” I said.

“How little?”

Brenda was interested.

“Normal little. See for yourself.”

But she wanted me to understand her moral principles.

“Your fans have to see it,” she answered. “Be brave enough to be normal.”

“I'm not normal: I'm the Gallito de Jojutla, even pharmacies sell my albums!”

“You have to do it. I'm sick of this phallocentric world.”

“But are
you
going to want
my
penis?”

“Your normal sort of little sort of penis?”

Brenda dropped her hand to my crotch, but she didn't touch me.

“What do you want me to do?” I asked.

She had a plan. She always has a plan. I would appear in another movie, a ferocious criticism of the celebrity world, and I would do a full frontal. My audience would have a stark, authentic version of me. When I asked who would direct the movie, I got another surprise. “Me,” answered Brenda. “The film is called
Guadalajara”.