Authors: Juan Villoro
The Guilty (3 page)
She didn't give me the whole screenplay, either. The scenes I appeared in were weird, but that didn't mean anything. The kind of films I think are weird win prizes. One afternoon, during a break in shooting, I went into
her trailer and asked, “What do you think will happen to me after
Guadalajara?”
“Do you really care?” she responded.
Brenda had tried harder than anybody else to be with me. Had I embraced her in that moment I would have burst into tears. I was afraid of seeming weak when I touched her but I was more afraid that she might never want to touch me. I had learned one thing from Cata, at least: there are parts of the body that can't be platonic.
“Are you going to sleep with me?” I asked her.
“We have one scene left,” she said, caressing her own hair.
She cleared the set to film me naked. Everyone else left in a bad mood because the caterers had just arrived with the food. Brenda put me next to a table surrounded by an enticing scent of cold cuts.
She stood in front of me for a moment. She looked at me in a way I'll never forget, as if we were about to cross a river. She smiled, and said what we were both waiting for:
“Should we do it?”
She got behind the camera.
On the buffet table, there was a plate of salad. I was a foot away from it.
Life is chaos but it has its signals: before I took off my pants, I ate a tomato.
I'm so discouraged by reality that to me, airplanes seem cozy. I resign myself to movies I don't want to see and food I don't want to taste, like I'm practicing a spiritual discipline. A samurai with headphones and a plastic knife. Suspended, cell phone off, enjoying a Nirvana where there's nothing to decide. That's what air travel isâa way of delaying the numbers trying to catch up with me.
The last call I got on land was from Clara. I was in the Barcelona airport. Anguished, she asked me, “Do you think she'll come back?” She was talking about our cat, Ãnica. Her name means
only one.
“Has there been an earthquake?” I asked. Cats can sense earthquakes. Somethingâa vibration in the airâlets them know the earth is going to split open. Time to head outdoors.
Male cats are the anticipatory seismologists. Female cats stay at home, especially Angoras. That's what we'd been told. Still, Ãnica had run away twice, no earthquakes required.
“Maybe she's picking up on emotional earthquakes,” Clara joked on the phone. Then she mentioned that the Rendóns had invited her up to Valle de Bravo. If my flight didn't get in on time, she'd go on her own. She was yearning for a weekend of sailboats and sun.
“Will you ever take a direct flight?” she asked before saying goodbye.
I live a zigzag life. For some reason, my itineraries all lead to cities that require connections: Antwerp, Oslo, Barcelona. I work for a company that produces the best tasteless water in the world. It's not a disparaging phrase. People don't drink our water for the taste, they drink it because it weighs less in your mouth. The luxury of lightness. The planet is always thirsty. Everyone needs to drink. But some demand the additional delight of insubstantial water.
I travel frequently to places that purchase expensive water, and jet lag is my constant condition. I've gotten used to the discrepancy in perception, the things I see when I should be sleeping. I read a lot in the long hours on flights, or I think, with my face against the plane's oval window. I often come up with ideas that seem mystical and then evaporate like hand lotion when I land.
Our departure from Barcelona was delayed. Now we're flying over London, off schedule. “We're in a holding pattern,” the pilot says. There is no room for us.
The plane leans into a leisurely curve. We'll circle like fruit flies until a runway opens up. The lovely autumn light makes the lawns below us shine, with the Thames sparkling like the blade of a sword and the city scattering toward inconceivable limits.
London is an hour behind Barcelona. Those minutes that haven't happened yet are an advantage for making a connection, but I don't want to think about them. I'll have to take the bus from Terminal 2 to Terminal 4, like joining the delirium of a theme park. I think about O.J. Simpson before the murder accusation, back when he shone as a desperate success known to devour yards on the football field and in ads where he was about to miss a plane. I like that about airports. They only have internal tension. Everything exterior is erased. You have to run in pursuit of a gate. That's it. Your destination is called “Gate 6.” O.J. was made for that, to run far away from intercepted phone calls, broken love, empty glances, bloodied clothes.
The captain's voice has been replaced by landing music. Techno-flamenco. We circle, miles above the ground, all of us watching the clock. How many flights will be missed on this flight? If the music were different we wouldn't worry as much. In some distant office, someone decided it was good to land to the beat of astral gypsies. And maybe it is. The discord of modernity and oranges. Music meant for arriving, not for waiting indefinitely with gates closing below.
I've missed enough connections for Clara to suspect it's part of a plan. “That much bad luck isn't normal.” Frankfurt shut down by snow, Barajas by strike. I've had
to sleep in hotels where you feel like you're wasting an opportunity to kill yourself. You move from the attractive provisional order of the airport to the sordidness of transitory objects. A rented bed somewhere no one expects to see you again.
Clara's only partially right. My bad luck isn't normal, but it's also not that bad. Once I missed a plane at Heathrow under a rosy sky. The arranged hotel turned out to be nice. In the distance, jumbo jets moved along the runways like the shadows of whales, and in the lobby I ran into Nancy. She had missed her flight, too. We work in far off cities for the same company.
We had dinner at a pub where they'd turned on a Chelsea soccer game. Neither of us likes soccer but we watched the game with strange intensity. We were living borrowed hours. Nancy has incredible blonde hair; it looks like she washes it with the water we sell. I've always liked her, but only then, in that time outside of time, did it seem logical to take her hand and play with her wedding ring.
She left my room at dawn. I saw her silhouette in the cold light of the street. In the distance, a triangle of purple lights marked the juncture of the two avenues that led to the airport. The control towers looked like lighthouses gone adrift, radar sets spinning in search of signals. I breathed in Nancy's perfume on my hand and understood, for once, the artificial beauty of the world.
We saw each other again, at meetings and conventions, without alluding to our missed-flight encounter. When Clara suggested I was getting delayed on purpose, I remembered that singular episode and my tone of voice
incriminated me, like O.J. before the jury, when he put on the black glove worn by his wife's murderer and it fit perfectly. I wanted to run but I wasn't in an airport.
“Is there someone else?” Clara asked me. I said no, and it was true, but she looked at me like I was a TV snowing ashes.
Now I'm flying over Heathrow again. What are the chances Nancy's missing a flight, too? If we saw each other, could we be indifferent to our geometry?
Nancy didn't imply a repeat encounter was possible. Still, I couldn't help noticing her ambivalence when she said, “You know where you're taking off from, but not which sky you're going to.” Then she laid her head on my chest.
I page through the airline magazine. Enviable landscapes, the face of a famous architect, and what I least expected: a short story by ElÃas Rubio. Even though he's publishing more frequently, finding him is always an unpleasant surprise. ElÃas almost married Clara. His style is strikingâto anyone not married to her. I can't read a single paragraph without feeling like he's sending her messages.
The techno-flamenco hurts my ears. There isn't much time left to make my connection, and I start looking for excuses to explain to Clara that I didn't miss the plane on purpose. I need some other problem. That's why I read the story. ElÃas is a leech who feeds on reality. He's one of the reasons I'm sick of it.
The first time Ãnica ran away, we hung posters on telephone poles; we left our number at the local vet; we went on a radio program that specialized in runaway pets.
Female cats don't leave but ours had gone. One afternoon, Clara asked me again if I really didn't care that she couldn't get pregnant. She had been drinking some tea from India and her words smelled like cloves. I told her I didn't, and I thought about the cat's absurd name, the one Clara had picked as a heroic wisecrack, the one that had transformed over time into a painful irony. I looked away. When I looked back, Clara was watching something in the garden. It was getting dark. Behind a bush, there was an opaque, hazy glow. Clara squeezed my hand. Seconds later, we saw Ãnica's fur, soiled during her absence.
That night, Clara caressed me as if her hands were made from a rain that leaves things dry. At least, that's how ElÃas described the scene, which he had used unedited in his story. The title was loathsome: “The Included Third.” Was he referring to himself? Was he still seeing Clara? Did she tell him those kind of minutiae? The repugnant writer accurately observed a nervous gesture of hers, the way she winds her hair around her hand. Clara only releases it once she's made some inscrutable decision.
As I read further, my spine freezes: ElÃas had foreseen the cat's second disappearance. After reconciling with her husbandâa piddling talc salesmanâthe heroine realizes happiness is nothing but suffering held in place. The cat's return had completed a picture. Everything was in order, but real life demanded a change, a fissure. The woman lifted a hand to her hair, wound the strands around it, and let them go. Without a word, she picked up the cat and took it to the countryside.
Had that really happened? Had Clara gotten rid of the cat so she could blame it on my absences, or to prepare for her own absence? ElÃas was full of vengeful fantasies (not for nothing was he a writer!), but the story's content wasn't imaginary. Too much of it had actually happened. What was Ãnica's meaning in the story? Was Clara freeing herself when she freed the cat? When Clara had called me in Barcelona, she talked around the cat like a clue. Only now, suspended in the London air, did I realize it.
Holding pattern:
if I don't get there on time, she'll spend the weekend with the Rendóns, the couple that at some hazy point in the past introduced her to ElÃas Rubio.
A grinding of metal: the landing gear. I can still make my flight. Terminal 4, Gate 6.
Is Clara starting to sense my missed flights the way cats sense earthquakes? What does she miss when she misses Ãnica? What time is it in my country? Is she winding her hair around her hand? Will she release it before I get to my gate? Will there be a rosy sunset in Heathrow? Is someone else missing a flight? Is our plane displacing another which could still arrive on time?
The turbines give a deafening roar. We touch down. My body feels numb, conscious of passing into a different logic.
What happens on the ground. The geometry of the sky.
“Ghosts come out of nowhere, but the dead just come back.” That's what Lupillo said to me as he squeezed out a sponge. You have to believe massage therapists. They're the only ones on a team who'll tell you the truth, the only ones whose sole aspiration is to spray on the analgesic.
Lupillo's line was the first sign I'd become an outcast. The second was that nobody played any welcome-back tricks on me. I had returned to Estrella Azul, the team where I got my start. If anyone had still cared about me, they would have pissed in my shampoo. That's how simple the world of soccer is.
“We even held a funeral mass for you!” added Lupillo. I was watching his bald head, shiny as a crystal ball. Yes, they'd held a mass for me where the priest praised my
hustle and integrity, virtues death had conferred. Dead men have integrity.